Here in the United States, the first Thursday in May is designated as the National Day of Prayer. On that day, the President of the United States, along with senators, Congress critters, businessmen, and other ordinary citizens come together to pray for God's blessing to rest upon this country. Despite the protestations of various liberals and non-Christians about the so-called separation of church and state, and that the United States was founded as a secular government, the simple fact of the matter is that the earliest settlers to this continent came for religious freedom, to be able to worship how they pleased, And how they pleased was in a Christian manner, very obviously. To deny the Christian makeup of the settling of North America is to deny history itself. In 1610, and I looked up all these, as I always do, the European population of the United States in 1610 amounted to about 300 people. 10 years later, when the Mayflower dropped off, what were known as separatists. The population was 305 of European settlers. But in that year, while It's not in that year, but dating back to the years what they call the Great Migration. By 10 years after that, the population of the United States from settlers coming in from Europe was over 3,000. By 1700, 80 years later, there were a quarter of a million European settlers here. And while it's, if you look it up on Wikipedia, you'll see two names for it. The first chosen name is the Great Migration, OK? But the real name is, and they do admit that, the Great Puritan Migration. These settlers, almost to a person, were Christian settlers. The Puritan migration, the foundational philosophy of what was to become the United States, was framed by the Puritans. And for those of you who don't know, the Puritans are the spiritual forefather of our own Reformed Baptist philosophy. When people ask me what our service is like, I said, it's a Puritan service, by which we mean we do only those things that are in Scripture, that we can find in Scripture, and we leave out the extreme. extraneous things that people might do in church. We believe that God has shown us how we should worship. And the early Puritans had first left England for Holland, Belgium, because of the persecution they were receiving in England. Later on, they just decided they wanted their own society. And at great personal risk, I mean, think it. I was going through the passenger rolls of the first 13 ships to come here. And really, there were only like 13 ships in the first 10 years, which is why there were so few people here. The Mayflower made many trips across the country, which I was surprised to find, across the ocean, which I was surprised to find. They came here because they wanted to truly live out their Christian faith. And that desire found its way into the fabric of the country. Because after the Great Migration, migration fell off to a great extent for the next 100 years, until the 1800s. On this latest National Day of Prayer, with 400 years of immigration from every nation on earth, the Gallup organization, who looks into these things, shows that Americans who identify as Christians still remains at 70% of the country. And I was really surprised by that, OK? That we were still by those who recognize themselves as Christian. I'm not going to say that God recognizes them as Christians. But 70% of the population. On further breakdown, 45% of those self-identified Christians say that their faith is very important in their lives, with another 27% saying it is somewhat important. For a total of 70%, 72% of self-identified Christians say that faith is either very important or somewhat important in their lives. However, out of the United States, I'm just going to say it's like 225 million Christians, only 32% or 71 million say that they had attended a worship service in the previous week. Now, that also is higher than I thought it would be, that 32% of self-claiming Christians actually went to church in the previous week, according to the Gallup poll. Now, while that is, like I say, a lot more than I would have thought, that means that only 22% of the US population of 325 million people are, in actuality, practicing Christians of any stripe. Now, the usual scripture. attached to the National Day of Prayer. And one that we often reference here at Mountain Reformed Baptist Church is 2 Chronicles 7.14, which says, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land and we pray for that in our prayer meetings we Talk about that a lot, how our country needs to be turning back to God. But with less than a quarter of our national population even possibly participating in a petition to God for the saving of our country, will God, and this is something I worry about, view this as a faithful remnant numerous enough to warrant saving the whole people by association. Will God spare this country for the 22% of people who worship him? Now, we purposely recently looked at two situations of salvation by association. The first one came at the end of Acts, where Paul is being transported back to Rome for trial on a Roman transport. I'd call it a prison ship, but it was a grain ship. But same thing. Paul's being transported back with other prisoners who are going back to Rome to face trial. A huge storm comes up. And when they found her on the coast of Malta, the guards wanted to kill all the prisoners because it was life for life. If they lost their prisoners, their life was forfeit. So they were preparing to kill