That Great City

Jonah chapter 3 verse 1. Then Jonah began to go into the city one day's walk. And he called out and said, Yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown. And the people of Nineveh believed in God, and they called a fast, and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. Then the word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, laid aside his mantle from him, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat on the ashes.

And he cried out and said, In Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, do not let man, animal, herd, or flock taste a thing. Do not let them eat, and do not let them drink water. But both man and animal must be covered with sackcloth, and let men call on God with their strength, that each may turn from his evil way and from the violence which is in his hands.

Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn away from his burning anger, so that we will not perish. Then God saw their works, and they turned from their evil way. So God relented concerning the evil which he had spoken he would bring upon them, and he did not bring it upon them. It's a reading of God's word, Jonah chapter 3. I'm going to get this out of my pocket.

I listened to a teaching recently on how to preach, and one of the things the guy said is, don't have anything in your pocket, so if you have to put your hands there, you don't distract people. So I'm going to take my keys out. Sorry. You're supposed to do it before you start, I'm sure. I'm sure there was more that I missed. I was cutting the grass when I was listening.

There is an interesting thing that's happened somewhat recently where our great cities in the world, we'll call them even, have shown themselves to be basically large gatherings of people that hate God. If you think of the 10 or 20 biggest cities in the United States, I'm sure we could probably name them. It's not hard. You've got Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Houston. most of the biggest cities in the United States we could name.

You think of cities like Boston where there's universities that were once very Christian places even. Big cities get a little bit of a bad name, I think, from Christians because they do become gathering places for evil, Michael. And whenever you get a lot of sinners together that aren't Christian, Just like if you've got a lot of Christians together who have a similar morality, there's a community of sorts is built.

There's unity. A common unity becomes what happens. And you end up doing things that make sense to those people. And so in big cities, you'll have a lot of the things that a small town, even a small town filled with evil people could never produce. I mean, you're not going to go through a lot of small towns and find a strip club, for example. or you're not going to have a Planned Parenthood out in the middle of nowhere, even in a blue county that's rural.

It's going to be in a more populated area where people can get to and where they can go do other things. So cities have been criticized by Christians lately, rightfully so in some ways. Tim Keller, a rather famous, I'll call him a philosopher, but he's a pastor in New York City and some people have argued maybe he's not a very good Christian at all or whatever but he said some helpful things but he likes to say some weird things online and recently he said something to the effect of when we bring the gospel to the city we need to think about how the city brings the gospel to us and as strange as that absolutely is and as criticized rightfully as that statement was, some people actually went so far as to almost make it seem as if cities are simply objectively evil to God.

And I had one guy, if you go to Genesis 4, one guy I listened to, and these are always kind of rural pastors that do this. So these rural pastors are fighting back. This is kind of the point of my introduction here. People that like to be in cities, especially Christians that are of what we call the intellectual elite, the ones that do the universities and the seminaries, they sometimes come out and they're pretty critical of rural America.

And there was some recent dust-up on Twitter recently where somebody criticized rural churches because they're backwoods, and they just had some things to say, and then everyone came out in support of their rural church and how helpful it was, even if they didn't have all the sophistication of the city. But I heard one guy say if you look at Genesis 4 and if you don know this story you should take the time to read it but shortly before the verse I going to read Cain committed what is the first recorded murder of his brother Abel. And in verse 17, though, it says, Then Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and gave birth to Enoch.

It says, and he built a city and called the name of the city Enoch after the name of his son. And, you know, I had a guy I was listening to say, you know, how good can a city be if Cain, you know, basically created the first one? I don't know if that's really logical, you know. Certainly there's been some bad cities in Genesis 11. In Genesis 11, the whole earth had the same language and the same words.

And it happened as they journeyed east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. Then they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and they had tar for mortar. And they said, come, let us build for ourselves a city and a tower whose top will reach into heaven. And so this is the Tower of Babel. and so you kind of have cities getting a bad name here because well some people that have put together cities have wanted to do great evil with their cities we also need to remember that some cities were actually founded by christians trying to create a place to live for others and create an infrastructure where people could have things like water and you know some of that kind of stuff.

