SERIES: Major Profit from Minor Prophets
The God of Second Chances
SPEAKER: Gene Moniz
Note: This series, done in the summer of 1999, involved one sermon each on the Twelve Minor Prophets. Obviously, since these books are of varying lengths, from one chapter to fourteen chapters, these sermons are focused on the key message of each prophet, rather than a detailed examination of their words. This sermon was given by Gene Moniz, Associate Pastor at First Free, St. Louis.
Introduction: On New Year’s Day, 1929, Georgia Tech played the University of California in the Rose Bowl. In that game a man named Roy Riegels recovered a fumble for California. Somehow, he became confused and started running 65 yards in the wrong direction. One of his teammates, Benny Lom, outdistanced him and downed him just before he scored for the opposing team. When California attempted to punt, Tech blocked the kick and scored a safety which was the ultimate margin of victory.
That strange play came in the first half, and everyone who was watching the game was asking the same question: “What will Coach Nibbs Price do with Roy Riegels in the second half?” The men filed off the field and went into the locker room. They sat down on the benches and on the floor—all but Riegels. He put a blanket around his shoulders, sat down in a corner, put his face in his hands, and cried like a baby.
If you have played football, you know that a coach usually has a great deal to say to his team at halftime. That day Coach Price was quiet. No doubt he was trying to decide what to do with Riegels. Then the timekeeper came in and announced that there were three minutes before playing time. Coach Price looked at the team and said simply, “Men, the same team that played the first half will start the second.”
The players got up and started out, all but Riegels. He did not budge. The coach looked back and called to him again; still, he didn’t move. Coach Price went over to where Riegels sat and said, “Roy, didn’t you hear me? The same team that played the first half will start the second.” Then Roy Riegels looked up and his cheeks were wet with a strong man’s tears. “Coach,” he said, “I couldn’t face that crowd in the stadium to save my life.”
Then Coach Price reached out and put his hand on Riegels’ shoulder and said to him: “Roy, get up and go on back; the game is only half over.” And Roy Riegels went back, and those Tech men will tell you that they have never seen a man play football as Roy Riegels played that second half.
When you hear that story don’t you just think, “What a coach!” Well, when I read the story of Jonah and the stories of others whose lives are like his, I think, “What a God!” We take the ball and run in the wrong direction, we stumble and fall and are so ashamed of ourselves that we never want to try again, and God comes to us and bends over us in the person of His Son and says, “Get up and go on back; the game is only half over.” That is the God of second chances.
That is what this book of Jonah is all about. It is not about a great fish, or a great city, or even a disobedient prophet. It’s about God! The book of Jonah is about God’s will and how we respond to it. It’s also about God’s love and how we share it with others.
Turn in your Bibles to the book of Jonah. It is about 8 books from the end of the Old Testament. I have chosen to use a 4-point outline (which you can find in your bulletin), with each point corresponding to one of the chapters in the book.
God’s patience with Jonah (1:1-17)
Let’s read the opening paragraph:
“The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: {2) “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” {3} But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD.” (Jonah 1:1-3)
As a prophet, Jonah was used to being used by God, but for some reason he did not want to obey God’s call for this assignment. Like many of us, Jonah thought that obeying the will of God was optional. Jonah’s wrong thinking about God’s will probably stemmed from a feeling that the Lord was asking him to do an impossible task. God commanded the prophet to go to Israel’s enemy, Assyria, and preach against the city of Nineveh, but Jonah would rather God just destroy the city. The Assyrians were very cruel people who had often abused Israel. Jonah’s patriotism was taking precedence over his obedience.
Jonah also had some wrong thinking about God’s Word. Again, like many of us, he thought he could take it or leave it. When God’s Word commands us to do something, we must listen and obey. Disobedience isn’t a wise option.
When my girls were little, I remember telling one of them to do something that she didn’t want to do. I then said you have a choice: you can choose to obey or to disobey. If you disobey, I will have to discipline you. What will it be? Before she could answer, Chris pulled me aside and said, “she really doesn’t have a choice, because if she disobeys and you discipline her, she still has to do what you asked.” So, the choice wasn’t to obey or disobey. It was to obey without discipline or to obey after discipline, but either way she would obey. God’s will and Word will be carried out. The question is, will they be carried out with or without discipline?
