If everyone could turn to the book of Jonah, I am going to read chapter 3. It is amazing how John was going over this today. Actually, it is not that amazing because it seems to happen a lot. I was thinking, “Wow! Yes, that fits right in with what I would like to talk about.” I am going to read the whole chapter of Jonah 3. It says in Jonah 3:1-10:
And the word of JEHOVAH came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of JEHOVAH. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey. 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. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
And that is the end of Jonah chapter 3. Jonah, the prophet and the book by his name, is very important information for us to think about and to look at in our day as we have learned of the coming end. It so happens that God gave Jonah information that had to do with time and judgment, as Jonah went to Nineveh and he said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Eight English words. That is all we read proclaimed to the Ninevites. It is even less in the Hebrew. But eight English words, that was his entire preaching.
Now, we will take a look at what God gave him to preach a little later. First, just a quick summary of Jonah, the book of Jonah. He was a prophet in Israel and God had come to him and command him to go to Nineveh and to preach. In chapter 1, that is what God said. In Jonah 1:2:
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it…
That is the same word as “preach” that is found in chapter 3.
…for their wickedness is come up before me.
And so Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh and he did not want to preach to the Ninevites, the preaching that God had given him. We are not told in this book why he did not want to go, but we can gather that it had to do with the people of Nineveh being the enemies of the Jews. He did not want to give them advance warning because he knew that God was merciful. He knew that God could potentially turn from the judgment that He was going to bring on Nineveh, and Jonah tells us that later in chapter 4. He says when he fled, “for I knew that Thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest Thee of the evil.” That was his motive for fleeing to Tarshish.
As he was on the ship, the mariners were going about their business when a great storm hit the ship, a terrible storm at sea. The ship was going to be destroyed. There was little doubt of that. All of the mariners were praying unto their particular gods and then they found Jonah asleep, which was amazing to them. They told him, “Wake up, O sleeper, and pray to your God.” Then they asked him who he was and who his God was. They discovered that his God was Jehovah; it was the Lord. Finally, Jonah revealed to them that if they cast him into the sea, the sea would cease from its raging and they would be safe.
But they did not want to do that. They actually were decent men. They were just like people today. You would not quickly take someone’s life. They realized that if they threw Jonah into the sea in the condition that the sea was in with its raging, no man could survive. They thought that it would mean certain death for him, so they tried hard to row and to control the ship but they could not; until finally, they cast him over into the sea. Almost immediately, the sea was calm—a nice, peaceful sea.
These men were experienced mariners. They were experienced in dealing with the sea and they never had seen anything like that before, so they worshipped and they offered sacrifice after the sea had calmed and there was no more danger to them.
But we know that once they cast Jonah into the sea, a big fish, a whale came along at God’s bidding and the fish swallowed up Jonah. That whale swallowed him up and he was three days and three nights in the belly of a whale.
Jesus makes reference to this in the New Testament. It is a fact. It is a historical truth. It happened that God had this whale come along and swallow him up and it is a picture of the Lord Jesus, as Jesus said, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Then after the three days and three nights, the whale vomited up Jonah and spit him out. Again, it was all under God’s control. It was the Lord’s will. It vomited him out onto dry land.
We do not know exactly where he was spit out. We all have the picture that he was on the beach and there was Nineveh and he just walked right into the city. It does not really tell us that he was cast out of the whale at the very doorsteps of Nineveh. God just indicates that he was vomited out on dry ground, and then the Word of Lord came to him a second time and told him to go to Nineveh and he did and then the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah.
Those eight English words were all they needed and it caused a great revival, we would say, as they were crying mightily to God, the whole city, from the king on down. God saw their works, it says. Of course, their works could not save them, just like our works cannot save us. But God turned from the evil that He had intended and He did it not and they did not perish. They were not destroyed after forty days. Nineveh continued as a city.
Now, that is a quick summary of the book of Jonah, and it is a good idea sometimes, it is a good discipline, to go through the Bible, chapter by chapter, and after each chapter, write a quick summary of what you read. It will help you to think about what you just read. If you can just make a quick summary and make yourself a note, I think that it would help anybody to have a better understanding of what they are reading.
