Let us go to Jonah 3. I will read the whole chapter. Jonah 3:1-10:
And the word of JEHOVAH came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of JEHOVAH. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
I will stop reading there.
Well, you had to know that we would go to Jonah 3, right? I hope that you know why. Why would we be going to Jonah 3 today? The reason is because we have forty days until May 21st, and this is the length of time that God gave to the Ninevites. He gave them forty days. We often try to put ourselves in their shoes; now we can. On this day, right today, we can.
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to have been a Ninevite and to have had some crazy guy come into your town, some guy who had just come out of a whale’s belly and who came walking into town and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown”? This is all that the Bible records that he said. Maybe you might have heard him yourself or maybe you did not, because Nineveh was a big city. Nineveh was a “great city of three days’ journey.” He went in “a day’s journey” and then proclaimed this message.
How many people could have heard Jonah without a microphone or a megaphone or with no way of broadcasting this message to the whole city like we have in our day? How many people could have heard him say this? Maybe he went to the busiest market to cry out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
Maybe only a couple hundred people or maybe a couple thousand people heard this message. The Bible says that Nineveh was a “great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons” or 120,000 people. Maybe Jonah even proclaimed this more than once, but the Bible does not tell us this. He could have continued into the city, going to this place and to that place and saying the same thing. We do not know. All we know is that he went into the city one day’s journey and cried out one time and made the statement that in forty days, Nineveh would be overthrown.
We do know that the king was not there, because it says in Jonah 3:6:
For word came unto the king of Nineveh…
So the king did not even hear Jonah personally. He did not hear Jonah directly. More than likely, only a few people in Nineveh heard these words directly; and yet what happened?
What happened was that whoever was there to hear, they shared this with their friends and with their family, and so on. This message went from person to person to person; yet as we get further and further removed from Jonah the prophet, we would think that the people would have believed this message less and less. What we find, though, is that they actually believed this. They actually and literally believed this.
We do not find that Jonah went into the city and found a man with palsy and told him to stand on his feet. We do not find that Jonah went into the city and healed any of the blind or made any of the deaf to hear or any of the dumb to speak or any of the dead to rise. Jonah did not do any of this. He just said one single sentence.
What proof did Jonah offer for what he was proclaiming? What proof did he give to show that what he was proclaiming was true?
We have to relate this to our day. We are proclaiming that May 21st will be Judgment Day. We are doing this because there are many infallible proofs that are coming from the Bible in relation to how God has developed the timeline of history and has locked everything in.
Even so, many, many people say, “This is not enough. What else is there? Come on; show me something else. Prove this to me. Show me where in the Bible it says these things.” But when you do take the time to show how these things are all laid out and how this all works out, this does not convince them. This does not change their mind.
Were the Ninevites a special sort of people? Were they different than us? It is true in our day that we think that we are much more enlightened. We think that since we are a modern society, we know more than those ancient people who worshipped idols. Unfortunately, we worship idols in our modern-day society as well. Actually, this happens quite a bit.
The issue is, however, that there was a lack of evidence. Jonah had nothing to back this up. He had nothing to prove this. He performed no miracles to verify that he was a true prophet of the Lord. Actually, when we examine this, he provided measly information. He only said one sentence that was given to perhaps a few hundred people or maybe a couple of thousand, and then this word went through all of the city and they believed God. They actually believed God.
Since we have forty days from today, I thought that this would be a good time for us to go back to this chapter and to take a look at this. We only have forty days, which can go pretty fast, pretty quickly. In three weeks, we will be on May 1st. When we look at it from this perspective, this is coming very fast.
Again, we cannot get around a date on a calendar. There is no way to avoid this. We cannot go from May 20th directly to May 22nd, as so many people would like to be able to do. Many people say, “I cannot wait for May 22nd to come,” and I am sure that they cannot. From their perspective, they greatly desire for May 22nd to come without event, without any change in the earth or any of these things coming to pass.
