Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus. the founder and perfecter of our faith. God wants his servants focused on God's agenda, not their own. It's taken extraordinary measures to get Jonah back on the road to Nineveh, but now he's going, in body, if not in heart. Today, Jonah's lessons continue, as do ours.
From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, Jonah has had to die to self-will and to self-reliance. What kind of death is next?
Well, you know, Dave, as I mentioned before, the Apostle Paul says, I die daily. And I've experienced in my life, even as I'm sure you have experienced in yours, that every day, is a new death to self. And Jonah, of course, had to experience that in many, many different ways. And you know, in this hurting world what we discover is this, that those who submit to God, who are willing to lay down their bitterness and their anger toward Him, are the ones that are greatly blessed. I'm holding in my hands a book entitled Dory the Girl Nobody Loved, and this is the last day we're making it available for our listeners.
I want you to write down this contact info. Go to rtwoffer.com. or call us at 1-888-218-9337.
Now after the message that you are going to hear, I'm going to be giving you that contact info again. Because in our broken world We need hope for the abused. We need hope for those who feel that they are entirely hopeless. We need to see God's grace in the worst of circumstances. But for now, let us listen.
Um Some people find it difficult to swallow the story of Jonah. But Jesus evidently believed it, and if Jesus believed it, that's good enough for me. One of the things that we see very early on in the story of Jonah, and you may turn to it in your Bibles. is that Jonah was very stubborn. He was a very stubborn prophet, and you and I are stubborn prophets.
But we read in the third chapter of the book of Jonah: then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise and go to Nineveh. God is the God of second chances. God is the God of new beginnings. There are some people who will not give you a second chance as they look at you through their own homemade microscope. But God is the God who gives people a second chance.
And so the word of the Lord comes to Jonah. And you'll notice in verse 3 it says, So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh. It does not say, but. If it had said so back in chapter 1, verse 3, so Jonah rose to go to Nineveh, the whole story would have been different. But back there, Jonah had a but.
He was willing to stand against God. And then it says in verse 4, but the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea. And now Jonah is finally willing to give in to God, having spent 72 hours in the belly of a fish.
Sometimes we give the impression that Jonah was spewed out by the fish in the suburbs of Nineveh. And then what he did is he arrived in the city and he was wearing very smelly clothes, very smelly clothes as a matter of fact, and we think that he had some seaweed still wrapped around his head and his body was white because of all of the gastric juices that he had encountered in the Creative Learning Center. But actually, that's not the way it happened. Because if you look at a map, you'll notice that Nineveh is at least 400 miles from any place in the Mediterranean. And so it may have been three weeks or a month later that Jonah arrives in Nineveh to preach his very short message.
Now Nineveh. Was this great city, and Jonah was intensely nationalistic and filled with hate toward those people. Because he knew that Nineveh had a reputation for violence, and he also knew that the Ninevites might come against Israel as they had plundered many other countries. And so, because of this intense nationalism, he greatly resented the fact that God was going to possibly be gracious to these evil people who really deserved judgment. They didn't even deserve a chance judgment.
Would be like you being asked to go speak to the terrorists who are blowing up cars and blowing up American troops and preach to them and say that there's going to be judgment and then God converts them and makes them stronger than ever. Wow. And so Jonah resents it. There were 120,000 children in the city of Nineveh, but Jonah did not care about those children. And there are more than 120,000 children in Chicago.
And the question that we have to ask, particularly in the next message in this series, is, do we care about those children? Uh All right, what God does now is he gives Jonah a lesson in compassion. Jonah is going to deeply resent that. He didn't mind if grace and compassion is given towards him or towards those who he deemed to be the people of God. That was understandable because they were worthy of that kind of compassion and concern.
But he deeply resented the possibility that God might be gracious to wicked, evil, sinful Ninevites.
So how does God get him to say yes? We're not sure if he ever really got him to say yes. I guess I should change that and say: how does God try to get Jonah to say yes? First of all, by where he was sent. The Bible says that he goes back to Nineveh.
And Nineveh was an exceedingly great city. It says three days' journey in breadth. Verse 4: Jonah began to go into the city. going a day's journey, and he called out, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. You'll notice that when he was running from God, he was running from God because of Nineveh.
God brings him back to Nineveh. The very issue from which he was running, the reason why he was running. God says, Jonah, you can't be in my stream of blessing unless you go back. in your detour to where we began, I am directing you to where you should have gone in the first place. Listen, when God gives us a second chance, He brings us back to those issues that caused us to run from Him in the first place.
And it is those issues that we need to deal with, whether it is resentment or anger or disappointment or situations. God says, if you want to be in my blessing, you go back to where you were supposed to be. And so Jonah arises and goes to Nineveh. Three times the Bible says that Nineveh was an exceedingly great city. It was great geographically.
Three days walk through it. People say, well, that's not possible because the inner city was actually quite small. It had a wall of a circumference of about nine miles. But we're told that the wall was nearly 100 feet high and was 50 feet wide on top, so that you could have several chariots going on on the wall at the same time. Those walls were huge fortifications.
