A few years ago, around 2014, apparently out of nowhere, a frightening, evil group appeared. Known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS for short, it was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and claimed to be the restored, rightful home of the Islamic caliphate, the religious-based kingdom which, according to their view, would usher in the end-times.
The violence of the group was appalling. Captured Christians, moderate Moslems, and members of other religions were tortured, beheaded, or burnt alive. It soon attracted fighters from across the Arab world and even from Europe and America. In the midst of the Syrian civil war, ISIS carved out a small territory with its army, and captured Iraq’s largest western city, Mosul before an international coalition turned the tide and eventually defeated the group, which still exists in small groups throughout the Arab world.
I became aware of the group before it arrived on Western news media because while reading about the Syrian civil war, I had come across a video made by the ISIS leader, where he personally ripped the heart out of a dead enemy and took a bite out of it. Those who think that evil doesn’t exist in today’s world, those who think that political struggles are just differences of opinion might want to think again.
As the group expanded, captured the city of Mosul, I became aware of something unusual. In the Middle East, every small place has history that dates back thousands of years. And just across the Euphrates River from Mosul, within a couple miles of the city center, there are significant ruins of an ancient city, a center of evil, the ruins of the city of Nineveh, where God asked a Jewish man named Jonah to go and preach.
We all know about Jonah and the whale. We all know that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and then spit up after three days onto the shore. What we often miss is the context. Why was Jonah in the whale? Why was he on a boat out in the sea? What was the overall story?
In ancient times, a person might be sold into slavery to pay off debts or taxes owed to another. Each major family had a wealthy man or two who looked after the extended clan. In a good family, if someone was sold into slavery for debts or taxes, this wealthy family leader would go to the new master of the slave and negotiate a deal. He would pay a price and “redeem” the slave from slavery. He would rescue him by paying off the slave’s debt. He was the family’s “redeemer”, the one who rescued the slave and bought him back. But there was one catch – the slave also had to accept the redemption. For the slave might have decided that he or she liked being a slave more than freedom. The slave had to agree to the redemption.
Jonah heard from God. He was told to “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”
At the time, around 750 BC, Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire and probably was the largest city in the world. This empire was known for the particularly savage ways they treated defeated enemies, skinning their enemies and hanging those skins up in the town. They were enemies of the Israelites who lived in Palestine.
And Jonah, the Jewish man, was asked by God to go to Nineveh and preach against their wickedness.
Imagine that God spoke to you about four or five years ago, telling you to go preach against the Islamic State, against ISIS in Mosul, the center of the evil. Would you have gone? Would you have had the courage to travel to that city, to enter that town where Christians were beheaded or burnt alive, to preach loudly a gospel of repentance to such a population of people who were committed to the destruction of Christianity?
God had told Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach against the wickedness of the Ninevites. Jonah decided to run down to the port city of Joppa and hop on a ship headed for Tarshish, the land we call Spain. Jonah had decided – he was NOT going to go to Nineveh and preach to those dangerous people!
Of course, after Jonah gets on board and the ship sails, God sends a great storm that threatens to destroy the ship. All the sailors cry out to their own gods and throw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship and help it sail higher on the water. But Jonah had gone belowdecks and fallen asleep, exhausted from his journey to the coast. However, the captain of the ship woke Jonah up and ordered him to call upon his god – apparently the idea was that if everyone prayed to their own god, one of the gods would hear and save them.
But the sailors were a superstitious group. They cast lots to determine who was responsible for the storm – it must be the presence of some evil person on board who had led the gods to send the storm.
Naturally, the lot fell on Jonah. He admitted that he was running from Yahweh, which is the proper name that God had told Moses when Moses asked for God’s name. YHWH. Yahweh. I Am that I Am. The name of God.
Interestingly enough, as recently as the 1800’s, when bad things began to happen on board a ship, sailors often decided that it was because of the presence of a Jonah on board, a man who had committed a great crime against God.
The sailors asked Jonah what should be done to him to calm down the sea. And Jonah told them to throw him into the sea because the storm had been caused by God because of Jonah’s disobedience. But the men tried to row back to land, yet finally gave up and then prayed to God asking to be forgiven before they eventually threw Jonah overboard. And the storm stopped and the sailors began to believe in Yahweh, the God of the Jews.