There are many, many people who are hoping and wishing that May 21st will come and go. They want to be able to get to May 22nd so that they can get back to their normal life in this world, but there is no normal life in this world at all. Wanting to go back to normal in this world is a problem all of its own. If anybody wants to go back to the normalcy that this world offers, this is a serious problem. It is a serious problem if someone enjoys and prefers this world to what God is saying is coming in His Kingdom, which is an eternal life with eternal blessings. When people greatly want this day to pass, this is really an indicator that there is a deeper problem in their life.
Let us go to Jonah 3:1. This says again:
And the word of JEHOVAH came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
We read about the first time that God came to Jonah in chapter 1 when God came to him and told him to go to Tarshish. This is when he tried to flee because he did not want to do this, and so he got into a ship that was going to Tarshish. He wanted to escape and to get away from his task, from the duty that God gave him to do. Then the Lord arranged a storm to come at sea. In order to quiet the storm, the mariners threw him overboard. God immediately quieted the storm and also arranged for a whale, a great fish to come and to swallow him up. After three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, Jonah was spit out onto dry ground.
Then we read in Jonah 2:10:
And JEHOVAH spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
So the Word of the Lord is going to come to Jonah a second time, as we read in Jonah 3:1-2:
And the word of JEHOVAH came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
God is telling us that He put words in Jonah’s mouth that He told him to preach, and this is exactly what Jonah did preach.
Let us first consider what Jonah did not preach. Jonah did not say, “Oh, you Ninevites, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” He did not preach this; God did not bid him to preach this. He also did not say, “Peace and safety to you people of Nineveh. May you live long and prosper, and may you have quietness in your city.” He did not say this. He gave no “peace and safety” message. In his message, there was also no grace, no compassion, and no mercy that we read about. Jonah did not say, “Yet forty days and God will overthrow Nineveh, but be encouraged because He is a gracious and merciful God. He is good and compassionate, and so He might spare you.” God did not give all of this other information, even though we know this to be true. He gave a message that had none of these things, a message that only contained two elements: time and judgment.
So we read in Jonah 3:4:
And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
The number 40 is used in the Bible mostly as a time of testing. For example, the Israelites spied out the land for forty days. It can also relate to judgment, because they spied out the land for forty days and then came back with an evil report and had to wander in the wilderness a year for each day. They spied out the land for forty days, and so they had to wander in the wilderness for forty years. This was a punishment. This was a judgment of God upon them.
So when God uses the number forty, it relates to testing. Jesus was tested in the wilderness for forty days. But this can also involve judgment, and we now have forty days left, each one of us. This means that there is a final test in our lives.
God has been testing all along during this Great Tribulation. We are now at the end of this. We have forty more days and the Great Tribulation, this time of testing, comes to an end. It will be over. Now, especially, we are down to the wire. We are down to the end of all things.
What is the test? The test is whether or not we will believe God. This was also the test for the Ninevites as God gave them the message, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” If we put ourselves in their place, we could quickly and easily write this off.
If you had heard Jonah proclaiming this, you could have said, “I do not know this guy. I do not know him at all. He is a stranger. Why should I believe him?” You could have also said, “Not only is he a stranger, but he is a foreigner from Israel, which is another nation and an enemy nation. Why in the world would I want to listen to a Jew, to an Israelite, to this stranger who is telling me that I am going to be judged in forty days?”
Those who were more concerned amongst the Ninevites could have taken what Jonah had said and run to their priests. They were Assyrians, so the Ninevites would have had holy men just like the other nations. They could have gone to these priests and asked, “Have you heard anything from God? Is God going to destroy us in forty days? Is God going to overthrow the city?”
These holy men of Nineveh could have been offended that anyone would dare make a claim like this without first checking with them, and so they could have said, “No; God has not revealed anything to us. You know that we are the holy men of God. If God was going to do something like this, He would have certainly told us.” But this did not happen. Nothing like this happened. They did not dismiss this. They did not ignore this. They did not go to their holy men to verify this.
