An Unthinkable Mission

Jonah’s adventure begins with an explosive command: “Get up, Jonah, go to Nineveh and preach a message of judgment.” Can you feel Jonah’s shock? Can you imagine God personally commanding you to preach in the streets of Baghdad, Beijing, or Barcelona? There is no “should you choose to accept it” clause attached to this impossible mission.

At first glance, it appears that Jonah is being sent with a message of condemnation. God gives him a seemingly straightforward assignment related to Nineveh: “Preach against it” (Jonah 1:2). Exposing sin was a core aspect of a prophet’s calling, and the biblical writer makes no mention here of a second chance for Nineveh. And so, we may be surprised to discover at the end of the book that God spares the city and its inhabitants.  

Our reluctant prophet, however, knows better. He is not surprised by God’s mercy. He anticipates it, and he doesn’t like it. Later, Jonah explains his reason for disobeying God in his own words: “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2). He is quoting Exodus 34:6 (and similar passages), where God describes Himself to Moses. Among God’s primary attributes are His love and compassion. Why would God bother to warn a city of coming judgment unless there remained a possibility that He would relent?  

As a missionary kid who attended boarding school, I’ve always taken comfort in the compassion of God. I knew He would be with me through the months of separation from my parents. Still today, I frequently remind myself that I serve a loving God. It’s a core part of the gospel. Somehow, Jonah doesn’t seem to find God’s compassion very comforting, at least not when it is directed toward Nineveh. The scale and the scope of God’s mercy greatly unnerves him.

When Jonah runs away, it isn’t to spare Nineveh from doom. More likely, he intends to ensure that their doom is sealed. Judging by his explanation at the end of the book, Jonah would have been willing (perhaps even eager) to relay a message of condemnation to Nineveh if there had been no possibility of mercy. Jonah is surprised—and indignant—that God cares about a nation he fears and despises. Isn’t Exodus 34:6 followed by another equally important aspect of God’s character: “He does not leave the guilty unpunished”? As we will see in a moment, the Ninevites certainly qualified as guilty. Shouldn’t mercy have reasonable limits?

Why Jonah Ran

Jonah had some obvious reasons for not being excited to preach in Nineveh. As previously noted, he may have been a hero in Israel during a time of relative prosperity. Maybe he had a pretty good life and ministry as it was. He wasn’t looking for a new assignment. Perhaps he had a wife and kids to consider, fields to cultivate, or a business to run. And getting to Nineveh wouldn’t be an easy journey. It would take Jonah longer to get to Nineveh, with far more risks than it would take you or me to get almost anywhere in the world today. And how would he frame his message? What if the Ninevites didn’t understand his Aramaic accent? Practical and logistical concerns like these might dominate our thinking if we were in a similar situation. But there’s more.

Nineveh was among the world's largest and most intimidating cities during Jonah’s lifetime. God Himself called it a “great city” (Jonah 4:11). Nineveh was founded by Nimrod and is symbolic of the world system in opposition to God (Genesis 10:8-12).^xii It was located near present-day Mosul, Iraq.^xiii In places, Nineveh’s walls may have been 100 feet high and wide enough to race three chariots side-by-side. They may have stretched as much as 60 miles around the city.^xiv Nineveh may have housed somewhere between 120,000 and 600,000 people, depending on how Jonah 4:11 is interpreted (maybe as large as present-day Baltimore).^xv  

The Assyrians also had a fearsome reputation for brutality and torture. One historian describes them this way:

The Assyrian kings literally tormented the world. … they made pyramids of human heads; they sacrificed holocausts of the sons and daughters of their enemies; … they impaled “heaps of men” on stakes, and strewed the mountains and choked the rivers with dead bones; they cut off the hands of kings, and nailed them on the walls, … and covered pillars with the flayed skins of rival monarchs.^xvi

Nineveh’s kings even boasted about their cruelty in monuments commemorating their victories in battle. Some of those carvings depict acts of torture, including skinning people alive, and are on display at the British Museum.^xvii And the Assyrians were idolaters. The prophet Nahum would later describe their wickedness and call them “vile” (Nahum 1:14, 3:1-4).  

