First Baptist Church
The Prodigal Prophet
Jonah 1:1 - 16
July 7, 2002
When I am told to do something I don’t want to do, you know what I do . . . I rebel. I do everything but what I’m supposed to do. I see that all the time with Joshua and Zachary — Joshua go to the bathroom, Joshua get your shoes on, Zachary, come on, let’s go, and it goes on and on. I think most of us can identify with Jonah. He was given an assignment by God, and basically he refused. If you’ve ever been told to do something and refused, then you know what Jonah was going through.
But there is more to the story than meets the eye. If you did word association with most people and said Jonah, they would say whale. But when we think of Jonah and the whale, we’re missing the point of this book. First, it’s not a whale, all we know is that it’s a big fish, and second, and most importantly, Jonah is a story about God’s love for the world. It can be summarized in John 3:17, ‘for God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him." Or hear the words of 2 Peter 3:9, "The Lord is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."
The book of Jonah is the story of God’s plan to reach the world, and one man’s hesitance to be part of that plan. God doesn’t want one person to suffer in hell. If it were up to God, we would all be heaven bound, however, that is a choice we make, according to our faith and our demonstration of that faith.
For the next 4 weeks we are going to take a pretty in-depth look at Jonah, 1 chapter at a time.
Let me say one thing up front, I believe Jonah is a true story. It is not a fable or an allegory. Jonah was a real person from the town of Gath Hepher which was about 4 miles north of Nazareth. In Matthew 12:40 Jesus stressed the fact that Jonah was an actual person by saying, "As Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." II Kings 14:25 tells us that Jonah was a prophet during the days of Jeroboam II. God asked Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, about 40 years before that same nation came into Israel, invaded the land and took thousands of people prisoner to Assyria.
God gave Jonah a very specific message to give to the Ninevites. Jonah was a prophet, so he knew when he heard the voice of God and he knew what to do. But something happened this time. Jonah didn’t do what was expected. Instead of extending God’s grace, Jonah ran.
Unfortunately, there are times when God’s message to us is not what we really want to hear. God may tell us the sickness we want healing from will not come about. Or God may convict us of something we really don’t want to be convicted about. Or He may ask us to do things we don’t want to do. And that’s what happened to Jonah. God told him to go to the people of Nineveh and declare God’s judgement on them because of their wickedness. The Living Bible paraphrases the last part of verse 2 by saying ‘the wickedness of Nineveh was such that it "...smelled to high heaven."’ The Assyrian Empire was well known for its wickedness and cruelty. One of their kings, Ashurbanipal would tear off the lips and hands of his victims. Another Assyrian king, Tiglath-Pileser, skinned victims alive and made piles of their skulls. Their military would hammer iron rods through prisoners noses or lower lips and lead them away as slaves.
In Jonah’s day the Assyrians were moving into the northern kingdom of Israel. The very place where Jonah lived. Jonah may have personally witnessed some of these attacks. Invasion took place over a period of years, not days and Assyria was heading south through the nation of Israel.
I want you to understand the mind set that Jonah was working with. He viewed these people as brutal savages. He wanted nothing to do with these wicked people. And he knew that if he went to Nineveh and the people repented, God would spare their lives. That was about the worst news in Jonah’s mind. Listen to what Jonah said in verse 2 of chapter 4 after that indeed had come to pass, "I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God Who relents from sending calamity."
In his hatred for the Assyrian people, Jonah didn’t want repentance to occur. Like you and me, when we are wronged, we don’t want to forgive. Instead we want our oppressors to be punished. We want them to hurt at least as much as they hurt us. Christian author Philip Yancey describes the book of Jonah as "...a true-life study of how hard it is to follow the biblical command, ‘Love your enemies." And if we are to have any impact on those who don’t know Christ, then we must learn this lesson. We must love as God has loved us.
In Ezekiel 33:11 God says, "I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live." As Yancey says, the reason the gospel is good news in the first place is because, "the free offer of God’s grace extends not just to the undeserving but to those who in fact deserve the opposite."
Jonah’s hatred of these people consumed him so much that he abandoned his call to be God’s prophet. Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse hit it right on the nose when he said that calling Jonah to go to the Ninevites was like asking a Jew to go to Hitler after the holocaust and tell him that God loved him and that everything would be forgiven if we would repent.
Jonah couldn’t stand the thought of these people being forgiven and coming into relationship with His Heavenly Father so he reacted with a jealous and unforgiving heart, and disobeyed.
