Jonah 3: The Worst Sermon Ever Preached

This sermon was preached on May 26th, 2024.

Our passage today is my candidate for the worst sermon ever preached. I’m not exaggerating. The worst. Which is what makes this passage so utterly remarkable. Because the worst sermon ever preached turns out to be the most successful sermon ever preached.

What we see in this chapter is the truth that it is God who is King, God whose intentions rule. God who works within all the mixed motives and weaknesses of human beings to bend them all together, to work for his greater purposes.

The mystery of his sovereignty and kingship—one we cannot sometimes make heads or tails of—but a truth that can be the root of our hope for our present and our future.

1 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”

3 Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” 5 The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

6 When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh:

“By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

A New Beginning

Our passage finds us at a new beginning. The first 2 chapters of Jonah could have been a story all to itself—Jonah called by God, he flees because he doesn’t like the people God has called him to. And it seems like Jonah has a death wish, but is saved from drowning by God miraculously. It was God saving his rebellious son from certain death.

I noted it last week, but the story says nothing of Jonah being saved from drowning, then deciding to do what God called him to. Maybe Jonah thought God’s salvation of him from drowning would mean that God would give up on that initial calling to Jonah. Maybe God would send someone else and let Jonah off the hook.

No, what we see here in our passage is a new beginning of God renewing his call to Jonah. Because God’s salvation of him, and us, is one that sets us on a trajectory to fulfill the purposes he has for us.

Here’s what I mean for us: the summary of why humanity was created in the first place is to love God and love others. But the reality of our human experience is that from the beginning we had fled this, making it impossible for us to fulfill the purpose for which we were made. And apart from God working for our salvation, this is the way it would be.

God seeks after us in Christ to save us. He frees us from the consequences of sin. But that’s not all—part of his salvation of us is that we are now enabled and freed to live out that original purpose. Truly enabled to love God and love others. Our salvation isn’t God just rescuing us from the consequences of sin, it’s him freeing from its dominion so that we can walk in all he has for us. So we can walk in love.

It’s why Scripture speaks of what Christ accomplishes as a new creation. God takes the materials of his old creation, seemingly destroyed by what sin has done to it, and reshapes and reforms it. Taking sin, which is by nature non-sense and is a marring of all that God has made, and wrestling it toward his purposes.

So God calls to Jonah here and it is a new creation. “Go…” God does lay shame or guilt over the head of Jonah. He doesn’t call Jonah a second time and say “look, you sorry good for nothing who failed at this last time.” We may have given up on a Jonah, but God does not. God is leading him to a repentance to life, not to wallow in shame or guilt.

Notice too that God does not negotiate. “Let’s find a mutually agreed upon mission for you.” The call remains the same—go to Nineveh. It means this time exactly what it meant before: Jonah going to Nineveh will be how God calls them to turn to him for grace. But this is a new beginning.

A Half-Hearted Obedience

Jonah finally agrees to go, on this specific call to a specific place. To go to these people that he hates. This great city of Nineveh. As it says, it was a very large city. It taking “three days to go through it” doesn’t mean that it was 50 miles across. It was at most 3 miles across. There were 120k people living there.

“3 days to go through” was a saying that meant it was large enough that conducting business took three days—one day to come into the city, another day to do one’s business, another day to leave. Which is why it’s significant that Jonah only goes “a days journey into the city.” He didn’t even properly come in and get set up. Jonah barely got in the city limits.

And look at the sermon he delivered. “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” That’s all he says. It’s 8 words in our translation, but in Hebrew it is 5 total words. Maybe the worst sermon ever delivered.

Jonah’s heart is simply not in it. He might like saying the words that Nineveh will be overthrown, but as he says later he knows what this can mean—that God announces calamity and judgment ahead of time so that people will hear and turn away from their sin to turn to him.

But look! The worst sermon I’ve ever heard is used by God to be the most “successful” single sermon in history! Not because Jonah was eloquent and well spoken. It didn’t have anything to do with Jonah. Notice what it says in v5: “The Ninevites believed God.” Not believed Jonah. They believed God.

As the church, when we begin to grow there will be a temptation to think that we cracked the code and figured out how to do it right, and we’ll attribute the number of people in our church to our own ingenuity and skill.

But our goal isn’t that people will hear the gospel and believe us. It’s that they will hear and believe God. We aren’t specialist, we aren’t the folks that have it all together. We are beggars telling other beggars where to find bread.

What great encouragement to us, too! God will work within and in spite of our faults and weaknesses. If God could work through this five word sermon, then he can certainly use our service to him, no matter how imperfect it may be.

Repentance to Life

The story of Jonah is usually remembered for the miracle of the great fish that swallowed him, and within whom he remained for three days. But chapter 3 shows us a greater miracle: the Ninevites hear this terrible sermon and repent!

“Repent”is a word that, I think, tends to bring negative images with it. I say “repent” and maybe you think of a street preacher with a megaphone, yelling to everyone that “the end is near!” Or maybe you hear “repent” and you think “here’s a bunch of stuff for me to do, hoops for me to jump through to get God to love me.” Or maybe you hear “repent” and you think it just means feeling really bad about yourself.