Even after the discipline of the storm, Jonah isn’t ready to obey. He would rather die. But God demonstrated His patience with Jonah by continuing His loving discipline of him, which was designed to bring Jonah to the place of obedience.
We have seen God’s patience toward Jonah; now we’re about to see…
God’s mercy toward Jonah (2:1-10)
From an experience of rebellion and discipline, Jonah turns to an experience of repentance and dedication, and God graciously gives him a new beginning. Jonah no doubt expected to die in the waters of the sea, but when he woke up inside the fish, he realized that God had graciously spared him. As with the Prodigal Son, whom Jonah greatly resembles in respect to his rebellion, it was the goodness of God that brought him to repentance.
Jonah turns to God for help. (2:1-2) Jonah deserved to die for his rebellion and yet God, who is rich in mercy because of His great love, did not give Jonah what he deserved but spared him. Jonah was now experiencing what the sailors experienced during the storm; he felt he was perishing. It’s good for Christians to remember what it’s like to be lost and without hope. How easy it is for us to grow hardened toward sinners and lose our compassion for the lost. While Jonah was hurled into the deep, God was reminding him of what the people of Nineveh were going through in their sinful condition: they were helpless and hopeless. We were helpless and hopeless deserving eternal condemnation, yet God in His mercy provided His own Son as a sacrifice for us instead.
Jonah accepts God’s discipline and yields to His will. (2:3-9) He recognized that God was in control and was the one who actually “hurled him into the deep.” He also recognized that he had some idols in his life that were robbing him of God’s blessings. An idol is anything that takes away from God the affection and obedience that rightfully belong to Him. One such idol was Jonah’s intense patriotism. He was so concerned for the safety and prosperity of his own nation that he refused to be God’s messenger to their enemy, the Assyrians. Another idol was protecting his reputation, as we will see in Chapter 4. You see, if God spared Nineveh, then Jonah would be branded a false prophet whose words of warning were not fulfilled. Jonah recognized these idols and promises to keep some vows he made to God. One of them surely was to go to Nineveh and proclaim God message.
Jonah knows he could not save himself nor could anyone else, only God could save him. And He did! The fish vomited Jonah onto dry land at God’s command. Jonah deserved to die, yet God shows him mercy instead.
Jonah is now ready to allow God to use him.
God’s power through Jonah (3:1-10)
Someone said that “The victorious Christian life is a series of new beginnings.” When we fall, the enemy wants us to believe that our ministry is over and there’s no hope for recovery, but our God is “The God of Second Chances.” Jonah 3:1: “Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time.”
You do not have to read very far in your Bible to discover that God forgives His servants and restores them to ministry. Abraham fled to Egypt, where he lied about his wife, but God gave him another chance. Jacob lied to his father Isaac, but God restored him and used him to build the nation of Israel. Moses killed a man and fled from Egypt, but God called him to be the leader of His people. Peter denied the Lord three times, but Jesus forgave him and said, “Follow Me.”
However encouraging these examples of restoration may be, they must never be used as excuses for sin. The person who says, “I can go ahead and sin, because I know the Lord will forgive me,” has no understanding of the awfulness of sin or the holiness of God. Psalm 130:4: “But with you there is forgiveness; therefore, you are feared. God in His grace forgives our sins, but God in His sovereignty determines that we will reap what we sow, and the harvest can be very costly. Jonah paid dearly for rebelling against the Lord.
Nineveh, a city of about 600,000 people, was steeped in sin, for the Assyrians were known far and wide for their violence, showing no mercy to their enemies. They impaled live victims on sharp poles, leaving them to roast to death in the desert sun; they beheaded people by the thousands and stacked their skulls up in piles by the city gates; and they even skinned people alive. They respected neither age nor gender and followed a policy of killing babies and young children so they wouldn’t have to care for them.
It was to the wicked people of this great city that God sent His servant Jonah, assuring him that He would give him the message to speak. It would take Jonah about a month to travel to Nineveh from his home. He would have a lot of time to think about what the Lord had taught him.
