The Word Did Everything
November 16, 2025
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Jonah 3:1-10
1 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying,2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” 3 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. 4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 5 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.
6 The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7 And he 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, 8 but 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. 9 Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”
10 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.
Let’s pray again.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
We’ve been talking about evangelism and outreach as a church, taking time at the end of the year to see what we can see in God’s Word in this book about a prophet named Jonah. And while a lot of the book is discouraging and convicting—and there will be more of that when Pastor Ron closes the series next week as we study chapter 4—this week we need to see the encouragement that the Word of God does everything. I’ll have two points. First, I’ll show how the author emphasizes that the Word of God does the work of God. And then we’ll talk about what work the Word of God does.
1. The Word of God Does the Work of God
For this first point, I’ll call your attention to several specific details of the book, so it will be helpful to have it open. I know we’re in chapter 3, but go back with me to chapter 1. Notice how the book begins.
Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD…
We talked about this part two weeks ago. Notice that the story begins with the Word. “Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah…, saying, ‘Arise, go…’” He does arise and does go, but he goes the wrong way. The Word of God says go east to Nineveh by land, and he goes west by sea to Tarshish. Until God hurls him into the belly of a fish.
Then we come to chapter 2. In vv. 2–9 we have Jonah’s prayer to the Lord. I won’t reread the prayer, but I will remind you of something Pastor Noah said last week when we looked at this in more detail. These eight short verses have no fewer than thirty quotes or allusions to passages from the Psalms. In other words, when Jonah is at his lowest low, what reforms his heart back to God is the Word of God.
Then notice the last line of chapter 2: “And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land” (2:10). I don’t know how God spoke to the fish, just as I don’t know exactly how he spoke to the wind and the waves and the storm. But he did speak. And the fish obeys his Word, just as the sailors did and as storm and the sea and the wind did. And just as in Genesis 1 the light obeys when God says, “’Let there be light.’ And there was light.” The Word of God does the work of God.
Now, we come to chapter 3. Notice how it begins. I’ll read vv. 1–4.
3 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” 3 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. 4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
Where is the emphasis? On the Word of God doing the work. “The word of the LORD came to Jonah,” we read. Also, notice what Jonah is to do. He is told basically the same thing he is told in chapter 1, that Nineveh is a great city, and that it is a wicked city, and that Jonah is to go there and preach. But do you see what he is supposed to preach? Look at again at v. 2: “call out against it the message that I tell you.” The message he’s called to proclaim is the message that God will tell him. The Word of God to Jonah will be Jonah’s words to Nineveh.
Let’s talk about that sermon for a bit. “Yet forty days,” Jonah says, “and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4). Is that a good or bad sermon? We’ll slow down here for a minute. Some people can talk about fire-and-brimstone preaching. This was literally that. The word for overthrown is the same word used to describe what God did to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:21, 25, 29). One might summarize this sermon as “turn or burn” preaching. Except, if we look closely, it doesn’t even seem to have the turn part. He seems to just say, “In 40 more days you will burn.” So is the judgment fixed?
As I studied this, I didn’t hear anyone say they believed this was all that Jonah said. So he probably said more than this, and that probably helps a bit. But we also need to realize that something is implied here. The turn in turn or burn is not said, but it is implied. There are times when God speaks, and God’s pronouncement is fixed; it doesn’t matter what people do. And there are times, actually most times, when there is an implied condition that God will be merciful if people respond, if people turn.
So, God might come to his people, Israel, and say, “I’m going to deal with that nation over there.” When God does that, it is, generally speaking, fixed. But if God goes to that nation over there and says to them, “I’m going to do this to you,” then it is not, generally speaking, fixed. Why? Because when the Word is spoken to a person, an implied invitation to repent is implied.
Perhaps framing it in our context might help us understand the implied mercy in Jonah’s sermon. Imagine our President having a private meeting with his generals and the members of his war cabinet. And he says something like, “What that nation did has to stop. We are doing something about this.” That is, generally speaking, fixed.
But if the President holds a press conference or goes over to meet with the president of another country, and he says, “What you’re doing has to stop. You must stand down.” That public address to that nation and that leader is an invitation to turn, even if the words are not directly said, which is the case here in Jonah 2.
