"The God Who Is"

the God who is. the book of jonah duane m. smets the resolved church.

the God who is. the book of jonah duane m. smets the resolved church.

To the people of The Resolved Church.

I love you deeply and it’s my extreme joy to serve you as one of your pastors under our great Head Pastor, Jesus.

The book of Jonah in the Bible is one of my favorite books. It’s short, it’s fun and it’s deep. Personally the journey of my life feels much like a Jonah story.

From a young age I sensed a call on my life to be a preacher but ran away from God and anything having to do with Him. I spent nearly four years running from God until the time where I truly became a Christian. Three years later I was youth pastor, then a college pastor and then in 2005 planted a church in San Diego, CA. Now, on this side of responding to God’s call, I can truly say there is nothing better and more freeing then simply being who God made you to be and being obedient to do whatever He asks of you. It’s a much happier life.

This book was born out of a number of sermons I gave in 2011 at The Resolved Church where I pastor. I am incredibly indebted to John Bale, Kiki Callihan and Arden Glende for the countless hours they spent adapting my sermon manuscripts and formatting the material into a readable book form.

These three people love Jesus deeply and are the kind of devoted servants who always work behind the scenes without any desire for recognition. Thank you John, Kiki and Arden, you guys are such a blessing.

The way this book reads is much like a tour guide through the book of Jonah. It’s not so much a commentary but a retelling of the story for our modern age and ears. For me, these pages bring up a lot of special memories because during our church’s excursion through the book of Jonah there were a number of people who became Christians as a result. It’s my prayer that God might continue to do that through this work.

the God who is. second printing May 2014.

Copyright Š 2014 by The Resolved Church Published by

Inkblatt San Diego, California 805.657.3555

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Edited by: John Bale & Arden Glende First printing: 2013 Printed in the United States of America All quotations of scripture are ESV unless otherwise noted. All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

the God who gives His word

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the God who brings us to our knees

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the God who saves the godless

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the God who reaches to the depths

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the God who loves lost cities

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the God who will be gracious

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the God who addresses the heart

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the God who gives His Son

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epilogue

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appendix

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resources

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chapter one. the God who gives us His word

why the book of jonah?

Jonah is a fun book.

In four short chapters a ton happens. Its got great stories with all kinds of surprises, twists and turns—ships caught in a storm, a great fish, a whole city coming to God, and a crazy magic plant. Have you ever heard the expression, “it’s a whale of a tale?” That comes from this book.

Jonah is a great story and its doctrine is just as rich and full. It grapples with some of the most difficult theological questions you can ask and answers them by putting God on display. Many have mistakenly looked at it as book about Jonah where his example is meant to teach us a moral lesson, but the book is really more about God and what He does. It’s not so much a biography of Jonah but a theography of God. On top of that, the book has some moments where it really digs under our skin, looking at how we operate as humans and what goes on in the psychology of our hearts. It looks at things like fear, sorrow, anger, bitterness, and resentment. This book gets into us deep.

Finally, and most importantly, it points to Jesus in a totally unique and powerful way. Jesus himself talked about the Book of Jonah and said it was the one sign that proved He was for real in what he came to do. This book documents something that happens in 8th century B.C., but teaches us that from God’s perspective the events were setting the stage for something greater God had planned—the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the 1st Century.

Pastor and author, Tullian Tchividjian, wrote a great book on the story

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of Jonah I recommend called Surprised By Grace. When interviewed by the Gospel Coalition he was asked, “Why do you say Jonah is one of the best books for helping us get a better grip on the gospel?”

Here was part of his answer: “most people inside the church, including ours, assume that the Gospel is something non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, but after we believe it, we advance to deeper theological waters. The truth is, however, that once God rescues sinners his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the Gospel, but to move them more deeply into it.

After all, the only antidote to sin is the Gospel—and since Christians remain sinners even after they’re converted, the Gospel must be the medicine a Christian takes every day. For our church, it was through probing the story of Jonah that we came face to face with the fact that the gospel is not just for non-Christians but also for Christians.”1 It really is true that in working through the Book of Jonah, we are consistently and increasingly exposed to pictures of ourselves. We learn what it looks like to continually turn to God, depend on God, and have God work in us through His mighty power, truth and grace.

It’s just a phenomenal book. Kids love it. Scholars fight over it. Lit nerds eat it up. If you have ever read Moby Dick by Herman Melville you might be interested in what he said about the Book of Jonah. Here’s what he said (You sort of have to read it like a Pirate): Shipmates, this book containing only four chapters­—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! What a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand!2 That’s awesome.

1. Tchividjian, Tullian. “The Gospel According to Jonah.” The Gospel Coalition. thegospelcoalition.org/ blogs/tullian/2011/03/11/the-gospel-according-to-jonah-2/. 11 Mar, 2011.

2. Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Boston: C.H. Sidmends Company, 1892. p 44.

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how can we know that book of jonah is true?

But how do we know the story of Jonah is true and not just “a whale of a tale?” There has been a lot of doubt and skepticism about Jonah for a number of reasons.

Most obviously, we have the issue of huge fish—it swallows Jonah, keeps him alive for three days, and then gets spit up on dry land. It just sounds too fantastic. Then, we have the whole city of Nineveh repent and come to God. Surprisingly, this just sounds even more unlikely. Go figure. Then, at the end there is a plant that springs up one day and jack-and-the-beanstalk style grows big enough to cover a full grown man and gives him shade. The next day it shrivels up and disappears. So now we’re just getting ridiculous. How are we supposed to know that these are not just fairy tales? What (if any) reason do we have to know the book is true?

Basically, what we’re dealing with isn’t a question of whether or not Jonah is a fairy tale so much, as whether or not there are such things as miracles.

A first point to be made is that fairy tales claim to be fairy tales. They start out with “once upon a time….” This book doesn’t. It starts out with a truth claim. What is that truth claim? “The word of the LORD came to Jonah”­­­­­—not a fairy tale, but the true and trustworthy word of the LORD. So then, what is the issue with miracles? The first thing to recognize about them is that they are all over the Bible. If you a problem with miracles, you’re going to have problems almost anywhere you turn in the Bible. But here’s the thing: the Bible is a book about God and the Bible presents God as being The One who created everything in the beginning and is all-powerful and never stops being so.

If the God of the Bible actually exists, then there is nothing he can’t do.

Miracles are not hard for him! He can exercise his supranatural strength and authority at any time he chooses because He is God. So, if there is a God, and He is anything like the God that the Bible describes, then everything in the Book of Jonah is entirely possible and within the bounds of logic and reason.

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But suppose we don’t want to accept the concept of God and His miracles because the world we know is not the world of His Bible? David Hume, the great skeptic, acknowledged that any rejection of miracles is based in experience. What he doesn’t acknowledge is that just because you haven’t experienced something doesn’t mean it isn’t true. For example, I’ve never had the experience of seeing the Eiffel Tower, but just because I’ve never experienced it doesn’t mean the Eiffel Tower doesn’t exist. Things that are true stand true regardless of my personal subjective encounter with them.

As a final argument for Jonah’s authenticity, we can make it real simple: in Matthew 12 and Luke 11 Jesus talks about the stories in Jonah and treats them as being completely true and factual. So, was Jesus wrong? Was he deluded or even lying? I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel too comfortable telling Jesus He’s a crazy person who believes fiction. how is jonah relevant for us?

So now that we’ve introduced Jonah and dealt with its authority and authenticity, you might still be wondering, “how is it relevant to us? What does this story have to do with us?”

First of all, if you’re reading this and still find yourself unsatisfied with my arguments for the truth of Jonah’s tale, consider this: you don’t have to believe everything that happens in the Book of Jonah in order to benefit from its message.

You can put your judgment about Jonah’s historicity on hold and just look at it as a story meant to teach something and still get a ton out of it. Basically, even if it is just a fairy tale, it is a very, very good one. The themes of fear, anger, guilt, and freedom are universal things we deal with as humans.

The picture of God that it paints—of who He is and what He is like—shines brightly regardless of whether or not you accept everything that happens in the text. So, if you’re reading this and you’re not yet a Christian, there is value in this teaching, and there is grace and time for your understanding of it.

The thing is, one of the coolest aspects about Jonah is that it’s not hard to understand and relate to, even for non-believers. It was written about ten

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thousand years ago, but there’s not a whole lot in it which makes it inaccessible to people in our day and age.

A big goal of mine is always to take us into the time of the Bible and get us into the shoes of the people who were first hearing and reading its words.

A lot of times, some big things separate our own time from the Biblical past, but here in this book, we see an era where the culture deals with a lot of issues that are similar to the ones our culture deals with.

In Jonah, we’ve basically got this self-righteous Christian who thinks he’s better than everyone else. Plus, we’ve got a bunch of pluralistic pagans who think there are many belief systems, all are fine, and there are many different ways to God. Sound familiar at all? This book is extremely relevant and helpful for those of us who live in a culture not so different from the one that Jonah lived in.

So what in Jonah is relevant for us? Everything. If you stick it out and read through this book, I promise you will not be disappointed. This is a powerful and amazing story and if you commit to it in, it will change your life.

This is my prayer for each reader—that as we work through this book your heart would be probed and pressed, and that you would learn more about yourself. Even more than that, I pray that you would learn and come to see the beauty and wonder of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—that we have a God who pursues us and died for us.

May God, by His Spirit, help us toward that end as we work through His Word.

chapter two. the God who brings us to our knees

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onah 1: 3-11 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. 5Then 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.”

7 And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from?

What is your country? And of what people are you?” 9And 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.” 10Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.

11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous.

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running from reality This portion of the story has a subtle, yet strong way, of getting up in your face and challenging you to think about whether or not you really believe in the God of the Book of Jonah and the Bible as a whole. As J.B. Philips once said in his book Your God Is Too Small: The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for their modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static.3 My prayer is that the Word of God in this text would do its work and truly bring you to a place of humility, worship, awe, and crying out to our great God so that you might see Him as He is and be brought to your knees.

The first main theme of the Book of Jonah is his flight from his calling.

What grabs our attention and throws us into the grip of the story is that God has asked Jonah to go preach to this great city of Nineveh, but Jonah’s not into it, so he flees. It’s drama from the start.

First off, we get direct words from God in verse 2: “Arise,” or get up, and “go” to Nineveh, that great city. If you’ve got an NIV Bible, one of the things you’ll repeatedly find is that they choose to not translate all the words God gave and this is one of those many cases. They leave out “arise,” which is very significant, as you’ll see a little later.

In 2 Kings 14, Jonah had been prophesying that God would enable Judah to push the Assyrians out of Israel and restore the border. Ninevah was in Assyria, and according to an 8th century BC inscription found during an excavation, the Ninevites had killed over 10,000 Israelites in the battle. This is most likely the “very bitter” affliction 2 Kings 14:26 refers to.

The picture is of Jonah at rest after that trial. Then, the Word of the Lord came: Get up. And what’s his instruction? Go to Nineveh, the great

3. Phillips, J.B. Your God Is Too Small. Touchstone: New York, 1997. Print.

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capital of Assyria, and preach. Now that his enemies are gone and he is safe, God wants Jonah to go to those same people and, as verse 2 says, “call out” to them. The Hebrew word here is literally the same word as “preach” (Qara).

And what is Jonah supposed to preach? That their “evil has come up” before God. What does that mean? It’s real simple. God wants Jonah to go to Nineveh and tell them that there is a God who sees and knows all things— that everyone, including the people of Nineveh, will have to account for their lives before the God of the Israelites.

This is no small thing. Later in the book we’ll learn Jonah’s exact thoughts about why he didn’t like this assignment. Nineveh is a big city. It was in what is now northern Iraq. Excavations show it had huge buildings and magnificent walls. So think of a big, great city like New York or Tokyo or Paris.

Instead of going to the big city, Jonah runs in the opposite direction. In verse 3 it says straight out—“but Jonah rose to flee.” So instead of rising to go, he rises to flee. Get the contrast? Word of God says, “get up and go.” So, he gets up… and flees. Then, the story tells us how he goes about fleeing. There is very methodical progression in it. He works hard to flee.

First, there is motive and intent. Verse 3 gives us the categorical statement, “he rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.” Tarshish at the time would have been the furthest possible known place one could travel to—the literal end of the world, over 2,200 miles away.

Most of the time, when people flee, they are not so much running toward a destination, but instead away from something specific. So what is Jonah running away from? He’s fleeing “from the presence of the LORD.” What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure, but he’s definitely fleeing from serving the LORD. For a prophet of God, you serve before the presence of God. Did Jonah think he could get away from God? Not likely because, as we’ll hear later in the story, he knew that God created everything and is everywhere. As Psalm 139 says, “where can I flee from your presence?”

Everywhere anyone can go He is there.

I want to point out a couple subtle things going on here. Sin always begins

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with that first inclination in the heart—to not want to do what God says.

Then, it starts giving birth to actual plans and actions. So Jonah goes down to Joppa to execute his plan. The text here says that he finds a ship going to Tarshish and pays the fare.

Here’s the thing—ships didn’t normally just go to Tarshish from Joppa.

Ships at this time could only go about 2 to 4 knots. At most, that’s about 4.5 miles per hour. So this literally would have been a three-year journey round trip for the captain and his crew. When we read Jonah found a ship and paid the fare, I know we all probably envision him just buying a ticket like he’s going for a cruise, like he’s going down to Cabo to party it up for a bit on a Carnival Cruise Ship—­sun, senoritas, and margaritas.

What is really happening here is that Jonah is hiring them—commissioning them for a long journey. It would have cost a lot. Jonah probably sold his house and all his possessions to have enough money to enlist this ship and its crew. Jonah has the intent to leave for good. Again, verse 3 says that he’s doing it to get “away from the presence of the LORD.” Lets stop here for a bit and consider something. There are some big things going on in the Book of Jonah, God is expanding upon His mission for the nations and developing His covenant relationship with His people, as we will see. However, you can’t read this story and not have this sneaking suspicion that in a way, it’s reading us. It is directly addressing the personal and individual stories of our own lives.

Here’s what I mean: in every single one of us there is a sense, deep down, that the world is about something bigger than just us. Deep down every one of us knows that there is a God, and that we are meant to live in relationship with Him—dare we say, “in his presence?” We are meant to love, worship, serve, and be in the peaceful shalom of God’s presence.

But all of us have run. As Isaiah 53:6 says, each and every one of us has turned to our own way. You see, I think there is something more fundamental going on here with Jonah’s fleeing. It’s not just moral disobedience that God asked him to do something and he doesn’t want to do it. There’s something more here. There is within each of us this battle between what

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we want to do and what God wants… And in the end we really want to call our own shots. We want to be in control. We want to do what we want. We really want to be God. So, we run to a place where we think that we can rule our own lives without God’s interference.

Tullian Tchividijian, says “to flee from God is to rise up against God….

If we obey God we must disobey ourselves…. It is in this disobeying ourselves where the hardness of obeying God consists.” 4 For most of us, the fleeing, like Jonah’s, is progressive. It begins in the heart with a conflicting desire that goes against what we know God wants and expects. Then, it gives birth to a plan, and then we start to act on that plan in the decisions we make. Before we know it, we are headlong in all out rebellion against God and running from Him. Sometimes it just happens gradually, like a frog in a kettle. If you boil a pot of water and try to put a frog in it, the frog will freak out and go nuts. But, if you put the frog in cold water, turn on the stove, and slowly heat it up, the frog won’t even realize that it’s cooking. Before you know it, the frog is dead.

Some of you have been running from God and you know it. You have taken a flight from reality because you haven’t wanted to actually deal with some stuff. You’re like the frog. You’ve been sitting in the kettle and the reality is you are actually in some pretty hot water with God. I believe through our study of the Book of Jonah, God is trying to get your attention.

So open up your heart and listen and learn and receive and repent. May God grant His great grace.

Ask yourself right now­­—just be real honest. Are you running? Are you doing your own thing? Or are you obeying and following God? meeting the almighty What happens next in the story is some hurling. The sailors try to hurl some cargo in order to save themselves, but it’s no match for God’s mighty hurling of the sea itself.

4. Tchividiian, Tullian. Surprised By Grace. Crossway: Wheaton, 2010. Print.

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Here’s what happens: Jonah is fleeing—or at least attempting to. Then verse 4 says, “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.”

This is an intense storm. This would have been one of the biggest and strongest ships of its day. These were experienced sailors and they get afraid for their lives—desperate. In four different instances, the story mentions their fear and it goes through the drastic measures they take in order to survive the hurling. This is no ordinary storm.

There are two things I want to talk about here. God causes storms and He does so justly.

First, God causes storms. That’s not how we normally think of storms.

What do we call storms when there is flooding, tornados, tidal waves, earthquakes, forest fires, or famine? We call them “natural disasters” right? This is a sneaky illusion we have bought into—that there are some things that are natural and some things that are supernatural and the world is divided.

What we get here in verse 4 of the Book of Jonah is the universal view of the Bible regarding all storms and natural disasters of any sort. This position holds that nothing is just natural, but instead, all things happen under the governance, council, rule, and power of God. I’ll just give you a brief sampling of Bible verses that support this view: • “Fire and hail, snow and mist, stormy winds [are] fulfilling [God’s] word!” (Psalm 148:8) • “Does disaster come…unless the Lord has done it?” (Amos 3:6) • “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7) The Bible does not describe anything happening in the world apart from the all-powerful and ever-sustaining action of God. He rules over all things!

When the rain falls and when the sun shines that is God at work sustaining His creation. You can call them “laws of nature,” but it is really God who is ever at work enabling those laws to function. God rules over nature.

For some of you, your God has been too small. He’s more like the Winnie the Pooh god who is detached and uninvolved—all lovey and dopey,

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with honey, up in the sky. That God is too small. The real God is a mighty God and He is a force to be reckoned with.

Now here’s the second thing, on the justice of God’s storms: storms are not natural. Unleashing calamity upon the earth is not part of the way God created things to be. God didn’t create the world with a natural destructive quality. While it is true that the Bible views all calamities as coming from the hand and will of God, it is also true that His destruction comes as a just response to sin.

Romans 1:18 says, “the wrath of God is [that is to say, current and ongoing] revealed against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth.”

Now I know some of you might be squirming because you wonder how that kind of God could be good or loving. I’ll just say this: if disobeying God and suppressing the truth about Him really is not just a running away from God, but a rising up against Him in order to supplant His rule, that is no small thing. God is not a good God if he lets such heinous rebellion and wrongdoing go unpunished. If you are in rebellion against God you deserve His wrath.

The good news is there is grace, which is why God’s just and right unleashing of wrath against sin does not mean that He is not loving. You notice in our story, this storm doesn’t kill anybody. Death is deserved, but God often grants grace and the opportunity to see and know His love for what it is. That’s what makes His love so great—that He doesn’t give us what we know we deserve.

John Calvin does a good job of describing how it often works when he says, “God sharply pricks us with danger so as to constrain us to tremble.”

Often times when destruction strikes, it has the ability of waking us up and snapping us out of our flight from reality. Calvin continues, “when calamity happens it is the duty of every man to examine himself and his whole life.”5

5. Calvin, John. The Commentaries of John Calvin on the Prophet Jonah. Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 2003. Print.

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The truth is, I think, that we all test God and secretly, deep down, wonder if we’ll get away with ignoring or disobeying Him. We won’t. A storm is coming. Better for us to repent now than risk Him simply ending us.

Is your God too small? Are you banking on God just being loving and thinking that He’ll let everything pass without consequence? Or, are you afraid of God? You should be. Fear is the main thing that ends up separating Jonah from the sailors. God is meant to be feared. As Psalm 2:11 says, “serve the LORD with fear and rejoice with trembling.” the fearless god-fearer Now lets look at exactly how Jonah and the pagan sailors react differently to the storm, and why.

