Look at what Jonah actually preached: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." That's it. No unless. No if you turn, God will spare you. No invitation, no terms, no promise attached. Nineveh had no covenant. No history with the God of Israel. No prophet assuring them of mercy. Everything they knew about Him, they had just learned from a foreign preacher walking into their city with a sentence of doom. And they repented anyway.
Nineveh has turned.
The word came, the people believed God, and the whole city - from the greatest of them to the least - put on sackcloth. Even the king rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, and sat down in ashes. Then he issued a decree: let man and beast alike be covered in sackcloth, and let them cry mightily unto God.
And then, at the end of his decree, the king says something remarkable:
"Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?" - Jonah 3:9
Pause with that opening phrase for a minute:
Who can tell?
Here's what strikes me every time I come back to this verse. Look at what Jonah actually preached: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." That's it.
No unless.
No if you turn, God will spare you.
No invitation, no terms, no promise attached.
Nineveh had no covenant. No history with the God of Israel. No prophet assuring them of mercy. Everything they knew about Him, they had just learned from a foreign preacher walking into their city with a sentence of doom.
And they repented anyway.
The king's "who can tell?" isn't doubt exactly ... it's honest hope. They turned to God not because they had been promised rescue, but because they had come to believe He was real, and that He was worth throwing themselves on. As we work through this section of the study, it's worth asking:
- What does it tell me about their belief that they repented before they knew the outcome?
- Have I ever obeyed God without a guarantee of how it would turn out?
- Do I sometimes wait for the promise before I'm willing to turn?
The journal gives you a page to write out Jonah 3:9 and then to imagine what those prayers actually sounded like. I love this exercise because Scripture doesn't record a single word of what Nineveh said. We only know they "cried mightily unto God."
So we get to wonder. This was, as far as we know, the first time this city had ever called on the LORD.
There was no liturgy to fall back on.
No memorized words.
Just a whole city (and their animals ... what!?) crying out together.
A few questions to hold while you write:
- What do people say when they pray for the very first time?
- What would repentance sound like out loud, coming from an entire city at once?
- Would there have been confession of specific sins? Pleading? Silence? Weeping?
- What would the king have prayed, having just stepped down off his own throne?
There's no wrong answer here. The point isn't accuracy ... it's putting yourself close enough to the moment that you feel it.
Then comes verse 10, and it's a stunner:
"And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not." - Jonah 3:10
Notice first what God saw. Not their sackcloth. Not their fasting. Not their decree. He saw "their works, that they turned from their evil way." The outward signs were real, but what God responded to was the turning underneath them.
And then the phrase we spent time on in the cross-reference study: God "repented," or as many translations put it, He relented ... He changed His mind.
This is where the cross references do their work, and I'd encourage you not to rush them. Here are a few additional verses to sit with besides the ones in the study:
- Numbers 23:19 — God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent
- 1 Samuel 15:29 — the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent, for He is not a man
- Malachi 3:6 — "I am the LORD, I change not"
- Jeremiah 18:7–10 — the potter passage, where God states plainly how He deals with a nation that turns
- Joel 2:13–14 — "who knoweth if he will return and repent" — almost the exact language as Jonah 3:9
Questions worth wrestling with as you compare them:
- When we change our minds, why do we do it? New information? Regret? Someone talked us into it?
- Can any of those reasons be true of God?
- In Jeremiah 18, what has actually changed - God, or the people?
- If God had not relented toward a city that repented, would He have been more consistent with His character, or less?
I'll say this much ... the passages that insist God does not change and the passages that describe Him relenting are not at war with each other. Something unchanging in God is precisely what makes His response to Nineveh so predictable. But let the cross references show you that rather than taking my word for it. That's the whole point of the study.
Before you close the journal, one thought to carry out with you.
Nineveh got no promise, and turned anyway. We have been given far more ... a completed cross, an empty tomb, a Savior who invites us plainly. We don't have to ask "who can tell?"
So the question isn't whether God will receive a turning heart.
He's told us He will.
The question is whether we'll turn.
Chapter 3 ends with mercy. An entire city spared. It should be the happy ending.
Turn the page, and we find the prophet furious about it.
Chapter 4 is coming, and it's the most uncomfortable chapter in the book - because it stops being about Nineveh's heart and starts being about Jonah's. And, if we're honest, about ours.
