Jonah: The Storm-Tossed Prophet

(Jonah 1:7-16)

 

It is not difficult to see in the early verses of Chapter 1 and now as we continue further, that Jonah’s mess was of his own making.  Rebellion always leads us into a storm.

And Jonah was in one.  A GREAT storm, the Bible calls it.  Jonah, you remember, was running from the clearly revealed and spoken will of God.  Jonah was sent by God to bring light and hope to a GREAT city. Jonah went the other way and found himself in the middle of a GREAT storm.  Few of us receive as clear an assignment as Jonah received.

But to Jonah, this assignment seemed impossible.  It was impossible first, because Nineveh was a GREAT city.  I’m sure most reading this have been in some of our national urban centers like New York, or LA, or Miami.  The sheer number of people are overwhelming and intimidating if you don’t live around it.

Growing up in a city with a population of about 38,000 even Jacksonville is an overwhelmingly large city.  It is the second metropolitan location I have lived near, including Louisville, Ky.  But neither Jacksonville or Louisville look large next to Manhattan, or Dubai, or Dallas or Guatemala City.

Jonah lived in a very parochial setting, surrounded by people like him and people he liked.  He knew many of them and if not, they probably knew him.  Going to Nineveh was way out of Jonah’s comfort zone.

But not only did it seem an impossible assignment from God to go and preach in such a large city, but it seemed an implausible one as well.  Jonah was being asked to go and offer grace and an opportunity for repentance to some of Israel’s most hated enemies!  They likely didn’t even speak the same language.

It would be like a Jewish rabbi being sent to talk about the God of Israel in Tehran!  “I can’t go there!  They hate Jewish people there!” And that was Jonah’s conundrum.  He hated the Assyrian people.  And they reciprocated their hatred.

But Jonah had forgotten the forbearance and mercy of God.  When Moses saw the back of God’s glory as he was hidden in the cleft of a rock in the wilderness, the word he heard as the Lord passed by was,

“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…” (Exodus 34:6)

God’s nature had not changed since that proclamation.  And it still has not changed!  God loves your enemies as much as He loves you!  Jonah was to be an emissary carrying that message to an idolatrous people.

 

The Fleeing Prophet

But Jonah ran from that opportunity. He fled west when God clearly told him to go east.  Jonah’s intention was to book passage on a ship carrying him, literally, to the end of the world as far as the Jewish thought of that day was concerned.  He was going to Tarshish, and probably bought a one-way ticket.

With this act, Jonah was retiring from the vocation of prophet.  He quit.  It was too hard, too unreasonable, too confusing.  He hung up his prophetic mantle and ran.

Jonah is about God shaping a prophet.  The story ends in Chapter 4 without a concluding word.  We leave Jonah stewing on a hillside under a withered castor oil plant.  We don’t know if he re-embraced his calling or not.  Jonah may have been finished with God, but God was not yet finished with Jonah!  Romans 11 tells us “the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance.”  When God calls, God never changes His mind…even if we change ours.

Before we get there, however, we go on an incredible journey with Jonah.  And that’s where our present text finds us.

Jonah had found a boat.  Again, in his effort to escape from “the Presence of the Lord,” Jonah saw his ability to book passage on a ship out of Joppa that just “happened” to be going to Tarshish as good fortune to him.  “You’re lucky:  There’s one boat left and it’s going to Tarshish!”

It’s interesting, when we find ourselves in rebellion and disobedience, and we seem to “get lucky” and take a job we shouldn’t have, or leave our family for another person (“surely God must have sent this person to me”), that we see these as signs of our good fortune.

The Proverbs tell us “there is a way that seems right to a man, but the end are the ways of death.” The Tarshish-bound vessel seemed “right” to Jonah, but it was about to transport him into the middle of a fight for his life!

 

The Sleeping Prophet

Jonah was sleeping when he should have been praying.  It took a frightened ship’s captain shaking him awake in the hold of the vessel during a “great” storm.  Jonah was physically exhausted, no doubt to sleep through a storm like this.