So I'm here to tell you that I don't think you can build a doctrine that God hates cities just because of a few of these verses. And I think that the book of Jonah, God calling Nineveh that great city, which is interesting if you keep looking through, oh, I can't remember now, maybe chapter 10 or 11 of Genesis, you'll see that Nineveh is one of the first cities ever mentioned. Kind of neat.

But God calling Nineveh that great city, I don't think is God's way of being impressed with what these Ninevites were able to do. I don't think it's God saying, oh wow, cities are great, you know, either. But I think that it's God also letting us know that he still has a plan for even people in cities. And even on a broader scale, God has a plan for people that maybe you don't expect him to have a plan for.

And Jonah's, one of Jonah's big errors was the belief that God's people were national Israel, which was true to an extent, and not wanting that to be shared with Ninevites, or Gentiles is what Giorno would have thought of them as, right? He would have thought of them as Gentile dogs. Ninevites in particular would have, it wouldn't have been hyperbolic.

It wouldn't have been overstating things to have called Nineveh one of the most evil civilizations that had ever existed. We think that we're experiencing some pretty wicked things going on right now in our country, and the barbarism that was experienced by people around Assyria and Nineveh was worse than what we've seen so far. and so Nineveh was a place that any normal person would have not wanted to visit especially a Jew if you had a daughter that said hey I'm getting older I want to go on a trip with my friends don't go toward Nineveh and I'm sure that you can think of places maybe that you wouldn't recommend people go to there's places even I don't go to and I kind of go almost anywhere. And there are certain places that it's like, well, I probably have to be more prepared to go to some of these places.

But our heart should ache for anyone that happens to be in a situation that they are in a place where maybe God isn't. And I don't mean to say God's not present, he's not omnipresent, But God is certainly more noticed in certain areas than in other places where they've even asked, like, hey, we don't want God here. Don't bring that here, right? And so our heart should ache for people who God has placed sovereignly and providentially in any single area. and there should be no area of the world where we decide, well, there's a phrase we use, we call it a God-forsaken place, we call it, right?

There should be no place that we actually could think of as a God-forsaken place. If Nineveh wasn't a God-forsaken place, if God desired to send a prophet there, then my argument to you would be that God may have a plan even for places that you would think are God-forsaken. So let's look at chapter 3 of Jonah real quick and just kind of see what happened here.

This is going to be kind of a macro view, an overview of it. but if you wanted to know what a particular word meant in verse 7, we're not going to get into that level of detail this week. But let's look at just the narrative. So Jonah arose, went to Nineveh according to the word of Yahweh, verse 3. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city a three days walk The idea being it would take you three days to walk through Nineveh So just imagine how large that is A normal person will say you could walk only three miles an hour if you could walk even, I don't know, eight to ten hours a day.

You can go a good number of miles in a day, 24 miles maybe, if you were trudging along well. It was a big place. It would have taken a long time. Then Jonah began to go into the city one day's walk, and he called out and he said what God told him to say. That's what the Bible tells us Jonah did. Yet 40 days in Nineveh will be overthrown.

So Jonah, being a Jew, being of a different religion and culture from these people, violated every single rule of how we are taught to do missions in 21st century. because we are taught to do missions by first learning the culture, respecting and loving the culture usually, and then trying to figure out how we can talk to people at their level, how we can maybe find out what are their felt needs and what are their perceived needs, and then maybe we can go somewhere and once we show them the love of God through our good works for a little while in their particular region or community, then maybe if they ask you, you can start to talk about why you happen to be there, which is because you're a missionary for the one true God. Jonah was the worst missionary in the history of time for a different reason. It was because he hated the people that he actually went to preach to, and it's because he didn't want God to save them.

That's why he's a terrible missionary. But he's one of the best missionaries in the history of time because when Jonah went on his mission finally, as hard as it was to get him to finally do it, Jonah went and he told the people exactly what God wanted them to hear. He didn't care anymore whether it would hurt him. He didn't care how he would be looked at by people.

He didn't care if people would call him names. Jonah decided, I am going to tell the people what God has said, and I will simply trust God with the results of it all. there is a lesson there for all of us. And you are surrounded right now by teaching. You're surrounded by teaching from Tim Keller, for example, and you're surrounded by teaching from missionary boards.

