INTRODUCTION Many great empires have risen and fallen before our day. Some were considered invincible, for some, their citizens couldn t even conceive of it right up to the day they collapsed. And in many cases, they fell to a people or peoples they thought were inferior to them. Question: Does our nation parallel any of them? Why a nation rises and falls is not a simple matter. There are many elements that come into play and even more opinions about them. Just look at the fall of Rome, how many books have been written about that! We could learn from all these nations, but there is one case that is particularly unique in all the history of the world. There is only one nation whose historical commentary is not written merely by men, but by God; the reason why they rose, and why they fell. To know God s view; what would that be worth to us? Israel had risen and was crushed out of existence, not once but twice. What led up to their demise? What did that fall look like? To how many generations did God send warnings before it happened? What form did those warnings take? And most important to us, are those lessons directly transferable to us? If we look into their past, can we glimpse our own future? If we can, it becomes more than history, it becomes personal. Now we are talking about the quality of our lives and the lives of our children. God has recorded it in His Word for a reason. And the most logical reason is; we can apply it to our own culture. That is why they are recorded in God s Word. And if God has gone to the trouble of telling us, I believe it is for the purpose of gaining wisdom and affecting our collective course. The question remains; do we have the sense and desire to learn what is to be learned? If so, how do we start? Here s what we re going to do. We are going to look at God s history of Israel from the vantage point of their fall. We ll call them, D Day 1 and D Day 2. The warning came in the form of the Prophets; men that God had sent with a very specific message for their time. We are going to place them in chronological order and follow them through time. There were so many that overlap, that we couldn t study them all, even in a year, so we will look at prime examples through each generation. D Day 1 fell upon the Hebrew people in 586 BC. For this journey, that is YEAR 0. We are there. It is quiet now, only a light wind is howling through the rubble that was once the city wall. Everyone has been killed or dragged away. Smoke is rising in black columns all around what was once a city. We find our way to a rock platform that was once part of a magnificent temple. We look down to see great stains of blood; a lot of someone or something was butchered here. As we look around we make a gruesome find; a pair of gouged out eyes, they are human. In the rubble we find fragments of a royal crown and a few tatters of a very ornate robe. Something awful happened here. It was a catastrophe from the lowest to the highest of this nation. We are standing in the remains of Jerusalem. Now we flash back further in time. The year is now 772 BC, we are YEAR 0 minus 236. There is a man deep in prayer. But the look on his face tells us, he doesn t like what he is hearing from God. We are on the seaside border of Israel. Can you guess who this man is? It is Jonah, and Jonah is unique in all the prophets. He is the only prophet ever sent outside of Israel. And he is the only prophet recorded who disobeys God. We can learn things here that we won t learn anywhere else. We are going to look at Jonah, verse by verse; starting in Jonah 1 1 P a g e
1. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2. "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.'' Cry out (Za aq) is a powerful phrase in the original Hebrew. It means to shriek from anguish or danger. There was nothing half-hearted that Jonah was commanded to do. When God asks us to communicate His Word, that is something to remember; it is not meant to be half-hearted. He was to shriek in Nineveh. Nineveh was a mega-tropolis of its day. The population has been calculated to be as much as 600,000 people. It was three quarters the size of present day Indianapolis! Its name means built by the god, Nimrod. It was the center of the rising superpower of Assyria. 3. But Jonah arose 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 from the presence of the Lord. Tarshish was on the coast of Spain, a trip to the west, Nineveh sat on the Tigris in present day, Northern Iraq, to the East. Jonah couldn t have picked a more opposite direction. What s going on here? Prophets are supposed to carry God s message. Why is Jonah so adamant to disobey? Assyria symbolized everything worldly, everything pagan, everything that was hostile to the spiritual and Godly aspirations of Israel. And what s more, it was a threat; in the time of Jonah it was a storm growing on the horizon. Israel was in eminent danger of being swallowed up. It was in danger of having its identity and faith ripped away from it. Assyria was the enemy, politically, culturally, and spiritually. It wasn t that Jonah was indifferent to their destruction, he wanted it! Every Israelite did! It would be a day to rejoice. Is it any wonder Jonah ran away! From the opening scene, we see something incredible and deep: THIS IS HOW GOD DEALS WITH HIS ENEMIES, or at least enemies as we perceive them. Ultimately it is with perfect justice, but it begins with mercy and compassion. There is no group of humanity that God doesn t desire is to warn and rescue. But, Jonah doesn t see it that way and so he runs. Runs where? From the presence of the Lord. Keep in mind, Jonah knows God is everywhere. But in that day, it was a pagan world. The one place the presence of the ONE TRUE GOD was an active influence, was in Israel. Jonah was running away from the inspired influence of God. He reasoned that if he ran far enough, he would lose touch with God s pull and he could ignore him. Does that sound familiar in our day? How many followers of Christ decide they don t want quite that much influence? They pull away from the places they feel the influence of God. They run to their workplaces, or relationships that are non-god, or at least God-neutral. They aren t rejecting God, just neutralizing His influence for a while. We just want to stick our head in a bit of comfortable sand. The problem is, we can never tread water spiritually, we are either growing closer to God, or we are becoming more distant. And both carry consequences. So how does it work out for Jonah? 4. But the Lord sent out a great wind on the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship was about to be broken up. 5. Then the mariners were afraid; and every man cried out to his god, and threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten the load. But Jonah had gone down into the lowest parts of the ship, had lain down, and was fast asleep. 6. So the captain came to him, and said to him, "What do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call on your God; perhaps your God will consider us, so that we may not perish.'' 2 P a g e
