Jonah Chapter 3
3:1-2 “And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.”
There is a second chance. If we have failed to obey God formerly yet we have been spared to see the grim reality of death, and what it means to die without hope, we are given a second opportunity to reconsider and to begin to obey God. Jonah had not only seen the grim reality of death, he had experienced it in a way, and he is now prepared to preach unto Nineveh, but we dare not wait for a brush with death to begin to obey God. Time is too precious, life is too short, death is too real to put off till tomorrow what we should have done yesterday. Thank God there is a second chance for us, a renewed appeal, a fresh call, a second time, but let us not defer or neglect it. The message is short and to the point. “Repent.” We need go to no school to learn it, we need attend no lectures or seminars for further instruction. If our lives so far have displayed only the Missing Prophet, and the world thinks God is dead, we can rectify that situation without further ado. Nineveh represents Israel, as we said earlier, but our commission is to our city, our community, our group, our neighborhood wherever we be found. There is no excuse for us. How shall we preach except we be sent? We are sent! God says we are His messengers, His witnesses, His living epistles, His prophets, His preachers if so be we are found in Christ. Now if you are not in Christ this does not apply to you.
3:3 “So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days journey.”
How would you have regarded Jonah if at the second call he had again refused to go? Would you have found a reasonable excuse for such a thing? We think not. The same argument must apply to ourselves. We were first called, then sent. If at the first we disobeyed God, let us go the second time. Neither be disturbed by the size of the problem you tackle, for it is not we but God who causes men to repent. Our part is only to show others that the end of all things is at hand, and to call upon men everywhere to repent. Nineveh is an exceeding great city of three days journey. It would require three lifetimes to fulfill the Lord’s command to go to all nations, and time is short. Already we can look back on wasted years. But neither the size of the harvest field nor the previous failure to obey must hinder us now, for we may never get a third chance. Death may claim us literally before we fulfill the commission if we put it off this time. And in death the only question from them will be, “Why hast thou done this?” Will we answer that it wasn’t convenient, that we were too busy, that we didn’t feel called, that we didn’t believe God was speaking to us? Will we offer as an excuse our weakness compared to the size of the city, our smallness in the face of the mighty commission? What will we say to those who were in this lifetime unaware that Nineveh was about to fall when we see them in the place of death? What shall we have to offer in answer to their Why? If we disobeyed God in the first instance, what shall we say to him if we disobey Him the second time? Arise, let us be going.
3:4 “And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
We have only one lifetime in which to do the work of the Lord. It is enough if we go only a day’s journey into the city. But let us begin to enter. Of course it seems foolishness, especially when we spend a whole lifetime preaching the end is nigh and behold, Nineveh, still standing! But our aim and object is not to predict the end of the world but to cause all men everywhere to repent. The end result is Nineveh’s repentance. Look at our hope, look at our salvation, then look at the conditions we see around us, and try to convince us that there is no need for Nineveh to repent! Yes, we may look like false prophets if we preach that Nineveh must fall, but preaching is not based on how the preacher feels but only on the urgent need for repenting. Yes, we are prophets of doom in a pleasure-seeking world but death is waiting for us all in the end. They must all die. Can we look closely at the place of death where our Lord Himself went and feel no compulsion to call on men to repent and be saved? Shall we look forward to the resurrection knowing that our friends and neighbours in life will not be there with us? Should we allow our own kin to perish without warning them in time? Yes, we may feel terribly alien and alone as we step out into the streets of our city, and our voices may falter as we cry “Repent!” but dare we disobey God a second time? Will we not have the satisfaction of knowing that at last we are not fleeing from the Lord’s presence? Will our solitary act of righteousness not cause another to reconsider, and another, and another till many join us?