When it says that it was a three days' journey, maybe what we should understand is that that includes all of the outlying areas. There was also a further wall, and beyond that, there were various towns and various settlements, and maybe that's what took three days to walk through. But Jonah goes one day's journey. And he begins to preach. Yes, it was great geographically.
It was also great culturally, by the way. In fact, archaeologists tell us that there was a library in Nineveh at that time, clay tablets, thousands of them, so that they had culture and they had advancements and they had education. It was great culturally. It was also great in terms of its wickedness. I will not, in a public setting, give you the details of everything that they did, but the Ninevites impaled children.
They skinned people alive and a host of other things that you don't want to hear about. They were really cruel. They majored in cruelty and in evil and in violence.
Now those are the Ninevites, the Assyrians of many, many generations ago. And as I like to point out, this has no relationship to the Assyrians that we know, Assyrians who are here today worshiping with us. But these were the people to whom Jonah was sent. And you look at this business of being sent there and you find out that God did an incredible miracle, as we shall see in a moment, because there were certain limitations. We'd have never expected God to do this.
Think about it for a moment. First of all, the limitations of method. Jonah came to the city and he didn't have advanced personnel. He didn't have cottage prayer meetings before he arrived. He didn't have television, he didn't have radio, he didn't have newspapers to pick up the stories so that others could hear about what God was doing.
He didn't even have a flannel graph board, as far as I know. He simply went there and began to preach. And maybe it's the way in which he looked, maybe it's because of what the Ninevites were going through. There are some stories there that they were at a very pivotal point in their history. They began to respond to this message.
Not only was there a limitation in terms of the method, but the message itself: yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Jonah, where's grace here? Where's something about God's forgiveness? Where's something about God's compassion? If he told them about that, the text doesn't tell us.
The main part of his message must have been that one statement: yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
So you have the limitations of a message. You also have the limitations of the messenger. Jonah did not want to preach this message. Probably went like this. Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
And he hoped to God. that it would be over its realm.
So that's the way in which he preached. He preached with anger, shall we say. And he needed a course in anger management, which God tries to give him in the next chapter. But he resents, he resents this idea that maybe they'll repent and God will be merciful.
So God tries to grind down his stubbornness, first of all, by where he was sent, the very place he did not want to go. His feet took him where his heart was not. Secondly, God ground him down, if we can use that expression, by what he saw. Oh, he did not want to see this. You'll notice it says in verse 5: And the people of Nineveh believed God, and they called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them.
Fasting! Who told them to fast? They somehow knew that if we're going to get in touch with God, we want to show our desperation, and so they fasted there. Here at Moody Church, we have a day of fasting twice a year, and it's hard to get people to fast for a whole day. Feasting.
Well, that's a different story. When we call a feast, we have people show up who we thought died during the days of Ironside. I mean, everybody's here during the days, like that's when we have a feast. But when you have a fast, The attendance is a little lower. We have more people in the supper room than we do the upper room.
We've noticed that. And then these people put on sackcloth. Sackcloth, my friend, was goat's hair.
Now, just think about that. That was prickly. It was terribly uncomfortable. What they were saying is: we want to show our desperation in God's presence and we even rid ourselves of creature comforts so that we can call on God and God knows how serious we really are. In fact, it says in verse 6 the word reached the king of Nineveh.
We don't know whether or not this was like the mayor or whether or not it was the whole king of the Assyrian Empire. And he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, sat in ashes. Could you imagine Mayor Daly going back to Grant Park? Sitting in ashes. And then giving the city of Chicago a proclamation.
Now, I've been to many of these prayer breakfasts and so forth, where there is a proclamation from the President, from the Governor, and from the Mayor. And if I may be a little bit facetious, it reads something like this: whereas prayer is not a bad idea. And whereas there's some religion in our previous history, And whereas we're into tolerance, And whereas we're a relatively free country, we exhort anybody who wants to say a prayer today, something like that. Notice this proclamation. Wow.
Verse 7, by the decree of the king and his nobles, let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows, God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.
Now there's a proclamation. You know, when God sends revival, everybody's on the same level: the mayor, the king. Those who are in positions of authority, the president, they all bow in the presence of God, they all acknowledge their sinfulness. And here we have this universal revival taking place in Nineveh. And we read it and we say, could this really have happened?
I mean, even they put sackcloth on the animals, the animals were supposed to have repented. I remember a dog in our neighborhood who should have repented. And we had a cat or two that I tried to get to repent. Wasn't very successful. You know the difference between dog theology.
and cap theology. A dog says, you feed me. Therefore, you must be God. A cat says, You feed me, therefore I am God. Isn't that true?
You see, these people realized that their sin was affecting even the animal kingdom. And the animals, I'm sure, didn't know what was going on because they never understood Jonah. They never understood the message. But they said, we are so desperate that we are even putting sackcloth on animals and we're forcing them to fast.
so that we might turn to God. You know, it's interesting that this is not recorded in any of the various annals of Assyrian history. And so some people have said, could this have happened? Maybe it was a temporary repentance. Maybe their repentance ended when.
