LIVE Join our service streaming live right now! Click here to watch.
Sometimes we become so fixed on where we want to go that we cannot see how we are defeating ourselves. Jonah runs in the opposite direction when God sends him to Nineveh, raising questions we often avoid: Do we understand who God is, who we are, and how He sees the people we would rather leave behind?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Have you ever been so fixated on where you’re trying to get that you can’t get there? Some sort of counterintuitive dilemma, doesn’t it? Determination is a good thing, focus is a good thing, but sometimes we become so focused on where we’re trying to get to, we don’t realize how we’re actually defeating ourselves in trying to get there. I was reminded of that with this video I wanted to show you. Here is someone moving; they’re fixated on where they’re going. They probably didn’t read the sign on the clearance because this is… uh-oh, let’s just see if we can fit. No, that’s not quite going to work, is it? No, it doesn’t work. They’re so fixated on wanting to move. I bet they had a long day. I bet they had been packing all day. If you’ve ever moved from house to house, from office to office, from home to dorm to wherever it might be, if you’ve ever done anything like that, you know how exhausting moving is. Does anyone here actually like moving? Whoa, whoa, wow. We will have a special program for you guys in the future, but for the sane amongst us, we know that moving is a horrible thing, right? It’s a lot of work. It is a lot of work.
Imagine these people there; they’re packing up the U-Haul. They get it all full. They’re not reading the clearance sign on the parking garage. They’re just trying to get done. When they start to— you see the truck slow down, they can see there’s a problem, but whatever, they’re going to just keep trying harder. “I’m going; I’m going to finish this move. I’m going to be done.” The driver needs to ask some questions, like, “Is the place I’m coming from and the place I’m going to able to fit a U-Haul?” The person didn’t ask that question. He or she just figured it would be, and so you have this whole U-Haul loaded up, and there’s a problem. A lot of times we need to ask questions, too.
As we’ve been talking about missions this month and thinking about what it means to be called by God to go and to serve, we run into another accidental missionary: Jonah, Prophet Jonah. He may have thought of himself as a prophet. We don’t have a lot of information on what he thought of himself as up to this point or even after this point. What we do know is that he needed to ask some really good questions of himself and of God, and Jonah doesn’t want to do that. He thinks he has it figured out. Oftentimes we think we have it all figured out, and so as he’s going along without asking those questions, he’s going to get himself in just a bit of trouble, we might say.
Let’s not just think about Jonah as some distant story, something we remember in an animated version when we were little, something that we had the flannel graph if you remember those. You had to have the little fish and so on. We’re not even really going to talk all that much about Jonah’s encounter with a fish today. Believe it or not, we’re going to have a sermon on Jonah, and we’re not going to spend a lot of time on that, because there’s so much more in Jonah, and we get bound up there. The real question is, does Jonah understand who God is? Does Jonah understand who God’s people are? Does Jonah understand who he is? He’s not asking those questions very well, and too often we don’t ask those questions very well either.
So let’s go ahead and come before God in prayer, ask for His guidance, and then we’ll dig in. Let’s pray.
Father, we often have a hard time understanding who You are. We often get parts of it but not enough. We often have a hard time understanding who we are. We think of ourselves as having everything right, everything organized, and even when we know that we don’t, we still find a way to somehow have it right in the moment in our minds. Lord, would You help us to instead see things as You do, and as You do that, as You transform us, would You help us to see the people around us the way You do as well? We ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Well, it all starts. It doesn’t start with Jonah on the sea. If you were a Hollywood director making a film about Jonah, I’d imagine you might start on the sea: a giant sweeping camera comes over the waves and comes up to a boat and onto the boat, and there you see Jonah contemplating what he’s doing, right? He’s contemplating being on this boat and contemplating the sea getting rougher and so on. But that’s not where the Bible starts. The Bible starts before that. Let’s not miss where it starts. Verse 1 of chapter 1 says:
“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.’ But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish away from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.”
There are a few things we should know about Jonah from the get-go. Jonah is an Israelite. We actually encounter him in the books of the Kings, just briefly. We don’t get a lot more detail, but we see him there as well. We have a way to kind of tie him into the lineage of the kingdom and how all that fits and so on. So we’re talking early 8th century BC. Both the northern kingdom, the ten tribes that break off from Judah, they’re still there, and the southern kingdom, it’s there, but none of them are being terribly faithful at the moment.