Well, let us read Jonah 3:1:
And the word of JEHOVAH came unto Jonah the second time…
The name “Jonah” is very interesting. It is a name that means “pigeon” or “dove.” That is what Jonah’s name means. If you look in a Concordance, you will see that “Jonah” is number 3124 and it will tell you that it is from number 3123, the word right before it. You can see that it is from that word because they are identical. They are identical. There is no difference in spelling, not even in vowel pointing. The vowel points are sometimes different, where words can be identical but even the vowel pointing is the same.
In the Old Testament, when the word “dove” or “pigeon” is used, it is the word “Jonah.” When Noah sent out the dove, that was “Jonah.” That is the word “Jonah.” And in the New Testament, we can understand that the word for “pigeon” or “dove” is the equivalent word to the Old Testament because it is translated as “pigeon” or “dove” in the New Testament, several times of the Holy Spirit who descends like a dove. In each one of the Gospel accounts, that verse is found of the Holy Spirit descending like a dove. It is also used in the Gospel of Luke regarding, I think, the sacrifice that was to be offered for a newborn child. Let me read it. In Luke 2:24:
And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.
This verse ties it in with the Old Testament usage of “dove” or “pigeon,” so now we can say that the New Testament word for “pigeon” or “dove” is equivalent to the Old Testament word. In saying that, we can understand Jonah to be a picture of Christ, because the pigeons would be sacrificial animals—that is possible--or the Holy Spirit, because of the Spirit descending like a dove in each one of the Gospel accounts.
Here in Jonah 1, when he is cast into the sea, we do see that he is a picture of Christ. As he is in the belly of the whale, he is a picture of Christ in Jonah 2. And in Jonah 3:1:
And the word of JEHOVAH came unto Jonah the second time…
We know that we are living at a time right now when God is setting His hand again a second time to recover the remnant of His people, as it says in Isaiah 11:11:
And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people…
That is the second outpouring of the Holy Spirit during the latter rain, which is now, or we call it the second Jubilee, how ever you want to identify it. God is sending the Gospel into the world a second time in a big way as He is going to save the great multitude that is out there in the world at this time.
It goes on in Jonah 3:1-2:
And the word of JEHOVAH came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
God is telling Jonah to go. He is commanding him to go. Actually, He commanded him the first time, “Arise, go to Nineveh,” and he disobeyed.
So it is very possible for a child of God to hear God’s command—and any Law of God in the Bible is a command of God—for a child of God to hear God’s command and to be disobedient and not obey it.
He did not stop being a believer. He was a truly saved person, and yet he heard the word the first time, he was disobedient, and God chastened him severely, even though it worked for God’s purposes as He painted this spiritual picture of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But, personally, Jonah spent three days and three nights inside a whale. That was severe chastisement for him because of his disobedience. God said, “Go to Nineveh,” and he fled to Tarshish for whatever reason.
You know, man, we, people, we all have our reasons for why we do not always obey God and we think that our reason outweighs God’s command, but it does not. It does not. We are commanded to obey the Word of God. If we disobey, regardless of why, then that is disobedience. If we are a true believer, God will chasten us and correct us, as He did Nineveh and as He did to Jonah with the command to go to Nineveh. Here, God is reiterating the command:
Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
It is an imperative command that He gives. It is not up for discussion. You are to go. And this reminds us of our command. We do not have a command like Jonah to go to one particular city, but God does command us in Matthew 28, in these two verses that are normally called the Great Commission, in Matthew 28:19-20:
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.
And that applies to every one of us. To every single person, from little to big, young to old, every believer, anyone who is a Christian and who professes to God, Jesus says, “Go!”
Now, we do not have to do what Jonah did and get on a ship and travel the sea in order to go where God would have us to go. That is how many missionaries went forth in obedience to God’s command throughout history. They literally had to pull up stakes, leave their homes, their families, their cities, and go to India and to go Africa and go to China, and they did go and they gave up their lives.
