After spending so long in the book of Matthew, for both your sakes and mine I have decided to take a short break and spend a little while in the Old Testament, and landed on the book of Jonah for our little detour.
I have always liked this minor prophet. It is had an effect on me several times throughout my life so far in different ways, redirecting me, inspiring me, forcing me to reconsider choices and I hope that you will also come to see this short story in a different light that will bring you closer to God. Let’s begin by reading the first chapter, which we will be looking in more detail this morning. Yes, we will be covering a whole 17 verses in one week. I know it’s seems like a lot. It is. But I think we can do it.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.” But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up. Then the sailors became afraid and every man cried to his god, and they threw the cargo which was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, lain down and fallen sound asleep. So the captain approached him and said, “How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish.”
Each man said to his mate, “Come, let us cast lots so we may learn on whose account this calamity has struck us.” So they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, “Tell us, now! On whose account has this calamity struck us? What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?” He said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land.”
Then the men became extremely frightened and they said to him, “How could you do this?” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. 11 So they said to him, “What should we do to you that the sea may become calm for us?” for the sea was becoming increasingly stormy. He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you.” However, the men rowed desperately to return to land but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them. Then they called on the Lord and said, “We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O Lord, have done as You have pleased.” So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. Then the men feared the Lord greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.
Jonah is a story that so many people know, but few people truly understand. It is one of the only minor prophets most people know anything about, with the possible exception of Hosea. It has been a very contested book throughout the years, especially over the last couple of centuries as the inerrancy of Scripture has been more vocally challenged or rejected outright. Even Martin Luther said of it that if it were not in the Bible, he would have called it a lie. Many Bible believing Christians even now approach this book with skepticism. If you go outside of the most conservative seminaries, really just a handful that remain true to the Word, you will hear nothing but labels of parable, allegory, or poetry attached to the book of Jonah, all making it clear that it is not to be accepted as historical fact.
Now I am going do something that might surprise some of you, I am going to not give you a defense of the extraordinary parts of book of Jonah. Not much of one anyway. There are many people throughout the ages who have tried to explain the story of Jonah with science and history. To make a defense of a human being able to exist in the bowels of a sea creature, laying out the dimensions of the stomach of a whale, arguing the possibility of hypothermia or a coma, pointing to actual examples in recorded history of people surviving being swallowed by a whale or a large fish.
The other major point of contention being the repentance of the city of Nineveh. The capital of the Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BC. A city, a people known for their excessive brutality. Honestly the stories they tell about themselves would shock you, let alone what they were accused of by others. It would make our most graphic horror movies seem childish by comparison. People point to natural and historical events that might lead to the city making some drastic religious change, solar eclipses, internal and external pressure on the Empire. It is all there, and if you really want to know I would be happy to talk about it with you or point you to some good material.
But in the end, none of that stuff matters. And it does not matter because of one simple fact, Jesus believed it was true and that is good enough for me. In fact, Jonah was the only minor prophet that Jesus ever referred to. And what is even more amazing is that the two major issues people have with the book of Jonah are the two issues that Jesus specifically mentions. We will see in Matthew 12, Jesus equate His three days in the grave to Jonah’s three days in the belly of the sea monster and the testimony of the men of Nineveh who repented.
In fact, there are a number of ways that Jonah and Jesus are equated. They are both from Galilee, near Nazareth. 2 Kings is the only other place in the Bible we hear about the prophet Jonah, other than the lips of Jesus, and it mentions that he is from Gath-hepher, which is right down the road from Jesus’ Nazareth. So, when the Pharisees in Jesus day said that no prophet came from Galilee, they obviously forgot about our antihero here.
They have similar origin locations, they both have the three days spent in the dark, but we also see that they were both sent to more than just the people of Israel. Jonah is the only prophet sent directly by God to the Gentiles. There were lots of prophecies about Gentile nations in the Old Testament. Both the warnings and promises of blessings in the future. But Jonah is the only prophet who is commanded to go to the Gentiles specifically to speak to them a Word from God.
Before we get into the text itself, I want to lay out a few things that most people have wrong about the story of Jonah, I want to go over the context, the narrative itself and point out a few things that will help us get our mindset right as we look at this book over the next couple of weeks.