But more than that, Jonah was spiritually asleep.  Here is a word for the church in a fearful time.  The men on this vessel were terrified, out of control, and frightened for their life.

And in the bottom of their vessel lay a man, sound asleep, who should have been awake, and on the deck, and telling these sailors to call out to the Lord of the heaven, sea, and earth.

One of the influential voices from the Jesus movement in the 1970s was Brooklyn-born Keith Green.  His prophetic songs still haunt me today.  One song, called “Asleep in the Light” has a refrain which says

The world is sleeping in the dark,
which the church just can’t fight
Cause it’s asleep in the light.

The sailors on the deck above were living in spiritual darkness.  They were crying out to non-existent pagan gods which could offer no relief for their situation.   Jonah meanwhile slept through his opportunity to be light in the darkness of their situation.

Before we start throwing stones at Jonah, however, we need to take a look in the mirror.  We are living through a time, in this generation, that will define the human race from this time forward.

In the midst of the craziness of people’s responses in this fearful, anxious time…what will history say the church did?   The sailors on the deck of Jonah’s ocean-going vessel were terrified for their lives.  They were ready to try anything, and more receptive to truth than they had ever been.

And yet, the church’s voice is ominously silent.  Are we fearful of the storm?  Do we not know the God of the virus?  Are we beholding to human definitions and limitations and the rebuke and fear of “political correctness?”

Or is this our hour to wake up?  We’ve been “asleep in the light” for longer than I can remember.   Our message no longer has relevance to a broken world. They think we have nothing to say that must be heard.

I wonder if it’s possible that, like the frightened sailors, the world is now searching for a true word, a hopeful word in this storm?  And if they are, can we rouse ourselves from our slumber?

I find myself convicted by this passage.  I see myself in Jonah’s face, wrinkled by blankets of self-righteousness and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced by the cries of despair around me.   More often than I’d like to admit, I hear the cries and roll over and go back to sleep…always wrapped in the comfort of my excuses.

When will we stop dickering over our petty political posturing and step up to be the church?  When will we prioritize the message of the cross over any other message?  When will we rouse from our sleep and ask the Lord of Heaven and Earth to still the storm and show His power to the fear-blinded world around us?

A fearful, sin-blinded, and storm-tossed world is waiting for a word from the sleeping church.  If God has truly placed us here “for such a time as this…” isn’t now the time to rouse from our slumber and speak and live for Jesus?

Jonah never found his identity, never let the sailors know who he was as a prophet.  He never embraced his identity as God’s man in that situation.  He hid in fear…in apathy…and turned a deaf ear to the despairing cries of the sailors on the ship.

The Hiding Prophet

When Jonah was awakened in the belly of the ship, not by the storm but by an insistent, pagan ship’s captain.  I don’t know how it goes for you, but there have been times that I have been awakened and didn’t know I had been asleep!

The problem today with the church is, we think we are awake.

But in reality, we are asleep.

 

The Waking Prophet

Whether or not Jonah knew the despair of his situation was unclear. He had slept through the storm.  Jesus did the same in the Gospels.  When Jesus was awakened tough, He calmed the storm.

When Jonah awakened, he did the same, though in a different way.  Jonah had already missed a lot of the action:

“But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. So, the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.” Jonah 1:4-6

Jonah was awakened by a pagan sailor throwing question after question at his passenger:

“How can you sleep through this?”

“Get up and call out to your god.”

One of the awkward moments for a backslidden, disobedient Christian is having someone ask him to pray for them.  “Everyone on this ship is calling out to their god, Jonah.  Why won’t you?”

Jonah could have honestly responded, “My God and I aren’t on Speaking terms at this time.”  But he climbed wearily to the deck and saw the peril of the storm.

“And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So, they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.”   (Jonah 1:7-10)

The men in desperation did the best they could spiritually.  They knew they were at the mercy of a power greater than they themselves could control.

