Who is Jonah and Nineveh?

We are beginning a new series in the Old Testament today on the book of Jonah. And I'm really excited to see where God will take us through this journey. It's a Sunday school classic. One of those favourite stories: a big fish, a man swallowed, a man vomited up. What's not to like about it?

As we'll see, I'm sure, we'll see the powerful God behind this story and we'll see the character of this God in it, and it will blow you away. I can guarantee you that. Let's have a read of the first opening lines of Jonah. We're just going to spend this morning looking at the background to the story of Jonah.

The book of Jonah is in the minor prophets in the Old Testament. It is after Obadiah and before Micah, if that helps anyone at all. And we're going to just read the first three verses of the story of Jonah. Jonah one, verse one: "The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai.

Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. 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." We're going to look at the few characters in the story of Jonah.

First of all, we're going to look at Jonah, and we're going to ask a question: who is Jonah? And secondly, who or what is Nineveh? Who is Jonah? Who or what is Nineveh? In our first verse this morning, we come to hear of a man called Jonah, the son of Amittai.

Now, we know that Jonah was a prophet in the northern part of Israel. He was a prophet to the northern ten tribes of Israel. The opening phrase says that the word of the Lord came to him. Now this is a normal phrase that happens with a lot of the Old Testament prophets: that the word of God, the word of the Lord comes to a certain person. The word of the Lord comes to Isaiah.

The word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah. The word of the Lord comes to Daniel. And so Jonah, being a prophet, it is no different. The word of the Lord comes to Jonah. But we don't know much more about Jonah than that.

We know that he is a prophet. We know that he is a son of Amittai. We don't know who really Amittai was, other than the fact that he was probably a well-respected member in Israel. If you mentioned the son of so-and-so, people generally knew who that was because otherwise you wouldn't have said it. So in other words, Jonah was a real man in a real family in the tribes of Israel.

The Bible wants to stress that this was a historical figure. But we don't read anything more of Jonah in these verses, but interestingly, we do have a small cross-reference of Jonah to two Kings chapter 14. And I want us to have a quick read of that because it's going to be important for us to get a deeper understanding of Jonah as a person. Turn with me to two Kings chapter 14, verse 23 and onwards. Two Kings 14, verse 23.

"In the fifteenth year of Amaziah son of Joash king of Judah, Jeroboam, the son of Jehoash, king of Israel, the northern ten tribes in Israel, became king in Samaria and he reigned for forty-one years. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord and did not turn away from any of the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat which he had caused Israel to commit. He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Sea of the Arabah in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant, Jonah, son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher. The Lord had seen how bitterly everyone in Israel, whether slave or free, was suffering. And there was no help, no one to help them.

And since the Lord had not said that He would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, He saved them by the hand of Jeroboam, son of Jehoash." Okay. So here we get a little bit of an indication, a little bit more detail on Jonah as a man. We see that he was from a place called Gath Hepher, which is a tiny little town in the northern parts of Israel. We also see here that he was an established prophet.

He had a bit of a history. Before his journey to Nineveh, he was involved in Israel. He was given another word by God to speak to the king Jeroboam. He's a recognised prophet, in other words. And so it gives us an idea of when he was around as well.

Given the history of what was happening, we know that Jonah would have been around 800 BC. Eight hundred years before Jesus. So this made him a contemporary with the prophet Elisha, who was also a prophet to the northern tribes of Israel. He was the man known, if you remember, to be the miracle worker, the powerful man that had a double portion of Elijah's power. So it's important for us to note here in two Kings 14 what God did through Jonah.

We see in the story, Jeroboam the second was a bad king. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord. The rest of Israel had turned to idolatry. The rest of Israel had started worshipping other gods. And there was a real threat that the enemies around them were going to overtake them.

And we see in verse 26 here in two Kings 14 that the Lord saw how bitterly everyone was, whether slave or free, how bitterly they were suffering and there was no one to help them. In other words, people were doing it tough. And we see God stepping in powerfully through the word of Jonah and restoring the boundaries. In essence, pushing back the enemies that were threatening to conquer them, that were threatening to destroy them.

God showed Himself to Israel to be a saviour. Now imagine if you were Jonah. Jonah saw firsthand the power of God and the fulfilment of a promise. God promised through Jonah to the people that He was going to save them from these enemies. And so God showed to Israel that He was a God who was compassionate.

Who took pity on people who were suffering bitterly. Jonah sees all this and he learns who God is by this incredible act of mercy. The people were rejecting God. The people were in rebellion against God. And yet, God chose Himself to be a God of patience.

A God of long-suffering, as the old English puts it. And so Jonah lives in the northern tribes of Israel with his contemporary Elisha, the great prophet of power, in the days leading up to the fall of Israel. Jonah faithfully testifies against the sin of Israel, but he also preaches the riches of God's patience and grace. So that's the story of Jonah. But then out of the blue, he gets this message.

