Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Cor. 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
When someone finally comes around to accepting something that they've been resisting, we're likely to say, "It's about time!" Jonah could be the poster child for this. Jonah 3:1 tells us that "the Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time." We're familiar with the first time the Word came to Jonah and what happened when he ran away from it. After spending three days in the guts of a large fish, Jonah was ready to listen to God. It's not hard to imagine God looking down on Jonah after he was spit up on the shore and thinking, "It's about time!"
We face our own struggles with resisting God. Through our own experiences, we learn that God isn't going to let us run away. While we haven't been swallowed by and vomited out of a large fish, it's through our own dark and disgusting times away from God that He gets our attention. We may even have to do this as a community. Israel certainly did. Their dark time as a nation lasted centuries. They had turned away from God and, despite His Word coming to them many times, they would not turn back to Him. Their nation was destroyed. The people were taken into captivity. They lost their homes, property, and even their families. Even after they were allowed back to their homeland, they lived under the rule of one foreign power after another. They were primed and ready for the promised Messiah. When John proclaimed that the Messiah had came, they might have thought, "It's about time!"
Jesus had His own perspective on the timing of things in the life of Israel. He knew that their expectations of a Messiah were twisted around. Over the course of time they had shifted from desiring the Savior God had promised to a savior they had fashioned. In light of their skewed desires, Jesus came proclaiming that it was about time. He said the time had come for the kingdom of God to draw near to them. "It's about time," He said in so many words, "for you to repent and believe the good news." Isn't it about time for us to do the same? We've lived so long in the darkness of our misunderstandings of Jesus and His Word that we're looking for the wrong things. It's about time for God to deliver us from our own disgusting great fish — to have us vomited out of darkness and death onto the shore of a dying world to become "fishers of men." It's about time for us to repent, to take to heart His good news, and follow Jesus.
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