Prophesying destruction to a pagan emperor known for torturing his enemies is no small matter. Few of us have embraced a ministry role that came with a decent chance of being skinned alive and turned into wallpaper. Jonah had good reason to be afraid to go to Nineveh, much less to preach there. But Jonah didn’t say he ran because he was afraid of the Assyrians. He ran away “lest the compassion of God should spare the sinful city in the event of its repenting.”^xviii

Assyria’s wickedness and cruelty and the threat it posed to Israel must have made Nineveh seem to Jonah to be an especially unworthy recipient of God’s compassion. About 30 years after the reign of Jeroboam II ended, in 722 B.C., Assyria turned its wrath on Jonah’s homeland. They invaded the northern kingdom of Israel as God’s instrument of judgment. We cannot be certain if Jonah knew about Assyria’s impending role in Israel’s demise at the time of his call to Nineveh, but he likely had a good idea of what lay ahead. Assyria had already threatened to conquer Israel at least once.^xix The prophet Hosea, whose ministry overlapped with Jonah’s, named Assyria as the instrument of Israel’s judgment (Hosea 9:3). At the very least, Jonah knew God would use Israel’s enemies to discipline them for their ongoing unfaithfulness.^xx  

Jonah may have thought, If Assyria’s wickedness has reached a crucial threshold and they’re going to come under judgment, can we not just get on with it? If I warn them and they repent, it will just give them more time to become a sharper knife. From Jonah’s perspective, the situation was horribly unjust. Here he was, a prophet of Israel, being told to give a cruel, foreign nation an opportunity to extend its lifespan. It would be like giving a violent criminal a “get out of jail free card.” It felt wrong, and Jonah wanted no part of it.  

In Defense of Jonah

I think we sometimes give Jonah a short shrift. It is possible he was more advanced in his understanding of God’s heart than many of us. How deeply do we wrestle with the tension between God’s mercy and His justice? What about the destiny of entire peoples and nations? Or issues of societal decay and judgment and our responsibility in that mix? Our God systematically makes people deeply uncomfortable as they get to know Him better. When was the last time your awareness of God’s sovereignty, His plan, and His intentions for each of us made you nervous? Jonah didn’t have the benefit of understanding God’s redemptive vision in nearly as much detail as we do today. And yet, he understood something important about God’s compassion.  

We find powerful linguistic symbolism in Jonah’s story. His name means “dove.” His father is called Amittai, which means “truth” or “faithfulness.” Joppa means “beautiful” in Hebrew. Nineveh signified chaos, rebellion, and idolatry in the Jewish mind. Tarshish, on the other hand, was a sort of Garden of Eden associated with gold, silver, ivory, apes, and baboons (1 Kings 10:22-25). Jonah, a man of peace entrusted with a heritage of truth, doesn’t accept God’s mission to a chaotic world. Instead, he heads toward a beautiful place where he can enjoy peace and prosperity. It’s a picture not only of Israel but of how many Christians live today. We also want to avoid the chaos associated with God’s mission to a rebellious world.  

Jonah didn’t just ignore God and stay home. He expressed his disagreement candidly by packing his bag and going down to Joppa. Then he left for Tarshish, which was no easy undertaking. While Nineveh was located about 600 miles northeast of Israel, most scholars agree that Tarshish sat about 2,500 miles to the west, on the southern coast of Spain.^xxi The voyage would have been long, dangerous, and expensive. King Solomon’s navy required three years to make a similar round trip (1 Kings 10:22).

Jonah’s flight wasn’t a rash act or a prophetic temper tantrum. He must have thought long and hard before he uprooted his entire life, both physically and spiritually, to avoid delivering God’s message to Nineveh. I imagine he had to sell land to pay for the fare. He had to explain why he was leaving to his friends and family (and possibly even the king of Israel). And Jonah likely didn’t intend to return. His disagreement with God was so strong that he was willing to abandon his calling as a prophet and go into self-imposed exile on the perimeter of the known world. Now, that is true conviction!  

Jonah may have inferred that because God intended to offer mercy to Nineveh, He would be less merciful to Israel as if God’s compassion came in limited supply. He was also aware that Israel herself had received warnings from his fellow prophets. Wasn’t Assyria far worse? Jonah wanted God to judge Assyria and bless Israel. God offered mercy to them both. He had sent prophet after prophet to warn His chosen people that their unfaithfulness was leading them toward destruction. Now, he was sending just one prophet to Nineveh with the same message, and even that seemed too much to Jonah.  