"Jonah, go and preach against Nineveh for its wickedness has come up before me." This leads us to the next question. Who or what was Nineveh? Jonah had previously seen how God was a God of grace, but he only experienced that to the Israelites. He came to understand God in a profound way, but God's next command was a shocking one.

You see, Nineveh were not Jews. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrians. Those enemies that were actually starting to push on the boundaries of Israel. Nineveh were Gentiles. Nineveh were heathens who didn't know God.

And so during Jonah's lifetime, Nineveh was actually the biggest threat to the nation of Israel that they had ever faced. There's been some amazing work in archaeology that says that Nineveh was in fact, at that time, the largest city in the known world. It was a huge, big city. Think Shanghai. Think New York.

It was the epicentre of the biggest superpower of that time, Assyria. In fact, in Jonah 3:4, which we'll get to later, it says just how big the city was. Nineveh, it says, was a very important city and a visit required three days. The Hebrew translation actually says the breadth of the city was three days. And scholars believe that means that if you were to walk from one end of its neighbourhoods to the other end, it would take three days walking.

That is how big this city was. Jonah 4:11 says that there was a population of more than 120,000 inhabitants. Another translation says that's 120,000 children. So that could be up to say 600,000 people in total. And in ancient days, that was massive.

That is a huge, huge city. The point is, this city was big. But for the Jews, Nineveh was more than an impressive capital city. Nineveh represented everything that was threatening to its very existence. You see, Israel would eventually in fact be conquered by the Assyrians.

God warned the Israelites: "Come back to me. Come back to me. I love you. Come back to me. Forsake those idols," but they never did.

And Assyria eventually overcame them and took them into exile. But Assyria was not a nice place. The ancient world knew them as bloodthirsty enemies. The Babylonians came after the Assyrians and they were the cultured ones. The Assyrians were barbarians.

They were absolutely horrible. Again, archaeological digs of Nineveh (and Nineveh, by the way, is in modern-day Iraq, if you are a Bible nerd like me) uncovered carvings in walls of the city of Nineveh where they showed how people were impaled systematically for having done all sorts of misdeeds. They depicted battle scenes of people being chopped up and sliced up.

People being taken into exile as slaves by putting rings through their noses and being led like cattle around. These were not nice people. The famous king Sennacherib, who was a big king of Assyria, they found an inscription again on one of these walls and wrote about a battle with the neighbouring Babylonian empire that he had. He wrote this: "I did not spare the inhabitants of Babylon, both the young and the old, and with their corpses, I filled the streets of their city." And so this is the background to the story of Jonah.

"Go to Nineveh and preach. Go to Nineveh and preach." And what does Jonah do? Verse 3 says: "But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish." Now I want to show you what it means for Jonah to have headed to Tarshish.

Can we put up that map? Joppa is there. That's where Israel is. Nineveh is northwest, northeast, 550 miles, but Jonah headed for Tarshish, 2,500 miles away on the Iberian Peninsula. That is almost directly the opposite direction he could have gone.

It's not like he just decided to go somewhere, you know, to the coast or something like this. This was a huge journey to try and flee from God. There was no way that Jonah wanted to go to Nineveh. So why did Jonah run? Well, we can probably empathise or sympathise at least with Jonah.

Lord, you want me to do what? You want me to go to our greatest enemy, our biggest threat, and preach to them that you want them to turn to you. Now, the fear of being impaled by his preaching would have probably been enough to scare any of us. But that wasn't actually the reason that Jonah ran away. Jonah chapter 4, verse 2 gives us the motivation of why Jonah ran from God.

Jonah prayed to God at that point and said: "This is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. Because I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love. A God who relents from sending calamity." The real reason that Jonah ran from God to the opposite side of the world wasn't so much the fear of preaching against the enemy. The fear was that this terrible people who deserved God's wrath and punishment would be spared by a God of grace.

A God of abounding love who is slow to anger. Now we have done this as well, haven't we? That frustration that we feel when we feel the Holy Spirit prompting or God's word prompting us about something and yet we feel it's so not worth it. This person is so not worth it. You've been sent to talk with a colleague.

You've been prompted to speak with an acquaintance. And yet, you feel choked by another emotion. That emotion of bitterness, of unfairness, that might say: "These guys don't deserve it. These guys don't deserve this." You know those people, the unsavoury kinds who might make you feel that they are corrupting your family, who are influences in your space that you don't really like.

The ones whose lives are a direct and unmistakable rebellion against God. And you as a Christian who wants to live a life that's pure and upright, can't stand it. Or perhaps they're the ones that have hurt you personally very deeply. The ones you feel so bitter about because they have treated you unfairly. The temptation is not simply to ignore them, but to do all things at all costs to avoid them.

But the challenge from us, for us, from God's word this morning, is that God is a God of grace and compassion. And that messes with us. That messes with our motivations. That challenges us so deeply. You see, because we realise that our discomfort or our bitterness is not important to God as the need for these people to receive His grace.