More often than not in conservative Christian circles, the book of Jonah is met, not with skepticism but with superficiality. There are so many simplistic children’s stories about Jonah and the whale, and I do not think I have come across one that gets the message of the book right. And yes, that includes the Veggietales version. Most of them focus on the whale, the big fish, and if I were a betting man, I would bet you a large sum of money that if you have a children’s book at home about Jonah there is some sort of sea creature plastered on the front cover, and probably just about every page. And I am sorry to break it to you, but the fish is really not a big deal in the story. It is not about Jonah and the whale.
Jonah is not about conquering the whales in your life. It is not the moralistic story that says “do not run away from God, just pray and obey.” As it is so often presented. The story is not about a worm, it is not about a plant, it is not about a whale, and it really is not even about a prophet, it is about God. It is about the sovereignty of God, it is about His redemptive plan and His work within the world despite the rebellion of man. The book is about the character of God. It is about the patience of God, it is about the mercy of God in the face of rebellious sin. It is a book that demonstrates God’s desire for all peoples to be saved even the worst offenders. It is about His willingness to move nature and supernatural ways to save and His equal desire to redeem an empire and an individual.
The book might be named after Jonah, but God is the most important figure throughout. The name Yahweh, the intimate covenant name for God, appears 25 times in the 48 verses of this short book, and there are 39 references Him altogether. Each chapter focuses on an act of God that Jonah reacts to. Though the story seems to follow the adventures of Jonah, if you look at the narrative from a more abstract perspective it is clear that God is the protagonist and Jonah the antagonist.
The Lord is the one attempting to accomplish a task. He is trying to redeem people. In this task He is challenged by the antagonist Jonah who attempts to thwart Him in several significant ways. Jonah is the one trying to keep God’s plan from happening. The narrative is laid out in two main Acts, and in each case, Jonah’s actions serve as the problem to be overcome. God wants to save the people of Nineveh in chapter 1 but Jonah runs away and only repents when his life is in imminent danger after being thrown overboard. God tries again to save the people of Nineveh in chapter 3 and when they do repent Jonah becomes angry hoping for their destruction.
As we work our way through chapter 1, I want to point out 2 reoccurring themes that will serve as our lessons for this morning. The first is the sovereignty of God in the redeeming of men. God is intent on this goal. It is the red line that runs throughout all of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. God’s plan of redemption and His work to accomplish that plan. Outside of establishing His glory, which is the purpose of our redemption, to glorify God fully, redemption is God’s purpose throughout Scripture. His work within creation is always directed to this goal and it is made unmistakably clear in the book of Jonah. God will make His plan of redemption come to pass even using His chosen tool, Jonah, who is in constant defiance.
The second thing we are going to see in chapter 1 is the defiance of Jonah. Jonah is a prophet of God, he spoke a message of repentance and redemption to the kingdom of Israel at a time of great sin in the northern kingdom. He is called a prophet of God, God speaks to him directly, giving him direct revelation, giving him both personal instruction and a message to deliver. We see in chapter 1, chapter 3, and chapter 4 God directly and audibly speaking to Jonah with chapter 4 recording a conversation between the two.
If I were to give a title to chapter 1, I would call it “A sovereign God’s pursuit of a defiant prophet.” The defiance of Jonah is made painfully clear in verses 1 to 3. It begins with God’s Word, a calling of Jonah to, “arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it.” If you read the prophetical section of the Old Testament you will see words like this over and over again. “The word of the Lord came to Jonah” or to Hosea, or to Isaiah. And then a command, “arise, go.” Who they are going to mean change, the message might be different, but the word of the Lord to his prophet, his mouthpiece on earth begins with “arise, go.” This is how God chose to interact with his people throughout the Old Testament. Using prophets, men set aside and used to bring his message of warning or of blessing.
