Join us on a thought-provoking journey into the biblical account of Jonah, where God’s intentions and revelations unfold. This episode challenges the listener to comprehend the intricacies of God’s character and His reluctance to punish, highlighting the importance of repentance. As we examine the steadfast standards of God, we’re reminded of His unwavering constancy and the hope it offers for transformation.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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What is the most important thing to know about God? Now, you may not realize this, but the hardest things for people to understand about God are not the most important things. I think it was Moses who said this. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law. So the important things to know about God are the things that are revealed. That makes sense. If you think about it for a moment, you will come easily to this realization. Most of the arguments about God among theologians, preachers, and teachers have to do with things that are not revealed. In other words, there is no scripture that says God is this or God is that that makes this argument. If there were, they wouldn’t be arguing about it. It’s the secret things that people make all these arguments about. Now, the God who reveals himself in the pages of the Bible is a person who exists in a place. That’s the way he presents himself, and so I think we’re safe in thinking of him in those terms. Yet some religious people are fond of speaking of God as omnipresent, as being everywhere at once. God is present in every blade of grass and every leaf of every tree, etc., etc., But the problem with it is they never seem to consider that when they do this, they are depersonalizing God. They are advocating a kind of pantheism that God is just a sort of a mysterious force that is everywhere. But no, the Bible does not reveal God as a mysterious force. It reveals God as a person who presents himself to us as a person acting in time and space. In fact, you can think of God as standing by a roadside, talking to a man named Abraham about what he is planning to do, because this aspect of God is one of the things that is revealed. It’s in the pages of your Bible. So, when we try to understand who God is and what he’s doing, God is a person. Now, if God is a person… then logic leads us to the consideration that he has a personality and he has character. And, in point of fact, that is precisely what the Bible reveals to us about God. And for us, the question naturally follows, okay, God’s a person. What kind of person is he? What is he like? And for some strange reason, people want to speculate about whether or not God’s got hands and arms and legs and this type of thing. And these aren’t the important things. The important things is what kind of character does he have? What kind of person is he? Now, God himself tells us what the most important thing is to know about him. In words given to Jeremiah, God has this to say about himself. Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might. Let not the rich man glory in his riches, but let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight. So God is loving and kind. This implies an affectionate person. He is a God of judgment, and judgment implies wisdom and justice, fairness and firmness. He is a righteous God, and righteousness implies that he’s got standards, and the existence of standards suggests that he is not whimsical, that he can be depended on, that he will be constant. You know, this is really a lot to know about God, and these are really very important things to know about God, that he is kind, that he is just. and that he has standards that he sticks to and stands by. These are important things to know. Everything else we learn about God has to be related to these primary traits of character. I say primary because God said, this is the thing you really want to know about me. If what we think we know about God seems to be in conflict with God’s basic character, then we can safely put those things aside to be examined later because they cannot possibly be correct as we currently hold them. Now, about this characteristic I call, or the Bible calls, loving kindness. How does that show itself in God? What does that actually mean? Well, there’s a story in the Bible that illustrates this in a singularly charming way, and the story is found in the book of Jonah. Nearly everybody that’s ever been to Sunday school knows who Jonah is, and they’ve heard the story of Jonah and the whale. Once upon a time, there was a great city called Nineveh. And like a lot of great cities, it had become very, very wicked. So God told a prophet named Jonah to go and preach to that great city. Now, right here, we come across something very important to know about God. A different kind of God, if he’s powerful enough and a city was wicked enough, would just rub it out. Why fool around? There’s a city over here. It’s a nasty, wicked city. Let’s just nuke it. Okay. So why did God send a prophet to tell Nineveh what was coming? The answer to this tells us something very important about God. Now, the first part of Jonah’s story, the part about him fleeing to the west and being swallowed by a whale and spit up on the shore, is a story for another day. What will occupy us today is the second part of this story, when Jonah at last finds himself in the suburbs of this city of Nineveh, preaching, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And here I’d like to ask an important question. Why is this book even in the Bible? It is clean outside the storyline of the Bible of the rest of the book. So there must be a singular reason why the book of Jonah is here. There is a reason, and I’ll tell you what that reason is right after this important message.