Have you ever noticed what is done when someone is interviewed about May 21st? By this time, I think we could write the script. This is how the news media approaches this topic. They come to one of the individuals who is in the caravan or who is holding up a Judgment Day sign. Then they ask them, “Do you think that May 21st will be Judgment Day?” This person responds, “Yes.” Then they explain why they think that May 21st will be Judgment Day, and I think that God has really opened the mouth of His people. He has given “a mouth and wisdom, which all [their] adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist.” They give a good answer because they are referring to the Bible.
What happens next does not happen all of the time, but it does happen a lot. After hearing from the child of God who tells them that Judgment Day will be May 21st, the reporter goes to a pastor, to someone whom they consider to be in authority, and they say, “Pastor, tell us something. These people over here are saying that Judgment Day will be May 21st. What do you think?” The pastor says, “No; no man knows the day or hour. There have always been these predictions that have come up all throughout history, especially in tough economical times. It is often then that we will find that these predictions are raised up, but they will come and go. There were over 200 in the past, and the 201st will come and go like the rest.”
Sometimes the media really piles it on. There was an article in the Philadelphia Enquirer that was written by someone who was not content with just one pastor. He had to go to three or four. When they all said the same thing, then they believed that they had the assurance that this was something that they need not worry about since these pastors did not believe that this was going to happen.
The news media thinks that these people have the authority to say that this is not going to happen because they are the Lutherans, they are the Presbyterians, they are the Episcopalians, they are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they are the Seventh-Day Adventists, and they all say the same thing; and so, finally, there is agreement. In the church world, there is finally agreement. They do not agree on anything else; and yet, amazingly, they agree that no man can know the day or hour; and so this is how the news report most often ends. They close out on a happy note, on what they consider to be a good note, which is that man cannot possibly know when the end will come. After all, they went to someone in authority.
Is the pastor the authority? Is the church the authority? Or is the Bible the authority? The Bible says that May 21, 2011 will be Judgment Day. We can put this on a scale and then we can pile up on the other side of the scale two billion professing Christians who say that this will in no way happen and that we cannot know. Does this balance out or does their opinion outweigh the Bible? No; absolutely not, because it does not matter how many people are against this. All of the world could be saying this and it would not matter.
If God is saying that this is the day, the appointed day of judgment, then this will be the appointed day of judgment; and He is definitely saying this. His pattern all throughout Biblical history has been that He forewarns before He judges. This is why He sent Jonah to Nineveh to say, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
To me, what is more astounding than Jonah being swallowed by a whale - living through this and then being vomited out three days later - is that the Bible says that “the people of Nineveh believed God.” They believed God without any evidence and without any proof.
This reaction of the Ninevites did not happen all of the time. Noah preached a similar message before the flood. How many believed Noah? Only his own family believed what he was saying, and it was God who worked out that eight souls out of a few million believed at that time.
So belief does not happen all of the time. The reason for this is what we find in the book of John. To get the context, Jesus is speaking to those who “believed on him.” He was not talking to those who said that they did not believe Him. It says in John 8:31:
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him…
This is whom He was talking to, to professed Christians.
In John 8:44-45, He is still talking to those who “believed on him.” It says:
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
Wow! They believe Him not, but not because He is telling a lie. If He lied to them, they would believe Him.
I hope that no one is doing this here, but we used to lie to our children. Those whom God has brought to Himself no longer do this, but the rest of the world still does. In one way or another, they will tell their children a lie. They say things like, “Santa is coming!” Do their children believe them? When they are young, yes; they believe this. They also say, “The Easter Bunny is coming to give you some candy and eggs!” Do their children believe? Yes.
We tell lies all of the time. We love lies. This is why we watch television. This is why we go to movies. This is why all of the things of the world interest us so much, because they are all lies. They are all a delusion. Yes; it is real. You can hold these things. They are physically there. Your iPod is in your hand. What you are doing with that iPod is the lie.
Is it not sad when people come home and turn on their television and just sit and watch things, every single day of their lives? This is where they cry. This is where they laugh. This is where they are enraptured with interest. They are living their life through images on a screen, through stories. They suspend all belief when they watch this stuff because they get all caught up in what they are seeing. It is like they are really there and that this is what is really happening, and it is all a lie.