all the prisoners. But Cornelius, the centurion in charge, did not want Paul killed. And he ordered that none of the prisoners be killed. Everyone was saved because of one righteous man aboard that ship. In this case, for the sake of a single Christian prisoner, all the others were spared, saved by association. In the other case, however, in our Sunday school in Genesis, Abraham lobbied God for the preservation of the city of Sodom. He said, would you kill the righteous along with the unrighteous? Would God do this? Abraham lobbied God that if he could find 50 righteous men in Sodom, or half the male population, would God save it? And God said, sure, I'll do that. And as we've seen, it got down to 40 and 30, and then 20, and then 10. The ongoing negotiations, after they got to 10, God walked away from the negotiations, because basically, he knew. and Abraham had figured out that they weren't going to find a single righteous man in Sodom. Not one. So if the United States, the most overwhelmingly Christian nation in the history of the world, can only muster at the most 22% of its population if not righteous, yet perhaps willing to pray for its restoration. What nation could possibly stand before God? What nation can possibly be saved? Really, because everybody the world over looks at the United States and says, you guys are so religious. Like, what's wrong with you guys? And we hope we don't catch it. So how can any nation possibly be saved? And for that answer, we'll go back to our study in Jonah 3, verse 7 through the end of the chapter, verse 10. We've covered the first six verses previously, and I'll just go through them. So we'll read the whole chapter of Jonah 3 today, because it's awful short. 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. and the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh and he rose from his throne, removed his robe and covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. So Jonah, the reluctant prophet who preferred to die rather than preach repentance to Nineveh, that hated enemy of Israel, did not have to preach more than a little. This was no harvest crusade, okay? It didn't last like for a week. It's not a great big coliseum. Jonah had to do little more than state his purpose of coming to Nineveh, and his message swept through the city like wildfire. Verse six shows that the message rose from the city, even to the king, who immediately left his throne, either in repentance or possibly for self-preservation. So today we finish off The rest of the chapter, verses 7 through 10 read, and he, the king, issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles. Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water. But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn away from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them. And he did not do it. Now, the king of Nineveh heard of Jonah's prophecy through the actions of his subject. The people themselves initiated a citywide fast and the wearing of sackcloth. From this standpoint, it would appear to be both late and redundant to take the action of the king the action the king did in verse 7. So now we'll just go through it verse by verse. And in verse 7 of course he said, 7a says, and he issued a proclamation and published it through Nineveh. Now, while the city was repenting already, the king issued a proclamation which ensured complete and full citywide compliance. The proclamation of a king back then carried basically a death penalty that went along with it. You go along with the king. You repent, or you, your life is at risk. And while a voluntary fast was a good first step, the situation was considered so dire in the country with the, as I said last week, the recent solar eclipse, with the famines, first of all, that are common in that area of the world, but that had just hit their nation, the earthquakes, And floods, which are also common in the Middle East, had also hit them in the past year. So dire was this, that compliance in the fast was no longer voluntary, but it was mandatory. All throughout Nineveh, the fast would be held, and no one would dare cross the King. Verse 7b says, By the decree of the king and his nobles, and they have found nowhere else In Assyria, or largely anywhere, where a king issued a proclamation and included his nobles in that proclamation, usually the king was good enough to issue the proclamation that everybody would obey it. But you'll recall that in Nineveh, They'd already lost Carchemish to a foreign invasion. They suggested Osserdon III, who was a weak king, was struggling with his authority in some areas of Assyria to the point that people might not obey him, but instead He included the names of his noblemen who controlled some of those areas to make sure that there was compliance with his edict. It's possible that parts of the kingdom may have responded better to some of the nobles than the king himself. So verse seven then goes on and says, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water. Now, that sounds a little bit weird to us. The animals are going to fast also. And I don't think this was voluntary on their part. And while it might sound weird to our ears, the welfare of man and animal were closely entwined in the ancient world. People don't think about it, but it's closely entwined in our world too, okay? But these people happen to know that food didn't come from the grocery store. It came from your herds and your flocks and your