Jonah 1:1-6 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. 3 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. 4 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. 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. 6 So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish. Jonah Away from the Presence of the Lord Over the next six weeks we are going to be moving chronologically through the book of Jonah. Yes, the one where the guy gets swallowed and puked up by a whale. Don t be too distracted by that just yet. In Jonah we see one of the most complex characters of ancient literature. He is manic, racist, prideful, fearful, at some points exceedingly joyful, and moments later suicidal. He is by no means an example to be followed, yet he is deeply relatable in all sorts of ways. In Jonah we see a person that knows all the right answers to questions about God, and yet is unable to apply those answers to the world he lives in and therefore comes up constantly frustrated. So often as Christians we know the right answers to say but the truth is we don t know how to connect those answers to our actual lives. We can t look into our lives and interpret them based upon who we know God to be. In fact, it is easy to find ourselves constantly frustrated by God, because the circumstances of our life and our ideas about God don t line up. Some of the most fundamental reasons people don t believe Christianity stem from this problem. If we know God to be kind and good and loving then why is the world so evil, bad, and hateful? Could a kind and good and loving God really exist, and if he does exist how could we possibly say that he is actually engaged with the world? In the book of Jonah, we can see how our own inability to correctly interpret our lives causes us to miss out on what God is actually doing in the world. It causes us to despise his grace and run towards his wrath because in the midst of our sin we can t tell the difference. The book of Jonah will help us reinterpret the world in light of who God is and what he is doing in it. 1
1. History & Background Jonah is mentioned in only one other passage of scripture, 2 Kings 14:25, which recounts Jonah as a prophet during the time of Jeraboam II. Jonah prophesied correctly that Jeraboam II would restore the territory of Northern Israel to the borders that they had under King Solomon. This meant recapturing land in the North of Israel that had been ruled by the Assyrians. This was a major victory for Israel against an extremely violent and oppressive empire and Jonah played a crucial role in realizing this victory. It would have been an incredible thing to be the prophet that God spoke through to clear out the cruel Assyrian empire. So when God told Jonah to go to Nineveh it was shocking. Nineveh is the capital of the Assyrian Empire. God is telling Jonah to go preach against your arch enemy at the center of their power. It seems like a suicide mission. Not to mention Hebrew prophets were not sent to Gentile nations. This is a true missionary journey that would have required Jonah to look outside of his own country towards not just another country but an occupying state. The best evidence we have of the Assyrian empire shows an extremely violent and cruel culture towards those they conquered. Jonah was a part of seeing Judah freed from that oppression, and now God is calling Jonah to go preach to his former captor. The Assyrian Empire was almost completely lost to history until 1845 1 when the ruins of Nineveh were discovered along with incredible artifacts depicting both the prosperity and incredible cruelty of the city. Currently in the British Museum in London hangs a 12-meter-long relief depicting Assyria s sack of Lachish a city in Judah just north of Jerusalem. This relief would have hung in the palace of Assyrian King Sennacherib and it depicts the brutal violence that they used against the Hebrew People, impaling them on stakes outside the city walls so that their cries would carry throughout the city. It is the record of their initial occupation of Judah and their capturing of Lachish recorded in 2 Chronicles 32, they were however prevented from capturing Jerusalem. Had they of captured Jerusalem they almost certainly would have plastered the 1 Lachish Relief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lachish_relief 2
palace walls with that victory, however matching the Biblical record, they did not. 2 Austen Henry Layard, the man who discovered these artifacts states, This highly interesting series of bas-reliefs contained, moreover, an undoubted representation of a king, a city, and a people, with whose names we are acquainted, and of an event described in Holy Writ. 3 So many of us as Christians assent to the truth of scripture, however when I was researching the archaeological evidence confirming events only recorded in the biblical record I found myself more surprised than I would hope to be. I think the reason for that is that I tend to think of God in terms of timeless principles, rather than as an agent active in the world. The reason I wanted to spend some time accounting for the archaeological evidence is because it is so important to prevent us from reading Jonah as an allegory. It is tempting to approach this book, and say, a man gets swallowed whole by a fish and lives, so the point isn t whether or not that really happened the point is what we can learn from him. However, this approach would actually be a grave mistake. In the complex person of Jonah, we see someone who is constantly trying to interpret the world around him and God s work in the world. In this way Jonah is extremely beneficial to us now, as we are in the same position. We live in a real world and we are trying to interpret a real God s work in the world. If this is not history, and it is just an old Aesop s fable then it isn t of any real use to us in trying to interpret our world and seeing how God is at work in it. If the ancient city of Nineveh had been discovered and the archaeological evidence contradicted the biblical narrative, then we would have some real questions to address. However, the fact is that scripture proved the evidence. If you re trying to read this just as allegory, the evidence raises an interpretive problem. The ancillary details of the book of Jonah are grounded in reality. The book of Jonah presents itself to us as a true historical event referencing an actual person and an actual city and then Jonah assumes a God that is actively at work in the world. The only reason to say that Jonah is allegory and not history is that you assume that God is non-existent or not at work in the world. But understand that move is not required and inspired by the text or the evidence, it is read into it. In light of Jonah s historicity, we can approach the 2 Matthew Cock, 3D-imaging the Assyrian reliefs at the British Museum: from the 1850s to today 2014. (Accessed 6/30/2016). https://blog.britishmuseum.org/2014/11/19/3dimaging-the-assyrian-reliefs-at-the-british-museum-from-the-1850s-to-today/ 3 Layerd, Austen Henry, Discoveries among the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon,1853. http://archive.org/stream/discoveriesamon00layagoog#page/n159/mode/1up 3
