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Good morning my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
As we begin another new week, what great global events will grab the headlines this week?
Have you discovered this remarkable irony: While we want OUR lives to be peaceful and blessed, our attention is drawn to the catastrophic, the disasters, the horrible news that affects others! In the news business one phrase is dominant… ‘bad news sells‘! Bad news captivates and holds the interest of people who grow bored quickly with peace. That is why whatever your source of news, it will always be primarily bad news, discouraging news, even frightening news.
Yesterday we left Jonah reporting amazingly good news for the great city of Nineveh. God had responded in love to the city-wide repentance and cry for God’s mercy. The catastrophic disaster which Jonah had warned was coming within a few weeks, because God had run out of patience with wicked Nineveh, was averted, through God’s compassion! Nineveh was given a second chance.
Jonah was not happy, in fact Jonah’s response to this miracle was anger! Jonah records his feelings this way: “Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry with God. He prayed to the LORD, ‘O LORD is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.“ (Jonah 4:1) If you could write one summary statement about God and how He relates to our human failures, what would you write? May I challenge you to take a moment and pick up a pen and your journal and try it?
I wonder if Jonah was being accused by some people in Nineveh as being a foreigner who had sounded a false alarm warning of impending great disaster? Could it be, some people were taunting him as a sensationalist, a false prophet, a deceiver? After Jonah had warned the city, and the people and the king had responded in great repentance and humility, Jonah did not immediately return home to Israel. Do you see what he did? Do we sometimes do the same?
“Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.” (Jonah 4:5) Do you suppose there are some Christians around the world who look at things like hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, famines, floods, political upheaval and global pandemics of disease… and they actually rub their hands together, not in despair but in glee, that they believe wicked people are receiving God’s well deserved judgment upon them?
Did you know the extreme despair Jonah felt is not unique to him? The prophet Elijah felt it when queen Jezebel sent word that he would soon be killed in her response to the Mount Carmel showdown and God’s fire from heaven and the subsequent slaughter of her false prophets of Baal. (1 Kings 19:4) Or do you remember Moses also reached a place of great despair and ask God to just let his life come to an end when he was emotionally exhausted from dealing with all the grumbling people. (Numbers 11:14,15) Sometimes God’s people grow weary in well-doing in our wicked, dark world. Has it ever happened to you my friend?
As we read the final verses of Jonah’s story, we find something very important for you and me today. God is ALWAYS wanting to teach us more of His truth / nurture our relationship with Jesus so we become more and more like Jesus / and remove from our lives those things that distract us or even disqualify us from being led by God to accomplish His great purposes in our world. Did you get that?
Listen to this from Hebrews 12:1,2 “Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Do we know ourselves well enough that we can easily detect when one of our weaknesses (things that hinder or sin that entangles us) is causing us to stumble rather than walking our life path with confidence in Jesus?
Jonah had just experienced one of the most remarkable events in human history, yet he was pouting. It was true, Nineveh had for a long time been a terribly wicked city and the Assyrian army was pushing closer and closer to his homeland Israel, as they captured cities and towns in the expansion of their world-wide empire. For those reasons and more, in Jonah’s justice, God’s destruction of the city would have been the judgment they deserved.
Perhaps Jonah had been thinking what it would be like to take that long road home to Israel and then start telling his friends and all who would listen, about his great adventure of warning Nineveh, but in their wickedness and their unresponsiveness, watching God send fire from heaven and burn the city to the ground, as He had done to wicked Sodom and Gomorrah so many centuries before.
Instead as you see in the last verses of Jonah’s story, no destruction came, and Jonah once again learned of God’s Creative power, His Omniscient power, God’s power restrained in mercy, and how easily it is for our human perspective to be selfish, distorted, and way out of alignment with God, and His ultimate desire of sin deliverance for every human being, everywhere in the world.
God said to Jonah “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than 125,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left…Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (Jonah 4:10,11) What will it take my friends, for you and me to see New York City, or Moscow, or Beijing, or Paris, or Hanoi or Havana or Tokyo or Dubai or Kabul or Las Vegas or any place in our world… as God sees the people in that place?
Eventually Jonah turned and walked down that long road back home. We have no record of what he told those who would listen to him when he arrived back in Israel. What we do know is the nation of Israel kept turning further and further away from God, becoming more and more like Nineveh had been. God sent other prophets to His people with warnings similar to what Jonah had said to Nineveh, but the Hebrew people did not respond as the Ninevites. They sealed their own fate by their lack of responsiveness to God’s love warnings.
Sadly, it appears the next generation who grew up in Nineveh disregarded the miracle which had taken place, and became even more wicked than their ancestors. In fact less than 50 years from the day Jonah had walked into Nineveh with his shocking warning, the great army of wicked Assyria attacked and conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. In 722bc Israel was destroyed. Samaria, its capital city demolished. Thousands upon thousands of Israelites were dragged off as slaves to Nineveh and other places in the Assyrian Empire. (2 Kings 17) We’ll look at that horrific event more closely a few days from now. For today, let’s celebrate the remarkable spiritual deliverance God brought to Nineveh in that generation.
The truth is none of us knows what this week or the rest of 2020 or next year will hold for our world. What we do know is each day we draw one day closer to the day God will finally say… “that’s enough! It’s time for accountability for every human being.” We have this day and the privilege of experiencing what Jonah did… being used of God to bring His hope to our dying world, one person, one act of kindness, one word of truth at a time, wherever you are in the world.
Does God see your heart and mine ready or resentful? Available to Him or angry? Respectful and reverent in our worship of God or self-focused, self-consumed and disregarding God’s desire to bring HOPE to our world today? Remember this truth: “The eyes of the LORD roam to and fro across the whole earth, looking to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to HIM.” (2 Chronicles 16:9)
Oh Lord Jesus we bow before You . . .
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Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
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Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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