Fryeburg New Church Assembly

Fryeburg, Maine
August 12, 1999

On Monday, I talked about how we got into this mess--in a nutshell, by following our own way instead of the Lord's. This morning I have a message of hope and comfort for you--and a challenge: Disaster is not inevitable! And Nineveh is a case in point.

When interpreting the book of Jonah, New Church Bible commentaries such as William Worcester's Sower Notes and Anita Dole's Bible Study Notes have treated the story largely from Jonah's perspective--which is quite understandable, since he is the protagonist of the story. From Jonah's point of view, the Book of Jonah is a story about overcoming prejudice against people outside one's own family and nation, doing good things for them as well as to "our own people," and opening up one's heart enough to rejoice instead of being angry when disaster is averted and good things happen to them.

This morning, however, we are going to look at the story from a different perspective--the perspective of Nineveh. For the Ninevites, the story of Jonah is one of a warning heeded, and a disaster averted. Their part of the story is told in Jonah chapter 3:

Before delving into the spiritual message of this chapter, let's set the physical scene.

Nineveh was a very large city for that time--over 120,000 people, according to Jonah 4:11--and ancient even in the time of Jonah. Its original founding is mentioned all the way back in Genesis 10:11, in the table of nations that describes the descendents of Noah's sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth. It was located in Assyria, on the east bank of the Tigris river, along the northeastern rim of the Fertile Crescent.

However, the description of it as a city that was "a three day walk" may refer to how long it would take to walk all the way around the city rather than all the way across it. We know from the ruins of Nineveh that the central walled city was about nine miles in circumference, or about three miles across. That is certainly not a three day walk, either through or around. However, if we include what we might call "Greater Nineveh," with its suburbs and the surrounding towns (which were apparently quite densely built, and closely connected together), it was indeed an "an exceedingly large city," of about sixty miles in circumference. This could certainly take three days to walk all the way around. If we look at it this way, Jonah could easily have reached the heart of the city in his one day of walking into the city to deliver his message.

Moving into the character of the city, in Jonah 4:11 it is described as a city in which "there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left." Perhaps it is a bit of hyperbole to say that all those people literally did not know their right hand from their left. We can take it as a figure of speech, meaning that these people were not especially bright.

This was reflected in their behavior. When Jonah proclaimed to the people of Nineveh that their city was going to be destroyed, he did not have to spell out why they were subject to destruction. The king knew why; he said in his proclamation to the people, "All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands" (Jonah 3:8). This fills out our image of Nineveh as a large city filled with simple people who were not highly intelligent, and who were behaving in an unintelligent and immoral way.

Now we have the basis for the spiritual meaning of Nineveh. Swedenborg tells us that Nineveh stands for false religious teachings. This is consistent with its location in Assyria, which corresponds to our intellectual and rational abilities--or in the negative sense, the misuse of our intellectual and rational abilities to destroy our faith in spiritual truth. Nineveh, in the negative sense, represents one source of false religious teachings. Swedenborg writes:

Falsity that comes from ignorance and the illusions of the senses. An apt correspondence for a people who "do not know their right hand from their left." This also gives us a perfect tie-in with my earlier lecture. For it was through trusting their senses instead of the Lord that Adam and Eve figuratively ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, bringing about their fall from their original close relationship with the Lord, and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

When Adam and Eve turned away from God and relied upon their own senses and reasoning ability instead, it not only caused their expulsion from Eden, but set the stage for Cain's murder of Abel. Wrong thinking led to wrong action--and the wrong thinking had come from wrong desires. In Nineveh, also, the people's wrong thinking led to wrong actions. Swedenborg has this to say about the king of Nineveh's proclamation that "all shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands":

So the people of Nineveh were not only stuck in the obscurity of ignorance and false ideas; that falsity went along with evil desires, leading to the violence toward one another. And so, to round out our spiritual picture of the Ninevites, we have a people clouded in ignorance and fallacies that come from their physical senses, and at the same time caught up in evil desires, which they are acting upon in their lives. Not a pretty picture.

