“And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.” Jonah 3.5 ESV
Yes, this is the exact same verse we studied yesterday. No, it is not the same takeaway.
There are patterns in the creation that we’re meant to notice. Some of them reveal God, even if only by how they work. Jesus told us that if we found we couldn’t believe Him, we could believe the works He did. It is the same with how God leads a people from willful, blind disobedience to submitted, humble obedience.
First, God must be realized to us; there must be a revelation—a revealing. Then, if we choose to run to the light and not away from it, faith germinates. We believe what we have seen, even though we have only seen it with eyes we have never used before (the eyes of faith). This new state initiates a crisis of action in our soul, and we feel deeply that something must be done.
“They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.”
Fasting is denying the body the food God has blessed, and it moves in an opposite spirit to what we did in Eden, where we didn’t deny ourselves the food God had forbidden.
Putting on sackcloth is symbolic of deep mourning. In Jonah’s day, this step was a great equalizer, and the phrase “from the greatest to the least of them” is significant. When the whole society wore the same thing for a garment, it meant that great people could no longer be identified by their great clothing, and poor people could no longer be identified by their lack of finery.
As one, the people sat still before God in mourning, the weight of the word of God spoken through the prophet bearing down on the souls of the inhabitants of perhaps the greatest city in the world at the time.
Romans 10.14-15 ESV: “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”
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