And it was at this point that a huge fish or whale swallowed Jonah. And Jonah prayed to God, viewed to make sacrifices to God and promised to praise God, saying “Salvation comes from the Lord!”
And after three days, God had the fish vomit Jonah onto dry land. Three days in a dark place. At one point during His ministry on earth, JESUS says that the only sign that will be given to a group of people about Him is the sign of Jonah – and Jesus spent three days in a dark place, His tomb.
Meanwhile, back at the coast, after getting fish guts cleaned off of him, Jonah hears from God again – God to Nineveh and preach.
You have to give Jonah credit. He learned his lesson. He walked through Syria to Nineveh and began walking through the city, preaching that the city would fall in 40 days. It took Jonah three days to walk through the city, it was that large. Three days again. Jonah spent three days preaching to one of the most blood-thirsty, violent groups of people on earth. Three days he preached. Many years later, Christian tradition has it that Jesus spent the three days His body was in the tomb walking through Hell, preaching to those who had been condemned before He came to earth. Three days again.
Who do you think about when you think about lost people who are far from God? Do you think about ISIS, which has taken over some tiny islands in the Indian Ocean? Or do you think closer to home? Do you think about places filled with people addicted to drugs, people who are focused upon violence, people who neglect their families and choose to worship chemicals that have enslaved them? Do you think about those areas where we get regular reports of shootings, of break-ins and robberies, of arson? Do you think about the areas or does your mind see people, people who once were delightful children but over the years lost hope, children who grew up without skills people would hire, teenagers who wanted friends even though with the friends came the addictions, young men and women who have no good way of paying rent, and so they fight and they steal, and they sell what should not be sold just to pay the bills or to buy the chemicals that keeps them from feeling miserable?
We have often thought of addiction, whether it be to drugs or alcohol or nicotine or gambling or whatever as a moral failing. But the doctors tells us today that for some people, the pull of the drug, the taste of alcohol, the smell of tobacco, the thrill of pulling the lever is so strong that it enslaves the person. It changes the brain and orders the person to go back to the addiction. It is, as the Apostle Paul told us, an enslavement to sin. Just as in the old days of debtor slavery, we cannot get free by ourselves.
And for many people, addiction can only be broken by a combination of staying far from the supply of the addiction – and a prayer to God to provide help in breaking free, admitting that we are powerless to break the addiction by ourselves. We have to desperately ask God for help – whether the problem is our addiction to alcohol, our addiction to cigarettes, our addiction to hard drugs, our addiction to gambling, our addiction to pornography, our addition to anger or violence or eating too much fat and carbohydrates! If we have tried a few times to break free, we need to pray to God for help getting free. We must ask God to redeem us from this slavery.
In Nineveh, Jonah walked through the city, a huge city, the largest in the world. He stopped many times and proclaimed, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown. And to their credit, the Ninevites believed Jonah. The king took off his robes and put on sackcloth, the roughest cloth he could find. He walked off his throne and sat in the dust, humbling himself. He even sent out a proclamation, a press release, and order to the people of Nineveh. He told them to fast, to not eat or drink. He told them to wear sackcloth, to pray urgently to Yahweh, to the God that Jonah had preached about. He ordered everyone to give up their evil ways and their violence in the hope that Yahweh, that God would have compassion on the city and let them survive.
Jonah walked out east of the city and made camp. Jonah hated the Ninevites and wanted them to die. Jonah wanted God to nuke the city. And so Jonah sat down and waited – 37 more days to go. And God grew a leafy plant at Jonah’s camp that provided shade for the man. And this made Jonah very happy, but the next morning God sent a worm to chew into the stem of the plant, and the plant began to whither and shade was gone. As the sun came up, God sent a scorching east wind, blowing off the desert, and that day the sun came down on Jonah’s head and so Jonah became angry with God about the plant.
Meanwhile, God had heard the prayers and seen the repentance of the people of Nineveh. God had seen how they had humbled themselves, stopped their violence, and prayed for help from God. They had accepted God’s redemption. And so God chose to let them survive.
This made Jonah hopping mad. “That’s why I went to Spain!”, he said. “I knew that you love all people and now, since I’ve preached, you aren’t going to destroy these evil people who I hate!”
And God asked him “is it right for you to be angry?”
