It is an honor to be in this position on a regular basis on Sunday evenings. And, as I was thinking about what I would like to do with you on these evenings, I thought that Jonah was an apt place to begin. It really is about God's vision for the city - God's call for us to minister to the city. But as I was thinking about Jonah, I was thinking about something that you and I do every day. Most of the time, you don't realize that you're doing it. You not only do it every day, but you do it again and again and again every day.
Everyone Interprets Life
In fact, it's impossible for you not to do it. If you're on this side of insanity, you do it quite regularly. This thing shapes everything you say; it shapes what you do. It shapes the decisions that you make; it shapes your choices and your interactions; it structures your relationships. It really does form the way you experience your world, and you perceive the things that you see and you hear and you touch and you taste; you interpret your world. You never stop doing that. You're constantly interpreting your world.
There is a thing that the Bible teaches, not in the words that I'm about to give you, but it's all over Scripture and it's this...that human beings do not live life based on the facts of their experience, but based on their interpretation of the facts. You are an incessant interpreter. That is a significant and important function. You never leave your life alone. You pick it up; you turn it in your hands; you look at it from every vista you can look at it; you think about it; you worry about it; you reconsider it; you replay the DVD over and over again, each time trying to understand what you're dealing with every day.
You think about God, and you think about others, and you think about the meaning and purpose of life - it all sounds very exhausting, doesn't it? It's amazing you have time to do all the other things that you do! You've been given an amazing capacity to think. Don't ever say to somebody, "The problem with you is you don't think." Be afraid; be very afraid; you never stop thinking. Now maybe you're thinking, "Okay, Paul, I understand that. What does this have to do with Jonah?" Well, you can turn there, if you would, in your Bibles once again to Jonah.
This is, by all accounts, a bit of a curious book...forty-eight little verses, two pages in the ESV. It's not really a classic prophet; there's very little prophecy actually in Jonah. It's not really a biography - we don't know a whole lot about Jonah; he's only mentioned one other place in Scripture. And if you read through this little book of Jonah, you will understand quite quickly that Jonah is not the main character of this story, and so you have to look at Jonah, and you wonder what is the function of Jonah in the Word of God, why this little book?
What does this little book do for us? How does this help us? Well surely, I've already said what's interesting to us in Jonah is that it does talk about God's call to a man to a big city, a big wicked city, and that man is running away from God, and there are many lessons to be learned about life and ministry in the city...God's vision for the city, God's grace in the city. But there's something even more magnificent about this little book. In the context of one incident in the life of one man, God gives us the grand themes of a Biblical worldview.
Maybe this is the modern way to say it, "Jonah is really a biblical worldview in a podcast." Brief as it is, the themes are sweeping and grand. In fact, Jonah really does define what it means to think about our world, to think about our lives, to think about our relationships, to think about the meaning and purpose of life, to think about all that there is to think about in a distinctly Biblical way. Jonah is everything you need to know about a Biblical worldview in 48 verses. Wow! Only God could do such thing.
And it's all brought to surface by this strange story of this man who gets a call from God, who runs away and is eaten by a fish. And yet, God takes that unique story and uses it as a means to remind us again of what life is actually about. And so, I would like you to turn in your Bibles again; we're going to continue our reading of Jonah. We're going to read now chapters 3 and 4: Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, 'Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.' So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD.
Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, 'Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!' And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, 'By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything.
The Repentance of Nineveh
Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.' When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.
And he prayed to the Lord and said, 'O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? This is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.' And the Lord said, 'Do you do well to be angry?' Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there.
He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.' But God said to Jonah, 'Do you do well to be angry for the plant?' And he said, 'Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.' And the Lord said. 'You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night.
And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?' There are, in this brief account of this one incident in the life of Jonah, four fundamental realities of a Biblical way of thinking about life. And these are the realities that are not only to shape the way that we think about our relationship to the city in which God has placed us, but they're meant to be the realities that shape the way you think about your everyday, the way you think about what you encounter as you live your life as one of God's children in this broken world.
