During Jesus' ministry He spoke of the "Sign of Jonah" as the only sign that that wicked generation would see, that is that Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and then came out. Jesus was, of course, speaking of His own death and resurrection. However, there actually is another lesson from the life of Jonah that is also relevant today.
Most people only remember the fish story about Jonah. But few remember how he came there in the first place. God had called him to go to the city of Nineveh to preach repentance to them. Foolishly, Jonah tried to run away from God because he was afraid of this task and we can understand that. Nineveh was the capital of the Great Assyrian empire. Assyrians had a reputation for tremendous cruelty to those other countries that they captured. They killed so many that they ran out of space for the bodies. This is not the place to itemize their evils but they would sure blow past the death and cruelty even of the Nazis. Ironically, though, the city of Nineveh as beautiful with parks and fountains adorning it. Jonah was not optimistic that calling them to repentance from their evil would work. He thought that it was more likely that they might kill him. But His greatest fear was that they actually really would repent and because He knew God, He knew that God would forgive them.
Here is the record from Jonah 3:
On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned." The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh: "By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish." When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.
Praying for repentance
Before we can receive revival from the Lord we must pray for repentance. We must repent from our own culture of more and our culture of lack of gratitude and our culture of corruption and death. We must pray for the veil of ignorance to be lifted from people and from our leaders. Our leaders reflect the people in many ways. The end justifies the means. I remember hearing growing up someone say, "It's only wrong if you get caught." Our leaders reflect this value but we can find it everywhere in our society. Worse still we have said that we are the final judge of right and wrong. This has been our country. We find stories of ancient religions sacrificing babies to their gods to be abhorrent. Yet, we kill millions of babies every year in our country in the name of freedom. Are we better than the Assyrians? We have parks and fountains yet we have such incredible cruelty among us.
I repent that my prayers for leaders were mostly about removing them instead of praying for the veil of ignorance over their eyes to be removed. We must pray for repentance in our homes, our communities, our states and our nation. If our nations does not repent then we can expect any new crop of leaders to likewise become corrupted. All of us are corruptible by the lure of power, prestige and money. We must pray that any new leaders be protected from the evil of corruption. We must pray that all of our leaders, current and prospective, humble themselves before our God.
We cannot have revival without repentance.
This is what Jonah knew, Ch 4: I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.
