“And should not I pity Nineveh…” Jonah 4.11 ESV
God wanted to release mercy over Nineveh. He in fact insisted on it. The reason I say that is because of the abundant evidence for it in Jonah’s life. The prophet was stubborn, but God was insistent. Stubbornness is a dogged refusal to change or be moved. Insistence does not allow refusal, and it is predicated on authority. Mercy was what God wanted for Nineveh, and mercy was what He delivered.
It’s amazing to see how effective Jonah’s sermon was there. It’s almost like God gave him the absolute minimum possible part to play. He told Gideon inasmuch, “You get only three hundred men to take down Midian.” He told Jonah inasmuch, “You get only eight words to catalyze repentance in a vast city that can’t tell its right hand from its left.” God certainly didn’t need Jonah, but He did certainly choose him as an instrument.
What happened at Nineveh looks more like a New Testament thing, honestly. I mean, it looks like the work of the Holy Spirit, not the work of a mere prophet. Think of what happened when Peter preached the first time at the beginning of the book of Acts, then compare that to what God did at Nineveh. Nineveh kind of blows it all away. Nineveh, for the scope of numbers alone, makes the results of Peter’s first sermon in Jerusalem at Pentecost look small. About 3,000 souls compared with more than 120,000 isn’t much more than two percent. What God did at Nineveh is staggering.
What’s even more instructive is that He did it through a prophet who was determined to oppose Him. Jesus wasn’t kidding when He told the people that the very rocks would cry out if the people did not render praise to their coming King. But He was arrayed humbly, on a borrowed donkey, and He traversed a carpet of palm fronds.
“And should I not pity…?” Fill in the blank for whatever impossible situation there is in your own life, and trust that God’s heart definitely is to deliver mercy, to give beauty for ashes, to release from the bondage of iniquity, to cleanse the stain of sin that leads to death, and to give life everlasting.
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