Heavenly Father, we know that in every life, storms will come – sometimes, they’re of our own making. Sometimes they’re made for us. We cannot always control the trials of life, but we can control how we respond to them. We know that You can calm storms – or uphold Your people to walk above them – or miraculously bring your people through them. And we know that we can always trust You to see us through every storm of life until we arrive safely on the shores of eternity with You!
May we enter this new year and all its unknown challenges with a greater confidence in You, with a 2020 vision of You, and may we face every wind and wave hand in hand with the Creator of skies and seas – in Jesus’ name, Amen!
As we begin looking toward our mission conference in a couple of months, I want to share some thoughts with you from the book of Jonah. The very first verse introduces our reluctant hero. It says, Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah, the son of Amittai.
The name, Jonah, means dove – which symbolizes a messenger of peace. And in the end, that’s what Jonah turns out to be, although he is a very unwillingly messenger.
This book is unusual among the prophets in a couple of respects. First, the whole book appears to be just one long STORY. All four chapters are telling a story about an event in the life of the prophet Jonah. The other prophetic books might occasionally tell a story, but they mainly consist of sermons the prophets preached to the Jewish people. But in Jonah, the only sermon is the eight-word message that the story records him delivering to Nineveh. The entire book is really just one long story – and while this story has a big fish in it, it’s no big fish story. What it tells us really is what happened. Jesus Himself confirmed that it was true.
But I’m going to let you in on a little secret that the Old Testament rabbis never knew about this story. It really was a prophecy after all. Not one the prophet uttered, but one he acted out! Just like the priests in the temple acted out the crucifixion every time they sacrificed another lamb – Jesus would later explain in Matthew 12:40 that Jonah was acting out a prophecy of Christ’s RESURRECTION!
Another unusual thing about Jonah is that his sermon was not to a JEWISH audience. It was to a crowd of Assyrians. Now it’s true that other prophets sometimes included messages to other nations besides Israel, but they predominantly preached to Israel. And any messages they had for other nations were preached within the safe confines of Israel’s borders and allowed to find their way to the people of other lands by word of mouth. Daniel is really the only other prophet who preached in a foreign land to foreigners, but then, he lived in that foreign land.
Jonah, however, is the only Jewish prophet who was called upon to travel to a foreign power and deliver God’s message of doom to them in person. And he balked at it, and people have criticized him for balking at it ever since.
But the truth is, Jonah shouldn’t have been the only prophet in all the nation’s history to go as a missionary to a foreign land and preach about God’s judgment to them. The Jews were God’s CHOSEN PEOPLE to, among other things, show the glory and praises of God to all nations of the world.
Throughout the Old Testament, Israel was commanded to tell all the other nations around them about God and His message of salvation. They were repeatedly given such commands as Psalm 96:3, Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all people.
Or I Chronicles 16:23-24: Sing unto the LORD, all the earth; shew forth from day to day his salvation. Declare his glory among the heathen; his marvelous works among all nations.
Or Psalm 18:49, Therefore will I give thanks unto thee, O LORD, among the heathen, and sing praises unto thy name.
Or Isaiah 43:21, This people have I formed for myself; they shall shew forth my praise. Over and over Israel was commanded to be a missionary nation, declaring the glory and praise of God to the world.
And how did they do as missionaries to the world? For the most part, about like Jonah!
Jonah is remembered as the reluctant prophet – so reluctant that it took a whale ride to get his attention and put him on track with what God wanted him to do.
We often give Jonah a hard time for being so callous to the Gentiles that he didn’t even want to share the gospel with them. But the truth is, his attitude wasn’t all that different from any of his contemporaries. Jonah was pretty representative of his entire nation. So if anyone ever wonders, why didn’t God just send a more willing messenger – well, there’s your answer. Jonah, reluctant as he was, was still about as willing a messenger as God Himself was going to find in Israel!
II Kings 14:25 tells us that Jonah was from Gath-hepher, which means “wine press of the well”. It was located about five miles north of NAZARETH where Jesus would one day grow up in lower Galilee. That’s interesting, because one of the criticisms that Jesus’ enemies later threw at Him in John 7:52 was, out of Galilee ariseth no prophet. In other words, “If Jesus is from Galilee, then that proves He’s not really a prophet, because no prophets have ever come from there!” In their blind hatred of Jesus, they completely missed that one of their most famous prophets came from a little village just a few miles down the road from Jesus’ hometown.
II Kings 14:25 also says that Jonah accurately foretold that King Jeroboam II would win back some borders for Israel – thus proving his status as a true prophet of God. Since the Bible gives us plenty of information to date the reign of King Jeroboam II, it’s fairly easy to date the ministry of Jonah as being sometime between 800 and 750 BC.
