Jonah 3:9

"Who knoweth whether God will not turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?"

The marvel of this repentance of the Ninevites is nowhere more evident than in this:

They repented with no invitation to repent.

They repented without promise that it would do any good if they did repent.

They repented without any wish or hope on the part of the preacher that they would repent.

They repented even in the face of Jonah's anger at their doing so.

They repented en masse, from the greatest of them to the least of them.

They backed up their repentance by turning away from their violence and wickedness.

Such repentance was rewarded by the blessing of God!

Some have supposed that the Ninevites had no hope when they turned to repentance, but that is inaccurate. God had given them the "sign" of the prophet Jonah (Luke 11:30); and they knew that Jonah, in the very midst of his rebellion against God, had nevertheless received mercy, and they may well have surmised that it could be even so with them. There was also the matter of the forty days promised by the Lord before the destruction; they evidently understood this accurately as an opportunity for them to amend their ways and appeal for mercy. Otherwise, God would have destroyed them instantaneously, without any time lapse at all.

Certainly, those pagans did not believe that God was fickle. "Instead, they believed that God's greatest desire was not to destroy men, but to save them";[36] and in this they were profoundly correct.

Many have marveled at the fact that the repentance of the Ninevites did not last; but, as far as we know, it lasted for that generation, and the blessing of God was continued for an extended time afterward. In fact, the greatest period of Nineveh's power and prosperity came a century after the events of this chapter. The eventual falling of the whole nation into debauchery and violence again was nothing more than the normal human reaction to God's blessings, nations finding it quite easy to renounce God and all righteousness in times of prosperity, and thus making the very blessing of the Father the occasion of their turning away from him. It may also be surmised that Israel, herself increasingly hardened and sinful, offered no encouragement to Gentile converts.