God's Word Always Finds Its Way

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[0:00] Thank you, Craig. And if you go around that way, you're better off. Yeah, you got it. Okay, so thank you, Craig, for reading our reading. And our sermon text is now all of chapter 3, chapter 3, verses 1 through 10. You can follow along in the bulletin. We'll be reading from the New Revised Standard Version today. Just make sure that's pointing at me real well. Okay. And so another introduction. So we're in a series on Jonah. This is week two. Very excited about it. And the overall theme is God saying, shall I not be concerned or should I not be concerned? Why does God send Jonah to Nineveh? Because he's concerned both from a justice point of view, because they're doing something that's wrong, but also from a compassion or grace point of view, he wants to reconcile with them. So God cares about us. We know that. But he also cares about distant lands, distant people, people we've never met. And he wants us to care too. He wants to use us as instruments. In his mission to embrace the rest of the world and to enter into other people's troubles.

[1:03] So today we're going to be looking more at this concept, even more at this concept of the word of the Lord, the bad Adonai. Okay. The word of the Lord is a really powerful concept, and it gets developed even more in Jonah. Some questions I want us to be thinking about as I read, where does the word of the Lord come from? What does the word of the Lord say about us? And what does the word of the Lord say about God, our Father? And those are very important questions that Jonah begins to unpack for us. So with that introduction, let's go to our reading is Jonah chapter three, verses one through 10. And it goes like this. The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time saying, get up, go to Nineveh, that great city and proclaim to it the message that I tell you. So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh. And he said, I'm going to go to Nineveh. And he said, I'm going to go to Nineveh. And he said, I'm going to go to Nineveh. And he said, I'm going to go to Nineveh. According to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days walk across. Jonah began to go into the city going a day's walk. And he cried out, 40 days more and Nineveh will be overthrown. And the people of Nineveh believed God. They proclaimed a fast and everyone great and small

[2:21] put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh. By the decree of the king and his nobles, no human being or animal, no herd or flock shall taste anything. They shall not feed nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth and they all shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. And they shall not eat or drink water. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind. He may turn from his fierce anger so that we do not perish. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them. And he did not do it. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. And we ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus name. Amen.

[3:27] All right. So let's again be thinking about the word. And I want to just go back to chapter one and remind us that in all of chapter one, and it was right at the middle of chapter one, that Jonah only speaks one time. He only has one sentence in all of chapter one. But it was a powerful word. He says in that, that's chapter one, verse nine. He says, I am a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the sea of the sea. I am a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. So it's almost a confession of faith. I believe in the Lord, the creator of the universe. It's a very powerful statement. That was the only word. And it was a powerful word because it was enough evidently to convert all the sailors on the ship that heard it, but also it was sort of backed up by the miraculous end of this huge storm once they threw Jonah overboard. And so that led them to faith in the true God.

[4:29] And so that led them to faith in the true God. And so that led them to faith in the true God. And so one question we could ask ourselves is, with a word so powerful that Jonah was able to speak, why then, when he got the first word from God to go to Nineveh, did he go the opposite direction? What is it in us, what is it in Jonah, that even in the presence of such an amazing word will go and do the opposite thing? Well, that's an interesting question. So as I said in chapter one, Jonah only speaks one time. He said, I am a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, if you notice in chapter three, he only says one sentence too. And in chapter two, which Craig read you can't get him to shut up at all. He's just talking, talking, talking. The whole thing pretty much is him talking with a few narrative elements on either side of it. So chapter two, we hear all sorts of things from Jonah. In fact, um, him, it could be a song. It could be him singing in the belly of the whale. Even if it smells like some sort of bad in there. He was able to sing. There are some old, it's fun to kind of read the older Jewish interpreters where they interpret their own text. And some of them thought that it was so comfortable in there that he was able to sing and praise God. And God thought he was a little

[5:45] too comfortable in there. And so that he caused Jonah to be spit out by one large fish that was a male and swallowed by a female fish. And in her belly were 365,000 baby fish swimming all around. And it drove him crazy. And that finally got him to kind of go and do the thing that he needed to do. Now that's not in our text, but isn't that interesting how kind of these adornments to the text kind of develop over the years. And they give you sort of the mindset that, you know, people were adding a little bit to the narrative and trying to figure out why was he singing in there? And, you know, why was he singing in there? And, you know, why was he singing in there? Was he comfortable or not? Well, we don't know. We know that we have this song of praise from him about God. And have you noticed, maybe you were kind of looking at that as Craig was reading and looking, you can look at it in your bulletin here. It's, you know, it's basically on the third page here. And it's set off like poetry in the sort of the text formatting. And it could qualify as a psalm. In fact, you could add this to the psalms. If you were to add this to the psalms, you could add this to the psalms. If you were to add this to the psalms. If you were to add this to the psalms. If