Their fear ended. We don't know. We don't know the depth of their repentance, though, as we'll see in a moment, Jesus Christ did acknowledge this as a great moment in history. But the people repented, and because they repented, we read in verse 10: when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them, and he did not do it, which was exactly What Jonah thought might happen. Yeah.
Yes, and God was not yet finished with this rebellious prophet. Jonah had to learn again and again that submission to God. is the best way. Today we're making available for you a book entitled Dory the Girl Nobody Loved and I want to emphasize that this is the last opportunity you will be able to get it from our ministry. I've written a number of books about the culture, about the struggles that people face, about issues of guilt.
But I have written this book, a true story, of a woman who experienced a horrible past but a blessed future. It actually begins in an orphanage and what she experienced there, but it ends in a graveyard. when she begins to see that despite her past she really had a larger family. and that she ultimately was a part of God's picture, which of course she couldn't see in her early years. If you want to bless people who are experiencing a great deal of hurt, who perhaps have had a very bad background in terms of their family, rejection abuse This is the book for you because it is a book of hope.
I hope that you have a pen or pencil handy because I'm going to be giving you some contact info. Here's what you can do. Go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com. We're making the book available for you for a gift of any amount.
Or if you prefer, you can call us at 1-888-288-888-888- 218. ninety three thirty seven.
Now because this is the last day Let me give you that contact info again. Go to RTW Offer. dot com or call us at one eight eight eight two one eight ninety three thirty seven. It's time now for another chance for you to ask Pastor Lutzer. A question about the Bible or the Christian life.
Pastor Lutzer, there's a difficulty in the common view that Jesus died on a Friday and was raised on a Sunday. Charlotte listens in Tulsa, Oklahoma. and has this question. In Matthew 12:40, Jesus said that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish.
so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. As hard as I try, I cannot get three days and three nights from three PM Friday until before daybreak Sunday. even applying the partial day theory, I still have problems with the three nights. What do you think? You're absolutely right, Charlotte.
You can't get three days and three nights out of that, and no one else can either.
So we're faced with the question as to whether or not Jesus Christ's words should be taken literally, and I take that they should be literal. three days and three nights.
Now the answer that I'm going to give is one that has come to me from a friend who did some research on this topic. And I tend to think that what I'm going to share is correct. Of course we can't go back and rehearse what happened. They didn't keep records in the same way that we might to day, but at the same time we can piece it together. We can make the words of Jesus Christ to be taken absolutely truthfully and literally, and, in the process, actually harmonize some of the puzzling texts of Scripture.
I'm going to give you the bottom line. The bottom line is this, that it is very probable that Jesus Christ was crucified Wednesday. and he was put in the grave on Wednesday. and that he was raised from the dead Saturday evening. After sundown, which according to Jewish custom is actually the beginning, Of Sunday If you look at that sequence, Jesus will have been in the grave three full days.
and three full nights.
Now, the reason that this makes sense also is that it is clear. from the New Testament. that there must be something else going on there in the text other than the regular Sabbath. which occurred. every week.
There is another Sabbath that is spoken of. And we know that because it talks about the preparation that was being made for the Sabbath the next day. It speaks about that in conjunction with the crucifixion of Jesus, and the Passover. In the Old Testament there were several different kinds of Sabbaths. This was a Sabbath that always took place every year in conjunction with the Passover.
And that would have occurred on Thursday.
Now, obviously, on this broadcast, we can't take time to look at all the different passages of Scripture, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and to put it all together. But if you take the point of view that Jesus was crucified on Wednesday, and rose from the dead after sundown, Saturday evening You can actually harmonize all these passages of Scripture.
Now, the question you're going to ask is: Does Moody Church have a special service on Good Friday? The answer is yes. And we aren't going to change that. Because the real issue isn't when Jesus was crucified. The real issue is, do we worship him acceptably?
because he was crucified. and it is a very worshipful service here at the Moody Church. on Good Friday. Let me say that the same is true regarding Christmas. We don't know exactly when Jesus was born.
Almost certainly he wasn't born december twenty fifth, but that doesn't mean that we change the day that we celebrate Christmas, because it is the celebration. It is the honor and the worship that we give him on those days which is important, even though our chronology might be off. Good question. Keep studying the Bible. Keep reading.
and keep taking it literally. Thank you, Charlotte, and thank you, doctor Lutzer, for that interesting analysis. If you'd like to hear your question answered, go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. Uh Yeah.
You can write to us at Running2Win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Running to win is all about helping you understand God's roadmap for your race of life.
Some of God's servants have to go to the school of hard knocks before they learn to obey God from the heart. Jonah finally went to Nineveh with a hard heart. He had no real concern for the people of a great pagan city.
Next time on Running to Win, we'll continue this series on brokenness, how God gets us to say yes. We'll be back in Jonah chapter 3 learning about death to self-interest, seeing an entire city repent after hearing Jonah's message. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