And so, they cast lots.  This was a common way of seeking answers and solving problems in that day.  They were superstitious, like most people are who reject the truth of the Living God.

We may not resort to “casting lots” per se but a world that flounders spiritually will consult fortune tellers, Ouija boards, palm readers, horoscopes and other occult and voodoo and Wiccan approaches to try and find answers for life.

Paul tells us in the New Testament that when we reject the truth, we are susceptible to believe any lie.  The more we push the truth back, the more appealing a lie will seem to us.  We see it happening all the time in the media, and in entertainment, and even in politics and government.

These men were doing all that they knew to do.  And the lot, interestingly, fell to Jonah.  He was the problem.  He was the reason for the storm.

Immediately questions began to come:

“Who are you?”

“Where are you from”

“What is your nationality?”

“Who is your god?”

“What did you do to make him angry?”

When he answered their questions, they were terrified!  “What is this you have done?” He had already told them that he was running away from the presence of the Lord.

And so now, they are left with a quandary.  They know who is to blame for the storm.  They know he is from the Hebrew people and they had obviously heard of the God of Israel and were terrified by that knowledge!

What are we to do to stop this storm?  The answer surprises them.

And repels them.  Jonah said, “Throw me overboard and the storm will stop.”

 

The Sinking Prophet

Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Therefore they called out to the Lord, “O Lord, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.” So, they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

Jonah’s suggestion that they throw him in the raging waves did not appeal to the men.  As desperate as they were, they still sought to escape the tempest by their own strength.  The men “rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not…”

They feared the Lord of the storm.  They were afraid of what His wrath might do if they injured one of His prophets.  Their confession and their statement “…for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you” was an expression of theological confidence that Jonah should have demonstrated.

It’s an embarrassment to Christian people at times when the world speaks more truth about God than we do.  Certainly, it seems at times that unsaved, worldly people have a more certain moral compass than those who claim to know the Lord.

These things are cause for embarrassment for those who named the name of the Lord as their God.  We should be proclaiming truth to a lost world, not the world repeating things to us about God.  We should be shining out in our lifestyles and moral choices, reflecting God’s light to the world.

And yet far too often it is the case that we are outlived and sometimes, out-thought spiritually by a world that has no access to the Holy Spirit.  These things should not be true of us.

After praying to the God of Jonah to forgive them for casting His prophet into the stormy waters, they threw Jonah overboard.  Immediately, the waters calmed…the winds ceased…the boat returned to normal…the skies cleared.

And they did the unlikely…the unexpected.  They worshiped.  They truly worshiped the Lord of Heaven and Earth and the sea and offered sacrifices.  Once again, these are things Jonah should have done, but would not do.

In his backslidden, disobedient state Jonah bore witness to the greatness of God in spite of himself!  God accomplished His greater purpose even without the positive help of Jonah, and even more in spite of Jonah’s efforts to frustrate God’s will!

But now, Jonah was adrift in an ocean, and truly in the hands of God.

 

A Concluding Application

All of the little Book of Jonah is an incredible well-told, artfully written literary work.  It takes on so many themes and so many important subjects that one time reading it will lead to many others.

But a question that arises time after time is this:  Did this really happen?  Is this (as some have said to me) a “preacher story?” In other words, is it some made-up or hyperbolized anecdote or is this a recounting of an actual event with a real person?

It is certainly a true story (actual event, historical rooting) as far as the Lord Jesus was concerned.  He referred, not only to the Jonah account, but read Himself into it!

In Matthew 12:39-40, Jesus spoke of being “three days and three nights” in the ground as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish.  Jesus saw Himself as the fulfillment of Jonah and of Jonah’s ministry.

Now there are certainly some hard things in that to understand.  Jesus was not comparing Himself with a disobedient, fleeing prophet.  By no means.  But there are two things we need to pay attention to in what Jesus said.

First, Jonah was cast into the sea as a means of appeasing the wrath of God being demonstrated in the storm.  His sacrifice saved the ship and the men aboard from perishing.  He allowed them to offer his body as a sacrifice for the sake of their salvation.

