Sermon Cloud

Introduction

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the book of Jonah?  Probably the big fish, right?  That’s a shame.  Because the book of Jonah is 48 verses long, and only two of those verses talk about the big fish.  Sadly, people in both the Church and the culture have been misreading the book of Jonah for years.  They have overlooked all of the main themes of the book of Jonah and focused instead on these two verses about the big fish.  It’s become so bad that people use that story as a test to see if you’re on the right team.  “Do you believe that Jonah was literally in the belly of the fish for three days?”  If you answer “yes” one group will write you off as un-intelligent and un-sophisticated because it is glaringly obvious to them that the story is a parable, not a historical account.  If you answer “no” another group will write you off as an unbeliever or a heretic because it is plain to them that the story is a historical account, though a miraculous one.  Of course one of these groups is right about the fish.  But both of them are wrong for focusing on this part of the story.  That’s not what the book of Jonah is about.  The story of Jonah is not about the fish.  It is about something much greater than that.  So as we begin our study of this book it would be best for all of us to start with a clean slate.  If you’ve never heard of the book of Jonah, then you’re at an advantage.  If you’re familiar with the book, try to forget everything you’ve been taught so that we can all approach this great book from a fresh perspective. 

So let’s not start with the fish, let’s start where the story starts, in chapter 1 and verse 1.  Our goal in this study of Jonah is to teach what the text teaches.  So we will eventually address the fish, but only when the text addresses it -- which won’t be until next week.  Let’s begin by reading verses 1-3. 

Yahweh and Yahweh’s Prophet

In the first three verses we are introduced to the book’s three main characters. The Lord, Yahweh, the prophet, Jonah, and the great city, Nineveh.  Though we will soon be introduced to several other characters, the book of Jonah will focus primarily on the interaction between these three principal characters – Yahweh, Yahweh’s prophet, and the city of Nineveh. 

Let me introduce you to the primary characters.  The first mistake we can make when we meet these characters is to decide that Jonah is the main character who the book is all about.  And certainly Jonah plays an important role in this story, but Jonah is not the protagonist.  Yahweh, the Lord, is the protagonist in this story.  The book of Jonah is about Yahweh.  Specifically, it is about Yahweh’s pursuit of his people.  It is about how Yahweh pursues his people and brings life out of death.   The book opens with this God of pursuit calling out to his prophet Jonah.

And while Jonah is not the main character in the story, he is a very important character.  Because it is through Jonah’s experience that we see Yahweh and get to follow his relentless pursuit of his people.  We know that Jonah was a true prophet.  He was chosen by God to speak God’s words.  This is why you find the book of Jonah in the Bible next to 11 other books written by or about prophets.  Together these 12 books of the Bible are known as the Minor Prophets.  But the book that is named after Jonah is different from the other Minor Prophets.  It’s written in the past tense, telling us about events that have already happened instead of foretelling events that are yet to come.  It doesn’t contain any lengthy oracles of prophecy.  Throughout the whole book Jonah really only speaks one sentence of formal prophecy.  The book of Jonah is unique amongst the prophets.  You might say that Jonah is most like the book of Job.  Because while most of the prophets reveal Yahweh to us through their words, Jonah and Job reveal Yahweh to us through their experience.  So we should pay very close attention to Jonah’s words and his experience.

The third primary character in the book of Jonah is the city of Nineveh.  We’ll never understand what this book is about unless we understand the city of Nineveh.  Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire.  The people of the ancient world had no greater fear than the Assyrians.  They were like the Galactic Empire in Star Wars or the Alliance in Firefly or the Agents in the Matrix.  In other words, they did some bad stuff.  Some really bad stuff, and the whole world knew about it.  They had a reputation for dismembering people while they still lived, they would pull out the tongues and testicles of some victims while they lived, they would burn the young, and they would host parades of bodiless heads, where they would force the friend of a conquered foe to carry their friend’s head on a pole as they marched for all to see.  The Assyrians were a violent people with a terrible reputation.  And no one knew that better than the Israelites.  They experienced this terror and violence first hand on more than one occasion.  At the time they were Israel’s worst enemy.