God hurls this storm. Picturesque isn’t it? What’s Jonah doing? Sleeping.

The Jewish Septuagint actually adds that he was snoring. Jonah 1, mid-verse 5 through verse 6 says, “but Jonah had gone down to the inner part of the ship and had laid down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, ‘What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god!’”

This crazy storm is raging on. The boat is undoubtedly rocking, tossed back and forth. The crew is trying to survive God’s hurling by hurling cargo off the side of the ship. And what’s Jonah doing? Hiding down in the hull of the ship, sleeping.

There is a strong double entendre here. He’s physically AND spiritually asleep. It is likely he has a severe case of depression here and is just trying to avoid life. Have you ever been so depressed to the point where you didn’t want to get out of bed? Have you been in a place where you just wanted to sleep the world away so you didn’t have to deal with any of your problems? That’s Jonah here—all out avoiding. He doesn’t want to think about anything. He cares for nothing and is no longer anxious about anything. The storm doesn’t even rouse him.

Then the captain comes and guess what he says? “Arise—” the exact same thing God said to Jonah when He told him to go to Nineveh. Arise and go.

But does it affect Jonah? No! The captain, who is this guy who doesn’t

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even know God, tells Jonah to pray. It’s funny how sometimes God speaks truth to us through some of the most unlikely people, but no response from Jonah.

He’s keeping his lips sealed.

The captain and the crew, in their desire to blame someone (as we often do) decide to cast lots in order to figure it out. In this circumstance, we see God use that to draw out the truth.

Basically, casting lots worked like this: You had two dice with two colors on them, one light and one dark. You throw the dice—two light sides up meant yes, two dark sides up meant no, and one of each meant roll again.

They go through the crew, and when it’s Jonah’s turn to roll, he rolls two dark sides up. Immediately the crew interrogates him with a barrage of questions.

Jonah has been caught and found out, so he finally fesses up. Look what he says: “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and dry land.” The word “fear” sort of sticks out because Jonah hasn’t been afraid at all during the whole ordeal. It’s been the pagan sailors who are gripped with fear. Jonah had been asleep—avoiding the issue until he is forced to cast lots, and then he finally fesses up.

Jonah is the one who is supposed to fear God, but even the storm couldn’t get his attention. It’s not until he is directly confronted that he realizes and admits his sin and guilt. Verse 10 tells us he admits he was “fleeing from the presence of the LORD.” the fearful godless So what can be said about these pagan sailors to explain why they were so quickly terrified by God’s wrath, even while God’s own prophet was unmoved? Jonah hired them for this journey, but then when the storm hits they are afraid and respond both spiritually and with action. Verse 5 says, “then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them.”

So right away, when we’re introduced to them, we’re clued into the fact that they’re spiritual people. They each cry out to their own god. You see here that polytheism (the belief that there are many different gods) and pluralism­

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(the belief that there are many different beliefs which are all universally good and true) is nothing new. These beliefs have been around for thousands of years.

Their gods could have been Asherah or Baal, or one of the other ancient near east deities. They figure someone must have done something to upset one of the gods and that was why a storm had chased them down. The view of ancient deities was that they got cranky, easily offended, and were rash and reactive.

Now I could be wrong, but I think there’s a part in all of us which thinks, “that’s so ridiculous!” The assumption is people back then were just not as smart and sophisticated as we are today and that’s why they had these barbaric beliefs.

But we’re no different. We may not have little idols or images of our gods, at least in the western world, but we’ve got our gods for sure. The god of luck, who we look to when we want good fortune to come our way. The god of karma, who we expect to reward us fittingly whenever we do a good deed. The god of work, who we trust to turn our hard efforts into tangible security. The god of science, who we hope will teach us how to understand the world around us and bend it to our will. You see—we don’t call them gods, but we have them and they are the things we find ourselves putting our faith and trust in.

Deep down we know that none of them are really gods at all. There is a hint of that with the sailors. The story emphasizes their belief in these gods.

When the captain goes to wake Jonah up, he says to him, “call out to your god!

Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.” Apparently the captain thinks his own god is ignoring him and there’s even the suggestion here that he’s not even sure his god is real. But maybe Jonah’s is real.

Interestingly, the sailors know instinctually, like all of us do, that wrongdoing and evil deserve a just response. In verse 8 they say, “tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us.”

When Jonah finally fesses up, he preaches the truth about God to the pagan sailors. We looked at it earlier, but let’s look at it one more time. Verse 9, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

Two things here: one, he tells them the name that God gave for Himself

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to Moses when Moses asked, “Who are you?” This is what is represented in the text as “LORD,” in all capital letters, which means it has God’s given name, Yahweh (in the Hebrew) behind it, and Yahweh simply means, “I Am.” I am the one and only true God who has always been and always will be.

In order to further elucidate who Yahweh is, Jonah says that He is the God of Heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. This is what is known as a merism: a figure of speech to say “He’s the supreme God over all who made everything.”

Upon hearing this, the sailors are struck with even greater terror. It says they were then “exceedingly afraid,” and they get mad at Jonah saying, “what have you done?!” There’s one true God who rules over everything and you’ve antagonized Him! What’s wrong with you? Then they cry out, “What shall we do?”

This whole scene is quite amazing. It’s literally pandemonium aboard the ship, and in the midst of it all there are some profound truths being revealed about the nature of man and his great need of salvation.

You see, the whole story seems backwards. Jonah is a prophet. He’s the one who’s got the real God. He’s supposed to be one of the good guys, but he’s not. He’s got no fear. He flees and doesn’t repent until he is forced to by these Godless pagans.

But then you’ve got the pagans sailors too. They’re just lost in a sea of spiritualism with no direction as to who or what is true, but they’ve got fear and they’re seeking and searching and when they hear of Yahweh, they respond.

Really, what’s going on here is we’re being shown a picture of two types of people. All of us fall into one of these two camps at one point or another.

You’ve got the religious people who think they’re right—the Christians.

They’ve got the right God. They’re on the good team. They are the one’s with the good moral lives, but they’re proud and think they’re better than others because of their moral living. In their pride is rebellion—an attempt to use God, to live life apart from an ongoing dependence on Him and His presence.

This subtle disobedience in the heart gets dismissed or spiritualized as being something that’s right or good. You see, Christians, like Jonah, need saving.

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Then, there’s the other camp—the irreligious who think it doesn’t really matter what you believe. They don’t have the right God. Their lives are full of just doing whatever they want and whatever makes them happy.

This is a rebellion against the God who made them because they have turned themselves into their own personal rulers. They strive to live their lives apart from an ongoing dependence on God and His presence.

This not so subtle disobedience in the heart gets passed over as being insignificant and inconsequential. Those who are not Christians, need saving.

Now I know I’m cutting off the story at a peak—right in the middle of a climax where we wonder what’s going to happen, but I wanted to end the chapter here because I think it’s striking how both the prophet and the pagans are brought to their knees to acknowledge and cry out to the God of the universe.

Jesus When I read in verse 11, “what shall we do?” I hear the desperation. I hear the heartfelt appeal. I hear another place in the Bible where almost the exact same thing is said. It’s on the Pentecost day that was Christianity’s very first church service.

The apostle Peter preaches a sermon not unlike Jonah’s, about how both religious and irreligious people were both jacked up and need to be saved. In response, Acts 2:37 says they were cut to the heart and said, “What must we do?” Just like the sailors—“What shall we do?”

On that day Peter responded by telling them the good news that there was forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ. He had told them about a day when there was a storm. It was a storm unlike any other—darkness covered the land and the ground shook with a mighty earthquake, and God unleashed the full wrath of Hell on His only son, Jesus, who hung on a cross as a stand in for sinners.

You see, Jesus was a prophet like Jonah, who had orders from God the Father to go preach. But unlike Jonah, Jesus never fled. He fully obeyed God’s command and preached the Gospel to undeserving sinners. Then Jesus, who

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did not need or deserve a storm, willingly went to the cross to take it on so that sinners might be forgiven. Unlike the sailors, there’s no crying from Jesus to stop the storm. Instead he absorbs the storm into His body so that both the religious and irreligious might be welcomed into the presence and peace of God. You see, the truth is that there are no good guys and bad guys.

We’re all bad guys in need of grace. In the cross, both the judgment of God and the mercy of God are expressed.

The sailors asked, “what shall we do?” The answer is there is nothing we can do, but Jesus has done it for us. Our response then, is simply turn from our sin and trust in Him. Trusting in Him looks like believing the mighty storm of God’s wrath was poured out on Jesus on the cross... for you.

If you know you’ve been running, stop. You will get caught. If there is something you’ve been avoiding or ignoring, don’t do it any longer.

If you’ve got pride, disobedience and rebellion to repent of, then do so knowing that Jesus paid it all and there is forgiveness and grace. Turn from sin to the Savior. He is a saving God. If you’ve felt detached and distance from God, come and draw near.

God welcomes us to the intimacy of His through the work of His Son. He is a loving God. If you have come to the realization your God is just way too small, be brought to your knees in humble fear, reverence, and awe at the work of the Savior—worship at His feet. He is a mighty and worthy God.

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onah 1:11-17 11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.”

13 Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. 14Therefore they called out to the LORD, “O LORD, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you.”

15 So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. 16Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows.

17 And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

the hurling and the rowing At this point in the story Jonah is forced to come clean and he tells the pagan sailors about the LORD, Yaweh, the God of the Bible, who made and rules over everything. Jonah also tells them how God had asked him to do something and that he decided to try and flee instead. In response to this, the crew and their captain start to really freak out because it is now clear this storm isn’t just going to go away—some God is really mad at Jonah. So, they turn to Jonah and ask, “what are we to do?”

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What we end up seeing through the interactions between God, Jonah, and the sailors in this chapter is a picture of God’s Justice and His Grace.

In verse 11, Jonah quickly moves from being the culprit to the expert.

One minute the sailors turn from being hysterically upset at Jonah, and the next they are left with no other option but to turn to him for help because God’s hurling of the storm isn’t relenting. Notice in the last part of verse 11, it says that “the sea grew more and more tempestuous.”

When you read stories like this multiple times it can become very easy to miss the full energy and emotion of a scene like this. I mean, they’re in the middle of a violent storm—the wind is howling, rain is plummeting down on the deck of the boat, and the ship is rocking back and forth. It’s hard to hold your footing. It’s a very loud scene!

It’s not just like they took a time out and sat down and had a nice theological discussion over coffee here. This is intense! When verse 12 comes, you’ve got to imagine the scene. Jonah is shouting, “hurl me into the sea and then God will stop hurling this storm… It’s my fault. It’s me He’s after—throw me overboard and you’ll be saved!”

But how do the sailors respond? They don’t like that idea. They may have accepted there was a God like Jonah said, who made heaven and earth, and maybe He’s even the only God, but they were not yet convinced that giving Jonah to the sea would make the storm stop.

Now, there’s a couple interesting things here. One, Jonah is actually doing his job as a prophet. He started back in verse 9 when he told the sailors who God was. Now here in verse 12 he prophesies. Jonah is a good Jew. He understands some things. He knew the principle of Romans 3:23 which says the wages or the cost of sin is death. The whole Jewish sacrificial system was based on this principle. When you sin, you pay a sacrifice of blood and God in His grace allowed animals blood to take the place of human blood. This showed that God is holy and that sin is serious.

Jonah really acts like a prophet for the first time in the book. He tells them the truth. He tells it like it is and he predicts the future—you sacrifice me and the sea will calm.

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We’ll talk about Jonah in a minute, but let’s zone in on the sailors here.

Rather than responding, listening, believing, and following Jonah’s words they resist… at least at first. Check it out. Verse 13: “Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them.” Their rowing is no match for God’s mighty hurling.

This is the second thing I think is interesting about this scene: the sailor’s response to the prophet. It’s a picture of what happens to us spiritually when we are confronted with the Word in the world. Many of us are like the sailors. Things happen in life, it has the effect of sort of waking up your spiritual senses. You become interested and maybe even partially open to the idea of God. But then when you realize it’s going to cost you to really follow him… you back off.

Perhaps you come from a background similar to where these sailors came from. You didn’t grow up Christian at all, no strong religious background, and you really didn’t think you had any kind of problem, or needed any kind of saving, but then something happens and you’re suddenly interested in spiritual things.

But instead of turning to God to save you, you start trying to save yourself. You turn to and make up you own self-salvation project. This looks different for all different people. For some, it’s exercise. You realize your life sucks and is out of whack and so you figure, “I’ll save it by getting in shape and eating better.” For some it’s financial. You realize money has wrecked you so you figure you’ll save your life by getting a new job, a better career, and you’ll handle your money differently. For some it’s moral. You realize you’ve just been doing a bunch of “bad things” so now you figure you’ll just stop and then you’ll be happy and saved. For some it’s a new relationship—new friends, a new hobby, a new house, or a new outlook. It could be a hundred other things, but here’s what they all have in common: they’re all, at their root, self-salvation projects and in every one of them you are looking to yourself and your own efforts to save you instead of the Word of God and the provision of God.

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For the sailors, all they knew how to do was sail and row, so they tried rowing, but it doesn’t work. Self-salvation projects never work. Or when they do, like say you actually run on your new treadmill, you find out your heart is still just as jacked up and you still need saving. What we really need is something totally outside ourselves to save ourselves.

Here’s the principle: we are helpless at avoiding God. You will never get to a point in your life when you are not in need of God. No matter how hard you try, everything will always consistently boil down to your need for God and your need for Him to save you!

Are you trying to avoid the God issue in your life by thinking you can just fix yourself? The truth you need to hear is that you can’t. What you need to do is hurl yourself into the sea and trust God to save you. the condition and the confession Maybe you’re not ready for that. Maybe you are like Jonah, afraid of God and what He wants you to do, but still not ready to cast yourself into the sea, take this encouragement from the story of Jonah: God will foil every last one of your attempts until you come to Him. Jonah is a marked man. God is after him. It’s one of the great mysteries of the Bible—why does God choose to set His love upon certain people and pursue them ferociously? When God has chosen to love you He will stop at nothing in order to bring you to a point where you are humbled and confess to Him and entrust yourself to Him, even if it means churning up a whole storm to get it done.

Jonah here knows his condition. There’s no question. He told the sailors back in verse 10 he was fleeing from God. It’s why verse 12 is just huge.

Now some have debated about whether Jonah is being selfish here and still trying to get away from God, but I just don’t think so. I think it takes a lot of humility and compassion to be able to say what he does in verse 12.

Look at it again. “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” Wow! Such brutal honestly and really such love for the life of

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these sailors that Jonah is willing to give up his own life in order to save them.

Here’s the thing, and I’ll just straight out be real with you: I don’t think many of you—wait, let me include myself—I don’t think many of us are that honest with ourselves. I don’t think we like taking responsibility for our own junk. I don’t think we like admitting fault. I think we like to think of ourselves as better than we actually are and I think we like to blame other people, difficult situations, and God for all our mistakes.

When Jonah says, “I know it is because of me,” those are heavy words.

Those are big words to say, “it’s my fault. It’s me. I’m jacked up­— ” to truly confess sin, to truly repent. None of us are very good at doing that.

Check out this section of an email I got from a person in our church who was relieved to be a part of a church community and church family where the big words of confession and repentance are accepted and encouraged instead of avoided.

I grew up in an environment where sin was to be avoided, hidden, and certainly not discussed. Whatever it was that you did, struggled with, or questioned was not something to be brought out in the open, almost as if it didn’t exist, and the better you were at keeping it hidden, the better the chance that it would disappear or at least be forgotten. So in a strange way, I’ve found it mildly liberating to be a part of a community where sins, both past and current, are brought out into the open and shared without fear of being judged or found out. Being a sinner with nowhere to turn and without a cure is difficult and depressing. My depravity, the corruption of my heart, my inability to do anything that pleases God; all these truths have been evident to me for as long as I can remember…[but what is new for me is finding out that] I’m not the only one in the church who needs a savior [and needs to receive] grace and acceptance.

That’s so good. You see some of you think that this thing or that thing in your life, your family, or in you church community is the root of all your problems. You think if those things just got fixed, then everything would be better. But none of those things are the issue… it’s you. You are the problem.

Some of you think you know all the right stuff to a right life. You’ve got the head knowledge, but the truth is you know your heart doesn’t really believe any of it. You can’t handle admitting it.

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Do you know how to repent? Not just admit when you did something wrong, but recognize the sin in your heart? We’ve got to learn how to exegete (draw out and direct) our hearts and not just Biblical text!

Now there’s something cool here in what happens with Jonah and the sailors that lines up nicely with something mentioned in the email I received.

When you come to a place where you’re willing to admit your own jacked up-ness, it naturally gives you a sense of compassion for others because you’re not looking down on them anymore. Everyone is literally, as in Jonah’s case, in the same boat.

Once Jonah admits his own sin, he wants to save the sailors. Once we all admit we’re sinners whom God is working in and saving, then we get liberated to actually open up with one another, and then we are able to actually extend grace and acceptance to one another. This is the communal aspect of the Gospel. The church isn’t supposed to be a country club of a bunch of people who have it all together. It’s meant to be much more like a hospital where we’re all sick and wounded and need help and healing.

So Jonah confesses, and then in verse 14, the sailors do too. Their confession is similar and different than Jonah’s. It’s like Jonah’s because they openly and honestly admit their condition. It’s unlike Jonah’s because they do it before God. Here’s what’s up. Look at it, verse 14: “therefore they called out to the LORD, ‘O LORD, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you.’” This is big. They call God by His self-given name, Yahweh, which we read in all capitals as LORD. This is big because they are acknowledging God as the true God and calling on His name for the first time. Their confession here is a conversion.

They don’t want to be held guilty for Jonah’s death, but they realize their rowing is doing nothing. God has announced the verdict by increasing the violence of the storm. Jonah is guilty. What God wants—what is going to please Him is hurling Jonah overboard.

So, the sailors give God what he wants.

I’ll say this and then we’ll move on to the next section: it very well may

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be that some of you have never really called on the name of the LORD, or at least not for a long time. You may use God’s name, sing about Him, talk about Him and even call yourself a Christian, but you never really say from the depth of your soul, “You are my God and I trust in you!”

Acts 2:21 says, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Some of you need to call on the name of the Lord. May God grant that grace.

God saves godless pagans First we see God granting grace by saving these random pagan sailors, who really knew nothing about God until Jonah came along with the almighty storm of the century following close behind. But the storm is really a blessing in disguise for them. Verse 15 says, “they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging.” What a moment this must have been for them!

The text here gives the impression the ceasing was almost immediate.

The repeated and contrasting use of the word hurl in the story is not unintentional. They hurl Jonah overboard, God quits hurling the storm, and then they’re saved.

Their reaction is recorded in verse 16: “then the men feared the LORD exceedingly.” Back in verse 10, they were “exceedingly afraid” and now they “fear exceedingly.” There is a shift because earlier their fear is a fear of terror—they think they might die. Now, it’s a fear of awe, reverence, respect, and honor.

I think Herman Melville in Moby Dick captures the sense here. He says, “the profound calm [after the storm] …carries more true terror than any other aspect of the whole dangerous affair…. All men live enveloped in whales lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, perils of life.”6

6. Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Boston: C.H. Sidmends Company, 1892. p 44.

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The sailors are simply stunned. The sea is now calm like a glassy lake.

Can you imagine what it was like? A storm of violent seas and white caps suddenly, you so calm you can see your reflection. What would you think?

