COVENANT PULPIT True and Better: Jonah Jonah 1:11-17 October 4&5, 2014 Pastor Bob Petterson Covenant Church of Naples PCA 6926 Trail Boulevard, Naples FL 34108 (239) 597-3464 www.covenantnaples.com
World focus is again on Iraq, and that frightening terrorist army: ISIS. These fanatics skillful use of the social media to show grisly videos of beheadings, crucifixions, and mass executions is designed to terrorize us all into submission. Some 2700 years ago, in Northern Iraq, the ancestors of ISIS used the same strategy. Those terrorists were known as Assyrians. Between the ninth and seventh centuries BC, these Northern Iraqis swept across the Middle East with lightning speed, building an empire that stretched from North Africa to modern day Russia. Their chariots were the Panzer tanks of that day. Their cavalry swept like the wind across desert steppes. They perfected siege technology that could level city walls within days. No one could stand up to the Assyrian scourge. But it s their cruelty that still astounds us 2700 years later. We know about it because, like the Nazis of our era, they left behind meticulous records of their genocides, recording their barbarities on stone tablets. They spoke of cities where every inhabitant was slaughtered in unspeakable ways, beheadings that left behind pyramids of skulls thirty feet high, and whole enemy armies impaled alive on stakes. On the spots where they committed atrocities, they left behind grisly stone carvings depicting their monstrosities. They were ancient ISIS, using the social media of their day to terrorize the nations. These ancient psychopaths repeatedly swept across Israel, leaving behind a swath of destruction, death, and misery. Every Jewish boy and girl grew up hearing about Assyrian atrocities as they passed by their grisly monuments. Assyrians were the boogeymen in every Jewish kid s nightmares. But no one hated the Assyrian monster more than a Jewish prophet from just north of Nazareth. His Jewish name was Yona. We remember him as Jonah. Imagine his shock in the first two verses of his story: The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. Jonah 1:1&2
Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Jonah s first reaction must be fear. The ruthless Assyrian would impale a Jew for just looking at him the wrong way. Now Jonah has to go to the citadel of Assyrian power and preach a hell-fire-and-brimstone sermon. That s bad enough. But, when he thinks about the God who has just given him this dubious assignment, a worse idea occurs to Jonah. It s recorded later, in his anger outside Nineveh: Isn t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That s why I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Jonah 4:2 Jonah wasn t worried as much about what the Assyrians might do to him, as what God might do for them: What if he preaches his damnation message, they repent, and God saves them? This patriotic and prejudiced Israeli couldn t stomach the idea that God could redeem his despised enemies. God might as well come to a Nazi concentration camp Jew, who has lost every member of his extended family to the holocaust, then command him to go to the Reichstag in Berlin to give Adolf Hitler this message: God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. This is precisely why this little book of Jonah is so riproaringly dramatic and disturbing at the same time. It s too bad that most folks get caught up in the story of the fish. Play a word association game: Jonah and the. Every one of you said it, at least in your mind: Jonah and the Whale. Since childhood, we remember that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, lived in its belly for three days, and then was spit up. Of course, skeptics have said that this is a whale of a fable, not historical truth. The fact is, the Hebrew text never says whale. Rather, Jonah 1:17 says, a huge fish. History reports eyewitness accounts of humans who have been swallowed by 25-foot long Mediterranean White Sharks and lived to tell about it. Archeologists have uncovered a stone relief under the king s palace in the ruins of Nineveh depicting a man coming out of a fish s mouth. Next to it is carved the word Yunas the Assyrian rendering of the Jewish Yona. Some