So you have prophets being brought up, Jonah’s one of them, and that’s the context of Jonah. Jonah is given a message; he’s to go to Nineveh. Now Nineveh is not a city of Israel. Nineveh is the capital of Assyria, the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrian Empire had its moments; sometimes it was stronger, sometimes weaker. There’s a lot to say that maybe in this moment, Assyria isn’t at its strongest. But it wasn’t someplace that the Israelites loved.
You see polls going on around the world: “What countries do you respect the most?” They ask Americans that, they ask other countries that. Assyria would be low on that list for Israelites. They didn’t go on vacation in Nineveh. Nineveh was a bad place with bad people in their mind. So it is a bit of a bizarre request in Jonah’s mind as he hears from God, “Hey, go to Nineveh.” It’d be sort of like, with all the sanctions going on today, someone telling you, “Go to Moscow.” And you think, “Oh, but Americans in Moscow right now may not go so well.” They sometimes arrest Americans on trumped-up charges over there, and they don’t come home. I don’t want to go to Moscow. That’s probably a bit of how Jonah felt.
Now Jonah also has already seen Israel under siege at times. He knows that things aren’t going that well on and off for Israel, that it has its moments, but it’s not going in a great trajectory. We’re not to the writing on the wall yet, incidentally, but you can see the writing on the wall here. For Israel at this point—not for the pagans. Jonah has a lot of reason to wonder what God’s doing. He’s called to help people understand what God’s doing, but Jonah’s probably asking, “God, what are You doing? How are You working? How am I supposed to go do this?”
I think one of the telling things we see in these first verses is that Jonah decides to go to Tarshish, which is somewhere in modern Spain. In other words, he’s going as far as he knows how, to go the opposite direction of where God’s told him—to go away from the land of God’s people, but also away from his mission field that he’s been called to. He’s going to escape the Lord, we’re told. Here we get the first clue that Jonah doesn’t get who God is: Jonah’s presumption is, “If I just go far enough away, the Lord won’t make me go do this.” Clearly, like so many ancient people, he’s thinking of deities, probably plural. He may not get it that God’s the only God. It’s quite possible.
Or at least, even if he understands that God’s the only true God, he doesn’t understand that the only true God is everywhere. Many ancient people thought that different gods picked out cities, sort of like we do. And you know, if we were in the ancient world today, maybe we’d have a patron god of St. Louis, right? So that god’s going to take care of St. Louis. If you go up to Chicago, it’s a whole different story. Jonah is thinking in those sorts of terms, it seems like. Jonah figures he’s going to get away from God. So he heads off, buys the ticket to the ship, and takes off sailing. Everything’s going to be great, right? No problem.
Doesn’t go that way, does it? No. I think if you know one thing about Jonah, you know what happens—I’ve already mentioned it—but what happens to Jonah? Yeah, yeah, he gets eaten. He gets eaten by a fish. That fish obviously has a very big mouth. He doesn’t bite bits of Jonah off and devour him. He just swallows Jonah whole. There’s been a lot of discussion about the fish, but the fish isn’t really all that important in some ways. God could have made a custom model fish just for Jonah—as far as we know. But what we do know is that Jonah is swallowed by this fish, and he learns that God can’t be escaped from. God’s everywhere. So he’s learning what he should have already asked God about.
We talked last week: Moses has questions for God. As Moses asks questions of God, what does he do? He is trying to learn who God is and how God works. Jonah instead assumes he knows how God works and responds in a way that he thinks is going to allow him not to do what God wants. So that’s the first problem.
The second problem, if you think about it, is Jonah is told to go and preach a message of repentance to the people of Nineveh. His thought in that is, No. No, I don’t want to. Do we know why? We’re not told explicitly why, but we have reason to think that Jonah probably doesn’t like the Ninevites. They’ve been bad news for Israel, and if he looks at the writing on the wall again, if he’s reading Jerusalem today and trying to learn about what’s going on in the region, maybe he picks up the paper from Assyria, he gets it on express delivery so he can find out what’s going on there, he reads it, he can see they’re rising and it’s not going to be good. Jonah says, I don’t want anything to do with them.