What would be your reaction? In that moment the sailors truly realize it is God who grants life and death and they are forever changed. They fear and worship God. They don’t get upset at God and tell God it wasn’t fair they got caught up in the storm just because of Jonah. No. They fear. You see, sometimes you end up in a sticky spot in life that has more to do with someone else’s sin which has affected you. I know some of you have gone through some really gnarly stuff that is not your fault. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter so much about the why of what happened but the how of your response. Do you respond in the fear and worship of the LORD, or do you respond in bitterness and anger against the LORD? For the sailors, they came into this story without God—Godless—and they leave the story knowing God. Sometimes people who have been through a lot will ask me why they had to go through what they went through. My response is always something along the lines of, “I don’t fully know, but I do know this: God knew exactly what you needed and there was probably no other way for you, and who you uniquely are, to learn what you needed to learn. If you didn’t go through what you did, you would have never truly had the same sense of God’s love and grace that you now have because of it.”

God saves godless prophets But what about Jonah? Where is he in all of this? He has pretty much lost his God. In verse 12, he’s the one who tells the men to throw him out. He figures he’s done and that’s the end—time to pay up. I imagine Jonah felt pretty useless. He has failed God. He figures that he’s lost his status and position of favor being in God’s service as a prophet, and he probably figures God doesn’t love or care about him anymore—that God just wants him dead. I mean really, Jonah has lost his God and becomes both a spiritual and literal cast away.

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Have any of you ever felt like that? Like you’re just damaged goods? Like you’ve blown it so badly that there’s no way God could ever love you again?

I’m pretty sure that’s Jonah at this point. When the sailors threw him overboard I’m guessing he didn’t even try and fight it or swim. He probably just closed his eyes, let himself go limp, and sank down, down, and down…

Then, God commands a fish to save his Godless prophet! Wait, what?

Verse 17 says, “and the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”

Now this is the point in the story where people start to dismiss it as just being fantasy—a mere fairy tale—but we already covered miracles when we first started the book, so I’m not going to go into all that. Basically, if there is a God, then He can do miracles because He’s the one who made the rules of nature and reserves the right to break ’em. There is nothing more fantastic in all of existence than the fact that God wanted anything to exist at all.

Now some have speculated that maybe this was a sperm whale, a whale shark, or a great white shark, which all get big enough to house a full grown man. Some of these fish are the size of a semi truck with a trailer. There are actually reports of this very thing happening to a guy a couple hundred years ago.7 Or there’s the option it was some other unknown fish. Marine biologists tell us there are waters so deep we don’t even know what lives down there or how big some of the creatures down there could be, so it’s possible on many levels.

But the real miracle here isn’t the fish. It’s this little word at the beginning of verse 17, “appointed.” Do you see it? It’s manah in the Hebrew, which here in this form means to prepare, appoint, ordain, or determine. This is crazy because what the Bible is alluding to then is this was God’s plan all along—to have Jonah thrown overboard, at which point God would have a fish ready to snatch him up.

7. Alexander, T. Desmond. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries: Obadiah, Jonah and Micah. Vol. 26.

Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove, 1988. Print.

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All of God’s creation is at His command and God commands the fish to be there by the boat ahead of time and at just the right moment. As Jonah is sinking God says, “Okay… now!” and has the fish swallow Jonah whole!

The fish is this huge surprise in the story. You don’t see it coming! It creates this automatic wow factor. What!? It’s this amazing statement of both God’s greatness and God’s grace! God’s got a fish to save Jonah. It doesn’t matter what Jonah has done. God was determined all along, not to just kill Jonah, but to bring Jonah to a place where he could experience God’s saving power.

Earlier I said that some of you need to hurl yourself into the sea. That’s because some of you need to get swallowed whole. Some of you need to experience God’s saving power. Some of you have never really seen what God can do. God is a redeemer and a restorer. He can take the most jacked up person, the most ugly situation, and turn it to good. When you surrender all of your life to God and allow yourself to sink into His mercy, oh the wonders of what God does!

If you feel like an undeserving cast away, then know God put the Book of Jonah into the Bible for you so that you might know the full extent of His mercy and grace. God appointed this great fish for Jonah and God has appointed this book for you, to bring people to Him. God saves all kinds of people The result here for both the sailors and Jonah is worship. This is what happens when we experience God’s saving grace—it causes worship.

What do the sailors do after they have come to truly fear the LORD? They have a worship service. They offer sacrifices and make vows. They start praying and singing and giving away their stuff and their money.

What does Jonah do after God gives him the fish? We’ll look at it in depth in the next chapter, but even if you just read part of the first verse in Chapter 2 of Jonah, you can see what’s coming—he prays.

Now here’s the thing: it’s easy to focus on either the story of the sailors or the story of Jonah and identify with one or the other, but that’s really not where the story is meant to lead us. The story is meant to lead us to see the

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true hero in it: God! The whole book of Jonah is about the greatness and goodness of God! He saves all kinds of people! Pagans and prophets alike.

Christians and non-Christians. All people need saving and he is sufficient for every one.

Jesus And this my friends is the message of the Gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ.

Jesus himself talked about Jonah and what happened with the prophet and the sailors. We will spend a whole chapter on that later in this book.

For now, I’ll just read the words of Jesus from Matthew 12:40: “just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

Jesus, at the time, looks in on the story of Jonah—how Jonah gives up his life to save a few sailors—and says, “that’s like me, that is what I’m about to do.” Jesus is the true and better Jonah.

Jonah was a prophet who was called to speak the Word of God. Jesus is the true prophet of heaven who is the Word of God. (Jonah 1:1) Jonah deserved death and allowed himself to be hurled into the sea to save a few sailors. Jesus didn’t deserve death and allowed himself to be hurled up on a cross to save all who put their faith in Him. Jonah gets swallowed up by a fish and is spit out on dry land after three days. Jesus gets swallowed by death itself and then rises from the dead after three days.

Jonah’s sacrifice was temporary. Jesus’ sacrifice was once and for all time.

Jesus is the true and better Jonah.

I think we all have a tendency to swing on the pendulum between acting as if there is no God at all or ignoring the God we know does exist. Both places leave us Godless. We need a savior.

The good news of the Gospel is Jesus is that Savior—the Son of God who is LORD and God and promises to be with us always. In Jesus we have

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a Savior who died the death we deserve and who rose to give us the new life we need, if we hurl ourselves before Him. Some of you have been avoiding God. It’s a helpless lost cause. Stop avoiding Him, submit, and receive His welcome.

Some of you haven’t really been honest with God, perhaps never, or maybe just not in long time. You need to admit your condition and confess your need for Him to Him. We all need saving and Jesus is the savior. His grace in salvation is meant to cause us to worship.

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onah 2 1 Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, 2 saying, “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.

3 For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. 4Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.’ 5The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head 6 at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O LORD my God. 7When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.

8 Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. 9But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!” 10And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

sinking into death This section of text is a little different from what we’ve read before. Up to this point the book of Jonah has been prose narrative. Now we get into some poetry. Chapter 2 is made up almost entirely of a single psalm—a prayer that Jonah remembers praying when he was in the belly of the fish. His words have been written down and preserved for us all.

Let’s quickly review the context of this psalm. Jonah is in the water and

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sinking and God sends a big fish to swallow him whole. It is not until he is safely within the belly of the fish that Jonah finally talks to God. Biblical poetry can be kind of tricky to work with. There are parallelisms, alliterations, metaphors, statements with retort, emotions, resolutions, chiasms…and more. Jonah’s poetry here really is a literary masterpiece, but I’m not going to spend a lot of time on these technical aspects of the text.

Instead, we’re going to explore a thematic outline of the chapter.

Chapter 1 of Jonah ends with: “the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” Then, chapter 2 starts out with: “Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish.”

Let’s pick apart a few of these lines and see how Jonah describes what he was going through.

In verse 2 he says he was in “distress.” This is dire trouble and anguish.

Then in verse 3 he says, “you cast me into the deep.” For all Jonah knows, God wants him dead. When Jonah disregards and disobeys a direct order from God, God sends a tempest. Jonah tries to evade and avoid God, multiple times. The sailors try to find a way to save Jonah’s life, but to no avail—the storm kept raging. It must have seemed only Jonah’s death would satisfy God and put an end to the storm.

Notice the text is referring to God when it says that, “You cast me into the deep.” That’s striking. Wasn’t it the sailors who cast Jonah overboard?

Jonah recognizes God’s sovereign hand at work in all of this, including the decisions and actions of the sailors. This is an important point. God was at work in the sailor’s hearts and hands when they threw Jonah overboard.

Before you can truly come to grips with God—before you can truly deal with who you are and where you are in life, you need to come to terms with the Biblical truth that God ultimately rules over all things­—you have to be able to look at every event in your life, however good or bad, as being the working of God to bring you to a place where you have no other choice but to look to Him. When Jonah is thrown overboard and begins to sink to his death and thinks he is about to meet his end, listen to how he describes it. In Verse 3 he

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says he has sunk “into the heart of the seas,” with “flood surround[ing]” him, and “waves and billows pass[ing]” over him. Verse 5 says “waters close[ed] in over [him] to take [his life],” and the “deep surround[s]” him. In verse 6, he hits the bottom of the ocean floor, “at the roots of the mountains.” And in verse 5 he says “weeds” were wrapping around his head.

This kind of vivid description couldn’t really have come from a person who hadn’t actually experienced drowning. I’m a surfer and I’ve surfed some big waves and I’ve been tossed around pretty good. There have been few times where I didn’t know how much longer I could hold my breath. The waves just take you and toss you. You don’t know which way is up or down, but you know that you are sinking and at the mercy of the ocean.

Check out what happens next: verse 7 tells us that Jonah starts to black out, “when my life was fainting away.” One translation has “my senses failed me.” This is a way of saying his consciousness was beginning to slip. Jonah literally hits rock bottom and begins to pass out.

Have you ever had a near death experience? If not death, have you ever reached a place where you’d truly hit rock bottom? Some of us have. Others have been graciously spared, at least thus far, from needing to be brought to such a place.

When you think of or hear the phrase “rock bottom,” you think of people that did so many drugs that they are completely strung out, or you think of people who suddenly realize it’s been months and months since they’d gone a day without getting drunk, or you think of the countless stories about girls who gave away sex for the first time and then ended up in a life of prostitution. These are all definitely rock bottom moments. However, I don’t think we usually think of the righteous people, the good guys, hitting rock bottom.

I especially don’t think we think of ourselves.

I want to tell you the story of a pastor friend of mine and what happened to him a few years ago. He’s a godly man, solid theologian, great father, great pastor, and loves Jesus. A couple years ago I got an email from him: I have been married to my wife for 15 years. She is a wonderful wife and mother of our two children. Last year she started experiencing depres-

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sion for the first time since I have known her. It cleared up for awhile… but in the last two weeks her depression has come back really strong. I have exhausted every resource I know of: prayer, having the leaders lay hands on her, natural remedies, reading every book on depression and trying every method, and now we are trying some pharmaceuticals. I have slept about 4-6 hours total in the last 4 days. I am taking care of her on an ongoing basis. I feel like I am in a fight to keep her from losing her mind. Please pray!

A week later: I need you to pray. My wife has continued to escalate. She hasn’t slept in weeks now, but simply lays in bed with insomnia. She started to have psychotic breaks in the night and I was becoming increasingly concerned she might hurt me or the children while asleep. This morning she had a complete breakdown in our front yard and the neighbors called the police. I had to admit her in a psychiatric hospital or the authorities would take her in. I went to the hospital with her…as they took her through the doors I tried to walk back to my car and collapsed on the front lawn of the facility and wept. I have never done anything so awful in my life. I am completely overwhelmed and crushed. My beautiful and sweet wife seems as though she is gone and dead. I trust the Lord and know he is good. I can say with Job, ‘though he slay me in him will I trust.’ I am slain and I am clinging to him. Please pray.

Some time later my friend told me that a couple days after he had written those emails, he got into his truck and was determined to go kill himself by driving into a brick wall. As he was driving, with his foot floored on the gas, the words of 2 Corinthians 1:8-9 came to his mind: “we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” At that point he pulled over and wept as the grace and goodness of God flooded his soul. Looking back on it, he says he never really understood the Gospel until that moment—until he had hit rock bottom.

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crying out for help Some of you have never hit rock bottom. Some of you have…a few times.

Some of you need to. Some of you may never have to experience something that extreme. But this stands true for all of us—God will do whatever it takes to bring us to the place where we quit relying on ourselves and turn to Him who raises the dead.

It doesn’t matter if you’re one of the good guys, like Jonah or my pastor friend, or if you’re one of the bad guys who have given into all sorts of destructive things, we are all the same. Rock bottom may look different for each one of us, but for all of us the rock bottom is the place where we call out to God to raise us from the dead. And that’s what Jonah does. So let’s look at what he says when he cries out for help.

First, let’s see it in the text. In verse 2 Jonah says, “I called out to the LORD” and “out of the belly of Sheol I cried.” He calls out to the LORD. This is big. This is the first time in the Book of Jonah where Jonah actually turns to God. He calls out to him by name, the LORD! It really is what most people end up doing when they realize death is imminent. You call out to God. This is an urgent prayer. Jonah is drowning and sinking fast. He doesn’t tell us what words he called out. Most likely it was a prayer he prayed in his head like, “God help me!”

In verse 4 he says, “I said I am driven away from your sight. Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.” And in verse 7 he says, “I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.” These verses give us a little more of an idea what Jonah was imagining when calling out. First, there’s admittance of sin. When he says, “I am driven away,” it is the same wording used to describe Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden in Genesis. Adam and Eve were driven out because of sin and Jonah has been driven away from God’s gracious sight because of his sin.

So what does Jonah do? He imagines God, in all His holiness, seated on His holy throne in Heaven and calls out to Him. He is driven from the sight of God, but in his mind’s eye he imagines God in the temple, and as verse 7 says, he presents his prayer to God.

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Let’s talk about this. What does it really mean to cry out to the LORD for help? We addressed this a bit in the last chapter, but I want to dig into it a little deeper. This is part of the challenge of being honest with ourselves— doing a little holy introspection.

There is a difference between being introspective and doing holy introspection. What I mean is this: introspection is good only if it leads you somewhere. Introspection is the examination of one’s own mental and emotional state and processes—basically getting emo on yourself. You’ve got a whole genre of music built on this idea. Introspective people are the people who are constantly thinking about their feelings and questioning themselves.

Usually this is fueled by immense insecurity and becomes one of the most self-centered, self-focused, and self-absorbed mindsets you can ever get caught up in. It’s almost always bad unless it leads you to repentance. Holy introspection forces you to realize you have been trusting in and relying on yourself instead of God and it can only end with you crying out to Him for help.

In the last chapter, I said that we need to learn how to exegete—draw out and dissect our own hearts. We do this so we can recognize that we must call out to God for help, asking Him to change our hearts. I don’t even think you have to understand everything that is going on in, or has affected your heart, as long as you get to a point where you are calling out to God for help.

Here’s what I mean: sometimes I don’t even know the state of my own heart until it is betrayed by words that come out of my mouth unintentionally. For example, one week, out of the blue, my wife asked me, “Hey Duane, are you okay?” I automatically said, “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?” I didn’t even realize how sharp I was being. She literally jerked her head back because I had just snapped at her. Then, in her loving, tender, gentle way she said, all soft like, “Well you just seem like you’re kind of on edge lately. Is something bothering you?”

At that point I called a personal time out and realized it was one of those moments where I needed to listen to my wife. I started thinking and processing­— holy introspecting­— and I recognized all the junk that was bothering me. To this day, I don’t even entirely understand all of what was bothering me that day. We prayed together. There were a number of things I prayed,

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but the biggest thing, which is also probably the most frequent thing I pray in my own personal prayer life is, “God help me. Jesus change my heart. Please.”

We’ve got to learn how to call out to God for help and to be okay with doing so. We are always one moment away from drowning in the great abyss.

We’ve got to get comfortable calling out to God for help even when we don’t have all the answers.

God is our Father. He is holy and good. He sits on a throne and rules the world with perfect justice and might. And He hears our prayers, especially those prayers where we call out to Him for help. And that is our next topic in this chapter: God is a God who hears our prayers. Jonah discovers this, perhaps for the first time, and he’s astounded by it. hearing the hope of God We start by revisiting an important point we sort of passed over in the beginning of this chapter: Jonah is praying this whole thing while in the belly of a fish! Most of the important parts of this psalm are all written in the past tense, but the last three verses are different.

First, let’s deal with the fish for a second. I’ve never been inside a big fish, so I’m not sure what it’s like. Apparently he could breathe, so we know there’s air. I’m guessing it was pretty dark, pretty wet, pretty cold, and pretty slimy. It’s an odd scene, really. Being in the belly of the fish doesn’t seem like a very delightful thing, but the emotion in this psalm is exactly that—Jonah is delighted.

For Jonah, this fish is a direct response and answer to his prayer. You have to remember the fish is totally unexpected! Jonah figured he was a goner, and so does anybody reading the story for the first time. I mean, he really thought he was about to receive the Judgment of The LORD. Did you wonder what Sheol was when verse 2 reported, “out of the belly of Sheol I cried?” Sheol is the Old Testament word for Hell. There’s a ton we could talk about on the topic of Sheol and Hell, but I think it would sidetrack us and pull us away from the main meaning and thrust of Jonah’s prayer. I’ll just say a couple of brief things.

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The Old Testament doesn’t tell us a ton about Hell. There is much more in the New Testament, most of it coming from Jesus Himself. He talks about its reality and existence, more than any other person in the Bible. For Jonah, he simply knew judgment was coming and expected he was in, or about to be in, Sheol or Hell.

The visual picture in Hebrew of Sheol is the underworld land of the dead. In verse 6 he calls it “the pit,” a literal cave or grave below. So Jonah sinks to the bottom of the ocean, figures he’s about to enter Hell, and then, in the last moments, verse 7 says when his “life was fainting away” he “remembered the LORD.” This is extremely telling. It speaks to the affection which lead Jonah to pray—he remembered the LORD. What did he remember?

Verse 8 gives us a clue: “those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.”

There are a couple things here: first, why talk about idols here? We’ll cover spiritual and practical idols in later chapters, but for now, at the very least, Jonah is realizing God is the one and only trustworthy and reliable God—that all others gods offer false hopes and never deliver.

I could be wrong, but it sounds almost like a slight acknowledgment that Jonah is speaking from experience, that he had his own personal idols.

This seems like a heartfelt recognition that he had grown to idolize his own agenda, his own plans, his own desires. He had begun to worship a false god—the god who only cared about letting Jonah do what he wanted to do.

Jonah receives judgment for this. In the middle of his lowest moment, just when he is about to receive the sentence of death, in the midst of the blurry fog of the dark waters, things become clear for Jonah. He realizes only God is God, and that God is justly punishing him in that moment. But then he remembers something else about God which gives him hope, God’s steadfast love!

Jonah remembers that God is a loving and gracious God! I wouldn’t be surprised if Exodus 34:6-7 came to Jonah’s mind: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and

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transgression and sin.”

What did Jonah remember that gave him hope? He remembered that even though he had sinned, God is a loving and forgiving God! He remembered that God is committed to loving His people. It’s hard to get at it in English, but where it says “steadfast love,” the Hebrew word is chesed. It means “faithful, continual, always, forever, never stopping, lovingkindness.”

Jonah, on the brink of death, realizes that though he is a sinner God is gracious and forgiving and is committed to loving him. This realization gives Jonah hope!

Do you know that God? Do you know this kind of hope? Not just hope that circumstances will get better, but the hope which comes from knowing the love of God? Are you in a place where you need to remember or be reminded of what God is really like?

Hear the message of Jonah: there is hope! There is no situation, no sin, no problem or difficulty in life too dire for God to deliver us from. There’s hope! God is not without judgment, but He is also not without mercy. There is always hope.