People love to read books. I used to read a lot of books. I used to read Stephen King novels. Guess what? There are no vampires. It is all a lie! There are no aliens either. This is also a lie, but how many people believe that there really are aliens? Guess what else? A fortune teller cannot tell your fortune. This is also a lie.
When we look at life, it is a lie in just about every area, especially when you go to church and the church says, “Be baptized and you will be right with God,” and when the church says, “Walk down this aisle, say the sinner’s prayer, accept Christ, and then you will be saved.” These are all lies, even though people strongly believe this. They have great confidence and faith in these things, “I know I was saved when I accepted Christ so many years ago,” and it is a lie.
So Jesus is giving the reason in John 8:45:
And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
Then we read in John 8:46:
Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?
Why do people not believe that Judgment Day is May 21st? Why? What is the real reason? What is the truth about this? We read again in John 8:46:
…And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?
Then He gives us the real reason in John 8:47:
He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.
This is what it comes down to. The people prior to the flood who perished in the flood were not of God. It says in 2 Peter 2 that the flood came upon the world “of the ungodly.” They knew all about the flood because Noah was “a preacher of righteousness,” but they were not of God and did not believe to the point of going to God and beseeching Him and casting their lives upon Him.
Instead, they believed their neighbors, they believed their family members, they believed others, because everybody else in all the world believed the same thing, “Noah is a nut, even though he is a good guy and a nice guy.” We know that people have a way of flowering up their attacks, “Noah is a good neighbor in many ways, but he is a nut! He is crazy. He has been building that ark for year after year after year after year. Look; we are still here; and now he is telling us that we only have seven days.”
It is very safe and comfortable to go with the flow of the world. This is what most people do and they do not believe the Word of God. The people of Noah’s day perished because of this, and so, too, will many, many people perish in just forty days because they do not believe the truth of the Word of God. They are being warned. They are hearing the sound of the trumpet with their physical ears, but they are not taking any action or doing anything about this. Therefore, they really do not understand and they are going to take their chances. This is the tragic thing that we are seeing all around us.
Let us go back to Jonah 3:3. It says:
So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of JEHOVAH. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey.
Where it says:
…Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city…
This literally means:
…a great city to God…
The word for “God” is in the Hebrew. If you look in an Interlinear Bible, this word “exceeding” is the word ‘elohiym, which is the word for “God.” It says:
…Nineveh a great city to God…
Therefore, if it was “a great city to God,” it was an “exceeding great city.” This is what the translators thought, which is true. It was a “great city,” because God had much people there and He wanted to make a positive example of them.
We have many negative examples of those who do not believe, like Lot’s sons-in-law. In Genesis 19, God told Lot, “We will destroy this place… escape for thy life.” Then Lot went to his sons-in-law and told them almost word-for-word what the Lord had told him, “Up, get you out of this place; for the LORD will destroy this city.” Then we read, “But he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons in law.” This is to say that they said something like, “Father-in-law, you cannot be serious! You really cannot be serious. You must be joking,” and then maybe they had a laugh.
Well, Lot was very serious. There was no time to waste. They were laughing then, but soon the fire and brimstone would fall from Heaven. At that point, there was no more laughter; there was no more joy.
Then we read again in Jonah 3:4:
And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
Go to Genesis 19. We read in Genesis 19:24-25:
Then JEHOVAH rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from JEHOVAH out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities…
This is the same word as “overthrown.” It continues:
And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
So God is using here the same word that He used with Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain. We know what this means then. If they were going to be overthrown, they were going to be utterly destroyed. They would have been completely destroyed, as God did to those four cities of the plain.
Going back to Jonah, it says in Jonah 3:5:
So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.
What can fasting refer to? It can refer to when someone stops eating, but we do not have to do this. In these last 40 days, no one should think, “I am going to stop eating from now until May 21st.” God does not care if you eat or do not eat. He would care if you were starving yourself; otherwise, it does not matter. God is using this word for fasting to represent something spiritually.
