To listen to the unabridged message click here: The Second Call
God brings mercy even through reluctant messengers
When we begin our faith journeys, it often feels easy. It is as if the world goes from black and white to color. We have this overwhelming sense of God’s goodness and grace, and when we are young in the faith, we can be almost radical about it. “I will do anything for Jesus, the one who saved me. I will go to the ends of the earth.” We are motivated by stories of missionaries, we read through the book of Acts, and we think, “I am going to be a radical. It is going to be great.”
Then we start living our lives. We try to follow Jesus through ordinary days, and life becomes very real. So many of the things we expected to happen do not happen. The simple answers we started with bump up against real life and begin to crash around us. We can end up in a place where we no longer know what to do, where we cannot quite get our hands around our faith anymore.
We get plunged into what St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul, and we begin to wrestle. Is this true? Can I even believe in God? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Is the Bible really the word of God? We question, and doubt, and struggle.
Some corners of Christianity will tell you that if you doubt and struggle, you are in a bad way. But read the Bible a little more and you find a whole line of people who wrestled and doubted and struggled, and came out the other side.
And when you come out the other side of the dark night, something has changed. All the baloney, all the frills, all the stuff that does not really matter gets cut away. What is left is a faith that has become resilient. It is something you can hold on to, a rock you can trust, because it has been through the hard season and survived.
Oftentimes that is when we receive a renewed sense of call. Now we know, and not just intellectually. The knowledge has made the long journey from brain to heart and become a part of us. Now we know that when we walk through something hard, God will show up. Now we know the people of God will come around us. Now we know we can trust the faithful one. And we are ready to step out in faith into a second calling.
In Jonah chapter 3, we see Jonah stepping into a second call.
Jonah was the prophet to Jeroboam II, a king who did evil in the eyes of God. And instead of that king and his people getting what they deserved, which is surely what Jonah wanted, the borders of Israel grew. Things were looking good, and Jonah was pretty ticked off.
So God said, “How about you go to Nineveh? Go preach to the Ninevites.” And Jonah said, “No. I have seen this story. I know how it ends. You are going to forgive them.” He got on a boat going the other way, and he spent a very literal dark night of the soul in the belly of a great fish. Then he was spit out onto the beach, which is where Jonah chapter 3 picks up.
Notice what has not happened. Jonah has not apologized. He has not repented. He has not taken ownership of anything he did. He has simply acknowledged that God is real and, in effect, said, “Even though you tried to kill me, I will still turn my face to you. See how faithful I am.” And then, finally, he relents: “All right, I will proclaim the message.”
Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”
Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.
When Jonah’s message 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. This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh:
“By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. But let people and animals 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 relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened. Jonah 3:1-10, NIV
God sends a reluctant messenger
“Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time.” Do not miss that little phrase. In chapter 1, God simply said, “Go to Nineveh and preach.” He did not tell Jonah what to say. Now, in the second call, after the dark night in the fish, God says, “Proclaim to it the message I give you.” God is leaving nothing to chance with Jonah, but he gives him everything he needs: the destination and the words.
“And Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh.” That sentence is remarkable all by itself. Jonah finally obeys. He steps out in faith and moves in the direction God called him.
But look at how he does it. Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah went one day in. He did not go all the way through.
Jonah is doing the prophet’s version of the middle school kid cleaning his bedroom. Mom says, “Go clean up your room.” “I don’t want to.” The kid ignores her, plays video games, and only after the threats arrive does he finally trudge off to clean. And most middle schoolers, I can tell you from experience, clean by shoving everything under the bed or into the closet and closing the doors. Did they really clean the room? No. They hid the mess.
Jonah does the prophet’s equivalent. “It is a three-day walk through this city. I will do one.” Jonah is what we might call a reluctant messenger. He has been through the dark night. He has been saved by grace alone, in a miraculous way, and he knows it. God gives him the call and the very words to say. And he is still reluctant.
But here is what amazes me: God sends reluctant messengers. God is not interested in perfection, and he does not need us at our most enthusiastic. Because what is the difference between a runaway messenger and a reluctant messenger? Obedience. The reluctant messenger still goes. The reluctant messenger still shows up.
That, at the end of the day, is what God wants from us most of all: to simply show up.
God uses a reluctant message
The message itself is short: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” Forty shows up all over Scripture: forty days and nights for Noah, forty days for Jesus in the wilderness. It is a number of completion, as if God is saying, “Nineveh, you have forty days to figure this out, or you will be overthrown.”
And how do they respond? “The Ninevites believed God.”