So what was making world headlines during the time of Jonah? ASSYRIA was – 600 miles to the east in Mesopotamia, where modern Turkey, Iraq and Syria all come together. The ancient Assyrian Empire was growing and threatening to dominate everything standing between it and Egypt – which included the western half of the Fertile Crescent with Israel and all its neighbors. So the people of Israel had good reason to fear the growing Assyrian Empire.
And the capital of Assyria was Nineveh. See how God describes it in verse 2:
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.
God calls Nineveh that great city – and that was true on several levels.
Of course, we’ve just seen that it was a rising military power – an aggressor state.
But also, Nineveh was one of the most ancient cities in the world. According to Genesis 10:10-11, it was built during the first generations following Noah’s Flood, around 2300 BC, shortly after the city of Babel. It was built by a man named Asshur for whom the Assyrian nation was named.
Also, Nineveh was a great city in size. Jonah 3:3 says that it was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey – that’s how long it would take to cross it from end to end. The city wall was 60 miles in circumference. It had a population of 600,000 – 10% of whom were little children who could not tell right from left.
And it was also a great city because of its fortifications. Built on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, it had access to water and food in case of siege. The ancient historian Diodorus says that its wall was 100 feet high and so broad that three chariots could ride abreast upon it, and it had 1500 towers that were 200 feet high.
But God says that their "wickedness is come up before me." For all its great wealth and culture, the people of Nineveh were violent. They were cruel and proud of it. We know that’s the issue, because in Jonah 3:8 the king of Nineveh himself specifically says, turn everyone from his evil way, and from the VIOLENCE that is in their hands. And a century later, Nahum 2:12 describes the Ninevites of another generation as a lion that did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his holes with prey, and his dens with ravin.
In other words, they were a nation of violent marauders who murdered and pillaged their way across the ancient world.
Assyrian art displayed in museums today shows how they tortured their captives and displayed the heads of their enemies as trophies to inspire terror among their neighbors. Some they hung about their cities in tree limbs. Some they impaled one on top of another like shish kebobs on a stake and drove them in the ground by the city gates like grisly totem poles for passersby to admire.
King Asshurnarsipal boasted about how he flayed enemy captives and draped their skins over his walls. He burned children alive and dismembered his captives.
King Sennacherib wrote, “I made their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of their blood as (into) a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked and the evil, were bespattered with blood and filth.”
When God says that their wickedness has come up before Him, it’s as though in all of the wickedness boiling throughout the world, Nineveh’s has bubbled to the surface of God’s attention, and the time to deal with it has come at last.
And today, nearly 3000 years later, the distant descendants of these animals call themselves ISIS and commit the same atrocities in the same lands – and film them and brag about them just as their ancestors did long ago. And the same kind of terror they’ve inspired in their part of the world nowadays is what Jonah and the people of his generation felt in 800 BC. And they had good cause to fear – in less than a century, the Assyrian kings Shalmaneser and Sargon would destroy the northern Kingdom of ISRAEL and carry its ten tribes into captivity.
So, that is who Jonah is told to go cry against – to lift up his voice and proclaim God’s judgment against – all by himself! So you might start to see why the reluctant prophet could’ve had second thoughts about it – and third, and fourth, and fifth...
I mean, imagine if God called on you to go all by your “little lonesome” over to northern Iraq today, march into some ISIS stronghold and start telling them that God’s doom was coming! Part of you might be saying, “Are you crazy! I’m not setting one foot over there – those people are maniacs!” And another part of you might be saying, “God’s judgment? Well, it’s about time! They’ve had it coming! Zap ‘em good, LORD – and I’ll stay well out of Your way while You do it!”
Now that might give you just a little feel for what would have been going on in Jonah’s mind when God told him to go warn the people of Nineveh about God’s doom coming upon them.
Even though Jonah is one long story rather than a bunch of sermons, it appears right in the middle of the prophetic books, because it has a very powerful message to the people of Israel. We’ve seen how God called Israel to be a witness, to be missionaries to other nations, and they had failed to do that. They said, “Aw, those other nations won’t listen to us – they’re too wicked. They’d just decorate their trees with our hanging heads. There’s no point in us going over there!”
And then God shows them how the nation’s capital was ripe for revival. They were ready to repent the whole time. The problem wasn’t primarily the reluctance of sinners to repent – it was primarily the reluctance of God’s people to warn them!