Like us, the men sought first, in vain, to save themselves.  They worked.  They tried hard.  They were genuine and sincere in their effort, but without the sacrifice of another their efforts were in vain.

Second, Jonah was swallowed (next chapter) by a “gedola” or great fish.  Not necessarily a whale, though it could have been.  The question that lingers in the Jonah story, especially since Jesus points to it as a type of His coming death and resurrection, is “did Jonah die?”  We will come back to that in the next session.

But clearly, we see in Jonah an Old Testament telling of the Gospel that would not be preached by the church for many years after Jonah walked on the earth.  How beautiful that, even before Jesus was born to Mary in Bethlehem, the Gospel story was being outlined and told by a soggy, Old Testament prophet named Jonah.

Only.  God.

JONAH, THE STORM-TOSSED PROPHET

(Jonah 1:1-6)

JONAH text. (Jonah 1:1-6)

We make some common mistakes as we read Jonah.  Only 48 verses in Hebrew, it mentions a “great fish” 4 times.  It mentions a “great city” (Nineveh) 9 times.  Jonah’s name comes up 18 times.  But God is mentioned 38 times in 48 verses!  Now just doing the math, what is Jonah about?  Well, we might correctly say “a GREAT GOD!”

It’s a great story to tell children, but we miss the “grown up” message of Jonah.  Jonah raises some of the toughest questions we wrestle with as Christians in the 21st Century:  Questions on racism, and nationalism, and death, and judgment, and God’s mercy and compassion, and God’s sovereignty.  Jonah deals with our call to missions, and evangelism, and our problems with idolatry.

I want to deal today, not so much with the storyline and narrative of Jonah, but to talk about some very serious mistakes that Jonah made…mistakes we also are prone to make.

First, Jonah underestimated how FAR God’s love reaches

Jonah went down to Joppa….

(NOTE:  You might remember Joppa from the New Testament.  It was in Joppa that Peter led a soldier named Cornelius, the first non-Jewish convert, to faith in Jesus.  But this was after God sent Peter a vision in Acts 10 to teach him “call nothing unclean that I have called clean.”  Peter had to overcome his prejudice. It’s maybe just ironic that it was the same Joppa where Jonah had gone to run with his own prejudice.)

The Biblical storyline begins with Jonah running “away from the Presence of the Lord” to the city of Joppa, to book passage on a ship to Tarshish.  One of the things that happen through the Book of Jonah is that we see the character, or attributes of God either plainly stated or implied in the story.

One of the first we’ve already encountered.  God is merciful and compassionate.  His call to Jonah is proof of this.  Jonah was not a philanthropist.  Nothing in this prophet could indicate he had an ounce of compassion toward Assyria.  God had to forcibly impress on him His desire for a message to be sent.

Jonah also was about to learn of an attribute of God’s nature called “omnipresence,” or “God is everywhere.” Conversely, it means we cannot go anywhere God is not.  God is not local.  He is not regional.  He is not national, nor does He belong to any political party, race or culture of people.  God transcends all of this and stands over it.

God sent Jonah to warn and testify to the Assyrian people…ruthless enemies of Israel.  They were an unusually cruel people and were considered a “terrorist state” people Jonah had been conditioned to hate; people that were beyond Jonah’s capacity to love, given his history with them.

Jonah was a prophet to Israel’s northern Kingdom and served King Jeroboam.   We read about him in 2 Kings 14:25 where he prophesied that Israel would regain territory lost to their enemies.  It came to pass as he predicted.

Jonah was a nationalistic, gung-ho, pro-Israel prophet.  He was a patriot to Israel and to his king in every sense of the word.  But God was about to take him from his pedestal of popularity and place him in the deepest struggle of his life.  Jonah was about to go into a storm that left him wondering about this God with Whom he claimed to speak.  Did he really know Him at all?  Had He been forsaken by Him?