Now notably here, while Jonah is sent to Assyria, the book of Jonah is given to Israel. And I think that’s important. What does it tell us? Well, it tells us that while Jonah had a message for Assyria, God had a reason for sending Jonah to Assyria that also had to do with his people. He wanted his people to reflect on Jonah’s mission. Why would he want that? For the same reason that we need to reflect on it today, which is that we struggle when God is going to send us someplace. Maybe it’s someplace we want to go, and then we’re like, Oh, great. But when He sends us to a place that you really don’t want to go, when He sends you to serve people that you don’t really like, what do we know about Jonah?
We don’t know much about Jonah at all, but for all we know, and quite likely, Jonah knows people—maybe friends, maybe family—that have died at the hands of the Assyrians. He’s thinking, these are murderous beasts. I don’t want anything to do with them. At the very least, he’s probably looking at them and thinking, “But God, they’re Gentiles.” Well, most if not all of us here today are Gentiles, but at the time, if you’re thinking about God calling his people, stay separate from the Gentiles. Don’t pick up their customs.
Jonah’s thinking, those unclean, filthy people that don’t know about the Lord that called us, why would I go to them? I don’t want anything to do with them. They don’t talk like us. They don’t eat like us. They don’t live like us. I don’t want anything to do with them. And in that, he’s not understanding truly God’s heart. God’s heart of love.
Commentators that have wrestled with this have noted this is a calling both to us as we think about how we relate to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ and to the broader world. Because on the one hand, if we can’t figure out how to love each other, how do we tell the world that we love them? How do we tell the world that God loves them if God’s people can’t get along with each other? How do we say that God is a God of love that has a message of love for the entire world if we’re busy not loving it? And yet, that seems to be exactly where Jonah is.
He doesn’t really understand God, and as we think about that, it really means he doesn’t understand himself, because Jonah presumably is standing on this understanding that he’s part of the people of God. He says, “Well, yeah, the Lord talks to me. I’m part of Israel. Of course He talks to me.” Sometimes we do that: “Well, God’s working in my life? Well, of course, I’ve been part of church for a really long time, or I am on fire for God,” or this or that. We come up with these reasons why God would favor me. God likes me. But do we understand why God has mercy on someone who doesn’t have those attributes that we come up with for ourselves?
It reminds me of the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal sons. We often focus on that younger brother who goes off, that brother who is just completely immoral. He demands his inheritance before his father is dead, demands it, runs off with it, uses it on all kinds of awful stuff, and then he comes back. Oh, that’s great. That’s a feel-good story, right? But don’t miss the ending. Don’t miss the fact that the elder brother, the one who doesn’t leave, the one who in some sense is the good one, the one who is part of God’s people—you would think that he’s not needing to be redeemed because he’s there. Well, he needs it just as much because he doesn’t understand who the father is.
He’s sitting off in the corner pouting when the father shows mercy to the returned prodigal. “Why would you forgive him? Dad, don’t you realize how awful he is? He’s wasted your inheritance. I’ve been here just slaving away for you,” he says. “I’ve been doing the work. You don’t even give me any time to have it with my friends. You’re gonna forgive him? Why would you do that?” Right there, we see that the elder brother doesn’t understand the father. That’s exactly how the parable ends. The father says, “You’ve always been here with me. I’m just celebrating because now you’re both back with me.”
That’s the heart of God, but it’s often not the heart of us as Christians. The longer we follow Jesus, the more at risk we are of falling into the camp of the elder brother.
Times I do. Too often I do. Where I start to think of myself pretty highly and look down on other people, and it becomes really easy to feed that. Notably here in that story and also in the book of Jonah, something happens which is that the ones who seem to get it better—the prodigal son in the case of the story of Jonah—what do we see? The sailors, who are not Israelites, the Ninevites who are not Israelites, they respond to the message. They understand something about God, yet the one who’s supposed to know it, who’s supposed to know God, who is actually a messenger of God, doesn’t get it.
And therein is the message for God’s people: Are we getting it? Are we hearing what God is saying? He’s challenging us. Do we hear what He’s saying? Because so often we think we do. We’re operating thinking we do. We have it right. We have these reasons that we’re favored by God. We have these reasons that we’re on the right side. Are we actually willing to hear? So Jonah’s built himself up, and he’s basically taking God down to allow himself to push away the people that he doesn’t want to deal with.
