Sunday Worship Service August 4, 2024

Prelude
Call to Worship Mark 6:34
Hymn JBC # 104 There shall be showers of blessing
The Prayer Time
The Lord’s Prayer
Hymn JBC # 3 Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness
Offering
Scripture Jonah 3:10～4:11
Prayer
Sermon “The God who has concern for the people in Nineveh”
Prayer
Hymn JBC # 639 Is your life a channel of blessing?
Doxology JBC # 676
Postlude

Good morning, everyone. Currently our church is reexamining our mission statement: “The work of our church.” Amidst that, the words “evangelism” and “gospel missions” are repeatedly used.
And however we are reexamining this, the fact that evangelism – the sharing of the gospel – is an important duty of ours as Christians remains unchanged.
Today let us look at the book of Jonah in the Old Testament to see what God has to say about evangelism.
Today I would like to talk mainly on the section of Jonah 3:10 – 4:11 as was just read, but in case there is anyone here who has not read Jonah before, I will briefly go over what the book is about.

Jonah is one of the minor prophets. In fact, Jonah 1:1 states, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai,” beginning the book in a style much like the other prophets.
In fact, other than in the book of Jonah, Jonah is only referred to in one other place in the Old Testament in 2 Kings 14:25. This is what is written there:
“He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Dead Sea, in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher.”
Here we can understand that “he” refers back to verse 23, where it says, “Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel.” “Jeroboam son of Jehoash” is historically called Jeroboam the 2nd, and was the 13th king of the northern kingdom of Israel. Its reign was said to be from 793-753 BC. Jonah is thought to have been active at approximately the same time as Jeroboam or slightly before him, in the first half of the 8th century BC.
Although it is possible that the Jonah in the book of Jonah and the Jonah in 2 Kings are different people, the name of Amittai, Jonah’s father, does not appear in other places in the Bible. Therefore, it is probably safe to think that they are the same person.
Now, the word of the Lord that came to Jonah was, “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

Nineveh was near the upper parts of the Tigris River in Mesopotamia on the opposite coast (east coast) of what is modern day Mosul in Iraq. It was a major city of the Assyrian Empire, a military power that was powerful throughout Western Asia through the 9th and 8th centuries BC and there was king’s castle there.
And about half a century after Jonah’s time, near the end of the 8th century BC, it officially became the capital of the Assyrian Empire. According to excavations research, the city is thought to have spanned about 5 kilometers from north to south, and 2.5 kilometers from east to west.

And as the word in Jonah 3:8 which is translated as “lawless” in the New Interconfessional Translation of Japanese is translated as “violence” in the New Japan Bible Society Interconfessional Version, (as “violence” in the English version (NIV and others), the Assyrian Empire was feared from the surrounding nations for its cruelty. Israel also faced this threat of Assyrian.
Now, Jonah was commanded to evangelize to the city of Nineveh in the enemy country of Assyria.
However, in Jonah 1:3 we see that, “Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish... he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord”
It is not known exactly where Tarshish was. It is thought that it may have been an island on the Mediterranean Sea, or a town somewhere on the western edge of the Mediterranean Sea, the southern part of Spain. In other words, it was in the opposite direction from Nineveh.
So, God sent a great wind to stop Jonah from running away, then prepared a huge fish to bring Jonah out of the rough seas. This huge fish swallowed Jonah and he was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. It is difficult to believe this could happen, so it seems there are more than a few people who think this book is a parable or fable.

You may think that three days and three nights would refer to what we think of today as three full days or approximately 72 hours. However, it is actually “approximately three days” in the modern saying, which is “three days and two nights”.
Jesus refers to Jonah in Matthew 12:40, saying the following:
“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

According to the records of the gospel, Jesus was placed in the tomb on Friday evening, as the Sabbath would begin at sunset on Friday. Then Mary Magdelene along with other women were the first to go to the tomb early in the morning on the first day of the week (in other words, Sunday) when the sun came up, and Jesus had already resurrected.
In other words, even if we estimate on the long end, Jesus was in the tomb from Friday before sunset until near Sunday’s sunrise, or around 36 hours.
It is said that after disasters like earthquakes or landslides, the survival rate of people trapped under buildings and such drops drastically after 72 hours. However, there are cases of people who have been safely rescued after over a week.
We do not know in what manner Jonah spent a day and a half in the belly of the fish, but according to the translation of 1:17 (2:1 in the Japanese translation) it says that God “provided” the fish.
If this is the case, it would not be unreasonable to think that God protected Jonah’s life in the belly of the fish. I do not believe it causes an inconvenience in thinking of this incident of the book of Jonah as historically true.
According to chapter 2, Jonah offers a prayer of thanks for his life being protected in the belly of the fish. Then the Lord commands the fish to vomit Jonah out onto dry land. Jonah 3:1 then says, “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time”