The important thing here is that they proclaimed a fast and they did stop eating and drinking. This is important because if we go to Matthew 24, it says in Matthew 24:37-39:
But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
They were warned. Why else would God indicate that they were “eating and drinking” and “marrying and giving in marriage” if He had not first told them that judgment was coming at a specific time?
So this means that this was wrong of them, but why? God gave the institution of marriage; there was nothing wrong with doing this. God knows that we have to eat and drink; there is nothing wrong with doing this either. What was wrong was for them to continue on with their lives, normally going on day after day. This is why He is pointing out that they were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.”
If we go to Luke 17, it also speaks of the flood, as well as of Sodom. We read in Luke 17:27-30:
They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.
These people were just continuing on. They were eating, drinking, marrying, building, planting, like it was just another day in the world. They were acting like it was just another normal day, and this was the problem. This was the problem then and this is probably the problem with some here. With a lot of people, the problem is that they are hearing this – and they might even believe this or have an interest in this – but they are going on as normal.
We have to do some things; this is true. We may still have to work. We may still have school. God tells us that whatever we are doing, “do it heartily, as to the Lord.” This is what we tell our children if they are still in school where they are still being tested in subjects. They sometimes ask, “Why should I continue doing these things if May 21st is Judgment Day?” The reason is because whatever they are doing, they are to “do it heartily, as to the Lord.”
We are to serve Him wherever He has placed us. However, there is also a certain mindset and an attitude that some can have, which is just to continue going about a daily routine, our daily normal business, when we are hearing something that is not typical, something that should evoke a response that is not one of just continuing on with everyday type of events. This warning is not to be taken as though we are hearing just anything else.
This is the end of the world. This is “the end of all things.” “The end of all things is at hand.” It is “the end.” There will be no more ends. “The end” is here. In forty days, the world will be destroyed. In forty days, Judgment Day begins. Then it will be over, for all intents and purposes. There will only be left a five-month period of great sorrow, of torment.
This information ought to at least allow each person who hears this to interrupt their lives. Stop what you are doing. Stop the way that you are going. Stop all of the unnecessary things that you do and start thinking seriously about your relationship with God.
We can look at it this way. I have never experienced this, but I know that through the news this happens all of the time. A hurricane is coming through the Caribbean. It is approaching the coast of Florida or Texas or some other state. They get a warning coming over their television or radio station from the Emergency Alert System (EAS). This interrupts their programming.
If we did this concerning the warning of May 21st being Judgment Day, all kinds of people would get upset. They would be mad, “How dare you interrupt our comedy show! How dare you interrupt the movie that we were watching to tell us this news!”
If the Emergency Alert System interrupts regularly-scheduled programming to tell people that a hurricane is coming directly for them where they live in their town on the coast, are they going to turn this off? This is what some people do with this warning of May 21st. They turn their back to this information. They turn around and move away from it.
But if a huge hurricane is heading their way that is going to destroy their entire town, are they just going to turn around and go into the kitchen to do the dishes? After hearing this, are they just going to walk around the house vacuuming and preparing their meal?
What about their children? Their children are probably running through the house and going off to play. Are they not going to say something to them? Are they just going to wave goodbye to their children, “Have a nice day”? How horrible! How awful!
There are usually one or two people who will ride out a storm; but most people know that if they have just been warned, they need to react, “I need to take care of things!” Then they frantically board up their windows and gather their valuables. They gather their children whom they love and make sure that they are in the car and ready to go so that they can get out of town and flee this danger.
The only difference between that type of warning and this warning of May 21st is that this is a billion times worse and that this is spiritual, because this warning is spiritually discerned. We cannot look at weather maps to determine this. We do not rely on the weather people to tell us that this is coming; and yet people have more trust in the weather people when they tell us that a hurricane is coming than they do in the God of the Bible who created the weather.
