Dennis Tuuri

# Jonah and Advent, Part Three of Four

Sermon text for today is Jonah chapter 3. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. And now as we read it, children particularly, you imagine what’s happening in this story. The book of Jonah is a very visual narrative and so it’s very easy to sort of see images of what’s happening and to catch this story as God presents it to us.

Jonah chapter 3, and our subject is advent and the city.

Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 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.

The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he issued a proclamation and published it throughout Nineveh. “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.”

And 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.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this wonderful picture of the coming of Jesus and the salvation of the world that we celebrate at this time of year. Bless us now with an understanding of Jonah 3 and its relationship to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to his advent. Make our Christmas joy this week full by an understanding of your word. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Well, this is quite a narrative and I’m going to—I hope this doesn’t mess up the feed or anything. But now kids, I ask you to think about what’s happening here and it’s quite easy, right? It’s a wonderful story and like the rest of the book of Jonah, it’s very easy to understand the basic things that are going on in it.

And I want to talk a little bit about some things that might not be so easy to your parents, but little kids, see what happened here. God said, “Go and preach to Nineveh.” This was the great city, the capital city of a huge empire. And he sends a man who had just been three days in the belly of a fish. Well, maybe not just, but shortly before this, sometime. He sends him. Now kids, Jonah is from Israel. Israel was dominated. They were controlled by the Assyrian Empire.

We know the time of this roughly because Jonah preached during the time of Jeroboam II. We’re told that in Second Kings. So we have a time reference here. And so Jonah is contemporaneous with a particular set of kings in northern Israel. And we know that at that time the Assyrian Empire had pretty much conquered the north. They hadn’t taken everybody away in captivity yet. That wouldn’t happen for another fifty years or so. But kids, Nineveh was the capital city of this Assyrian Empire. So this man, king of Nineveh, that we just read about, he may indeed have been the emperor of all of Assyria. And in fact, we probably think he was.

So this is the great capital city of an empire that ruled much of that world then, including the place Jonah was from. Jonah was an individual prophet, nothing to commend him, right? He comes from a vassal state. That means a state that was ruled over by this king. And he comes to Nineveh and he has a very simple message. And God says, “Say these words. Say only these words. Speak this word.” And he comes to that city. And he speaks that word. The king hears that word and he commands his whole city, which is a picture of his whole empire really. He commands them all to repent, to put on sackcloth and ashes, and not just that, not just to act sorry, but to change their lives, to turn away from evil and from doing bad things to each other, the violence that was in their hands.

This is a story of a radical conversion of a world power through a very simple message spoken by a man who had nothing extraordinary to commend him. In fact, who knows? But, you know, it could be that his skin was bleached white. He might have looked pretty strange. Now, we don’t know why this king was so ready to hear these words, and we’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes, but the simplicity of this story is a wonderful one.

And it’s a little picture, you know, of what will happen when Jesus comes. Now, this is the story your parents, many of them will read to you this week sometime, probably Christmas Eve, Christmas morning, the Gospel according to Luke in chapter 2. Now, remember, we’ve talked about Luke and his other book, right kids? He wrote Luke and he wrote the book of Acts. And you remember what happens at the end of Acts? Paul, like Jonah, gets in a boat to go preach to Gentiles.

Like Jonah, a big storm comes up when Paul’s in his boat. Unlike Jonah, well, like Jonah, all the men are saved, but Paul is saved, too, and the ship breaks up. So it’s a little bit different. Things are a little bit different. And then Paul gets off that boat. They’re safe. The boat’s all wrecked. Everybody’s saved. Just like in Jonah’s story, the sailors are saved in chapter one, right?

And then Paul has this fire thing he’s at and a serpent bites him and it has no effect. He’s a godly guy and God’s going to save him from many attacks until he’s done his bit for God, his job for God. And where does he end up at the end of Luke’s book? Well, he ends up in the big capital city of the empire that ruled the world, Rome. And he ends up in Rome, the Roman Empire. That’s where he wants to go. That’s where Luke’s gospel ends.

And that’s kind of where it begins and where Jesus’s birth is described. Luke chapter 2. It came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. Caesar Augustus, the greatest Caesar of all, the Roman Empire, not believing in God, pretty radically opposed to God. They ruled the world and all the world had to be registered. You think that you got it tough? Well, these people all had to go back to whatever city they were from. They had to travel, right? So they were oppressed.