Here's the first reality. It's the reality of a God of awesome glory who is at the center of the universe. Now, I know that if you're like me, you want to be at the center of your universe. When you have to wait, you wish that you were in the center of your universe. When you're hungry, you wish that you were in the center of your universe. When you're in an argument with somebody that keeps pressing you and won't listen to your stunning wisdom, you wish that you were in the center of the universe; when you face things that you hadn't planned and you would've never planned for yourself, you wish that you were in the center of the universe.
One of the tragic things that sin does to us is it makes us desire that place that only God can ever have. And Jonah makes it very clear from the first verse to the last verse that there is a God of power and glory beyond what we can wrap our brains around, who sits at the center of the universe, the one place I can never want to be. And it's hard to characterize the grandeur of this God that is pictured in this book. This is not just a God who created things. I mean that would be an awesome glory in itself, but this is a God who is in intimate control of His creation.
He can send the wind where He wants to send the wind. What power! Just try to control wind for a moment; see how far you get. This is a God who can call on a fish to swallow a man. What an amazing thing! In all of the vastness of the ocean and all of the vastness of all the creatures in the ocean, God can summon one fish to do His bidding-that's glory! God wants to grow a plant, He can grow a plant. Try, by the word of your mouth to grow plant; well don't try; it would be a miserable waste of your time.
You don't have the capacity. And God, with a thought or a twitch of His finger, can wither the plant that He grew. This is a God of glory! But He's also not only the Creator and Controller of the physical world, He's the King of kings, He's the King of nations. It's not enough for Jonah to recognize that the Lord is King of Israel and King of Judah, He's King of Nineveh; He is the King of kings. He's the ruler of everybody who exists wherever they exist. There is no challenge of that rule. He is King!
A Glorious King and Judge
And whether you recognize His rule or not, Jonah presents to us a glorious King who has the power and the authority to do what He wills with the kingdoms He rules. He's not only King, He is Judge. He has the power and authority to say what is right and to say what is wrong. Well, I guess that's a power we crave too - we want rule. We want to set our own law. We want to create our own rules. We want people to keep our rules. We like people who keep our rules. We like people who submit to our kingship.
But we aren't the King, we aren't the Judge. There is a King. There is a Judge. And so God has the authority to look at the great city of Nineveh and say, "This is not what I've ordained the city to be. This is a place of evil." He has the right to call us to live inside of His boundaries, to observe His wisdom, to obey His Word. There is a Judge in the center of the universe, a God of awesome glory! Now I would ask you this question, I have to ask you this question, "Did you recognize His glory this week?"
Did you rest in His power? Did you find comfort in His rule? Or did you wish that you had His throne, and you could rule your world as Sovereign? Why is that question important? Listen, these realities we can't give away to the city until they have first gripped our hearts. You cannot give away what you, yourself, don't have. And I think if we were honest this week, probably in more ways than we realize, we challenged this God of glory. We crave His position, maybe in a moment of irritation, maybe in a moment of envy, maybe in a moment of selfishness, maybe in a moment of anger - our anger is played out horizontally, but it's really an anger with God.
It's really a question of His authority. And because we are not comfortable with this (gesture), we're not comfortable with this (gesture). In the center of the universe is a God of awesome glory. But there's a second reality that just jumps off the page in Jonah. It is that this world in which we live is a place that is terribly broken by sin. You see that in Jonah beautifully depicted in both a corporate and an individual sense. Corporately you see the case study of Nineveh. Nineveh was, by all accounts, a great, great city.
If you read the history of this period of time, a city of over 120,000 was considered to be a very populous city. This is probably the prince of the Assyrian cities. And it was reported that you could get goods from the north and from the south and from the east and the west in Nineveh. You could buy about anything you wanted because people flocked to Nineveh to sell their wares. It was a cultural capital, and yet, Nineveh was a broken city known for its selfexaltation, known for its idolatry, known for its corruption.
And as I was reading about Nineveh, I couldn't, I couldn't help but think of the city that we live in. What city in America has the heritage that this city has? I love the new architecture in Philadelphia. I love the way it interacts with the old classic American architecture that's here in the city. I love that this has become a place of great culture, art, and music. I probably love the restaurant revival in Philadelphia more than I should. I love that Walnut Street doesn't close down at six o'clock in the evening anymore.
