The Rescue of God

Well, this morning's sermon is about the sermon. What is a sermon? Someone has said a sermon is the art of speaking in someone else's sleep. Or did you hear about the man who had a dream that he was preaching? He woke up and he was.

This sermon of Jonah's—that's the sermon we are focusing on—the sermon of Jonah's is just five words long in the original Hebrew. Just five words. It's a bit longer in English, but in the original, it's just five words: "40 more days and Nineveh will be overturned." That's the sermon. Was it a good sermon? We know a good sermon when we hear one. This sermon is succinct, it's brief, we like those sorts. This was a successful sermon, judging by the results, the most effective sermon perhaps in the whole Bible. Billy Graham would love to have preached a sermon as effective as this one. So determined was God to have this sermon preached that he pursued Jonah across the Mediterranean. The very opening of the book, one verse one, God says to Jonah: "Go to Nineveh and preach against it." One verse two, Jonah runs the other way. One verse three, he heads to Tarshish. He goes down to Yafo. I discovered yesterday that's how it's pronounced in Arabic: Yafo. Do you know how I know this? Because Michael Mata told me. His family are from Palestine, they are from Yafo. He has family there.

The whale vomits Jonah up, and then the word of the Lord comes to Jonah again and says: "I want you to go to Nineveh."

And so this sermon is the center of the book. Everything in the book is a lead-up to this sermon, and everything after the book is the result of the sermon. So it's the absolute centerpiece. If Jonah is a drama in four acts, this is act three, scene one. It's the pinnacle of the whole piece of drama. And today, in honor of the sermon, I have a five-point sermon. Five points. My five points are this: the audience, the sermon, the result, the preacher, and Jesus. The audience, the sermon, the result, the preacher, and Jesus.

The Audience

First of all, the audience. Nineveh was a tough crowd. You might think you're a tough crowd. Some of you know a man by the name of John Chapman. I remember him telling a story about speaking at a university mission, and the university mission was they'd organized an event for him at a place called "The Boat," which is on Newcastle upon Tyne. And The Boat is a boat that's moored under the bridge, which looks a lot like the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And there is a lot of—it was a student watering hole, and there was a lot of alcohol there, and there was a disco there, and there was a revolving dance floor. And he said a kilometer away, a kilometer away, I could feel the sound hitting me in the chest. That's how loud it was going to be. And there were lights flashing and there was a smoke machine. And when he got up to speak, no one could hear what he had to say. And when at the end he said, "I'm going to pray," a couple of drunken uni students ran down the front and threw themselves at his feet and said, "We'll pray with you, brother. We'll pray with you." It was a tough crowd.

Well, Nineveh was a tough crowd. A contemporary prophet, Nahum, described Nineveh as the bloody city, full of lies and robbery, never without victims. This was a very dark place. These were a bloodthirsty people, a people given to calculated cruelty. The things they did to their enemies that they overthrew is well documented by the ancient sources, but we also have archaeological evidence for that. So if you go to the British Museum, you can see a number of carved stone reliefs of what the Assyrians did to those they conquered. Ian Powell once said to me, "You have to be careful with illustrations because sometimes they can be so graphic and so distressing that people can't really think about anything else." So I'm going to spare you the details. I'm not going to tell you. You can go and look it up if you want to. You can see quite clearly on the internet and online what it's like. But we are talking about the most barbaric acts you can possibly imagine. No wonder Jonah was reluctant to go to that group of people.

But they were also affluent. I mean, they were the winners. They were the nation that had conquered the nations around them, and the tribute that they had collected from their conquests led them to be able to build a vast city with parks and gardens and civic buildings. And why would they even listen? Was preaching even the way forward? What about forming a missionary society? What about establishing a committee to look into the feasibility of outreach into Nineveh? Or what about God? Why couldn't God just give some skywriting, or perhaps a magic hand that appears and writes on the wall? That had been done. Preaching is such an antiquated form of communication. And yet, in this great city, sinking under the weight of its own sinfulness and selfishness and self-obsession, we just get five words: five words, "40 days and you'll be rubble." You've got about six weeks, the standard settlement period for Sydney real estate—that's 42 days. You've got two days less than that.

The Sermon

Well, that's the audience. What about the sermon? Well, you know straight away, it's not three points and a poem. It's not chitchat. There's no jokes. Nothing in the sermon about the hobbies of the preacher—he likes music and outdoor sports. No cute illustrations about his family. No reference to the state of the world or society, which would be reasonable. No political undertones. Sometimes prophets did talk about the political. There's none of that here. Just a mere mortal man going to a cesspool like Nineveh with the understanding that a mere sermon might change them. And it's a message of judgment. Again, that's such an unpopular topic, such an unlikely topic, and yet it exceeded the wildest fears of the preacher himself.

The Result

Well, that's the sermon. What about the results? The sermon is a striking success. We know it's a striking success because in the town square you hear people saying, "Have you heard this visiting preacher, Jonah? He's very good." No, you know it's a striking success because in verse 5, it says "They believed God." There is a flicker of hope in the heart of the king, because why would God send a prophet unless there was a way out? Why would God send a warning if it were irreversible? Why would God send Jonah to Nineveh if he just meant to destroy it? Why send a prophet at all if the fate was sealed? There must be the possibility of a way out, otherwise God would not have done this.