Now, God has really made it very easy for us, very simple for us. “Go ye into all the world,” and we do not even have to leave our own home! We do not have to leave our home. We can go on the Internet and we can share the Gospel with potentially just about anybody in the world, because the Internet stretches all over the world. Or we can call somebody up on the phone and talk to them, yet they could be hundreds or thousands of miles away, or we can mail somebody something. There are many different ways that we can bring the Gospel to people all over the world and it would be in obedience.
Notice what Jesus says. In bringing the Gospel, we are to teach. We are to teach and that involves doctrine. You have to have an understanding of the Word of God, of the Bible, in order to bring a message that teaches people so that they can learn. It is not that you just take a portion of this or a portion of that, but you try to explain it. You try to teach people, as it says in verse 20, in Matthew 28:20:
…to observe all things…
Not all things that our church says or that our denomination teaches, not what our confession says, but teaching them:
…to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you…
That is the Word of God. That is the Bible. So we want to teach the Bible.
The Great Commission is also in Mark 16, in the last chapter of the Gospel of Mark. It says in Mark 16:15:
And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
It is interesting that in the last chapter of Jonah, we read that more than 120,000 men of Nineveh and “much cattle” were in that city. So God is indicating that there were not just people there but that there were animals there, too, which He is using to teach something else, but it goes along with this command:
Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
No one is to be avoided: no one. Not the old who are apparently hardened in their ways, and not the young who today are apparently hardened in their ways. No one is to be avoided when we bring the Gospel. It is for the beautiful and for those who we would maybe consider to be not so beautiful. It is for every human being, because every human being is going to be impacted by the Word of God or by what God has in mind, what His plan is. Especially as we are getting closer to May 21st, 2011, it will impact every person in the world.
That is why when I am handing out tracts and I see the little one coming along, I go to the mother or to the father and then to the little one. The little one may take it sometimes and sometimes they do not, or the parent shoos you away and indicates that they do not want you to do that. But since the Gospel is for every single person, then we should try to witness to every single person and tell them all that we know, all that we can share.
Let me go on, “Preach the Gospel to every creature,” and then here in Mark 16:16:
He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
In wording this verse and the following verses in the way that Jesus did, He is telling us that when you go into the world and you bring the Gospel, do not forget to let them know that it is a spiritual Gospel. The Bible is a spiritual Book full of parabolic statements. Right away, you have to start explaining what it means to believe, that God must do the work of saving us and give us faith following our salvation, and that we are baptized not through water, not just by having water sprinkled on us or by being dunked, but through the Holy Ghost. Through the Holy Spirit, we are cleansed spiritually from our sins as the Word of God can wash us. The Bible speaks of “the washing of water by the Word,” and that is what is in view here. This is what we are to bring to the world. We are to share what we know of the Bible.
Let us go back to Jonah. In Jonah 3:3:
So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of JEHOVAH.
He had received the rod in the whale’s belly and now he is being obedient. Now he learned. He learned. I do not think that he fully learned his lesson because later he still kind of…his spirit does not seem to be in what he was doing in bringing the message to the Ninevites. But nonetheless, he went. He went, even though maybe he was not completely enthused with the job that God had given him with the task at hand. But he received chastisement and was corrected by it and now God says in Jonan 3:2-3:
…preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of JEHOVAH.
And then it says:
Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey.
It is interesting that in the original language, in the Hebrew, we are missing something in this verse. I will give you a literal reading of this verse. It says:
Now Nineveh was a great city to God, a journey three days.
Nineveh was a great city to ‘elohiym. That is the word that is there. It is in the Hebrew. You can check it out. It is the same word ‘elohiym that is in Jonah 3:5:
So the people of Nineveh believed God (‘elohiym)…
Or in verse 8, Jonah 3:8:
…cry mightily unto God (‘elohiym)…
Verse 9, Jonah 3:9:
Who can tell if God (‘elohiym)…
And in verse 10, Jonah 3:10:
And God (‘elohiym) saw their works…
It is the very same word in the Hebrew, but it is not brought out in the English. Yet in a way, it is, because in the Hebrew, it says:
Now Nineveh was a great city to God…
And so the translators, in trying to express that, said that it was “an exceeding great city,” because if it is “a great city to God,” that would really make it an exceedingly great city, would it not, that God has this emphasis on Nineveh?
