God will Do Everything for us to Repent

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Jonah 3:5-6 “The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust.”

The entire Assyrian nation who, as recorded in the notes of chapter 1 were known for their absolutely wicked acts, turn to God through the preaching of one man. Repentance was found in the king right down to the least of them. The king himself put on sackcloth repented and led his country in doing the same!

There is one interesting comment from Henry Clay Trumbull about the repentance of the whole Nineveh when they saw Jonah:

“What better heralding, as a divinely sent messenger to Nineveh, could Jonah have had, than to be thrown up out of the mouth of a great fish, in the presence of witnesses, say on the coast of Phoenicia, where the fish-god was a favourite object of worship? Such an incident would have inevitably aroused the mercurial nature of Oriental observers, so that a multitude would be ready to follow the seemingly new avatar of the fish-god, proclaiming the story of his uprising from the sea, as he went on his mission to the city where the fish-god had its very centre of worship’ (H. Clay Trumbull, ‘Jonah in Nineveh.’Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 2, No.1, 1892, p. 56).”