Articles
Prophetic Sabotage
"Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 'Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.' So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, 'Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!'" (Jon 3:1-4)
Jonah is one of the most bizarre of the prophetic books. While other books record the prophets' speeches and sayings, the book of Jonah is largely told about Jonah from an third-person perspective. The book can hardly be interpreted in a way that is complimentary of Jonah. He flees God's instructions the first time (Jon 1:1-2), and cares little for his own fate when telling the sailors to dump him into the sea (Jon 1:12). It becomes clear by the end that Jonah hates the Ninveites and would be happy to see their destruction.
In light of all of this, Jonah's preaching seems odd. The city is said to be three days journey across, and yet Jonah only goes a single day's walk in. The prophets ordinarily preached messages of judgment and repentance, but Jonah seems to give the absolute bare minimum. His speech is actually only five words long in Hebrew! While guys like Jeremiah would write pages and pages of material trying to exhort Jerusalem to repent, Jonah gives the smallest amount of effort possible to make God's message known. He omits any discussion of "why" this judgment is coming. He omits any specific address of the Ninevite's sin. He omits any offer of repentance, restoration, or hope. No instruction is given as to how to convince God to relent in judgment.
I recently saw this question raised: Is Jonah's behavior prophetic sabotage? It certainly seems that way! While I might be ordinarily inclined to suggest that the writer is simply "summarizing" Jonah's speech, it seems clear from Jonah's own view of things in chapter 4 that the prophet isn't actually interested in the city's salvation. Jonah gets mad at God for being too nice (Jon 4:1-2) and even asks God to kill him, since he's letting the Ninevites live (Jon 4:3). Jonah's paucity of information in his own speech strongly suggest that he is intending to intentionally undermine the Ninevite's salvation. If he can't break the letter of God's commandment, he can surely break the spirit of it.
Of course, the "sabotage" Jonah puts forth fails miserably. The Ninevites call a fast and put on sackcloth at every level of society (Jon 3:5). The king of the city discards his royal robes for garments of mourning (Jon 3:6). A royal proclamation is put out commanding the people to fast as a sign of repentance from sin (Jon 3:7-8). Even the beasts are forbidden from eating and told to wear sackcloth! The hyperbolic nature of the Ninevites' repentance is the single most incredible thing to happen in this book (and that's saying a lot, considering that this book also describes Jonah spending three days live in the belly of a fish).
There are several powerful lessons in examining this bit of "prophetic sabotage."
First, no matter how far someone goes in trying to undermine the truth, the message of God actually is powerful enough to be heard and understood by the listeners. We may get frustrated that people out there are trying to pervert the truth and distort the message of the gospel. And it is true that the majority of people in this world will be led astray to the broad path of destruction. But the truth is not shielded from our eyes by unfaithful messengers. It is freely available to us in the word of God.
Second, the fact that Jonah couldn't successfully sabotage his own preaching shows that the power to convert has never actually been in the preacher at all, nor in the specific wording of the message even, but rather in the God behind the message who transforms men's hearts. This should give us a healthy check to our egos, the next time we think that we can win someone over merely by the persuasiveness of our words.
Third, our teachers are not the standard for our faithfulness. The Ninevites could learn the truth from Jonah while still being more faithful than Jonah himself. Their repentance was not "tarnished" just because the prophet who instructed them was faithless. Occasionally, one hears a story about a preacher who baptized and taught many hundreds, but then fell away himself. Are his converts lost? Was the Christianity he taught them a sham? No! "If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself" (2 Tim 2:13).
Prophetic sabotage is bad. But not even it can destroy the message of God. May we always strive to remain faithful as he is faithful!
