The Lord is a jealous God, filled with vengeance and rage. He takes revenge on all who oppose him and continues to rage against his enemies! The Lord is slow to get angry, but his power is great, and he never lets the guilty go unpunished. [Nahum 1:2-3 (NLT)]
When God sent Jonah to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, it was to warn the people that they would be destroyed for their sins. While we tend to focus on the miracle of Jonah and the sea creature, the real miracle in the Book of Jonah is the city’s response to the prophet’s message—Nineveh immediately repented of its sinful ways. Some forty years later, however, the Assyrians were once again back to their old behavior: rejecting God’s authority and worshipping idols. Around 740 BC, they attacked northern Israel and, in 722, they invaded the remaining kingdom and took Samaria, just as both Hosea and Amos had prophesized they would. The northern kingdom’s population was resettled elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire and Samaria became the center of a new Assyrian province.
Nineveh was located along the eastern bank of the Tigris River at what now is Mosul, Iraq. With a circumference of about 60 miles, it was an “exceedingly great city.” With over 1,500 towers and both an inner and outer wall, Nineveh was considered impregnable. That inner wall was over one hundred feet tall and thirty feet wide—an expanse that meant three chariots could ride side by side on it. Believing themselves invulnerable, the people of Nineveh put their faith in the city’s walls instead of God and fell back into their sinful ways. No matter their size, however, neither towers nor walls can protect us from God’s judgment!
Sometime between 663 and 612 BC, the Judean prophet Nahum pronounced God’s anger against Assyria and its capital city Nineveh. By this time, Assyria was the most powerful nation on earth with a reputation for brutality, torture, and oppression. Nahum warned that the Assyrians were being judged for their idolatry, pride, deceit, rebellion, cruelty, slaughter, and injustice. God had given them a chance, but now His patience was exhausted. He was not about to allow Nineveh’s evil to continue. “What sorrow awaits Nineveh, the city of murder and lies!” declared Naham. [3:1]
In 612 BC, Nineveh was attacked by the Medes, Babylonians, and Scythians who drove the Assyrians out of the city. The city was completely destroyed—literally flattened to the ground and so thoroughly destroyed that archeologists didn’t even discover and identify its remains until the 1840s. The Assyrian empire came to an end and the Medes and Babylonians divided its provinces between them. Indeed, Naham’s prophetic words that, “You will have no more children to carry your name. … There is no healing for your wound; your injury is fatal,” were true. [1:14,3:19]
In Psalm 86:12, we read, “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” Indeed, God is slow to get angry and will always give His people a chance to repent and change as He did in Jonah’s day with the forty days He gave Nineveh. Let us not forget that Scripture also tells us that God will not let evil go unpunished. Nothing can protect us from His judgment. As Jonah learned, there is no place we can hide from the Lord and, as the people of Nineveh eventually learned, God will settle all accounts. Sin will not go unchecked forever and judgment will come. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather learn God’s lessons from the Bible than from personal experience!
The first thing to clear up when writing about the Book of Jonah is whether it was a fish or a whale. Both the Hebrew word (dahg) and the Greek word (ketos) in later translations were used to describe this sea creature. In 785 BC, at the time of this story’s writing, neither language had a word that could identify the exact species so it could have been a fish, shark, whale or some other now extinct large sea creature. For those who choose to use this discrepancy to attack the Bible’s veracity, it’s probably wise to remember that Linnaeus’ classification of living things occurred in the 18th century and not 2,800 years ago when Jonah was swallowed by something huge in the sea. When learning the story in Sunday school, most of us were told it was a whale. Having seen Disney’s Pinocchio with Geppetto living in a whale’s belly, it was easy to picture Jonah doing the same.
The story is told of a Sunday school teacher who was teaching her class about the Ten Commandments. “What is the commandment about parents?” she asked. “Honor thy father and mother,” was the quick reply. “Is there a commandment about brothers and sisters?” the teacher queried. One little boy shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!” While we know we’re not supposed to kill them, how should we treat them?
Last month, there were sentencing hearings for two politicians in a northern state. One pled guilty to bribery and the other pled guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. Even though both men abused their positions and betrayed the public’s trust, both of their lawyers argued that their clients’ crimes really weren’t that bad so they didn’t deserve time in jail. In direct reference to the crimes of a former governor of their state, one lawyer argued that wire fraud and money laundering were insignificant when compared to bribing government officials to get lucrative contracts, trying to buy a Senate seat, or shaking down hospitals to get campaign contributions. After the other lawyer pointed out how little money his client actually pocketed from his crime, he called his client’s bribery “a brief dalliance with corruption,” cast the blame on another corrupt official who encouraged him, and assured the court that his client wasn’t a bad person but just a “good person who made a mistake in judgment.”
Back in 2008, my husband and I joined others from our church to see Fireproof, a movie by Alex and Stephen Kendrick. It was about Caleb Holt, a firefighter, who’s urged by a friend and his father to hold off on getting the divorce to which he and his wife have agreed. Counseling him to fight for his crumbling marriage, his father gives him a Christian self-help book called The Love Dare and urges him to go on its forty-day challenge. Having nothing to do with the game “Truth or Dare,” the book dares Caleb to improve his marriage, not by changing his wife, but by changing the way he treats her. After completing the forty day challenge, Caleb continues changing his behavior and he and his wife eventually reconcile. As I remember, the movie ends with them renewing their marriage vows. Several months after seeing the movie, I spotted The Love Dare book while browsing through a bookstore. Whether the movie gave birth to the book or the book gave birth to the movie, I don’t know. In any case, I purchased it and, without my husband knowing, took on its 40-day challenge.
The church in which I was raised recited a general confession during each service and I sometimes wondered why we bothered to confess. I reasoned that, since God sees everything we do, He already knows what sinners we are and what sins we’ve committed so why bother to tell Him what He already knows? Eventually, I understood that, while God knows what we’ve done wrong, He wants us to know it, too. Until we repent, how can we be redeemed? Until we acknowledge our guilt, how can we be pardoned? We must admit why we need forgiveness before we can accept it.
Devotions of the Heart 