200 years later, the ancient Babylonian historian Berosus wrote about a fish-man who came out of the sea to Nineveh. All that may encourage us believers about the historical credibility of the Bible, but it isn t the core of this story. Here s the most important lesson: The issue isn t whether Jonah lived in the fish, but whether he lives inside of us. The drama isn t whether God can save ruthless pagans like the Assyrians, but will he redeem a religious bigot like Jonah? Yet this isn t so much Jonah s story as it is ours: not whether God can get Jonah to go to Nineveh with the gospel, as much as whether he can get us to go to Naples with it; not so much whether Jonah will love the Ninevites, as whether we will love our neighbors. The same prejudices that were in Jonah, lurk in us. We know that the Ninevites repented. We never find out whether Jonah did. But this story looks beyond that ancient prophet to a true and better Jonah; the One who obeyed his Father, was thrown into the storm-tossed seas of this world, impaled on a stake by the Assyrians of his day, and then spent three days inside the belly of death s grave. The issue for all of us ultimately isn t even whether Jonah is inside us, but does Jesus live in us? Will we share his gospel with modern Ninevites who live around us or will we sit on the sidelines while they perish? 1. RUNNING FROM GOD IS A DOWNWARD JOURNEY The prophet immediately became the rebel. We read, But Jonah ran away from the LORD he sailed to Tarshish to flee from the Lord (Jonah 1:3) The Lord told him to go to Nineveh in Northern Iraq. He headed for Tarshish, an ancient Spanish seacoast city on the Atlantic Ocean. It was as far west as a Jew could go in his day. More precisely, it was as far as he could run in the opposite direction from Nineveh. Are you running from God s will today? Beware, Jonah. You may get away with it for a while. There might even be a getaway ship waiting for you at Joppa. All that proves is, if you want to run away from God, the devil will be there to provide free transportation. But, if God has called you to be his own, the rebel road will always take
you down. Notice Jonah s downward spiral: he went down to Joppa (1:3) Jonah had gone below deck he lay down (1:5) He went down into the sea. (1:15) He went down into the belly of a great fish. (1:17) In Jonah 2:6, he literally says that he went down to hell. Proverbs 3:12 says, The LORD disciplines those he loves. I once read a book by a Christian guy who went off the deep end of gross immorality. The Far Country exacted a horrific price. It took everything he had, and a boatload of God s amazing grace, for him to climb out of the pit that he had dug for himself. He later wrote a poem about God s severe mercy. I have never forgotten this line: Those whom the Lord royally elects, he ruthlessly perfects. Your arms are too short to box with God. If he wants you to go to Nineveh, you will end up in Nineveh. 2. WHEN YOU CAN T OUT-ROW THE STORM, JESUS CALMS THE SEAS. Jonah is on the run, playing hide-and-seek with God. But no one ever wins that game. The Hound of Heaven pursues the rebel, and catches him out at sea. That s a bad place to be when you are poking a stick in the eye of the God who controls the weather. The Mediterranean becomes the mean seas, stirred up by gale force winds. Frantically, the pagan sailors try to row to shore. They offer up sacrifices to appease their various gods. At first, Jonah hides below deck, callous to the fact the Gentiles above are fighting for their very lives. Colin Smith, in his book Jonah: Navigating a God-Centered Life, writes: Jonah s anger is not marked by outbursts of rage but by a quiet withdrawal from the company of others and a preoccupation with the events of his own life. How about you? Is there a growing preoccupation with your own life (and its disappointments) that causes you to ignore the storms that others are battling? All around us, people are fighting for their lives, desperately trying to row to some safe harbor, all the while throwing up prayers to the false gods of their own imagination. Jonah, maybe you need to wake up and realize that, if this ship goes down, you are going down with everyone else.