Now, in the Old Testament, the predictions of what would happen when God’s people sinned was that the Gentiles, the non-believers, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, whoever, would flood over them. They’d be like a flood, right? So they’d be kind of like Jonah drowning in the water. Well, that’s just what happened. Israel is a vassal state. They’re a vassal state to a huge empire, the Roman Empire. And the head of that empire is Augustus Caesar. So in the middle of that flood we can say here comes a decree that tells people they have to be registered.

The census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, each everyone to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth into Judea to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife who was with child. We know the story, but do we remember those details that it’s in that period of empire and we got this guy and his wife and they’re going to have somebody that looks even weaker than Jonah. They’re going to have a little baby, but the baby’s going to be born in a town that wasn’t that significant either.

But what does this verse tell us about that town? It says it’s the city of David. Who was David? He was the great king. So this is the city of the king. And Jesus’s dad, mom, they’re descendants of David, their royal family, so to speak. So, right away in the story, we got an evil Roman emperor. We’ve got the coming of a person into the world that will have effect on that empire. Right? And this is the beginning of Luke’s account. By the end, Paul’s taking in the same message to Caesar’s household just like Jonah goes to Nineveh to convert the Ninevites and the Assyrian Empire.

So we have a king coming, a king born in a kingly city and a king coming whose parents were of kingly lineage. So he’s coming. So it was that while they were there, the days were accomplished for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. So he’s placed in this box, this little box that animals would feed in, right? And we know the animals are going to be there and the shepherds are going to bring some of their animals. So, just like in the story we just read, there were men and beasts together repenting and then coming to worship God, that’s what we’ve got going on here.

The shepherds, by the end of this story, they come with the animals and they’re worshiping Jesus. And what is he in? He’s in a little box. Now, if you know your Bibles, you remember another baby long time before in a little basket that was saved in the midst of the waters, right? That was Noah, right? No, it wasn’t Noah. Who was it? Moses. That’s right. And who was Moses? He was the deliverer of his people, right? So, we see now a little picture that the deliverer of this people and not just the people of the world because the animals are involved. They’re being described here. Jesus is described in that way.

All right. What happens next? Now there are in the same country shepherds living out in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them. The glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. And then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you. You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger in the city of David, a Savior.”

The gospel. What is the gospel? The gospel is that it’s the good news of something that happened. And the something that happened was Jesus came and he died on the cross for the sins of his people. And that as we believe in Jesus’s death on the cross and in his resurrection that he was the Son of God paying the price for our sins, then we’re saved from our sins and we’re going to go to heaven and eventually back here on earth with Jesus and his people. That’s the gospel and that’s what it says here. There’s a Savior born and his name is going to be Jesus because he’s going to save his people. But it doesn’t just say Savior. It says this Savior comes in the city of David. He’s not just a Savior. He’s a king. And he’s a king who’s already in his weakness being contrasted with the great and powerful Oz. No, the great and powerful Augustus Caesar.

And then at the end of Luke’s second book, Acts, here comes Jesus’s messenger to Rome to convert Rome and the Roman Empire. Now, it’s going to take some time. As it turns out, not going to be overnight the way it was at Nineveh, but it will be converted. Constantine will come along and the entire Roman Empire converts to Christianity. It all ties together.

So the gospel—and the gospel in Jonah 3 today: Jonah 2 was about saving us, right? Personally, individually. Jonah 3 is about saving a city. And it’s not just a city. It’s a great city. And it’s not just a great city. It’s a capital city. It’s the capital city of an empire and the king himself brings salvation through obeying God’s word to his people. So the gospel is also that Jesus came not just as Savior but he came as king, not just to save a few people here and there but to save this whole world and the response to that is what we’re doing today.

The response to that is singing songs of praise. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.” That’s the song that we sing today. And as we sing these Christmas songs that we like every year so much, isn’t it interesting how optimistic they are about the world, right? We just sang these songs. The day is coming my prophet bards foretold when the ever circling year comes round the age of gold when peace shall dwell over all the earth in ancient splendors fling and the whole world send back the song which now the angels sing. That’s what happens when the gospel—the gospel not just of personal salvation but the gospel of global salvation, saving cities, empires, representing all the world, saving a group of sailors in chapter 1, one who are kind of all alone in the midst of a sea.