To see this principle spelled out directly, you can see it in a passage like Jeremiah 18. While this may seem a technical point about a tiny sermon, it actually matters. The application is that today (or any day), if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. If God is still speaking to you, listen to his Word, and trust him for what he might do.
I’ll give one more place where the Word of God does the work of God. In v. 5 we read, “And the people of Nineveh believed God.” Surely this implies that they believed Jonah. But that’s not what the author records for us. He records that in Jonah’s words—perhaps even words he preached half-heartedly—that they saw the Word of God. It doesn’t say that they believed Jonah but that they believed God. In summary, the Word of God does the work of God.
In eleven days many of us will find ourselves at a Thanksgiving dinner table. It might be your own table or it might be your aunt and uncle’s or some other friend or family member. In that environment—an environment where people are catching up and laughing and talking about why they are thankful and asking someone to pass more dinner rolls—imagine if the conversation hits a lull, and after a pause, you nervously speak up.
“You know, Uncle Bill, I’ve been thinking. You might not have noticed it, but over the years I see greed increasing in your life; you seem to have a growing love of money. In the Word of God it says in 1 Timothy 6:10 that ‘the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.” Then you pause. Then you say, “I just think God wants to provide everything you need to be happy in him forever through his Son Jesus. And I’ve been scared to bring it up, but here we are.”
Maybe that’s not what you say. Maybe, instead, you say, “Thank you, Aunt Sally, for having us in your home. I think you make some good points about society. Let’s talk about those more. But it seems to me that you carry yourself with tremendous arrogance. I mean, you might even be right in some of your observations about those who have little money. But when you talk like that, all I hear is disdain and pride. In the Word of God there’s a letter written by James, and it says, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ I believe God has better for you than a life of constantly looking down your nose at others from moral high ground.”
Maybe you don’t say any of those. But you bring up your grandson’s struggle with alcohol or the lesbian relationship of your coworker or someone’s problem with gambling or your whatever. And to each, you connect a particular sin and struggle to a particular part of the Word of God.
I know the answer, but I’ll ask anyway: How do you think that’s going to go over?
Well, I’m not going to tell you that this is the evangelism strategy you are required to follow this Thanksgiving—or any other time. I’m not saying necessarily even saying this is a strategy you should consider. But stay with me here for a minute.
In our current moment in time and our current part of the world and in the current prevailing wisdom of our Christian subculture about how best to do evangelism, it’s not simply that what I described just now would be considered unhelpful.
In the prevailing wisdom of our Christian moment, most Christians today would find what I described as laughably stupid, as needlessly hurtful and harmful, as unnecessarily public and shame-inducing, and as patently, obviously, ridiculously unwise.
Instead, we tend to think, Christians should try to have the best decorated home and the best Thanksgiving celebration so that someone we love could say to us, “My oh my, this cranberry relish is delicious! Can you please tell me about the hope within you?” To which we will say, “Thank you for noticing; it’s all because of Jesus.”
Now, I’m not being fair. That’s not how relationship evangelism is taught. I’m exaggerating for effect. It makes a lot of sense to pay rent in your relationship before you talk about the most important things in the universe. I know in our moment that a clear confrontation with the Word of God is likely to bring great offense rather than great repentance.
So I get it; it makes a lot of sense to be a great neighbor, a great brother or sister, a great co-worker, a great whatever, and over time, as you get opportunities to care for others and love on them and encourage them and be there when times are hard, I know that is what God tends to use to most open outsiders to the good news of Jesus. When you tell others that Jesus loves them, you want it to have credibility because they also know that you love them. I get it. This approach makes sense.
Here’s my question: could it be, though, that in our desire to perfectly manicure our words—in our desire to perfectly orchestrate the situation, to perfectly navigate the right balance of grace and truth, good deeds and gospel proclamation—could this focus on us have caused us to forget that it is the Word of God that does everything? In all our desire to care about others and care about how God comes across to them, could it be that we’ve come to trust our ability more than the ability of the Word of God?