[6:53] you wanted to. When you take it apart, and almost in this order, there are actually snippets from many psalms in chapter two. And don't take notes on this, but I just want to illustrate that. That if you were to go from beginning to end, you would get snippets of Psalm 120, 20, 31, 102, 69, 42, 31 again, Psalm 5, 139. 38, 69 again, 18, 116, 103, 142, 143, 88, 102 again, Psalm 138 again, Psalm 31 for the third time, Psalm 116 again, and then Psalms 22 and 3. So there's a lot of maybe copying going on. But speaking of memorizing, if Jonah was just saying this extemporaneously in the belly of the fish, he knew the psalms. And they were coming out of him in that moment. It's pretty amazing. It's a song of hope, if you look at it. God really got his attention. He was thrown overboard. And he thought he was going to die. Here comes this deliverance in the form of this giant whale, giant fish. And his life is saved, and he begins to praise. And there's this sense that God is with him where he is, and that God will listen to him, that God is attentive.

[8:23] And interested in what Jonah is going through in the same way that God wants Jonah to be interested and attentive to what a far country is going through that God himself is concerned about. So God is always modeling the kind of behavior that he wants Jonah to have. As you'll see in chapter four, that gets really interesting, and it gets really challenging. And I don't know why we organize it this way, because I'd really love to preach on chapter four, but Victoria gets to, so I'll just get to listen next week. But it's the, it's, it's the real, it's really the, the, the, it's, it's the climax of the whole story in chapter four. It's really great. So in the end of chapter two, there's this hope that God will save him. The final line of chapter two is deliverance belongs to the Lord. The final thing that Jonah says is deliverance belongs to the Lord. And again, there's this, I mean, foreshadowing that when he gets to Nineveh, the deliverance that comes to Nineveh, at the end of chapter three is also coming from the Lord. God changes his mind about what he was planning to do and does not do that thing. So at the end of chapter two, and we're just kind of catching us up now, it seems that Jonah has straightened himself out more or less, right?

[9:40] And I say seems to, because his journey's not over yet. He's not done growing as a person. He's going to make a few more mistakes. And so now the word comes to him again, and I'm at chapter three, verse one, in case you're following along. And it's almost identical to chapter one, verse one. So there's these kind of striping parallels between chapter one and chapter three. It goes like this. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, all the same, a second time, that's the different part, saying, go to Nineveh. So Jonah goes, that's the straightening out part. He finally figures out he needs to be obedient. He finally goes, despite his reservations. We're going to get again to his reservations about why he wouldn't go the first time. And why he's unhappy when they do repent. So Jonah goes, and he enters the city, and the Bible notes that this is a huge city. It could have been actually a complex of three very large cities with Nineveh at the center. And so, you know, if you kind of like a metro area, and it was a huge distance around, right? And it said, even the Bible says it took three days to walk across the whole city. So Jonah goes one day. And so he goes one day, and he's walking. So he goes one third of the way into the city.

[10:56] And just like chapter one, he only has one line in this whole chapter, chapter three, and it's simple. All he has to say to them, maybe this is the bare minimum. Maybe this is his reluctance to give more detail, but it doesn't matter as we'll see. All he says is 40 days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Doesn't say, so straighten up and God may save you. It doesn't say, you know, anything, like that. It's just a word of judgment. 40 days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown. There's no escape hatch in there. Like this, the way he presents it is almost inevitable. So he must be enjoying himself, right? This is, and then he goes out of the town to watch, make sure it happens, right?

[11:39] So there's not much more detail than that. Just the simple sense. And again, it's the only thing that he says. But just like chapter one, when he speaks the word of the Lord, or when he speaks the truth about God, it has the summation. And so, you know, the word of the Lord is the word of the Lord. And so, you know, the word of the Lord is the word of the Lord. And so, you know, the word of the Lord is the word of the Lord. amazing power. And that starts to develop for us what we know about God's word. Verse five in chapter three tells us that the people instantly believed it, which is great. And I wonder, but it doesn't say this, that I wonder that maybe this was because some work had already taken place in that city in their hearts, whether it was the Holy Spirit or just humans kind of coming to their senses, that the people in the city were thinking, this place is going to be a place of glory. And so, you know, some people were thinking, if we were to end up with some great great great great great And then someone comes along and confidently says, 40 days. And then that's the answer. How long can we go on like this? I guess we can go on for about 40 days. And then the judgment comes. And they think, yeah, that's about right.