I love that there are traffic jams at 11 o'clock at night in old city on the weekend. But there are shocking things in this city as well that, like Nineveh, demonstrate the cruel brokenness of the world that we live in; it's a broken place. If you have been at all aware, if you ever read a newspaper, ever watch a local news account, you know that this city, over the last several years, has been marred by political corruption where the rights of government are sold for money. We all know that the violence in this city is shocking; it's indefensible.
It screams how tragically broken we are. We should not get used to it. We should not say, "It's ok!" - we shouldn't. This weekend, Luella and I, I was with her on Friday, picked her up at her gallery, and we decided we were going to go see a movie at one of the Ritz Theaters, and I ran out and grabbed a city paper, classic Philadelphia thing to do, to look for the theater times, and was assaulted by four or five pages of utter perversion that is publicly advertised in the newspapers of our city and goes on in walking distance of this congregation.
Enough! It Is Not Okay
We must say, "Enough! It's not okay. It's not okay." And you can't help but read Jonah and be sad at what Nineveh has become. Your heart should say, "Oh, wouldn't it would be wonderful if God could've said, "Nineveh that great and wonderful city." But He's got to say the second thing, "...that it is exceedingly evil." This world is a broken place. Literally, you can just about stand on any corner of any great city anywhere in the world, and you can see the brokenness. And the Bible describes it. It's not just a lack of education; it's not just poor politics; it's not just a failure of urban planning; it's not just an anemic welfare system.
The Bible says, "It's sin!" There's something that has infected human culture and it has broken it. It doesn't function the way it was meant to function. But you also see that brokenness in Jonah in an individual sense, and here, Jonah is our case study. How outrageous it is, who do we think we are that God would actually come to us, and God, this God of great glory would say, "This is what I want you to do," that God would honor me to be part of what He's doing on earth, and I would say, "No!"...and run and go in another direction-how outrageous is that!
Who do we think we are? And yet, maybe you haven't had a recent visit to Tarshish, but you've run from God; you know God says, "A soft answer turns away wrath, and a harsh word stirs up anger," but you want to be angry, and you want to give that person 'what for', and you turn from God, and you run in another direction. You know you shouldn't lust, but you give your eyes and your mind to things that you should not give your eyes to and your mind to, and you would rather have your pleasure than honor and serve your God - you've run to Tarshish.
And perhaps your marriage has become more of a cold war d‚Äötente than it has an intimate union because, in many, many ways, you haven't run toward God, you've run away from Him in that marriage. You'd rather have your way; you'd rather win the argument; you'd rather have control than to be part of what God is doing in that relationship. You see, sin makes us rebels against God's plan. Sin makes us people who would rather have our way than God's way...who would rather do what seems best to us than what the God who created it all, who has the most expansive wisdom you could ever imagine, says is best.
We would rather say, "This is my best and this is what I'm going to do." The second reality is we live in the world that has been terribly broken by sin. Third reality...that human beings were created for transcendency. Human beings were created to be connected to something bigger than our own lives. We were created to live for something much bigger, huger than me and mine. Eugene Peterson makes this wonderful observation in one of his most recent books. He says that the Holy Trinity has been replaced by another trinity-holy wants, holy needs, and holy feelings.
And so, I do what my holy wants tell me to do. I do what my holy feelings direct me to do. I do what my holy wants draw me to do. And yet, that was not the way human beings were created to live. You see, there's a way in which, without this call, this design to live in a much bigger world than the world we would choose to live in, Jonah doesn't make any sense at all. Why does it make any difference how Nineveh lives? Let Nineveh live the way it wants to live. If the people of Nineveh can be happy, let them live however.
Who cares whether Jonah goes or doesn't go? Let him just live. But you see that's not how human beings were created to live. That, in its very nature, is a dehumanizing existence because human beings were meant to get their identity and their meaning and purpose, their reason for getting up in the morning vertically, not horizontally. My connection to this was meant to define how I would be connected to this (gestures). And I would ask you practically, be honest with yourself, "What do you live for every day?