But in this case God’s chosen tool rebels. For reasons that will not be made clear until chapter 4, Jonah decides he does not want to obey the Word of God and he goes the opposite direction. For now the reader is left not with a reason, not with a way of possibly sympathizing or empathizing with Jonah and his disobedience. It could be fear, the Ninevites were known for their cruelty and they were an enemy of Israel. It could be a sense of pride. No other prophet had ever been sent to speak directly to the Gentiles. There were messages given by God directed toward other peoples, other cities and nations, but the prophets were never told to go there. We’re not given an answer to “why” Jonah decides to disobey were just given a blunt description of his complete rebellion. This mission, this message is completely unacceptable to the prophet.
And in verse three we see the reaction of Jonah to this command. “But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.” That verse is quite a mouthful but it is making a very clear point about the defiance of Jonah. He was told to go to Nineveh, the city that was 500 miles North and East of Israel, on the Tigris River in modern-day Iraq. Instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah headed down, South to Joppa in order to catch a boat heading east to Tarshish. Most scholars believe this is a reference to a port in Spain on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea near modern-day Cadiz, near Gibraltar.
The words of this verse highlight this defiance, it emphasizes this complete opposite directional choice as a way of stressing Jonah’s absolute rejection of God’s command. Three times in verse 3 it mentions Tarshish. Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish, he found a ship heading to Tarshish, and he went down into the boat to go to Tarshish. He could have just said no, find someone else. He could have stayed where he was in Israel surrounded by friends and family. He could have decided to pick up a trade, become a farmer, become a craftsman and leave his life as a prophet behind. But no, Jonah hightailed it in the opposite direction, he was going to the other end of the known world, as far away from the Nineveh as possible.
This is an active, audacious defiance, total disobedience. This is not weakness or doubt. Other prophets questioned their qualifications when called by God. Jeremiah thought he was too young, Isaiah thought he was unworthy, Moses thought he was inadequate, there is not any of that, Jonah just says “no!”He hears the command, he arises but turns his back on God and heads the other way.
But what the rest of chapter 1 is going to show us is that no matter how defiant God’s prophet is, God’s purpose will succeed. God’s reaction to Jonah’s reaction comes in verse four and we see a second great intervention of God into the natural world to accomplish his plan. How does he respond? He hurls a great storm onto the sea. I think that is great, he does not just cause a wind come, he does not just stir up the waves, he hurls the storm at Jonah and the unfortunate sailors who accepted him as a passenger.
And this is a nasty storm. Before the end of the same verse the ship is, literally in the Hebrew, thinking about, pondering, considering breaking up. This is a nasty storm. It has the sailors terrified such that they are throwing their cargo overboard. These are hardened sailors who lived on the ocean, who knew the Mediterranean Sea and how to traverse it. And they are terrified, they have never seen a storm like this, throwing everything overboard to lighten the ship. This is no small thing, there was no storm insurance. They were not getting this cargo back, they were throwing away their money, their livelihood to stay afloat.
They are just trying to stay alive and on one of the trips down to the hold to throw away their livelihood to save their lives, the captain sees Jonah asleep. You have to wonder how? How could a prophet of God, on the run, in absolute rebellion and sin sleep so soundly that this killer storm could not even wake them up? What kind of mindset allows that kind of confidence? Full indifference to the situation.
The captain in verse six comes to him with the same question, though for a very different reason “how is it that you are sleeping?” What you do not see here in the English that is blaring in the Hebrew is the captain’s not so coincidental choice of words for his command. “Arise cry out to you are God.” The same verbs from verse 2, “arise” and “cry out.” I wonder if Jonah caught the irony. “Cry out to your God. Perhaps he will be concerned about us.” The crew have all been praying to their pagan gods. I am sure there are a number of different divine names getting thrown around and these desperate men want every chance of success and so they grab their passenger and demand he pray to his God as well.
But Jonah does not pray. The whole ships on the cusp of death but Jonah persists in his defiance. Then the sailors get out the dice to learn who has brought the storm upon them. They pray to their god’s and that was not working so the next logical step is that the gods were angry at somebody aboard and so they needed to figure out who that was. And so we see the next direct intervention of Yahweh. This was a system that was used throughout the Mediterranean world to divine the will of the gods. They were not dice like we think of them but they worked in basically the same way. Equal chance for everybody so they roll and let the gods show them who is at fault.
