A sermon by Nate Wilson
for Christ the
As
I mop up the last of the book of Jonah, I want to deal some issues related to
the last verses of chapter 3 and chapter four. I want to deal with chapter 3
verse ten today, and then conclude with chapter 4 verse 11 next week. So for
this week, let us consider 3 sticky questions that arise from the last verse in
chapter 3:
(1) Was Jonah
a False Prophet?
(2) Are we
saved by our works?
(3) Does God
change His mind?
I
would like to suggest that each of these questions has to do with whether or
not we can trust God. If the answer is Yes to any of these questions, then God
and the Bible cannot be considered a reliable source of truth, and God’s plan
of salvation would not be reliable either! So the answers to these three
questions are very important.
Illustration:
Anchor. Say I have a boat that I don’t want to drift out to sea while I’m
sleeping. I throw an anchor over the side of the boat to hold it in place. If I
haul up on the chain in the picture and there is no anchor on the other end
below the water, then I’m in trouble; I’m going to lose my boat! So I want to
figuratively pull on the chain of this scripture passage by looking into these
three questions to see if there really is a God we can depend upon, or whether
the Bible says we’re in deep trouble!
·
Jonah prophesied that
·
But apparently no
political uprising occurred, no foreign army invaded, and no natural disaster
happened. Does this make Jonah a false prophet?
·
Goldman: the concept of an “overturn” could
carry both a positive and a negative dimension: “If they would not repent, it
would be destroyed. But if they did repent, they would be ‘overturned,’ i.e.
their hearts would change from evil to good” (Son. 146). So, whether there was
a political revolution or a change of heart, God's word predicting
a “turn-over” in 40 days would be true either way!
·
In fact, a foreign army did invade
·
There was a political uprising, even
though the same rulers continued to rule, for the people of the city as well as
the king confessed their sin before God, turned from their wicked ways, and honored
God – at least for a time. The city was changed by God’s transforming power.
·
So, NO, Jonah was not a false prophet.
What can
we learn from this?
§
This includes Buddah,
who prophecied some 1,500 years ago that because women joined his movement,
Buddhism would only last for 500 years!
§
It includes the Muslim
prophet Mohammed, who prophecied that the end-time war and arising of
the antichrist would occur in 1453[1].
§
It includes Joseph Smith,
founder of the Mormons, who predicted 1891 as the end time when Christ
would return.[2]
§
It includes Charles
Russell, and Joseph Rutherford, founders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who
prophecied the end of the world in 1914, then 1915, and then when the end of
the world still hadn’t occurred, tried for 1918, then for 1925, and then for
1942. Both died before finding out that that the end of the world wouldn’t
happen then either.
§
Predictions of the date of
the end of the world are often a characteristic of cults. We must be careful
not to get drawn into groups who follow prophets whose prophecies have been
proven untrue.
a3:10 וַיַּרְא
הָאֱלֹהִים
אֶת
מַעֲשֵׂיהֶם
כִּי שָׁבוּ
מִדַּרְכָּם
הָרָעָה
10 Well, God saw their
behavior, that they had turned away from their evil way. And God was made sorry
over the evil which He had promised to do to them, so He did not do it.
Jonah 3:10 tells us that the reason God relented
from His anger toward
Does this mean that God saves us because of our
good works? Does He look down from heaven and say, “Johnny is a bad boy, so I’m
going to send him to hell, but Suzie is trying hard to be good, she turns away
from evil, so she’ll go to heaven.” ??
Either way we answer the question, we have a
problem:
§
If the answer is Yes, then our salvation depends
upon us rather than upon God. If it is our actions that determine
whether or not we go to heaven, then Jesus is not really the savior and His
offer of salvation is questionable.
§
If the answer is No, then Jesus is the Savior,
but people will do wrong things with impunity because the will figure their
works don’t matter.
What information has God revealed to answer this
question? Thankfully we have more than just Jonah 3:10 to inform us as to
salvation; we have the whole Bible. And if we look at the whole Bible rather
than just this account to build our understanding of salvation, we will see a
few things emerge:
§
James 2:10 says that “he who keeps the whole law
of God and yet stumbles at only one point is guilty of all.” Simply stopping a
sinful habit is not enough to save us from God’s wrath.