I want to take back the word ‘repent,’ because it’s a glorious word. It means life is possible, even when we can’t see it. Repentance means hope in an otherwise hopeless place.

It means we can look at the odiousness and depth of our sin—-and also look at the glories of God’s mercy in Jesus, and see that Jesus is more beautiful and stronger. As we confessed earlier about repentance unto life—it include a true sense of sin and the mercy of Jesus, in a sense that causes us to turn from sin and its false pleasures to the greater good of Jesus.

In this passage Jonah preaches, and God brings to the people of Nineveh this gift of repentance. The king hears of Jonah’s message, and shows that his heart has been changed—he issues a proclamation to all of his people for all of them to express repentance in big ways.“Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

The king asks “who knows? Maybe God will relent?” Do you know who knows? Jonah! He could have told them clearly. But again his heart is not in this. He knows, but he will not inform the king. But God has worked not just because of Jonah, but despite Jonah, and beyond Jonah. We know that because the king has clearly gained an understanding of God that leads his to repentance. He has apprehended that mercy exists, and that he can be someone and his people can be people who find God's mercy. He’s discovered what the apostle Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 7: the difference between what Paul calls “worldly sorrow" and “godly sorrow.”

In 2 Corinthians 7, he says that worldly sorrow is a sorrow for sin that ‘leads to despair.” This isn’t the repentance that God wants for his people. He doesn't ask us to wallow in guilt and shame. As Paul says, worldly sorrow brings death. It leads us to absolute despair.

But the sorrow for our sin that God brings to us is different. It’s a sorrow that walks into joy. A sorrow that recognizes the reality and depth of sin but, as Paul says, “godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret.” This is what I mean when I say that repentance is a beautiful word.

And Paul continues on in 2 Corinthians 7: what godly sorrow produces. Earnestness, eagerness, alarm, longing, concern, readiness to see justice done. True repentance to life leads to exactly this—turning from the things that tear us apart and turn us to that which is good and gives us goodness.

God Changes His Mind?

If anything, this chapter makes clear one thing: God is King. He cannot be boxed in by the disobedience of Jonah. He cannot be boxed in by the wickedness of Nineveh. He’s not limited by the sorry-ness of Jonah’s sermon. God is King, he is sovereign.

The people of Nineveh recognize that. The King of Nineveh recognizes that. Jonah eventually recognizes that. God is King, he is sovereign. But then we get to the end of this chapter brings us to a remarkable moment—-God seems to change his mind.

Here we see his sovereignty on displace in this greatest extent. He relents from the destruction that their sin deserved. This of course leads us to ask a question: how can God change his mind? Don’t we believe that he knows all things? And even further—as Scripture tells us—that he orders all things?

I think sometimes we can speak of God’s sovereignty and God being ‘in control’ and think of it as God vs us. Like when we think of free will and God’s sovereignty, we think of it in competitive terms. And if we have free will, God cannot be sovereign and vice versa.

But I think that’s the misunderstand who God is and how we relate to him. God is fundamentally different kind of being than us. He isn’t just like a super-human, like a bigger, stronger, and more knowledgeable version of us. He is the Creator of all things, we are his creatures. He is the foundation of who we are. It’s because of him that our lives and decisions have a significance beyond what we create.

It’s not like we’re playing a cosmic game of musical chairs and either God or us is ultimately the one who sits in the chair. No, it’s more like God is the chair. Without him, all the attempting to sit in the world would mean a collapsing and falling. He holds us up. It’s not a thing in competition.

And so his ordering of all things and his sovereignty isn’t something against our free will. But it includes our freedom. And God takes all the strings of our decisions and lives and weaves them together in the larger plan of his good purposes. So here in Jonah, we see God interacting meaningfully with the people of Nineveh, declaring through Jonah the destruction and judgment due to them because of their wickedness…but this was all part of his greater purpose to bring grace into a world marred by the effects of sin.

That brings us to another dynamic at work, though. The truth is that humanity is in bondage. We have free wills, but those wills are marred and torn apart. And for us to see the grandeur and glory and beauty of who God is, it requires him calling us to life and healing our wills. It requires God making us alive. Which is what God does through Jesus.

And the thing that Jonah 3 teaches us is that there is no one beyond the reach of God’s grace. No enemy who cannot be won to him. No sin so bad that he cannot forgive, no darkness so deep that his light cannot shine. That when he causes all the threads of our human wills and decisions to be woven together into a larger tapestry, it’s a tapestry of his goodness and glory—and we find like everyone in this story founds—that his love for us cannot be stopped by distance, the foolishness of others, the foolishness of ourselves, our weaknesses, or anything else. And that’s a case of great joy.

This is the way that God will not change his mind. God sets his affections upon us, and he does not change his mind about us.

Hear me. He will not change his mind about you. Or me. He knows your junk. He knows your sin. He’s know your weaknesses. He is not deterred because there is something stronger than your junk and your scars—his love for you.