Why was Nineveh “a great city to God”? Why was Nineveh a great city to Him?
Well, we know that He had much people there. He had much people there. “Nineveh shall rise in judgment,” it says in Matthew 12:41:
The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
They repented and they are going to rise in the judgment and condemn others with their resurrection, so they must have been true men. They had to be true believers. They were really saved. God saved them through the preaching of Jonah, eight English words. Eight words, that is all that he used to save “twelve ten-thousand men.” That is how it is put in Jonah 4 in the Hebrew, and we can see how God is stressing the number twelve because it has to do with fullness. 10,000 would be 10 x 10 x 10 x 10: 4 10’s. It is the completeness of the fullness, we could say, of those whom God is going to save.
In other words, it is a picture; it is a type and a figure of God’s people. That is why it is a great city to Him. It is a great city to God just as it says in Matthew 5:35, which is speaking of swearing:
Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.
In Revelation 21:10, speaking of the New Jerusalem, the spiritual Jerusalem, that Heavenly Jerusalem, it says:
And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God,
So Nineveh was a great city to God. He had a deep concern for the people of Nineveh, and so He wanted to bring His Word to the Ninevites so that they could hear the Gospel, so that they could hear the Gospel and through the hearing of the Gospel, they could become saved.
Now, in Jonah 3:4, it says:
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.
“Yet forty days,” so time and judgment. Time and judgment, that was the message. “Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed.” “Overthrown” is used to refer to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboim, the cities of the plain that were overthrown by God, meaning that He rained down fire and brimstone from Heaven and destroyed those cities. That is what it means to be overthrown. If you are a wicked city and a wicked people, it means that God will destroy you, as He speaks of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Epistle of Jude saying that they were an example of an eternal fire, and that is what God has in mind by “Yet forty days, and Nineveh will be destroyed” in a similar way to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Now, why did God give them forty days? Forty? He could have given them any length of time. He came to Noah and said 120 years at first. Later, He said, “Yet seven days.” In other cases, He came to Lot before the destruction of Sodom of Gomorrah, and they did not have much time at all. They had to quickly flee from Sodom in order to escape that overthrowing. But here, God gave Nineveh forty days, and forty in the Bible normally has to do with testing, testing. The spies searched out the land of Canaan when they came out of Egypt for forty days and they failed the test because they came back, most of them, with an evil report. And God said, “Okay, you are going to wander in the wilderness one year for each one of the days that you searched out the land.” And they wandered in the wilderness for forty years, tested all the way through. We know that with the Lord Jesus, He was forty days in the wilderness being tempted of the devil, testing, testing, testing, forty days.
What is a test to the Ninevites? What was their test? Well, I think we can see two things at least. Number one was that Jonah was a single man, one person, one person who was unknown to them. From what we know in the Bible, they did not know him. He was a foreigner on top of it. He was a stranger. So what was the test? “Are you going to believe this individual who is from another country, and a country that we do not particularly like, and he is coming and saying eight words?”
That is a test, is it not? That is all that God gave to the Ninevites: a lone prophet coming with a single sentence of warning to a whole city. He just went into the city a day’s journey to share the Word of the Lord, and that was it. That was it. They heard.
Now, we do not know where he went into the city, how they heard him. Most people did not actually hear him. I do not think that are to understand that he told every individual personally, but he probably went into a public market and he cried out, as it says here in verse 4, Jonah 3:4:
Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
He could even have said it without too much feeling because it was not really his desire to do this, but God commanded him, “Go to Nineveh and preach the preaching that I bid thee.” So what he said was exactly what God wanted him to say and he went and somebody in the marketplace heard, “Did you hear what he said? Forty days and Nineveh, our city, will be overthrown!”
Now, God, in all probability, prepared the people of that city. We are not told how, and that is God’s business, but it could have been that they were involved in wickedness, in all probability. It is very probable that they were since that is what people generally tend to do, so there could have been that weighing on their minds and it could have convicted them of their own sinfulness. But word began to be spread and the first aspect of the test was, “Will you believe this person when you could probably give a thousand reasons not to believe?” If people do not want to hear something, they can dissect it in a critical way, a thousand and one different ways.
