This is an extended version of what I wrote in my newsletter this week. In my newsletters, I often apply what I’ve learned in the Bible to my real life and my novel story world. Subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in reading about how and why I write my books. Ultimately, to God be the glory!
God Started the Mission
In the short book of Jonah, God told the prophet to go to Nineveh and tell them to repent.
- “Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before Me” (Jonah 1:1-2).
Jonah refused because he was rebellious. God pressed on him in various ways, including a lesson in the big fish. After God delivered him from the sea, God called him again.
- “And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee” (Jonah 3:1-2).
Jonah relented and went reluctantly as God’s chosen missionary to that big city in Assyria.
So when did Jonah go to Nineveh?
Since Google is now an answer machine with its Gemini AI, asking it would be the same as asking other AIs, so I decided to cross check my query with Grok and ChatGPT.
God Sent Missionaries
In Nineveh, Jonah preached exactly as God had instructed him. Lo and behold, the Assyrians received the message, repented, and “believed God.”
- “So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them” (Jonah 3:5).
Even the king of Nineveh turned to God because he didn’t want to perish (Jonah 3:6-9).
- “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from His fierce anger, that we perish not?” (Jonah 3:9)
Now for the world history connection.
I started re-reading Jonah last Wednesday, and on the very same day, I saw a piece of historical infographics on my social media newsfeed about Assyrians in China in the 7th century, and I was like, “Wait a second. The same Assyrians from Nineveh?”
I cross-checked multiple online search engines and found out that those missionaries who traveled from Assyria to the ancient capital of Chang’an to share the Gospel and translate Christian Scripture into Chinese for the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty had indeed originated from the same culture and geographic area as the Nineveh people whom Jonah witnessed to centuries before that.
Wow.
All three answer engines (Google, Grok, ChatGPT) said the same thing, so I picked one with the clearest format to show here.
God is Sovereign Across Time
After further research, I found out that those Assyrian missionaries to China spoke Syriac, which is a dialect in the Aramaic language that our Lord Jesus Christ was fluent in.
Now let’s connect the dots.
- 8th Century BC: God sent Jonah to the Assyrian city of Nineveh to preach repentance. As a result, the people believed in the God of our Bible.
- 1st Century AD: After Jesus had been crucified, buried, resurrected, and ascended to heaven, God sent Paul, Peter and the other disciples to spread the Gospel to their known world, which included Assyria. Now the people believed in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Savior of the world.
- 7th Century AD: God sent Assyrian Christians to the ancient Chinese city of Chang’An to share Christ. There, they translated Scripture into the Chinese language.
Did Jonah have any idea what God was up to when He invited him on an epic journey to Nineveh? Even when he complained and griped, God didn’t explain to him what He was going do more than 1300 years later, when Assyrian Christians with the same Nineveh roots would travel 5000 miles to bring Christianity to the Tang Dynasty.
The missionaries most likely traveled along the Silk Road, which was a popular thoroughfare connecting East and West in the 7th century. Below is an AI-generated map of the possible stops along the way.
But the point is that only God could have created the historical dots and connected them across centuries.
God Shows World History
Did Jonah know all that was going to happen centuries after he had passed away? If he had known the future, would he have run away from God to the coast and taken a detour by way of the belly of the fish?
By the same token, did the disciples who wrote the Four Gospels know the impact of their obedience to God? This impact is alive and well today as the Gospel of Christ is preached in every corner of the world.
I love world history. I don’t have time to finish my colonial fiction these days, but I still love to read and study the real history of countries around the world, especially when it comes to how Christianity reached their shores.
The most important history is His Story. In the story of Jonah, I learned a lot about Jesus and how God works.
But first, don’t some people out there think that the entire story of Jonah was fictitious? Here is Grok AI with some historical tidbit about Nineveh, which is near the modern city of Mosul, Iraq.
A Note to My Readers:
My background is Computer Science, so it’s natural for me to interact with Artificial Intelligence in today’s computing environment. You saw that I used Google, Grok, and ChatGPT to research the connections between Jonah and the Assyrians the same way that I once used old web search engines.
Factual research aside, I want you to know that I do not use AI to outline, draft, write, edit, or proofread my books. Even though I might use AI videos to create promotional and marketing videos post-publication, such as the book trailer I made for Zero Out (Binary Hackers Book 3), I can write my books myself, thank you very much.
- My books are mine alone and copyrighted by me. I plot with my own mind (look at all my gray hair LOL), I draft with my own hand (handwritten, actually), and then I revise with my own editing skills (on the computer, but of course).
- After that, I send my manuscript to a professional editor to be copyedited and proofread manually. I specifically told all my editors to never use AI of any kind, but to use their own knowledge of the English language to copyedit my books.
- In the process of publishing, I have to tell Amazon whether I use AI to write my books, and I am proud to say NO. I also made sure that my cover designers do not use AI-generated images for my book covers.
The downside of my manual process means that I take a painstakingly long time to write a book because of all the thinking I have to do. Thank you so much for your patience as you wait for human me to write my books, one handwritten chapter at a time, even my near-future technothrillers. For real.
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