Jonah is also about God’s will.  God has a desired will for each of our lives.  The debate is usually about just how detailed the plan is.  But most would agree, if God is our Creator, and He is Sovereign and in control of all things created, as well as the time we are living, then He has some intention for us to live out.  Sometimes elements of that plan frustrate us.

Jonah didn’t want to go where God was sending.  Sometimes the greatest opportunities for life begin just outside of your comfort zone.  But we don’t immediately see these times as opportunities.  We see them as a problem.

Jonah’s problem was his love was limited, as yours and mine tend to be, to include only those we like.  Or those who like us.  Or those who ARE like us.  Jonah couldn’t understand how God could love the Assyrian people.  In Jonah’s religion, God blessed good people (meaning Israelites) and judged bad people (meaning non-Israelites).  He couldn’t reconcile God’s mercy and God’s justice as he saw it.  How can a just God forgive and allow a horrible nation to repent and come back to Him?  It didn’t fit Jonah’s theological paradigm.

Eric Mason said that Jonah let his SOCIOLOGY overrule his THEOLOGY.  He allowed RACE to trump GRACE.  Racism and nationalism make the mistake of saying that if we hate someone or refuse to love them or think they don’t deserve to be loved, God must feel the same way.

It’s our duty to hate them too.

But Who does God love?  And Who does God hate?  And how do we know?

Second, Jonah underestimated how BIG God is

God HURLED a storm….

There is an interplay in Jonah with the adjective “GREAT,” or, in Hebrew, “gedola.”  The same word is used interchangeably to describe a “gedola” (great) fish, a “gedola” (great) city, and a “gedola” (great) storm.

The word “gedola” has to do with immensity, dimension, intensity and size.  We use the English word “mega” in much the same way.  “Mega” could describe a hit movie in a theater, a city, a shopping center, a sale in a store, and other uses.

As Jonah ran from the will of God, which was specifically to “go and preach to Nineveh, that “gedola” city.  But Jonah’s refusal to go and do as God desired led him directly into the path of a “gedola” storm, and later into the belly of a “gedola” fish!

That is exactly what happens when we run from the revealed and clearly stated will of God.  We run from God’s best into our mess.  We abandon the glory and joy of working with God to accomplish His purposes in the world, and squander them on the confusion and chaos of trying to do things our own way.

The little book of Jonah also stood as a stark message to the people of Israel.  While I believe Jonah really happened (so did Jesus by the way, if you’ll check out Matthew 12:39-40), it is presented as a larger working parable for the people of Israel.

Jonah had simply been sent by God to do what God had intended for Israel to do all along:  Being a light to the nations; being a missionary people to a lost world.

But Israel had squandered their opportunity by emphasizing the privilege of being the people of God and refusing to embrace the responsibility that goes with that.  Lest we think we’ve ironed that out, we haven’t.  God grafted us in (Romans 9) to be a new growth on the vine of Israel that would hopefully bear fruit, since the original vine did not.

We find ourselves doing the same thing, however.  We would much rather emphasize our privilege as the people of God.  We have grown complacent in the thought and belief that we are saved, so that should be enough, and that’s all God expects.  Now, let’s enjoy the privilege of the people of God.

But God is still seeking a people to be the light…to be the missionaries who will go with His Presence and bless ‘all the families (nations) of the earth’ as Abram was called to be a blessing in Genesis 12.  The Great Commission that Jesus left us in Matthew 28:19-20Sadly, like Israel we miss it.  Like Jonah, we run from it.

Jonah kept going down…an interesting metaphor that occurs throughout Jonah.  The further Jonah ran, the further down he went.  He actually thought he could get somewhere that God couldn’t see or know where he was.

You see, Jonah thought God’s “jurisdiction” as God ended at the border of Israel.  That God was not even God of the oceans, and that he could go there to hide from the face of the Lord.

David the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 139,

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.” (Psalm 139:7-12)

Assyrians, like most cultures of the day, were idolatrous.  They had their own religions and their own deities.  They worshiped the god Marduk.