Too often we run from God because we think we can. In other words, we run from God because the God that we’re running from isn’t really God as He is. We might call Him by the right names. We might read the right Bible to think about Him, but do we actually act as though He’s the God that’s revealed in these pages? Because when we think we can run, when we think that we can come up with the exception of why we don’t have to do it, when we run to our Tarshish that gives us freedom from what God calls us to do, we’re actually making God smaller. Jonah’s making God smaller. He’s treating God as a God who can be narrowed and limited, and these people, they’re bad people. I don’t need to help them out.
And in that, Jonah can’t actually be the prophet that he’s called to be. He’s not going to do and experience the joy that God intends for him because he’s not actually powered up the way he’s supposed to. His whole foundation is askew at this moment.
This week we had the local fire department come and inspect our building. We largely passed. We needed to get a new fire extinguisher. That’s not too bad. I am really happy. But one thing that came up in conversation as we’re preparing for that visit is that back when we shared this space with the Lutheran Student Union, there had been a smoke detector sitting in the space ready to detect smoke, but it’s not here anymore. “Oh, we need to put smoke detectors.” So now we have smoke detectors. Isn’t that a great thing? Yes, yeah. Hopefully we’ll never use them, but they’re there.
However, as I was putting in the smoke detectors, I did something that I often do, which is I got the battery reversed. They’re battery-powered smoke detectors and they have those 9-volt batteries, you know, those square ones that are a pain to work with, with a positive and a negative terminal. When the smoke detector ships, it has the battery flipped over so that it’s not draining the battery before you need to use it. Probably so you don’t have boxes in the store going off, chiming when something is smoking in the store or whatever.
Can you imagine having to rip open all the boxes and get the… so the battery is reversed, and so I took the battery and I flipped it over. However, inevitably, and I do this every time I have to work with batteries like this, I flipped it over but I still had the terminals going the wrong way. So I seal up the… I close the lid, put it up on the ceiling, press the test button, and nothing comes out. So I take it down, flip the battery back the way it was, thinking maybe I had it wrong. Put it back up, nothing. It was facing the wrong way in two different ways—the terminals were wrong, and it was facing the wrong way. So finally, I look at the diagram, see how it’s actually supposed to go, put it in, and what do you know? The smoke alarms work.
So often in our lives, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We have the Bible. Here’s what God is going to use to fuel our mission, guide us into what we’re supposed to do. We have it there and it’s sitting there in our battery slot here, right by our heart, and it’s right there, but we need to actually turn it over and open it and actually allow it to speak. Sometimes we need a little fiddling, because we go, “Okay, you know, I’m gonna go right back to the Gospel of John.” That’s good. That’s a great place to go, incidentally. But God calls us throughout His Word. He wants us to study the whole of His Word. Often, there’s one of those terminals in that battery that we like pretty well, and we go ahead and plug that in, but we forget to plug in the whole thing, because the whole thing makes us uncomfortable. The whole thing actually challenges us to do things we don’t want to do.
And so what do we find as we put the battery in the wrong way? We find that we’re not actually moving towards God’s kingdom further. That doesn’t mean that you’re not saved; let’s not turn this into salvation by works. But it means that we can’t experience the fullness of it. Jonah isn’t called a false prophet. He’s simply a prophet that’s missing out on an awful lot of the joy that he could be experiencing in God’s work.
Too often, what Satan does once we are believers: He tries to turn our battery a little askew so that, yeah, okay, you’re in church. Yes, you believe in Jesus. Okay, I’m not gonna get you, but I’m going to make it as miserable for you as possible so you don’t experience the joy of the Lord, and you’re not sharing that joy contagiously with others.
What’s Jonah’s problem here? And why are we told this story? Why does it start with this part? It’s because we’re being told here God wants His people, whether in ancient Israel or today in the church, to understand that we need to have a right heart toward God. We don’t understand who He is. Do we really get it? His love, His power. Those two go together here.