And if you wanted to go to an SBC church and you wanted to be a missionary, they have their NAMB thing, they call it, N-A-M-B, where they tell you how to be a missionary. And the teaching, the predominant teaching of today is not to do it this way. I don't like to use ourselves as examples much in sermons, but as a church, we go places, and we proclaim God's Word to people, and there are people who will tell us, you're doing it wrong.

In fact, I would not doubt that Jeremy has heard that. Elijah's done more of the Planned Parenthood stuff where everything we do is wrong to the people there. But there's people that walk by me all the time when we're on the street preaching, The truth of God's word. And there was one guy, I remember, I still can picture this guy because it really struck me too.

Because it's hurtful. This guy walked by and he looked at me with the most serious look and he said, he said, right message, wrong method. And I can still picture the guy. I remember where I was when it happened. Because it struck me so hard that here's a guy who really says that he believes in the message that I was sharing. And his thought is, this isn't the method to give it to people.

I would argue that there can be many methods and that whatever method he employs may be a pretty good one at times. But I will, I hope, go to my grave trusting in the foolishness of preaching. That God will use the preaching of his word, He'll use the handing out of tracts or pamphlets. He'll use talking to people one-on-one. What God doesn't use to save people is your smile, the light in your eyes, the water bottle you handed them.

He may use these things to lead people to conversation and things of that sort. I would guess that everyone's story in this room is that somewhere along the line, the kindness of Christians in your life actually had an impact on you. I can say that for certain. I absolutely was opposed to Christianity, and although I believe fully that God regenerated me and effectually called me and granted me faith so that I would believe, he used, over the course of several months, the kindness and the friendliness of Christians to actually kind of pique my interest in it.

And that is no contradiction to the fact that it was still his gospel and his power to grant me faith to save me. so Jonah goes into the city one day's walk he called out and said yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown so lesson number one God's word is your only I don't want to say weapon but it is but God's word is your only tool that you really have to try to help other people to know what God has said there is no other tool that God has given you that has the power and that God has promised to bless in the same way that God blesses his own word. So now we have the Ninevites' response. And I'll spoil the chapter four for you.

This is what Jonah was afraid would happen. So if you can imagine, like if you can imagine I won use us as an example because I don want to do too much of that I think we good guys in here and good girls but if you can imagine I hate I won use us as an example because I don want to do too much of that but I think we good guys in here and good girls but if you can imagine a guy goes to Planned Parenthood down in, we'll say in Atlanta, and a woman walks up and a woman's got her pregnancy belly and she's walking in and he calls out to her and he says, you know what, you shouldn't kill your child, it's against God's law, I would prefer that you would turn to Jesus Christ and live and save your baby. And if that woman turned and said, you know what, you're right.

I'm not going to do this. If that guy was Jonah, he'd be angry. You understand? Like, this is Jonah. This is his problem. But in the text, what we see in verse 5, it says, And the people of Nineveh believed in God.

Which I think is a key thing that I want you to catch in here. because the Ninevites did a lot of things as a result of their belief, and you could kind of get confused when you read it and think, oh, well, they were saved by their works or something like that. But I actually see this as a statement that they're believing in God. They're believing what Jonah is telling them is from God.

For them to believe this guy, and I'm going to tell you, I think Jonah probably stuck out like a sore thumb. I don't think he waltzed in and they were like, oh, he's probably one of us. Okay, I don't think so. He was wearing Fear God and Nothing Else shirt, and they're all doing their thing, right? You get it. And he says this, and they believe in God.

And this is what I want to share with you about cities. I'm not trying to brag on cities. I happen to like cities, so that's my bias here. and but by walking into a city and being able to proclaim what he proclaimed more people were able to hear his message so when it says and the people of Nineveh believed in God we're talking about a large population all right if it's true that in verse 11 of chapter 4 the 120,000 persons who don't know the difference between their right and left hand means 120,000 little kids.

