We are first introduced to Jonah the prophet in the Book of Second Kings.
"In the fifteenth year of Amaziah son of Joash king of Judah, Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel became king in Samaria, and he reigned forty-one years. 24 He did evil in the eyes of the LORD and did not turn away from any of the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he had caused Israel to commit. 25 He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo [5] Hamath to the Sea of the Arabah, [6] in accordance with the word of the LORD , the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher. 26 The LORD had seen how bitterly everyone in Israel, whether slave or free, was suffering; there was no one to help them. 27 And since the LORD had not said he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam son of Jehoash." 2 Kings 14:23-27
Jonah was a prophet during the reign of King Jeroboam the second. He prophesied the restoration of the land of Israel to its ancient boundaries, a prophecy he lived to see come to pass. At the time, the Assyrians were oppressing Israel. The words
“bitterly” and “suffering” are poignant descriptions of the cruel and barbaric treatment handed out by the Assyrians. Rape, murder, torture, the plundering and burning of grain fields and buildings traumatized a whole nation. Jonah lived through this and it is most likely that his friends and family were victims. The wounds of grief and suffering went deep inside his heart. Who were the principle culprits? The Ninevites, citizens of Assyria’s capital city.
Then, the time came when the unthinkable happened.
"The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: "Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me." Jonah 1:1-2
God asked Jonah to face his enemies, a prospect few people welcome. Jonah certainly didn’t. There is a saying that when people are confronted with unpleasantness the common response is either “fight or flight”. How did Jonah respond?
"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." Jonah 1:3
“Flight” was Jonah’s choice and what a flight it was! He ended up in the belly of a fish for 3 days and apart from the mercy of God he would have perished there.
In the Biblical account of Jonah’s life, there is nothing that indicates that fear of the Ninevites was the driving force behind his behaviour.
I remember a song about Jonah from the days of my childhood in Sunday school that contained the line, “he just obeyed a very foolish notion!” However, there is nothing in the Bible account to suggest Jonah was given to impulsiveness.
What then were the reasons for his reaction? Did his past experiences with the Ninevites affect him to the point that he lost perspective? Had the brutal attacks traumatized him? Are these the reasons he ran? We discover the answer to these questions in the Bible.
"But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD , "O LORD , is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, O LORD , take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live." 4 But the LORD replied, "Have you any right to be angry?"
(Jonah 4:1-4)
Jonah struggled with a strong unwillingness to forgive his enemies or to let God forgive them. His heart was filled with hatred for the Ninevites. He ran from the call of God to prevent his enemies from being blessed with mercy. He most certainly did not want to be the instrument through which that mercy came.
The natural human response to trauma is to attempt to cope with it in a way that excludes God. Ultimately, as the text reveals, Jonah was not only fleeing from the Ninevites, he was running from the issues of his own heart. The terrible events from the past had shaped the character and behaviour of Jonah and he became a man who was out of control.
Coping with trauma by taking our lives into our own hands at the exclusion of God’s presence and will, is a very common human response. The loud cries from his wounded heart prompted Jonah to flee to a place where he could be alone with his broken-ness. It is a place that led him nowhere except into deeper despair.
Jonah’s behaviour was actually a form of idolatry. Idolatry happens any time we revere anything or anyone more than God or his decreed will. As such, idolatry is much more common than we think and its practice is not limited to the non-Christian world.
Jonah faced the challenge that each of us are faced with. He was required to superimpose the kingdom of God, a kingdom of divine order, onto a system diametrically opposed to that order, the system of this world. As daunting as that task must have seemed for Jonah, or for any of us, the venue where we are called upon to do this is the arena of our own hearts. Since this is the home of our wounds, the challenge becomes even more daunting. Jonah was content to serve God wholeheartedly as long as he could do so in an arena of his own choosing. When it became apparent that that is not the way it works he ran as fast and far away as he could.
The Book of Jonah is a unique because it is not about prophecies as other prophetic books are, it is about the prophet. We are given deep insight into the struggles of a man of God, a deeply spiritual man with a very successful ministry, who could not come to terms with the suffering and trauma from past atrocities in his life. He became a man given to anger and suicidal tendencies.