Whether Jonah is having that creeping doubt, “I don’t know that God can pull this off,” or it’s more, “I don’t know why I should mess with those dirty, stinking Ninevites,” either way, he’s missing a part of who God is. By not understanding who God has, he can’t move on to step two. He can’t move on to the next question he needs to ask.
But once we orient toward that, once we understand who God is, and we understand what the elder brother was missing in the parable of the prodigal sons—that he was receiving grace from the father as well, that it wasn’t just the younger brother, and that he was actually missing out on the joy of that relationship because he was so busy being bitter toward the younger brother—once he got away from that, wouldn’t it be nice to think that the elder brother does get away from that and actually experiences the father’s love?
Then he can start to understand, “Well, what’s my role in this?” First, we need to understand who God is. Do you understand how He loves you, how you need His love, and how powerful He is to bring that love even to the people we think are most beyond His reach? Because nothing is.
Once we get there, then we can start to ask the question, “Well, how do I view the people that God is sending into my life or sending me to?” We’re all being sent to. Devon’s been sharing bits with us about this call to a mission field, but here’s the thing that we should be doing as we hear that: we should understand that God is calling each and every one of us to a mission field.
And we celebrate the specific mission fields, but we shouldn’t let that be an excuse to forget that God is calling us, even if we’re doing what we think is a menial everyday existence. You think, “Well, I’m so glad God is sending some people to the mission field.” Here’s what you need to understand: God is sending you into the mission field of that menial life, and it’s not menial because God has a purpose for you in it.
Where is God sending you? There’s a reason why we have that “You’re Now Entering the Mission Field” sign over the door as you leave the church building every week. That is the mission field out there. If you’re driving home tonight and you see your neighbor, that’s the mission field. If you go into school tomorrow, that’s the mission field. If you go into work tomorrow, that’s the mission field. If you go on to social media, that’s the mission field. Wherever you are, that is the mission field.
God is going to send some of us far away. God has placed people who live far away, like we were talking about Shelly Helvetti earlier and what she’s doing in Ethiopia and all of her team, and how wonderful that is.
How wonderful it is when you’re right in your subdivision. You drive there and everyone’s out mowing their lawn and planting their flowers, and it seems so normal. Those people need God’s love.
How do I view those who God is sending me to? Jonah chapter 3 verse 10: “When God saw what they did, the people of Nineveh heard Jonah’s message; they repented—how they turned away from their evil way. God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.”
But displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That’s why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Let’s just recap where Jonah is at this point. Let’s think about this missionary. Incidentally, mission training school, if they ever teach you to act like Jonah like this, that’s bad. Devon, run if that’s what they do, okay? Run.
Jonah has been called. He runs the other way. He ends up on a ship. He realizes that the reason the ship is about to sink is that God has brought a storm on it. The sailors, they have more fear of the Lord than the prophet, and they’re saying, “Well, we don’t want to throw you overboard,” but Jonah says, “You’re going to have to. This is between me and God.”
They throw him overboard; the fish swallows him. God miraculously provides for Jonah so that he can be spit up on the shore. It may not have been pleasant, but God’s providing for him in that. Jonah ends up on the shore. Jonah is alive. Jonah goes to Nineveh.
If you’ve ever done any kind of ministry at all, and I know all of you here have done ministry, and I imagine all of you online have done something—you’ve shared the gospel in some way, you’ve invited someone—Jonah has something spectacular happen. He goes to a large city; he preaches that they’re doing evil, and they repent. That makes Jonah mad.
Jonah doesn’t want them to repent. Jonah wants to say, “God’s wrath is coming upon you, and I can’t wait to watch it fall upon you.” Why is Jonah that way? Well, it’s all those things that we were speculating about earlier. Presumably Jonah is thinking, the Assyrians have heard us before. I can see where this is going. I know it’s not going to be good with the Assyrians, and yeah, we’re a little wobbly in following the Lord too, so the last thing, the last thing we need is a powerful, repentant nation out there that isn’t us. I can’t wait to see it burn because then it’s not going to be a threat to us.
Jonah’s looking at them, and even though they’re not at their height at the moment, Assyria is moving again towards thinking about Western expansion. Alliances are starting to be formed, there’s intrigue and rumor, and people are wondering what’s going to happen. We’ll soon see kings falling over themselves to give tribute to the Assyrians so they don’t get attacked. Presumably Jonah can see something of this.