And if the number of little kids in a population is only, we'll say, like a sixth of a whole population, we're talking about, you know, three quarters of a million people at least living in Nineveh, okay? A lot of people could hear him because he went into the city. I'm going to claim that although sometimes cities do some things poorly, and cities do things in ways that we don't like, and the organization a city provides to evildoers to allow them to pool their resources to create things that are even more evil than they'd be able to do if they were separated.

Think the Tower of Babel for a moment. God separated us for a reason. the existence of cities also gives us the ability to by the power of God see great revival maybe in a short time because of the preaching of his word Jonah preaches the people believe in God and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them now I know that sackcloth is a real common term probably to all of us right? We're all girls.

You guys have a lot of sackcloth at home? No? Yeah, we don't either. In fact, I never heard the word until I read the Bible. I don't want to get into all the details for you, but the idea is that they're mourning. Sitting in ashes, fasting, abstaining even from getting to drink water.

These are all expressions of mourning. These are the kinds of things people would do when a family member died, and they're the kinds of things that people do when they're dying to self. These Ninevites are mourning the fact that God is going to justly destroy them. In general, when you tell somebody who is anti-God that God is going to send them to hell, that God will put them in a lake of fire for their sin.

In general, when you warn people of the wrath of God, their response is to simply get more angry at God and to deny Him harder. So it's like those memes where it's like, I'm going to deny God even harder now. I don't know if you've seen those memes where people say, I'm going to do whatever harder. I think it's Michael Scott, lack of a... I think so. But anyway, if the response of a sinner to the judgment of God is mourning, that is an example that they are believing it, that they actually are realizing this is righteous that I would be punished.

I deserve God's wrath. It's not just that Jesus came to be a good example. It's not just that Jesus died to show us what self-sacrificial love looks like. People realize that they deserve the judgment of God, and they mourn it. And so we'll see here that from the greatest to the least of them, they called a fast and put on sackcloth. Now we'll see, I think the next sentence, I don't think it's like chronological, I think the next sentence gives us the details that this sentence just gave us.

So the word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne. That alone is a big deal, right, when a king gets up. It laid aside his mantle from him, the thing he's wearing, covered himself with sackcloth and sat on the ashes. Kings don't do this. It's not kingly to sit and mourn your sin and your country's sin. It's kingly to be the king.

This guy gets it. And because, again, don't get me wrong, I think rural is good, I think cities can be used by God. Because he's the king of this city, and because of the influence he can immediately have directly over people that are his subjects in a close vicinity, he's able to have an impact. He's able to reach more people than even Jonah did with his preaching.

I think that we should give the gospel to everyone that we meet. I think we should want to stop. I think you should want to stop in Columbus if you're down there and talk to a homeless man about the gospel. I think you should want to stop and talk to a child about the gospel. I also think that it can be strategic and even wise that we might seek out public officials, senators, mayors, representatives, presidents.

Getting the gospel to people who are of influence can be a very good thing. Not because, oh, wow, everyone will get saved if, you know, this guy gets saved, right? We've all, you know, if popular athletes saying Christian things got the world saved, we'd have been saved a while ago. But people can have an influence that maybe you wouldn't have. And so finding people who have those kinds of influences can be strategic.

At the very least, a person who's a lawmaker, believing the gospel and trusting in God's law as the right way to do things, may be able to create a little better society for everyone and protect people from evil and promote good better than they're already doing. There are some people... Where did I put my water bottle? Oh, it's over there by the lodge, you know.

I don't need it. Well, if you got it, thanks. So I think it can be strategic, and I think it can be wise. And even if a person doesn't end up believing the gospel, it may be worth trying to have that impact. I have a neat story about a friend of mine online. I've never met him in person, but he's a police officer in Washington, D.C. area.

And he was actually contracted to be part of the security team for President, Well, for the candidate, Donald Trump, when he was a candidate for president, before he became president. And I remember that day encouraging him to try to give him the gospel somehow. And he handed him a million-dollar bill gospel tract, and he said, here, I want you to read this.

And that was it. He got a handshake. And but so, you know, you kind of sit there and think, OK, well, here's a man that I could never reach. But somebody reached him with the gospel. And if Donald Trump was going to believe the gospel and was going to promote Christian things, he would have more ability to maybe have an impact than I do. And so I think it can be strategic to do that kind of thing.