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Here comes Jonah walking through Nineveh saying, Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Now, if you happen to be listening to this in Dallas, what effect would it have for you folks there in Dallas for an unknown prophet to show up in one of your northern suburbs saying, Yet 40 days and Dallas shall be overthrown. Well, now, if you’re a football addict, you might think he was a Redskins fan, but it has no effect at all as long as this guy doesn’t start blocking traffic. Nobody cares that you’ve got some idiot out in the suburbs preaching yet 40 days in Dallas or Kansas City or wherever will be overthrown. So what happened in Nineveh is really remarkable to say the very least. Jonah 3, verse 5 says this after the preaching of Jonah. So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. For the word came from the king of Nineveh, and he got up from his throne, he laid aside his robe from him, he covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes, and boy, I mean, he’s serious about this thing. Somehow or other, by some incredible miracle, this man hears, believes, listens, and tells his whole country, his whole city, and it’s a city-state, huge city-state, folks, we are in a lot of trouble. and it’s time for us to get right with God. So he caused it to be proclaimed and published all through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Don’t let them eat. Don’t let them drink water, not even the animals. Cover your cows with sackcloth. Cry mightily to God. Yea, let everyone turn from his evil way. Let’s change the way we’re living here and get rid of the violence out of this town. Who can tell? Maybe God will repent, maybe this won’t happen, and maybe we won’t die. And then, something not quite so remarkable, but still based upon the way some people, I guess, look at God, it’s remarkable. God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do to them, and he didn’t do it. Now, I know someone’s going to say, oh, I don’t understand this. God’s not good for his word. He said he was going to kill him, and he didn’t kill him. Now, if you’re quick on the pickup, you already know what’s going on here. The reason why God sent Jonah to Nineveh in the first place with a prophecy was to change the outcome. Nothing else changes. Nineveh is going to be destroyed. He doesn’t want that to happen. He could have turned Nineveh to toast like he did with Sodom and Gomorrah, but he didn’t want to do that. Now, this is an important thing to know. God doesn’t like killing people. It’s not something he wants to do. So why is the book of Jonah in the Bible? Because it reveals an important side to the character of God and how he works. God doesn’t like to hurt people, and he doesn’t like to see us hurt people either. Now, there are people who believe that prophecy in the Bible is a kind of fortune-telling and that God is like a time traveler. They think God looks into the future, he sees what’s going to happen, and then he sends us a prophet to tell us what’s going to happen. Now, if you think about that a minute, I’m sure you’re going to say, I wonder why God would do something like that. And the presumption you see is that the future is already written down. In other words, you can get in a time machine if you could, and you could travel forward into the future. You could actually see what the future is going to be, and you could come back, make the right bets, and become a wealthy man. Presumption that the future already exists and is written. But here’s the problem with that. If the future is already written, then Jonah lied to Nineveh. How could I say that? Well, look at the passage. Nineveh was not overthrown 40 days later. It didn’t happen. The prophecy then would have been false. Now, we know God did not send Jonah to lie to Nineveh because God doesn’t lie. So the only conclusion left is the future of Nineveh was not written in advance. But the outcome of the way they were living their lives was knowable. The future was not written. But if you are looking at the way someone lives his life, if someone is living his life in a self-destructive pattern, you know what the outcome of that is going to be. And you’d like to tell him. You’d like to tell him so he could turn his life around, wouldn’t you? Well, God’s like that. He simply wants them to know. So here we come to the answer to another important question relative to prophecy. Why should God tell us what the future holds? The answer? So we can change the future. And this is an act of great kindness by God who doesn’t want us to fall down and hurt ourselves. So that part’s easy. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get back to the story. God looked and saw their works that they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do to them, and he didn’t do it. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. Now, I’ll have to confess to some mystification about that. I don’t really quite get my mind around Jonah in this case. How could a man come to the place where he has so much of himself invested in this thing to where God himself, who gave him the message in the first place, changes his mind, decides not to do it, and then you’re angry with God because somebody didn’t get killed? Well, he prayed to the Lord, and he said, “‘I pray you, Lord, was not this my saying when I was yet in my own country?’ I fled from before you. I didn’t want to come here in the first place. I got on that ship, and I tried to flee to Tarshish because I knew that you are a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and that you easily repent of the evil. What in the world is he saying here? He is saying that he knew that God was very likely going to change his mind on Nineveh before he ever went there. Now, that for some reason was bad news for Jonah. But boy, is it good news for you and me to know that God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, of great, enormous kindness. And that even when he has said he’s going to do us in, if we’ll just repent, if we’ll just turn our life around, he won’t do it. To repent himself? I mean, God is not man that he should repent, and yet we are told in the Bible that God does sometimes repent of what he is going to do. Now, Jonah… Well, Jonah’s a little hard to figure, but I have known people like him. They take a certain relish in preaching about sin and the awful things that are going to happen to sinners, can wax very eloquent from the prophets about the moral decay and the rampant sins that are in a country, and tell us that God is going to really come down on us. And you can easily imagine how someone might be a little disappointed if their worst predictions didn’t come to pass. You remember back when everybody was predicting disaster over the year 2000 because of some mistakes in computer programming? I mean, people were putting food under their beds, storing up water. They were filling up trash cans with water in their garage so that in case something on the water company failed because their computer didn’t work, that they’d at least have water to flush the toilets with. Well, it didn’t happen a day or so after January 1st when we had sailed over the new year with no problems at all. One person who had previously been really forecasting complete and utter disaster and a collapse of our whole economy on this thing wrote to some friends, let’s not get discouraged. There is still time for something to happen. And I read that and I thought to myself, what a man, what a prophet. He’s just like Jonah. Jonah was that kind of guy, seriously. And he said, O Lord, take my life from me. It’s better for me to die than to live. I don’t think I’d really care to invest that much of my own self into a prophecy like this. Although I trust God, I’ll do what he says. And if he sends me to tell Dallas that they’re going to be overthrown in 40 days, I’ll go do it. But I’m not going to be surprised if God changes his mind. And one of the reasons I won’t be surprised, that’s because of the book of Jonah. So God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry? Are you really in the right attitude here? Jonah didn’t even answer him. He went outside the city, sat on the east side, and made himself a little shelter and sat under it in the shadow until he might see what would become of the city. Let’s not get discouraged. There is still time for something awful to happen. This is Jonah’s approach to this thing. And the Lord provided a vine and made it come up over Jonah that it might be a shadow over his head to deliver him from his grief. He wanted him to feel a little bit better. And Jonah was exceeding glad of the vine. Even here we come across a God who is so gracious, so kind. He loves Jonah. He’s kind to Jonah. Jonah is in an absolutely rotten attitude, and I can see certain Greek gods hitting him with a lightning bolt or crushing him under their thumb like an ant. God didn’t do that. He decided to teach him a little lesson. So he gave him a vine to shade him, and Jonah really enjoyed that and appreciated it. Then God sent a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the vine and it withered. It came to pass when the sun came up, God also provided a vehement east wind, and the sun beat on the head of Jonah, and he finally passed out and wished he was dead, and said, It’s better for me to die than to live. Oh, poor guy. And then God said, you’ve got to think there’s some things going on good for this guy because God will still talk to him. And he says, now, are you doing well to be angry for the vine? This time he answers God and he says, yeah, yeah, I do. I’m right to be angry even unto death. And the Lord said, you had pity on the vine for which you did not labor. You didn’t make it grow. It came up in a night. It perished in a night. This vine here is nothing. And the operative words in this that really strike me is to Jonah, he says, you had pity on the vine, right? And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city wherein there are more than six score thousand, that’s 120,000 people, who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand and also a whole lot of cattle? And here we come to the point of this fine story. God’s purpose is not to kill, but to save. Jonah felt sorry for the vine. God felt sorry for the children of Nineveh. And he even felt sorry for their cows. And this, this is what it means to say that God exercises loving kindness. God is tenderhearted. And that, my friends, is something well worth knowing about God. And it brings us squarely to the second important thing to know about God. And I’ll tell you what that is in half a minute.