Now, I pointed out earlier that, for the most part, this prayer psalm we’re working through is looking backwards in past tense. It doesn’t tell us anywhere at what point the fish swallowed Jonah. There’s a lot going on here, and much of it happens in a few split moments as Jonah’s life flashes before his eyes. exclaiming the wonders of salvation Here’s what I think happened. Jonah is sinking to his death. He remembers God’s love. Then, he cries out for help and the fish, right at that moment, gobbles him up! One moment Jonah thinks he’s about to die and the next he’s inside the fish, breathing, and can’t believe he’s alive. This causes an immediate response of praise in Jonah.

There is an exclamation in the beginning and the end of the prayer. Verse 2 says, “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me!”

Then verse 9 reads, “but I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you;

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what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!” We won’t spend long here. I don’t even know quite how to explain it, but it’s like once the moment comes when you simultaneously realize how sick and sinful you are, and yet God loves you and forgives you, the immediate response is praise!

I don’t quite get it, but it’s the way the soul works. Being a recipient of grace turns the heart to praise. Our hearts automatically start thanking God, worshipping Him and expressing love back to Him. We extol His wonders and rejoice in His salvation.

What happens here with Jonah is beautiful and it is the exact same thing we saw with the sailors. After they’re saved from the storm, they worship God and offer vows and sacrifices. Jonah gets saved from the deep and then he’s offering vows and sacrifices.

Now, obviously, he’s not building a little fire inside the fish and making an animal sacrifice but, as verse 9 says, he offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving with his voice. This is the purest form of sacrifice there is. As Psalm 51:17 says, “the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart.”

A sacrifice is an offering you offer up to God. In that sense it’s not so much a setting of something aside or a giving up of something, instead it is a pouring out of one’s self to God. With Jonah the sacrifice is followed by a vow. A vow is a commitment, a promise. Here the vow is a commitment and promise to praise God. It’s like saying, “I will worship you, and I will follow you all the days of my life.” It’s the confession of a true Christian.

Now there’s one last thing here I think is important for us to get. When Jonah exclaims, “Salvation belongs to the LORD!” do you think he just means, “God saved me from drowning?” No. It’s more than that, isn’t it?

Jonah’s salvation from drowning by God’s fish wasn’t so much a physical salvation as it was a spiritual one. God used the experience to save his soul.

This whole chapter, this whole prayer, is about Jonah’s change of heart.

I think this is important for us to note because otherwise we run the risk of turning the whole story of Jonah into a false gospel. Here’s how: you

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look at the story and say, “Hmmm…okay. Things were bad for Jonah so he called out to God and then things went well for him. So I should just call out to God, and then things will go well for me.” When we do that, we take this story and turn it into a self-help manual and miss the entire point.

The whole point of the story, the whole purpose of the prayer, is to proclaim how God changed and turned Jonah’s heart. God saved Jonah from himself. Jonah, when he exclaims, “salvation belongs to the LORD,” is still in the fish. He probably figured he was still going to die, but God spared him long enough to come to know His love and grace so he wouldn’t spend eternity in Hell.

Verse 10 is like this added bonus. Just when Jonah declares the salvation of God, the fish vomits Jonah up on dry land, which is amazing in itself.

During the three days that Jonah was in the fish, God had the fish traveling, taking him back to Joppa! As we’ll see in the upcoming chapters, God wasn’t done with Jonah. God wanted him to take the lesson he had learned in the belly of the fish to others. Specifically, God wanted Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach to them from the song he had learned to sing: salvation is found in the LORD. Jesus Let’s wrap up this chapter by seeing how this passage of Scripture tells us about Jesus. We finish every chapter in this way because Jesus, after he died and rose from the dead, said that all of the Bible, every story and every word, is all about Him. So every time we open the Bible we firmly believe that we haven’t fully understood it and its message until we see Jesus in its words.

In Matthew 12:40 Jesus Himself says, “for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

In this chapter, we’ve worked through the description of Jonah’s experience as he went down to the heart of the earth. We’ve heard his last thoughts and words. We’ve read about it in vivid detail and the most obvious thing in all of it is this: Jonah sinned and deserved to be exactly where God put him—

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at the bottom of the ocean, one foot through the door to Sheol.

Jesus was different. Jesus went down out of obedience to His Father, God, who had ordained He go and die for other peoples’ sins. As He was going into the heart of the earth, Jesus had no need to cry out to God for His own salvation. Instead, He cried out for ours. His last thoughts and words included these cries from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” and, “it is finished.”

In Jonah, we learn that salvation comes from the LORD; in Jesus we learn Jesus is that salvation. He is the one God has provided out of Heaven to go to the depths of the earth in order save our souls from sin and corruption.

In Jesus, we come to see and know a loving God who has gone to great lengths and reached down to great depths in order that we might know His forgiveness and come to praise Him. There is nothing God is not willing to do to show us and teach us about His great love. To that end He crucified His own son! Oh, through what great depths our God reaches down in order to save!

Where are we at in this story? Which character are you? We are all at the bottom of the ocean, in the earth, and Jesus has come down to save us.

The Gospel is Jesus died for our sins and rose again. This prayer psalm we have been working through screams out that message. Apart from Jesus there is death. We must cry out to Him for help. Only in Jesus is hope found.

Jesus is worthy of all our thanks and praise.

As we finish with this section of text, I implore you respond in whatever way you need to—today, right now. Don’t even waste time closing this book.

Maybe you’ve hit rock bottom and are sinking into death. Know Jesus died so you don’t have to.

Maybe you’re in a place where you’ve been trying to do everything yourself, out of your own strength, and you need to cry out to God for help and ask Him to change your heart.

Maybe you simply need to hear the hope of God. Look to Jesus. There is no clearer demonstration of God’s true grace and mercy, slow anger, abounding steadfast love and faithfulness. Always, He is keeping steadfast

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love for thousands—forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

Lastly, maybe you need to come and offer thanksgiving and make some vows. Have you been holding back your praise? Don’t hold back any longer.

The true sacrifice is one of a broken and contrite heart. Give God your heart.

Make some vows. Determine that you will worship, follow, love, and serve the one true God.

chapter five. the God who loves lost cities

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onah 3:1-10 1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth. 4Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 5And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.

6 The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything.

Let them not feed or drink water, 8but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. 9Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”

10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.

nineveh & the great city we live in So far we have learned a ton from the Book of Jonah. We have learned how God cares for and goes after those who don’t know God at all, like the sailors. We have

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learned how He cares for those who do know Him, but foolishly ignore and run from Him, like Jonah. We’ve learned how God is mighty and powerful (and actually, kind of scary) because He controls things like wind and waves and big fish. And we have learned that even when we hit rock bottom, God is there and He still cares and is still forgiving and full of lovingkindness.

This brings us to the second half of the Book of Jonah. Now we get to see Jonah actually doing what God wanted him to do in the first place, before the whole boat detour.

At the beginning of Jonah 3, we see Jonah back on dry land in the midst of a great city. Immediately we get to see God repeating Himself to Jonah saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it.” These are the exact same words God told Jonah at the very beginning of the book!

Only this time God adds some extra words you see at the end of verse 2: “the message that I tell you.” That’s sort of like saying, “and you better do it this time!” I don’t know what else Jonah would do? He already tried to run. He already tried to kill himself. Neither of those things worked. Apparently God is just hung up on this Nineveh city and He’s hung up on Jonah going there with His message.

So what is with Nineveh? Let’s talk about the ancient city of Nineveh and cities themselves. I am a pastor in San Diego, which can stand in for almost any major city in the United States.

Nineveh was at that time the capital of Assyria. Four times in the book it is called “a great city” (1:2; 3:2-3; 4:11). What made it great? Well, a few things.

One, it was big. We’re told in verse three it was a three days journey to walk either through or around it. Ancient records say it was 480 stadia in circumference, which is about 60 miles around. One account says it had over 1,000 towers. It was just a monumental city. Nineveh was one of the largest and most beautiful cities of the ancient world. It was set in between the mountains on the eastern side of the Tigris River and was encased within great magnificent walls. Geographically, it is near to where the modern city of Mosul is today in Iraq.

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Genesis 10:8-11 tells us that Nimrod, Noah’s great grandson was the one who originally founded Nineveh. Many years later, one of the city’s kings, Sennacharib, commissioned a major building project that installed fifteen hundred 70 foot walls around the city. Sitting atop the walls were 30-foot-tall winged lions and bulls made out of stone. It was becoming a great city.8 The very last verse in the Book of Jonah tells us there were more than 120,000 babies who lived there. So we’re probably talking somewhere between five and six hundred thousand people living there. That is a lot of people in once place, especially for Jonah’s time.

It was also known to be great because of its military power and brutality.

The king who ruled a century before Jonah’s arrival bragged about the great strength of the city. Tchividiian quotes the king, “many captives I have burned in a fire. Many I took alive; from some I cut off their hands to the wrist, from others I cut off their noses, ears and fingers; I put out the eyes of many of the soldiers. I burnt their young men and women to death…I have constantly established my victory and strength over the land.” 9 He goes on to describe how in one battle he had the soldiers skin those they defeated and he took them and draped hundreds of human skins over Nineveh’s walls. Gnarly stuff. Jonah himself, as we learned back at the beginning of the book, was around when 100,000 of his friends, family and countrymen were killed by the Ninevites. Nineveh was a great city. Greatly beautiful, greatly populated, greatly powerful, and greatly feared, but Nineveh was also greatly broken.

There was a cancer in the city—a darkness which had consumed it. As we’ll see, it’s own king knew the place was filled with evil and violence.

So here’s the question: why does God care about Nineveh? I mean, this has been the place He’s been going after from the start. Is God just out to destroy it because they’re bad? Or is there more to the story?

8. Scarre, Christopher. The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World. Ed. Scarre, Christopher. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Print.

9. Stark, Rodney. Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became An Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. New York: Harper One, 2006. Print.

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Well, we’ll see in more detail that God had a specific plan for Nineveh and what it was. But before we get into that, there’s something we could easily miss and pass over in all of this: God cares about cities and He always has.

Throughout the Bible there are good cities and bad cities. Babel was a bad city. Bethlehem was a good city. Jericho was a bad city. Jerusalem was a good city. We consistently see this theme. God is always appealing to the bad cities and trying to get people to repent and change or get out of the city before He has to destroy it. God has always cared about cities. Why? Because that’s where people are and God cares about people.

Cities are important. Not only are they places of safety and refuge, but they are designed by God to be central places where He is worshipped and the places from which His light emanates. In his book “Kingdom Prologue” Meredith Kline writes, “Man was commissioned to enter into and carry forward the work of God, furthering God’s ultimate purpose of glorifying himself by developing the kingdom city as a reflector of the divine glory.”10 In fact, the whole thrust of human history in the Bible is a move from one city to another. It starts out in the Garden of Eden, where sin and corruption entered into the world, moving then out and forward into every new city that is built. All of this moves toward the ultimate city, which Revelation describes as coming down out of Heaven, with God Himself dwelling in the middle of it.

Christians have always cared about cities for this reason. Historian Rodney Stark wrote a book called Cities of God in which he documents how the first three hundred years of Christianity were particularly successful because the Apostles went after the cities—the culture forming centers of the world. He writes: “Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement.

The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was ‘rural person,’ or more colloquially ‘country hick.’ It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities most of the rural people remained unconverted.”11 Thus, Christianity was actually so city focused that those who didn’t live in the city were called pagans merely because they lived and worked out on a

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farm in the fields. Then, only after time, it came to refer to those who either didn’t know or had rejected the message of God’s love that He had provided in Christ.

Cities put all kinds of people together in one place, which brings out the best and the worst of the human heart. In cities you get a density, as well as a diversity of people. Those who are like one another bond in mutual support and accomplish great things. Yet, even for those people who are not alike, the inclusive nature of the city forces them to learn how to live and work and play and grow together. Cities force people to interact in cooperative relationship. That is why they’re important to God. Let me tell you about the city that I know best, San Diego. I love my city. It is eighth largest city in the nation and definitely the best city in my opinion. We don’t have to deal with tornados or floods, just the occasional earthquake and forest fire. We’ve got great beaches and are known for our amazing weather. My city is simply beautiful. I live just a couple miles east of downtown, so nearly every day I drive the I-5 past the buildings downtown which appear to be sitting on the surface of the bay. My city is just awesome.

There’s a reason San Diego is known as “America’s Finest City.”

But San Diego is actually a lot like Nineveh. They were near a big river, we’re near a big ocean. They had a lot of people living there and so do we.

They were known for their military might and we’ve got Marines, Navy, Army, Airforce and Coast Guard all stationed here. San Diego has one of the biggest military bases in the country. Granted, we’re not skinning people and draping ‘em on our buildings, but we are tough. Perhaps most of all, just like Nineveh, San Diego is also very broken.

Financially, we are broke, literally. Socio-economically, we are broke with one of the biggest homeless populations in the country. We’ve got gang problems and drug problems and family problems. Nearly every night you 10. Kline, Meredith G. “Kingdom Prologue” Genesis Foundations for a Covenental Worldview.” Wipf and Stock Publishers: Eugene, Oregon. p. 74.

11. Stark, Rodney. Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became An Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. New York: Harper One, 2006. p. 93.

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turn on the news and it’s reported that someone got shot or hurt. If you live in North Park, Normal Heights or City Heights you’re probably familiar with what we call the “Ghetto Bird.” It’s this helicopter that shows up almost nightly, circling around and calling out on the loud speaker the description of someone the police are looking for.

San Diego is beautiful, but it’s broken…spiritually most of all. We’re a confused city—a melting pot of any and every religious belief possible.

As a whole, we’ve got no consensus, up, down, left right, so we just say it’s “all-good,” agree to disagree, and try to play nice. Yet we’re all hurting and longing for reconciliation and renewal with God, and with one another. jonah & the great word we listen to Like Nineveh, we’re a great city and we’re a city in great need. We’ll talk about exactly what it is that we need, but for now let’s get back to the story and look at what happened when Jonah went into Nineveh.

Remember we already know Jonah doesn’t like Nineveh. You would expect and hope that after defying God and even more so experiencing His merciful salvation, Jonah would understand God’s graciousness toward sinners, but that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

It might just be me because I’m a preacher, but it seems like Jonah preaches the worst sermon ever here. It’s five words in Hebrew, eight words in English. Verse 4 says, “yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

This is the exact message God tells him, and Jonah is a good Jew. He knows forty is a special period of time after which God usually does something good. After forty days of rain, the flood of Noah’s day came to an end.

After forty days up on the mountain, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. After forty years of making them wander in the desert God brought his people into the promised land. In the New Testament Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness being tempted and then starts His great ministry.

After He rises from the dead, Jesus appears for forty days and then ascends and the church gets started.

I think there is a hint of God’s coming grace in the words of Jonah’s

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message. In fact the word for “overthrown” in verse 4, meaning overturned, can also mean “transformed,” and some have read a literary kind of double meaning into the line. Yet that’s not the vibe you get from Jonah here. It sounds like he wants the city to be overthrown, not transformed.

I imagine him walking through the city yelling out: “forty days and you’re all gonna die!” “Forty days and you’re all gonna die!” “Forty days and you’re all gonna die!” It’s like all those stupid billboards that were showing up all over the country during the Harold Camping debacle of 2011 saying Jesus was returning on May 21st, even though Jesus Himself said no one can know the day or the hour (Mt 24:36). Funny story: at our church amidst all the “judgment day, save the date, the end is nigh” sentiments I was preaching from the book of Jonah. The billboards used a verse from Jonah, so a few people asked if our church was responsible for the billboards. We were not.

It was all doom and gloom, and no grace. It’s such a different story from the time God came to Abraham and told him about His plans for Sodom and Gomorrah, but said He wouldn’t destroy it if Abraham could find even a couple people there who would turn to God (Gen 18). That’s different than just “judgment day is coming,” or “forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” It’s way different.

Jonah here is preaching the worst sermon ever, but guess what happens?

People take him seriously and believe. Verse 5 says they “believed God.” All of them—from the greatest to the least. It’s crazy. I put a lot of work into my sermons and my delivery. Maybe I ought to quit studying and preparing and just start telling everyone that they’re all gonna die and then we’ll see the whole city of San Diego come to Jesus!

I don’t really think that’s the answer because I think something special was going on with Jonah. Some commentators have tried to guess why the Ninevites responded the way that they did and have suggested everything from fear of invasion, a solar eclipse, famine, earthquakes, or even a previous omen as being factors to explain their response. Maybe some of it is true, but even then, I don’t think just hearing those five words would have been enough for me.

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Here’s what I think happened—actually John Calvin does a good job of stating it when he says, “it was the hidden power of God (attached) to the preaching of his word…God not only spoke by the mouth of Jonah, but added power to his word.” That’s what makes the difference. That’s what I pray for every time I preach—that somehow, some way, beyond me and despite me, that God would speak to you His word. I pray that God would add His power to the words of this book so that they might pierce you heart and draw you to Him. You see, there is tension here. Throughout the whole book of Jonah he has been resisting God’s Word, but everyone else receives it. The pagan sailors who had never heard of God, yet when Jonah reluctantly gives them the word and tells them who God is, tells them to turn to God, tells them start fearing Him, and tells them to make sacrifices—they respond! When people of Nineveh hear Jonah speak the word, even though it’s just five words, they respond!

The tension here comes from the fact that the Book of Jonah, which tells a story of preaching to pagans, is actually preaching to us. It is showing us that we, the people who claim to know and fear the LORD are the ones resisting His Word, not the pagans. So are you? Is there something God has been trying to get through to you that you’ve been resisting? Is there something you know you simply need to give into and believe? Is there an area God is calling you to make a change in?

What is God saying to you through His Word? The most important thing we can ever listen to is the word of God, not crazy billboards, not crazy street preachers, not the ideas of our friends and family, and not our own feelings that so easily deceive us. We need to hear, listen to, and obey the Word of God. repentance & the great sin we turn from The next section of the text describes how this thing with the people of Nineveh happened. It gives us some details and does a great job of demonstrating the biblical concept of repentance.

This is basically how it all goes down: the king of Nineveh hears about the message that Jonah is preaching and he does five things. He gets up, takes

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off his royal robe, puts on sackcloth and ash, then sits down and issues a decree for all who live in his city.

If you’re wondering what sackcloth and ash are, it’s just like it sounds. A sackcloth is a rough piece of cloth used to make sacks, like in a sack-race at a birthday party. As a common sign of grief in the ancient world, people would cut a hole in one, put it over their heads, and then burn something and use the ashes to dust their head and clothes.

It was a literal representation of their discomfort with and in sorrow.

Notice the fifth thing the king does: he calls for a citywide fast—no eating or drinking for anyone, including the animals. Somehow he recognizes that God, the creator, rightly rules over everything. The king is surrenders and puts the lives of his subjects at the mercy of God. In taking off his royal robes, he humiliates himself before all his people and acknowledges God as the true king.

Then look what he says. He admits and confesses his own sin and the sin of his city. Verse 8 reads: “let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.”

This is important to recognize, because there are two parts to repentance, and often we don’t get this second part. Sometimes we think repentance just means to be sorry, but that’s really only the first part. In fact, 2 Corinthians 7:10 says, “godly sorrow leads to repentance.” So the repentance really comes after the sorrow.

The word “repentance” itself literally means change, a change of course or trajectory in the opposite direction. You need both here. You’ve got to have the sorrow part or it’s not genuine, and you’ve got to have the turning part or it’s just emotionalism with no lasting effect. Repentance is real change through and through—attrition and contrition, sackcloth sorrow, turning from change. You’ve got to have both. Without sorrow it’s just behavior modification that’s not motivated by a real love for God and it simply won’t last. If all you have is sorrow but you never take action and turn, then you really weren’t sorry and probably just embarrassed or frustrated that some-

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body else saw you fail.

