Sermon: We Are Jonah (part 7)

Sermon by Ife Ojetayo
text: Jonah 3:1-5
Sunday January 8th, 2012

Turn if you will to the 3rd chapter of Jonah. I know we’ve taken a two week break from our journey through the book of Jonah, I’ll like us to briefly quickly remember God’s word to us through the life of Jonah thus far.
You know in Jewish tradition during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in which Jews fast and pray before they read the book of Jonah in the synagogue every year and after its reading the congregation proclaims in one voice ‘we are Jonah’. I agree with them fully, it’s easy to see Jonah as this stubborn, cranky disobedient prophet who runs way from his duty. But I see myself in Jonah at every turn of this story, like him I recognize God to be sovereign, meaning He has supreme power and authority over all things, at all times and in all places. Yet, like Jonah I do not want God to be sovereign over my life, I recognize his supreme power except when it comes to my life, my decisions and my future, because those are my decisions and it’s my life and He should mind His own business. I would rather God uses His infinite resources to make me comfortable, give me a good job and gives me an advantage over my peers and I’m thankful for the new life He’s given me through Jesus but it’s not necessary for Him to tell me how or where to live or what I should do with my life. This was where I was 5-7 years ago, I knew God and I, like Jonah wanted to serve him as long as He, the one with the supreme authority, doesn’t deviate from the plans I’ve laid down.

And so like Jonah I ran away from God’s call to a vocation in the church because it wasn’t in my plans.  I had lofty goals, I even intend to serve glorify God with those plans, but really I was seeking my own glory first, God’s glory will have to be secondary. Like Jonah I was in a place of anguish and torment, while I was not in a physical storm, I felt uneasy and I could not find peace outside of God’s will. And from a place of desperation and at my wits end, having failed miserably trying to do my thing, I turned to God. There are some of you here this morning who have or may be going through similar situations. Your discomfort and unease is God’s grace pursuing you as it was for Jonah. God’s mercy and grace pursued him on his way to Tarshish and turned him towards his maker in the ocean in the belly of a great fish. God brought a storm into his life and drove him literally into the depths of the sea to bring him into repentance and submission. God loves Jonah, he loves you and I that when necessary, if He has to

He will make us desperate sometimes so that He can make us obedient
He will make us unhappy so He could become our source of joy
He will make us uncomfortable so that we might not be complacent but useful
He will make us miserable so that we might become holy.

He wants above all things, above your happiness or comfort that you and I will be conformed more and more into the image of His Son Jesus Christ.

So in the case of Jonah, God orchestrated ways to bring him to repentance and show mercy to him. That God will pursue Jonah in his disobedience was an act of grace, that he will show him mercy and appoint a fish to save him from death was an act of grace, that he will preserve his life in the belly of the fish for 3 days and nights and deliver him safely to dry land was God’s grace. Jonah did not deserve any of God’s mercy, he deserved judgement and death like the people of Nineveh he hated so much, yet God saves him. At this point Jonah is no different from the Assyrians he was called to preach to. In his arrogance he wanted to dictate to God who He should be merciful to, and when God’s will didn’t align with his, he ran and put innocent lives in danger at his expense. Yet God saves him from imminent death, that is why he was able to say in chapter 2 verse 9 ‘Salvation belongs to the Lord’. Before, Jonah could not bear to see the Assyrians hear the God’s message and be shown mercy, now he’s come to the realization that God will show mercy to whom he chooses to show mercy (Rom 9:15).

There are 3 important areas I want us to focus on this morning in verses 1-5, the first is the ongoing work of grace in the life of Jonah. The second is the manner in which his preaching as been shaped by his experience, his life being a testimony of mercy and unmerited favor from God. And third, the power and sufficiency of God’s word to bring sinners to repentance.