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Do you remember what God said were the important things to know about him? The things that he really wants us to get? It’s back in Jeremiah 9, 23. He says this, Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches, but let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord which exercise lovingkindness, Now, this judgment thing makes us a little nervous. The loving kindness, we’re comfortable with that. But when it comes around to the question of judgment, that’s different. Once upon a time, there was another prophet in another time. This fellow’s name was Ezekiel. God came to him one day, and he had this to say, Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. I want you to hear the word I’m speaking, and I want you to give them a warning from me. This is Ezekiel 33, verse 7. When I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you will surely die. And you, Ezekiel, do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sins, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. In other words, I’m telling you, you go tell this man, just like Jonah, you go tell Nineveh that they’re going to die in their sins. You don’t tell them they die. I hold you accountable. But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways, and he does not do so, he’ll die for his sin, but at least you have saved yourself. Now, son of man, Ezekiel, say to the house of Israel, this is what you people are saying. Our offenses and our sins weigh us down, and we’re wasting away because of them. How can we live? How are we going to make it? This is what you people are saying. Now, here’s what I want you, Ezekiel, to say to those people. As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways. Why would you die, O house of Israel? Now, that’s God’s message. He’s saying, look, I don’t take any pleasure in people’s death. I’m not happy when people are hurt. I don’t like it when people die for these things. So what I’m telling you is, change your life. Turn around. Now, you have to understand this. It doesn’t take any intervention on God’s part for us to be destroyed. We are quite capable of destroying ourselves. We’re quite capable of destroying our whole society. We’re capable of bringing the whole thing down around our ears without any help from anywhere. And God says, that’s not what I want to see. I would far rather see you turn away from what you’re doing and live long and happy lives. Therefore, God says, Ezekiel, say to your countrymen, the righteousness of the righteous man is not going to save him when he disobeys. In other words, you can live a good, righteous life, and then you turn away from that. All your past righteousness is not going to help you any. The wickedness, and this is maybe more important to most of us, the wickedness of the wicked man will not cause him to fall when he turns from it. You can live a terrible, wicked life, and then when you turn from it, that previous wicked life will not be held against you. The righteous man, if he sins, will not be allowed to live because of his former righteousness. Now, I ask you folks, is this fair or what? God says, you live a good life, but then in the end of your life you turn sour. I’m sorry, that previous goodness isn’t going to help you. Your previous wickedness isn’t going to hurt you. What is going to make the difference is the way you’re living right now. That’s fair. Now, if I tell the righteous man that he will live… and then he trusts his righteousness and does evil, not one of the righteous things he has done will be remembered. He’ll die for the evil he has done. You know, this is kind of complicated going through and reading it in Ezekiel. It sounds a little heavy, but at the same time, it’s a very simple principle. It’s not how you start out in a race that counts. It’s how you finish. It’s how you do in the end of it all. If I say to the wicked man, you will surely die. But then he turns away from his sin and does what’s right. If he gives back what he took and pledged for a loan, if he returns what he has stolen, if he follows the decrees that give life and does no evil, he’ll surely live. He will not die. None of the sins he has committed will be remembered against him. He has done what is just and right. He will live. And then God said this to Ezekiel. He says, yet your countrymen say the way of the Lord isn’t fair. But it’s their way, he says. Isn’t it their way that’s not fair? If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and does evil, he’ll die for it. If a wicked man turns away from his wickedness and does what’s just and right, he’ll live by doing it. Yet all you people say the way of the Lord is not fair. But you see, if we had known the important things to know about God, We could never have ever said that he is not fair. The objective God has in coming and telling us the future is so that we can change the future, so that we can turn things around. And that’s what Ezekiel is driving at in his message to the house of Israel in his own time. And there is an important distinction in all this to make. God is not a grandfather in the sky. God is a father. A grandfather can afford to be indulgent, but a father has to be firm. He can be loving. And he must be kind, but if he is not just, his kids will never come to understand right from wrong. A good father must be loving, must be kind, and must also be just. Then there is that third important thing to know about God. that he says, let the man that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, which exercise loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. What this last thing, righteousness, means is that God has standards of right and wrong. There are things you do that are right. There are things you do that are wrong. They are called laws. And since God is not a great grandfather in the sky, what is right today is not going to be wrong tomorrow, and what is wrong today is not going to be right tomorrow. God is the one great constant in the universe. And that is something about him we must never forget. He told another prophet, Malachi, For I am the Lord, I change not. And it’s for that reason you people haven’t been consumed. He also said through James, Every good and perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. And you see, you can take that to the bank.
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God is constant. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1 888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net Stay in touch with the new Born to Win with Ronald L. Dart app.
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