Repentance is huge. It is the rhythm of the Christian life. To live is to be increasingly convicted of sin and turning away from it while Jesus changes us from the inside out. Some of you are caught up in sin and you know it. You know that you are living in sin and that you need to change. Repent. Some of you need to move beyond emotions and move on to action. Some of you are self-righteous, constantly comparing yourself to others and thinking you’re doing fine because you’re not as bad as others, but you haven’t really gone before God and you’re numb toward Him spiritually. All of your life is just action and you need affection.

What is God calling you to repent from? Some specific thing? An attitude or outlook? Don’t be proud and think “I’m doing fine.” No one is doing fine.

Every one of us is failing and in need. If you can’t see it, you just haven’t dug deep enough. I need change. I need the Gospel to work in my heart. I need more sorrow and more repentance. We need to be more like the king and be willing to disrobe our robes of feeble righteousness and bow before the King of Heaven.

I already spoon fed you some Calvin, but he has more to say on this point. He says “the faithful ought to live their whole life continuing to repent in order to serve God.”12 The Christian life is one where we are always being moved, and always being turned, to see our gracious God. We are to be tooled as His servants unto those others who need the touch of His hand. This is where the text leaves us at this point: pointing at the great grace of God. grace & the great God we turn to What we see in the third chapter of the Book of Jonah is that turning away from sin isn’t enough. There has to be something greater to hold our attention—someone greater and more worthy of our attention and devotion.

Nothing and nobody will do but God Himself. All else leaves us empty.

12. Calvin, John. The Commentaries of John Calvin on the Prophet Jonah. Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 2003. Print.

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The king’s prayer and edict are made in the hope that God will relent and not destroy Nineveh. Verse 10 says that when God saw what they did, “how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster He said he would do.”

The next chapter makes it fairly clear that the administration of grace and mercy towards Nineveh was God’s plan all along. We need to see the character of God in this verse.

Some have tried to over-analyze and over-philosphize this word “relent,” or as some translations say, “repent.” It’s silly. God doesn’t ever repent because He never does anything wrong, and He wouldn’t have been in the wrong if He destroyed Nineveh. The Book of Jonah has championed God’s sovereign rule over all events, present and future—over storms, sailors, the sea, and even sea monsters.

This verse is merely describing the action of God from a human perspective, not the divine one. It is a literary device called a anthropopathism (for you nerds). I’m not even going to say anything else about it because it distracts from the point of this verse entirely.

The author’s intent is for us to read and hear verse 10 and think, “Wow! I can’t believe it! God is so gracious! These people are sick and evil and God had grace on them! Wow! God is truly a gracious God! Maybe there’s hope for me too, because deep down I’m really sick too and I need a God like that.”

That’s the point!

You see, there is something bigger going on than project Jonah and project Nineveh. The story really isn’t about either of them. It’s about a gracious God who loves lost people in lost cities. It’s about God doing the greatest miracle of all—greater than the storm, greater than the fish, greater than the great city of Nineveh—it is about the miracle of changing the human heart.

Here’s the truth: we know we ought to care more for the cities of God, but we don’t. We know we ought to listen and obey God’s Word, but we don’t. We know we ought to be sorrowful and repent, but we don’t. The truth is, even if you know you must do these things and try, you will still fail.

You can’t do it.

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Ultimately, what we’re left with is the knowledge and understanding that we are a people who are in need of the grace of God—the same grace God determined to have on the Ninevites from day one. And just as God had planned from the beginning of the Book of Jonah for His grace to come to the city of Nineveh, God planned from the beginning of time for His grace to come into our world.

Jesus The Book of Jonah really points forward to God sending His son Jesus into the world—Jesus, The King, full of grace and truth. Jesus submits to the mission of God from the start and comes preaching and teaching the word: “Repent, believe in me.” Unlike Jonah, His message is more than just a callous declaration of justice. The message of Jesus is that He came to suffer justice in our place, once and for all.

Jesus is the true and better king of Nineveh because He takes off the royal robe of Heaven and steps down into the earth, taking sackcloth and ash upon himself for your sin and for mine. But He doesn’t stop there. Unlike the king of Nineveh, God did not relent, but instead poured out His full wrath.

Jesus suffered on the cross for every sin and wicked thing mankind has ever done. Every ounce of judgment which was held back from the thousands of people in Nineveh was stored up to be unleashed on Jesus.

He does it so our hearts might truly be changed and turned to God. That’s what we need. We need Jesus. The Book of Jonah really points to the good news of who Jesus is and what He has done—how Jesus took on the disaster we deserve. It is only through getting a grasp of this truth that we can be transformed and then be a part of transforming our city. San Diego needs the gospel of Jesus Christ. Your city needs the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is what I am inviting you into. Whether it’s specifically inviting you into the community of The Resolved Church in San Diego, or into the church in general, with Christ at its head­— our mission is to be a part of and live in the Gospel city where Jesus rules and reigns because He conquered sin once and for all. God loves cities and wants to see them flourish and prosper.

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Our vision is to be like that of the early Christians and go after the cities.

We are to see ourselves as missionaries called to live in houses, in neighborhoods, and workplaces where we live out the good news of the Gospel by continually turning from sin and turning to Jesus. When that happens we experience the love and peace, God means for us to enjoy as we express His grace in all the avenues of life—in our families, friendships and communities. We are here to help people in that and to learn that the Gospel life and the Gospel city is the good life.

Some of you need to get a bigger vision and sense of the significance of actually loving and committing to a city for the sake of the Gospel, rather than chasing after all kinds of other things.

Some of you need to really begin to listen to and obey God’s Word rather than listening to and doing your own thing.

Some of you need to repent of some things today and turn to Jesus—to truly be sorry and to truly turn and change.

Some of you need to marvel at the great grace of God and thank Him for His goodness.

Jesus lived and died on a cross and rose again for our sin. May He be glorified and we may be changed as we trust in Him for our salvation.

chapter six. the God who will be gracious

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onah 4:1-4 1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2 And he prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. 3Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4And the LORD said, “Do you do well to be angry?”

God’s grace is evil In the final chapter of the actual Book of Jonah, we see this exciting event-filled climax of the prophet’s standoff with God. The first four verses focus on God’s nature and His character of grace and that’s what we’re going to focus on in the following pages.

Jonah clearly has a beef with God. Like a prosecutor in a courtroom, Jonah calls God out onto the stand and is charging Him with a crime. Listen to the way he prays in verse 2 when he says, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? This is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”

Sometimes it’s hard to pick up on tone in a text, but not here. Jonah is not happy. It really actually reads like he is shouting. He’s upset, in the worst way, when he levels this accusation against God. There’s a battle going on here between Jonah and God—between God’s Word and Jonah’s word. The question is: who is right?

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Have you ever had a problem with God’s Word and questioned whether it was right, or true? If so, you’re in good company here.

So what, exactly, is Jonah’s charge here? His charge is that God’s grace is evil. Verse 1 says, “it displeased Jonah exceedingly.” The translation could be better. Here is how the original Hebrew text reads: “yerah yonah gadowl rah.”

Do you see the word ra? It’s in there twice. The word “ra” in Hebrew means “evil.” So a literal translation here is, “it was evil to Jonah, a great evil.”

Bible translators tend to be tentative with the word evil, especially when it applies to something God did, coming from a prophet God spoke through.

Jonah thinks it was an evil, a great evil. What’s the “it” here? “It” is the event we studied in the last chapter. At the end of Jonah chapter 3 where verse 3 says, “when God saw what they [the Ninevites] did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster he had said he would do to them and he did not do it.”

Do you see the connection? Jonah does not think God should have relented. More than that—he thinks it is wrong, no evil, that God did not bring disaster down upon Nineveh. He thinks God is wrong and has massively erred. Yet it goes even deeper than that. Jonah isn’t just mad that God had grace on Nineveh, he’s mad that God is gracious at all. Jonah has a fundamental problem with the attributes and character of the God he worships.

Notice at the beginning of verse two, in his prayer, we finally find out the real reason for why Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh in the first place.

All we knew up until this point is that Jonah was disobeying God and going his own way. We had reason to speculate, given the background offered in 2 Kings 14, that it was because the Ninevites had killed a bunch of his friends.

We had reason to think that he was probably scared of the Ninevites, or just plain didn’t like them, but here we see there was much more to it.

We see here that Jonah knew if he went to Niniveh and told its people about God that they would probably repent and God would show them grace and he didn’t want that! Notice how verse 2 says, “this is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God…relenting from disaster.” Jonah has a problem with God being gracious. He’s got a funda-

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mental problem with who God is and whether or not God really deserves to be God or is acting as God should act.

You have to feel the tension here. Jonah says, “is this not what I said?”

Jonah’s word versus God’s Word. One commentator paraphrases Jonah here and says he’s basically saying, “See, I was right all along. I knew it. I knew this would happen because that’s who You are. I was right all along. I knew if I went and preached to Nineveh that they would repent and you would have grace on them. I knew. I told you so.”13 Jonah wants God to only exercise His justice, not His grace. Maybe you’ve been sitting here and wondering what grace is. It can easily become one of those words Christian people throw around all the time without ever really knowing what it is.

We say “grace” at our meals. We name our kids Grace. (No offense if you’re name’s Grace. It’s a good name.) Maybe some of you are Mumford and Sons fans? Me too. They have a popular song that asks “how this grace thing works.” Grace is confusing. To truly understand what grace is you’ve got to understand what justice is. Justice is rightly getting what you deserve. Grace is not getting what you rightly deserve. It’s undeserved blessing and favor.

Mumford and Sons actually almost gets it right. This is the full stanza of “Roll Away Your Stone” that struggles with grace: Darkness is a harsh term don’t you think? And yet it dominates the things I see. It seems that all my bridges have been burned, but you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works. It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with the restart.

Grace is the restart that comes when you have burned all your bridges and you deserve darkness and the wrath of God. So here is Jonah’s contention with God: if God is just, then He should not be gracious. If He’s gracious, then His justice is compromised.

13. “One Commentator paraphrases....

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Jonah wants the Ninevites to burn. No second chances. They really do deserve to burn. I explained how sick and cruel they were in the first chapter—skinning humans alive and draping their flesh over Nineveh’s walls. They were an evil and wicked people. They made Gaddaffi, Osama bin Laden, Saddam, Stalin, and Hitler look like pansies. Jonah’s contention is, “No! God you cannot grant them grace or you’re corrupt. You’re evil.”

It’s bigger than how God has treated the Ninevites. It’s how God is always treating His enemies. Jonah’s charge against God isn’t just a charge against how He acted once, but a charge against the fundamental character and nature of God. Jonah’s God is a God that is and always has been gracious.

Let’s just stop here for a second so you can take a few moments to ask yourself, what is my God like? Most people have a god that falls into one of the three following camps: Camp 1: God is the one true God who is just and right, and one day he is going to prove it to everyone and wipe everyone out. People in this camp can’t wait for that to happen.

Camp 2: God is just a big teddy bear full of love who doesn’t really get riled up about much of anything. “Don’t worry about it man…it’s cool, God loves you and He’ll let it slide.”

Camp 3: People who are not sure if there even is a God, but if there is, he’s just sort of out there and detached and doesn’t care. He isn’t really involved at all and we can never really find out what he thinks, one way or the other.

What camp are you in? What god do you worship? What god do you long for?

One who will bring swift justice? One who will let all the bad go and bring everyone into His love? Or is it the one who has detached himself from both justice and love?

Jonah is in Camp 1, but sees God as being in Camp 2. Really, his view of God goes way back apparently. Jonah has been feeling this way about God for some time, long before this whole Nineveh encounter came about. This leads us into my second point concerning this section of text.

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God has been gracious In the second part of verse 2, Jonah says, “For I knew you are a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (emphasis added).

So here’s the thing: this is a very well known phrase if you’re a Jew living during 8th century. They are the words that God said about Himself back in Exodus when He revealed Himself to Moses. These words get incorporated into a bunch of Psalms, worship services, and prophecies that come later, including Exdodus 34:6, 2 Chronicles 30:9, Nehemiah 9:17 and 31, Psalm 86:15, Psalm 103:8, Psalm 111:4, Psalm 112:4, Psalm 145:8, and Joel 2:13.

When the Israelites got together for church they would sing, “God, you are a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster!” Jonah knew this. He had read of it, sung it, and heard story after story about it, which ought to be a wake up call for us. You can grow up hearing it, and singing it, and still have a fundamental problem with who God is. It is possible to grow up knowing about Christ and not really be a Christian.

Jonah here says, “I knew.” Way back in Joppa when he fled to Tarshish, when he thought about who God was and what God would do, he knew God would be gracious. How did he know?

Jonah had to have learned it from Exodus 34:8. The Book of Exodus in the Bible is titled as such because of the great exit God’s people made out of Egypt. They had been slaves there for over 430 years, and through a string of great miracles God delivered them. Then He had them follow Him out into the desert. At first they rejoiced—so happy at being free and not being slaves anymore, but God doesn’t tell them His whole plan in advance. So after they end up in this desert and things get difficult, they start to question God and His goodness. They start to wonder whether they should have left in the first place. Then they come to this mountain, Mt. Sinai, and their human leader Moses, following God’s direction, goes up on top of the mountain to get some instructions. The people camp out at the base of the mountain and just wait. It turns out that Moses ends up being gone for a long time… forty days.

There’s a bunch of thunder and lightening up on the mountain while he’s

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there. The people don’t know what’s happened to him. Exodus 32:1 reports the Israelites saying, “we do not know what has become of him.” All along Moses has been the one to speak to the Israelites on God’s behalf, but he is gone and God is silent.

So then this dude, who is actually Moses’ right hand man, gets this dumb idea. The people are complaining and he does what every weak leader ends up doing, which is to just try and make the people happy instead of lovingly confronting, challenging, and leading them.

This God, YHWH, who is apparently supposed to be the one who miraculously led the Hebrews out of Egypt, is fundamentally different than all the other local deities. You see, in the culture of the time, there were many different gods and many different beliefs. It didn’t really matter which one you believed in or worshipped as long as you were being spiritual. But the god of the Israelites was different—God, YHWH, the LORD, was different because nobody had ever seen Him. Nobody knew what He looked like.

He was a god who only revealed Himself through words, not images. He required people to believe thoughtfully, not just serve and act thoughtlessly.

But thoughtful worship is not easy.

So the Israelites came up with a brilliant idea. They said, “Okay YHWH, the LORD is the one who brought us out of the Egypt, but we need something tangible to worship.” So Moses’ right hand man, Aaron, goes along with it and says, “okay then, everyone take off your jewelry—the rings off your fingers, ears and noses, your bracelets, anything gold you have, and put it in this fire and we’ll melt it all and make an image of YHWH for you to worship.” So the Israelites do it. They make this golden calf, call it YHWH, and start worshipping it and saying it was the calf was what brought them up out of Egypt.

I know it sounds stupid, but these people are not stupid primitive apes.

We want to, and actually do end up doing the same thing. Think about it. So often we pray, “Oh God, give me this or that, or do this and then I’ll believe.”

We want something tangible in order for us to believe in and follow God. It seems easier that way.

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All the while Moses is up on the mountain. He hasn’t died or anything. In fact, God is doing something phenomenal. He is writing—Himself, with His very finger—the Bible. He’s giving Moses the Ten Commandments. Written on stone. Guess what the first two commandments are?

Commandment number one: “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt... you shall have no other gods beside me.” Commandment number Two: “You shall not make for yourself any image and say it’s me.”

God’s going to be the God of His Word, revealed in a book.

The story in this passage is thick with irony. Moses comes down from the mountain, sees the dumb golden calf, gets pissed, and throws down the Ten Commandments, breaking them. Then he leaves, and goes back to meet with God and tells God that he quits and doesn’t want to lead the people anymore.

Then this phenomenal thing happens. God tells Moses even though the people are what he calls “stiff-necked,” He has decided to have favor on them and to commit His presence to be with them. It’s crazy. You don’t expect it all. What do you expect? Justice. Instead they get grace. God even says it. In Exodus 33:19 he says, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious.”

However, Moses wants some assurance. So in not so many words, he asks God to prove it, and guess what God does? He lifts Moses up, puts him on a ledge at the side of the mountain and then passes by him in a great wind and bright light. In a booming voice He says, I am “the LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Ex 34:6-7).

Jonah knew all of this. He knew it! He knew it because God had said it. God had committed Himself to being a God of grace. He had promised it. Jonah knew God would be gracious because He had been gracious. The evidence was clear.

Sometimes you hear that the God of the Old Testament is the mean God and the God of the New Testament is a God of love. Far from it—the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old are one and the same. The evidence is clear. God is a God who will be gracious because He is deter-

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mined to be so, as He Himself witnesses about Himself. It’s just who He is.

Every one of you reading this could look back on our own life, and if you could manage to be careful and insightful enough, you would discover the truth that time and time again God has been gracious to us. Where and when has God been gracious to you?

God’s grace is real and it is ever present. The fact that we are here, right now, breathing air, is His grace. The fact that we have made it this far in life, despite all the dangers of this world, is His grace. The fact that we were even born into this world, is His grace. Everything is grace. There is no doubt God is a God of grace.

Jonah does not think that God should be graceful. Jonah thinks he has a better idea.

God’s grace must be dismissed We see Jonah’s solution in verse 3 where he says, “Therefore now [since you are in fact a God of grace and you shouldn’t be…therefore] O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

Now, it’s hard to know exactly what Jonah is getting at here. I think there are a couple things going on. At the very least, Jonah is saying he doesn’t want grace. He would rather die. I don’t think that necessarily means he thinks he needs grace. In fact, in the entire Book of Jonah, we never see any confession of wrong doing or wrong thinking from Jonah.

In either case, Jonah at least sees life itself as a gift of grace but he doesn’t want anything to do with it if he has to share it with the Ninevites. Jonah could also, very well be trying to manipulate God. “It’s them or me! Who do you love more? Either kill them or kill me God!” Jonah here seems to be trying to put God in a box. He is trying to force God’s hand so that in either scenario, God’s actions in judgment will eclipse His grace.

But really, Jonah is just confused. If God was really going to withhold his grace then He’d wipe out both Jonah and the Ninevites, but Jonah doesn’t see that. Jonah thinks a world full of perfect justice, rather than grace, still

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has room for him.

How deceiving the desire for justice can be. If all our actions and thoughts were judged justly, we would all be thrown in prison or executed. And you have seen how prison and execution works out in the end—nothing ever actually gets fixed.

Maybe some of you have heard of the story of Corrie Ten Boom. Corrie was the daughter of a watch-maker in Holland, born in 1892. Corrie’s family was Christian and when Hitler invaded Holland in the early 1940s, the Booms harbored and hid Jews in their home to protect them from the Nazis.

Eventually they were caught and taken to a prison camp called Ravensbruck where Corrie lost her dad and sister.

Years later, Corrie was at a church in Germany and after the service a man came up to Corrie to introduce himself. At the sight of his face, she became horrified. She recognized him as one of the men from the prison who had forced her to walk naked and degraded throughout the camp as she and many others awaited their death. For many years she had harbored thoughts of hatred and longed for justice, thinking that restitution would heal her deeply felt wounds. When she saw the man’s face, she was overwhelmed with a thousand hateful reasons to rush forward and attack him, But in that same moment she remembered how much God had forgiven her in Christ. So she extended her hand toward the man, and spoke the words, “I forgive you.”

Corrie and the man began to weep together and God healed her heart.14 Like Corrie, Jonah’s desire for justice led to a dark and bitter obsession with revenge which worked to harden his heart against grace. We will deal more with Jonah’s heart in the next chapter, but for now, we see how his bitterness has hardened and conditioned his response to God’s actions.