One underlying message of Jonah, though, is that he also was idolatrous.  He had created God in his own image…made Him an Israelite…believed He hated Israel’s enemies and only really loved the Jews.  And He stayed in Israel!  Blessed to be a blessing to the nations.

Whether we acknowledge God as God or not, He still is.  Though none in Assyria named the name of Yahweh in worship, He was still their Creator and their sustainer.  He was about to become their REDEEMER.  It was God’s grace for His creation that kept them alive.

You know when the Bible says, “Every knee will bow, and tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord…”  that’s what this is saying.  Whether we acknowledge Jesus as Lord of all or not doesn’t change the reality that JESUS IS LORD!  We will either acknowledge this and bow before Him or resist Him and be judged by Him.

And we will never take missions seriously until we understand and acknowledge this reality.  God loves other nations as much as He loves America.  Now if you are trapped in nationalistic thinking, that statement will give you some heartburn.  You may say you believe it, but your heart recoils from it.  There’s nothing wrong with patriotism, until it becomes nationalism which means you believe your country, your nationality, is the only one God cares about…or the people He loves most.

The problem with a theology that is nationalistic in nature is that it reduces God.  As long as we see God as the God of only nation, one people group, one culture…we reduce not only God, but we reduce ourselves.  Nationalistic religion is self-absorbed, and self-centered.  And when the chips are down, it is easy to kick a nationalistic God to the sidelines.

We will never take God seriously as long as we reduce Him to a size we can comprehend, explain, or relate to.  If you can understand all of God, you are not truly understanding God at all.  Our sin is making God too small in our eyes.  Jonah made God small in his own eyes by believing He could only be the God of Israel.

We are guilty of making Him smaller than our problems.  We think, “God is big, but obviously the coronavirus is bigger, right?”  Well of course it’s not, but we can drift into thinking that way.

Is God bigger than cancer?  Than your marital problem?  Than mental illness?  Than addiction?  Is God bigger than the grave?  And we make Him smaller than our passions.  We make Him smaller than our causes, or our agendas, and even our nation.  We use God to serve what we want or what we think is best.  That’s what Jonah was guilty of doing. That’s what Israel had done.  And if we aren’t careful, we will repeat the same sin.

God is sovereign. He is bigger than this universe.  Over every problem, and bigger than every issue you confront.  In our Milky Way galaxy, there are over one hundred billion STARS.  Our sun is among the smallest of all stars.  In our known universe, as far as we can see and estimate, there are no less than one hundred billion GALAXIES!   This awe and wonder made the Psalmist David reply,

“When I consider the heavens, the handiwork you have made what is man that You are mindful of him…?”

Trust me, God is more than enough to handle any issue you are dealing with right now.  With David the Psalmist, we’re amazed to know that God knows us…and cares.  He is God of the farthest-flung star in our universe.  And He certainly reigns as God of every nation, every ethnic group, and every piece of ground on earth.

Third, Jonah underestimated how DEEP God’s mercy will go

God pursued Jonah into the depths, even in Jonah’s disobedience.  You know, whenever you run from God’s will or God’s command or God’s presence, you always go “DOWN.” You never go “UP!”

The story of Jonah is the story of God giving a rebellious, disobedient prophet a second chance.  Jonah was confronted in the belly of the very ship he had booked passage on by a pagan sailor who was showing more devotion to his false God than Jonah was to the One True God!

How far will God go to get our attention when we’re in a state of rebellion?  Well first, we need to be very afraid when God leaves us alone!  Here is an amazing act of a merciful God Who would not let go of His rebellious child’s hand, no matter how hard he tried to pull away.

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me… (ruthlessly pursue) me” (Psalm 23)

God in grace doesn’t turn His back on us, even when we are determined to turn our back on Him.  Like the story of the prodigal son, (which parallels Jonah on many fronts), maybe you’ve found yourself running “away from the face of God.”  He’s calling you back…calling you home today.

No matter how hard you’ve run or how far you’ve gone…

…He wants you back.