And this is how the story of Jonah begins.  Yahweh calls his prophet Jonah, an Israelite, to go to Nineveh, the capital city of his arch-enemies, and preach to them.  Jonah hears the Lord but as quick as he hears the instruction he turns the other way, runs to the ship port, pays his fare, and boards a ship that is headed toward Tarshish, far away from Nineveh.  For this decision Jonah has earned himself quite the reputation as the disobedient prophet.  It’s certainly true that Jonah initially resisted God’s call, but he is not alone in this.  Abraham initially resisted God’s call.  Moses initially resisted God’s call.  Gideon initially resisted God’s call.  Jeremiah initially resisted God’s call.  Even Jesus Christ, in the minutes before his arrest, asked for a way out of God’s call.  Jonah is not alone.  Jonah is in good company.  So it’s important that we don’t demonize Jonah as the disobedient prophet.  Because that’s not the intention of the author.  The book of Jonah was not written to show us that Jonah has failed, it was written to show us Yahweh, the God who pursues.  Even as Jonah flees from his responsibility, Yahweh pursues him.

Now, at this point in the narrative we don’t know why Jonah is running from God’s call on his life.  Could it be because he is afraid to preach to the Ninevites?  After all, they had a reputation for killing anyone and everyone who came against them.  Could it be because he feared that he would be rejected by his fellow Israelites for preaching Yahweh to their enemies?  If these were Jonah’s reasons we might empathize with him.  Those of us who follow Jesus have been commissioned to preach Yahweh to the world.  Sometimes we resist that call because we are afraid of rejection, either by those we are preaching to or by those who should be preaching with us.  But these are not the reasons that Jonah fled.  We don’t find out the real reason why Jonah fled until the fourth chapter of this book.  In Jonah 4:2 Jonah tells God why he fled, in his own words.  “That is why I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish.  I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”  Jonah did not want to preach to the Ninevites because he knew that if they repented God would have mercy on them.  Jonah found this unacceptable.  He wanted his understanding of justice to be done.  The Ninevites were violent, murderous enemies of Israel and enemies of God.  And Jonah wants God to judge them.  He does not want God to have compassion on them and show grace to them.  And so he goes in the opposite direction, hoping that his enemies will be judged for what they’ve done.

Jonah disobeyed Yahweh because he was uncomfortable with Yahweh’s amazing grace.  He refused to preach to the Ninevites because he did not want them to stand on equal ground with him.  And this is a much worse sin than the fear of rejection because it is a sin against the character and nature of Yahweh.  But it is also a much more common sin.  Because all of us are like Jonah in this way.  On various levels and in various ways we are all uncomfortable with Yahweh’s amazing grace.  We resist the grace of God in our own lives because it forces us to acknowledge that all of our work and all of our goodness has absolutely no value in God’s economy.  We resist the grace of God because to accept it is to admit that we are evil and in need of a savior, it is to acknowledge that we cannot save ourselves.  This is an offensive message.  But if through God’s intervention we surrender our lives to the grace of God we still face the struggle Jonah faced.  We don’t believe that this same grace should be extended to certain people or certain groups of people.  We want them to be punished for what they have done.  We don’t want them to be on equal footing with us.  At the very least we want them to have to earn God’s grace and forgiveness, to prove to us they have changed.  And because of that we don’t preach Yahweh and his gospel to them, just as Jonah refused to preach Yahweh to the Ninevites.  God’s grace is scandalous.  So scandalous that it caused Jonah to flee from God’s call.  What is ironic is that Jonah fled because of God’s pursuit of the wicked but little did he know that God would also pursue his disobedient prophet. 

The Sailors and Yahweh’s Prophet

And this is the point where the story gets extremely intense.  Let’s read what happened next in Jonah 1:4-12.  Jonah knew he could not run from the presence of Yahweh, but he did think he could run from his responsibility.  He underestimated the God of pursuit.  Yahweh’s pursuit of his people is not hindered by human resistance.  Which is why he sent a great wind over the sea.  The sailors who had allowed Jonah to travel with them were accustomed to storms interfering with their work.  But this storm was a storm of unusual strength.  They could feel that the boat was on the verge of breaking.  As we read the narrative we can immediately sense the desperation and fear of the sailors as they begin to throw their cargo over the edge of the ship.  This was a radical action for transporters who made their living by getting cargo from one port to another.  They would never have tossed their livelihood into the sea unless they were certain that the threat of death was very real and very near.  Faced with death this group of pagan sailors began to cry out to their own gods for deliverance.  But of all the people on this boat there was one who was not calling out to his god.  Ironically, it was the one person who worshiped the true God.  It was Jonah.  He was below deck…asleep.