So how does God respond to Jonah’s rant? Jonah has charged God, called Him out on His character and rendered a verdict against Him. It’s all pretty borderline blasphemous. John Calvin calls the way Jonah talks to God in this

14. Ten Boom, Corrie. The Hiding Place. Old Tappan: Chosen Books, 1971. Print.

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passage monstrous. “It is certainly a most unseemly thing, when a mean creature rises up against God, and in a boisterous spirit, contends with him: this is monstrous and Jonah was in this state of mind.”15 It’s crazy. If I were God and Jonah talked to me like that, I think I would have just been like, “That’s it! You tool!—Bing! You’re done.” That probably tells you a lot about me and what camp I would fall into. Sometimes I can’t wait for God to just smite people who defy Him. I guess that makes me as blind and stupid as Jonah, but God is better, God is truly gracious, truly slow to anger. Check out how He responds to Jonah. In verse 4 The LORD asks him a question, “Do you do well to be angry?”

Now this isn’t the first time one of God’s men has questioned God like this. Job in the Book of Job actually used courtroom language and called God to court questioning Him about all the bad stuff that had happened to Job. Toward the end of the book God finally shows up to Job’s court and starts hammering him with questions like, “Where you there when I created the world? When I placed the stars and created the animals?” and then God says to Jonah, “who are you to question me?”

In the Book of Habakkuk in the Bible, another prophet gets mad about God always letting people get away with being evil and asks God when He is going to get up and do something. Then Habakkuk climbs up into this tower and says he’s going to stay there and wait until God answers him.

With all of these men—Jonah, Job, Hakakkuk—God responds and it’s with grace. Here with Jonah, rather than smite him for being rude and disrespectful, and downright wrong, God turns around and asks Jonah a question and probes him. Notice God’s response, even in entertaining the conversation, which is more grace from God. God already had a ton of grace on Jonah—giving him life; calling him to be a prophet; not killing him with the storm when he disobeyed; saving him with a fish; and now when Jonah angrily challenges Him, rather than lashing out, God responds carefully and

15. Calvin, John. The Commentaries of John Calvin on the Prophet Jonah. Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 2003. p 130.

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lovingly. God’s answer to Jonah’s charge, evidence, and verdict is more grace.

“Do you do well to be angry? Should you really be angry with me?” This is gracious, extremely gracious, beyond gracious. In fact, this whole chapter is one pile of grace upon grace. We’ll dig deep into it in the next chapter, but for now I want to tie this section of the text together on one last note, once again, Jesus.

Jesus Jonah has a fundamental problem with God being gracious. He doesn’t think God should be gracious. He’s wrong. We don’t want to ever call God on justice saying, “that’s not fair, that’s not fair,” because what’s fair is never creating us, and what’s fair is He wipes us all out because we’re a terrible failure in glorifying our Maker. However, there is something to be considered in Job’s fundamental problem with God. I kind of think Jonah’s right.

If God just lets all this stuff go without consequence, there is real cause to question His claim to goodness, righteousness, truth, and justice. Sure, He is sovereign—it’s His prerogative and He can do what He wants—but how does that make sense? If a judge just lets a murderer off the hook with no punishment, even if he’s sorry and just claims grace, isn’t there something wrong with that? God’s grace can be confusing, can’t it?

Now in Jonah’s case, God means to go after the duplicity of his heart, which we’ll see in the next chapter. In Job’s case we learn there was something bigger going on between God and Satan; but in Habakkuk’s case, when God responds, he says something interesting. God says that “the just shall live by faith,” which is basically just a veiled way of saying, “hold on for now. In time I will reveal the future things I will do which enable me to have grace on you now. Trust me.”

Throughout the Old Testament, God’s response to the questions brought before Him was a promise—a covenant that looked forward in time, through history, to a point when God was going to do something great and bring everything together.

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In the New Testament, Romans 3:23-26 gives us an interesting summary of exactly how that plan came together. In verse 25 it says, “God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” See that? Romans here takes up the fundamental problem Jonah has with God: how can he be gracious? Romans says that salvation, justification, and redemption are all gifts of grace. But God extended His grace forward through history by passing over the sins of people like Jonah and Habakkuk, storing up all the just judgment and wrath, so that it could all be poured out on Jesus at the cross. That’s what that word propitiation means there: the satisfaction of wrath.

The consequence Jonah longs for is found in Romans 3:6. God is just.

He is right and good and not evil because He did punish the wickedness and sin of men, but He punished Jesus instead of us and Jesus can justify. Jesus can stand as restitution for all of the sins committed against God and God’s people. Through Jesus, God can therefore grant grace and save people and not be corrupt.

This, my friends, is the Gospel—the good news about who Jesus is and what He has done. Jesus answers the problem of Jonah. The Book of Jonah is something much bigger than a story about Jonah and the Ninevites. There was an extending and receiving of grace God would provide for in future times in Jesus. The story of Jonah and the Ninevites, and the whole Old Testament is a story of a people living in need of the grace of God, and God granting that grace on the basis of what He would one day do in Jesus.

This the point we will conclude this chapter with. We need grace, and grace is provided for us in Jesus. God is a God of grace and He has determined throughout all time, He will be a God of grace.

On any given day, each and every one of us are in one of two places: we either live life thinking we deserve something good and it is owed to us and we have done enough to get it, OR we live life realizing we don’t deserve anything except judgment, could never do enough, and simply need massive grace and change.

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Jonah’s view of God needed to change. Does yours? Where do you need God’s grace today? My guess is if God is not an active presence in your life—I mean a daily, ongoing, relational, dependent, Spirit-filled presence—then there are probably some issues between you and God you have yet to work out.

Maybe for some of you, you’ve never really had a straight up honest talk with God like Jonah does here. Maybe some of you need to do that right now.

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onah 4:1-11 1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2 And he prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. 3Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4And the LORD said, “Do you do well to be angry?”

5 Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. 6Now the LORD God 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. 7But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered.

8 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.” 9But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” 10And the LORD said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

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getting to the heart of the matter In this chapter, we finish the Book of Jonah, carefully considering the great climax and cliffhanger we find at its end. Throughout the book have been exposed to some truly magnificent events and some truly intense conversation, both of which force us to engage with some of the more difficult truths of the world God has created. What we find in this last chunk of text is nothing different. We get one last gripping encounter between God and Jonah.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like beneath the surface of the earth?

If you have then you’re not alone. In 1864, a guy named Jules Verne wrote a novel titled Journey To The Center of The Earth. If you’re the type that normally watches movies instead of reading books then you may have seen the old 1959 film version, or the modern remake in 2008 with Brendan Fraser. Neither of the movies received awards or positive reviews. In any case, the story of the book and the movies is that a professor named Lidenbrock deciphers this ancient rune talks about a secret passageway hidden at the bottom of a volcano crater in Iceland, which takes you to the center of the earth. So Lidenbrock takes a team to trek up there and go down this hole. On their journey they encounter all kinds of odd phenomena. Strange acoustics that cause things to be heard differently. Strange gases that smell differently than anything on the surface. Strange plant and animal life. Strange water which flows in the wrong direction. As they journey deeper, they discover that hot volcanic magma at the earth’s core is what causes all kinds of disturbances on the earth’s crust.16 Though unscientific, it’s not too unlike what experts tell us is actually beneath the surface of the earth. The center of the earth is about 4,000 miles below what we walk on. Apparently, by using various forms of seismic technology, scientists tell us there are three basic parts to what’s beneath the surface. There is the crust, which is about 6 miles deep and is made mostly of rock. After the crust is the mantel, which is 1,800 miles thick, is more fluid,

16. Verne, Jules. Journey To The Center of the Earth. New York: Dover Publications, 2005. Print.

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and consists of 3,000 to 5,000-degree hot, ice-like forms of magnesium and iron. Then, there is the core. The core is the hottest and most dense part of the earth, running upwards of 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit and is made up of nickel, iron, and various gases. Pretty intense stuff. Many think all of the floods, tornados, tsunamis, and other weird weather phenomena we experience is directly related to what’s going on beneath the surface of the earth.

The heart of the earth and the journey to it is not unlike the journey to the human heart and what takes place beneath the surface of our lives.

In dramatic fashion, this final chapter of Jonah puts God on display as a He draws out and addresses Jonah’s heart. Within his heart there are all kinds of things going on beneath the surface. We see what he hears, sees, and feels and we see him mad hot and blisteringly angry. We are a lot like in that we have hearts with subsurface rumblings that affect every part of our lives.

My prayer is that in exploring this section of text, we can attempt to get beneath the surface of our own hearts. My hope is God would open up your heart and address some things in the same way that He did with Jonah. having it out with the Holy One In the last chapter, we mainly dealt with the character and nature of God, and just looked at verses 1 through 4 Jonah chapter 4. Here we are going to deal mainly with the character and nature of Jonah and how God goes after him.

The first thing we need to notice is that Jonah is at least finally talking to God. In the very beginning of the book when God told Jonah to go to Nineveh, there’s zero conversation between Jonah and God. Instead, Jonah just ignores God and takes off.

After God sends a storm after him, and Jonah gets himself thrown overboard, God sends a fish to get him. At that point Jonah responds to God in a psalm, a song or prayer of thanks (whatever you want to call it) for saving him, but he still doesn’t talk to God about what was really bothering him in the first place, and why he took off running. Then, as we learn in Chapter 3, and as we see here in Chapter 4, Jonah never really had a change of heart.

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Really, here at the end of the book, wer’e back at the same place with Jonah and God. Nothing has changed about Jonah’s heart or his attitude toward God and the people God has sent him after. The only thing different here is that Jonah tells God why he didn’t want to obey in the first place.

Generally it is a bad idea to talk to God this way, but here we see Jonah doing it anyway. He’s not only disrespectful and rude, but he’s also borderline blasphemous. But at least he’s talking to God and telling Him what’s really going on beneath the surface. That’s a start!

Look at it, verse 3 says, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish.” Then, Jonah confesses the reasons for his flight. He finally talks to God. You see, God’s a pretty big God. He’s not petty and reactive, requiring us to come to Him with just the right words and just the right affections. The important thing is we come. He doesn’t get His feelings hurt easily. He can handle our sinful attitudes and warped ideas if we will simply bring them to Him. Too often we do the opposite thing. We do what Jonah did the first time.

We ignore it and we try to run from it, hoping the issues will just go away, but they don’t. Have you ever tried and experienced that? Usually it’s only a matter of time before the same issues rear their ugly head again and usually it’s much worse, and much uglier the second, third, and fourth time around.

Or, the other thing that often happens with us is that instead of running, we try and cover up. This is when we know things are not right or good between us and God, so we just try and ignore it or cover it up by doing some good things like going to church, reading our Bible, or doing some nice things for others. We resort to religion rather than dealing with whatever real doubts, fears, and frustrations we have brewing beneath the surface and creating distance between God and ourselves. In the meantime, more and more detachment, and eventually disbelief, enters in until any real relationship with God disappears or dissolves.

So my first point here is really just noting that at least it’s good that Jonah is talking to God. We have to talk to God. We’ve got to get real with God and if we don’t, then any belief we claim to have in Him, or life we claim to have

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in Him, is a lie. We’ve got to deal with the heart. Otherwise we end up with a dead intellectual belief in God or a dead spiritual practice for God. God will not tolerate either one of those things for very long.

Sometimes, I know, it’s hard to know what’s really going on in your heart, but you sense the distance and detachment. Sometimes, when I begin to sense the uneasiness and tension beneath the surface in my heart, and I don’t know what’s going on, I just try to get away and get alone with God. Sometimes I’ll take a day, or few days, and get up in the mountains or go to San Diego’s Sunset Cliffs overlooking the ocean, and I’ll get out my journal and just start writing out all the things bothering me. Then I read back through them and try and figure out how each thing really is a problem with God I’m having. Ultimately everything, one way or another, is a sin issue between God and myself.

For example, say you’re worried about ___. That’s really just a way of saying my life isn’t going or may not go the way I know it’s supposed to go, so God either isn’t doing the right thing, or may be doing the wrong thing.

Every single issue we have in life, no matter what it is, always boils down to an issue between us and God. Too often we are simply too dense, too afraid, or too hard-hearted to actually sit down and have it out with God. But we must. There’s too much fake Christianity going around and it’s worthless.

We’ve got to learn to be a people who really deal with our hearts and take what’s going on to God, no matter what it is. I’m begging you to be honest with yourself and the God who made you.

Well, let’s get back to Jonah and look at what has happened to his heart from not dealing with his sin. why external solutions cannot fix things The first thing is to recognize is that Jonah is angry. Check it out. The first time we see it is in verse 4, right after Jonah has registered his complaint with God. God picks up on his tone, identifies it, and asks, “Do you do well to be angry?” We see it again in the second conversation that Jonah has with God.

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In verse 9, God sees his anger and asks him the same question verbatim, “Do you do well to be angry?” This time Jonah responds, acknowledging his anger, and replies, “Yes, I do well to be angry, [very] angry.”

Anger. To be honest I don’t even know where to begin with anger. It’s deep. It’s complex. There are many dimensions to anger and the Bible has a ton to say about it. On top of that, it is something I have had, and continue to have to deal with, and it has brought about a lot of sin in my life, so it’s hard for me to talk about. I seriously hate anger. I am so messed up when it comes to anger that I get angry about being angry!

I guess defining anger is a good starting point for talking about it. The Hebrew word here for anger simply means “to be hot,” which is actually pretty descriptive. A person’s body temperature can actually rise when angry, and you can even sometimes see people get visibly red in the face. There are countless causes for anger—things like seeing or experiencing injustice, threats of personal harm, or just frustration over not getting what you want.

Many have noted that when anger occurs we tend to go one of two directions with it. We either express it or repress it. That is, we either become aggressive in some physical display of anger outwardly, or we become regressive in some subtle, inward absorption of anger. It either goes out, or goes in, and regardless of the direction, it often begins to form and shape a person’s character— breeding things like bitterness, resentment, dispassion, and depression.

In Jonah’s case, it looks like he’s mainly been doing the internal thing.

That’s often the route religious folk go. They try to suppress it because they know outward expressions of anger don’t turn out looking very good and religious people try so hard to be, or at least look good. So remember Jonah: he’s fled from his hometown to Joppa, then went on a boat to Tarshish, then was thrown overboard into the water, then into a fish, and then into Nineveh.

We’re talking weeks and months going by, and it isn’t until now that he finally opens up and acknowledges his anger. An angry person usually doesn’t get that way over night.

Jonah’s anger has eaten away at him. Sometimes anger can seem to be like that old Centipede game on Atari. It can just eat and eat and eat away at

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you. It can take on a life of it’s own. There are times when I’ve become so angry that I totally feel like I became a different person.

Jonah here is also clearly depressed. His anger has torn him apart and now his depression has made him suicidal. In verse 3 he requests divine euthanasia. Look at it. He’s so angry he says, “O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” Then look at verse 8 where he asks God again. It says that, “he asked that he might die and said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’” Then in verse 9 he tells God he is angry, “angry enough to die.”

If you remember back to the first chapter, Jonah asked to be thrown overboard into the sea to die as a result of his refusal to go to Nineveh the first time. So really, we’ve got four different times where the Book of Jonah points out that Jonah is depressed and suicidal. The Bible is no stranger to these things. It is acutely aware. Some of its biggest heroes struggled with depression and suicide—the great King David, and so did the Prophet Jeremiah.

Suicide works the same way in every person who ever contemplates it, attempts it, or achieves it. The thought is this: “I will be happier if I ended my life. If I am dead and it is all over, it will be better for me.”

Anger, either external or internal, is what leads to depression and depression is what leads to suicide. This stuff is real. Current statistics say that 10% of Americans, that’s around 27 million people, are on anti-depressants.17 Ironically we’re the wealthiest AND the most depressed country in the world. That’s one in ten people, and of those one in ten, only thirty percent of them say the drugs even help a little bit. Many cities are trying to preemptively curb it by offering anger management courses. The courts of San Diego often require them as part of their rulings against those who commit crimes in a fit of anger.

Anger, depression, and suicide seem to leave no persons untouched. Men, women, and children of all races, all classes, and all professions (including

17. Szabo, Liz. “Number of Americans Taking Antidepressants Doubles.” USA Today. 4 Aug, 2009.

Gannett Co. Inc. Web.

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pastors) have been marred and affected by it. A recent study came out saying that seventy percent of pastors constantly fight depression.18 In the Acts 29 Network (which the church I pastor is a part of), we’ve had two pastors who committed suicide.

This stuff, this Jonah stuff, is real. Just like Jonah, we often fall into the trap of thinking the solution is something external. For Jonah, he sees death as the only solution, and offers God two options: either kill the Ninevites or kill him.

Right after he first presents these options to God in verses 3-4, it says he goes outside the city and makes a makeshift tent for himself. Then, at the end of verse 5 it says that, “he sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city.”

Jonah was hoping God would change his mind and decide to destroy Nineveh after all. He was hoping that maybe he had knocked some sense into God. Most likely he was wishing for God to rain down fire and sulfer on Nineveh like God did on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, back in the book of Genesis. Jonah is kicking back, waiting for the show to start.

That’s Jonah’s first proposal: death for the Ninevites. His second offer is death for himself. Jonah sees death as the only option for his anger and depression—kill the source or kill the self. Jonah, lost and blinded by his bitterness, sees things only in terms of the external things around him as though they are acting against him to make him angry. But Jonah’s problem was not an external problem, it was an internal one. Jonah is not made angry by outside things, he is angry because of his sin, which is a heart problem.

God sees this and knows this, and thus he pursues Jonah. He has been pursing Jonah all through the book. He pursued him physically when Jonah tried to run, and now God pursues him spiritually when he wants death (just another form of escape). God doesn’t want to help Jonah escape though. God wants to help Jonah be free. So, God attacks the true source of anger, the human heart.

18. Krejcir, Richard J. “What is Going on with the Pastors in America?” Into Thy Word: Teaching People How to Study the Bible. Web. 2007.

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being taught by the wonderful counselor God is so extremely gracious with Jonah. Time and time again He extends His hand to Jonah and pursues him no matter what. That in and of itself ought to be a great encouragement to us. It’s a testimony and reminder that our God truly is the One who will never leave us nor forsake us. Those He has chosen to set His love on, he has chosen to do so unendingly. As Tullian Tchividjian remarks, we may “feel dehumanized, cheapened, discouraged, depressed, or radically disappointed by everyone and everything in this world. But not by God. Nothing and no one will ever be as patient and forgiving toward you as God is.”19 The first thing we notice is how God contrasts Himself with Jonah. In chapter 3, verse 10, God saw how the Ninevites repented and He relented. In chapter 4, verse 1, Jonah saw how the Ninevites repented and he is displeased and angry. In 4:2, God is declared as being slow to anger. In 4:4, Jonah is immediately angry.

In His slowness to anger, God puts forth the full range of the power and wisdom that He has at his disposal—all in order to get at Jonah’s heart. First, He questions Jonah. He asks Jonah a simple, honest question. Should you be angry? Really?

Counselors, Christian ones and secular ones alike, have discovered the power and the art of asking questions to really draw a person out. Sometimes all we need is someone to lovingly challenge us and ask us some hard questions we may not have considered. A lot of times we really need to simply question ourselves. “Why do I feel this way? Why did I do this or that? What am I seeking? Am I justified in responding this way?”

After asking this probing question, God exercises His divine power in attending to some of Jonah’s physical needs. As a side note, this is the same principle throughout the Bible, whether it be miracles or good deeds done to others, always their purpose is to gain access to someone’s heart and turn it to the worship of God.