[12:55] So the city must have or might have been receptive to the word of the Lord. But it doesn't matter, really, because it's the word of the Lord. It functions in several ways. And take some notes here about how the word of the Lord functions. It functions. In the first place, it comes from God to Jonah. It says so in chapter 1. It says so in chapter 3. The word of the Lord comes to Jonah. So it comes from God to a human. But it also comes from Jonah to the sailors on the ship. It also comes from Jonah to the people in the town. And so the word of the Lord also functions when it is spoken by one human being to another. when God speaks through humans, and he does that for us. The other way it functions is that the word of the Lord goes from a person back to God. Jonah is singing praise while he's in the belly. And whether it's a psalm or a song or it's his own creation in some ways, he is speaking God's words back to God in praise. And in prayer, asking for help, thanking God for help, counting on God's deliverance. And so there's at least three ways that the word of the Lord functions, from God to people, from God to a person who then speaks to another person, and then the word goes back to God.

[14:21] So there's this parallel, as we saw before. There's a parallel between chapters 1 and chapters 3. The sailors respond to the word of the Lord spoken by Jonah. The city responds to the word of the Lord spoken by Jonah. And so we need to remember something powerful about God's word.

[14:41] And this is what it says. And this is actually a sort of a real live demonstration of the principles that we find in Isaiah 55, which I'm about to read to you. Isaiah 55, verses 10 and 11. It's happening on a macro scale in this story. And this is what Isaiah 55, 10 says. It's about the word of the Lord. It says, For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return, there until they have watered the earth, making it, there we go, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. So that's the metaphor. The rain comes down from heaven. It goes and it does what it's supposed to do. So as the rain is, God says, So shall my word be that goes out of my mouth. It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish, that which I purpose, that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. So that's the principle of God's word in this story. But also I think in the world is that God's word does what God intends it to do. And it does it on God's terms. It just does it. So think about water that maybe falls in the hills above our town here in the city. We're in that ridge of mountains, right? Think of the water that falls there when it rains. It always finds its way back to the ocean and from the ocean it evaporates and goes back to the heavens, right?

[16:20] Just like God says. But it has to go around obstacles in the way it digs. It has to go around rocks and trees. It has to develop enough volume to get over certain sort of barriers. And if it can't get over those barriers, it'll seep into the soil and join an underwater stream. And then those, those streams will rejoin these other streams and they all end up going out to the ocean. It always finds its way back. That's how water works. It's a great metaphor.

[16:50] So God's word, now listen, God's word was always going to go to Nineveh. There was no doubt in God's mind about that. And even though there were detours along the way, even through broken and disobedient people like Jonah, the word of the Lord was going to go to Nineveh. And there it was going to accomplish what God's purpose was for it. And the fact that this book was written at all proves it, right? Because we have the history of it. And we have even the history, a self-critical history of Jonah about his own life, about how he was so wrong, about how he made so many mistakes. And yet God's word continued to speak through him as a broken person.

[17:36] So that's the word of hope. And that's the hope for us right now. And I think we're all in a moment in our lives, in the life of this world, in the life of our country, where hope is kind of hard to grasp at right now, kind of a difficult concept. I think there's a lot of turmoil, a lot of brokenness, a lot of uncertainty.

[17:59] But the word of the Lord isn't broken or uncertain or lacking in hope. We can hope in it. That there's this hope that God will go out through his word and accomplish what he determines. Now, we don't know always what he determines, but we know it's for the good. We know, as in the case of Nineveh, there's both a justice aspect of God's word, where he calls to account broken people, broken nations, broken empires, right? But at the same time, he embraces them with forgiveness. He's like the father waiting outside for the son to come back, to throw his arms around him and ask him to come back into the house.

[18:44] That's the word of the Lord at work, and it's working in our world now, and it works through us. I would just say in this time of difficult, difficult time to find hope, difficult time to find resolution in all the challenges that we're around, that we may not know exactly what God is up to in the world, although we have a pretty good idea. But we can trust, like Isaiah 55 says, that he has a purpose, and that his purpose will be accomplished because his will and his word are behind it.

[19:16] And you may be saying to yourself, well, do I need to go to Nineveh? Do I need to call an empire to repent? Maybe. It's possible. Don't discount the possibility that you might need to speak a prophetic voice to an empire. All right? It could happen. It could be you. It could be all of us.