fields. We would know it if we thought more closely about these things today. Man's sustenance comes from livestock. Man's sustenance comes from fields. The ark that Noah constructed did not just save mankind, remember. It saved the animals. Or not just mankind, I wrote, but animal kind as well. I don't think we ever say animal kind. But beyond that. I spoke of the Assyrian Book of Omens last week. Well, there's a series of omens in that book that included the behavior of animals in them, that the omens that included the animals had to have the animals doing what could be done to keep a curse from the people. Those animals had a role in the avoidance of judgment in the Book of Omen. So was their participation recorded in royal Assyrian proclamations dating from the time of Jonah? Well, yes. One such reads, decree of the king, and this was right from the time of Jonah. I don't know which king issued this, but they dated it. Decree of the king, you and all the people, your land, your meadows, which means pastures and croplands, will mourn and pray before the god Adad and repent. You will perform the purification rites so that there may be rest. And that is a found document from the Assyrian Empire of the 800s BC. Verse eight says, But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. I'd like to see them get sackcloth onto a cow, but perhaps they just drape them ceremonially. Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Notice that the Assyrians know what they are noted for. They are known for not just being evil, but being violent. Here they are called to leave their violent ways. We don't really know how long, by the way, that this fast was to take place. A lot of the commentators think that the reason for calling out from Jonah that 40 days and they would be overthrown was that they had to fast for the whole 40 days. Well, we all know that while man can go a number of weeks without food, we can only go a number of days without water. And animals the same. And so what they are thinking is that The fast will go on for the three days that Jonah was originally going to preach throughout the city, that it would be a three-day fast, and then it would be over. This edict also commands all people to call out mightily which means, in the Hebrew language, with all their strength, to God. This call brings to mind the pagan sailors of Noah's hire. Remember, they first called out to their gods, and it was to no avail. They were not saved by calling out to their gods. On learning the name of Jonah's God, however, Yahweh or Jehovah, They called on the true God of Israel for deliverance. Because the narrative here does not name Yahweh, by the way. Remember, God told Jonah to call out his words exactly. 40 days and you'll be overthrown. And as I pointed out last week, the word translated overthrown has a large range of meanings here. Because the narrative here does not name Yahweh, it is supposed that they called on their own Assyrian high god, just because they didn't know who else to call out to, because Jonah did not give them the name. Verse 9 concludes the king's proclamation on a hopeful note. He says, who knows? God may turn and relent. and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish. And this, who knows, perhaps, more or less is what it's saying. Who knows, perhaps, God will turn. Who knows, perhaps, shows up 10 times in scripture, by the way, in various areas. It shows up here, nine other places. The most, the one you'll remember, the most famous use of this is in Esther. 4-4. Mordecai comes to her uncle and says, Esther, you've got to go into the king. Who knows? Perhaps you were made for a time such as this. OK? So 10 times this shows up in scripture. Only twice does God respond to the who knows perhaps here in Jonah. and in Esther every other time. Every other time God does not relent the punishment he has promised. Verse 10 closes out Jonah 3 in the worst fashion possible in the eyes of Jonah because God says When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. Now, a lot of the early translations say that God repented. Well, God doesn't repent. Older versions as I said, say repented. Newer versions often say God reconsidered. Okay, reconsidered. Maybe I was hasty. No. Or changed his mind. No. God did not change his mind or reconsider his judgment against Nineveh. But while God sent Jonah to preach His condemnation to Nineveh, we know that from the very beginning of his narrative, Jonah was to be the means of God's mercy displayed on Nineveh. That's the whole point. That's why Jonah ran away. God was determined that Nineveh would repent and be shown mercy. That very phrase, 40 days yet and you will be overthrown, as I pointed out last week, could mean in 40 days you will repent. Because it means, good old Hebrew, the word means the same thing. Overthrown, repent, undone. It was God, it was not God who repented. It was Nineveh. It was not God who relented. Nineveh relented in their opposition to God. It was not God who changed his mind or reconsidered. It was Nineveh who reconsidered and changed their evil ways. God is very clear, OK? People say, well, he didn't destroy Nineveh like he said. changed his mind and repented. In Jeremiah 18, 7 through 8, God says through his faithful prophet, and listen to these words, okay? He says, if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation concerning which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. Okay, God says from