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 had shown absolute obedience to God’s commands. Yet when this same man was ordered to proclaim judgment, he disobeyed: instead of going to Nineveh, he ran away to Tarshish.
The Jews’ sense of being the chosen people ran deep, for they took great pride in having been chosen by God. Yet John 3:16 records that God so loved the world that he gave his one and 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 all who believe in Jesus Christ. Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit came upon his disciples, they would receive power and be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth. From this we see that God’s plan was this: he wanted to save every person in the whole world.
In Luke 15 there is a prodigal son who took his father’s property and went far away, and an elder son who was hurt that the father loved that prodigal to the very end. From here on, I would ask you to think of the father as God, the elder son as Jonah, and the prodigal as the people of Nineveh.
There was an elder son who obeyed his father’s every word without question, and a younger son who, simply because he was a son, spent the family wealth as though it were his own. Wanting to leave his father and live in the world as he pleased, the younger son pressed his father to hand over his share in advance. The elder son tried to stop it, insisting that their father’s property must never be squandered out in the world, but the father gave the younger son his portion. Just as the elder son had feared, every report that came back about his brother was the same: he was keeping company with prostitutes and wasting his father’s wealth. We sneer at the way this younger son lives. Yet look at how we ourselves use the wealth, health, and wisdom God has entrusted to us, as if they were ours to spend however we like, and we are no different from him at all.
Even after hearing that his brother had fallen into ruin, the father never stopped worrying about his welfare, and as the elder son watched, his hurt only grew. He could not understand why his father did not rebuke the younger son for squandering the wealth, or why he kept waiting for him to come home. Then one day the father called the elder son. He told him that his brother seemed to have run out of money and to be in danger, and that it would be good for him to go and bring his brother home. This is just like God telling Jonah that he wanted to save Nineveh, a city that had left him to live in the world as it pleased. It was not enough that God pitied those people, who were like enemies to Jonah; now he was telling Jonah to go to them and call them to come back. That is what stirred up Jonah’s resentment.
The elder son flew into a rage and stormed out. What he did is exactly what Jonah did when he got on a ship to escape to a place where God could never ask anything of him again. Jonah only hated Nineveh, a city like the prodigal son; it never occurred to him that only by embracing even such people would he become a big-hearted man. Had he understood the father’s heart and taken those sin-filled souls into his arms to save them, he would have seen how great the father’s love is.
The father told the elder son to love his brother because only when he had grown large-hearted enough to embrace even an enemy could the father trust him with his whole estate. Telling him to take his brother to heart was, in the end, for the elder son’s own sake. The father was able to help the younger son without the elder son. But the father asked the elder son, because a brother who forgives his brother and helps him out of love brings the father a different result than someone else’s help in fetching him home. Jonah fleeing to Tarshish and the parable of the prodigal son follow the same thread.
Jonah was the son of Amittai, from Gath Hepher in the land of Zebulun. He was active between 793 and 753 BC, and he won the king’s trust by prophesying that Jeroboam II would restore Israel’s borders and conquer the land from Hamath in the north to the Arabah in the south.
One day God gave Jonah a special charge. He was to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, his people’s enemy, and tell them that their wickedness had come up before God and that unless they repented they would be judged. For Jonah, going into the enemy nation of Assyria to proclaim judgment was no easy decision. But God, who loves life, could not bring himself to judge the more than one hundred twenty thousand people of Nineveh, and he meant to send them his word through Jonah. Jonah did not grasp what was in God’s heart. Because he was in the grip of the chosen people’s sense of superiority and bore deep national resentment toward Assyria, he did not obey the command. He disliked the thought of going to Nineveh, a people he was on bad terms with, to deliver God’s will. But judging by the way he burst out in anger when they repented and turned, he seems to have known already what God would do.
From the elder son’s point of view, he had always obeyed his father’s word, so he must have thought his father regarded him as special. And regarding his brother as a sinner who had thrown his father’s wealth away on wild living, he could not understand a father’s heart that loved and forgave him. But to the father, both sons were simply children he loved.
Jonah knew that if his enemies heard the gospel he brought and turned back, they would receive eternal life, and that is why he was unwilling to risk his own life for them. Suppose you preached the gospel to an enemy with whom you were on the worst of terms, and that enemy became a child of God and received that wonderful blessing. You would feel that you had somehow lost out. This is the wickedness of human nature.
Genesis 6:9 records that Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and that he always walked with God. A righteous person is one who walks with God and lives a blameless life. Here the word “blameless” carries the sense of “upright” or “faithful,” so it stands opposite to falsehood, pretense, and vanity. The people God desires must live uprightly; they are not to lie, put on a show, or live lives of vanity and pride. God warned Noah again and again of the judgment that would fall on the world. When the wicked hear God’s warning, they grow harder, as Pharaoh did; but the righteous are afraid that people will not be saved, and they agonize and grieve over it. If we have received God’s love and grace, we must act as Noah did.
God’s mercy and covenant cannot be explained by human reason. On the one hand he commands that an ark be built to save life; on the other he declares that he will judge the world. To reason, the two simply cannot be reconciled. So in a situation like Jonah’s, where reason cannot follow, we can understand God’s will only if we hold to absolute faith. Jonah ought to have looked with absolute faith to the salvation God would bring; instead, unable to make sense of it, he refused the command.