Remember, “The Will of God will never lead you where the Grace of God cannot keep you and the Power of God cannot use you.” Our competency comes from God’s power, as seen in 2 Corinthians 3:5-6: “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. {6} He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant.“
From a human perspective, Jonah’s mission seems ridiculous. How could one man, claiming to be God’s prophet, confront thousands of people with a message of judgment? How could a Jew, who worshiped the one true God, ever get these idolatrous Gentiles to believe what he had to say? Only by the power of God. For all Jonah knew, he might end up impaled on a pole or skinned alive! But, in obedience to the Lord, Jonah went to Nineveh and God’s power did flow through him.
It would take about three days to get through the city. When Jonah was on his first day into the city, he began to declare his message: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned!” (Jonah 3:4) Was this the only message he proclaimed? Surely, he spent time telling the people about the true and living God, for we are told that “The Ninevites believed God.” (Jonah 3:5). They had to know something about this God of Israel in order to exercise sincere faith in him. Did Jonah expose the folly of their idolatry? Did he recount his personal history to show them that his God was powerful and sovereign? We simply do not know. The important thing is that Jonah obeyed God, went to Nineveh, and declared the message God gave him. God did the rest.
We get the impression that from the first time the people of Nineveh saw Jonah and heard his warning, they paid attention to his message. Word spread quickly throughout the entire district and the people humbled themselves by fasting and wearing sackcloth. When the message reached the king, he too put on sackcloth and sat in the dust. He also issued an official edict, ordering the people to humble themselves, cry out to God, and turn from their evil ways. Even the animals were included in the activities, being forced to wear sackcloth and abstain from food and drink. (Jonah 3:6-8)
The Ninevites didn’t want to perish. Isn’t that what witnessing and its message are all about—telling perishing people how to find eternal life? John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
They hoped God’s great compassion would move Him to change His plan and spare the city. How did they know that the God of the Hebrews was a compassionate God? No doubt Jonah told them, for this was a doctrine he himself believed. Jonah 4:2: “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.”
And sure enough, God did show compassion on the city and did not destroy it.
Jonah 3:10: “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” Notice that God showed His mercy and did not destroy them because He saw what they did, not because He heard what they said. Faith is an action word. James told us that faith without action isn’t real faith. James 2:17: “In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
This would be a great place to end the story, if this story was about an evil city repenting, or even if it was about a prophet who repented and then preached one “heck-of-a-message” that motivated thousands of people to repent and turn to God. But that is not what this story was after. Instead, it is trying to get us into the very heart of God, where we can see His character manifested in patience, mercy, and power.
God’s ministry to Jonah (4:1-11)
The fourth and final chapter reveals the thoughts and intentions of Jonah’s heart, as well as his sin. Remember at the end of Chapter one, I said that Jonah in his rebellion greatly resembles the Prodigal Son. If that is true, and it is, then we are now going to see how he resembles the Prodigal’s elder brother–critical, selfish, sullen, angry, and unhappy. It isn’t enough for God’s servants simply to do their Master’s will; they must do the will of God from the heart. Talking to slaves, Paul exhorts them in Ephesians 6:6: “Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.”
The heart of every problem is the problem of the heart, and that’s where Jonah’s problems were to be found. Jonah 4:1: “But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry.” What I find so amazing is how God tenderly ministers to Jonah even when he is sulking and seeks to bring him back to the place of joy and fellowship.
As we look at Jonah’s second prayer, we see that it is very different from his first one in content and intent. He prayed his best prayer in the worst place, the fish’s belly, and he prayed his worst prayer in the best place, at Nineveh where God was working. His first prayer came from a broken heart, but his second prayer came from an angry heart. In his first prayer, he asked God to save him, but in his second prayer he asked God to take his life! Once again, Jonah would rather die than not have his own way. Do you want to know the real reason Jonah fled to Tarshish?
