In Jonah 3, we see God re-commission Jonah. God didn’t give up on him. This should call to mind John chapter 21 where Jesus gave Peter the opportunity to confess his faith in Him three times, after having denied Him three times previously.
Now, imagine the scene. Jonah had been in the stomach of a huge fish for 72 hours—the digestive acids of that fish likely would have burned all the hair off his body (including eyebrows), shredded his clothing, and bleached his skin white. So, Jonah shows up in Nineveh, barely wearing any clothing, bleached albino white, and having been vomited up by a fish. This would have been a strange sight to see.
As a polytheistic culture, the Assyrians would likely have worshipped an ancient fish-god, so they probably would have seen Jonah as a herald of the displeasure of the gods, at least initially. But then something happened: Jonah preached God’s message and the people got it. They weren’t fearing all of their “gods;” rather, they repented for fear of the true and living God, Israel’s God! This is yet another beautiful example of God’s sovereignty over all things, including people.
The repentance of the Assyrians is a remarkable episode in the history of the Missio Dei. A reluctant prophet proclaims a vague message of divine judgment and an entire city repents. This reinforces the theme of God’s sovereignty over all things which we see throughout this book.
Now, we also know from history that the Assyrians were a brutal empire. They would behead their victims and stack the severed heads in large piles at the city gates of people they conquered as a warning to others who would resist them. We also know that they would, at times, skin their victims alive. Now that would be a tough way to go! Here are some examples from a scholarly research paper on the Assyrians:
In his official royal inscriptions, Ashurnasirpal II calls himself the ‘trampler of all enemies ... who defeated all his enemies [and] hung the corpses of his enemies on posts.’[1]
Later, Ashurnasirpal II said this of one of his military conquests, boasting that he had done the following:
I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me [and] draped their skins over the pile [of corpses]; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile ... I flayed many right through my land [and] draped their skins over the walls.[2]
And one more, just to give you an idea of who these people were:
I felled 50 of their fighting men with the sword, burnt 200 captives from them, [and] defeated in a battle on the plain 332 troops. ... With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool, [and] the rest of them the ravines [and] torrents of the mountain swallowed. I carried off captives [and] possessions from them. I cut off the heads of their fighters [and] built [therewith] a tower before their city. I burnt their adolescent boys [and] girls.[3]
This goes to show how powerful God’s grace, love, and mercy truly are. We think of how “easy” it is for an otherwise good person to come to faith in Christ, but how often do we really believe that He is in the business of saving “the worst of the worst.” This chapter of Jonah should remind us that He is both willing and able to do just that.
You can check out my YouTube video which accompanies this post here.
[1] Erika Belibtreu, Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death, http://faculty.uml.edu/ethan_Spanier/Teaching/documents/CP6.0AssyrianTorture.pdf, page 4.
[2] Ibid., 5.
[3] Ibid., 5.