Perhaps it’s hard for us to relate to Jonah’s resentment of the Assyrians because, in the West, most of us don’t live with the same fear of enemy invasion. Oceans separate us from most of the rest of the world, and we don’t perceive ourselves as having enemies in the same sense that Israel did. We may have concerns about terrorists or intercontinental ballistic missiles, but I don’t think many of us feel like we’re on the verge of being invaded by a foreign ruler who will burn our cities, put hooks in our noses, and drag any survivors into slavery. To most of us, wars are things that happen in distant places. Modern economic and even geopolitical threats don’t have quite the same psychological impact as pyramids of severed heads.  

But in Jonah’s day, Israel was a small nation surrounded by violent superpowers. And from one perspective, Jonah was right about the danger of sparing Nineveh. The spiritual turning died out within 50 years. Jonah might have lived to see Assyria take the northern kingdom into exile, although he would have been an old man then. The northern kingdom was never re-established. It was game over.

Let’s have some sympathy for Jonah because his fears were real, and he acted on his convictions. And yet, he missed the point. God loved Assyria. In His mercy, He extends compassion even to the undeserving. He makes the sun shine on everyone, believer and unbeliever alike, and He offers salvation to everyone.  

What About Us?

I’m comforted that sharing our spiritual blessings with the rest of the world is God’s idea. It doesn’t come naturally to us humans. God is carrying out His Abrahamic promise as part of a master strategy. The challenge is, like Jonah, we have ideas that often conflict with God’s. We want Him to fall into line with our plan. Or we try to run away and leave God—and His instructions—behind us. Without an appreciation for the big-picture context of what God is doing in the world, we will be perpetually frustrated. His actions (and inactions) don’t make sense unless we accept them in faith as part of a global, eternal plan.  

Jonah and most of the Israelites were self-absorbed. God intended them to be whole-hearted worshippers and conduits of His blessing to surrounding people groups. And he intends that for us today—arguably even more so, given the increased breadth and depth of our understanding of His redemptive plan.

Let’s be honest. How do we score on God’s scale of compassion? Are there people we deem, consciously or not, to be unworthy of the same level of grace that we have received? Do we viscerally feel that God loves both our neighbors down the street and the Bedouin nomad in the Sahara Desert as much as He loves us? And how much do we value God’s grace toward us if we consider others less worthy to share in it, or ourselves not obligated to convey it? We probably never actually think, This person should not receive God’s mercy. We probably agree, cognitively, that everyone should hear the gospel message and have an opportunity to repent and find new life in Christ. That’s commendable as a starting point, but I don’t think it’s where God wants to leave us.  

A mark of our authenticity as followers of Jesus is our concern for the “lost sheep”—people separated from God. Jonah had 600 miles to traverse to warn Nineveh, but people can be far from the gospel in many ways besides geography. Social constraints, caste systems, economic disparity, historical resentments and injustices, political distinctions, linguistic chasms, and differences in worldview all make it difficult for people to learn of God’s justice and compassion and respond with repentance. Gospel emissaries today attempt to cross vast spiritual distances to reach people all over the world who have no idea what they’re talking about when they try to explain that Jesus died on the Cross to save them. As one of my mentors used to say, “This is the hardest work in the world.” It’s also incredibly fulfilling and God-glorifying work!

A Call to Headhunters

My own family’s story is a more recent example of the Nineveh mandate at work. In 1962, when I was six months old, my parents and I left Vancouver, Canada, on a ship called the Oriana. We traveled to what was then Netherlands New Guinea, the western half of the world’s second-largest island. New Guinea looks like a Tyrannosaurus rex basking on the equator just north of Australia, with a mountainous spine stretching from head to tail. When we arrived, the established missionaries told my parents, “We’ve just heard about a tribe down in the malaria-infested southern swamps. They’re called the Sawi. We don’t know much about them except that they live in treehouses and are probably headhunters. Are you willing to take the gospel to them?”  

I like to think that my parents considered my interests at least briefly before they responded, “We’d love to.” We settled into a little thatch-roofed house in the Sawi jungle. As my parents began learning the language, they were shocked to find that the Sawi were not only cannibals but also idealized treachery. When my father eventually told the story of Jesus, including how He was betrayed to death by His friend Judas, one of the men chuckled. “Tell us more about Judas,” he said. “He sounds like one of us! I would love to give my daughter in marriage to a man like Judas.”