That is what God does with a reluctant messenger. He uses him, because the message does not belong to the messenger. The message is God’s, and God can use whatever means he wants.
Remember who these people are. Nineveh is not a mild enemy. Nineveh is the mob boss of the ancient neighborhood: “We will protect you from all the other bad guys. You just pay us, bend the knee, and tell us how great we are.” Israel despised Nineveh. This is not Michigan and Michigan State. It is not even Michigan and Ohio State. This is a hatred that runs deep.
And these people hear the message of a reluctant messenger, and they repent.
It starts from the bottom up. All of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth and fast. Then the message reaches the king, and he does not order Jonah arrested. He comes down off his throne, takes off his royal robes, covers himself with sackcloth, and sits in the dust. Then the top sends it back down: by the king’s decree, everyone is to fast, everyone is to call urgently on God, and everyone is to give up their evil ways.
And notice, the decree names the sin specifically: “their violence.” The literal Hebrew is “the violence in their hands,” the violence in their palms. The king looks at the violent reality of the Ninevite way of life and says, “We have to turn from that. Who knows? God may yet relent.”
God used a reluctant message, carried by a reluctant messenger, to bring an entire city to repentance. But he needed the messenger to be present. That is how the love of enemies in Matthew 5:43-48 shows up in Jonah 3: Jonah is present among his enemies.
He does not do it warmly. He does not show up saying, “Let us all be best friends.” He shows up grumbling, a third of the way into town, announces that God is going to overthrow the place in forty days, and leaves. Loving your enemy does not mean becoming best friends. It does not mean vacationing together. It means that, at the end of the day, you want even your enemy to hear the message of grace. You want what is best for them. And you might do it reluctantly, through gritted teeth, out of pure raw obedience. But this is what enemy love often looks like: showing up, inviting someone into something better, and then walking away.
God brings mercy
“When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.”
An imperfect, reluctant messenger, carrying God’s message, and God uses it to bring grace and mercy. He is able to use our most reluctant showing up. That is God’s amazing grace.
Some readers stumble here: did God change his mind? Can we change God’s mind by changing our behavior, and what happens to God’s sovereignty if we can? I do not think this is God changing his mind. God’s heart has always been for people to do what is right and set aside their evil ways. His desire is that all of us walk in the way of the Sermon on the Mount.
Sometimes God has to tell us the truth so that we can recognize what we are doing, realize that we have sinned, repent, and seek his grace. And when that happens, God is not changing his mind. He is saying, “You finally got here. I have been waiting for you.”
Because here is the dirty little secret of the story: Jonah and the Israelites were not the only ones created in the image of God. So were the Ninevites. God wanted to reconcile and restore them, just as he did Israel. What Jesus would later bring to the fore, the good news going out from Israel to the world, is already on display here in Jonah, before Jesus ever arrives. God is the Creator of all people, and he wants his creation restored, reunited, redeemed. And people learn that they need this grace through God’s reluctant messengers, who bring his message to them.
That is the gospel, right there in Jonah chapter 3, and it happened because one man reluctantly decided to love his enemies.
Your second call
Maybe you recognize yourself in this story. We all walk through hard seasons of life, our own metaphorical belly of the fish, where we have heard something of what God wants us to do and we have turned the other way. Then life gets going, we pass through the hard night of the soul, and we emerge with the sense of a second call. And at that point, like Jonah, we have a choice. Will we be obedient, no matter how reluctant we are? Or will we simply walk away?
Jonah does not come out of this story a hero, except in one respect: when he received the second call, he was obedient. Reluctantly, but obedient.
So here is the question I want you to wrestle with. What is God calling you into in this season of your life? Perhaps you are not on your second call. Perhaps you are on call number four, or call number six. But what is the invitation God has put before you right now? Perhaps you have been hearing it and feeling reluctant about it, because you know what it will mean. It will mean loving someone who is really hard to love. It will mean showing up for someone you really do not want to love. You may be looking at it and saying, “No.” But you know it is exactly where you are supposed to be.
This is the amazing and beautiful thing we see throughout the story of Scripture: a reluctant messenger is given a message, and God uses it to bring mercy and grace to people. We are invited into that same story, each of us. No matter how reluctant, God can use you to take his message to people who need to hear it, so that they might receive grace and mercy.
Would you pray with me?
Heavenly Father, I pray that you would open our eyes and our hearts and our minds to what you are calling us into in this season of life. What does our second call look like, as we continue to grow into a resilient faith?
Lord, I pray that we would be obedient to that, no matter how reluctant we might be, so that you might give us a message that we can give to people, so that they can respond and be united with their Father in heaven.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.