Why Nineveh doesn’t save Joseph Smith

I promise that I won’t be making prophets, false prophets, and prophecies the only topic on this blog for this year! It’s just that I’m on a roll, and don’t want to stop. I’ve had these topics on my mind for a while, and one thing leads to another, and it’s just worked out well to hit them all at once, because they are all related.

In a previous post, I talked about how that LDSs will point to the Olivet Discourse as what might be considered a “failed” prophecy by Jesus, so that if Christians reject JS as a false prophet because of false predictions, they must by the same criteria reject Jesus as a false prophet for what appears to be a failed prediction about the world ending in 40 years. This post is similar and explores another “rescue” that Mormons often try to use to “save” JS from the charge of being a false prophet.

The argument typically goes like this, “So, one failed prediction means that the claimed prophet is a false prophet, eh? Then that means that Jonah is a false prophet, because he said that God would destroy Nineveh in 40 days, but then God didn’t destroy Nineveh!”

Before I give my answer, take a minute to think about how you’d respond. Would you be caught flat-footed? Many would, so if you don’t know how to answer it, you’re not alone! This highlights the importance of knowing and understanding the Bible, because the Bible contains the answer, in the book of Jonah itself as well as elsewhere.

The Bible is replete with statements that show that whenever a people repent of the evil that they were doing, that God forgives and doesn’t bring the punishment against them.

First, there is the whole giving of the Law, with its blessings for obedience and cursings for disobedience, culminating in the last chapters of Deuteronomy (starting around ch. 27), including tacit or explicit statements that if the people do wrong then start doing right, God will turn away His anger so as not to bring the punishments on them, but that if they do right then start doing wrong, God will punish them. There are many other similar statements throughout the OT, both in word and in practice (e.g., we see historical examples of God punishing wickedness but also of turning away from punishment when repentance was made — for instance, when David repented of his sin with Bathsheba), so that even if we had nothing else, we could still understand the principle that repentance brings forgiveness and a reduction or elimination of punishment. We might even shorten it to the rhyming couplet, “if they repent, He will relent”.

But wait, there’s more! There are multiple passages in Jeremiah in which this is specifically said:

At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.

Jer. 18:7-8

Jer. 26 has three such instances — two direct statements that if the people turn away from their evil, God will turn away from their punishment, and one statement reminding the people of Hezekiah’s experience of him repenting and God granting him 15 more years of life. See also Jer. 42, and many other similar passages all throughout the OT.

This is also implied in the very book of Jonah itself! Most people are familiar with the broad overview of the brief story, since it’s a favorite Sunday School story, of Jonah getting eaten by the whale (or whatever sea creature it was): God calls Jonah and tells him to go to Nineveh and “cry against it” because of their wickedness, but instead of going there, Jonah takes a ship in the opposite direction, is thrown overboard and is eaten by a sea creature and stays there for 3 days before being vomited up on the beach, whereupon he finally obeys and preaches in Nineveh. People may or may not realize that the story continues with Jonah leaving the city and sitting on a hill outside the city to see the city be destroyed (after all, Nineveh is Israel’s sworn enemy!), and gets mad when God spares the city because the people repented.

Here’s a question for consideration — why did Jonah run away in the first place? We aren’t told at the beginning, so we might be tempted to speculate. Some might think that he was too afraid to go to the big and powerful enemy city and pronounce woe and destruction on it, thinking that they might capture and kill him for so doing, but that isn’t the case. And if you think about it, you’d think Jonah would be only too happy to go and tell Israel’s enemies that they’re all going to be destroyed in just over a month — one less powerful enemy for Israel to worry about! Instead, he turns and runs away. We find out later why — at the end, when Jonah is sitting, waiting to see Nineveh go up in smoke and it doesn’t happen, we read:

And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.

Jonah 4:2

We aren’t told at the beginning of the story, when it happened, that Jonah had said this, but we see that even then, Jonah knew that if the people of Nineveh repented, that God wouldn’t destroy it. This then makes his running away his way of ensuring that Nineveh would be destroyed! He didn’t want to go preach to them, because he thought it likely they would repent, and he knew that if they repented God wouldn’t destroy them, and he wanted them destroyed.

Now, bringing this to our day, and looking back at JS’s failed predictions, in order for Mormons to apply this account of Jonah predicting that God would destroy Nineveh but then it didn’t happen, to any or all of JS’s false prophecies, they must show that the prediction could reasonably be linked to man’s actions, such that a bad thing was foretold but the people repented so the bad thing didn’t happen. The D&Cs are full of such failed predictions as these, including things like the United States would be punished if they continued to treat the Mormons badly or didn’t get justice for JS’s death, etc. These situations were never remedied, but the promised destruction didn’t happen.

In Jonah, we have a very tight connection between a change in the actions of man (from wickedness to repentance — in their case, the entire city repented and went about in dust and ashes and sackcloth — even the animals! — to show their change of heart) to a change in the promised / predicted outcome. There is nothing like this in most of JS’s failed predictions (maybe all of them, but I’m not sure I’ve seen them all). Not only do most of the predictions have nothing to do with repentance or obedience (even implied, much more explicitly said), but we also don’t see any connection between a change of action in any man (either from rebellion to repentance, or from obedience to disobedience) and a change in outcome.

JS repeatedly predicted that bad things would happen to Mormons’ enemies, but nothing ever did, even though they didn’t repent. Similarly, he repeatedly predicted that good things would happen to the Mormons themselves, but these predictions also often failed, and the only thing we’re told is a very vague statement about how they must have sinned, but we’re never given anything that explains what those sins were, who committed them, and that they began this sin after the “good thing” was promised, such that God was punishing them for this new sin by withholding the previously-promised blessing. So, no, Nineveh doesn’t rescue JS from being a false prophet.

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