He tried apathy first. He said, “Well, I know Lord that you’re angry with them. I don’t want to give them a message at all. Then they can just deal with their maker, and it will be really great.” So he has apathy: “I’ll just let it go. Just let them face judgment because they haven’t been confronted.”
Then he says, “Okay, I can’t avoid it because I can’t sail away as far as I’d like, and there’s this giant fish that swallowed me, and so on, okay, I will go there. But when I go there, Lord, I am going to hope that every single person who hears my message perishes. I can’t wait to see it.”
In that, I’m reminded again of that truck I showed you earlier. Let’s pick back up where they were. They’re backing up; they ran into that pipe. Now Jonah sort of backed up; he goes forward: “Well, let’s just try it again. God called me to preach repentance. I’ll just try it,” and let’s take a look here, I’ll look around and see what’s going on. Notice that filth now that’s coming out of that pipe; it’s just pouring down on them there. Oh boy, this is getting worse, right?
Well, let’s see what we can do now. Well, let’s think about this. Maybe we’ll try it again. They try it again, and again. I’m not going to show you the whole thing. They keep running into that pipe, and the filth of that water—it’s a sprinkler pipe—but it’s collected all kinds of stuff over the years. So their determination to move forward—Jonah’s determination to move forward with his view of the Assyrians—he thinks this is a great plan.
If they are all gone, they can’t hurt us. What’s he doing? He’s spreading filth instead of God’s love. Jonah thinks he’s justified. Jonah just keeps ramming forward even though God’s made it clear, “No, I have a specific plan. I’m guiding you towards that plan.” Jonah says, “Okay, yeah, the pipe’s there. I ran into it once. I couldn’t get away to Tarshish. Well, let’s just ram into it again,” and have a completely wrong-headed attitude about what God sent me to do.
At least I can have fun watching them burn if I have to go there, right? Most of us thankfully aren’t wanting to call fire down on people. Sometimes we might, but hopefully not all the time. Jonah does. Incidentally, later the disciples want to as well. But we do the same sort of thing.
I can be really hard on Jonah, but I was thinking about this, and I thought about how I often approach things. If I’m upset about something, one thing that generally makes me seem very calm—I’m pretty good at just internalizing—I just kind of absorb stuff. I just take it in. If someone insults me, someone says something unkind, does a lot of unkind things, I just keep taking it in and in and in.
I don’t like conflict. I hate conflict. I really, really hate conflict. Anyone else hate conflict? Well, that’s actually a good thing. We should hate conflict. We shouldn’t rejoice in conflict. That would be another way of running into that pipe. But I hate conflict, and so I will, to an extreme degree, try to avoid conflict, and I just keep taking it in. But that doesn’t mean that I’m really calm. I may appear calm, but I’m just boiling on the inside, thinking all kinds of unkind things, imagining all kinds of unkind things, right?
So I’m not really avoiding conflict. I’m just keeping it inside myself. I think Jonah’s plan when he goes to Tarshish is like that. But when he goes to Syria, it’s like when someone finally brings that me to so much of a boil, I can’t hold it in anymore, and then I’m just ready to spew acid out, right? I’m just, “Let’s just have it. Okay, let’s just do this.” That’s so ugly.
I don’t like that about myself. This is not me talking about how you should handle things. But I realized as I was studying Jonah and thinking about this message how much I can be like Jonah. I first run to Tarshish, and then I go and say, “Okay God, if you’re going to insist I deal with this person, let’s go for scorched earth.” I might not call down literal fire, but I’m not coming with God’s love.
The question is, who is it that is in my life? Who is it in your life? God’s calling you to love, that God’s calling you to seek relationship with, that God’s calling you to be the restoring hands and feet of the kingdom for. Instead, we’re doing one of those two things that Jonah does—maybe both of them back and forth.
How do we understand truly what Jonah is going through here? Imagine whatever country you want to, whoever is going to be the next big superpower. Let’s say we don’t know. Jesus could return tomorrow, and maybe we’ve seen the last superpowers on earth. I tend to think there will be more rising and falling of world powers over time before Jesus returns. Either way, but let’s say hypothetically that we’re going to see another power rise.