§
In the case of
§
“All have sinned,” says the Bible, and “the
wages of sin is death.” Every person on earth has done some sort of sin, and
that sin damns them. There is no way around it. You can’t start doing good
things and win God’s favor. Somebody HAS to die, or else your sin is still
stuck to you, and you will be condemned by God, no matter how good you try to
be.
§
That is what’s so great about Jesus – the death
of God-become-Man by Roman crucifixion in the first century A.D. was the
ultimate death by which the sin could be justly punished and done away with.
What saves us from God’s fair punishment for our sin is not our good works, but
the death of Jesus, who took on himself our sins as well as the punishment of
death for our sins.
·
It’s not like God looks down from heaven and
says, “Wow, Jimmy is being really good today, I think I’ll save him.” The
scriptures tell us that God has been thinking about Jimmy for a long time and
preparing Jimmy for that moment.
o
Eph 1:4 God “chose us in Him [Christ] before
the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him...
o
Eph 3:11
This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried
out in Christ Jesus our Lord,
·
So God’s relationship with those who are saved
starts with His plan to save them in eternity past before the world was
created. This continued into human history – God was thinking about Jimmy when He put Jesus on
the cross, placed Jimmy’s sins on Jesus and punished Jesus for them instead.
·
God wrote Jimmy’s name in the Lamb’s book of
life (Psa. 69:28; Php. 4:3; Rev. 3:5; 13:8; 17:8; 20:12,15; 21:27) and then
sent His Holy Spirit to give birth to spiritual life in Jimmy (John 3:3,7; 1Pe.
1:3,23), convict Jimmy of his sin (John 16:8), and draw Jimmy to himself.
·
Titus 3:5
says: He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in
righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and
renewing by the Holy Spirit.
·
So you see, one sin is enough to condemn us and
that salvation is a process that begins with God’s mercy and results in good
deeds; it does not begin with our good deeds and result in God’s mercy.
·
Throughout the Bible, the two components of
“repentance” and “faith” are what God calls us to do to be saved. When we
believe that Jesus died to pay for our offenses against God and when we turn
away from a life of rebellion against God, then we will be saved.
·
God works with those who
are in a covenantal relationship with Him. He notices whether or not they are
obedient to Him – and blesses or curses as a result of what He sees.
A.
After making a covenant
with Abraham, God gave Abraham a son and then told him to sacrifice his son.
God blessed Abraham for his obedience to the point of sacrificing his
son (Gen.22/James 2:21ff).
B.
God made it clear in the
Mosaic law-covenant that He would reward obedience & curse
disobedience (Lev. 26).
C.
And The Psalmists
consistently call God to follow through on His promise to bless the righteous
and punish the wicked based upon their actions (Psalm 18:20-27).
D.
We also see this in Jesus’
teachings: “In Matt. 25, Jesus talks about Judgment Day… ‘If you don’t love the
poor, if you don’t love the hungry, the naked, the poor wanderer, the homeless
– if you don’t love them, then no matter what you say, you don’t love me.’ A
deep social conscience, and a life poured out in service to others, especially
the poor, is the inevitable sign of real faith – and justice is the grand
symptom of a real relationship with God. If you know Him, it will be there. It
may come slowly, but it will come. If it doesn’t, you don’t have the
relationship you think you have.” (Tim Keller, “Justice”)
E.
The Apostle Paul also
addresses the issue in Romans 6, where he wrote, “Are we to continue in
sin that grace might increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin
still live in it?”
So the answer is No, Nineveh was not saved by
turning away from evil; rather they
repented because God caused them to, and as a city that had entered into a kind
of covenantal relationship with God by accepting His terms of surrender for the
city, God responded to their righteousness with blessing, just as He would
respond later to their unrighteousness in the book of Nahum with destruction.
What
can we learn from this?
1.
We can praise God for taking the initiative
to save us. Our lives should constantly be filled with thanks to Him.
2.
We also should walk with
confidence before God (1Jn. 2:28; 3:21; 4:17; 5:14), unafraid of
condemnation, knowing that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God
(Rom 8:35-39).
3.