One might think that success should help compensate for trauma or at least significantly dull its pain. There is no doubt that Jonah was a success. As we previously noted, due to his prophetic words king Jeroboam the second led a great and successful military campaign and recovered Israel’s lost land. Jonah also led one of the greatest spiritual awakening/revival campaigns in history. The account of this is in the text:
"Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very important city-a visit required three days. On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned." The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh:
"By the decree of the king and his nobles:
Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish."
When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened."
Jonah 3: 3-10
In the Ninevah awakening/revival, Jonah had a 100% conversion rate. Few ministers of God enjoy that kind of success.
But no amount of success could take away the pain of his wounded heart! The biggest struggle of Jonah’s life was his battles with intense anger, hatred and self-destruction. In terms of its potential to destroy him, this battle eclipsed his three-day in the belly of a fish episode.
At the time Jonah was in the fish he encountered God in a remarkable way. Jonah chapter 2 is Jonah’s testimony of salvation and deliverance and resolve. Here are some remarkable verses.
"When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, LORD, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple. 8 "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. 9 But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from the LORD."
And the LORD commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land." Jonah 2:7-10
No testimony is surer than Jonah’s. He knew it was grace that had saved him and he was very thankful. In this state of heightened spiritual experience he made vows that he was sure he could keep. He was through with running. He would go to Ninevah. His demons were dead – or so he thought. However, salvation does not ensure sanctification and Jonah would find this out. He was saved all right but, as the narrative suggests, he was still covered with vomit. There was some cleaning up to do.
In spite of his remarkable deliverance, his anger returned. In his day there were no anger support groups to attend or self-help books to read. There was only himself and God.
Sometimes God’s words can sting. If you had been through all Jonah endured how would you feel if anyone, let alone God, asked you, “Have you any right to be angry?”
Anger was the place to which Jonah retreated when his memories got the best of him. Here, wallowing in self-pity, he found some reprieve from the throbbing ache in his heart.
It is here that we learn something wonderful about the mercy and grace of God. God doesn’t leave us alone. He comes to us even if we don’t invite Him and even wish He would stay away. Interestingly, God never addressed the root cause of Jonah’s dysfunction. He never probed his memory bank to see what would surface. Instead, God took issue with Jonah’s behaviour. God in His infinite wisdom knows its not the abuse we suffer that destroys us, its our reaction to that abuse.
When traumatic experiences occur a person is usually powerless to prevent them or control them. The child that is repeatedly beaten by a parent is too young and helpless to defend himself. He grows up feeling everything was his fault. By the time he is an adult he has likely built thick and high walls around his heart to hide the layers of internalized shame. The prolonged abuse is experienced as repeated rejection and rejection is a powerful force. These feelings of powerlessness and rejection produce long term effects that later manifest themselves in control issues. The victim becomes the perpetrator.
If a boy suffers abuse at the hands of his mother he may, during the critical formative years of his life, develop a deep aversion to women. As a result, in later years he may become a wife beater or be otherwise abusive. It is also possible that he will reject women entirely, resulting in his sexual development being oriented towards those of the same sex.
If it was father rejection he experienced he may internalize deep feelings of male-rejection to the point he rejects his own male-hood, and in his deep broken-ness seek love from someone of the same sex. Or, he may become a homosexual in an effort to find a father’s love and acceptance he was never given. The possibilities are many with gender confusion being just one of them.
This man may find that being alone is his most favorite environment and if so it may be it is to this state he will retreat to express much of his sexuality. There, he may find satisfaction in pornography for the images he sees are just that, images, that don’t demand a relationship and they can’t reject him.
He may turn to drugs, alcohol, gambling or other forms of addiction and self-abuse.
The world system offers every imaginable escape from broken-ness and pain. Some have no appearance of evil and are in and of themselves, innocuous. Putting oneself into his career with wholesale abandon may appear to be innocent enough but in actuality be a desperate quest to find meaning and make sense out of an otherwise chaotic existence. All of these pursuits and efforts, good or bad, ultimately are traps that lead to bondage and enslavement.