And you know, for centuries western Christians have avoided evangelizing Middle Eastern Muslims for the same reason. “They won’t listen to us; they’re blinded by Islam; they’re too fanatical to get saved.” And yet now we’re seeing an amazing work of God spreading throughout the Muslim world. Many times more Muslims have flocked to Christ in the first part of this century than in all the previous centuries combined.
And the conversions are only accelerating. It’s as though God is showing us that the problem was never with the Muslim’s not listening as much as it had been with Christians not speaking to them!
Hey – that’s Jonah and Nineveh all over again! The conversion of Nineveh was a rebuke to Israel’s reluctance to warn them as much as the conversion of millions of modern Muslims is to the silence of Christianity across the centuries.
But the conversion of Nineveh was a rebuke to Israel for another reason also.
How many prophets had God been sending to the Jewish people century after century? But the more messengers He sent them, the harder their hearts grew against Him. They thought they were better than all the surrounding heathen. They were God’s chosen people, after all – what did they need to repent for? In their smug self-righteousness, they dismissed the messages of their own prophets by the thousands. They reviled them, beat them, killed them, and sinned on against the LORD with a high hand.
And yet, the wicked heathen of Assyria repented from the king to the beggar at the preaching of one single messenger, and a reluctant and hostile messenger at that! How ironic that the prophet who preached with the greatest reluctance conducted the greatest revival! And what a rebuke it was to the “moral superiority” of the Chosen People!
No wonder Jesus would say in Matthew 12:41 that the men of NINEVEH shall rise in judgment with this generation and shall condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonas and behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
And again, America has had such a Christian culture for so long, and we have taken it for granted. The gospel has been preached all over this land by millions of messengers across the generations. But while other “heathen” parts of the world are being lifted out of their own dark ages by the gospel, western “Christian nations” are riding a toboggan slide toward Sodom.
In the 1900s, Africa became the first continent in the history of the world to go from unchristianized to majority-Christian in a single century.
In the Philippines, Korea, China, India, and other closed off nations, the gospel is now thriving – while America is drowning in sexual perversion, secularism and hedonistic materialism.
But if the failures of our generation parallel the failures of Jonah’s, then the transforming power of Jonah’s message can transform our nation too!
The message of God’s judgment on sin, and His mercy on repentant sinners never changes. The people of Nineveh escaped God’s judgment, and so can you by accepting the penalty Jesus paid on the cross for your sins.
3 But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.
We don’t have to guess why Jonah fled. He himself explains in Jonah 4:2, Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.
Of course, fear of the bloodthirsty Ninevites may have helped his decision, but the reason Jonah himself gives is he didn’t want the Ninevites to repent and find God’s mercy. He wanted God to zap them and remove the Assyrian threat to Israel.
So he heads 50 miles downhill to Israel’s seaport, Joppa, the modern city of Jaffa, and boards a ship heading to Tarshish in the opposite direction.
You know, anytime someone wants to run from God, the devil always has a ship waiting! When it says that the ship was going to Tarshish, it means it was ready to sail – Jonah had boarded just in time.
Tarshish is believed by many to be the ancient city of Tartessos on the Atlantic coast of southern SPAIN. The Hebrew language did not use vowels, and the consonants in Tarshish and Tartessos are so similar they could just be different ways of pronouncing the same place.
I Kings 10:22 says that Tarshish supplied a fleet of ships for Solomon, supporting the idea that it was a coastal city.
Ezekiel 27:12 says it was a source of tin – a rare metal in ancient times, prized for its use in making bronze. And other ancient historians confirm that Tartessos was known for supplying tin.
If that is indeed where Jonah was fleeing to, then it would’ve been a ship journey of nearly 3,000 miles – beyond Gibralter and the Gates of Hercules – literally to the end of their known world. Jonah would go to the last place on earth before he’d preach to the Ninevite barbarians!
But every Jew knew the songs of David who said in Psalm 139, Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?... If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. Jonah’s about to learn this the hard way!
Verse 3 says twice that Jonah sought to flee from the presence of the LORD. Was he literally trying to escape the presence of an omnipresent God? Not likely!
But God identified Himself as the God of Israel. He said that in Jerusalem and its temple, I will put my name there forever, and mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually. It was in Israel where the prophet heard God’s voice and felt His call – where he experienced God’s influence. Apparently, he thought that if he left Israel, God would call somebody else. If he was simply no longer available to go to Nineveh, God would have to call someone else.
So he paid the fare, and you can imagine that a trip to the end of the world would have cost a healthy sum. Well, he may have paid the shipmaster’s fare, but he’s about to find out that God’s fare for his rebellion will be higher by far!