They sort of represent a little mini version of humanity, too. And they’re moved from crying out to their pagan gods to crying out to Yahweh when God’s servant Jonah speaks in the midst of a storm. That’s what’s going on. That’s why our Christmas songs are so optimistic. This story in Jonah 3 really has overtones that come back to us as we read and as you read this week, Luke chapter 2.

Now, I hope you’re having a good time the last week or so getting ready for Christmas. I thought maybe what I should do here for the parents is to just tell everybody: take a deep breath, trust God, everything will be ready. I don’t know about you, but my life’s been rather hectic the last few weeks and more so this year. It’s been a little tougher for us getting ready. We’re going to have Epiphany cards in two weeks. No Christmas cards today. Gives us two more weeks to get ready. And I don’t know where you’re at.

You know, I heard a guy on the radio saying that Christmas is about trying to bring back those wonderful childhood memories we have had when Christmas was so wondrous and the country is in a different time, etc. And you know, it is true that you sort of try to bring back those childhood memories and you really can’t. But, you know, and it’s been tough for me this year kind of getting into Christmas, Christmas and the joy of the season. But these stories, these historical accounts which are true, but these wonderful stories, narratives that we just talked about—Jonah 3 and Luke chapter 2—man, they have helped me a ton. I am going to be very happy tomorrow at Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, rejoicing in the message of Jonah 3 and Luke 2. And I hope today’s sermon, you know, helps you parents to sort of relax a bit right now.

Calm, chill. I know it’ll get very hectic downstairs after we’re done here, but for now, just relax and get ready for the joy of Christmas as we go over very briefly a few more details of this story.

All right. On your handouts, I’ve got a David Dorsey structure. Don’t worry about it being called a chiasm, but it’s a wonderful little way to remember how this story moves. That’s all chiasms are. They’re a way to help us to know how a story moves. These things, you know, history is not cyclical. History is a spiral going up. Things are getting better and better, okay? And they go through troubles, but they’re getting better. And that’s what these structures are. It doesn’t mean the only important part of the story is at the center. I mean, the end is what really is the topper, right? Usually, what’s at the center has some degree of relationship to how things are getting better.

And the rest of the story gives you details of things getting better and better. And so on your handout today, I’ve given you some of this material. I’ve given you a little structure about how it works. So there’s this prologue. Jonah is a picture here that God is a God of second chances. I mean, he had rebelled. He had a bad attitude. He disobeyed God big time in chapter 1. And God, when he brings him to repentance by nearly killing him, he doesn’t say, “Well, I’ll have to use somebody else now. This guy isn’t worthy.” No. God uses the guy who sinned greatly to take a great message.

Because God’s deal is not tied to the personality involved. He tells Jonah, “Say what I say and say only what I say.” That’s basically the meaning of what he tells Jonah here. He says, “Proclaim the proclamation.” It’s the same word. Your translations don’t help you there, but he’s saying, “What I tell you, that’s what you got to say. What saves Nineveh is not Jonah. It’s the word of God.” Okay? And Jesus is the word of God incarnate. And he’s what saves the Roman Empire, and he’s what saves the world. So Jonah is not the guy. So what that means is you and I, brothers and sisters, God is a God of second chances. The wonderful thing about sin is you can repent and God forgives it. And he doesn’t just say, “Okay,” and then go use somebody else.

He uses you again. God is the God of second chances. And if you compare this first verse of chapter 3 with the first verse of chapter 1, they’re pretty closely the same. A little bit of difference. Let me mention something here in terms of the prologue in chapter 3. So you’ve got it on your handouts. He says here, “Call out against it the message that I tell you.” Not such a good translation. The “against it,” for instance, it’s not there. There’s nothing about against it. It could just be to it. It doesn’t necessarily mean against it. And what he’s saying is the call out and the message—as I just said, same word in the Hebrew. Say just what I tell you to say. That’s the meaning of that phrase. So the emphasis is on the word of God spoken by his messenger, but not the messenger. It is the message itself. And he tells Jonah, “Now do just what I told you to do.” Right? That’s what we tell our kids. Well, that’s what it means there.

