Jonah 1
The Runaway Prophet
Jonah was a prophet of the most-high God. It was his job to listen to the word of God and then communicate it to the people. It is by God’s word through Jonah that Jeroboam II extended the boundaries of Israel in 2 Kings 14:25. Much of what he would communicate would be drawing people back into right relationship with their God. He would have called people to obedience to their God.
But this time it is he that is called to obedience – and he balks!
1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 "Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me."
3 But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord .
A little geography lesson: Nineveh is in what is now northern Iraq, as best as we can figure is that Tarshish is a varient of the city Tartessos in southern Spain. It is basically on the edge of the then known world. It was as if Jonah showed up at the docks in Joppa and said “I’d like a ticket for the furthest I can go from here!” He was trying to run from God.
Why run from Nineveh?
Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria. And Assyria was a very powerful and significant nation. Assyria was Israel’s enemy, and Nineveh was the capital city. Have a look at Nahum ch.3. The book of Nahum is a prophecy against Nineveh, Chapter 3 describes the ferocity and the brutality of the Assyrians.
1 Woe to the city of blood,
full of lies,
full of plunder,
never without victims!
2 The crack of whips,
the clatter of wheels,
galloping horses
and jolting chariots!
3 Charging cavalry,
flashing swords
and glittering spears!
Many casualties,
piles of dead,
bodies without number,
people stumbling over the corpses-
4 all because of the wanton lust of a harlot,
alluring, the mistress of sorceries,
who enslaved nations by her prostitution
and peoples by her witchcraft.
The Assyrians were a cruel and heartless people - Assyrian engravings depict people being tortured, skulls worn around their necks to show their cruelty. When they took over a town in battle they would take any survivors and they would impale them on stakes in front of the town. After a battle they’d pile up the skulls of their enemies making pillars out of them. Their leaders would often remove the heads of their enemies and wear them around their necks. This is not a friendly nation or a friendly city (not exactly on the top 10 holiday destinations of the day) - in fact this is the nation that eventually invades and destroys Israel in 722BC (you can find that in 2 Kings 17).
And it’s to this group of people, to this great enemy nation, to this enemy city that God calls Jonah to go.
He is probably thinking, “yeah right God, you want me to go and say bad things about Nineveh to their faces so that they can kill me slowly and painfully!”
Instead, he runs the other way to get away from God.
Running from God
Have you ever done that? You know that God is calling you to a specific thing, but out of fear or rebellion, you run the exact opposite direction?
The call on your life might not be to a place as dangerous as Nineveh, but it is a call all the same;
A call to change your behavior – but instead you do everything you can to avoid the topic
A call to be more public with your faith – but instead you keep your light under a bushel
A call to forgive someone for harm they have done to us – but instead you avoid them at all costs in order to keep your grudge.
A call to quietness and prayer – but instead you fill your life with really important busy things
A call to a specific ministry or use of your spiritual gifts – but instead you put it on the back burner until a more opportune time
A call into relationship with God through Jesus – but instead you throw yourself into the things of the world
What Jonah forgets is that you can’t run from God! He knows it in his head – he even tells the sailors on the ship, "I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord , the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land." (verse 9) If God is the creator of all that there is, it is not like you can leave town on him!
Psalm 139
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, [1] you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
Or to quote blues men Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee…
“You can’t hide –there’s no need of try’n
You can’t hide – ‘cause you don’t know how
God’s got your number, knows where you live
The devil’s got a warrant for you.”
Jonah runs but he can’t hide, because God won’t let him go – and this is a good thing – because the worst place to be in our lives is outside the will of God!
God pursues Jonah – the storm
4 Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. 5 All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.
But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. 6 The captain went to him and said, "How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us, and we will not perish."
When we are trying to run from God, often times he sends a storm to bring us around. Sometimes the troubles that come our way are just the stuff of life – the troubles that are common to everyone. Other times they are persecution for doing the right thing, but there are times when troubles come because we are not following the voice of God in our lives. There are times when we are going through troubles and we want to blame the devil, but it might not be the devil that is sending troubles our way – It says that God sent the storm on Jonah!
This what I like to call “harsh grace” – it is harsh because it hurts, but it is grace because the intention is that the storm draws us back into God’s will, his presence and his love.
The writer to the Hebrews tells us:
"My child, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,
6because the Lord disciplines those he loves,
and he punishes everyone he accepts as a child."[1]
7Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children is not disciplined by their parents? 8If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate and not true children. 9Moreover, we have all had human parents who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! 10Our parents disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. 11No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
The Gospel singer Kirk Franklin Says “you should be happy about your troubles – if it wasn’t for troubles, some of you would never pray.
