The Signs Of The Time

Repeated Phrases in Jonah:

1. Jonah Ran away from God

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. . . (after the storm almost destroyed the ship) 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.)

God’s Question for Jonah:

is it right for you to be angry?

You can run away from God’s will, you can be angry about His will, like Jonah, but you can’t escape. It doesn’t work. As the Spirit said through David,

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

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, 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.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

and the light become night around me,”

12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;

the night will shine like the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

"God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there."

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

You can run away from God’s will, you can be angry about His will, but it won’t work, because He has a plan.

2. The Lord provided . . . (He Had a Plan)

4 Then the LORD sent a great wind on the sea,

17 Now the LORD provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Jonah 4:6 Then the LORD God provided a leafy plant . . . God provided a worm

God provided a scorching east wind

God has a plan, a calling, for each one of us.

D L Moody

Henry Varley, a British pastor relates . . .

During the afternoon of the day of conference Mr. Moody asked me to join him in the vestry of the Baptist Church. We were alone, and he recalled the night’s meeting at Willow Park and our converse the following morning. “Do you remember your words?” he said. I replied, “I well remember our interview, but I do not recall any special utterance.” “Don’t you remember saying, ‘Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to him?’ ”“Not the actual sentence,” I replied.

“Ah,” said Mr. Moody, “those were the words sent to my soul, through you, from the Living God. As I crossed the wide Atlantic, the boards of the deck of the vessel were engraved with them, and when I reached Chicago, the very paving stones seemed marked with ‘Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to him.’ Under the power of those words I have come back to England, and I felt that I must not let more time pass until I let you know how God had used your words to my inmost soul.” Paul Gericke’s Crucial Experiences in the Life of D.L. Moody

Jonah ran away from God, but he had no right to be angry, because God had a plan

And

Jesus spoke about these events with Jonah, and He called Jonah a sign

3. Signs of the Times

Jonah hated the Assyrians. They were a brutal people. Ninevah was their capitol city. That’s why he wanted to escape.

But God had a plan.

When Jonah was spit from the whale’s balene beak, he would have been blue and hairless from the acids of the whale’s stomach.

You know what the ninevites worshiped? Dagon, the fish God!

Jonah himself was the sign to the Assyrians.

[Matthew 12:38 Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.” 39 He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. . .