In Jonah s time, every culture had its gods. That made one thing very obvious; every war between nations was a holy war. Every war affected the spiritual condition of a nation. We may place different things up as gods in our day. But do we really think it s any different? They find Jonah asleep in the storm. It is a perfect parallel to Jesus, sleeping in the storm (Matt 26:40,41); what is entirely different, is the reason. Jesus slept in the security of God. Jonah slept in deference to God. Being asleep isn t always proof of innocence. When Jesus was suffering in the garden, and the fate of humanity hung in the balance; the church slept. How often has the church remained asleep as our spiritual fate hangs in the balance? As we look at the spiritual condition of our culture today; is the church asleep or awake. Are we Jonah or Jesus? Here s the thing; when people are asleep for the wrong reason, there is usually a very rude awakening. 7. And they said to one another, "Come, let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this trouble has come upon us.'' So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8. Then they said to him, "Please tell us! For whose cause is this trouble upon us? What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?'' 9. And he said to them, "I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.'' 10. Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said to him, "Why have you done this?'' For the men knew that he fled from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. Casting lots was an accepted way among God s people to come to a decision. It wasn t gambling, but trusting God to control the outcome. It wasn t for personal gain, but direction. It was for something that was affecting them all. And what a lesson for us in our day: Even these ancient people who were entirely pagan, instinctively understood something we seem to forget in our day. There is no such thing as private sin. When we do wrong, it is like a rock hitting the water; the ripples go out and affect others around us. And what do you think happens when everyone throws rocks? You get turbulent waters. Last week we talked about collective sin or as Jesus called it the sin of an entire generation. Jonah s sin was lack of regard, in deference to the Lord, the generation of Jesus was indifference and the sin of our generation, what is it? I would have to say, both. Jonah shows us it leads to storms, figurative and literal. In this storm, Jonah identifies himself as a Hebrew. That has significance; that is the term God s people used to identify themselves to outsiders. The in-house term was Israelite. Jonah was professing God to the world even as he was defying the God he professed. That is to say; his own tongue deepened the guilt. I can t help but draw a parallel with the church today. God tells us to speak of Him in gentleness and love; yet, there is no shortage of in your face Christianity. He tells us not to judge the outside world; yet, we have a reputation for judging. He tells us to love one another; yet, local churches dividing in animosity is common. He tells us to remain pure; and yet, we look just like the culture. He tells us to put aside the trappings of wealth and go deep; yet, the western church attracts people by intentionally skimming the surface and amassing a multi-million dollar business. So let me ask you: Is it possible, we are a community of Jonahs ; prophets on the run? And if we are; what storms are coming? CONCLUSION Here s the bottom line: Jonah s world is our world. The technology may be flashier, but it is still the same human nature. 3 P a g e
Understandably, we want the church to be a place of healing, of refuge and of inspiration. And it should be all those things. But what God calls the church to be before anything else is a beacon. It is commissioned to be the great search light of truth, even when the truth isn t comfortable. Truth often calls out a warning so we can take safe action. In Jonah s day, the truth was: there were dangerously negative elements. To ignore them would be catastrophic. There were enemies. There were things that shouldn t be tolerated. It was crucial to be aware and acknowledge them. Today, in our world, there are cultures that take such an opposite position to ours that unless one group or the other compromises its core values, we will inevitably be at odds. To communism; there is no God and religion is the opiate of the people. To Islam, there is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is His prophet. Everything else is infidelity, and the Qur an does not tolerate infidelity. Sura 2:191 (Of the Qur an) And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah [civil chaos] is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-masjid al- Haram [Mosque of Mecca] until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers. In fairness, the Qur an is filled with some wonderful wisdom, and its call to war is only under one strict condition: When something outside of Islam threatens the faith. However, it speaks of Judaism and Christianity as threats. That is simply the truth. (It s rather interesting; do you know where Nineveh was situated? The present day location is the city of Mosul. Anyone following the Iraq war knows; that city has been a major flash point of the present day Jihad.) Our mention of Islam is by no means to foster hatred; it is to simply emphasize one point: The situation of Jonah is directly relatable to our day. We sit with a storm on our horizon. There are people we can easily perceive as our enemy; and in Jonah s story, God shows us how HE responds. (Compassion and mercy). And the lesson goes deeper than that and we dare not miss it! In Jonah s day, Assyria wasn t the real enemy at all. The real enemy was the spiritual vacuum that Israel had formed within its own collective soul. They professed God but they disregarded Him. There had been and there always will be some physical threat as long as God s people are on this fallen world. Israel itself, was created out of a miraculous escape from the superpower of Egypt. Then; from the wondering in the desert to the golden age of Solomon; their existence didn t depend on the lack of threat, but on the quality of their faith. The Old Testament is a three thousand year lesson: the real enemy is ourselves when we let the spiritual vacuum deepen. In a vacuum, two things happen: 1. The object is crushed (or implodes) 2. Something will rush in to fill that vacuum. And from that spiritual principle, here is a deduction for our day: The Islamic situation in America isn t the enemy, it is the consequence. As we walk along with Jonah we are seeing the stage being set. We are D Day minus 236 years. Jonah had a relationship with God; he could hear Him. His sin wasn t disbelief, it was actually something worse; it was disregard. Disregard is worse because it sets up the worst type of vacuum. 4 P a g e
As we look into Jonah, the message so far to us is simply this: Wake up! Wake up to the truth and stay true to God s call! 5 P a g e