19. Tchividiian, Tullian. Surprised By Grace. Crossway: Wheaton, 2010. Print.

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So get this picture. It’s hot in the desert. Jonah tries to get some makeshift shade for himself. It’s probably pretty shanty. So God does something nice for Jonah and makes a magic plant. Ever wonder where the whole Jack and the Beanstalk story came from? Right here! God makes this magic plant sprout right up, big and tall enough to provide shade for a full-grown man. Many think this was probably a caster oil plant because of the Hebrew word, and if so, it’s this bright green plant with big green leaves. Jonah is stoked! Verse 6 says he was “exceedingly glad because of the plant.” Earlier he thinks God is exceedingly evil for saving Nineveh, but now he’s exceedingly glad about God. There’s a lot of fancy word play going on here. In verse 5, the Scripture says God made the plant “to save him from his [evil].” Most translations say something like “discomfort,” but again, we saw earlier in our exploration of the text that the Hebrew word is ra, which means evil. It’s like the text is whispering to us, “Hey, God’s not the one who’s evil. Jonah is, and God is going to use this plant to save Jonah’s soul!”

So Jonah is stoked on the plant. You’ve got to love this—Jonah is excited and content and thankful. So on the next day, God crushes the plant, and He does so by sending this magic worm and magic wind and magic heat to kill it.

There’s this not so subtle theme all throughout the Book of Jonah that God is sovereign over all. He is the Creator, the LORD, and He has dominion over all storms, fish, plants, worms, winds and heat. God exercises a great use of His power in going after Jonah.

Now, notice this: in verse 9 Jonah is angry again, but look at what he’s angry about this time. This time he’s angry not because of the Ninevites; he’s angry because of the plant. Do you ever notice that when one thing makes you angry, everything starts to make you angry? This time Jonah is angry that God took away the plant that was saving him.

God had asked Jonah a question before all this: “Do you do well to be angry?” and then He launched into this object lesson for Jonah with the plant.

Now it’s over and the plant is gone and God asks Jonah a second time, “Do you do well to be angry?”

The question alone just seems so convicting. To us, the hypocrisy seems

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so clear, doesn’t it? Ed Welch says it’s the angry person who is usually last to know. He writes, “Those who are angry are confident in their rightness and over time can become massively, utterly, completely deluded, blind and can feel quite good about themselves after bludgeoning someone close to them, as if they have set the world aright.”20 Some of you have become angry people and you don’t even realize it.

God here is trying to draw out Jonah’s heart—trying to help him realize and see his hypocrisy and self-righteous duplicity—but he just doesn’t get it.

Sometimes the time for asking questions ends, and the time for preaching begins. Sometimes the heart is so hard that nothing less than a hammer will do.

Jeremiah 23:29 says, “is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” God’s Word here comes to Jonah like a hammer. Let me quote it one more time to get it fresh in our heads. Verse 10-11: “The Lord said, ‘You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?’”

So get God’s logic here. It’s a lesser to greater argument, a qal vahomer.

God says, “Look, Jonah, you didn’t deserve the plant. I just gave it to you. You had it one day before I took it from you and you want me to save the plant so bad you’re ready to die over it. Think about Nineveh. Yes, they didn’t deserve to be saved, but they’ve been growing for much more than a day and more than that, there’s people in there—120,000 babies who don’t know their right and left hand. And are not people more important to me than plants?”

Ahh! It cuts deep—like a sharp, hot knife. God more than levels the playing field here and then the book just ends. It’s shocking—no fairy tale ending. It seems to just get cut off. We’re left hanging on the edge of our seat wondering what happened. How did Jonah respond? Yet the book just ends.

20. Ed Welch

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So what’s up with that? I mean we’ve seen it over and over again—this book is a literary masterpiece. This couldn’t have just been an accident and there are no varying manuscripts with different endings. This is it. So why does it end like this?

I think the answer is that the Book of Jonah, the story of his life and all that happens to him, isn’t really a story about Jonah. It is a story about us. We can’t help but read about Jonah and see glimpses of ourselves.

The irony in the book is that God is the only one who really deserves to be angry, but instead of dishing out anger, He’s dishing out grace. Many have noted that the abrupt end of the book appears to be intentional because it’s meant to put us in the place of Jonah. We are the ones who are called to respond. The question isn’t really so much of, “What happened? Did Jonah repent?” The question is, “What are you going to do? Will you repent? Will you respond to God or will you stay in a hardened state against Him? Will you have a change of heart?”

Jesus Now here’s the kicker: how does this change of heart happen? Could Jonah have just said to himself, “Okay, self…change!” No. We don’t work like that, do we? If we did, the world would be a different place. Our hearts need to be pierced.

Really, Jonah was actually on to something when he thought a death had to occur in order for him to be happy, but the death Jonah needed wasn’t a physical death to just put him out of his misery, and it wasn’t a death to the Ninevites so that justice would be served. He needed a deathblow to be dealt to his sin.

The only way a heart ever changes—the only way lasting change ever happens is when sin is rooted out and put to death.

Here’s the good news of the Gospel: just as God stooped down out of heaven to reach out to Jonah and draw out his heart, God has reached down out of heaven in Jesus to reach out to us. Jonah thought he was in the right, but he was dead wrong. Jesus was right, and died a death for every wrong and sinful thing mankind has ever felt, said, and done.

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God is ever the wonderful counselor who goes after His children. In the Garden of Eden He steps in after sin and calls out, “Where are you?” In the desert of Nineveh He steps in after sin and calls out, “Repent.” On the cross of Calvary He dies for sin and cries out, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Listen—disdain for others is always a failure to see how God should have disdain for us, but instead has had grace toward us in Jesus. Self-righteousness and religion are always great enemies of the Gospel. The only way out of anger, bitterness, depression and suicidal tendencies is to see and know the great love of God given to us in Jesus.

Here’s how anger and the Gospel work. Anger normally goes in one of two directions, outward or inward. In the Gospel, what happens is your anger goes a third direction—it goes to the cross and Jesus absorbs it. He takes it into Himself. Result? The anger is removed and Jesus makes us new creations. He changes us.

The degree to which you see yourself as a sinner in need of change is the measure of God’s grace that you will experience in your life. No external solutions will work, only a great massive change of heart. We just need a lot of grace, the same kind of grace God gave Jonah. The good news is that He has given even more because He didn’t just stoop down to have a talk with us and make a magic plant, He became a man and died on a cross for us so we might truly know His grace and be changed.

Every single issue, every single problem you will ever deal with is an area where you need the salve of the cross to be applied. The Gospel is the answer and solution to all of life. I’ve said it many times, as many others have, that in the Gospel we truly realize we’re far worse off than we ever thought, but at the same time we find we’re far more loved and accepted than we ever thought possible.

Jesus is good news for sinners. We must have Him.

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atthew 12:38-41 38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” 39But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

all the Bible is about Jesus Now that we’ve finished looking at every last word of the Book of Jonah, we conclude at the place where all things must end, in Jesus. The first order of business is to look at why it is so important to see how everything finds its end in Jesus.

Then we will look at why it is so easy for us to do this with the story of Jonah. As with most things, Jesus did the hard work for us.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone about the Bible, maybe even a specific part of the Bible, and in response to whatever you said, the answer was something along the lines of…”well, that’s just your interpretation?”

It’s a weird thing. Normally people don’t have conversations about the different interpretations of a book everybody is reading. Let’s say we’re having a conversation about a number one New York Times best-selling book, like something by Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling. You wouldn’t be talking about the meaning of a passage in one of these books with someone and say, “Well that’s just your interpretation.”

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What I have found is when it comes to the Bible, people come up with all kinds of crazy ideas and interpretations. In 2011, this whacky dude named Harold Camping decided to do some math on the Bible and came up with this ridiculous notion that the world was supposed to end on May 21st, 2011.

It didn’t.

There are four different main approaches to the Bible. One flat out just says it’s not true at all—that it’s a fairy tale and you should read it like a fairy tale. Another viewpoint says it’s part fairy tale and part true, and you have to try and figure out what’s what. A third view says it’s just a book that you’re free to interpret however you like. You take whatever meaning or significance you want by reading into the text your own personal experience and that is what it “means.” In other words, you get to use it to make your own fairy tale. Then there’s a fourth view. The fourth view says the Bible speaks about real people and events that actually happened. It teaches all the good lessons of a fairy tale, but even better than a fairy tale because it’s actually true.

When you take that fourth view, like we do at The Resolved Church, it forces you to work hard with the words of the Bible and take what it says very seriously. For Christians, Jesus Christ is the leader and Head of our religion.

We love Him, believe in Him, follow Him and everything thing that He has said and taught us.

There are two different times when He was teaching and preaching and He addressed this issue of how to interpret the Bible. What He said on those occasions is striking—shocking, really.

The first one was near the beginning of His teaching and preaching ministry, in the middle of His famous “Sermon on the Mount.” It’s Matthew 5:17. He’s in the middle of saying some pretty radical stuff and then He busts out this line where He says He has come into the world to fulfill all of the Bible.

Matthew 5:17: “I have not come to destroy the (law), but to fulfill the (law).”

The pastors and preachers of the day interpreted His message to be that of a crazy, self-absorbed lunatic. I mean, on the one hand, it’s hard to blame them. This guy shows up saying the most complete way to interpret the Bible correctly is to see it as being fulfilled in Him. If I said to you, “Look, the

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whole key to understanding and interpreting the Bible is to see how it relates to me, Duane Smets,” you’d rightly think I was insane and throw this book in the fire.

It’s a huge claim Jesus makes here.

C.S. Lewis used to say there are only three options for interpreting the life of Christ: Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or He was in fact who He said He was as, the Lord of all.21 The second time Jesus says this type of thing he makes it even more clear and He actually tutors some guys through the process. This second one is at the end of His preaching and teaching ministry, after He rose from the dead, in Luke 24:13-34.

Here’s what happens: Jesus runs into these two guys at an old school, ancient gas station (or something like that) and discovers they are traveling to a town called Emmaus. Turns out, Jesus is going there too. At first they don’t realize that it’s Jesus. They get to talking, and basically the substance of their conversation is confusion about the Bible. They have questions and are confused about how the Bible and the things it says could be true.

Then Jesus does something phenomenal. Luke 24:27 says that, “beginning with Moses [that’s the first five books of the Bible] and all the Prophets [shorthand for the rest of the Old Testament], He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” This is crazy! He takes them through the whole Bible and shows them how every person, every story, every event, every law, every miracle, every prophecy…all of it was all pointing to Him! He tells them that the way to interpret the Bible correctly is to see how it relates to Him. Let’s be honest, Jesus has to either be the most delusional egotistical person on the planet, or He is in fact God, the author of the Bible, and the savior for peoples of the world. He says it plain and clear. This whole book­­— the Bible—every chapter, every verse, every word—all about Him.

21. C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity.

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Every night at our house we read the Bible with our children. Sometime we read from the ESV and memorize verses. Sometimes we work on catechism questions to teach sound doctrine. Sometimes we read a story from a kids Bible like The Jesus Storybook Bible or The Gospel Story Bible. I love kids Bibles. What they do is re-tell each story in kid language and then briefly conclude every story with a hint or reference to its fulfillment in Jesus. There is an introductory chapter in The Jesus Storybook Bible titled “The Story and The Song,” where it explains its method: “God created everything in his world to reflect him like a mirror—to show us what he is like, to help us to know him, to make our hearts sing… and God put it in words too and wrote it in a book called The Bible.” 22 Now some people think the Bible is a book of rules telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. The Bible certainly does have some rules in it. They show you how life works best. However the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what He has done.

Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes that shows you people you should copy. The Bible does have some heroes in it, but most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all. They make some big mistakes (sometimes on purpose). They get afraid and run away. At times they are downright mean.

No, the Bible is not a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne—everything—to rescue the one he loves.

It’s like the most wonderful of all fairy tales that has come true in real life!

The best thing about this story is that it’s true. There are lots of stories in the Bible, but all of those stories are telling one big story: the story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them. It takes the whole Bible to tell this story, and at the center of the story there is a baby. Every story in the Bible whispers His name, Jesus. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle—the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together—and suddenly you can see a 22. Storybook bible

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beautiful picture.

Maybe you’re sitting there and you’re wondering, “okay…so what’s that look like?” What did Jesus say to the two dudes on the road to Emmaus? Let me give you some examples from pastor and theologian Tim Keller: • Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us.

• Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for acquittal.

• Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void not knowing wither he went to create a new people of God. • Jesus is the true and better Isaac who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us.

• Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved, so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us.

• Jesus is the true and better Joseph who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them.

• Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant.

• Jesus is the true and better Rock of Moses who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert.

• Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends.

• Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves.

• Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people.

• Jesus is the real Rock of Moses, the real Passover Lamb, innocent, perfect, helpless, and slain so the angel of death will pass over us. He’s the true temple, the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true

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sacrifice, the true lamb, the true light, and the true bread.23 All of the Bible is about Him and the redemption he provides for and extends to us. All of the Bible is about Jesus, and until we see that we’ll never really fully get the Bible. We’ll just keep coming up with whacky thoughts and ideas and interpretations that leave us lost and helpless. What we need most is Jesus.

So when we come to a Book like Jonah, it is really important for us to see how it relates to Jesus. Every sermon I preach always ends in the Gospel.

It’s also one of the reasons we always receive the Lord’s Supper at our church each week. If every book, chapter, verse, word, and pen stroke of the Bible is about Jesus then it’s really important that every one of our services, sermons, stories, and Biblical interpretations all conclude and climax with Jesus.

Where are you at with the Bible and Jesus? When you think about the Bible does it seem to you like this dark heavy book that hangs over your head? Or do you think of it as the greatest story ever told? It is truly the greatest because of how it not only puts Jesus on magnificent display but offers redemption for your soul. If you don’t see it like that, I’m begging for you to change your view of the Bible. It’s a much better book than you ever dreamed existed.

Now, as we have worked through the Book of Jonah, I have been very intentional about linking the story to the Gospel of Jesus without actually going to Matthew 12 and looking at what Jesus Himself has to say about how the story of Jonah is about Him. I did this because the perspective that Jesus offers us is one that looks back on the completed story of Jonah, or perhaps I should say the almost complete version the Book of Jonah gives us (remember the cliffhanger?). Now that we have gone through seven chapters talking about a stubborn old prophet named Jonah, it is time to see what Jesus has to say about the man in Matthew 12:38-41.

23. Tim Keller

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the sign of jonah is Jesus The first thing Jesus talks about in regards to Jonah is that his story is a “sign.”

The whole conversation comes about in Matthew because the scribes and the Pharisees are asking Jesus for a sign. In verse 38, they say to Him, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.”

You have to wonder what they wanted to see? Jesus had been doing all kinds of miracles all the time up to that point. Just a few verses earlier, in the same chapter, Jesus had just healed a dude with a withered hand. I mean, it kind of seems like Jesus had been doing a bunch of signs already. So what is it they were wanting?

To really get at it, I think we have to ask ourselves what we have perhaps secretly longed for, or wished God would do, to make it easier to follow him.

Some of you may not be Christians, and some of you are Christians but in the back of your head you wonder, is it really all true? Is there really a God and a Jesus—a cross and a resurrection? Is it really true? I wish there was some sort of incontrovertible proof. Have you ever thought that or wished for that? I have.

This is most likely what the scribes and the Pharisees were asking for.

Jesus’ miracles could be interpreted in several ways, and for all they knew, maybe it was some sort of magic or something. They wanted a bigger and more direct sign or proof—most likely something from the heavens where Jesus would just let loose and unleash his power. They wanted to see him exhibit Godlike power, Old Testament style, by ripping open the sky, or making angels suddenly appear to praise him, or by making wind and the weather obey his voice. The funny thing is that Jesus did actually do all that stuff, just never on command, and never in front of his opponents, which is actually kind of the point. In response to them, Jesus says they are “evil and adulterous” for seeking a sign. Why is that?

Here’s why: if Jesus was actually God, then as God, is it fitting for him to dance whenever man tells him to dance? Would it be the Godlike thing for him to do exactly as man wishes, whenever he demands it? When man says, “jump!” is God supposed to say, “how high?” Isn’t that a role reversal?

If God did respond that way, wouldn’t it belittle his very God-ness? I mean,

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who’s the boss? Wouldn’t it end up seeming like man is the one in charge, and not God? Effectively, what you have here, with the scribes and Pharisees demanding a sign, is mere man literally stepping into the place of God and telling Him what he must do, which is why Jesus says it is adulterous and evil.

Now Jesus could’ve just left it at that, and he would have been fully within his rights, but then he does something funny. Jesus is always full of grace.

Right after saying he won’t give them a sign he throws ’em a bone and actually gives them a sign anyway, just not the kind of sign they were looking for.

He says, “no sign will be given…except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” This is freaking genius. Really, it is, in several ways. First, he points back to the Word, because it’s always God’s intention that we rely on His Word for truth rather than our experience. Second, he points backward in time to Jonah and what happened with him and the fish, and says that a similar thing is going to happen to him. When it does happen that will be a sign from God to them.

So what is Jesus getting at with this? Well, let’s recall what happened with Jonah and the great fish. The storm is raging. Jonah is thrown overboard in order to save the lives of the sailors. You figure Jonah is a goner but instead he gets swallowed whole by this great fish. Then, after three days, the fish spits him up on dry land and Jonah is alive and able to go preach to Nineveh, so they might be saved...and they are.

Jesus looks forward in time to what He was going to do in dying on the cross and rising again. Then, He looks backward to what happened with Jonah and compares it to what He is about to do. “I’m going to give up my life and be in darkness for three days in order to save some people, and when I come back to life on the third day, good news will be declared so that many people will repent and be spared.”

The sign of Jonah is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and it is the royal proof, evidence, and sign of the truth of Jesus—the truth that He is from God and His salvation is real. Listen to Romans 1:4 on this which says,

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“[Jesus] was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” What Jesus does in Matthew 12 is hang all the truth of His whole life and ministry—the whole of Christianity—on His resurrection from the dead. This provides an opportunity for solid evidence against His truth claims, AND makes Christianity different than every other religion in the world. However, what is most astonishing to us, what makes it a real sign for us and not just some fiat demonstration of divine power, is that it speaks to the deepest longing of our hearts and lives.

Feeling does matter.

Here’s what I mean: the essential struggle of the scribes and the Pharisees was with doubt. Now, sometimes faith gets pitted as being the opposite of certainty, as if faith is this blind leap in the dark, unknowable, but that’s not faith. Faith means trust. In the language the New Testament is written in (Greek), faith and trust are the same word, “pistos.” To get at the idea, let me pose this question: Will there be faith in Heaven when there’s nothing left to doubt because it’s all there—Jesus, the throne, the angels, no more tears, sorrow, or pain? Will there be faith then? Yes, because faith is trust, and we will delight in and worship Him who we trust in. There our faith will not disappear—it will be made complete. This is why Hebrews 11:1 says faith is “assurance if things hoped for.”

Beneath the surface our deepest struggle, our deepest challenge and the deepest reason we long for some sort of sign, is because we doubt. Why do we doubt? We doubt because we are afraid, afraid of the unknown, afraid of life not turning out well, afraid of the wrong thing happening, afraid of darkness and ultimately death. Yet, Jesus goes to the heart of that doubt and fear by rising from the dead! Through His resurrection, Jesus secures new life for us and offers it for those of us who trust in Him. It is the greatest sign of all.

It’s the greatest sign He could ever have given because it’s the sign that most deeply ministers to the needs of our hearts—the need for life!

Sometimes I’ve had friends say to me, “man, if I could just see Jesus, or if I just saw Him risen, or saw some miracle or sign, then of course I’d believe.”

I don’t think so. I don’t think so because I don’t think our inability to believe

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is primarily a head issue. Not only would it diminish the significance of what Jesus did if he had to keep dying and rising in every generation in order to prove it to everyone, but also the attitude—the heart of demanding a sign— shows that no sign will really do. The only sign that can really get through to us is one which addresses the heart, and that’s exactly what the resurrection of Jesus does for us.