Jonah 4:2-3: “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. {3} Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live,”
Jonah says, “I knew it! I knew if the Ninevites repented you would forgive them.” So, what’s the problem? This is the idol I mentioned earlier. Jonah would be branded a false prophet! Remember that Jonah’s message merely announced the impending judgement; it didn’t offer conditions for salvation. Jonah 3:4: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” Jonah was concerned about his reputation, not only before the Ninevites, but also before the Jews back home. His Jewish friends would want the Assyrians destroyed, and if they found out that Jonah had been the means of saving Nineveh from God’s wrath, they would have considered him a traitor, for helping save the enemy.
When reputation is more important than character, and pleasing ourselves and our friends is more important than pleasing God, then we are in danger of becoming like Jonah, living to defend our prejudices instead of fulfilling our spiritual responsibilities.
Jonah once again abandons his place of ministry and goes and sits down outside the city where he can watch what would happen. Just like the Prodigal’s elder brother, he refused to go in and enjoy the feast. He could have taught the Ninevites so much about the true God, but he preferred to have his own way. What a tragedy it is when God’s servants are a means of blessing to others but miss the blessing themselves!
God once again ministers to Jonah by providing a vine to aid in protecting him. This made Jonah very happy, but the next morning, when God prepared a worm to kill the vine, Jonah was very unhappy—so much so that he wanted to die. He called the city to repentance, but he wouldn’t repent himself. He was more concerned about being comfortable than about winning the lost. The Ninevites, the vine, the worm, and the wind have all obeyed God, but Jonah still refuses to obey.
In chapter 1, we saw that Jonah’s mind understood God’s will, but he refused to obey it, and he took his body in the opposite direction. In chapter 2, he cried out for help, God rescued him, and he gave his body back to the Lord. In chapter 3, he yielded his will to the Lord and went to Nineveh to preach, but his heart was not yet surrendered to the Lord. Jonah did the will of God, but not from the heart.
Jonah had one more lesson to learn, perhaps the most important one of all. He has already learned of God’s patience, mercy, and power but he still needs to learn about God’s compassion for sinners, like the Ninevites. It seems incredible, but Jonah brought a whole city to faith in the Lord and yet he didn’t love the people he was preaching to. He had pity on the vine that perished, but he didn’t have compassion for the people who would perish and live eternally condemned apart from God.
God says look, there are 120,000 children in Nineveh (The Hebrew way of describing children is: “people who cannot tell their right hand from their left.”)
“Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
The end! Wait a minute, why is the ending so abrupt? Because that is exactly where it is supposed to take us—to the revelation of the heart of God.
Application: Let me share with you what I believe God wants us to learn from this wonderful Book of Jonah. I will do that with the help of two stories.
1. The execution of a child molester and killer in Washington State in 1990 or 1991 and the comment of the mother of one of the boys that was molested and killed. Before he was executed by hanging, he said these final words, “I am
sorry for what I have done and I have made peace with Jesus.” After he was dead the mother of one of the boys who was a victim was asked what she thought about what he had said. Her reply was, “He cannot go to heaven just because he said he was sorry. God would never let someone like him in that easy.”
I believe her anger and her pain kept her from seeing God’s heart for sinners like this man. Like Jonah, she wanted her way, not God’s. Her enemy should be destroyed, not forgiven.
2. Herb Gregg, the missionary that was taken captive last November in Russia was rescued this week. It came out that he had been tortured and had a finger cut off, and that they made a video of it and used it to demand a ransom. Herb was asked, “If you could say anything to your kidnappers what would you say.” He smiled and said, “That God really loves you.”
I believe Herb is a man who has seen into the heart of God and has God’s compassion for his enemies.
Do not worry about all the times you have sinned either by wrong thoughts or wrong actions. Just follow the advice of two men. The Apostle Paul said in Philippians 3:13, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.” And Coach Nibbs Price, “Get up and go on back; the game is only half over.”
“Wow, What a God!”
Prayer: Father, thank you for the Book of Jonah and for how it has given us a look at your heart. Thank you that it also has given us a look at our own hearts. And how like Jonah we are intent on our own wants, our own comforts, and how we are unconcerned about those around us. Lord, help us to feel for others the way You feel, to have pity on those who are lost. Help our hearts to reflect Your heart and show to the world Your love and compassion by declaring Your message of Truth, Hope and Forgiveness, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
DATE: July 4, 1999
Tags:
Second chance
Patience of God
Mercy of God