This time Jonah obeys what he was commanded and goes to Nineveh, then spends a day going around proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown,” as he was told to by God.
Since it took three days just to go around the city, it seems likely that it would have taken even longer if Jonah had gone around the city of Nineveh while preaching, but there is no mention of whether Jonah spent more than three days walking around every corner of the city of Nineveh.
Then surprisingly the people in the city of Nineveh repents, and even the king who heard this proclamation repents.
As a result in Jonah 3:10 it says, “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.”
However, this book continues to show many unexpected developments.
In Jonah 4:1, it says, “But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry.” In verse 2 we see that Jonah still wanted the people of Nineveh, his enemies, to be destroyed as God had proclaimed. When we consider the situation Israel was in, this may be understandable.

Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and evangelized to Nineveh. However, in his heart he did not desire for the people of Nineveh to be saved. He only evangelized them reluctantly because God told him to. However, contrary to Jonah’s secret desire, the people of Nineveh repented, and God forgave them.
In Jonah 4:3, we see Jonah sulking because this did not go as he desired, saying “Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
God did not immediately scold Jonah, but instead handled him patienly. First, in verse 4, God asks him, “Is it right for you to be angry?” However, Jonah does not answer to this at al. He just sits and waits to see what will happen.
God then provides “a leafy plant” (in Japanese “TOGOMA = easter oil plant”) to shade Jonah from the heat. Jonah was briefly happy about the plant, but the next day God “provides a worm to chew the plant and cause it to wither”. He then also provides “a scorching east wind”.

Jonah again says that it would be better for him to die, then God asks him, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” To which Jonah replies, “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.” Then God says the following:
“You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”
Here the book of Jonah abruptly ends. What might God be trying to tell us?
I would like to make it today’s message by sharing a few things that God has spoken to me as today’s message.

I had misunderstood something. I had unconsciously believed that I first had to become a worthy Christian in order to evangelize. Due to this, I have not been able to proactively evangelize. However, what I noticed here was that it is just important to speak. If we do not speak the gospel, people cannot hear it.

Romans 10:14 says the following (starting in the middle of the verse):
“...And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”

Our ministry may not be enough. In his heart, Jonah wished for the people of Nineveh to be destroyed. He did not evangelize wishing for people to be saved. However, people heard the word of God that Jonah preached, repented, and were saved. Is it not important to preach the gospel in the first place?
What we can understand from the last two verses is that God has concern for the people that He created. This word “have concern” can also be translated as “have mercy”.
Just as we read in the Call to Worship words, Jesus “looked at the multitudes and had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd”.
The people of Nineveh were Jonah’s enemies. However, to God they were people He created that did not know right from left and were like sheep without a shepherd.
God has concern for even the people we think of as enemies and has mercy on them.

If we look at the words used in another Japanese version (the Colloquial version), “the leafy plant” in 4:6, “the worm” in verse 7, “the scorching east wind” in verse 8, and even “the huge fish” in 1:17 were all “provided” by God. God had a certain purpose in dealing with Jonah.
As we see in 4:2, Jonah understood that God was merciful for everyone. However, he was caught up in his own desires, and could not make God’s desires his own. Jonah’s desires, his desires for his enemies, remained unchanged even when experiencing miraculous salvation.

God deals with Jonah patiently, revealing His desires for the people of Nineveh using “the leafy plant” as a maetrial lesson. God may have desired for Jonah to understand His desires, even if only a little, and dealt with him accordingly.
We know that God so loved the world and desired for all to be saved that, in order to actualize that desire, He sent His own Son, Jesus Christ, to be offered as a sacrifice for our sins.
However, how much do we make God’s desire for people to be saved our own?
Beppu’s population is currently 112,000 people. If God had concern even for the tyrannical people of Nineveh, how much concern on the people of Beppu as well? Who is going to share the God’s though with these people?