Jonah 3: 8-10
... "Cry loudly to God for help. Turn from your wicked ways and your acts of violence. Who knows? God may reconsider His plans and turn from His burning anger so that we won't die."
God saw what they did. He saw that they turned from their wicked ways. So God reconsidered His threat to destroy them, and He didn't do it.
God never enjoys destroying the wicked. He would rather they turn from their wicked ways. Always.
God had called Jonah to go preach in Nineveh that God would destroy them in 40 days because of their great wickedness. They deserved it; Jonah had heard all the stories, and may have even witnessed, how cruel and violent these people were, in perpetrating unspeakable cruelty on those they conquered.
Jonah wanted God to destroy them, and he knew that if they repented that He wouldn't, so he ran in the opposite direction (4:1-2). While he was in the big fish's belly he cried out to the Lord, and He performed a miracle in having that fish vomit him up on dry land, instead of at the bottom of the sea (2:1-10).
I've seen a picture of a fish cut open with a man inside it. People who have spent any time inside a big fish have all their flesh and hair bleached white from the fish's digestive juices.
Can you imagine how stark Jonah must have looked there in the Middle East? That had to have had an effect on the Ninevites. Johah got only a third of the way through the city when they all decided to repent, from the king down to the lowest servant, and recognized the power of Jonah's God (3:5-9).
God does destroy the unrepentant evil people, and He destroyed Neneveh a generation later. But He will also always relent and forgive those who repent and turn away from evil.
God has told us His ways; His good, moral, kind, generous ways. Evil is always bad for us, it always hurts and harms us. Ourselves and those around us.
And God calls all people everywhere (Acts 17:30) to turn from their idolotries and thefts and murders and immoralities (Revelation 9:21), and turn to Him, to recognize that His Son Jesus is our Savior by taking our place in death as our personal Sacrifice (as He fulfilled that first chapter in Leviticus, the individual person's sacrifice). His Blood shed for our forgiveness actually takes away all of our sinfulness, from the grossest sin down to the "innocent" fib, and that Original sin that we inherit from Adam as our "flesh," our "sin-nature." This cleansing makes us fit to enter Heaven, because God will not tolerate any kind of sin to dwell in His Presence (see Habakkuk 1:13).
O my Father, You are so kind, so wise, and so powerful to have designed this Earth for us, to put in it everything we need, and to give us Your written Word so we can know You. Thank You for Your Holy Spirit in us to teach us Your Truth, and to be able to understand how all parts of Your Word fit together to tell one Story, the Story of Man, from before the beginning to beyond the end; the Story of our need and Your provision; about Jesus from beginning to end of the Book.
Thank You for Your great Love, wanting for everyone everywhere to repent and follow Your ways. That is how we can access Your bountiful provision here on this Earth, and be cleansed to spend our Eternity with You.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
