When the word reached the king of
Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him,
covered himself with sackcloth and sat on the ashes. Jonah 3:6
Continuing thoughts from yesterday's
blog. Here is Jonah running around Nineveh and preaching the
destruction that was to come. People believed him and repented,
putting on sackcloth. So today I was going to focus on the king.
Well, then I typed the verse. Did something odd strike you? It hit
me. The repentance of Nineveh did not start with the king; it started
with the man on the street. It started when people heard the word of
God, believed it, applied it to their own hearts and lives, and began
fasting and praying for forgiveness, and THEN the movement caught on
at the castle! Well, that changed a few things in my mind. Yes, the
king gave orders, but those orders only applied to those who hadn't
already taken action or believed the message, and for the animals.
Everything and everybody was affected by the command, but it was the
result of the grass-roots effort of the common man.
We are waiters. Not servant-type
waiters, but we wait for someone else, preferably someone with power
and authority, to start making things right. We wait for a movement
to sweep the country and then join in. It happened with
abortion/pro-life movements. It is happening with supporting police
right now in the midst of the contrived race relations controversies.
We wait for someone else to show us what to do or how we should
respond. This is why there are sociology classes. This is why there
are slogans and sayings out there that are repeated over and over and
over and over...if you hear it enough, you start to believe it. What
is wrong with this sin or that? Marriage for gays? Why not? Divorce
on demand? Better than being miserable! We see it, hear it, and let
our hearts be turned by it, often totally against what God has set
forth as TRUTH in His Word. But when we then hear God's Word, it
pierces through the foggy lies than lay deep in our subconscious and
we begin to repent. And when we repent, and others repent, there is
the slow snowball effect, and it gains ground. We begin to question
the lies we have been told, we see the damage that the lies have
caused (like post-abortion syndrome and thousands of kids living in
poverty because their parents don't live together), and soon there is
a shift, a repentance (turning around), and God relents to send
destruction. The problem is then that the next generation sees God's
mercy and believes it to be God's weakness, and they turn back to
their sin. Then God does send the judgment that He mercifully held
back. Nineveh did not continue to walk in repentance. The love of God
did not take root there after the repentance, and destruction did
come many years later. But that generation who listened to Jonah was
saved.
How long do we wait for someone to do
something to change the direction of the moral slide of our country?
There is the Tea Party working in politics, there are a few lone
voices crying in the wilderness of the religious right, and there are
tv preachers, True Women movements, etc. People are going back to the
Bible, back to the Constitution, back to the origins to see what we
are made of, what the goals were, what the standards were to be...and
finding God. What does God think? When we know the answer to that
question, we repent, and when enough people hear and repent,
eventually the word gets out to the leadership, the power-brokers of
the world. They may or may not respond to the grass-roots, but when
they do, things happen, usually to the extreme, like here. Did having
the animals not eat or drink change God's mind? No. But it did show
that they were taking God seriously. They as people had already
denounced their culture of violence, brutality, and hatred. The
government stepped in and joined them. God took notice that from the
greatest to the least, everyone took Him seriously. And He had
mercy...great, undeserved mercy.
So when we are tempted to wait for
someone else to repent, someone else to start something to move the
country, the family, the church even, toward God's Word, we only need
to act ourselves. If God's Word does not come back void, He will
bring others to the same place of self-change, and that is when
revival breaks out. It takes longer for those at the top to get the
Word that God means business, but that is ok. If it took that long
back then, why should the people in power today be any different. We
are called to repent ourselves, to believe God, whether the rest of
the world does or not.
Stand, my brothers and sisters, for the
Word. Let it change you, and let God let you join in the movement to
repentance and revival throughout the land. Happy 2015.
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