My father’s heart sank as he realized he had a major cross-cultural communication challenge on his hands. How could the Sawi ever understand the gospel message if they considered Judas the hero?

The answer came a few months later in the form of another surprising cultural concept, the securing of peace between warring Sawi villages through the giving of a tarop tim, or “peace child.” This event's subsequent drama and impact are vividly documented in my father’s missionary classic Peace Child.^xxii In time, a significant percentage of the Sawi people came to saving faith in Jesus. They formed an alliance with their former enemies to share the gospel with other language groups in the jungle and now worship together in vibrant churches.

My parents, like many missionaries throughout history, stepped out in obedience at significant risk to themselves to warn a godless society of divine judgment and God’s offer of salvation through His own Peace Child. Growing up with a front-row seat, I witnessed the truth of Romans 1:16, “The gospel … is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile,” and even to isolated cannibal tribes like the Sawi!

Modern-Day Ninevehs

While we may readily imagine God’s call to a cannibalistic jungle tribe as being a kind of “Nineveh experience,” many other barriers can separate whole communities and societies from the blessings of the gospel. Think of the 7,000-plus languages spoken worldwide (not to mention thousands of dialects). Many of them still need Bible translations so that people can understand God’s Word. Or think of the geographic and cultural obstacles encountered in places like Tibet and Yemen. I have friends who ride camels from oasis to oasis with nomadic tribes in the Chadian Sahel. Others serve among committed atheists in Europe or immigrant communities like the Uyghurs in American cities.

Many of today’s gospel ambassadors don’t live in remote rural areas but rather in the “great cities” of the world. God has a particular concern and place in His heart for these massive concentrations of humanity. Whereas less than 10 percent of the world’s population lived in cities throughout most of history,^xxiii today, it’s over 55 percent—a dramatic shift.^xxiv There may not have been many metropolises in Jonah’s world, but today, we have over 30 megacities with at least 10 million people, more than half of them in China and India. Tokyo (37 million), Delhi (32 million), and Shanghai (29 million) are the most populous. These cities have populations equivalent to sizable countries but relatively few churches or even individual Christian witnesses.  

Jonah’s Not-So-Hidden Message

Many books and sermons emphasize life lessons from the book of Jonah, such as “Don’t run from God,” “We should obey,” and “We need to be compassionate.” Such character-building takeaways are certainly important, and Jonah’s story includes many such lessons. But a real danger exists of missing the bigger point. Running from what? Obeying what? Compassionate toward whom? The book of Jonah emphasizes the danger of failing to fulfill our mission as His people to be salt and light cross-culturally to the nations of the world.

Our time on earth is brief. This life is preparation for billions of years to come. Imagine arriving at the wedding feast of the Lamb described in Revelation 19, surrounded by saints from every people group on earth. Amidst the overwhelming joy and amazement, will we perhaps feel a tinge of regret? Why didn’t I realize this was the big picture? And why didn’t I get more involved when I had the chance?

In Romans 10:15, Paul writes, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” He is borrowing language from passages like Isaiah 52:7, which describes messengers proclaiming the end of the Babylonian captivity to the people of Judah. We are called to be messengers with beautiful, well-traveled feet, overcoming every barrier to proclaim the good news of freedom from sin to people who have not heard it. Some of those people, like the Assyrians and the Sawi, may be part of violent cultures (after all, many cultures view America as violent, too). Their remote locations, complex languages and radically different worldviews may seem insurmountable obstacles.  

We may sometimes wonder if some people can—or should—be saved. In the book of Jonah, God thunders a resounding “Yes!” He is “not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). As His people, we should be praying regularly, “Lord, lead me to unexpected people and places. Give me Your compassion for people who seem far from Your grace.”

Discussion Questions

1. Imagine God personally commanded you to preach in the streets of a megacity like Baghdad, Beijing, or Barcelona. How would you respond?  
2. Have God’s sovereignty and His intentions ever made you nervous?
3. When have you felt that God’s mercy was unjust?
4. What categories of people do you think Christians are prone to consider (whether consciously or not) to be unworthy of God’s grace?
5. What barriers to the spread of the gospel feel most challenging to you (e.g., geography, governments, other religions, number of cultures and languages, etc.)?