I’m not going to name a name; I don’t want to name some country, but let’s just imagine we’ve had times in the past where there have been grave threats to the United States, and we think, “Oh no, this country wants bad for us.” Remember that is the country you fear most in the world, and you have reason to believe will bring harm to your country, to your home.
What if God sends you to go and preach repentance to that country—not love of your own country, but love of Him—turning around from the destruction and judgment they might face, and you can full well look at it and say, “But there’s still going to be a world power. There’s still going to be a threat to us.”
That’s what Jonah is going through here. He doesn’t go and preach, “Come, become part of Israel, become part of the people of God.” He goes and says, “Repent of your ways. Repent.” He doesn’t even use the word repent; he just says judgment’s coming. They put it together; they’re attuned enough to what the Lord is doing. They hear a message of judgment, and they desire to turn and to experience God’s love rather than His wrath. They say, He hasn’t even promised it, but “Maybe if we actually humble ourselves before Him, He’ll hear us.”
Imagine whoever it is that will someday—if the world continues for long enough—will someday bring down our country, whatever other country that might be. Because every world power that has ever risen has fallen.
Imagine if you knew who that was, and God sent you there, and you knew that power would continue to rise, someday would bring down your country, bring down the living conditions of your family, and you were called to do something that would take them and turn them away from God’s wrath for the time being.
Because Jonah’s message doesn’t change Assyria forever. It doesn’t become a second Israel. It doesn’t become faithful to the end. It’s a momentary moment of repentance that saves them from destruction, and then they do eventually come in, and they wipe out Israel. God uses them as a tool of judgment on Israel itself.
How do we understand that? Jonah’s basically asking the question as he’s sitting there watching Nineveh and watching that the wrath isn’t falling upon Nineveh. He’s saying, “Can a loving God really be just?” He’s angry with God because God, yes, You’re loving, but can You actually be just? Because those people had it coming for them. Then You sent me, and You had the audacity to enable them to actually respond to my message, and then You had even more audacity, and You loved them enough not to destroy them.
Can God be just? And yet in that, Jonah isn’t reflecting on how much he’s dependent on God’s mercy. It comes back to him understanding himself in relation to God. He understands how those people fall short, but he doesn’t understand how he falls short. He’s not thinking back to how God rescued him, when God could have just let him sink to the bottom of the ocean and called up a different prophet. He doesn’t even think in this conversation he’s having with God at the end of the book how God is having mercy on him in that context.
Take a look at verse 6 of Jonah chapter 4:
“‘Cause now the Lord appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah, so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, ‘Do you do well to be angry for the plant?’ He said, ‘Yes, I do well to be angry, and angry enough to die.’”
Jonah’s banging his head into that pipe again. Maybe if I just bang my head into that pipe enough, I’ll finally get through, right? Let’s go ahead and see if that works.
So here we are. We’ll pick up with our friends here again. What can we do? Let’s try this again. Can we do it? Here we go. We’re trying to get through. Maybe if we go slowly and just scrape the pipe slowly it will work. You can see the water pouring down on the truck. I’d hate to see the deposit they’re going to lose on that truck.
Oh, they made it. They made it past that pipe, but they didn’t get very far, right? Sometimes when we say, “God, I don’t want to be loving, I don’t want to be forgiving, I don’t want to help people into a place of repentance, I don’t want to restore things, I’m afraid what they’re going to do. I’m afraid what it’s going to do for my status, for my place, for my church, my world,” we start to ease under and say, “Well, I’ll just sort of moderate. I won’t have, I don’t need to preach any more fire and brimstone. I’m just going to ease under that pipe.”
And we ease and we ease and we ease and we think, “Ah, I’ve got it.” We hit the accelerator and bam, whenever they hit off-screen, it’s right there waiting for us.
Because what’s really the problem, while we’re busy angry with how God isn’t dealing with the other person, or the other people, or the other nation, or all the other people, is we don’t understand how our own heart’s opposition to God is getting in the way of doing His work.
Jonah doesn’t want repentance. That’s not why he’s there to preach. He’s there to get vengeance. He wants them to know how bad they are. And he feels very good letting them know how bad they are. He just wants to see God follow through on how bad they are.
