Dealing or Avoiding Sin…

 

When looking at Jonah and the city of Nineveh we need to see people learn sin and how to deal or avoid sin at three different levels:

1. These are people who learn from other’s mistakes. They accept the advice of others and avoid a sin that the person giving advice has dealt with at one time or another.
2. This group disregards advice and examples. They decide they can commit wrong without any repercussions. Until they have that one close call that convinces them to change their ways.
3. This person ignores several close calls and changes their ways ONLY after suffering from the consequences of their actions.

Ok…there is actually four different levels of how people learn and deal with sin in their lives: This last group is the ones who ignore advice, examples, close calls, and the suffering consequences of their actions. After all this they STILL REFUSE to change their ways. Only God can truly know when someone is beyond hope. Our job is to pray for them.

Which group of people would be Nineveh, The King, and what about you…Where do you fall in the group of people?

Jonah Chapter 2:10-3:6…

This will be a summary of the lesson:
Verse 10: We see God speaking to the fish and Jonah ends up on dry land.
Chapter 3:
Verse 1: The Word of the Lord came to Jonah a 2nd time. Praise the Lord we serve a God of second chances.
Verse 2: Did God’s message change?
I propose it was Jonah that changed. We need to see that Jonah’s change was not in his attitude toward the Ninevites though.
***Jonah 1:2 in most translations reads “Cry out against” where in most translations Johan 3:2 reads “Preach to it”
Verses 3 & 4: Notice a couple things here:

• Nineveh was huge. Would take a 3 day journey to cover all of it
• Johan right off the bat starts crying out “Yet, 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”

QUESTION: What is missing in Jonah’s message?
Where is a message of mercy or a chance to repent?
Verse 5: Take notice Scripture says Ninevites believed God doesn’t say they believed Jonah.
QUESTION: What is the significance of sackcloth without ashes?

Sackcloth only without ashes is a sign of mourning. It is only when there is combination of sackcloth and ashes is their mourning and repentance.
Ashes were figurative of worthlessness.

Verse 6: King put on sackcloth and sat in ashes. This was a representation of mourning, repentance and figurative of King saying he was worthless. He set aside his royalty and robe.
It is an interesting point to consider that normally a prophet would enter a city and go to the King to deliver message from the Lord for the whole area. However, this King had Word of Lord travel to him. The King could have had Jonah brought to him and then disposed of…nice way of saying killed. But instead the King did something entirely different. We will see the Kings response in verses 7-10.
Have a blessed week.

Jonah....Repentant??

One of the questions we have been discussing is Jonah's repentance. It was brought up by one of the students, "Jonah was repentant for his disobedience while sitting in the belly of the big fish. Yet, he was not repentant of his attitude toward the Ninevehites."

This brought up the question, "Do we know if Jonah was ever repentant towards his attitude of this people of Nineveh which God told Jonah to prophesy?"

What are your thoughts?

Hello RBBC College and Career SS...

I am testing a blog on this class. Yes, you are my guniea pigs. :-)

We are going to see if having a blog and me doing my best to type up the lesson each week will help us stay connected. I am setting the blog up so that it will come to each of your individual e-mail boxes when I update the blog.

This blog will not be private like the FB group. This blog will be available for anybody to read the lessons we are studying. As always, the FB group will stay private and each of you who are a part of the group are the only ones with access to see and read the comments left there. However, comments on here will be public after they have been approved by the moderator (me).

This way you will not have to go to the FB page (but you are still welcome to do that) to stay updated.

I have a blogging program on my desktop that will also help me be more diligent in keeping the class updated.

In Christ,
Miss Dawn