Jonah has had a transforming experience.  He had been living his faith his way.  Look where it got him.  God wasn’t interested in making Jonah sorry, though; God is interested in making Jonah holy, getting him straightened out for service on God’s terms, life on God’s terms, faith on God’s terms, according to God’s Word.

“[T]he word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time” (3:1).  God tries again.  Has the transforming experience had its effect?  Will Jonah welcome the guest now?  Will he receive God’s Word?  Let him receive it with fear and trembling, only let him receive it.  God asks a lot of us, beloved!  He doesn’t set the bar low; He lifts us up.  Grace.  Grace for Jonah and for those to whom God intends to send Jonah.  The Word came to Jonah, as visitor, guest, and grace, for Jonah to bear the Word and give the Word to others sorrowfully in need of that grace.

God tells Jonah to do the very thing He had already told Jonah to do.  God repeats Himself.  Have you ever had to repeat yourself?  Parents seem to do that a lot.  Devon will tell you she has to, with me, a lot.  Jonah gets the same mission: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you” (3:2).  God does not change His command to us.  He changes us for His command.  God does not change His Word for us; he changes us according to His Word.  God entrusts Jonah with a message and a mission.  Jonah feels weak-kneed under that message, frightened at the prospect of the mission because, now, he knows he will go.  Oh, my Lord, I’m really going to do this—like stepping out of the airplane for your first bona fide skydive.  Jonah goes not to mumble softly some message he’d prefer to speak, but to proclaim God’s message.

Yes, “Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord” (3:3).  Those are quite possibly the most beautiful words in this brief book.  Jonah goes to Nineveh: Sin Central.  What does that mean?  It doesn’t necessarily mean obviously, outrageously sinful acts were to be seen on every street corner, though I suppose there was enough of that, too.  Sin isn’t always outrageously obvious.  All sin is, brothers and sisters, is not living life on God’s terms.  Sin is living life on terms other than God’s terms.  Kind of on God’s terms, mostly on God’s terms, won’t do.  Jesus didn’t tell us to forget about all that be holy for I am holy stuff.  Along with the woman caught in adultery, Jesus tells us to go and sin no more.  We work on that every day of our lives; we’re not there yet, but we’re slowly, slowly getting there, together; we have help and we need it.

Nineveh, we’re told, “was a very large city; it took three days to go through it” (3:3).  Some of you have traveled, been to some of the largest cities in the world: Houston isn’t so far away.  But even little West Columbia is quite large enough: we don’t know everybody here.  We can find strangers right here, just down the street.  So many lives that we don’t touch, and many that we do.  Our mission is not quite the same as Jonah’s, but it’s not entirely dissimilar.  God sent Jonah to Sin Central to speak God’s Word, there, to set God’s Word alongside the sin, to compare, measure, to reveal, to evoke a response.  No one can be neutral to God’s Word.  People will either accept it or reject it.  Indifference and indecision are not in-between categories.  We’ve convinced ourselves that all those people with whom we might speak will reject God’s Word, every time, so we don’t bother.  Yet our conscience still whispers, truthfully, that they won’t reject, every time.  But we don’t bother: and let’s just be clear that we includes me.

God calls us, equips us, and sends us out with the gift of His Word, telling us to give it to everyone everywhere He leads us.  It’s a big mission and it’s a big world into which we go.  And how small we are, just like poor, frightened, weak-kneed Jonah, sort of pulling himself slowly along the walls of Nineveh, pale and trembling, panicky, feeling the hand of God and not especially enjoying it.  If this is what the joy of the Lord feels like, forget it!  But that’s not all.  Yes, Jonah feels very small, and in Nineveh he is, but, not so very strangely, Jonah doesn’t feel so very alone there.  After what he’s been through, Jonah feels like he’s beginning to understand, maybe for the first time in his life, that the one who is Biggest of all is with him.  The fish was big, and the dark, cold, deep was big—so big!—and God is Biggest of all.

“Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, ‘Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown’” (3:4).  He is going slowly, reluctantly!  And he is going.  There are things we should be doing and things we should be saying for God promptly, right now.  There are other things we should be saying and doing for God only after careful thought and planning.  The point is, whether right away or after proper, prayerful preparation, to do these things rather than not do them.  Jonah had preferred to coast along the not doing route.  He understood now, vividly, where that led.  All those people around him—their lives were headed there, too, and God had now sent Jonah to say something about that.

Would you rather talk to someone about Jesus when you aren’t sure of the reception you’ll get or maybe 75% convinced you’ll be rejected, or would you rather, instead, do some act of kindness, smile, and say nothing?  If God had asked Jonah to go give bread to the hungry of Nineveh—and there were many hungry in Nineveh—or if God had told Jonah to pray for the people of Nineveh on some hill outside of Nineveh, or if God had told Jonah to take up a collection for the downtrodden of Nineveh, my guess is Jonah would have been eager, even glad, to do any of those things.  God commands Jonah to speak God’s Word in Nineveh, to the people living in Nineveh.

Why?  So that God will be blameless when He blasts every living thing out of Nineveh?  So that, when God does, Jonah will have the happy satisfaction of saying “I told you so!”?  No.  No.  For transformation, for a second chance, grace, salvation.  Forty days.  Why not tomorrow, if God was set on being rid of them all?  God was not set on being rid of them all.  God wished to save.  Forty days.  Listen now, consider now, choose now, while there’s time.  Yes.  That sounds familiar to us.  That sounds quite biblical, actually, just like God.  God sent Jonah to speak God’s Word in Nineveh in order to save people out of Nineveh.  God is at work in Sin Central for salvation.

Beloved, we all carry Sin Central with us, within.  We know God is at work, there.

And what do you suppose happened there in Nineveh?  “The Ninevites believed God.  A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth” (3:5).  Well, is that likely?!  The Word getting through, breaking through, tearing through?  A miracle!  Belief!  Beloved, faith and belief are always a miracle: God at work.  It sounds like a revival there in Nineveh, people of every caste and class turning to God with trembling and hope, contrition and prayer.  No one was too proud to kneel.  No one had convinced him or herself that such a message couldn’t be for him or her—I’m too far gone!  It’s too late for me!  Sometimes that’s genuine hopelessness; sometimes it’s just lack of interest, wanting to be left alone, not bothered, just like Jonah had in the hope that maybe he could run from God after all.

A fast.  Time to step aside from the thoughtless, reflex routines of living and take a good, hard, candid look.  God didn’t say the fast He wanted was abstaining from beer, meat, and chocolate for a few weeks.

“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” (3:6).  If even the king of the pagans takes the message to heart!  God’s Word gets through, beloved.  God’s Word changes whom God chooses to change.  We look around and it seems as if there are many whom God has not yet changed, and we’re left feeling confused and concerned.  We really love some of those not yet changed!

Even the king of the pagans listens and responds in trembling hope.  This is the proper response of those who govern on earth.  If only more would.  Can you imagine any king, president, prime minister or dictator for life kneeling before God’s Word, today?  The King of Sin Central now understands and acknowledges—miraculously: grace!—that his authority has been given to him by God for a reason, just this purpose, to lead and govern by faith.  The king calls upon all his subjects, every citizen, to “call urgently on God.  Let them give up their evil ways and their violence.  Who knows?  God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish” (3:8-9).  Be done with the living that isn’t living on God’s terms: that’s the fast God wants, the way God loves.

Out in the wilderness, where people came to hear, to turn and confess their deep desire to be received and healed by God, John the Baptist told them about the way to live for Life.  He urged them to turn from practices and habits that gave no honor or glory to God.  He called them to live to honor and glorify God.  John told them about the one who was coming, God’s compassion, His compassionate alternative to His fierce, just anger.  Then, God’s compassion was there, with them: the Way, and the truth, and the life.

If only our turn toward God were already complete, but maybe if the true desire is there, active?  “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” (3:10).  Poor Jonah!  God told him to tell all those unclean pagans that they were going to be wiped out, tell them that God was going to show them, teach them a thing or two.  And He did.