Jonah finally cries out, Pick me up and throw me into the sea, and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you. (Jonah 2:12) The problems in our world are not caused only by nonbelievers. If the good ship America ever sinks, it won t be the sins of the pagans, but the silence of Christians hiding out below deck that is to blame. As the cartoon character Pogo famously said, We ve met the enemy and he is us. We have all sinned and turned Paradise into a raging storm. All our efforts to out-row it, or create safe harbors, or sacrifice to gods of our own making, won t save us. Someone has to be thrown overboard. Thanks to God: Jonah s story points to a true and better One who came down to earth in obedience. He loved us, but we crucified him. He was thrown into the sea of God s wrath for us. He became the perfect sacrifice. He calms the storms always did, and always will. He alone is our safe harbor. Even Peter understood that. When the storm is raging, it s better to get out of the boat and walk by faith to Jesus. Safety is only found in his arms, and not in our boats. 3. THE WAY OUT OF HELL IS THROUGH HIS RESURRECTION. Jonah now spends three days in the belly of this leviathan. In chapter two, he describes it in the most graphic of terms. His words could be translated from the original Hebrew, Hell has swallowed me! (2:5) In 1758 a British sailor was swallowed by a 25-foot-long White Shark in the Mediterranean. According to the ship s log, he complained most about the intense heat and burning stomach acids that bleached him white like paper. Jesus said, Just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish for three days and nights, so will the Son of Man be three days and nights in the earth. (Matthew 12:40) Jesus literally descended into hell on the cross. His body lay in that tomb for three days. The fish didn t want to keep Jonah down; the grave couldn t hold Jesus down. That nasty prophet was enough to give any fish indigestion. If the spirit of Jonah is in you, throw him up and spit him out. It will never happen until you embrace Jesus. The old person must die with Jesus on the cross, and be buried with him in the grave, so that the new
person can rise up out of the grave with him to live a new and different life in Christ! 4. GOD WILL GET YOU TO HIS DESTINATION, ONE WAY OR THE OTHER. Like I said, that nasty prophet would cause any fish indigestion. Jonah 2:5 says, the fish vomited Jonah out on dry land. The rebel is right back where he started in the first place. Jonah could have saved himself a lot of trouble. Either you will go God s way (the shortest distance between two points is a straight line), or you will go the hard way of the big fish belly, get belched up on the road to Nineveh, bleached by stomach acids, covered in vomit, with seaweed sticking out your ears. God will get you to his destination. The route is up to you. Maybe you ve been belched out of the fish. Life is a mess. Don t despair. The story has hope: And the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time. (Jonah 3:1) Our God is the God of second chances. We can t out-sin his grace. But remember this: 5. GOD HAS BLESSED YOU TO BE A BLESSING. He gives grace to us so that we might give it to others. Jonah still doesn t get it. He goes to Nineveh, walks around it for three days, and repeatedly preaches the shortest sermon in recorded history: Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed. (Jonah 3:4) He never tired of laying that line on his hated enemies. Then he goes outside the city in the hot desert for a ringside seat on the fire that s going to rain down on the Assyrian capital. What a nasty man! Jonah 4:11 says that there are a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left in Nineveh. That would be a 120,000 babies and infants. There were probably a million people in that ancient metropolis. And Jonah can hardly wait for them all to be vaporized. Still God blesses this ingrate with more grace. He is bleached and scabbed over from the fish acids, which makes him miserable under the hot Iraqi sun. So God lets a leafy shade tree to grow up and give him cover. Another act of grace! Still Jonah gleefully munches on his popcorn and sips his Big Gulp. So God sends a worm to eat the
roots and the tree falls over. Now Jonah has a meltdown with God. He screams, Now O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than live. (Jonah 4:3) Jonah goes from being the rebel to the petulant child throwing a temper tantrum: If I can t have the triple chocolate Coco Puffs, I m going to lie right here on the supermarket floor and hold my breath till I turn blue. His real anger is that his preaching brought repentance. From the king on down, every last Assyrian butcher has cried out to the God of Jonah to save them. And Jonah 3:10 becomes another in a long line of biblical verses to report the amazing grace of God: he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened. Jonah shakes his fist at God and bitterly complains, I knew all along that you are a gracious and compassionate God (Jonah 4:3) Wait a minute, Jonah! Wasn t it that same compassion that pursued you when you ran away? Didn t that same compassion save a shipload of sailors at your request? Didn t it bring a fish to save you from drowning, and cause the fish to spit you up on dry land? Didn t that same grace keep you safe when you blasted the Assyrians in Nineveh, and provide the shade tree when you were burning up in the desert? Jonah loved grace when it was lavished on him. But he finds fault when it is extended to his enemies. We are all so much like Jonah. We want mercy when we sin, but justice when others sin against us. Look back on your life, Jonah. How many times has God lavished you with grace? The story ends abruptly with God pleading with Jonah to understand grace. We never know how he responded. There is a reason for this: Jonah is really our story to end for ourselves. You are sitting in Naples. Storms abound. God s judgment is at hand. Do you care? Will you go, even to people who irritate, frustrate, and even make you so angry that you want to see them blasted by God? Will you look beyond and see the true and better Jonah who did come to Jerusalem, die there, and rise again on the third day to fill you with his presence, grace and power? Will you embrace him, and then reach out in mercy to others? Copyright October 4&5, 2015 by Covenant Church of Naples /PCA