And it says here that he—Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. So he immediately obeyed. And Nineveh is an exceedingly great city. Well, as it turns out, that’s not really—it can be translated differently, too. It’s a great city. And what have we had great in this story so far, right? Well, we had a great wind in chapter one, great troubles, which ended up with a great salvation of the sailors. But we had a great wind, then we had a great fish described at the end of chapter one, and now we got a great city. So this is a great story. It’s a wonderful story. And it’s got these big things going on that help us to remember it and remember the mood of it and what it’s all about.

But it says here “was exceedingly great.” Well, that word “exceedingly”—that actually is the word for God. Basically, it’s Elohim. So another way to translate that, maybe a better way, it could just mean, you know, something is godlike. It’s a godlike great city is one way to say it here. But maybe another way to say it, maybe a better way is it’s a great city to God. It’s God’s great city. And I think that it’s important for us to know that God has designs for our cities, right? This is a great city to God. He has interest in the city. He has interest in the world. He’s not just about your individual life and your individual salvation. He is saving cities.

Why cities? Well, cities are pretty important places, my friends. One, there’s a lot of souls there. We’ll see that next week at the last in chapter 4. But cities, they kind of form how you live, whether you know it or not. You may live in the suburbs, you may live on the farm and some of you may be pretty removed, but most of us are in touch with the culture, the legal system, right? Even to a degree the spirituality that comes out of cities. Cities are beginning places for these things. They affect the culture, what beauty is defined as. The cities are where laws flow out of. Okay? And the cities are places that spirituality kind of flows out from too.

And so it’s easy to respond against the cities negatively and discard them. But God is at work in cities too. And he’s been at work in Nineveh. God has an interest in Nineveh. And now he’s going to bring Nineveh to salvation. But this prologue reminds us that God is a God of second chances and that God is a forgiving, compassionate, saving God. What just happened to Jonah? He basically spit in God’s face. God dunked him in the ocean and then had a fish swallow him up and he’s in the belly of the fish for three days and he’s saved. And Jonah has repented. He’s prayed to God with thanksgiving for his deliverance from the belly of the fish. Right? And so the message of this resurrected, saved Jonah is that God is compassionate and forgiving to even his enemies as he brings them to repentance. That sets us up for what’s going to happen in Nineveh.

Okay. And then the story moves ahead. We move from threat to relent. In the first little narrative there, God is threatening to overthrow them. In forty days, Nineveh shall be overthrown. But in the matching section down below, God has relented of his plans to overthrow Nineveh. So we move—the story that’s told here is that God begins by saying in forty days they’ll be overthrown but then at the end of the story when God saw what they did—they turned from their evil way—significant then—when that happens God relents.

When men repent, God relents. That’s his way. But repentance here is real significant. And we see in the middle of the story that the people begin with ritual repentance. They respond to the message of God’s judgment. That’s the message to the city. And they repent in sackcloth and ashes. And they have a ritual repentance. They’re not going to eat food. And then the king commands them not just to do those ritual repentances indicating, you know, woe to us. We’re so sorry for what we did. We’re like dead men. But the king says, you got to turn everybody from your ways. Stop being evil and stop the social injustice, the violence you’re doing to one another in the city. Pretty important point here.

When God saw what they did, well, maybe that means when he saw that they were really sorry for what they did. But no, it goes on to tell us what it means. When he saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, then God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. Brothers and sisters, this is so important. Over and over again in our culture, in the Christian culture of cheap grace, we think repentance is some kind of sorrowful emotion. It is not. It is a change of heart evidenced by a change of actions. When you stop doing what’s wrong and apart from that stopping doing what’s wrong, you can be as hang dog as you want to be. But if you don’t stop doing what’s wrong and start doing what’s right, the Bible says you haven’t repented and God’s not relenting.

Now, unfortunately, far too many of God’s people relent when men repent in that way. Not so God. This story reminds us that if we’re looking for the eternal, the cosmic salvation of great cities, great empires, this wonderful world—if that’s what we’re seeing in the advent of the word of God is a picture of the coming Jesus whose advent as the word of God will save nothing short of the whole world—then if we see that story, then we have to understand that the way that comes to pass is through repentance. It’s from a ceasing of doing evil. Yes, accompanied by ritual actions indicating we’re dead. Great. That’s good. But it’s not enough. You have to stop doing what’s wrong and start doing what’s right.