Don't get me wrong, God sees our groaning and He knows our pain. That's a great assurance we also have in God's word, that He cares about these things. But if we are to take a step backwards and gain perspective, then the little bit of sin that these individuals have done against us is actually not worth comparing to the insolence and the arrogance that these people's lives daily speak against God. And it says: "God, stuff you. I'm going to do it my way."

And so the little bit of frustration we get in their dealings with us, God is constantly having with them. And yet despite this, despite this wickedness of these people, the God of grace and compassion says: "Speak to them so that they may repent." See, God wants Jonah to go and preach to Nineveh. Jonah goes to Tarshish.

God wants one man to preach repentance to thousands. But Jonah decides one man's sense of fairness is worth more than a 100,000 lives. God wants to show grace to the wicked, but in fact, Jonah reveals his heart of wickedness to this God of grace. The question we have to answer, friends, is: Do you know that God and that character? And do you understand it?

What is God's relationship to this sinful world? And what are we called to do about it? Is it really that God is satisfied with our excuses? Is it true? Is our sense of righteousness or our comfort really more important than the calling of God on our lives?

To be agents of grace and a voice of repentance. Is not wanting to be tainted by their wickedness really a good excuse? When we serve the God who has imparted on us His Holy Spirit, to protect us, to sanctify us, to make us holy? Is not wanting to disrupt my image, my status, my lifestyle really just an excuse to say "I want my comfort over the lives of a hundred people within my sphere of influence"? There's nothing.

Friends, there is nothing stopping us from bringing another person to church. There's nothing stopping us from training ourself how to share the gospel. There's nothing stopping us from starting an Alpha course, starting an Introducing God series in your cell group, in this church as a ministry. The question is: if nothing is stopping us, then what is stopping us? But I don't want to end there because that makes this about us.

And it isn't about us. The story of Jonah is actually not about Jonah. The story is actually about God and who God really is. Our God, friends, is the God of mission. People have said to me: "I prefer reading the New Testament because I see in the New Testament the God of grace and love.

The God who comes to us and desires us. And in the Old Testament, we see the God of judgment and justice. He is clinical. He is cold." But look at this God in Jonah. All of His interactions with Jonah when He was dealing with Israel and now with Nineveh is abundantly loving.

His people Israel under a wicked king, steeped in idolatry and immorality, deserving God's punishment and rejection is spared. And not only spared, but their boundaries are extended. And they get to live another generation with blessing upon blessing. Not only spared, but empowered to restore their boundaries. And now, Nineveh, the great city of Assyria, murderers of babies, killers of the elderly and the fragile, famous for their bloodthirst and their oppression, is sent a messenger from God.

By all rights, again, He could have wiped them from the earth, but instead He extends a message of peace. Why? Because God is a God of grace and compassion, slow to anger, and abounding in love. And we have seen that the most powerfully in the person of Jesus Christ, haven't we? We have seen that the most powerfully in Jesus.

"For God so loved the world that He sent Jesus." And unlike Jonah, Jesus gladly took on this burden. And unlike Jonah, Jesus took it to the nth degree to finish the job. Jesus preached the news unlike Jonah with great earnestness and sympathy: "Come.

Come. Enter the kingdom. Be a part of this. Share in my Father's joy." See that God wants to do something beautiful.

It's a message that comforts our hearts, but it's a message that drives us to share that with others. That is the heart of God in Jonah. That's what we're going to experience in the next few weeks. Let's pray. Lord, your word is so rich.

And now we have to do some work in understanding some of these things. How magnificent are these three verses to us. Lord, throughout all of history, you have worked in circumstances and situations. You have worked with backdrops and backgrounds. You have worked with personality types.

God, and you worked with Jonah. And Lord, in Jonah, we see so much of ourselves. In Jonah, we see so much of a sense of fairness and what is right according to us. Nineveh, the evil ones, the ones that do not deserve your love, Lord, are extended an invitation to be found by you. Father, there are so many people in our lives that hurt us and sometimes just annoy us.

And Lord, we just want to ignore them at the best of times, if not downright avoid them at all costs. Father, give us a heart that breaks for them. Give us a heart and a new perspective that Lord, their sin is always before you. Lord, their wickedness is an insult to your holiness and what you have created them for. And yet, despite that, you have sent us Jesus Christ.

You have sent your only son so that whoever believes, Lord, will spend eternity with you, will have a restored relationship with their creator. And Lord, that is magnificent. But we pray that you will empower us, convict us, challenge us, and give us the right opportunities. Holy Spirit, lead us so powerfully in our conversations. Lead our thoughts.

Inspire us, Lord, for ministries, for opportunities, for ways to serve you, Lord. We dedicate our time and our energy and our money and everything we have to you, Lord. Use us as you see fit. In Jesus name, we pray these things. Amen.