The king showed in a very real way that he had come under conviction by getting off his throne, taking off his royal robe, putting on sackcloth and sitting down in ashes. But he did more than present personal repentance; he instituted a reformation of the society and didn't do it alone; the nobles endorsed his edict.A number of scholars

The Spirit of God illuminated the truth of Jonah's message to the mind and hearts of the Ninevites. The light of the truth had flooded into the black darkness of their hearts, and they were grieved to the core of their being as they stood at the bar of divine judgment. 800 years later, thousands of Jews in Jerusalem would

On the day Jonah began preaching, the people began believing. They heard, they considered, and they fully accepted the truth of it.This is astonishing when you think about it. Here is this 'exceedingly great city', the global power of the day, renowned for its brutality to foreigners, not only receiving this message of impending judgement at the hand of a

Jonah took God at His word, and he took God's Word, and he proclaimed it. There was no trying to avoid what he might have considered the difficult parts. No obscuring of the word 'overthrown', no watering it down to 'you might experience a little challenge'. No preaching it in empty parking lots in the middle of the night. He

With a sense of conviction arising because of the grace of God in his life, Jonah goes into the city, and heralds and proclaims the message God has given him, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" It's breathtaking in its simplicity and clarity, assuming that was all he declared, but there is no reason to think it's not.

We're in the eighth century BC here. By this stage, Nineveh was a major city in Assyria in what was the golden age of Mesopotamian history. However, it was also a period of internal strife in the empire, as provincial rulers would battle with the federal government and the King over issues and the boundaries of self-determination. Sometimes this strife

Who is this Jonah who now sets off for Nineveh? Well, he is a changed Jonah. He has been reshaped. Gone is the rebellion, replaced with a wholehearted commitment. Gone is the desire to run in the opposite direction from Nineveh, replaced by a desire to arise and go where God is sending him. Gone is the heartless attitude to

Jonah has unfinished business to do, and God reminds him of that by reiterating His command. Why, if the command still stood, and the situation in Nineveh hadn't changed, did God need to come to Jonah a second time? There can be no other reason than that it was necessary for Jonah's sake. God's coming to Jonah a second time

What could Jonah have learnt from this experience? Here are a few things that could have crossed his mind:- You can try and flee from the presence of God, but you can't outrun God's sovereign purposes for your life. You can expend time and money trying to escape God's plan, and yes, it may prove successful for a while; a

There are a couple of possible interpretations of verse 8, and I am going to go with the one Desmond Maxwell, in his excellent commentary on Jonah, in the Tyndale OT Commentary series, opts for, and that is that those who worship idols have abandoned their loyalty to their gods. He reasons that "If, as seems likely, this verse forms