Jeremiah, hey, when I preach destruction of a country and they repent, I reserve the right to forgive them and to bless them. God reserves the right to himself to call anyone to repentance and to forgive those who do return to him, even an entire violent city, such as Nineveh. In a scene very similar to this in Jonah, God calls his nation Israel to repent through his prophet Joel, OK? We've talked about Joel. He's a rough contemporary of this time. Joel 2.12-14 says, and this is The Lord talking to Israel now, not to Nineveh, not to some evil city. God's talking to Israel and says, yet even now declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments, okay? Don't tear your clothes and put on sackcloth. Rend your hearts. And he goes, return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. And he relents over disaster. Who knows, perhaps, and it actually says whether in mind, but who knows, perhaps he will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind him. or who knows whether he will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord your God. I hate to tell you, I told you there were two times when they said, who knows, perhaps this is not one of them. Israel, now think about this. Israel, God's chosen people, do not turn. and confess their sins and come back to God. Nineveh did, okay? There's not a righteous person in Nineveh. Nineveh turns, and God relents. But here in Joel, Israel does not, and the judgment will come down on it. God did not turn and relent. As I say, this is one of those eight times that the hope of God blessing His apostate people does not come to pass. And instead, God's judgment and condemnation rests on the unrepentant. So why does God save some evil people and not others? Surely Nineveh was as evil as Sodom. You know, we've been looking at Sodom in our adult Sunday school. Surely Nineveh was as bad as Sodom. God sent Jonah to them because their great evil had risen before me, so evil that of all the evil nations throughout the Gentile lands, it was Nineveh that came to God's attention. So why was Nineveh saved? and Sodom utterly destroyed. Now, God sent two angels to Sodom, okay? He sent two angels. It's not like God wasn't trying, okay? It's not like God said, I hate Sodom and I'm gonna destroy them. God sent two angels. to Sodom, and the townsmen demanded the angels be given over to them for their sexual desires. God sent a bedraggled--" and see, I always like to, just like the commenters in my commentaries, half-digested prophet. They really enjoy that visual, by the way, and so do I. But God sent a bedraggled, half-digested, disobedient prophet who half-heartedly muttered six words. And actually, it's only four in the Hebrew. So he only said four words. And the entire city puts on sackcloth and ashes and makes every man and animal go on a strict fast. Nineveh was spared by God because they heard his word and sincerely repented. They called out in whatever uneducated way they knew how to, to Jonah's God in true repentance. Sodom was destroyed because despite God sending two angels to them, they did not repent. And frankly, they were never going to repent. That's why they were destroyed. They were already lost. There was no righteous to save, except Lot and his family, and they got out. But they were never going to repent. Sodom was destroyed. They would not repent. None of it is saved. They repented. You see a theme here? The people in Sodom remind me of the atheists today who say that there is literally, absolutely nothing that will make them believe in God. Okay? If Jesus came back and stood before them, they would not believe in God. But remember, that's already happened in history, and Israel didn't believe in God. They turned from Jesus, who literally came back from the dead, and stood before them, and Israel did not accept them. The verse used in the national day of prayer, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land, shows God's requirement for salvation. Not just, as 2 Chronicles says, my people. The sailors on the ship that Jonah tried to flee from the presence of God on were not God's people. They were not my people. Yet no matter how imperfectly they called on Jonah's God, and they did know Jonah did give him the name in that one, and they called on the name of Yahweh, But no matter how imperfectly they called on Jonah's God, they did so both in repentance and faith. And God heard from heaven, as 2 Chronicles says, and saved them. There was not a single believer in God in Nineveh when Jonah uttered his four words. Four words which did not even include God's name, or for that matter, even God. He didn't even mention God. They were in no way my people in 2 Chronicles. They were not God's people. They didn't know who he was, and yet their faithful repentance reached God in heaven, and he forgave their sin and healed their land. So when we get pessimistic, as I often do, about the United States surviving, and being restored by God. Remember, we've got 22%, okay? Faithful Christians in this country, 22%. That's better than none, okay? By a little bit. We have 22% who do call upon the Lord. He would have saved Sodom for one righteous, repentant man. And we know this because Nineveh had not one righteous man either. But at God's word, delivered by Jonah, they humbled themselves and prayed. They sought God's face, turned from their wicked ways, and God did indeed heal their land. My prayer, and I'm sure yours also. Let's close in prayer.