Jonah 3:1 “Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.’ Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh.”

Jonah ended up fish food the first time God sent him to preach in Nineveh. This second time was different. The Lord’s intervention with his prophet led to a better outcome.

God didn’t have to give Jonah this second chance. It’s not as though Jonah was his last option at the position of prophet. Hosea, Amos, and Joel are all biblical prophets who lived at the same time. They wrote books of the Bible. They bravely preached to people who didn’t want to hear their call to repentance. The Lord could have used any one of them to warn the city of Nineveh that God’s patience with them was about to run out.

But that’s not the way the Lord deals with the people he calls to serve him. If we want to get a job done, we generally try to find the best man or woman for it. We are mostly concerned with completing the task and doing it right. When my church built a new sanctuary, we interviewed three different consultants to help us run our stewardship campaign, a half dozen architects to design the building for us, and another five construction companies to erect the building. Everyone we talked to was reasonably competent and close in their bids. We wanted the best one. After all that we still ended up with windows that leaked at the very first rain.

The Lord is as concerned about growing and developing people as he is about getting a job done. Otherwise he would do it all himself. We all know about Jonah’s big fail the first time around. He didn’t merely do a poor job of preaching to Nineveh. He ran in the opposite direction. My wife manages restaurants for Pizza Hut. When she tries to hire someone, and they don’t come back after the first interview, she doesn’t hunt them down and drag them back into the store. If they don’t want to work for her she figures she is better off without them. It can be a headache to turn them into a good employee.

God, on the other hand, miraculously intervened in the weather, created a storm at sea, and nearly sank a ship and drowned an entire crew just to get Jonah thrown overboard. He sent some giant tuna (maybe it was a whale–the ancients didn’t classify animals the same way we do) to swallow Jonah and keep him alive for three days, giving the prophet some time to chill and think about the choices he was making. He had Jonah unceremoniously vomited back onto dry land after he had learned his lesson.

The Lord went to extraordinary measures to turn Jonah into the man he wanted for the job. He took extraordinary measures to free us from our sins. He still takes extraordinary measures to turn us into believers and use us in his church today. That is how grace works. It often is not efficient. It may seem to skip over the best qualified. But it overcomes our congenital resistance to God’s call and remakes us into the servants he seeks, obedient to his word.