READ: Jon. 3:5–9: … Who can tell if God will turn and relent, and turn away from His fierce anger, so that we may not perish?
Jonah’s message from God appears severe: you shall be overthrown. Yet it is also longsuffering: there is still time for repentance. Forty days remain.
The response of the inhabitants is astonishing and impressive, unique in its extent. The city contains one hundred and twenty thousand children and more than half a million inhabitants. Jonah has not even completed half his journey through the city before the entire population turns to God.
This is not Jonah’s work but God’s. Scripture does not say that they believed Jonah but that they believed God.
Just as the sailors recognized God’s hand in the storm and praised His almighty power, so the people of Nineveh recognize that the judgment announced to them is God’s judgment. They understand that they deserve it and cannot escape it unless a miracle occurs—a miracle of grace, a divine wonder of forgiveness.
Perhaps most remarkable of all is that they hope for such mercy.
That heathen men should believe in God is already a wonder of grace. Their faith expresses itself in fasting and the wearing of sackcloth. The entire population humbles itself before God, including the king himself.
The people understand that this God cannot be mocked. He is almighty. What He speaks, He performs.
Even the animals are included in the public fast. Everyone is commanded to turn from evil ways and from violence.
It is evident that this is the work of the LORD Himself. Through God’s preaching the people of Nineveh are convicted of their sins, acknowledge them, and repent of them.
The sincerity of their repentance appears from the Lord Jesus’ own testimony that the men of Nineveh shall rise in the judgment and condemn those Jews who rejected Him (Matt. 12:41).
Do we clearly understand that our acquittal from condemnation is by grace alone?
Sing: Ps. 103:3.