So that’s what happens here. You know, at the beginning he threatens and at the end God relents of what he had said he would do. There’s a movement. There’s a movement from ritual repentance then to real repentance to deed repentance. From word or emotions to deed repentance. They, in addition to being ritually repentant, to saying, “Oh, we’re so sorry, you know, please forgive us,” they actually turn away from their wicked deeds. There’s that movement. And so the relenting of God is tied to the next set of interior markers where the people begin with ritual repentance, but based on the king’s word, they’re moved to deed repentance.

And the center, as we move toward the center: the king hears and the king commands. Now, it says here that the people were doing this stuff and then word came to the king and we read that and we read it in the way that it would read in a modern story. So in a modern story, we’re super democratic and everything’s got to be bottom up. And so we read it that way. And so the word comes to the king—in other words, the people are doing what’s right and eventually the rulers figure it out. This phrase “word comes to somebody,” the particular Hebrew words used, it is never used that way. It’s not used that way. It’s an idiom that instead means that he heard an actual published word. So what it means is the king heard the word of the Lord—hearing it in other words from Jonah. Doesn’t mean he heard a rumor on the streets. It means he heard the word and he’s at the center of this in the movement of the people. Okay, some people might have heard it first, but he hears it and it’s his command at the center of the text that moves everybody into repentance and which moves God to relent. So the center of it is the king hears the word of God and then he issues a command based upon the hearing of that word.

Okay. So that’s at the center of this thing. By the way, it says that no—Jonah, Nineveh is a great city. Three days’ journey. Well, that too may not be quite how we would think of it as we’re reading it as an American story. We think of it as three days in breadth as the translation I read says. Doesn’t say breadth. It just says it’s three-day journey city. Now, that could mean it takes three days to cross it. But as it turns out, in that part of the world and in that particular period of time, a three-day journey meant that there were these formal protocols in great cities. And the first day you would come into the city, present your credentials, who you are, and then the second day you’d do whatever it was you were there to do, and the third day you’d have an exit from the city.

So formal capital cities had this three-day journey thing going on. Now, we don’t know if that’s what it means. It could mean that it took three days to travel through the city. We don’t know. Nineveh was a huge city, a great city built by Nimrod, the same guy that built Babel, right? After the flood, Nimrod, he figured out all that neat technology was. He did excavation work. He dug up whatever he could find from the flood. And he built these great cities. He was a great hunter, a great hunter, evil man though. Built Babel and then he builds Nineveh. And Nineveh is described in Genesis as a great complex, a huge metropolitan area. So Nineveh is not just significant in terms of the Assyrian Empire. It’s significant as being one of these great cities, the second major city after Babel built by Nimrod, kind of the antithesis to God.

So it kind of represents a cosmic sort of centering of people in opposition to God. And so it’s not just the Assyrian Empire. It’s sort of tied to this big picture again that there’s a reversal of the fallen nature of the world and reversal of Babel, etc. By the way, so what’s the message? Forty days. What is forty? Well, that forty-day thing—we got a dove. Jonah, we got the floods. We got the forty days. And we’re reminded again of Noah in the midst of this. And so Noah, Nineveh, forty days. All this stuff combines together to tell us that this isn’t just about a city. And it’s not just about an empire. It’s a cosmic representation of humanity, fallen humanity.

So the king of this, here’s the word, commands people to repent. And if that is right, and either way you look at it, at the middle of that—from the king hearing the word of God and then speaking commands that apply the word of God—what does he do? He dies. The old king is dead. Long live the king. He puts on sackcloth and ashes. He repents before God. Now, that’s a picture of death. And so what we have at the middle of this wonderful story—what Jesus will accomplish with his advent coming to a different empire in relationship to a different ruler but still to fallen humanity—is what’s going to happen is the old world will die and be born again. That’s what it represents.