What is your definition of a good day, a good week, a good month? What is it that you want from your job? What is it that you want from your house? What is it that you want from your friendships? What is it that you want from your physical body? Do you just want God to endorse holy wants, holy needs, and holy feelings? Or do you get the fact that He's called you to something that is gloriously bigger?" This will sound very harsh, but I'll say it of myself, there are times when I don't minister because I don't care--because I'm taken care of.
Walking Through the City With a Cold Heart
And I've got what I want and I can walk in my city and I can believe in a God of grace, but I walk through my city with a cold heart because I'm satisfied. We were not created to live that way. And so, the problem with Nineveh is not that they wanted too much, the problem with Nineveh is they settled for way too little. The things that they were living for were never what human beings were meant to live for. The problem with Jonah is that his world is too small. And isn't it, that often, that it's the problem with us as well?
I was created from day one to be part of something bigger, to be part of the plan, the purpose of that God of glory. I'm meant to get my identity and my meaning and purpose, my inner sense of well-being, my deepest satisfactions in life from Him. The reality of a God of glory who is in the center of His universe...The reality of a world that's terribly broken by sin...The reality of the fact that human beings were made, designed for transcendency, but there's one more reality. Maybe it is the sweetest of the realities in this 48 verses - it's the reality of unrelenting transforming grace.
I love Jonah. I love this book. I love it most because of the story of grace. I see Nineveh in this man (self). I see Jonah in this man (self). This would not be a comforting book to me if it were not for the unrelenting themes of grace that are here. You say, "But, Paul, isn't Jonah basically an announcement of judgment?" Think about this, if you announce judgment, that's a grace. Do you understand? Because if all you are going to do is judge, you don't announce it! The announcement of judgment is God giving people an opportunity to turn, to repent, to pray.
And so, from the first note of this little book, we see grace. And what's the last verse? "And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city?" It's a God of warning grace, a God of rescuing grace. There are the brackets of the book of Jonah. He would warn; he would rescue, because He is unrelenting in His grace. Why would God not let stubborn Jonah drown? He's just a prophet. There's got to be more. It's not like there's a shortage. No, you see that's not the God of this book. There's a tenderness of heart of God toward Jonah.
At the end, where is Jonah? God's rescued Nineveh by His grace and where's Jonah? Jonah is angry, disappointed with God, and he says something that you've got to recognize the humor here, he said, "I knew this is what you would do, because I knew you were God of grace. I'm so mad." And yet, God doesn't say to Jonah, "How dare you?" God, very sweetly harnesses the forces of nature to give this man a lesson in what true grace is really about. What a sweet picture of God's grace. You see, you can stand before a God of glory; you can stand in the middle of brokenness; you can receive that scary call to live for something bigger than yourself when you recognize the unrelenting, transforming grace of that God of glory because His grace says, "I will not call you to do a thing without making you able to do it.
I am a God of grace." Why do we care about our city? -- because God is a God of awesome glory. Why do we care about our city? -- because sin has left it broken. Why do we care about our city? -- because it's filled with people who have shrunk the size of their lives down to the size of their lives and they don't even know it. They are missing the thing for which they were created. Why do we care about our city? -- because we believe that God's transforming grace is the most powerful force in the universe.
Welcome to Jonah - it's for us. It's for our city. God help us that these four realities would not only shape our ministry, but would shape everything we do and everything we say to His glory, to our benefit, and to the benefit of those who are around us. Let's pray: Lord, thank you for these 48 verses, what a gift you have given to us in them. Thank you that you have compressed in these few passages an amazing picture of the world that we live in. Thank you for the clarity with which you bring these realities again to us, the reality of Your glory, the reality of the brokenness of our world, the reality of Your design that we would live transcendent lives way beyond the borders of our own little lives, and the reality of unrelenting, perseverant, transforming grace.
Would You not, in Your love, transform us even more so that we may be Your agents of transformation in the city that You've placed us in, in the city we love? In Jesus name, Amen.
