Jonah
3So Jonah arose, and went to Nineveh, according to Yahweh’s word. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey across. 4Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried out, and said, “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!” 5The people of Nineveh believed God; and they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from their greatest even to their least. 6The news reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and took off his royal robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7He made a proclamation and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, “Let neither man nor animal, herd nor flock, taste anything; let them not feed, nor drink water; 8but let them be covered with sackcloth, both man and animal, and let them cry mightily to God. Yes, let them turn everyone from his evil way, and from the violence that is in his hands. 9Who knows whether God will not turn and relent, and turn away from his fierce anger, so that we might not perish?” 10God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. God relented of the disaster which he said he would do to them, and he didn’t do it. 1But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2He prayed to Yahweh, and said, “Please, Yahweh, wasn’t this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and you relent of doing harm. 3Therefore now, Yahweh, take, I beg you, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4Yahweh said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Jonah was a prophet who showed absolute obedience to God’s commands. And yet that same man, given the command to preach judgment, would not go to Nineveh but fled to Tarshish — disobedience.
The Jews held a strong pride in having been chosen by God, and so their sense of being a chosen people ran deep. But John 3:16 records that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. God wanted to give eternal life not only to Israel but to everyone who believes in Jesus Christ. Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you will receive power, and he told them to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Look at this, and you see that God’s plan was to save every person in the whole world.
In Luke 15 there is a prodigal who went far away with his father’s property, and an older son who felt wronged by a father who loved that prodigal to the end. From here on, please take the father as God, the older son as Jonah, and the prodigal as the people of Nineveh.
There was an older son who obeyed his father’s word without question, and a second son who used all the property as though it were his own, simply because he was a son. The second son wanted to leave his father and live as he pleased in the world, so he pestered his father to give him his share in advance. The older son tried to stop it, saying that using their father’s property freely out in the world was absolutely not allowed; but the father gave the second son his share. Just as the older son had feared, every piece of news that came back about his brother was of squandering their father’s money in the company of prostitutes. We laugh at the way this second son lives; but look at how we use the money, the health and the wisdom God has entrusted to us as though they were our own, and we are no different from him at all.
Watching his father worry, unchanged, over his brother’s welfare even after hearing that he had fallen, the older son’s sense of grievance only grew. He could not understand why his father would not rebuke a son squandering his property, and was instead waiting for him to come back. Then one day the father called the older son. Your brother seems to be in danger now that his money has run out, he said; it would be good if you went and brought him home. This situation is the same as God telling Jonah that he wanted to save Nineveh, which had left God and was living in the world as it pleased. It was not enough that God pitied those enemies; being told to go to them and tell them to come back now filled Jonah with resentment.
The older son flew into a rage and walked out. Behavior like that is the same as Jonah’s, boarding a ship to flee somewhere God could never ask him again. Jonah only hated Nineveh, the prodigal, and it never occurred to him that embracing even people like that is what makes a man a large vessel. Had he understood his father’s heart and taken those sin-filled souls into his arms to save them, he would have seen his father’s great love.
The father told the older son to love his brother because only when the older son becomes a large vessel, able to embrace even an enemy, can he trust him with the whole estate. Telling him to take his brother in was finally for the older son’s sake. The father has the power to help the second son without the older one. But a brother forgiving his brother and helping him out of love, and a brother fetched home by someone else’s strength, give the father different results, and that is why he asked the older son. Jonah fleeing to Tarshish and the parable of the prodigal run along the same line.
Jonah was the son of Amittai, a man of Gath Hepher in the land of Zebulun. He was active around 793 to 753 B.C., and he prophesied that Jeroboam II would restore Israel’s territory and conquer the land from Hamath in the north to the Arabah in the south, which won him the king’s trust.
One day God gave Jonah a special calling. He was told to go to Nineveh, the capital of the enemy Assyria, and take them the news that their sin had come up before God, and that only repentance would spare them judgment. For Jonah to go into Assyria, an enemy nation, and preach judgment was no easy decision. But God, who loves life, could not judge the more than a hundred and twenty thousand people of Nineveh, and so he meant to send them his word through Jonah. Jonah could not measure that heart of God’s; he was gripped by the superiority of a chosen people and his national feeling toward Assyria was very bad, and that is why he did not obey the command. He hated the thought of going to Nineveh, with whom relations were bad, and preaching God’s will; but from the way he exploded when he saw them repent and turn, it seems he already knew what God was going to do.
From the older son’s side, he had always obeyed his father’s word, so he must have thought his father regarded him as special. And because he thought of his brother as a sinner who squandered their father’s money, he could not understand his father’s heart in loving and forgiving him. But from the father’s side, both sons are simply children he loves.
Jonah knew that if his enemies heard the gospel he preached and turned, they would receive eternal life, and he hated taking the risk of staking his own life for them. If you preached the gospel to an enemy you were on very bad terms with, and he received the astonishing blessing of becoming a child of God, you would feel that you had lost something. This is exactly the evil in human nature.