Well, they explode with repentance. The king comes down off his throne. The king proclaims a fast. All of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth—the homeless, the housekeepers, the halfway houses, the landed gentry, the lawyers, the physicians, the merchant bankers, the tech gurus, or their equivalents. They all put on sackcloth. See, the judgment of God is the great leveler in life, for all come under that judgment. And a black cloth is even placed over the beasts, the horses, the sheep, and the cattle. And water is withheld from the animals so they too will bleat and cry out to add to the lament of the 120,000 souls in Nineveh. And God heard. They cry out to him, they believe, they believe God, they cry out to him, and God heard.

"40 days and Nineveh will be destroyed." Yet 40 days. Why "yet 40 days"? Isn't this a call to change? Isn't this an offer of grace? Is the message of doom an opportunity for the hearers to turn back? And in some way, by the work of the Spirit, the sermon was a resounding success, and they were persuaded that it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

You might know the famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards called "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God." It was preached hundreds of years ago, and the most unlikely, the most unlikely of sermons. And people have studied it and said, you know, what are the rhetorical devices that are used here? And, you know, really, when they're looking, they're really not finding anything at all. And yet it was greatly used by God, this message of disaster, impending disaster.

Why was this sermon successful? It was conveyed by a reluctant preacher, and yet God blessed the sermon, not on the eloquence of the sermon, not that it stirred the intellect necessarily, not that it was funny, but by the foolishness of the preaching, God moved the will of the hearer and saved those who believed.

The Preacher

Well, what about the preacher? Point four. Think about Jonah for a moment. Jonah is very orthodox. He's got everything right in his own head. He's a very orthodox believer. He's got the right doctrine. If you look at one verse 9, when they say, "Who are you?" he says, "I'm a Hebrew. I worship the Lord. I worship the God of heaven." So it's like his creed. He says the creed. He believes in salvation by grace. Look at chapter 2:9: "Salvation comes from the Lord." He knows it comes from God. It's a free gift, not something that someone could earn it. It comes from the Lord. It's given by him. The prayer in chapter 2, it's an exemplary prayer, picked up from his reading of the Psalms. He does all those things. You can say all those words, but is that enough? He's orthodox, but it's a closed and limited sort of orthodoxy. It's a tight-fisted orthodoxy. The net has to be wide, and what he's doing is he's making it as narrow as he can.

We've got to be careful, haven't we? We've got to be careful because we might be technically correct in our beliefs, but beware of a belief system that is not bound with grace and mercy. And so you have to ask yourself here with Jonah, is he really trying? There's no mention of mercy in his sermon. There's no incentive. There's no vestige of compassion, no gentleness of heart, there's no pity. "40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown." Why 40 days? In the Hebrew idiom, 40 days signifies a long and indefinite period of time. It's vague. It's blunt. It's almost defensive. There's no urgency. It's not like he says, "Thus says the Lord." God is telling you this. He doesn't say that. There's no indictment on their behavior, so they'll feel the weight of the way they've acted. There's nothing like that. There's no future hope for them. He doesn't give any hope. He preaches to lessen the chance that they will turn back. And yet, God answers their prayer.

Jesus

Well, lastly, Jesus. You notice all the way through the book of Jonah, it's the Lord. The Lord said to Jonah, "Go and preach." The Lord appointed a great fish to get Jonah where he wanted him to be. They are praying to the Lord. It says, "Salvation comes from the Lord." It's the Lord who instigates this. It's the Lord from whom this comes.

Remember the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus preached that terrific sermon at the beginning of Matthew's gospel where he talked about love for enemies, talked about "blessed are the meek, the merciful," the golden rule. He also said this. He said at the end, he said, "Broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter it. Narrow is the gate that leads to life, and few find it." See, Jesus in his kindness, he warns about this very thing. The kind and gentle-hearted Jesus says, "Be careful, be warned." You might have seen that as well in Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where he says, "There is a chasm. There is a chasm." And the rich man says, "Well, send Lazarus to my family to warn them." And Jesus says, "They've got Moses and the prophets. That's the warning they need." And the rich man says, "No, if someone rises from the dead, well, then they'll believe." Jesus says, "Even if someone rises from the dead, they still won't believe."

People say judgment of God was invented in the Middle Ages to scare people—you know, Dante's Inferno and things like that. But it's right here in the words of Jesus. If God can make a world and people destroy the world and God does nothing, that's no God. If God can make people and people destroy people and God shrugs his shoulders and does nothing, then that is no God. And we might think to ourselves, "Oh, well, that's okay because they were terrible, these people." And they were. It applies to them, but it doesn't apply to us. But we just need to be really careful when we start drawing lines here.

But lastly, is it fair that God forgives them? Is it fair that God has forgiven these people? Remember the thief on the cross, the thief who died on the cross next to Jesus, probably more than a thief, probably more likely some sort of terrorist or freedom fighter, being subject to capital punishment, no doubt for a capital crime. And there he is on the side of Jesus. He can't change the moral balance sheet of his life. The receivers have already been appointed. And he turns to Jesus and says, "Remember me when you come in your kingdom." And Jesus turns to him and says, "Look, I'm really sorry but it's too late for that. It's cause and effect. It's a moral universe. It's just karma. You can't avoid what's happened to you." No, no. The God of all says, "Today you'll be with me in paradise." I'm glad I know a Savior who is gracious.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we pray this morning that this unlikely sermon, just five words, may cause our hearts to reach out to you in thanks, in thanks for your gracious rescue of this group of people, undeserving. And help us, Lord, to appreciate your rescue for us also, undeserving. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

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