Yet, as with everything in the Bible, it is also a picture of us--in this case, a picture of us when we have gotten off track. Like Adam and Eve, Cain, and the people of Noah's time, the Ninevites had set themselves up for a disaster. We set ourselves up for disaster, too, when we follow our own way instead of the Lord.

Let's get specific, using the Ninevites as an image of just how we get off-course. What might it mean for us to be caught up in "the illusions of the senses--when our understanding is unenlightened because it is in obscurity--and also in ignorance"?

Let's face it: sometimes, when we are being told things that we don't want to hear, we just don't pay as much attention as we ought to. Perhaps our friends are telling us that we're getting too grumpy to be around--but we're too caught up in poor little ol' me. Perhaps our boss is telling us that our work just isn't up to our usual standards--but our mind is anywhere but on our work. Perhaps our spouse is telling us that this marriage isn't what it ought to be--but we aren't interested in putting out the effort to make it better. Perhaps the Lord is telling us that we have lost our first love, and we need to rededicate ourselves to living from genuine spiritual love--but we've gotten too fascinated by our car or our boat or our TV or our computer or our hairstyle. Fill in your own example.

In all of these instances, we are paying more attention to our own selves and our own pleasures and possessions than we are to the thoughts and feelings of those around us, and our duty to the Lord. And in all of these instances, if we continue on our present course, we are setting ourselves up for disaster. If we persist in being a grump and a complainer, we will drive away our friends one by one. If we don't get our work back up to snuff, we'll eventually lose our job, or perhaps languish in low-paying positions. If we don't put out the effort and the love that a good marriage needs, we set ourselves up for a hard and loveless home life, and perhaps for divorce. And if we allow cars or boats or TVs or computers or hairstyles or any other external thing to become more important to us than the Lord and our spiritual life, we set ourselves up for the disaster of spiritual death--and that kind of death lasts a very long time!

You get the picture. When we pay more attention to ourselves than to the people around us, and more attention to the world than to the Lord, we set ourselves up for disaster on both an interpersonal level and a spiritual level.

And this selfish and materialistic direction, once set up in our minds, tends to take over our hearts and hands as well. Just as the people of Nineveh not only "didn't know their right hand from their left," but were also involved in evil ways and in violence, when we turn away from loving the Lord and loving one another, sooner or later we start to say and do things that shut us off from the Lord, and hurt both ourselves and the people around us. We start out by putting down those who get in the way of the downhill course we have started on. "Those friends are more trouble than they're worth," we may say. "The boss is a slave-driver--who could work for someone like that?" Or the familiar, "Nag, nag, nag! All you ever do is nag! Why don't you get off my back!"

Our social sense may keep us from progressing to any kind of physical harm to another person; but if we persist in this course, we will find other ways to hurt them. We may not literally kill them or steal from them, but we will certainly kill their reputation and steal their good name by talking behind their backs. We will feel perfectly justified in not taking our responsibilities at work seriously, or in slacking off on our marital and family commitments, because those people just aren't worth putting ourselves out for.

Once again, not a pretty picture. And yet, as the story of Nineveh shows, it does not have to be a picture that ends in disaster as it did for Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the whole culture that existed at the time of Noah. Those people went almost inevitably to pain, heartbreak, disaster, and destruction once they had set themselves on a course away from the Lord. But we don't have to do that.

And the reason we don't have to do that is, as I mentioned in my earlier lecture, that ever since the Flood, our minds and hearts are no longer fully unified. Yes, our head tends to go along with our heart, and our heart tends to go along with our head--and our hands do go wherever our heart and head lead them. But unlike the people of that very earliest religious era, we are capable of wanting one thing and thinking another. We are capable of lifting our minds above our feelings and our actions, and taking stock of our lives. We are capable of standing back, looking at ourselves, and measuring ourselves against the standards that the Lord has given us through the Bible and the Church. And if we are willing to do that, there is nothing inevitable about the disasters that we set ourselves up for. Like the Ninevites, we can stop the disaster before it happens.

The Lord sent plenty of prophets to the people of Bible times. Most of the time, it seems, the people did not listen to the prophets. Most of the time, they went right on living as they had before, and disaster struck just as the prophets said it would.