Genesis 6:9 records that Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and that he walked with God. A righteous person means one who walks with God and lives a blameless life. *Blameless* here carries the sense of *honest* or *faithful*, which is why it is the opposite of lying, pretense and vanity. The believers God wants must live honestly, and must not lie or behave with pretense or live vain and proud lives. God warned Noah again and again about the judgment the world would receive. When a wicked man hears God’s warning he only hardens, like Pharaoh; but a righteous man is afraid that people will not be saved, and agonizes, and hurts. If you have received God’s love and grace, you must act as Noah did.
God’s mercy and his covenant cannot be explained by human reason. The command to build an ark in order to save life, and, on the other hand, God’s word that he would judge the world, make no sense at all to reason. That is why, in a situation that makes no sense to reason, as it did not to Jonah, only an absolute faith lets you understand God’s will. Jonah should have seen God’s salvation with an absolute faith; but it did not add up to him, and so he refused the command.
Only by believing that God is alive and at work does an absolute obedience toward him, and a fear of him, come. This fear that believers hold is called reverence, or godliness. Jonah had forgotten that he was a sinner just like the people of Nineveh, and that he had been saved by God’s forgiveness and mercy. He did not see his own sin, so he did not fear God and could not lean wholly on grace.
But a righteous person always admits to being a sinner, and so the Word is fearful to him and he knows that the world is vanity. Someone with this faith will watch the world grow wicked and pray for it, and will devote himself all the more to its salvation. Noah obeyed by faith a command that reason could not understand; Jonah did not look at it spiritually, and that is why he disobeyed.
What would you do if, like Jonah, you were commanded to go to an enemy nation and preach the gospel? If you were told to go to North Korea and proclaim that God will judge it in forty days, so repent, would you obey? You would probably hesitate, because you might die preaching it. Of course, Jonah’s flight from God to Tarshish was not only avoidance of what might come back on him for preaching judgment in Nineveh. Jonah did not want to go because he knew God would save Nineveh whether or not he went and preached judgment.
Jonah boarded a ship for Tarshish to escape God, and a storm suddenly rose and put the ship in danger. The sailors looked at the great waves and each called on the god he trusted, and they threw all the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. When the sea still would not grow calm they cast lots to find whose sin had brought the trouble on them, and the lot fell on Jonah, who had been asleep below deck. Keep it in mind that when a child of God does not live by faith, the people beside him suffer.
Jonah 1:17 shows that Yahweh already knew Jonah would be thrown into the sea, and had prepared a great fish to swallow him safely. The sailors did as Jonah said — throw me into the sea and the storm will grow calm — and when they threw him in, the storm dropped away into quiet. Jonah knew what kind of God he was dealing with, and he knew there was no escaping him.
Jonah was put in the extreme position of having to spend three days and three nights in the belly of a fish. From the fact that he told them to throw him into the sea, he seems to have known perfectly well what God is like; but his own judgment mattered more to him, so he did not obey. Three days in the belly of the fish, in the dark, he experienced death, and he came to see that even his own life depends on God, and repented.
God put Jonah inside a fish to show him how trivial human thought and judgment are, and disarmed his disobedience at a stroke. The belly of the fish is death to Jonah in itself. Until he entered it Jonah could decide and plan his own future for himself; inside the fish he could do nothing. People think they hold the right to judge and decide about God’s word; but God’s word is law, and it is not something a person can judge or change. Jonah did not know that God was keeping his life even in the moment he was thinking and judging so proudly, and that this was the only reason he could entertain such foolish thoughts.
How have you used the time God has given you so far? Have you walked the road of disobedience as you pleased, like Jonah? Keep in mind that going off into the world away from God like that may well land you in the belly of a fish. Through this suffering and this miracle God changed Jonah’s mind and brought him to his destination, Nineveh.
God gave him a second command once he reached Nineveh: go around the great city for three days and preach judgment. And then, one day after Jonah went into the city and proclaimed God’s judgment, an astonishing thing happened. The people of Nineveh, as though they had been waiting for him, heard the word he preached, and from the king down to the common people they began to repent of their sin. This astonishing miracle looks as though it happened because Jonah preached; but God already knew that Nineveh would repent.
The king of Assyria at that time was Ashur-dan III, and scholars suppose that he repented on hearing Jonah’s message because the nation had suffered three great disasters. There was a plague in 765 B.C., and in 763 B.C. the country suffered an eclipse and another plague; so when the king and the people heard Jonah’s message, they would have thought God was giving them a chance to recover.
In 4:1-2 Jonah grew furious and complained: back in my own country, did I not tell you that I knew you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abundant in loving kindness, who relents and does not send disaster, and that there was no need for me to go and preach at all? He ought to have rejoiced that they repented on hearing the word he preached, and instead he is angry with God. That is because Jonah already knew that God telling him to preach judgment was God’s own resolve to save them, and that Nineveh would repent regardless of what he preached. Jonah knew that when God plans and determines something he carries it through, and it seems to have galled him that God had brought him there by way of a fish’s belly.