And that day when the sun beat down on Jonah’s head, God also said, Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?
God said, “You’ve been so concerned about this plant – but you didn’t plant it, you didn’t tend it, you didn’t make it grow. I provided it for you. It grew in a day and it died the next day.
“So shouldn’t I be concerned about this great city, with over a hundred and twenty thousand people who don’t know wrong from right, and besides them, there is all their livestock?”
And the message is this: Jonah – and us – are often concerned about the little things of life – is our phone working? is the Internet on? Did the delivery from Amazon arrive on time? How’s the air conditioning working today or the heating system? We are so concerned with our comforts – did we spill something on our shirt this morning and have to change into another shirt? Was our coffee hot enough? Did we have the right brand of breakfast cereal? Were there too many people in front of us in the line at McDonald’s. We’ve all complained about these things that are so important to us.
Yet God is concerned with the hundreds and thousands and millions of people in this world who don’t know right from wrong – especially with those people who have made the wrong choices and are suffering because of it. God is more concerned about the people who are not praying to Him than with the people who are praying to Him, sitting safely her in a church building. God sent a storm and a huge fish just to get Jonah to walk to Nineveh and preach for three days. Why? Because God is concerned with all those people who were living in violence in Nineveh. Like an ancient redeemer, God wants His family members to be free.
In the same way today, God wants each of us Christians to go to our personal Nineveh, the homes where the people we most fear live, the people we despise live, the people who we don’t trust live – and speak with them gently, kindly, but insistently about the need to rethink their relationship with God, their need to turn – not to the church, but to God, their need to ask God for help with their lives and their need to choose to follow the leadership of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. Like Jonah, we need to tell people that they have been redeemed and are free – if they will humbly accept the redemption and turn to the Redeemer.
2000 years ago, God sent part of Himself to earth in the form of Jesus Christ. Jesus was sent to be the Redeemer, to pay the debts we had run up, the fines God was due for disobeying Him. He paid the price through His sacrifice upon the cross in Jerusalem. And through that sacrifice, we were redeemed – if we will accept the redemption. We must want to be free of our slavery, our debts. But if we will accept the redemption, our Redeemer will set us free!
Perhaps you are watching or listening, and your life has been one bit of trouble after another. Perhaps you’ve begun to realize that you are escaping from the world in a way that’s harming your health, your relationships, your job. Perhaps you’re one of the young men or women I spoke of earlier who has lost hope. As the king of Nineveh saw, there is always hope with God – if we pray to God, if we ask for help, if we turn to His Son for assistance.
But, you say, someone from a church hurt me once. I’m sorry. But will you let a person from months or years ago keep you from a good relationship with the God of the Universe? Will you let that person control your life, even today? Or will you step forward with Jesus to take control of your life by asking His help today?
If you can, join us at our 10:30 am live service any Sunday morning on Rt 47. For here, you will find people ready to point the way to a bright, wonderful, joyful relationship with God – the same God who had the fish dump Jonah on the shore, the same God who controlled the storm, the same God who changed the hearts of the people of Nineveh, whose descendants would have to be saved once again from violence when the men of ISIS took over.
But God saved them again when the coalition of Western nations, led by the United States, destroyed the armed forces of the Islamic State and set them free.
You, too, can be set free from the evil that controls you. Simply pray to God to be set free, for God’s son has redeemed you. You need to accept the redemption.
And if you have been close to God for months and years – Go home this afternoon and find your person Nineveh, the people who need to hear God’s word the most – and talk with them – in person, over the phone, on chat, and by writing cards and letters. You can tell others of the great things that God has done in your life and the lives of your friends. Don’t make God send a whale after you. Go to Nineveh and tell the people of the God who loves them!
Father, I pray for these people in this church and all those watching and listening at home. Fill them with your Holy Spirit, teach them Your ways, help them bring the Good News of Jesus’s love into their hearts so that they may do great things by trusting and following Your Son Jesus and Your Holy Spirit. Give them the courage to step away from their old life to go to their personal Nineveh's, to forgive others daily, and joyfully do Your will. I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Remember: God forgives when we humbly ask Him for help. Each of us has a personal Nineveh where we are to speak God’s word. Each of us has been redeemed – and we need to accept that redemption by the One who is greater than any of us.
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