Is that not true? Is that not true? No matter how much evidence is presented, no matter how much of the Word of God is presented to some people, they are going to use their own mind and their own reasoning and they are going to say, “Well, who supports this single prophet? Who is for him? Do we have anybody else amongst us who agrees with this man? Is there anybody here in Nineveh who agrees with this prophet? He might be a madman for all we know. He is probably some crazy person who left Israel and came to us. Why should we believe this guy?” And that is very easy to do, very typical of the mind of man, that they would attack the message and the person and that they would dismiss it in a second and go about their business.
It is absolutely incredible that the Ninevites listened! It is absolutely incredible that they heard this one sentence and that they listened and believed…Jonah? No.
Jonah 3:5 says:
So the people of Nineveh believed God…
They believed God, but God did not go there personally. No, but He sent His servant. He sent an ambassador. He sent a messenger, just one person, one individual. We do not know what Jonah was like, what he looked like, his style of clothing. We do not know anything about him, but we can probably guess that he was just a typical person, just an ordinary human being whom God commanded to go with the Gospel, and he went finally because circumstances that were out of his control but completely ordained and controlled by God made him go to be obedient to God’s own Word, and yet the Ninevites passed the test with flying colors because they realized that this is the Word of God, that it was coming from God and that it was not coming from man, and so they believed God.
Now, if we go to 2 Corinthians 5, I would like to read a verse there that I think is very important. It says in 2 Corinthians 5:20:
Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.
And that is the believer. That is you, if you are a true child of God. That is me. That is the one whom God has sent into the world. We are an ambassador and an ambassador is someone who represents the one who sent him. The American ambassador to Bolivia does not stand on his own, but he is a representative of the American government and the president of the United States and the power of this country. So, too, with the believer, the messenger of the Gospel, we are an ambassador sent from God to warn people, to bring the Gospel that will bring warning to individuals that they be reconciled to God, and that is the message that the Ninevites heard. That is exactly what they heard through the preaching of Jonah. Jonah preached only time and judgment, but they understood that implied within it was a message of grace and mercy and of reconciliation to God, and that is why they began to cry out, beseeching the Lord for His pardon, that He might turn from the anger and wrath that He intended against them.
So this is our case, and, you know, people are very proud, people are very proud. It is part of our nature, “Well, bring the President here and I will listen. Do not send me an ambassador! Bring the one who is really in power and in control to me,” like Naaman when Elisha’s servant went out and told him what to do, “Go dip yourself in the river Jordan seven times.” Elisha did not even come out. He just told his servant to carry the message, and Naaman was offended. He was greatly offended, “Oh, I thought that he would come out and heal the leper,” and it took his servants to come to him and tell him, “Now, look, Naaman, if he would have told you to do some great thing, would you not have done that? But he is only asking you to go and dip yourself in the river.” Finally, he did go and then he was cleansed from his leprosy.
You see, God sends Lazarus’, beggars, those who are even at times openly despised by the people of the world, to bring His message, and yet God is going to hold all people accountable for the hearing of their message and their response to the message.
It is kind of like at home, and I think that people with families will understand this, when some of the older children are upstairs and the mother or the father wants the children upstairs to do something. One of the little ones is downstairs so you send them up, “Go tell your brother or sister that I want them to go take out the trash.” The little one goes up and you can hear them yelling at the little one, “What are you telling me that for? Who are you to tell me that?” Well, the little one actually had a little authority because they had an authority invested in them from mom and dad. I know that when I hear that, I really do not like it. I really do not like it when I hear the ones upstairs picking on the little ones, especially when they are coming with a message from me.
I take offense, and that is what God is saying. That is how He does it. He brings His Word through humble means, meaning us, and we carry His Word to the people of the world and the world easily could dismiss us and despise us and overlook us. However, God’s people will respond and they will respond in a big way because we know at this time that God is saving a great multitude.
