Jonah's second three-day experience

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N0t only did Jonah go through the whale for 3 days and nights, but a second series of three days occurred in relation to his ministering to Ninevah. And God required a second, sort of, death, burial and resurrection to get him victory over HIMSELF.

Ninevah was so large a city that it took three days to walk through it. Jonah went one day into the city and preached. As we know, he wanted to see the city destroyed. He hated those gentiles due to their sin and felt they deserved destruction. But when God told him to preach for them to repent, he knew God would forgive them if they did repent.

Once he attempts to shame God by saying he knew God would forgive them, and that was the reason he fled to Tarshish, to begin with - to avoid preaching to them - he left the city and watched to see if God would destroy it, anyway.

So entering the city took a day, and leaving it took a second day. That evening of the second day he made a tent and watched.

God not only sent the storm and fish when Noah was fleeing to Tarshish to get him to preach to Ninevah, he then sent three more things after he completed his message. He prepared a gourd to overshadow him in the heat of the day. Jonah was thrilled.

The third day in the morning arrived, and God then prepared a worm to destroy the gourd. Then He prepared a hot east wind that gave him heatstroke and he fainted.

In his complaints to die, repeating the same words he told God about how he felt like dying due to seeing Ninevah spared, God asks him a second time if he did well to complain as He did the first time Jonah complained.

Another third day in the morning saw Jesus resurrect. And although the gourd died, that morning, another man resurrected, in a manner of speaking. Jonah.

God rebuked him and told him that he had more care for a gourd that he did not plant nor water, that came up in a night and died the next day, than all the hundreds of thousands of souls in Ninevah!

That self-centred, selfish miserable prophet wrote the book about himself and ended it as with a mic drop by God, Himself, slamming him for his unbelievable selfishness.

Wow.

What a way to end a book about yourself (!) and resurrect after a death to your own selfishness and become a caring man of God!

We need the older generation of our lives (as with the Exodus story) slain to see the new man arise and be the mature believers we were born-again to be! Infants are born and need to mature.

Spiritual maturity is when the JORDAN river is parted and we enter the KINGDOM Land (not heaven!), as we were saved from sin when we crossed the Red Sea parting. And like Jonah, we need victory of the cross over our fleshliness to rise again into true newness of life where self is kept under!