What happened to Jonah?
"Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live."
But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?"
"I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die." But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?" Jonah 4: 5-11
Jonah perched himself on the side of a hill overlooking the city of Ninevah to “see what would happen to the city”. I wonder what he expected would happen? Did he think God might change his mind and obliterate the city? Did he think he could sit there long enough to see it decay naturally? He was sure acting strangely for a man with such an admirable history of operating in the anointing and power of God. How could a person experience God so profoundly in so many areas of his life and yet in other areas be so totally given over to despair? This, typically, is the frustrating reality for many Christians.
What was true for Jonah is true for all. Every defending strategy devised by man ends in failure. Jonah’s wasn’t working for him and in an effort to reach him, God demonstrated to Jonah just how silly and futile his self-help efforts were.
As he was sitting on the hillside going nowhere, watching a city that was going nowhere, a very interesting and somewhat amusing series of events took place.
The sun was hot so Jonah made a shelter. The shelter didn’t quite fit so Jonah’s head was exposed. God miraculously caused a vine to grow that shaded his unprotected head and eased the discomfort of his self-inflicted pain. I think this act of mercy was as least as great as the act of mercy God showed Ninevah. Why? The Ninevites didn’t know much better than to act the way they did. The Bible says they couldn’t tell their right hand from their left. But Jonah knew better. His knowledge of God and his deep experiences with God demanded behaviour from him that was much different than he displayed.
Jonah was happy about the vine. It was the one good thing in his otherwise miserable life. But then God caused a worm to chew the vine and it withered leaving Jonah exposed again. To add insult to injury, God caused a scorching east wind to blow that caused Jonah to become even more exposed and vulnerable. He almost passed out and had he done so in those circumstances he would likely have died. For Jonah, all this must have seemed like a cruel joke with God himself being the cruel jokester.
There is an important lesson to be learned here. God permits us to erect our self-made defending strategies to ease our inner pain, and depending on what they are, even bless them. However, He knows better than anyone that these efforts belong to a temporary world system that will fail, fail, fail!
In an effort to move us to a better place, God orchestrates events that are designed to protect us from the perils that our independent ways with their flights from God most surely create. A flight from God is inevitably a flight into addiction or a concoction of different pain numbing efforts that eventually take on a life of their own, compounding one’s inner despair exponentially.
Speaking of a better place, all Jonah had to do to ease the pain of the scorching sun, his parched throat and his dirty and stinky body, was simply get up and go somewhere else. No one forced him to perch on the hillside. What was wrong with him? Why didn’t he move? Surely he knew he was acting stupidly! Those who have experienced, or are presently experiencing, the enslavement of addiction to a habit know that moving to someplace else is a lot easier said than done.
The cycle of addiction gained in intensity in Jonah’s life. Once again, instead of his life circumstances causing him to reconsider his ways he became even angrier about the withered vine. By now his perspective was completely gone. His anger consumed him. His anguish was unbearable. Voices driving him to commit suicide grew louder in his soul. His tongue joined in agreement, and mingled together with howling wind, came his desperate cry, “it would be better for me to die than to live”!
Don’t talk to me about rights! Don’t tell me what to do! Leave me alone! How can you be so callous? Can’t you understand what I’m going through! When those who love us try to reach us, our reactions are often like Jonah’s.
How does the story of Jonah end? Is there a happy conclusion? We don’t know. All we hear at the end of the book is the repeated appeal of God asking Jonah to forsake his anger. At the same time we see Jonah firmly entrenched in a spiritual abyss engulfed by his own anger and struggling with the ultimate act of self-rejection – suicide.
When the triggers that release despair are pulled too often, releasing a barrage of pain that is too great, in successive waves that are too many, suicide is the sad choice that some make. Did Jonah give in to his despair, or did he finally listen to God? The Bible doesn’t answer this question. I don’t think God takes pleasure in holding us in suspense so maybe the story ends where it did for a reason. Maybe God is trying to get us to direct the question elsewhere and cause us not to ask, “What became of Jonah?” but rather, “What will become of me?”