We need to challenge ourselves. Brother Rob challenged us in the confession time to think about how we love others, how we forgive others, and how we’re working through that. That’s often a very complicated process.
Anyone who’s ever experienced great hurt, and anyone who’s trying to work through forgiveness, understands this is hard. I’d love to say I have it all down. I don’t. But what we don’t want to do is say, “Okay, I think I have enough of it down. I’m going to hit the accelerator and go the way I really want to go,” because we’re going to run into that post.
God’s challenging us to have a right heart toward Him, and a right heart toward those around us. When we don’t have that, we’re missing out on the experience of what He’s actually calling us to experience.
I was reading about a gift that was given to the king of Sweden. He was given a live lion. The people actually liked him. I mean, they weren’t trying to unleash a lion upon him. They gave him a lion because it was something exotic, this fascinating creature that people have been fascinated with over the centuries.
In many parts of the world, I’ve never run into a live lion out in the wild. I’ve gone to the zoo, right? But this is hundreds of years ago. They didn’t have a zoo with a lion in it. He’s given a gift of a lion.
Now the lion lived for a while and then he died. Nothing particularly strange about that, but the king valued this gift, and he wanted to put it in his castle, Gryphsholm Castle, and save it. So he sent it to the taxidermist. The taxidermist took the lion, and here we go.
How’s that? It kind of looks like a dog. How do you like that tongue? That’s what came out of this dead lion when he was sent to the taxidermist. Why? Because the taxidermist had a distorted understanding of what a lion looked like. Why do you think a lion looked like that? I kind of wondered that, and then I thought, “Well, wait a second. Take a look at the average lion on a coat of arms. Take a look at that tongue there, that lion. Does that really look much like a lion?”
It’s not where you go for zoological information, but that’s all the taxidermist knew about lions. The taxidermist reshaped this lion, affectionately called Leo, to look like this caricature of a lion.
That’s what Jonah had been doing with God and with the people around him as well. He was looking at a portion of God’s calling, a portion of God’s truth, and he understood a little of it. He understood a little about people in the world—that these people were bad, that God’s people had been called, that he had some kind of calling, that he had some justification in existence—but he didn’t understand who God really was and what God could do. He didn’t understand God’s heart for each and every person, including the people that Jonah didn’t want to see survive.
So Jonah goes and lives this calling as a prophet, but he’s living it like Leo the Lion—with his tongue out and weird eyes and so on. They weren’t trying to be comical. Jonah wasn’t trying to be comical, and yet it is. It’s so sad and pathetic and hurtful and mind-blowing. When you’re looking at it from a distance, you’re thinking, “Well, just go on Wikipedia. If only they’d had it several hundred years ago.” They could have seen what a lion looked like. Jonah could have looked at the stories that had been passed down and the scripture that had already been written and understood something about God, but Jonah is instead holding on to just this little shield of God, missing out.
We desperately, desperately need God to give us an undistorted view of ourselves so we understand how far we are, how much mercy we need. We need Him to give us an undistorted view of other people so we understand how desperately they need God’s love, yes, but how loved they are. So that when we’re looking at ourselves and elevating, and when we’re looking at other people and pulling down, instead we realize how we’re all the prodigal, we’re all broken, we’re all deserving of God’s judgment, and yet as He calls each and every one of us to be agents of restoration—that’s our calling as Christians—to be priests to this world, to bring God’s love to this world, as we understand that we aren’t worthy, that we are just loved, so are they.
God has the power to work in that. God bends us back into shape to do His mission, and sometimes it’s painful and it’s hitting that pipe like Jonah did over and over and over again. May we seek Him with hearts that say, “God, help me not to run into the pipe. Help me to run straight into Your love and give it to those around me.”
Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, we come before You as those who too often stubbornly run the wrong way, that miss out on Your grace and Your love. Father, would You help us? Would You help us to be those who forgive? Would You help us to be those who repent? Would You help us to be those who love?
Lord, we sometimes get it right. Parts of Leo the Lion were relatively right. Yet we get other parts terribly wrong. Would You help take the deformed parts of our understanding of ourselves, of other people, of You, and have them formed to be more like You? That we would take on the very appearance of Jesus and that as He has offered us forgiveness when we didn’t deserve it, that too, we might be those who communicate that to a hurting world.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Start the Conversation