4 But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.
That phrase, the LORD sent out a great wind, describes God as hurling forth the wind. God very deliberately and emphatically aimed this wind at Jonah.
The verse says the ship was like to be broken – that is, it looked to the sailors like it would break apart any second. They fully expected the storm to destroy them barring some immediate miracle.
In the Bible, natural disasters are often a response to the sins of GOD’S PEOPLE. Whenever God’s people become disobedient, they’re not only useless to the cause of Christ, but also a hazard to the world. In this case, God’s messenger had gone AWOL – he wasn’t delivering the warning that God told him to give the people.
And I’m afraid we’re living in a day when many of God’s messengers have gone AWOL. Many people who’ve been looked up to as spiritual leaders have caved into the pressures of modern culture and are being intimidated into silence against the sins of our time. Or worse, they are cowardly denying the sins of our time!
Because when God’s messengers fail to cry out against evil, the people are emboldened to ignore God’s law – they’re emboldened to sin – to expose themselves to His judgment. They are inviting the storm, and it will come!
And when it does, one of two things will happen – either the people will repent and pray, as we see in the next verse – or the ship will be broken, and they’ll perish!
And in our nation today, at the beginning of 2020, it doesn’t take a gift of prophecy to see that there’s a storm a coming! The rise in violence, the decline in civility, the partisan hysteria, the unbridled hatred, the censoring of blacklisted voices – barring some miracle, barring repentance, barring revival – what else can the escalating violence lead to but a storm? What else but a breakup of the ship?
But the most hopeful thing about all of this is that the solution is not in the hands of the world. It’s not in the hands of the lost – of the devil’s people.
If our nation’s fate were up to the Hollywood crowd, I’d be really nervous!
If it were up to the media or academia, I’d be scared!
If it were up to the clown circus that’s been going on in Washington, I’d give up!
But thank God, the solution is in the hands of GOD’S PEOPLE who are called by His name. If they’ll humble themselves and pray and seek His face and turn from their wicked ways, God will hear them – and He’ll forgive and heal their land.
The purpose of the storm was to correct the wayward prophet – not destroy him. And as soon as Jonah repents, look at what happens to the storm in verse 15!
5 Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep.
When the mariners found themselves in a storm, they suddenly got religious. Since every man cried unto his god, it seems they were from various nations, each worshipping some different idol.
But when Jonah witnesses to them, and they do what he says, look Who they all end up worshipping down in verse 16!
It’s just a foretaste of the citywide crusade that’s about to come!
This verse says the mariners tried to lighten the ship. Acts 27 describes how the sailors in Paul’s ship tried to save it during a similar storm. They lightened the ship by casting overboard anything that could be spared first, and the cargo only as a last resort. This was to keep the deck high above the turbulent water line. The wares these sailors throw overboard first would be the ship’s furniture and tackling.
But, of course, the real weight that the ship labored under was the sin in the heart of God’s prophet. Until that was cast out, nothing else would save them.
Meanwhile, as everyone else frantically worked and prayed to save their lives, Jonah was gone down into the insides of the ship where he lay fast asleep, oblivious of the danger he’s put everyone in.
6 So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not.
It’s a sad thing when a servant of God is rebuked by pagans. Jonah should’ve been the one calling these mariners to prayer, not the other way around. The ship master is appalled that while they’re all praying, Jonah is so indifferent to their danger as to sleep through it all. He urges the prophet to call upon his God – Who is, in fact, the only God that can actually do anything to save them!
So Jonah joins the prayer meeting up on deck. And you know, the first right thing that any disobedient person ever does is PRAY!
You know, as we look at the danger our culture is in, drowning in sin and threatening to sink into hell – violence, perversion and rebellion against God blowing like a gale from hell all across our land, it’s discouraging sometimes to see many Christians asleep through the storm. Pastors all over this nation should be crying out to their people, What meanest thou, O sleeper? Arise, call upon God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not!
And for those lost in sin, we cry out to you – put your trust in the only Savior Who ever died in your place to pay the penalty for your sins, Who ever rose again to give you victory over death.
Are you spiritually asleep, or are you alarmed at the sin in our land – the sin in your own life? Are you calling upon God to think upon us, to think upon yourself, that we perish not?
We often hear Jonah criticized for not sharing the gospel in a dangerous setting – but how many of us are willing to share the gospel right here in the Bible belt? Is there someone you’ve hesitated to share the gospel with because you assumed they wouldn’t listen?
Do you deal with rage in your own heart? The people you’d like to see God zap – would you be willing to have compassion for them?