But so the king raises up. But listen, he cried out and said in verse seven, he says in Nineveh by the decree of the king. He makes a decree. And his nobles, do not let man, animal, herd, or flock taste a thing. Do not let them eat, and do not let them drink water. This is really strange sounding.

Why can't animals eat? Like, I don't understand. Why would the king say, well, animals can't eat along with people, right? And the best explanation I saw was that by withholding even food and water from your animals, as you're a person who is supposed to be mourning your sin, doing what the king said, calling on God with your strength and turning from your evil way and the violence in your hands, that while you're sitting there starving and thirsty, and you have to listen to even your animals belting out cries for something, it will remind you again of the horror of the destruction that was promised upon you and your city And like the king said who knows God may turn and relent and turn away from his burning anger so that we will not perish.

There is implied in this statement that Jonah did not proclaim to them that they could turn. it's implied here that the king really just believed God's going to destroy our country, and we don't have any instructions as to how we can flee the wrath of God. But who knows? Maybe if we just turn and do the things that we know are the right things, God will relent concerning his anger.

Spurgeon has a whole sermon on just the words who knows and it's a really neat sermon turn to Jeremiah 18 Jeremiah would not have been written yet but still true in Jeremiah chapter 18 the word which came to Jeremiah from Yahweh saying this is chapter 18 verse 1 arise and go down to the potter's house and there I will make you hear my words then I went down to the potter's house and behold he was making something on the wheel but the vessel that he was making of clay was ruined in his hand of the potter, so he turned around and made it into another vessel according to what was right in the eyes of the potter to make. Then the word of Yahweh came to me saying, can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does? Declares Yahweh, behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

At one moment, I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to uproot, to tear down, or to make it perish. Wasn't that what he said about Nineveh? But if that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I plan to do against it. and then he says a similar thing in the opposite direction that he might say he's going to do something with a nation and if they turn away from god he might not continue with them god is letting us know that his heart is for the repentant his heart is for those who turn from evil and from the violence that is in their hands and that he will see those as his people not the ones that avoid him.

God is interested in people's hearts. This is why the nation of Israel was the people of God in a quite literal, carnal sense, but God's people, the new nation that God has created that we see, that's his church, right? There is no nation on earth that is truly a Christian nation. There's been some attempts But if God doesn't grant faith, if the people of the nation don't believe in God, then they're not God's people.

And so we can see that God will relent and turn away from his burning anger so that the Ninevites will not perish, according to Jeremiah 18. And so the Ninevites are granted, I believe, granted faith in God. I believe they're actually saved. Some people argue that, well, at the very least, they were saved from the destruction that was meant to the city, but they weren't really converted.

I think the Ninevites actually got converted, and I think it's sad to know that it wasn't very many generations later that they were right back to their old ways. And that's part of the result of not having good discipleship and not having God's word on a regular basis given to you and dispensed to you. If you look at the New Testament and you don have to turn there in fact if you turn to your table of contents what you see in the New Testament is that Paul wrote letters to Romans Those are people in Rome.

Paul wrote letters to the Ephesians. Those were people in Ephesus. A really big, wicked city. God had his people there God wrote to people in Philippi he wrote to people in Colossae he wrote to people in Thessalonica he wrote to them twice, at least twice he wrote to Timothy in Ephesus he wrote to people on Crete the Bible talks about cities in good ways and in bad ways but I don't think that in any of those situations God has kind of point blank declared, well, cities bad, lots of acreage, rural good.

I think that cities often provide temptation because of the ability to fit in with others that are like you in their sinfulness and in your sinfulness that can cause us to, again, create devices of evil that we couldn't otherwise create if we're spread out. Cities also enable us. I mean, where do people in rural America go when they get sick? They come to the big city where the hospital is that has all the technology and where doctors that want to work.

And again, we've got some problems in the medical establishment, but we have a lot of really good doctors still in our country. And there's a lot of really advanced technology we do to help people and to save people from trauma and difficulties that occur. And for the most part, people that are into that kind of stuff, they gather in cities. That's where they can enjoy themselves and do the things they want to do.