But now, in our day of heightened racial tensions and Black Lives Matters and White Supremacy and everyone in between Jonah is taking a brand-new bounce.

Jonah was a racist prophet.  He was a man who put his nationality as a Jew above every other race on earth.  He blamed the Ninevites for what they had done, not to him personally, but to his forefathers and to other nations.

Jonah despised the Assyrian people so much he was more than ready for God to wipe them off the map.  People he’d likely never met, never sat with for tea; people with whom he’d never shared a meal.  But he hated them.  How much?  Enough to rejoice if God wiped them out!

But the large fish is only mentioned four times in the book.  Jonah is not about the whale.  And it’s not about the great city.  Nineveh is mentioned nine times.  It’s not about the prophet either.  Jonah is only mentioned eighteen times.  But GOD is mentioned 38 times in a book that just has 48 verses!

You know that the MAJORITY of our Bible’s 66 books were written from right to left?  Every OT book was written…God’s Holy Spirit inspired people who read from right to left, and people who think from right to left.  That is one of the main reasons we struggle so much with Old Testament books, and why we miss so much of it while we try to make it make sense as people who read and think from left to right!

Now I know that some of us, as modern, scientifically-minded left to right thinkers, believe that it would be unlikely that this is a REAL event…that it actually happened…that JONAH was swallowed by a fish.  C’mon pastor.  Sounds like a scene from Pinocchio or something.

But you may never have seen the video clips of a whale shark or even a great white that could swallow a person!  So maybe it was something much bigger than a whale that swallowed Jonah.  We don’t know.  The Bible says it was a “great fish” I’m pretty sure there wasn’t enough space inside the fish to set up a little table and chair like Geppetto had in the Pinocchio cartoon.  It would have been dark, smell like dead fish, and Jonah would have been marinating in gastric juices that probably started bleaching his skin.  And I’m sure that some of our fishermen in here have a “great fish” story at least that big that got away!

We do need to understand that the Lord JESUS believed it really happened!  In fact, He used the story of Jonah’s being swallowed as a way of explaining His time in the grave before resurrection came.  “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish…” (Matthew 12:39-40)

But ultimately Jonah’s story is about God calling Israel back to their intended purpose:  To be a light to the nations who do not know Him…  A missionary people, carrying the Good News to the world.  But the story  was repeated time after time and the Israelite’s chose over and over again  to emphasize their “chosen nation” status and neglect their duty to evangelize and do missions and to tell the nations about the God they served!  They thought God chose them to bless them.  But God blessed them to be a blessing to the nations, not to keep Him to themselves.

Church be careful.  Christian, listen up.  You were “grafted in” to the vine of Israel to do what Israel would NOT do…go to the nations and share the Good News of Jesus!!  Let’s not fail in that task as they did.

Jonah failed.  This is the story of a man called to do exactly what was in his job description:  Represent the God of Israel to a lost nation—in this case the Ninevites.  But Jonah did exactly what we do:  Eric Mason reminds us that Jonah put his SOCIOLOGY above his THEOLOGY.  He put his RACE above God’s GRACE.

The God Who Sends

This is actually an amazing beginning.  Most of the prophets, especially the minor prophets, began and finished their ministry calling Israelites back to covenant obedience to Yahweh.  Some of the prophets were sent to the northern Kingdom of Israel, and some to Judah in the south.  But it is rare to unheard-of for a prophet’s ministry to turn to a pagan people…especially despised people like the Ninevites…maybe God could find us some NICE unbelievers to love, right?

The Assyrians were an unusually cruel and wicked people.  Their evil was notorious.  It would have been an easy assumption that God would simply want to wipe them out for their sinfulness.

But instead, God sent a prophet.  An emissary to warn them and give them opportunity to respond to Him in repentance and faith.  This is where we encounter the radical mercy and grace of God.  “And…”

It was a difficult assignment for Jonah.  He had been taught all his life to hate Assyrians.  He had been taught all his life to believe GOD hated the Assyrians too.  Isn’t it interesting that we assume that because we hate someone, that God must hate them too?

