Day 264 - Obadiah - Jonah

ONE-YEAR JOURNEY OF THE BIBLE
Day 264 - Obadiah - Jonah (What America Can Learn From the Ninevites)
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"And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day's walk. Then he cried out and said, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"  So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them...  Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it."  (Jonah 3:4-10)

Sadly, non-believers consider the story of Janah and the big fish as a fairy tale.  It is sad because they miss the blessing that could only come to those who believe that the story is true.  When you really think of it, if God was able to create the universe out of nothing, why would it be so difficult for God to call a big fish to swallow a person and then vomit him out after three days? 

Although there are many spiritual lessons I love about the book of Jonah, I want to focus today on the deliverance of the city of Nineveh (probably about the size of New York City) from total destruction like Sodom and Gomorrah.  Jonah's message to the people of Nineveh, as we read from our text above, was that God would overthrow it after forty days.

Amazingly, the inhabitants of Nineveh, who were Assyrians, repented with fasting and sackcloths at the command of their king!  As a result, we read that when "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it (Jonah 3:10)."  

O how I pray to God that the people of America would do as the Ninevites did.  I pray that God would so convict president Obama of his own sins as well as the sins of his country that he would plead with the American citizens to repent with fasting and humility in the hope that God would relent from judging the nation just as He relented from judging Nineveh.

There could not be any national repentance, however, apart from individual repentance and only when individual citizens of a society repent and humble themselves before God could we even begin expect a national revival.  But we don't need to wait for president Obama to call Americans to repent; we must do so right now and begin to fast and ask for God's forgiveness for our sins and for the sins of this nation.

May God help us all to humble ourselves before His throne and cover our hearts with ash and sackcloth through fasting and prayer with all humility and may God have mercy on this land of America and relent of His judgment that is sure to come upon us unless we do as the Ninevites did.