Despite the fact that it is only Jesus who saves
us and not our works, there are still real consequences from God which are
based upon our works. We should seek to obey God and do what is right
and enjoy walking in His blessing!
Well,
if Jonah was not a false prophet, and if Nineveh, was not saved by their works,
what about:
b3:10
וַיִּנָּחֶם
הָאֱלֹהִים
עַל הָרָעָה אֲשֶׁר
דִּבֶּר
לַעֲשׂוֹת
לָהֶם וְלֹא
עָשָׂה.
3:10b and God relented
over the evil which He had promised to do to them, so He did not do it.
The question is, “Does the eternal, all-knowing
God change His mind?” Does God really get irrationally angry and need some
sense talked into Him?
Once again, if the answer is Yes, then
we’re in trouble, because it would mean that God is fickle.
Once again, we have to go to the whole council
of scripture. There are many scriptures that state emphatically that God
does NOT change or change His mind:
· 1 Samuel 15:29 “The Strength of Israel will not lie or repent; for He is not a man, that He should repent.” (cf. Ex. 24:14, Num 23:19)
· Psalm 102:26-28 “Even they will perish, but You endure; And all of them will wear out like a garment; Like clothing you will change them, and they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will not come to an end.” (also quoted in Heb. 1:11,12)
But doesn’t it say in Jonah 3:10 that God
“repented” or “relented” ? (I don’t think that the NIV’s translation “had
compassion” is the best – this is an exception to the way even the NIV usually
translates this Hebrew word (over 90% of the time they used a different word).
If the Bible says that God relented or repented, doesn’t that mean He changed
His mind?
Many people have offered answers to this
question:
§
for instance, John Calvin and R.C. Sproul have
sought to explain this apparent contradiction as anthropomorphism – a statement
describing God as though He were human because we humans have no other way to
comprehend God’s nature, and therefore the statement should be understood that
it is speaking figuratively, not literally.
§
there are others, and I don’t have time
to review them all.
§
But as I have thought about it this week, I was
intrigued to find an answer to this question in the use of the Hebrew word
translated “relent” here.
As I mentioned a couple of
weeks ago, the Hebrew word translated “relent/repent/had compassion/made sorry
over” is “nacham,” and the root meaning of this word is “to sigh.” But as I
surveyed how the word was used throughout the Old Testament, I noticed an
interesting pattern:
Do you see the pattern here?
God’s Immutability (the
fact that He does not mutate/change) follows from His other attributes:
§
The Perfect Holy One has no regrets - no sin to
repent of,
§
There is nothing for the omniscient to learn, b/c
He knows everything already!
§
no change of location for the omnipresent, b/c
He is everywhere already!
§
He is always hating sin, always bringing
justice, always turning evil to good and always showing redemptive mercy in a
billion places on the earth simultaneously at any given point in time. If He is
always doing these things, He is not changing when He does them. It is part of
God’s eternal, unchanging nature to want to be asked to withhold judgment.
·
Martin Luther loved to preach from the book of Jonah,
in part because it speaks of God’s mercy upon an entire nation of sinners. He
said, “The left hand of God’s wrath is replaced by His right hand of blessing
and freedom” (Verkuyl). He’s always had both hands and He’s always used first
one then the other; this does not represent a change in God.
·
God lets people realize that He is angry and
that they deserve punishment so as to bring them
to their senses and cause them to do what is right.
·
I think that this is what God is doing to
·
The Ninevites were concerned with whether or not
God would repent, but God was concerned with whether or not they (and Jonah)
would repent!
What
can we learn from this?
1. Praise God
that he does not change. In the midst of a crazily-changing world, He will stay
the same.
2. We can
reflect in our own imperfect way the unchanging nature of God by obeying Him:
a. Gal 6:9 “And let us not grow weary of doing
good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”
b. 1Co 15:58
“Therefore… be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work
of the Lord…”
3. Trust in
Him because He is not limited and fickle and corrupt like we humans are. If we
pull on the anchor chain of faith in Jesus, there is an anchor there; our ship
is safe secured to Him. He will consistently bring about restoration from the
ravages of sin when we repent of it and trust Him to save!
Heb 6:17-20
In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the
promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, 18 so
that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we
who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope
set before us. 19 This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a
hope both sure and steadfast…