This hits me close to home. Some of you know this; some of you don’t. But we have a staff team of five people who spend 90 minutes every Monday thinking about the preaching of the Word of God. We give significant time to debriefing the last sermon and significant time to talking about the next passage and the next sermon. And we’ve done that for years and years. And most weeks the person preaching spends around fifteen hours poring over the Word and praying over the Word. I wish I could prepare faster, but it just takes a long time. Strictly in terms of manhours and salaries, our church invests significant resources in the preached Word of God. I don’t apologize for that at all. Getting the Word right matters.
I won’t speak for the others, but I will also tell you that sometimes in all this work, I feel in myself an uncomfortable question bubbling up: Benjamin, what are you trusting in most, my Word to bring my power and mercy, or your wisdom and your eloquence?
Most of you aren’t preachers, but you likely have people you love, and you want them to know God in a deeper way or perhaps come to know God for the first time. So probably these struggles are not so foreign to you. We can all be tempted to trust more in our own ability than in the Word of God. This can make us either very arrogant if we think we’re good, or very timid because we think we’re bad. All the while, we’re thinking too much about us and too little about the Word.
Let me put it like this. I’m not much of a golfer, but some of you are, and even if you’re not a golfer, you can probably relate to this. Golf is a super technical game and requires lots of focus and spending years getting good coaching on your form and hours of practice. But it’s possible to stand there in the tee box so in your own headspace, to have your mind so contorted with all the different things you’re supposed to do to hit the perfect drive and how you’re supposed to hold your hands and pivot on your feet that, when it comes time to swing, you fall apart and shank the ball into the woods.
Sometimes, you need a friend to look at you and say, “Buddy, just grab the big club out of your bag, and grip it and rip it. The wind is at your back; the fairway is wide open.” This, I think, is the encouragement we receive from Jonah 3. “Oh, Church,” God is saying, “just let my Word go out; it won’t return void.” Behold, Jonah. Behold, Nineveh.
All of this was to point out the encouraging truth that it’s never about our cleverness or wisdom or ability or even that our hearts are perfectly in it. This chapter in Jonah encourages us that, as we do outreach, the Word of God does the work of God.
2. The Word of God Gives Second Chances and Brings Revival
And if this is true, we should ask what is does the Word of God do? What is the work of God the Word of God does? Well, many things of course. God can walk and chew gum. But over and over again we see that the Word of God brings us the mercy: the mercy of second chances and the mercy of revival. You see that in the passage, don’t you? God’s Word brings the mercy of second chances. That’s so encouraging. Look at 3:1–2 again.
3 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh…”
I’m not being accurate when I say the Word of God brings the mercy of second chances. I’m using the phrase second chances because that’s a phrase we use in our vernacular and because the passage says that the Word came a second time.
But, second chances? Oh no. When Jonah arose and first took one step away from Nineveh and one step toward Tarshish, and he didn’t die, he got a second chance. And when he got on the boat, and didn’t die, he got a second chance. And when the storm came, he got a second chance. And when this happened and this happened and this happened, and when he found himself on the bottom of the sea in a great fish unable to go any lower, he got a second chance. Can you believe the patience and mercy and kindness of our God? God is not like us. And that’s a good thing.
I’ve heard one of my favorite preachers say something like, “We talk about the God who gives second chances? You already used your second chance before you even got off your knees after you asked Jesus into your heart.”
What this means for you is that if you’re a believer who has drifted from the Lord, or even run directly away from the Lord, the Word comes to you in mercy a second time and says, Arise and go. Come back to the Lord. Come back to Jesus. Come back to mission. Come back to the church. Come back to your family. Come back to God, your first love.
And this Word is good news not only for Jonah but for those in Nineveh. He, a believer, gets a second chance and they, new believers, get revival. I’ll read 3:6–10. Notice how it begins with the Word going where no one could have gone on their own.
6 The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7 And he 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, 8 but 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. 9 Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.” 10 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.
Notice the genuine nature of the repentance that happens here. They put on sackcloth and ashes and fast. We don’t do that exactly. What it means is that they choose to be uncomfortable on purpose. They set aside ordinary comfort to express what was in their heart, namely, that they knew they were wrong and needed mercy.