story to find an account of how God is actually operating in the world, and learn to better understand his work in our own lives. With that in mind we can turn back to the story. Jonah is a literary masterpiece which establishes themes in the very beginning that it carries throughout the rest of the book. This however does not mean that it is fiction or that the author didn t intend meaning in the way that he recounted the story. History in scripture is recounted in such a way to guide us towards a proper understanding of God s work in the world. With this background let s get into the story and establish the basic tension that the historical book of Jonah is written to highlight. 2. Reluctant Prophet Jon 1:1-3 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. 3 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. After being commanded by God to head to Nineveh Jonah goes in the exact opposite direction. He goes down the coast to a port city called Joppa and buys a spot on a ship headed for Tarshish. Nineveh was to the East and Tarshish is about as far West as anyone knew about, probably in modern day Spain. The writer emphasizes over and over again that Jonah was not going to Nineveh, three times in this verse he says Jonah is going to Tarshish. His purpose in going is stated explicitly as to flee from the presence of the Lord. A pretty tall order for a boat in 760BC. The shear ridiculousness of his flight exposes how skewed a perspective Jonah was able to have about God in his moment of panic. The strange thing is that Jonah could have just as easily stayed in Judah and disobeyed the Lords command to head to Nineveh but instead he actually runs the other way thinking he could escape the presence of the Lord. But Jonah s flight was not reasonable, it was compulsory. Sin forces us to run from God. The first thing that Adam and Eve do after disobeying God, when they hear the Lord walking through the Garden; they hid themselves from the presence of 4
the Lord (Gen 3:8). And when God calls for Adam saying, where are you? Adam responds, I heard the sound of you in the Garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself (v. 10). We run from the presence of the Lord, because it is the Lords presence that exposes who we really are. The Lord s presence exposes our nakedness and our shame and we know that his justice demands our punishment so we are afraid. This is a shame we all know. Consider the feeling of being caught in a lie and how tortured it can make you feel. You would rather do anything else in the whole world than be found out, because it is so painful to be revealed as a liar. And because it is so painful, your lies continue. You continue running. And the very thing that made you feel ashamed and naked in the first place you are now running towards to try and fix your shame. Sin is insanity. We do this in all sorts of very stupid ways, we run from truth and the reality of who we are so we don t have to face the consequences of being seen as naked. An article in the New York Times recounts a study that found that 30 percent of respondents lied about having seen The Godfather. 4 We don t want to be exposed as out of the loop or not cultured so we hide who we really are. In the text, Jonah s running is described as a descent. He runs down to Joppa, and goes down into the ship, and then he goes down into the inner part of the ship, and then he falls asleep. This going down is a euphemism for death. 5 As he flees from the presence of the Lord, he is running towards his death. This is the insanity of sin in our lives. We run away from a just God to avoid the punishment of our sin, to hide in our shame, it feels like an act of selfpreservation but in reality it is suicide. We are running from the only thing that could save us and running towards the very rebellion that is killing us. It is well within the rights of a just God to allow Jonah to keep on running, to let him continue in his descent. Jonah s running could have been the end of the story. There are other prophets God could send to Nineveh. Hosea and Amos were around at the same time and probably available. But God doesn t leave Jonah to his running. 4 Campbell, Rebekah The Surprising Large Cost of Telling Small Lies. New York Times, 03/11/14. Accessed on July 1, 2016. http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/the-surprisingly-large-cost-of-telling-smalllies/?_r=0 5 Gen 37:35 5
3. Relentless God Jonah 1:4-6 4 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. 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. 6 So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish. But the Lord does not remain absent, he does not allow Jonah to run towards his death. The Lord is as relentless as Jonah is reluctant. He hurls a storm on the sea that brings Jonah s ship to the point of total destruction, so that his physical running is brought to a standstill. In the midst of the storm Jonah remains asleep until the captain finds him and wakes him up with a familiar word. Arise. The very word that God had used to commission Jonah to go to Nineveh initially. Now in the midst of a storm in the middle of the sea in the belly of a ship Jonah hears that word again from the mouth, not of a prophet like he is, but of a pagan sea captain that calls upon Jonah to reach out to the God that he is running away from. Perhaps his God will give a thought to them that they may not perish! They don t know, but it s worth a shot. Just maybe, Jonah s God, for some reason would care that they are perishing. God, in the storm that he had hurled upon the sea brings the crew and Jonah to a point where their only hope is to throw themselves upon his mercy. The crew has thrown everything else off the ship, and called on all their other God s. But their last hope is perhaps Jonah s God will be merciful. God in bringing the storm was not bringing a punishment, he was forcing Jonah into a position to own who he really was, and come back into the presence of the Lord. From what we know about sin, we can see that a calm sea would have been God s wrath, let him keep running. But a violent storm was God s mercy drawing Jonah back towards himself. The good news of Christianity is that God pursues us in the midst of our sin and running. He doesn t wait for us to repent to start pursuing, and he doesn t leave us alone spiraling in our sin. He is a relentless God in his pursuit of sinners. He will bring the storm to draw you back. 6
In our sin, God s presence can be the most terrifying thing. But when we see the true character of God, that God is gracious and merciful slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster, when we realize who God is that is pursuing us, then we are able to see the insanity of our running and turn to him. We can realize that the storm was not an act of punishment but an act of mercy because if it weren t for the storm perhaps we would never have turned from our sin. As I said before, Jonah is not a good example of realizing the sweetness of God s sometimes painful pursuit. Jonah felt like he was being pestered and punished by God s presents. David however captures the reality well in Psalm 139. 7 Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! 9 If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. Jonah took the wings of the morning, that means he headed west out into the ocean, to dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, but even there, although he didn t know it, God s hand was leading him. When we see the true character of God we can interpret properly his actions toward us, and trust more in his character than in how things immediately appear. This gives us the courage to run back towards him in the midst of our sin instead of away from him. 7