Why Is Jonah In The Bible?

Finally, I found myself moving to Fresno. The yearn for the Sem had long since passed, but I still felt that I wanted to serve God in some capacity. You see, God is rather persistent. He knows what and how and where and why and whom He is going to use for the furtherance of His kingdom.

That’s how I ended up here. God put me here. Not in the place of my choice. Not according to my timeline. Not according to what I necessarily wanted. But according to what He desired. And to that I now say, thanks be to God.

How often have you heard the call from God? Maybe not to go into the ministry, but perhaps to share the Good News with a neighbor or a family member. How many times have you run from that call?

Fortunately, God is persistent in giving us opportunities to be “little Christ’s,” to be shining lights in our homes and in our communities.

My advise: Don’t ignore God’s call. He has purchased you with the blood of His Son Jesus Christ. He has asked you to forgive as you have been forgiven. He has asked that you be the salt and the light of the earth…not for your sake, but for His names sake. So that all may hear the Good News and come to salvation through Christ our Lord.

That’s one of the purposes of this book. From a personal viewpoint, to listen to the call of God.

The second purpose is a Christological one. What does that mean? Well, Jesus used the book of Jonah and the example of Jonah when He was speaking to the Pharisees and some teachers of the Law. They had recently accused him of being in cahoots with Beelzebub. They thought that his miraculous powers came not from God, but from the devil. So, they asked him for a sign. What they wanted was what so many of us want when we ask God to give us a sign: a big NEON one up in the sky. The leaders of the Jewish nation wanted God to show them that Jesus was really who he said he was.

But Jesus used a sign from the OT. He used the historical sign of Jonah. Jesus said: "A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 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.”

Jesus was prophesying about his resurrection using the example of how the Lord had brought back Jonah from his watery grave. This is why we sometimes hear the words of Jonah read on Easter Sunday.

Finally, there’s a third viewpoint from which to look at this story.

And this third viewpoint has a lot to do with why Jonah didn’t want to go Nineveh in the first place, and Jonah’s reaction to what happened when he preached the Word of the Lord.

The last verse of our text this morning reads: 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.

Now, I have to tell you that if I was able to go to a city…a big city…or a small one…and preach an eight-word sermon and get the reaction that Jonah did, I would be thrilled. Hopefully it would not be because it was me doing it, but because the people had heard the Word and responded in a positive fashion.