And so, the one true God gets involved. This was not just chance landing on Jonah. Proverbs 16:33 points to the sovereignty of God even here, “the lot is cast into the lap, but it is every decision is from Yahweh.” He has been trying to get Jonah’s attention, the command did not work, the storm is not doing it, so he directs the dice cast by these pagan sailors to fall on Jonah. But still Jonah resists.
Fulfilling the command of God even in defiance, Jonah is forced to witness to Gentiles, the very thing he was trying to flee. The sailors begin the interrogation, “tell us now!” What did you do, what god did you anger, what is your job, where are you from, what country what people?
Jonah answers with even more irony. I wonder if he caught the irony when the words came out of his mouth. “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land.” You fear the Lord God of heaven? Does not seem like it so far.
“Then the man became extremely frightened” in verse 10. The sailors who were terrified of the storm before. Who were throwing their livelihood overboard, who are crying out to any and all gods who would hear their plea, who are on a hunt for their typhoid Mary, the cause of their distress a moment before have their fear magnified 100 times over. They were scared before now they are extremely frightened. They had heard about Yahweh, the God of Israel. The stories of David, the miracles of Elijah and Elisha would have made the rounds. Their gods were important to them, they were worth praying to in the minds of these pagans, but they knew what Yahweh could do and it left them petrified.
They asked Jonah, “what should we do to you?” How do we get out of this? And instead of obedience, instead of telling them to turn the boat around and take him back so that he can head to Nineveh, in the greatest act of defiance yet Jonah says, “I would rather drown.” Just toss me overboard and the sea will become calm. I would rather die than go to Nineveh.
The sailors are too scared of Yahweh to do that, they know that if they throw Jonah into the raging waters it means certain death and so in verse 13 they tried desperately to return to land, but God will not let them. He is not after these pagan sailors, He does not want them to turn the boat around he wants Jonah to turn around. He wants Jonah to repent.
So finally, these pagan sailors, who are becoming less pagan with each verse call out to Yahweh, call out to the God of Jonah, the God of the Hebrews, earnestly praying, “do not let us perish on account of this man’s life.”
And look at this in the end of verse 14, they recognize the hand of God. They see that it is God who has brought the storm, who has brought this punishment against Jonah and that they are caught up in it. They recognize his sovereign hand in all of this. And they realize that they have to throw Jonah overboard and they do.
I want to see here also that this is not some sort of noble sacrifice by Jonah. There is no repentance in him yet. He is at the height of defiance, “I would rather die than obey.” He is not taking one for the team, he is not accepting the consequences of his actions, this is wholesale insubordination.
Finally, the sailors give in and they tossed Jonah overboard and again God miraculously intervenes. The highlight at the end of chapter 1, verse 17 in the Hebrew text is actually part of chapter 2 and so will look at that next week, but the highlight at the end of chapter 1 is verse 16. The chapter does not end on the nerve-wracking cliffhanger of Jonah being sucked under the waves, (will he survive, will he repent, what will God do?). The chapter ends on a far more positive note.
Despite Jonah’s rebellion, despite his defiance, God has used him to redeem these Gentile sailors. “Then the men feared the Lord greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” At the beginning of this chapter they are a bunch of pagan sailors who will cry out to any god that will listen and by the end they have declared the sovereignty of God, stood in wonder and fear of the Lord, offered sacrifices to him and made vows.
I want to end our time this morning by offering up a thought for you to consider having looked at this chapter, something to take home and ponder. It is just this, God can use anyone to bring the gospel to a lost and dying world. Through this year we have been talking about evangelism quite a bit in Sunday school. Going over to different series on the topic and I am sure the thought has occurred to you more than once “I am unable or unworthy to spread the gospel.” I am not good enough, I am not knowledgeable enough, I am to sinful, to frail, imperfect.
God can use anyone in his redemption plans. If he can use a Prophet who running the exact opposite direction from the commands of God in complete defiance and rebellion, he can use you. If you can use someone who does not even want to be used to bring an entire ship full of the lost to a knowledge of who he is, imagine what he could do with a willing servant no matter how imperfect they may be.