God is concerned about Nineveh! How shocking that message must have been to Jonah and to Israel. It might be comparable, today, to a religious leader in Israel standing up in a synagogue and announcing that God is concerned about Cairo, or Mecca, or Tehran. Jonah’s message was one of warning: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4) But that message resulted in the people of Nineveh believing God, and “they called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of the” (3:5). God was pleased: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it” (3:10).
Jonah knew that God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (4:2), and he was so angry that he wished to die; so distraught was he that God would show mercy to Israel’s enemy! God pitied Nineveh, Jonah hated the city. God reached out to Nineveh, Jonah wished that it would just fall into a hole in the ground. God was merciful, Jonah seemed vindictive. Just think, if God had behaved toward us as Jonah wanted him to behave toward Nineveh! But God did not! Paul put it like this: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life” (Rom 5:8-10). That's good news for all!
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
which is more than liberty.
There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good.
There is mercy with the Savior,
there is healing in his blood.
The love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind,
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind. -- Frederick William Faber (1862)
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