The God Who Sees

Jonah went DOWN to Joppa, bought a ticket going DOWN to Tarshish (away from God’s presence), went DOWN into the bottom of the ship ….away from the place God had called him to go…to flee from the assignment God had given him.

Jonah’s story is one of going down…down to the ship…down in the ship…down in the sea…. down in the belly of the fish.

Now before we shame Jonah, let me ask this question.  Have you ever tried to run from the call of God?  Has God ever clearly told you to do something, and you just pretty much said NO?   We find our life in a downhill spiral when we do this.  We don’t ever help ourselves…we only hurt ourselves.

Maybe like our children sometimes do, we say OK, but LATER.  That answer normally aggravates parents.  Because the next thing they’re going to hear is I FORGOT.  Some smart Moms and Dads have learned to say NOW.  If you have people working for you, and you supervise them or own the company that writes their check, and you ask them to do something isn’t it  implied with your request…NOW?

Is delayed obedience enough?  Or is it, in reality, the same as rebellion and disobedience?  Jonah ran.  He didn’t want to do what God had said, and so he headed in the opposite direction.

Jonah had prophesied before about the fortunes and lands of the people of Israel being restored (2 Kings 14:25). He was obviously a very popular prophet, carrying joyful messages from God and getting applause.  He would only get God’s applause for doing this.  Some would think he was crazy doing this.  Some would think he was a traitor to the Jews!

So, he became, in the words of one book title, a Prodigal Prophet as he ran from God’s call.

The God Who Pursues

But God stubbornly pursued Jonah.  Listen.  The times we need to fear are those times when God STOPS pursuing us and leaves us to our own devices and our own destruction!

Jonah experienced and received the same mercy that he was willing to withhold from the Ninevites.  We learn in later verses that he was not fleeing God because he was afraid of what they might do to him.  He was afraid that God would do exactly what He did:  Show them mercy!

You see we want to help God decide Who He should save, Who He should show mercy to, and Who He should love.  Who are those people?  The ones we believe deserve it!   If God hates the people we hate, then He also has to love the people we love, right?  Jonah decided God should not be showing mercy to these Assyrians!  He hated them, and surely God did too!

God pursued Jonah.  From the moment he departed from Israel and headed south to Tarshish…but from that moment God was after him.  He made the mistake of thinking he could leave God behind in Israel.

His theology was wrong.  He believed God was the God of Israel exclusively. That was very common thinking among people in that day.  This God belongs to us!  He watches over everything that happens in Israel and the more land and nations that are captured, the more God can rule over.

But Jonah was about to learn an important lesson, and a hard one for him.  First, that God is the God of every people, every land, every nation, every culture, every people, every ethnic group.  God is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-national in His dominion.  God is omnipresent. He is universal in scope.  He created every person, not just those of certain races and nationalities.

Whether or not they acknowledge that does not change the reality.  Whether or not you believe in God does not change the reality one bit that He exists.  You don’t diminish Him with your unbelief.   He is still God.  You will either acknowledge Him as Creator and Lord, or you will be called to account for choosing to disbelieve.  But either way, the reality doesn’t change.  God is the God of all people.

As such, God is a lover of all people.  Every ethnos, every land, every nationality.  He doesn’t love us more as Americans any more than He loved Israel more than the Ninevites.  His heart, His love is for every person…because every person has the image of God stamped on them.  If you hurt or hate any person, you are doing the same to the God Who made them.

Third, Jonah was about to learn one of his most important lessons:  that the God Who called him also pursues him relentlessly.  This is such a powerful lesson of grace.  We don’t earn God’s love by our obedience or lose it by our disobedience.  We will know greater blessing if we obey, plus we get to partner with God in His redemption of the world.  We miss those blessings if we refuse to obey and live only for what we want.

—What is God calling you to do today?

—Are you thinking biblically about Who God is?

—Who is the hardest person…or group or race or nationality for you to love?