At the end of the gospel of John, what do we have? New creation. So all of this tied up with Noah, tied up with Babylon and Nineveh, tied up with the death of this king means that a city dies and is raised back to life. That’s what the fasting is. You’re not eating food. You’re going back to dust. The ashes are like dust. That’s where you came from. Sackcloth means all your glory has been stripped away. You just are melting away. I’m melting. You’re melting away into the earth. You’re dying. You’re going back to where you came from. So the king dies, the old king is dead. Long live the king. The new king comes. New life comes to the city. So that’s the beautiful picture of this message. That’s the beautiful anticipation of the advent of Jesus Christ. And I would say it’s also a description in many ways of what the advent of Jesus is all about in our day and times as well.

Jesus comes to us sometimes telling us, man, if you don’t stop that evil you’re doing, I’m going to destroy you. He tells us that. And we should tell people. We do that when we excommunicate people. We do exactly that same thing. We warn people. So this story is this wonderful picture of death and resurrection at the center. A picture of the salvation, a cosmic salvation affected by the coming of the word of God into the world.

God is a God of second chances here. And the second chance is a second chance not just for Jonah, but really it’s ultimately second chance for the world. God cares for cities. Nineveh has this tremendous significance to it and it represents the city that was built by Nimrod along with Babel. And the forty days remind us of that forty days of rain leading up to Noah and which is again a decreation-recreation picture and it puts this story firmly in that line of literature that tells us when the greater Jonah comes, when the word of God himself comes, what we’re going to have here is the death of the old world and the resurrection of the first.

So the three great things in the first three chapters are storm, fish, and Nineveh. Chapter two was about saving a man. And chapter three then is about saving a city, but really a city that represents all of reality as well, all the world. The gospel then is the good news that Jesus came to save us from our sins. But the gospel is also the good news, the good news that God is saving the world. So, you know, when you rejoice at Christmas, you know, I hope you get jazzed about the story in Jonah 3 and its relationship to Luke 2 and what we’re celebrating at Christmas time. This is why there’s so much joy. Yeah, saving us from our sins. Wonderful. Redemption has been accomplished. But even broader than that, the world, the city is being saved as well.

In Jonah 1, the advent of God came in a storm, troubles. In Jonah 2, the advent of God was a fish that brought actually salvation. And in Jonah 3, God’s advent, the culminating advent in the book of Jonah is his word. His word comes to affect the salvation of the whole world.

Now, this means if this is a picture of the gospel, this means that the gospel implies bad news. I mean, if I told people, well, Jonah’s a great picture of the gospel. Well, yeah, sort of. But, man, there’s a lot of trouble in Jonah—a shipwreck and saved by a fish in his belly and Nineveh is going to be destroyed. It sounds like bad news. Does Jonah preach the gospel? Well, kind of implicitly, yeah, he does. Because implicit with a warning from God that you’re going to be destroyed if you keep on sinning—overthrown, changed, whatever it is—is implicit with that is that if you don’t do that, if you repent from what you’ve done, God will save you. And there’s the gospel.

The gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father. He has accomplished redemption for you, my friend. You can rest in that. And I don’t, you know, whatever troubles you got this week, they’re real. I understand it. But feast and rejoice on Christmas Day knowing that Jesus has accomplished your eternal salvation. That’s the gospel. And he’s at the right hand of God ever making intercession for you. But the gospel is also that he sits at the right hand of God until all the world become his footstool. He is saving the whole cosmos.

That’s the gospel. It’s not that he hopes it’s going to happen. It’s not a message that we’re supposed to take that might make it happen. It’s news. This is what has happened. That’s the gospel. That’s what we sing joyfully to God about. That’s what the angels were singing about. The gospel has happened. It is a gospel of the kingdom for salvation for individuals and a new creation in all the world. Jesus sits at the right hand of God and the gospel is stop doing evil world. Things have changed. My judgments are not less. My judgments are greater because the salvation is greater. All the world is becoming saved now. I sit at the right hand to the Father and in my providence I’m bringing to pass salvation. It’s bad news. You know, there were probably bad news that got the king of Nineveh softened up. You know, it’s like a fight pop. He’s getting softened up and then the knockout blow comes at the word of God.

We don’t know for sure, but this is interesting. About the time that Jonah was a prophet, during that same period of time, the empire in Assyria was having some trouble. There was a total solar eclipse which was a huge deal to people during those days. There was famine that was going on and their empire was starting to lose territory. The Uratus were starting to overtake some of their territory. They had military losses happening. So there were things shaking their empire. We don’t know exactly. The story says we don’t need to know what specifically—maybe it was just the power of the word of God and that’s it. And that’s a great picture, too. But you see, here’s the deal. If the gospel implies bad news, and it does, that means that bad news implies the gospel.