The captain thought Jonah was crazier than Whitney was for marrying Bobby.  He rushed below deck to wake him.  “How can you sleep!?” he shouted, which is sailor-speak for “what is wrong with you!?”  “Get up and call on your God!  Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish.”  The captain had no idea that Jonah’s God was the source of this storm and that Jonah was the reason for it.  This was the perfect opportunity for the prophet to begin to fulfill his calling.  Jonah could use this opportunity to tell these pagan sailors about Yahweh, the true God.  But he did not.  He remained silent.  But even with Jonah’s silence the sailors knew they were facing something abnormal.  This storm was raging for a reason and their pagan worldview told them that some god somewhere must be angry with someone on the ship.  So they cast lots to find out who was causing this terrible and potentially deadly storm.  The lot fell on Jonah.

If this were a movie this is where the music would stop and the camera would slowly zoom in on Jonah and the sailors to capture this dramatic moment.  Then, with no time to waste, the sailors fire off 5 questions in rapid succession, hoping to quickly deal with the problem.  “Who is responsible for making all of this trouble?  What kind of work do you do?  Where do you come from?  What is your country?  From what people are you?”  They needed the answers because they were afraid of the storm.  Very afraid.  But they were about to become even more afraid as Jonah answered.  “I am a Hebrew, and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”  In this one sentence Jonah makes a beautiful confession of faith and takes a step toward fulfilling God’s call on his life.  He tells the truth about Yahweh.  He proclaims Yahweh to a group of pagan sailors.  He says that his God, Yahweh, is the only true God – the God of heaven who made both the sea and the dry land.  And Jonah knew this first hand.  Yahweh previously pursued him on dry land and was now pursuing him on the sea. 

The sailors heard Jonah testify of his God and they were terrified.  They had heard of Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews.  They had heard of his awesome power.  About how he rescued them from Egypt and brought them into the Promised Land, destroying every enemy who stood in their way.  They had heard the reputation of Yahweh as a warrior who stands above all other gods.  So when they heard that Yahweh was behind the storm and Jonah was the cause of it they were shook.  Now more afraid than ever the sailors asked Jonah, “What have you done?” They weren’t looking for an explanation, Jonah had already told them he was on the run.  This was really more of an expletive than a question – “What have you done!”  In the midst of this dramatic exchange the drama intensifies as the storm continues to rage but now harder and harder threatening to tear the boat apart at any minute.  The sailors look to Jonah again.  “What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?” 

This is a moment of truth for Jonah.  He knows that he’s guilty.  He knows that the sailors are in this position because of his sin.  Our culture has a tendency to celebrate individualism.  If an individual chooses to sin that is okay, that is their choice.  But what we see here, and throughout all of the Bible, is that sin is communal.  There is no such thing as a private sin.  The sin of one affects the entire community.    Jonah knows this.  And Jonah knows that he’s going to die.  But he has the opportunity to choose whether his death will be meaningless or meaningful. He can die a meaningless death on-board this ship and take a number of sailors to death with him.  Or he can choose to give his life in a meaningful way and save the sailors from death in the process.  He can choose to continue to turn away from Yahweh or he can choose to take one final step toward Yahweh.  Whatever Jonah chooses he will die.  He will either die with the others or he will die for the others.  The same could be said of us.

Jonah chose to take one last step toward Yahweh.  “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he replied, “and it will become calm.”  Then Jonah finally made his confession of guilt, “I know that it is my fault that this storm as come upon you.”  Finally, we see Jonah responding to Yahweh’s pursuit.  Everything that has happened in the story thus far is a result of Yahweh’s relentless pursuit of his prophet.  Yahweh used the boat, the storm, the sailors, the casting of lots – all of these things – to bring Jonah face to face with his calling.  Not in judgment, but in mercy.  And now Jonah finally responds to the call.  Though he is in no position to go to the Ninevites he is in a position to proclaim the truth about Yahweh and then give his life for those who do not know him.  That’s the calling of every prophet, in fact of everyone who worships Yahweh.  Jonah chose to respond to Yahweh’s pursuit by allowing his own death to bring life to others.      