If we go back to Jonah, the second thing that was part of this test of the forty days was, “Not only are you going to believe it, but are you going to take action? Are you going to respond?” Because that is really the indicator of true belief. People hear something; they can give assent, “Okay…yes…May 21st is going to be the rapture…October 21st is going to be the end of the world…five horrible months of torment in between.”
That should not be our reaction. We should really have a very emotional reaction even, and we should think, “Wow! Wow! If it is true, that is not long off, that is not far. What can I do?”
Well, you can learn from the Ninevites. It says in Jonah 3:5-9:
So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?
You see, the Ninevites heard and responded. They took action and it started with the king as he commanded everyone to do this. But the people also, in obedience to the king and in obedience to the Word of God, began to give evidence of repentance with the sackcloth and the ashes and the turning away. They did not eat. They did not drink. It became the most important thing for the Ninevites that they go to God, that they go to God and cry mightily unto Him, not weakly, not weakly, not, “Lord, save me…amen.” That is how some people pray. That is how some people pray. They know that they have to….“God have mercy….amen.”
That is not prayer. That is not prayer. Prayer is when it affects your whole life and it is a demonstration that we do believe. “I do not know if God has saved me yet, but I know one thing, I am going to respond in whatever way I can.”
Now, the equivalent to this, this is spiritual language, the equivalent would be to get a Bible and to make it your best friend, to take it with you to school and to take it with you to work and to read it on the subway and to read it at lunchtime and to read it when you get home. Put a Bible in the bathroom and every time you go to the bathroom, read the Bible…and read and read and read.
That would be one of the things and along with reading, praying, praying. Whenever there is an opportunity, “O Lord, O Lord, help me! Give me a right spirit and a heart that I might pray and beseech You in an earnest way, that it truly might be the prayer of my heart that You would save me because I do not want to perish. I do not want to die.”
Who wants to die? Who wants to have their life come to an end when the life can be extended forevermore in a glorious way that none of us can even imagine? Who wants two more years of this life or even if you had longer, which you do not? Who wants that little paltry period of time in place of everlasting joy and peace and happiness? Nobody in their right mind. Nobody would want that kind of deal and exchange if they had their wits about them, if God had given them a sober mind.
So God warned the Ninevites because they were a great city to Him, and He is warning us. Now, we have a lot longer than forty days, but it is the same thing. He has opened up our understanding to time and judgment, and now the question is how we are going to respond. How are we going to respond? How will we respond? Will we respond as the men or the relations of Lot in Sodom and be as one who mocked when Lot warned them, “The judgment is coming right now! Let us get out of the city!,” and they perished? Will we respond like the people of the world in Noah’s day as they were warned and they perished in the flood? Or will we respond like the people of Nineveh, like the Ninevites, who are a great example to each one of us?
Okay. We will stop here and let us close with a word of prayer.
Dear Heavenly Father, we do thank You for advance warning. It is a mercy to know that a hurricane is coming ahead of time because we can save our belongings, some of them, and our lives. To know that judgment is coming ahead, we can go to You, a very merciful and gracious God and of tender mercy, and we do pray that the souls of our children and others will be precious in Your sight, and we do ask that You would draw them to Yourself ever closer. Father, we pray that You would be with us the rest of this day as we go our ways, and we do ask that You would help us to share the Gospel, the preaching that you bid us to preach, which is whatever we have learned that is true from the Bible. We ask that You might open up a door for a witness and that You would close doors on the enemy so that they cannot prevent or interrupt the sending forth of Your Word. And we pray this in Christ’s Name. Amen.
Why do we not have a hymn and then if anybody as anything, maybe we will have time for a few questions after that?
Chris: Alright. If anyone has anything, a question or a comment that you would like to make, you are welcome. You can come up, if you are here at the fellowship. If you are on Paltalk, just raise your hand and Bob will relay any question or comment that you might have. Okay, does anyone have anything? Sally.
1st Question: I have been kind of thinking about just exactly what we are to tell those to whom we are witnessing. You said that there were only eight words that were used by Jonah to say to these people. Mr. Camping said the other day that we need to know that May 21st is the Day of Judgment.