[19:36] But I think just as much that word that God needs to speak through us, he wants to speak it into seemingly small things, too, the daily interactions with other people that we can fill with God's grace. So God will speak to us about small matters and large matters because to God they're all large matters. They're all important to him, and we're important to him. What's important is our obedience, our willingness to do what he asks us, and not to let our own prejudices get in the way. of following God's word and doing what it asks us to do. So we're beginning to get some answers to those questions we started with. If you remember, there were three questions. Where does God's word come from? It comes from him to us, directing us, and it comes through us back to him in praise, and it comes from us out into the world in testimony. And it's powerful. God's word is powerful, and that's where it comes from. The next question is, what does it say about God? What does the word say about God? Now I'm going to skip ahead and steal a little thunder like I did last week. The very last line of the whole book of Jonah in chapter 4, the whole book, is God saying, Should I not be concerned?

[20:51] What it says about God is that he's engaged in our world as both a judge and a loving parent. He loves Nineveh. With one hand, he needs to call them to account. With the other hand, he needs to embrace them. And he does both through Jonah, which is amazing. So what does it say about God? It says that God is concerned about the world in the same way that Jesus was concerned about the world, in the same way that we're called to be concerned about people that we can't see, but whose suffering we need to enter in some way.

[21:26] What does it say about us? What does God's word say about us? Well, it says that we carry God's word. We're able to speak God's word, but we need to speak it faithfully. We need to be educated about it. We can't make up new words for God, but we speak God's word to other people.

[21:47] But it also says that like Jonah, we have this tendency to let other things get in the way of us speaking the word that God has called us to speak. And that could be our own projects. It could be our own cares. It could be taking care of our own needs. And for Jonah, and for us sometimes, it was his own prejudices. He really didn't want Nineveh to be warned. He really didn't want it to be given a chance to lament and repent and be saved. And it's even evident in what he says to them in verse 4 of chapter 3. Forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown. Not a single escape hatch from Jonah about repenting and God relenting, although the people figure it out and they do it, and God does.

[22:39] He's still ready for them to be destroyed. You may remember Jack repenting. I'm looking at the spot right now where he would always sit. I miss him very much. He's down in Southern California. They moved down there, Jack and Sharon. He has a children's book, and I wish I could, I should get a copy of it. Now that I've said that, now I have to get a copy of it. It's a children's book about Nona, Jonah, not Nona. Who's Nona? A children's book about Jonah.

[23:06] And it tells the story of Jonah, but it's like a kid's book, so the characters are animals. And so Jonah is a mouse. And the whole city of Nineveh is a city full of cats. Do you get it? Makes sense, right? It's a really clever way of doing it. It's very close actually to how things were because the Assyrians actually devoured smaller nations. They had them for lunch. That's why everybody hated the Assyrians. They were controlling everything, destroying everything, violence all the time, tearing, you know, like a cat would tear a mouse limb to limb. Assyria tore countries apart, and that's what they did. They relocated them, did all sorts of things. So who would expect a mouse to enter a town full of cats? Really?

[23:56] And not only that, but go into the town full of cats and say, stop eating mice, right? And the cats would be like, we eat mice. That's what we do. But then the cats repent and become vegetarians. I don't know exactly. At some point, something falls apart when you go into that. But here's the thing. A cat is no match for a mouse who's carrying the word of the Lord with them. A cat is no match for a mouse with the word of the Lord. So we'll have to get that book. Maybe I'll, if I can get it in time from Amazon, I'll show it to you next week during the announcements. And you can look at it. And you'll maybe send it home with somebody, and they can borrow it from the church library. So Jonah has a lot more growing up to do. What it says about us, the word, is that we don't want to go into a town full of cats and tell them to stop eating mice because we feel like a mouse. We don't want cats to get sick. I love cats, but I like mice too, but I like cats more. But it says we don't want to be obedient because we have our own projects. We have our own prejudice. We have our own way of doing things. And this word of the Lord that's so powerful that it can convert a boat full of sailors, and it can convert a town full of Assyrians,

[25:17] and yet it doesn't sink into our heart enough for us to say yes the first time. So it says a lot about us, and it says a lot about our need to repent and our need to straighten out and to sing God's praises, but to follow it up with action. So Jonah has a lot more growing up to do. Chapter 4 is all about that. It's all about Jonah taking the next steps in his growth. But for now, let's remember these things. We're almost done. The word of the Lord is spoken to us, and we speak it back to God in praise, and we speak it to other people. The word has a power of its own to accomplish all that God chooses it to do, and God sends his word as a sign of his justice and his love for the world. And our task is to take the word seriously and to go and do what the word tells us to do. Let's pray.

[26:13] Father, thank you again for your word, for this testimony, for your love for this world, for your justice that burns inside of you, and the compassion that burns is strong. Lord, make us instruments to go out into this world and speak your word, and we ask it in Jesus' name.