The Sailors and Yahweh

But the sailor’s initial response is not what you’d expect.  Read with me from 1:13.  Though the sailors now knew that Jonah was the reason for the storm they did everything they could to protect him.  Though he gave them permission to toss him overboard they tried and tried to save his life, even at the risk of their own lives.  If I were them I would have dropped him over the edge quicker than Brittney Spears dropped Jason Alexander.  But they didn’t.  Isn’t that crazy?  Jonah was perfectly content with letting the Ninevites perish but these pagan sailors were unwilling to let Jonah perish!  Here we have yet another reason to thank God for his grace.  It’s no secret that sometimes the people outside of the Church are better people than those who are inside the Church.  Someone once said that non-Christians never look better than when they are compared to some Christians.  And that shouldn’t surprise us at all.  Because no one who is in the True Church got there by their own effort, goodness, or righteousness.  Everyone in the True Church was brought into the Church by God’s work alone and God’s will alone – purely by grace.  So of course there will be many people outside of the Church who put many in the Church to shame when it comes to morality and right living.  But though they may be relatively good when compared to some others, they are not truly good.  Which is why they need Yahweh’s grace, too.   The sailors knew this, as we see as we keep reading verses 14-16.   

It didn’t take them long to find out that they could not run from the storm anymore than Jonah could run from Yahweh because Yahweh is himself the creator, sustainer and Lord of the sea.  So  as the storm continued to strengthen they finally cried out to Yahweh, the Lord, the true God.  “Please, Lord, do not let us die for taking this man’s life…for you, Lord, have done as you pleased.”  After completing their sincere prayer they picked Jonah up and dropped him into the raging sea and at that moment the sea became calm.  That was no small miracle, but neither were the events that followed.  These sailors got onto the boat as your garden-variety pagans.  But they would exit the boat as worshipers of Yahweh.  When the storm calmed the text says, “at this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.”  This is when we realize that while Yahweh was obviously pursuing Jonah he was also pursuing these sailors.  The author tells us that these sailors feared the Lord, they sacrificed to him, and they vowed to give their lives to him.  They did this after the storm was already calmed so it wasn’t one of those false conversions that fades away once the threat of harm has passed.  They worshiped Yahweh after the threat was already removed.  They converted to the True God because they saw with their own eyes that he was surely the Lord over all of creation and they experienced his goodness when he delivered them from certain destruction. 

Conclusion

We’ve just read the first 16 verses of the book of Jonah.  I hope you can already see that this book is not about a great fish.  This book is about Yahweh, the God who pursues his people in order to reconcile them to himself.  It is about how he will accomplish this purpose whether through human obedience or disobedience.  The book of Jonah allows us to see Yahweh in pursuit of his reluctant prophet, a group of pagan sailors, and the people of an evil city.  And we see that Yahweh always prevails.  But the book of Jonah is just a glimpse into the heart of our great God.  Yahweh’s relentless and tenacious pursuit of his people is ultimately found in Jesus.  In Jesus God pursued us by becoming like us.  He left his exalted throne and willingly humbled himself by coming to us where we are, as we are.  Then Jesus crossed every boundary – social, religious, and political --- to proclaim Yahweh’s gospel to the very people who were fleeing from him.  As if this were not enough he continued his pursuit even when it landed him on a wooden cross, where he died in place of the people he was pursuing.  He died pursuing you and me so that we could be reconciled to God.  When we would not come to him he came to us and gave himself for us so that through his death we could have life.  This is Jesus, the God of pursuit.                

The book of Jonah points us toward Yahweh’s ultimate pursuit as seen in Jesus.  But the person of Jonah also points us toward Jesus, the ultimate pursuer.  We tend to overlook this because we’ve been taught to write Jonah off as the prophet who never got it.  But Jesus himself speaks of Jonah in a positive light.  He speaks of Jonah as a type of Christ, as a sign who pointes toward Jesus.  And we can see this too if we read the book of Jonah in light of what Jesus has said.  Both Jesus and Jonah were from Galilee, both were sent by Yahweh to preach to their enemies, both calmed a storm after sleeping through it.  But the most striking similarity is this: both Jonah and Jesus willingly chose their own death so that others might have life.  Jonah’s experience was a dim picture of what Jesus would experience as he pursued his people with tenacity and with incomparable grace.

The grace of God is truly radical.  And our natural response as humans is to flee from it, just as Jonah did.  We don’t want to receive it because we don’t want to admit we need a savior, we want to continue believing that our works have value in God’s eyes.  And we don’t want to preach it because we don’t think certain people and groups of people deserve to receive it.  But that’s the whole point.  Yahweh pursues the undeserving.  He pursues the wicked, the violent, the murderous, the lying, the filthy, the immoral, the impure, the helpless, the hopeless, the unrepentant, the undeserving.  In other words, he pursues you.  You’re here today because God is pursuing you.  If you’re listening online today it is because God is pursuing you.  He wants to bring you life through the death of his son and he wants you to proclaim this life to all who are dead in their sins.  This is the God that the book of Jonah tells us about.  Let us worship him.