Chris: Well, I think what he is saying is that it should not take us as a thief, like many people are unaware because they do not want to know. I think it is referring to that, because there are some people, like little children, who are not going to have that knowledge, or a baby whom God is going to save. But if anyone has the capability, the mind, then, yes, they should understand this.
1st Question (continued): I worry sometimes because I talk to ladies in their home and oftentimes I do not speak about Judgment Day or anything like that and I keep reminding myself…I remember that the centurion said, “Just speak the word and the person will be healed,” and, you see, I do not know. Are we supposed to go over the whole Bible?
Chris: Well, that is why tracts are very good. You can give them a tract. Included in the “Does God Love You?” tract is information about May 21st. By the way, Lord willing, shortly, we are going to have a tract that is going to deal with the 5-month period. It is going to say “May 21, 2011 the Rapture.” It will have a picture of an hourglass on the cover with that at the top. Towards the bottom of the hourglass, it says “October 21, 2011 the End of the World.” There will be information in the tract that is primarily dealing with that 5-month period, the judgment that is coming.
1st Question (continued): I am trying to focus on what exactly will God use to save a person, not necessarily….
Chris: Oh, well, He can use anything, any word, any part of the Bible, any Scripture.
1st Question (continued): So I should not worry?
Chris: Well, actually, I was emphasizing Jonah’s sentence because there are some people who might say, “Well, you have a tract that is focused on the end and 5-months and I think you should really, when you have a tract, bring the Gospel with it.” I was just trying to emphasize that it is the Gospel. Since we are coming out with the tract shortly, I wanted to look at this to take a closer look.
1st Question (continued): That might be a good thing to send with the tracts. You would not have to explain…
Chris: Well, actually, what happened was that I wrote a letter telling people about May 21st that we were putting with every Bible and with everything that we send, like CDs. Every time someone gets a Bible, they get tracts and they also get a letter explaining the 5-month period. Someone in Ohio took that letter and found the image of an hourglass and put it together to be on this tract. After seeing, that I thought, “Well, why do we not expand it?” I think that it will be useful.
Bob: Nate, go ahead and post your question.
2nd Question: Could you please explain the three days’ journey and how Jonah entered into the city one day’s journey.
Chris: Well, three days’ journey is found several times in the Bible. I looked that up and it seems to be a different context, so I was not able to understand exactly what was meant, except for the number 3. We know that 3 has to do with God’s purpose, so it was God’s purpose that His Word go into Nineveh or into the world and it will save those whom He intends to save. That is one thing that we can see. And, again, how he went about a day’s journey, historically, we might be able to understand that with the character of Jonah, but, spiritually, I do not know what the meaning is.
3rd Question: In Jonah 3:5, who is the beast?
Chris: Jonah 3:8:
But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth…
I did not take a look at that word. I do not know. It could be any animal, every animal. It might be cattle. I am not sure, but it is just expressing their complete desire to trust God and to stop the way that they were going, the whole society, the whole city, and cry to God. They really believed; they truly believed Jonah. They believed what they heard, and, you see, that is the thing. God works in people, all kinds of people. The vast majority of people will be skeptical and they will not believe it. I think that the Bible shows us that. That is the nature of man. But God’s people are going to hear and it is going to hit them hard and they are not going to be able to shake it. It is going to trouble them and they are going to be led to repentance by the goodness of God, by His longsuffering patience, and they will become saved. I think that is what the repentance of the Ninevites is teaching us.
Okay, does anybody else have anything?
4th Question: I just wanted to clarify to make sure that I am understanding this. The people on Paltalk were mentioning that in Jonah where it says that it was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey, I took it to mean that this was talking about it being a huge place and that it would take three days to go through the city.
Chris: Well, yes. I was not saying anything about the size of the city. Let me read it again. In Jonah 3 and the last part of verse 3:
Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey.
The literal reads:
Nineveh was a great city to God of three days’ journey.
So I was spending a little time wondering if it was saying that Nineveh was a great city to God or was it three day’s journey to God. I think that the answer is that Nineveh was a great city to God, to ‘elohiym. That is because it is representing those whom He intends to save. We can see that by the number of the 120,000.
Okay we will stop here.