So let me ask you, where do you need the resurrecting life and power of Jesus to minister to you? Where are there areas of deadness and darkness that need new life? Where is there fear, doubt, and distrust that you need to turn over to the trustworthy savior? In what areas of your life do you need to hear The Gospel—that Jesus is real, He is true, He is alive, and He knows and loves and cares for you?

The resurrection of Jesus isn’t just our ticket to ride into heaven when we die, though Jesus does promise eternal life to those who believe. It’s more than that. Jesus’ resurrection is the life-giving power of God that He administers unto us here and now. He gives us new life! Believe.

May He do that through His Word by His Spirit in you right now. the judge of judgment is Jesus The second thing Jesus says about Jonah could easily be a whole sermon in itself, so I’ll try and be somewhat brief and let the text drive our discussion.

In verse 41 of Matthew 12 it says, “the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.”

Remember what happened in the Book of Jonah? Jonah finally goes to Nineveh after avoiding and running from it for a long time. He gets there and he preaches the crappiest sermon ever given. He basically goes around yelling, “40 days and you’re all gonna die!” But in a miracle of God’s grace, for reasons unknown to us, the whole city from the king on down listens to Jonah and repents.

According to what Jesus says in this passage, it was real repentance.

There was true, genuine, Godly sorrow. Not only that, they actually changed

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the way they were living. Jonah 3:8 says that they turned from their evil ways and the violence of their hands. Remember that biblical repentance is both sorrow and lasting change.

So Jesus says the people of Nineveh who repented are going to rise up against those who don’t respond to Jesus’s word and work with similar repentance. Let’s unpack that a little.

First, Jesus says the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment. What does that mean? We don’t have space to tour through a hundred Scripture references, but I’ll just give a brief overview.

Romans 1:18 tells us judgment is happening all the time—bad stuff which is the wrath of God, meant to wake us up so that we’ll turn to God. Hebrews 12:6-7 tells us what may be judgment for some is simply loving discipline for others—meant to teach them and draw them closer to God— that’s judgment in general.

However, both the Old and New Testament teach there will be one great Day of Judgment, called a “last” or “final judgment.” Bible commentator David Hubbard summarizes it well when he says, “Judgment at history’s end is the climax of a process by which God holds nations and persons accountable to him as Creator and Lord.” 24 In Matthew 12, Jesus does refer to The Judgment Day, but He also says three times throughout Matthew 24-25 that no one knows or can know the day or the hour. One of the times, He specifically says it will be on a day we do not expect, but when it does happen everyone will see it and know it (Matthew 24:50). Jesus and multiple biblical writers go out of their way to point this out. There will be angels, a trumpet sound, and great displays of God’s glory. Philippians 2:10 says everyone—believers and unbelievers alike—will see Him and bow their knees before Him, acknowledging Him as the King and Lord of all. So, there’s no secret rapture or people disappearing.

The word “rapture” doesn’t even occur in the Bible. Everyone’s there at the end before The Throne. Some are bowing in worship and some are bowing 24. David Hubbard

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in fear, about to receive their just sentence, from the only wise and just God. In the end Jesus, sitting on His throne, will execute judgment as the great judge of all. Here are Jesus’s words from Matthew 25:31-34,41: “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And He will place the sheep on His right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world… Then He will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’”

Intense stuff. Here’s the point: Jesus is the judge. This is exactly what Jesus is saying when He looks back at the Book of Jonah. He points out that all it took was one crappy sermon from Jonah for the Ninevites to repent. Now, those same Ninevites will rise up as part of the just judgment of Jesus, who has blessed many with a much greater sermon and demonstration of grace.

And we, the generations since Jesus and until now, have heard more and have seen even more of God’s grace and glory. So you would think our repentance would come easier.

Yet it doesn’t, does it? We have all the benefit of Jesus’s extensive teaching and preaching recorded here in the Bible. We have all the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. Even though we have all of theses benefits, it doesn’t make repentance any easier does it? To be sorry and to change…that is still a hard thing to do.

Now, I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of sin and I don’t want to push Jesus’ words beyond what they are intended to say, but look at what Jesus ends up in the end of verse 41: “Behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” When you work at the meaning of verse 42, we see it ends restating Jesus’ superiority over Jonah and anyone else, “Behold, something greater than Solomon is here.” Jesus ends by calling us to see His greatness.

So my concluding question for studying this passage is this: what makes Jesus so great? Just that He’s God, and has all power, and will judge everyone?

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I don’t think so. What did Jesus tell us right before this? That He will die and rise again. And why does He die and rise again? Jesus tells us over and over and over again throughout his ministry—He dies to pay the penalty for sin, which we deserve.

God, the judge, stands over us. Our sin is serious. We deserve judgment.

So what makes Jesus such a great judge? Because He gets up off his throne, climbs down from behind His judgment bench, and gives up His life to pay the penalty of justice that we deserve. There is no other judge like that.

Can you imagine it? I was in court one time for a stop sign ticket. If you have ever been to court, you know it’s intimidating! There’s this towering wooden podium with the judge sitting behind it in a black robe. Can you imagine what it would be like if it was your turn to come up to the podium and speak into the microphone, and then the judge gets up, climbs down from his perch—down to your place—pulls out his wallet and say, “I’ll pay the fine for you,” and hands you the money? Can you imagine that?

Do you get it? Do you get why Jesus’s call to repentance is not just graceless fear mongering like those stupid billboards we see when some crazy old man or religion thinks that they have a “Save the Date” for the Apocalypse?

Jesus’ call to repentance is a gracious call for us to look on Him—to see who He is, and what He has done for us—and to embrace it with all of our hearts and lives.

You see, the Christian desire for the Day of Judgment isn’t meant to be excitement about God sending people to Hell. Our primary motive is meant to be longing to at last see our Loving Judge and Savior face to face, and to bow in adoration. He is great, and because He is great, I long for that greatest of days.

Until then, you won’t see me driving a painted bus around and posting billboards about judgment. I’ll be preaching the Good News of The Gospel— about who Jesus is and what He has done for us. It is my prayer that you’ve got a taste of that in going through the text of Jonah and Matthew.

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conclusion The conclusion to this chapter and to all of the story of Jonah is Jesus. So a few sailors might be saved, Jonah was thrown out of a boat and nearly died, spending three days in the darkened belly of a giant fish. For all time those of us who get lost at sea, Jesus was thrown onto a cross, actually died, and spent three days in the darkened heart of the earth. Jonah was spit out of the fish’s mouth onto dry land so he might offer the people of an ancient city repentance and the hope of new life. Jesus was spit out of the grave itself so He might offer the people of all cities throughout all time a chance for repentance and the assurance of a new life. Jonah thought God should not have had grace on the Ninevites because it compromised God’s justice. Jesus thought God should have grace, so He took God’s justice upon His very body and soul, in order that He might extend it towards all mankind.

The Book of Jonah is about Jesus. Jesus—The Great Judge who died and rose again for our sin. He is both the reason why we can we repent and the reason why we can rejoice.

If one thing has been clear throughout our study of the Book of Jonah, it is that we’re all in need of God’s grace and salvation. Whether we’re irreligious like the sailors, religious like Jonah, or anti-religious like the Ninevites, we’re all in need of grace.

Jesus rose from the dead and ever lives to minister to us. So when you come recognize your need for Jesus, know He is for you. Repent of sin by embracing Jesus’ great work on the cross. He’s the judge who died for you. Then allow Jesus to administer new life to you by the power of His resurrection from the dead. He is good. He lives and He cares for us.

epilogue.

Our walk through the Book of Jonah has been a journey originally presented through a series of sermons given to a particular people, in a particular place, at a particular time. While those particulars were significant and momentous, what remains is what has remained since the words of this great book of the Bible were first penned: the message of God and His grace for sinners.

I Peter 1:24-25 quotes the Hebrew Scriptures saying, “grass withers and the flower falls but the word of the Lord stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8), but 1 Peter adds this interpretative note in verse 25 saying, “and this is the good news that was preached to you.”

You read through eight different chapters, each highlighting and focusing on different aspects of the Jonah story. Yet each concluded with the same good news message. Each preached the unchanging Word of the Gospel that though we are sinners, there is a grace for sinners which God has extended.

First, we looked at the simple fact that God has given us His Word. The God of the Bible is not one who created the world and then detached Himself from it. God has been intimately involved and has made known who He is, and what He is like, to all people through His Word. God has given us the Book of Jonah for our good that we might know Him and what He is like.

In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the nature of Jonah’s life story, how he ran away from God and yet God would not let him go. God pursued him and brought Jonah to the place where he recognized that God is to be feared and worthy to be worshipped. Jonah’s story is the story of every human being who has ran from God and what we need most is to see that we can’t run from God, and instead need to surrender our lives to Him.

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With the third chapter, we looked at all the excuses and replacements we come up with instead of having God as Lord of our lives and how both religious moral people and irreligious immoral people are equally alienated from God. In the Gospel God extends Himself to all types of sinners. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve grown up Christian or without any Christianity whatsoever, both types of people desperately need a savior.

As we moved into the halfway point of the Book of Jonah, we dived into what it takes and what happens when we hit rock bottom in our lives.

Whether it is addictions that ruin us or life experiences which crush us, inevitably the nature of being and becoming a Christian is recognizing you are person who needs help. The good news of the Gospel as presented in the Book of Jonah is that when we cry out God is swift, ready, and willing to save us.

The fifth chapter of this book looked at how God’s loving and gracious care goes beyond individual people in His love and care for whole cities. A day of God’s judgment will come and the example of the city of Nineveh is one where a whole city repents and turns to God. We are challenged by this story to love a city and commit to it with the love of The Gospel.

After Nineveh repents the Book of Jonah enters into a brief excursus peering into the nature of God’s grace and what it really means for Him to be gracious and be committed to being gracious. Grace is a word which is easy to use, but it is a huge word when you actually stop and try to understand what it really means. God’s commitment to being gracious is wrapped up in His very being and His purposes for His redeemed people.

The final words of this old book from the Bible take a piercing look into the why and how of what we actually need to be honest with ourselves spiritually. So often we are prone to looking to external solutions when it’s our heart that needs healing. Only when we address the heart does real, lasting change occur. Only God can heal the heart and The Gospel is God’s only cure.

The Book of Jonah actually ends on somewhat of a cliff hanger, leaving readers anticipating a conclusion, and historically it doesn’t come for hundreds of years, until Jesus. Jesus identifies Himself as a the final and culminating

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chapter of the Jonah story. Jesus is the Word God has given to His people for life and salvation. Jesus is the One who has run down out of heaven to rescue us when we have run from God. Jesus is the One who loves and saves both saints and sinners. Jesus is the One who truly can and does deliver us from the bottomless pits of despair and sin. Jesus is the One who will one day return to build a true and better city with people redeemed from great cities all over the world throughout time. Jesus is the One who is truly gracious, since He took the justice of God’s wrath upon Himself on the cross. Also, it’s the love of Jesus which actually changes our hearts and turns them toward the living God. Simply put, the Book of Jonah is a book about Jesus. Jesus is the hero of the Jonah story.

It’s my prayer above all, through reading this book, you would not only grow in your wisdom and understanding of the Bible and the God it makes known, but that you would also chiefly grow in your love and service to Jesus and that you would long for others to know Him too. The message of the Gospel is that we are sinners, but Christ Jesus died for our sin, rose again and lives today.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

appendix.

Jonah scholarship: date, authorship, unity, historicity & resources A big passion of mine is building confidence in the Bible and its words as being authentic, reliable and truthful. Many have difficulty with either the content or even the text of the Bible. In sermons, when relevant, I address the content of the Bible which is not easy for us to hear or accept. However, not every question and challenge to the veracity of the Bible can be handled in a sermon, particularly in regards to questions regarding the reliability of the text. There is a whole academic discipline, tradition, and methodology dedicated to this type of questioning known as “higher criticism.”

When it comes to “higher criticism” questions about the book of Jonah abound. Yet there are good answers. So as a warning, this is a whole other level of nerdery but for the handful that care. This appendix answers some of the main criticisms about the trustworthiness of the book of Jonah. date Often many will quip, “scholars say…” as if they were some unified body of authority and accuracy. The truth is the only thing which really makes you a scholar is having a Ph.D and have written a serious book or in this case biblical commentary. Scholars widely differ on a lot of things. Some “scholars” are very liberal and some very conservative. Some do better work than others and some sloppily dismiss good data. “Scholars” are all over the place on the date of Jonah. They range from 750-250 BC. That’s a pretty wide date range.

2 Kings 14:25 names Jonah specifically by his father, which was the ancient equivalent to a first and last name, “Jonah son of Amittai.” The only other place “Jonah son of Amittai” appears in the Bible is in the book of Jonah.

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In addition, this is the only Jonah extra-biblical sources (Sirach, Tobit etc.) have ever named. So we’ve clearly got the same Jonah and the Jonah mentioned in 2 Kings 14 is dated with a pretty specific and narrow window: during the reign of King Jeroboam II, who reigned for forty-one years after his dad Joash was king.

This is almost unanimously recognized as being either from 784-743 BC (Albright) or 793-753 BC (Theile). Either way, we are clearly talking 8th century BC. Now it should be a given then that Jonah was thus a prophet from the 8th century BC. Yet some “scholars” have rejected this for three primary reasons. 1.

Supposed Aramaisms in the book of Jonah (4th century BC, 300 years later). 2.

Supposed copying of motifs from Jeremiah (6th century BC, 200 years later) or Joel (post exhilic 6th century BC). 3. The references to Nineveh in Jonah as being a great city with a king, when Nineveh was in Assyria, who is known to have had capitals in Calah and Assur.

Upon closer inspection none of these reasons stand up to scrutiny or explanation.

1. “Aramaisms” have turned up in Ugaritic texts as far back as 1200 BC, thus they have been increasingly recognized as “Northwest Semitisms” 2. The continuity between Jonah, Jeremiah and Joel is easily accounted for by recognizing the nature of divine revelation’s homologoumena (speaking with one voice). Sharing the same God and the same concepts is not the same as dependency.

3. Nineveh was most likely the capital of Assyria at the time and “King of Nineveh” and “King of Assyria” were simply two ways of referring to the same person, like King of England and King of London.

In the end standing with the specific historical time reference of 2 Kings 14 is the most reliable source for dating the book of Jonah. authorship The book of Jonah is written in third person as a narrative. In addition, the book of Jonah as a whole is highly critical of the person Jonah and his decisions. Due to these two factors many have questioned whether Jonah actually wrote the book, since most people would not want to speak negatively of themselves or think of themselves in third person terminology.

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However, the book begins with “the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai” which is the way all Prophet books begin their writings even when using an amanuensis like Jeremiah did with Baruch. Such a phrase is an ancient identity mark for authorship of a book which is why the Hebrew biblical canon (since 400 BC) has long titled the book, “Jonah” and placed it in the collection of the minor prophets.

In response to the book of Jonah’s critical nature of Jonah depends on how the story of Jonah ended. The book ends abruptly with God prompting Jonah to humble repentance. If Jonah did not repent then yes, this critique carries legitimate weight. But if Jonah did repent then the sort of repentance God was seeking would undoubtedly change Jonah into being a person who would gladly admit his faults so that God’s character might shine and others might experience the same grace God worked in his heart. A book like Jonah,

by Jonah is exactly what we would expect. In addition there are several parts of the story which would have been only known by Jonah himself (being in the fish, his suicidal thoughts, and God’s provision of a supernatural plant).

Thus, whether Jonah directly wrote the book or relayed it’s facts to another, Jonah communicated this story which has been recorded. Overall, once again, it’s most reasonable to simply side with the words of the Bible, that the book of Jonah is the product of the “word of the LORD” which came to Jonah. unity Due to the largely narrative nature of the book, both the introduction (a classical prophet book introduction) and Jonah’s prayer (a psalm like poem) while in the belly of the fish have been questioned as literary additions into an expanding story. However, upon closer analysis G.M. Landes has shown the details of prayer and subject theme demonstrate too close of a parallel with the word choice style and literary themes emphasized throughout the story in the book of Jonah. In addition, manuscript evidence knows of no other

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composition than the inclusion of these two parts with the rest of the book of Jonah. Thus, such questioning of Jonah’s literary unity is really an argument based on silence with no physical evidence to support it.

2 Kings 14:25 identifies Jonah as a professional prophet during the ancient Israelite dynastic tradition. As such he would have been trained in literary techniques of poetry, letter and narrative. It is completely likely and feasible that Jonah put all of his skills to work in this great composition. Today’s reader of the book of Jonah can be confident the book is a carefully crafted work, arranged exactly in a complete whole as its author intended it to be read. historicity The most well known mark of the book of Jonah is Jonah’s whale. It is due to this simple key part of the story that the book is often wholly rejected by liberal scholars because it is deemed physically impossible for there to be a fish that big seemingly even more fantastic, to have Jonah stay alive inside it for three days and nights. The fish is considered grounds to reject the book as representing true history and thus the veracity of the rest of the book’s claims about God are rejected as well. In this vein Jonah is seen merely as an ancient mythical story along the lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Atrahasis Epic or others...it is just a story, written by primitive man, full of conjecture about God(s) who don’t really exist and supernatural events which did not really take place.

The problem with the liberal rejection of Jonah and its message upon the ground of the whale is it presupposes a particular world view which is the base of it’s argument. The presupposition is that of scientific naturalism, a philosophy which states that unless something can be tested and proven empirically (with use of the five senses) it does not and cannot exist. Thus, upon that test of truth an unlikely fish and the Judeo-Christian God do not exist.

Yet, what scientific naturalism fails to recognize is the inconsistency of it’s own claims. How can empiricism be tested empirically? For example, scientific naturalism regularly uses numbers and mathematics and yet numbers are true realities at work in the universe which cannot be tested empirically. Or we could

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ask an even bigger question, how can reason prove that reason is a sure guide to truth? These are the philosophical questions of epistemology and world view, not science.

Christianity and Judaism posit a God who by definition is not nor cannot be bound by physicality, or by the “natural laws” it claims He created and sustains. The God of the Bible is presented as a Spirit and as the all-powerful Creator of everything. Thus, if there is such a God making an extraordinarily large fish (even if it was just one) who could house Jonah and then somehow supernaturally sustaining him while in the fish would not be a difficult task.

If there is a God, He has the power and ability to do such things.

Lastly, one has to recognize that the fish is only one aspect of the story. It seems to me that the book expects us to be surprised at that part of the story.

But the goal of the book is not to convince of concerning the historicity of the fish or even any other details of the story...it’s goal is to convince us to turn to the God of the book of Jonah. The book of Jonah is more about theology than anything.

Flat out rejecting it’s historicity is based upon preconceived philosophical bias not only does not meet the book on it’s own terms but it fails to suspend judgment in order that one might consider the God is presents because He is a God from whom all things are possible. If there is a God then surely Jonah’s fish was His fish. conclusion The words of the book of Jonah can be trusted. Yes Jonah tells a whale of a story and speaks of some things which may be difficult to be believe. But that is more a matter of the message of Jonah than the text of Jonah. What is not difficult to believe is when the book is written, who wrote it and what both the human author and the divine author behind it intended for readers to read.

resources.

Sermon Series: • Tim Keller | thegospelcoalition.org – Jonah • Tullian Tchividjian | crpc.org/sermons – series 14 Books • Man Overboard by Sinclair Ferguson • Suprised By Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels by Tullian Tchividjian Commentaries • Calvin’s Commentaries Vol.XIV: Jonah by John Calvin • Minor Prophets: Jonah by Joyce Baldwin, Ed. McComiskey • New International Commentary on The Old Testament: Jonah by Leslie Allen • Salvation Through Judgment and Mercy by Bryan Estelle • Tyndale Old Testament Commentary: Jonah by Alexandar Waltke • Word Biblical Commentary: Jonah by Douglas Stuart