The troubles that God sends our way are not to punish us per-se, but to draw us back into his will and his call in our lives
For Jonah, the storm is literally a “wake up call.” Even though he is running from God he is asleep in the bottom of the boat!
When we are purposefully running from the will of God in our lives, it is often like we have fallen asleep in that area of our lives. We put it out of our mind, or “on the back-burner for a while until God sends a wake up call, and we are reminded of God’s call on our life, or the promises that we have made to God.
Jonah is woken up by the captain who is much more spiritually astute than Jonah – he bids him to wake up and pray to whatever god he served.
7 Then the sailors said to each other, "Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity." They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah.
8 So they asked him, "Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?"
9 He answered, "I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land."
10 This terrified them and they asked, "What have you done?" (They knew he was running away from the Lord , because he had already told them so.)
When they ask Jonah “what’s up?” he is still able to get out the right words – he serves the God of heaven, the creator.
There are times in our lives when we are able to keep up appearances very well – we can say the right things, and do the right things, but inside we are still running from God and his call on us. In fact, we can often live with this contradiction very well. Jonah is able, in one breath, to say that he is running from God, and in the other breath say that he worships God. On Sunday mornings we can lift up our hands and our voices in praise to God, but Sunday afternoon to start the run again.
Our running affects those closest to us. Jonah may think that his argument with God is between him and God, but He brings the sailors into it when he boards the ship. We might also think that our running from God is our own business, but when we run from God and the call that he has on our lives we affect everyone who is in the boat with us – our family, our friends, our work-mates. Not only do they not receive the blessing that they would receive by being in relationship with someone who is following the will of God, but they often times have to endure the storm that God sends to bring us around.
Sometimes non-Christians see the seriousness of our actions before we do.
When Jonah got on the ship, a couple of the sailors asked him why he was traveling to Tarshish, and he told them that he was running from his god. That made total sense to these pagan sailors because they believed that gods were territorial. They had certain regions that they held sway over, so if you ticked a god off, all you had to do was move out of the neighbourhood and try not to anger the new gods of the new neighbourhood.
But when Jonah tells them the god that he was running from is the God of heaven, the creator of the land and the sea, they freak out: “what did you do that for?” “How could anger such a powerful god?”
There are times in our lives that our non-Christian friends or family can say to us “Aren’t you supposed to be a Christian? Then, why are you doing this, or why are you not doing this?”
God uses the mouths of these pagan sailors to ask Jonah the prophet the question that he has for him: “What have you done?”
In the end, running from God placed Jonah in a far more dangerous place than going to Nineveh ever would.
11 The sea was getting rougher and rougher. So they asked him, "What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?"
12 "Pick me up and throw me into the sea," he replied, "and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you."
13 Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before. 14 Then they cried to the Lord, "O Lord, please do not let us die for taking this man’s life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, O Lord, have done as you pleased." 15 Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. 16 At this the men greatly feared the Lord , and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.
It is hard to figure out if Jonah knew that God would save him, or whether he just figured that drowning was better than anything the Ninevites would do to him, but all the same he asks to be thrown overboard.
These sailors are nice guys – I might have thrown Jonah overboard just for being stupid enough to try and run from God – but they try and save his life! They try and fight the storm, but it gets worse, and they give in and with much fear and prayer throw Jonah over the side.
And the storm stops.
They are floating on the calm sea like it was all just a bad dream except for their wet clothes and torn sails, there is no sign of the storm, and no sign of Jonah.
These men once again do the right thing and fall on their knees worshiping Jonah’s God and promising to serve him.
Jonah has the gift of evangelism – even in disobedience he creates converts!
God continues to be gracious to this runaway prophet. Instead of leaving him to die, he sends a great fish to swallow him and carry him to land over three days.
17 But the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.
Even when we are running from God, and he sends a storm, he also sends a way out – it might be as slimy as the belly of a fish, but it is a way out all the same.
Next week we are going to look at “how to pray in the belly of the fish.”
We learn three things from this story
1) Don’t run from God
What is god’s call on your life right now – to give your life to him? To step out in faith? To stop a certain behavior?
Are you running from him?
2) Recognize God in the Storm
Not every storm that comes our way is sent by God, but some are. Even the ones that are not specifically sent by him can be used to his purpose – we need to ask him what he is calling us to even in the storm.
3) God gives second chances
The first two verses of chapter 3 are a carbon copy of the first two verses of chapter one – Jonah gets a second chance! God is the God of second chances.