But not in Nineveh. We get the feeling that they listened almost too easily. They didn't argue with Jonah. They didn't say, "Who's this foreigner coming in here telling us what to do?" They simply believed God, and repented. This suggests that these people knew, somewhere in their hearts, that they had gotten badly off track. They were ripe for the message that Jonah was carrying to them. Everyone great and small, from the king and his nobles down to the common people, recognized that they had been behaving badly.

I suspect that all of us here have that same feeling somewhere inside of us when we are not living up to our own religious standards. Perhaps sometimes, in accordance with the primary spiritual meaning of Nineveh, our minds are simply clouded through not really knowing and understanding just how hurtful and damaging our attitudes and actions are. But somewhere we sense that this just isn't right. Perhaps we've allowed physical pleasures and the lure of money and personal status and power to pull us away from our spiritual path. But our conscience is still in there, telling us that we are squandering our lives, and storing up disaster for ourselves. The voice of Jonah within us is proclaiming our destruction if we stay on this course.

And like the Ninevites, we can listen to that voice. We don't have to continue down the mistaken path we are on--whether we got on that path through ignorance or through being pulled away by less than noble desires. We can turn away from the evil ways and from the emotional or literal violence of the course we have taken. And the correspondences of the Ninevites' way of repentance gives us a helpful insight. On how to start this process. Swedenborg says:

That may sound a little harsh: "on our own we are nothing but evil and falsity." But think about it. Everything good and true comes from the Lord. And we are "on our own" when we have turned our back on the Lord, and are following our own way instead. Turning our back on the Lord means turning our back on everything good and true. And what is left? Evil and falsity! So in fact, it is a no-brainer to say that when we are on our own--by ourselves, cut off from the Lord--we are nothing but evil and falsity.

Our experience of this is that when we are not following our spiritual path, but turning toward our own desires and pleasures instead, our attitude gets more and more negative, selfish, and materialistic, and we get ourselves into more and more trouble. If we continue on that path, the final result will be some form of skid row. For the alcoholic, it is a very literal skid row of losing everything, and ending out as a drunk on the street. When we are unwilling to do our job and contribute to society, it is the skid row of financial ruin. When we care more about ourselves than about our friends or our spouse, it is the skid row of broken marriages, broken friendships, anger, conflict, revenge, and fear.

So let's face it: on our own, we are nothing but evil. And the first step in repenting--a fancy word that means admitting we are wrong--the first step of repentance is recognizing that we have insisted on going our own way instead of the Lord's way, and that has caused us to be immersed in both false ideas and evil actions. False ideas: our rationalizations and self-justifications; our unfair and disrespectful put-downs of everyone who doesn't support us. Evil actions: all the mean, hurtful, stupid, and destructive things we say and do when we care more about ourselves than about anyone else.

Yes, the beginning of repentance is to gain some humility about ourselves, and recognize that we--yes we ourselves!--are very pigheaded, stupid, and destructive when we go off on our own course. If we are never willing to admit that we are wrong, we will never take the steps to change our direction. But if we follow the example of the Ninevites and listen to the message God is trying to get through to us, then we can, with the Lord's help, turn our lives around, even when we have gotten badly off course.

As you can see, we could spend hours ferreting out the spiritual meanings of this one brief chapter in the Book of Jonah. There are several other fascinating details that would be fun and useful to go into. But I've had plenty of time to talk, and it's time for you to get a chance. So I would like to leave you with this thought:

Spiritual disaster is never inevitable until it actually happens. The Lord is always willing to give us another chance. In fact, that is why we have as many years as we do here on earth: because the Lord wants us to have plenty of time to realize what a mess we have made of things, and to turn back to God. And if we do, we can have the same happy ending that the Ninevites had in the book of Jonah:

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Music: Tears of Gold � 1999 Bruce DeBoer

Nineveh: The Disaster that Wasn't

Lectures delivered at

Fryeburg New Church Assembly

Fryeburg, Maine August 12, 1999

Fryeburg, Maine
August 12, 1999