God is telling us that the end of all things will be May 21st of this year, forty days from now. Are we to continue just preparing our meals and eating and drinking, laughing, marrying and giving in marriage? There are going to be people who will be having their weddings on May 21st, because this is a Saturday in the spring. This is the tragedy that Jesus was speaking of, “Because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.”
Going back to Jonah, we read in Jonah 3:5:
So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.
What does “sackcloth” indicate? We do not have time to go to too many places, so let us just go to Esther 4. If you do look up this word for “sackcloth,” you will find that this is often in connection with mourning and sadness. It says in Esther 4:1:
When Mordecai perceived all that was done…
What had been done? We read in Esther 3:13:
And the letters were sent by posts into all the king’s provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day, even upon the thirteenth day of the twelfth month…
They were given a date, a date of judgment, a date in which they were to perish. If they reached this date, they would die unless something happened between the point that the proclamation was given and when this date was to arrive. Otherwise, all Jews were going to die.
Here is the reaction of Mordecai and the Jewish people. We read in Esther 4:1-3:
When Mordecai perceived all that was done, Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and cried with a loud and a bitter cry; And came even before the king’s gate: for none might enter into the king’s gate clothed with sackcloth. And in every province, whithersoever the king’s commandment and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes.
This is sanity. This is evidence of people who have their wits about them, people who have soundness of mind. They understand that they are going to die on a set date, but they also understand that there is a God who can spare them, that there is a God who can rescue them and deliver them and save them. He is a faithful God and a good God and a merciful God, and so they went to Him. This interrupted their lives. When someone puts on sackcloth and ashes and they are weeping and wailing and mourning, this means that something has interrupted their lives.
It is very important that they were mourning, because the world laughs now. The Bible says, “Blessed are they that mourn,” and yet the world laughs now. They do not want to mourn. They do not want sadness. They do not want sorrow.
For instance, we read in Luke 6:24-25:
But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.
If you laugh now, enjoy yourself. Continue in “the pleasures of sin,” as you have, as I have, as we all have. Continue. Continue allowing television and Internet and iPods to take up your time, all of these things that are so numerous that we cannot even keep track of them. Continue to allow these things to be something that consumes and wastes your time on a daily basis. You will enjoy your pleasure now, but there will come a time when you will mourn and weep.
In Revelation 18, this is what is going on. The people of the world are seeing this judgment approaching, because it has begun, and then there will be weeping and wailing from the people of the world. For now, we “sow in tears,” and yet the Bible says, “but joy cometh in the morning.”
So be a little cast down. Shed a few tears. We should. We really should and we should go to God and beseech Him. Ecclesiastes tells us, “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting.” Allow this information to seep into your mind, and it will cast you down if you are not saved. If you are saved, what about your family? You will begin to greatly sorrow for them and you will begin to mourn at this time, but then joy is coming soon. On the other hand, continue.
Each of us now has forty days, as Jonah 3:4 proclaims:
…Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
Of course, there is one more day or milestone that we will observe shortly from Genesis 7:4:
For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth…
Here we see similar language, and we are only 33 days away from the time when we will be able to say, “For yet seven days”; but God’s grace and mercy is here right now.
Let us go to Zephaniah 2. This is very comforting and should really bring great consolation to us. We read in Zephaniah 2:1-3:
Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together, O nation not desired; Before the decree bring forth, before the day pass as the chaff, before the fierce anger of JEHOVAH come upon you, before the day of JEHOVAH’S anger come upon you. Seek ye JEHOVAH, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought his judgment; seek righteousness, seek meekness: it may be ye shall be hid in the day of JEHOVAH’S anger.
It may be. There is no guarantee.
Let us end with Jonah 3. They were sitting in sackcloth and ashes, and then we read in Jonah 3:6-9:
For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?
So this is not guaranteed, but it could be. It may be that God will turn away from destroying the individual who goes to Him on His terms, because we also have to remember how merciful and kind He is. When anyone ever went to Jesus, He never turned them away; never. No matter what they requested as far as healing, He healed them in every case. This does not mean that He will or that He is obligated to heal us from our sin, but this does tell us of His nature and how good and kind He is.
Let us stop here.