In the first verses of chapter 3 we see a similar call to Jonah like the one in the first chapter, God’s word came to Jonah a second time saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you”. God again for the second time calls Jonah to do His will, He recommissioned Jonah as His prophet and gave him a word to speak to the Ninevites. Why would God call Jonah again when he has proven unreliable? God could have easily forgiven him and let him out to pasture like a lame race-horse, to live out the rest of his life in obcurity. But God’s grace works in us to conform us more and more to His Son, and that means we don’t get to sit on the sidelines and watch. God will use us warts and all, not because he needs us, what I mean is that neither you nor I are indispensable to God’s work and purpose in the world. His call on our lives whether in daily steps of obedience or in big steps is to shape our lives so He will have maximum glory and we will have our greatest joy.

So in the case of Jonah, God was not finished with him. God saves him but his salvation does not end there, God’s forgiveness and salvation is an ongoing process. With Jonah it leads him to restoration, His desire for Jonah is that He will be more and more like Jesus, that is His desire for us as well. This forces us to depend on him and continually ask for Him to mold and shape us into His likeness. It is an ongoing process and with Jonah as with you and I, God is not yet finished with us.

This takes us to the second point. Jonah, having gone through chapter 2 is better equipped now to go and deliver God’s message to the Ninevites than he would have been in chapter 1. He is a testament to God’s mercy and unmerited grace, He knows full well that without it he would be dead. He is indeed just like the Ninevites apart from God’s saving grace, nothing separates him from this reality. His years following the law does not save him, his lineage does not save him, his vocation as a prophet does not save him. Salvation belongs to the Lord. He alone saves us from beginning to end and as we’ll see with Jonah God was still working out this salvation in him.

So God told Jonah what to say and he proclaimed the gospel to the Ninevites as God told him. Verse 4 is interesting because it tells us of the vastness of this great city. One man was to preach to a city so vast that it will take 3 days journey to walk its diameter and to proclaim God’s judgement on them. Imagine yourself in Jonah’s place, God has called you to proclaim judgement on a powerful pagan country, to people renowned for their creativity at killing. To proclaim that a God they do not worship will come and wipe them out.  One would think that the best Jonah could hope for is to be ridiculed and laughed off as an insane man (which he might have seemed having spent 3 days inside the belly of a fish), and at worst an angry mob will lay hold of him and tear him apart limb from limb.

Yet Jonah obeyed God and proclaimed the gospel. Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. It seems like a stark message to deliver to people that are living in outward rebellion against God. Wouldn’t it have been more effective for Jonah to cajole them and do some relational evangelism, you know go to the marketplace get to know them and tell them about God loves them and wants to have a relationship with them. Imagine sitting with an unbelieving co-worker during lunch and telling him/her ‘you have forty days to turn to God or you shall be overthrown’. I don’t advice that you do that actually. But you cannot sit with that co-worker week after week if your intention is to tell them about God without telling them of a God who hates sin and yet offers grace to those who will repent and turn to Him. No amount of relational living without verbal proclamation of the gospel will do any good. We should be relational, but I think the church has erred too far in being cautious about proclaiming the gospel to a dying world. God’s word is powerful and effective and proclaiming it changes lives, if you’re sitting here today you are testament to that. So why do we think we have to tame the gospel? Jonah proclaimed the gospel, he was not relational or “loving” yet God used the proclamation of His word through a less than perfect mouthpiece to bring a whole city to repentance.

In fact the very act of pronouncing God’s judgement on the city of Nineveh was an act of mercy. Throughout the OT and NT, whenever God pronounces judgement through his servant there is always a call to repentance and turning to God. Consider the account we read this morning of Peter’s sermon after Pentecost, it was a damning condemnation of his hearers as the murderers of Jesus, yet it was a call to turn to that very same Jesus for mercy and grace.

While Jonah was not afraid to pronounce judgement we know that he was hoping that God will destroy the city of Nineveh as we’ll see in the first verses of chapter 4. I’ll like to believe that none of us are like Jonah in this regard, we are not telling people about Christ while secretly hope that God will just wack them. But I think we might be on the other side, we feel compelled to tame God’s word so that we won’t offend people. Or we feel inadequate to proclaim it because we don’t know enough. We simply don’t trust that God’s word has power and effective to save. I think we should remind ourselves of Jonah, the word of God is not dependent on us, God does all the work all he wants of us in our obedience in declaring it.

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