Sometimes, when reading the Bible, one can think that God makes His decisions in the same way people do: first He plans to punish a person or an entire people, and then sometimes, depending on the circumstances, He takes pity and changes His mind, changing His decision. When it comes to people, there is nothing surprising in such an algorithm for making a decision: a person may not know something, or may overestimate certain facts, or may simply acknowledge a mistake and replace an erroneous decision with the one that now appears right.

But God is not a human being! What, then, is going on? What can He fail to take into account when making a decision? Is there anything that can make Him change His mind?

Only one thing: people's decisions. This can appear incredible, but this is exactly how it is: God can change some of His decisions depending on the choice made by an individual person or by an entire people. After all, He really has given us freedom and treats it with complete seriousness. And if we ask Him for something with all our heart, even if the matter is forgiveness for sins we have committed, He will not leave it without attention.

Then any changes are possible in His decisions. After all, He does not want sinners to perish because of their sins; His task is not to punish, but to save. Sometimes He can hand an individual person or an entire people over to their own fate if they do not want to see Him and let Him into their life; after all, as everyone knows, love cannot be forced. But as can be seen, one turning and repentance is enough for Him to intervene again. Then the disaster hanging over a people can disappear like smoke. And the people receive a chance for salvation and for new life.

Can God revoke His decision? And if He can, in what cases? What are fate, doom, predestination? Do they exist? Prophetic experience gives the best answer to this question. Prophets are often considered predictors of future events, to whom God Himself reveals His plans so that people may learn about them.

But is that so? The biblical language has no word that in other languages is conveyed by concepts such as doom, fate, or destiny. The Bible does not use them at all. In that case, naturally, there is no reason to speak of any predestination, since predestination is impossible if nothing is programmed in advance. Nineveh was supposed to perish; it seemed doomed. But its inhabitants repented of their sins and turned to God, and He, seeing their repentance, canceled what even Jonah himself thought was already the inevitable end.

The natural question arises: what about God's plans and purposes? How can one plan anything at all if one never knows exactly whether events will happen as planned? Meanwhile, when the matter concerns us ourselves, we, being in just such a position, are still able to plan our actions and often to carry out what we have intended, provided, of course, that nothing goes completely contrary to what we were counting on. The goal remains the same; only the ways of reaching it change. Why, then, should we be surprised that God too often acts in the same way?

He could act differently. He could simply carry out His plan without paying any attention to us or to our choices. He could forgive us nothing and give each of us only one chance. But He does not want merely to carry out what He has conceived; He wants to do it in such a way that we are drawn as deeply as possible into His works. Not because He cannot manage without us, but because being drawn into His works also means becoming participants in His plans and, in the end (if, of course, we do not leave on our own), inhabitants of His Kingdom. The Kingdom without which there can be no talk either of salvation or of life.

The repentance of the Ninevites enters a new, more powerful stage when the impulse to repent reaches the king. Although we know of no historical kings of Assyria who repented, it is important to see something else here: the king does not stand aside from the movement of repentance that has seized the people and does not reject this “initiative from below.” As head of the people, he does not separate himself from those who repent and acknowledges his own sins, which are inseparable from the sins of all his subjects. The example of one who holds power can influence his subjects in either direction. Just as we should not reject the possibility that hardened sinners may change their ways, neither should we think that rulers are incapable of being guided by considerations other than purely utilitarian ones.

The Lord revoked the calamities He had foretold because their repentance was genuine. This means that we too may hope that the calamities which frighten us today need not happen if we change our ways. If only our repentance does not turn out to be a mere formality.