If we’re honest with ourselves we’ll have to admit that we’re not to different from Jonah. We defy God when He guides us in directions we don’t want to go. What if God called you to be a missionary in the jungles of Africa or in a Middle Eastern country. What would you do? Most of us would run . . . and run . . . and run . . .
That’s exactly what Jonah did. He went in the other direction. God told Jonah to go east to Nineveh, Jonah went west to Tarshish. Tarshish was a Phoenician sea port city in Spain about 2,300 miles from Joppa. It’s believed it would have taken about 1 year to reach Tarshish. It was as far as Jonah could go in that direction away from Nineveh.
I don’t believe it was a coincidence that there just happened to be a boat heading to Tarshish. Almost as soon as they were out of the harbor verse 4 says that "...the Lord sent a great wind on the sea and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up." Now, this was no typical storm. In fact in Hebrew it literally says that the storm was so bad "...the ship itself thought it was going to break up."
The sailors on this ship were probably Phoenicians, some of history’s greatest sailors. They were well-acquainted with storms at sea and they knew this was no natural storm and that in fact it was supernatural. So they cried out to their pagan gods for help and threw cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.
Now while all this was going on where was Jonah? He was sound asleep below in the boat. How could he sleep at a time like this? I tend to think that Jonah was so tired from running from God, that he was physically, emotionally and most especially spiritually exhausted. When we disobey God, we are reduced to trudging through this world on our own power. And you and I can’t make any headway against the storms of life on our own strength. Sin slows us down by draining our strength. It’s like trying to swim with a stone tied around your waist. In Psalm 32:4, David says that when He disobeyed God his, "bones wasted away...his strength was sapped as in the heat of the summer." This is why Jonah slept. This prophet of God who was used to relying on God’s strength had lived the past few days on his own.
So, in an ironic twist the pagan captain of the ship comes to Jonah to ask him to pray. Ultimately it is determined through drawing lots that Jonah is the cause of this supernatural storm.
God caused Jonah to get the short straw and when he did the spotlight fell on him. The sailors pestered him with questions, saying, "Who are you? What have you done to cause this storm?" And Jonah told them his story. In verse 9 he said, "I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land." When Jonah said that, the sailors became even more afraid. They correctly believed that it was Jonah’s God who created this storm because of Jonah’s disobedience. Also notice that Jonah’s sins caused the sailors to suffer, cargo was thrown overboard and lost. The end result is that we don’t sin in seclusion. Like second-hand smoke, our disobedience wounds the people around us.
Well, these sailors asked Jonah what they should do to stop the storm. He instructed them to throw him overboard which shows he would rather drown than witness to the Ninevites. Instead these men did all they could do to row back to land. They cared more about Jonah than he did about them or the Assyrians! When rowing didn’t work, they did something Jonah still had not done at this point. They prayed to God, finally they followed Jonah’s instructions and threw him into the sea. Immediately the raging sea became quiet, just like the waves in the wave pool at SIX FLAGS when the motors are turned off. Instant calm. These pagan sailors responded by worshiping God, making thank offerings to Him, pledging to live lives of gratitude for His saving grace. It’s a strange twist, Jonah wouldn’t go to Nineveh to prophesy to the Gentiles, but through his own choices, when he tried to escape, he was put into a situation where Gentile sailors put their faith in the one true God because of Jonah’s weak, brief, and halfhearted witness given under duress.
Well, today as we remember Jonah, a man who was disobedient to God, I want us to also remember God’s only Son, who, when commissioned by God did NOT run, even though He was sent to a planet full of sinful people, people who would despise and reject Him — people who would treat Him so cruelly that He would intimately know suffering. Jesus was the only One in fact who has ever been perfectly obedient to God. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ was...
"...in very nature God, [HE] did not consider equality with God something
to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He
humbled Himself and became OBEDIENT to death even death on the cross."
Jesus faced the most difficult command God ever issued. He knew the unimaginable pain and separation He would suffer on our behalf if He were to obey. He even asked God if there were another way, but when the answer was "NO" Jesus was obedient and today, we can enjoy a relationship with God only because of that obedience.
I believe God is speaking to us at First Baptist Church. I believe His Spirit is alive and miracles are happening. I pray that our ears are open to hear the words of our Lord as He calls us.
Just as He told Jonah to GO to the people of Nineveh, there may be someone God is commissioning to GO. . . and tell of His love. Maybe there is someone you have a hard time loving, someone you need to forgive. If that is true then I urge you not to make Jonah’s mistake. Obey God. Commit right now to go to that person.