Jonah knew that when God says he will judge a person or a place, he acts as though he will destroy it at once, but that he sends no disaster if the sinner hears the Word and turns. From a prophet’s side, though, it is shameful when judgment is preached and the hearers fear the Word and repent, because his own prophecy proves wrong. Preach judgment and judgment must come; preach blessing and blessing must come, and then a prophet is not ashamed. But when the hearers turn and are blessed his prophecy is wrong, and Jonah must have hated that. Yet a prophecy of judgment must prove wrong. In the Bible there are things God said that did not come about, and many events where a prophet’s prophecy was wrong.
Exodus 3:8
8I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey; to the place of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite.
God told Moses to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt and into Canaan. If Moses was told to lead the people into Canaan, then the word is fulfilled only when Moses leads them in. But Moses and the people all died in the wilderness. God promised that he would come down himself, rescue them out of Egypt and lead them into Canaan, and they all died in the wilderness. It was God’s promise, and still they did not enter Canaan.
Hebrews 3:7-9
7Therefore, even as the Holy Spirit says, “Today if you will hear his voice, 8don’t harden your hearts, as in the rebellion, like as in the day of the trial in the wilderness, 9where your fathers tested me by proving me, and saw my deeds for forty years.
God meant to lead Israel into Canaan, but these people were hard and stubborn of heart; they lived as they pleased and did not obey the Word. Their hearts always went astray and they never grasped God’s will, and in the end they did not enter the rest God had given. You can see that God’s plan from the beginning was neither Egypt nor the people who came out of Egypt, but Canaan.
Who enters Canaan is finally decided by the people who enter it, and God’s people are exactly those who kept faith to the end through the crossing of the wilderness. God led Israel into Canaan by his grace, with Joshua — not by the law Moses received. If you do not grasp God’s deep providence, you see only what is in front of your eyes, and you can drift away from God instead.
God always warned the people who had sinned and gave them a chance. He has never once judged without warning, which is why a warning must always be turned by. If you do not move from the seat of judgment to the seat of faith, you will receive the judgment God sends exactly as it comes. Even when the process of moving is painful and demands patience and effort, God’s command must be obeyed. If there had been no one like Jonah to say that judgment is coming, so repent, Nineveh would probably have been judged.
God spoke to Jonah about Nineveh’s sin, and Nineveh heard God’s word through Jonah. Nineveh, in the middle of its suffering, did not take the warning Jonah brought as a human word; they heard it as God’s word and feared, and that is how they could repent. God saw them turn from the road of sin, withdrew his judgment on Nineveh and sent down grace instead.
The grace comes from God, but there has to be someone preaching, as Jonah did, before people in the place of sin can hear and see and turn. Jonah, though, knew the judgment he preached would not come to pass, and so he had no wish to go to Nineveh at all. From a prophet’s side, preaching God’s word and not seeing it fulfilled lowers his own sense of worth and makes preaching the gospel frightening.
Watching Nineveh repent, Jonah grew furious and said that he had known the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, and would relent and send no disaster. And so, he said, take my life, and spare me the shame.
God knew Jonah’s heart, so he prepared a fine piece of theater to show him how precious a thing saving a life is, and what a valuable calling Jonah had carried.
Jonah built a shelter in the shade and sat down to see what would happen to Nineveh, and God prepared a vine for him. When the vine grew and made shade, Jonah was truly glad. Here we can see what a delightful God he is. Seeing Jonah so glad over the vine, God prepared a worm to eat through it, and it withered at once. With the vine gone, the fierce sun beat down on his head, and Jonah could not bear the heat; he grew angry with God and said it would be better to die.
When God asked whether he was right to be angry over the vine, Jonah retorted that he was right even if his anger killed him. Yahweh asked: you care this much about a vine you did not labor over and did not grow, one that did not last a single day; how then can it be wrong for me to care about a Nineveh where a hundred and twenty thousand lives and their cattle were all about to die? A splinter under one’s own fingernail hurts more than another person’s death. To Jonah, the vine that kept him cool was more precious than a hundred and twenty thousand lives. Do you see how wicked a creature a human being is? God is the one who called these people, who know nothing but themselves, to be his children.
Jonah seems to know God, and still he could disobey, because he himself was at the center. God taught that same Jonah through the calling to preach the gospel in Nineveh and through Nineveh’s salvation, so that he could understand God’s love better. God is telling Jonah, and telling you, to understand his heart — that he wants to save the lives of the world even though it sins — and to preach the gospel. This is not a command but love.
You have received the same calling as Jonah, and if you have boarded a ship for Tarshish, may you get off it quickly and head straight for Nineveh. If you are stubborn and will not get off, there is no avoiding a storm, and no avoiding suffering like the belly of the great fish. But if you obey, then just as the father told the older son that everything of his was the son’s, God will thank you for obeying in faith and share his glory with you. Obey as though you saw what cannot be seen; obey the moment God commands, as though the same thought had already been yours, and God will say that he entrusts still more souls to you.
May you not judge in advance as Jonah did, nor insist on your own righteousness as the older son did; and may you be precious believers who look for God’s will, devote themselves, and come to understand God’s love.