And if we see the fiscal cliff, you know, or if we see California passing exit laws and them taking your guns away, whatever it is that we see going on in the world of difficult times and troubles, the bad news that we see, it’s God softening this country up. That’s all it is for the proclamation of the gospel and for its salvation. Bad news is happening because Jesus is reigning at the right hand of the Father and he is stopping old ways by bringing judgments into the world and preparing people to hear that great news that unless you stop doing that stuff, God’s going to destroy you. But guess what? God is gracious and compassionate. He is not a God of destruction. Salvation belongs to the Lord. That is his character. And even all this stuff that’s happened and all the bad problems you’re suffering is simply preparation for the best blessing you can ever imagine in your life.

Now brothers and sisters, that’s true of our personal lives. That’s true of our corporate national lives. And that’s true if the whole world goes down in an economic collapse. All that is is a predecessor to the proclamation of God’s world word that brings salvation to the world. So this is the good news. This is what we celebrate at Christmas time. Man is brought to repentance through difficult times. And when man repents, God relents. That’s what’s happening here. And in the greater picture, I’ve listed some things on your outline. You know, the greater picture of course is that cosmic reality—the dove, the flood, the forty days, the animals, the coming of the cosmic gospel—and there’s Jesus, right?

And what happens at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, the story we just talked about at the beginning of this sermon. Jesus comes to an empire. He comes in a royal city that will combat the royal city of Rome. And by the end of Luke’s gospel, there’s Paul on that ship like Jonah. Like Jonah, sailors are saved. Like Jonah, he then goes to the great city. And what are we left with at the end of the gospel? The gospel of Luke, the gospel of the good news of Christ’s acts through the Church, then the advent of Jesus to Rome. At the end of Luke’s second book, the book of Acts, what we’re left with is tremendous hope.

We know the story. We know Jonah. We know the resonances of what’s happening. We know about the flood. We know about the dove. We know about recreation. We know about Babel and destruction. And we know about Nineveh being converted as a picture that all the world is being brought to salvation in Jesus Christ.

For the Christian rather, Christmas is a time of wonderful great joy. It’s a time that says we don’t need the smartest guys, the best, you know, the smartest women. We don’t need the intellectuals. All we have them, but we don’t need them. At the end of the day, we have a simple guy going in to the city that represents fallen culture. And we got a simple guy going in and God tells him do exactly—say exactly what I’m going to say. It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s got to do with my word and that word will crush nations and rebuild them. It will decreate that city. The city dies. The king dies. All the people, all the beasts, they die. They put on death and then they come back to life in Jesus Christ. That’s what God is doing. And he doesn’t need a lot of us. There was one guy here. He doesn’t need, you know, money. He doesn’t need your smart intellect and stuff.

All he needs is men who are faithful, men and women who are faithful to repent of their sins and then to speak God’s word into their culture. Christmas says that this is going to happen with or without you. We’re given presents. Esther gave presents after their defeat of the enemies of God, right? Same thing. The wicked people were destroyed. In that case, they didn’t convert. They were destroyed. And the Jews defended themselves against the enemies of God. And as a result, they ended up giving presents to each other at that holiday season. And in the same way, we give gifts to one another in celebration this Tuesday. It is a celebration of the reality that the gospel is conquering the world.

We can look back on two thousand years of Western history and the gospel conquering. Yeah, we’re in a trough. But it means we’re going to get even better with this next resurrection, so to speak. We know what happened to Rome. We’ve got the rest of the story. We know what was converted. We know Western civilization was built on the basis of the word of God, the word, the Lord Jesus Christ. And we know what history is all about. We’re not, you know, whistling past the graveyard this week, folks. Even in the midst of the bad news we see, we know implied in that bad news is that God is alive. He’s moving in the context of our times, our nation, our empire, our world, and he’s moving to bring salvation.

Let’s pray. Lord God, cause us to rejoice this week. Help us, Father, to focus upon the reason for the season, our salvation accomplished in Jesus, and not only that, but the renewal of the world. Bless us, Lord God, in our joy today and on into this week for what you have accomplished through the word coming to men in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.