So cities are neither bad nor good. I think cities are also very strategic. God sent Jonah into a city. God sent Jonah into a city that was not like the cities he was from. The people there were not friendly to Jonah. The people there were not people that Jonah would have thought to himself were like gospel ready.

All right. When we go to our city, we all live outside of Columbus. I don't think anybody here actually has a Columbus address. us. I did for a little while, didn't I? But even then we were technically Columbus, but in a weird way we didn't feel like Columbus. When we go to Ohio State, we go to the place with the big university, one of the largest universities in America, at least by enrollment count. and we go on game day when I understand there's over 200,000 people actually in the area partying or enjoying the football or whatever they happen to be doing.

It's said that there's 100,000 people in the stadium and there's 100,000 people outside the stadium. When we go down there and we go into a culture where we have to spend most of the day averting our eyes from things. And we have to spend most of the day being jeered at by people who don't believe in God so much that they can't stand to hear somebody else talk about them.

Which is ironic. We do it because we believe God has his elect from every tribe, people, tongue, and language. And that the people that God decides to save, like the Ninevites are not saved because they're doing something impressive. Do you remember the confession today? I don't have it memorized. Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous.

Just listen not for anything wrought in them or done by them but for Christ sake alone I think we sometimes have this idea that there people that are closer than others I think sometimes we have the people in our life that we know that are like, oh, they're so close. They already believe, like, oh, they're Republican. They already believe a lot of the same Christian-y things I believe.

So they're, like, really close to salvation. And then there's the people at the pride parade, and they're, like, over here, And then you've got the even worse perverts, like pedophiles. They're already in our Nineveh, where we're not even going there. We're not even going to give them the gospel. And we have this idea in our mind of these caste levels of sinners, where some of them are even going to be worthy of the gospel.

And somehow in our mind, we think they're close. And I've heard people say this, like, oh, she seems close. If you believe what the confession says about how salvation occurs, you're either outside or inside. And I've seen enough people who started to have a sense of their sin and started to have some sorrow and repentance about things who have rejected Christ outright.

And I've seen some people, not many, who have hated God to such an extent that you thought that they weren't even listening to you eventually come to faith that I've stopped worrying about what I think I'm perceiving in a person prior to whether they're going to get saved or not. I proclaim the word to them, and that's what your call is to do. And your call is to do it freely.

Because if people treated you the way that you treat most people, sometimes just in your mind, withholding the truth of God from them, you wouldn't be saved right now. If your Jonah, whose job it was to bring the gospel to you, didn't do what he was supposed to do, you wouldn't be saved right now. And so that's the final exhortation of all this. I don't care if you want to live in a farm.

In fact, I hope somebody I know has a nice farm with lots of extra food because I'm not one of the preppers, so I'm going to need a place to stay when everything goes down, all right? I don't care if you want to live in a condo that's stacked on top of another condo, like right downtown. It only has 400 square feet, but you're close to the... I don't care.

What I want is for us all to have a heart for everybody that we can come into contact with, to understand that God is still saving people, and that the people he saves are the people that are outside of what you would consider to be the kingdom of God. That's who he's bringing in. And so we need to love people with the truth. We need to be a little better than Jonah and actually from the heart, preach a message.

Even if we preach a message of destruction, it needs to be with the hope that it will cause people to say, who knows, maybe God will relent concerning the evil that is owed to me. I am one of the first guys I can think of who is proclaiming the wrath of God to people. I don't shy away from it. But it's always got to be tempered with, but if you will turn, instead of who knows, well, I know, God will relent concerning the evil that is owed to you if you will trust in Christ.

Jesus Christ came so that sinners could be forgiven. Jesus Christ came so that God, who is rightfully angry with those who do wicked every single day, which is every one of you, God who is rightfully ready to punish anyone who has violated his law, Jesus Christ came so that God could be continuously just, yet justify the one who has faith in Jesus Christ. Because if God were to take a sinner and put him in heaven without sacrifice, he could rightfully be called unjust.

God cannot do that. And so God, who is just, has made a way so that the unjust can be forgiven all on the basis of Jesus Christ's death, burial, and resurrection for forgiveness of sins. So today is the day to believe that.