And notice that they didn’t just affirm that they were generically wrong. Notice that in the king’s public pronouncement, as he calls for a day of prayer, v. 8 says, “Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.” “Yes,” he says, “We are evil.” And that was true, but they even name specifically the violence of their hands, the violence that historians tell us made the Assyrian army so renowned. Behold the humility that the Word of God produced in this king’s heart. How hard is it for the one most responsible to publicly take the most responsibility and admit his wrong? Put yourself in the king’s place. Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you are there now.
Notice, they don’t wait until the thirty-ninth day. They do this on day one. And they don’t explain how their situation is unique. They own it. They even require their animals to participate. That’s a bit odd to us. But it would be like people shutting down factories that normally run three continuous shifts going empty. It would be like letting food products in those factories spoil. It would be like stopping trading on Wall Street. In other words, more important to them than money is getting right with God.
Think back to the Thanksgiving dinner table I mentioned at the beginning. What if when Uncle Bob or Aunt Betty hears that searing rebuke related to what the Word of God says about pride or sexuality or greed or whatever, and rather than standing up at the table and shouting, “How dare you! I never want to see you again,” and then storming out of the house and your life, what if, instead, a long pause followed. And your friend or family member bows his head—right there in front of everyone—and then looks back up, and you see the tears on his cheeks, and he says, “I know. I know. I hate my problem with anger. I just don’t know how to be free of it. Would you help me know what God has to say and whether there is hope that I could change?”
I guarantee that when I recounted those stories a moment ago, no one was expecting that outcome. But it can happen. We’ll find out next week that Jonah expected the Word of God to do the work of God and bring mercy to Nineveh.
Throughout the series, I wasn’t sure when to bring in a key passage from the New Testament, but I want to take us to Matthew 12. That’s on page 767 in the pew Bibles. Flip there with me for a minute. If there was any doubt about the Word of God producing genuine repentance and conversion, notice that Jesus believes their conversion was sincere. Many of these violent pagans will be in heaven because revival came through the Word of God doing the work of God of bringing the mercy of God.
In the context, Jesus was being asked for some sort of miraculous sign to validate his ministry. Matthew 12:38 begins,
38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” 39 But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. (Matt. 12:38–41)
“They got a sermon that merely implied mercy, but I’m here,” Jesus says, “living and dying and rising and promising mercy if you turn. But will you turn? They did.
Do we believe the Word of God can still bring revival? “Well, I know he did it in Nineveh,” you say. “I know he did it in the book of Acts in the early church. But I don’t know if he does that anymore.” I believe that he can. You should too.
If Jesus, the one called the Word of God, can come to earth, live the perfect life, die on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sins, rise again to give people the mercy we don’t deserve, and ascend to the throne of the universe where he promises that he all authority in heaven and on earth, and that he will come again—if he’s doing all that—then I believe his Word can bring revival again. The Word of God has done it before.
Conclusion
I titled my sermon, “The Word Did Everything.” It comes from a somewhat humorous but also serious quote from Martin Luther. Luther was a Catholic monk five hundred years ago who became a Christian when God showed him mercy. This change in him led him and others to attempt to reform the church by the Word of God. Listen to this reflection from Luther about where his success came from.
What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Nor was I crucified for anyone … How did I, poor stinking bag of maggots that I am, come to the point where [followers] of Christ [go] by my evil name? … I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything. (Concordia Seminary, Mar 21, 2017, www.csl.edu/2017/03/luther-the-word-did-everything/)
We might get rattled about his line about drinking beer and whether that was done in moderation or what have you. But that’s what I think makes it even more fitting for a closing reflection on Jonah 3. Luther did some good things, but he also had deep flaws, and I don’t have in mind his relationship with alcohol. He had plenty of problems—just as Jonah did. And just as I’m never fully the preacher I ought to be, and just as you are never fully the Christian that you ought to be. But God doesn’t stop the Word of God from doing the Work of God, which very often means bringing the mercy of second chances and the mercy of revival.
Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father…”
Sermon Discussion Questions
What are times you’ve felt like God has used you to share about Jesus with others? When are times you feel like you relied on your own ability too much? What ability specifically? Take time to confess that and ask for more opportunities to share about Jesus.
Have there been times you’ve seen revival in your life, in those you love, in whole communities? Do you struggle to believe that God can do this? If you’re not actively praying for this, what is holding you back?
What has God done for us that we can have second chances? What passages show us this?