Only when we believe that God is alive and at work do absolute obedience and fear toward him arise in us. In those who believe, this fear is called reverence, or godliness. Jonah had forgotten that he was a sinner just like the people of Nineveh, and that he himself had been saved by God’s forgiveness and mercy. Blind to his own sin, he did not fear God, and he could not rely wholly on grace.
The righteous, however, always acknowledge that they are sinners; that is why they tremble at the word and know that the world is empty. As people with this kind of faith watch the world grow more wicked, they will pray for those in it and give themselves all the more to their salvation. Noah obeyed by faith a command that reason could not understand, but Jonah disobeyed because he did not look at things with spiritual eyes.
If, like Jonah, you were commanded to go into an enemy nation and preach the gospel, what would you do? If God told you to go to North Korea and proclaim that they must repent, for in forty days he would judge North Korea, would you obey? You might well hesitate, since you could be killed in the middle of preaching. Of course, Jonah did not flee from God to Tarshish only out of fear of what might befall him after proclaiming judgment in Nineveh. He did not want to go because he knew that God would save Nineveh even if he never went there to proclaim judgment.
Jonah boarded a ship bound for Tarshish to get away from God, and suddenly a storm arose and put the ship in danger. Seeing the huge waves, the sailors each cried out to their own gods and threw all the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. When even then the sea did not calm, they cast lots to find out whose sin had brought this trouble on them, and the lot fell on Jonah, who was asleep below deck. I hope you will keep this in mind: when a child of God does not live by faith, those nearby suffer for it.
Jonah 1:17 tells us that Yahweh already knew Jonah would be thrown into the sea, and he prepared a huge fish and made it swallow Jonah safely. Jonah had said that if they threw him into the sea, the storm would die down. When the sailors did just that, the storm subsided and the sea grew still. Jonah knew who God is, and he knew there was no escaping him.
Jonah was put in the most extreme of situations: three days and three nights in the belly of the fish. Telling them to throw him into the sea suggests he knew very well who God is; yet he did not obey, for his own judgment mattered more to him. During those three days inside the fish, through the darkness, he experienced death, and when he realized that even his life depended on God, he repented.
To show him how small human thinking and judgment are, God put Jonah in the belly of the fish and broke his disobedience in a single stroke. For Jonah, the belly of the fish was death itself. Until he was swallowed, Jonah could decide and plan his own future, but inside the fish he could do nothing at all. People imagine that they have the right to weigh God’s word and rule on it, but God’s word is law, and no one can judge it or change it. What Jonah did not realize was that even while he was entertaining his proud thoughts and judgments, he could think such foolish things only because God was keeping him alive.
How have you used the time God has given you so far? Have you not walked the path of disobedience as you pleased, as Jonah did? Let us remember that whoever leaves God and heads out into the world like that might end up in the belly of a fish. Through this suffering and this miracle, God changed Jonah’s mind and brought him to his destination, Nineveh.
When Jonah reached Nineveh, God gave him a second command: to go through the great city of Nineveh for three days proclaiming judgment. Then, only one day after Jonah entered the city and declared God’s judgment, something astonishing happened. As if they had been waiting for Jonah, the people of Nineveh heard the word he brought, and from the king down to the common people they began to repent of their sins. It might look as though this remarkable miracle happened because Jonah preached, but God already knew that Nineveh would repent.
The king of Assyria at that time was Ashur-dan III, and what moved him to repent at Jonah’s message was that the nation had suffered three great disasters. There had been a plague in 765 BC, and in 763 BC the people suffered an eclipse and another plague. Scholars suppose that when the king and his people heard Jonah’s message, they would have taken it as God giving them a chance to recover.
In 4:1-2 Jonah grows very angry and complains to God. Had he not said, back in his own country, that there was no need for him to preach, because he knew that God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, a God who relents and does not send disaster? If they repented on hearing the word he had preached, he ought to have rejoiced; instead he is angry with God. The reason is that Jonah already knew God’s command to proclaim judgment was God’s resolve to save them; Nineveh would repent no matter what he preached. Jonah knew that God accomplishes whatever he has planned and resolved, and it seems to have galled him that God had brought him all that way, putting him in the belly of a fish to do it.
Jonah knew that when God declares he will judge a person or a place, he acts as though he will destroy them at once, yet if sinners hear the word and turn back, he does not send the disaster. From a prophet’s standpoint, however, if he proclaims judgment and the people hear it, take fright, and repent, his prophecy turns out wrong, and he would be ashamed. A prophet escapes shame only when the judgment he proclaims comes as judgment and the blessing he proclaims comes as blessing. If they turned back and were blessed, his prophecy would prove false, and Jonah would have hated that. But a prophecy of judgment must fail. In the Bible there are things God spoke that did not come to pass, and there are many events in which a prophet’s prophecy did not come true.
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 bring the people of Israel out of Egypt and lead them into Canaan. If he told Moses to lead the people into Canaan, then the word is fulfilled only when Moses brings them into Canaan. Yet Moses and the people alike died in the wilderness. God had promised that he himself would come down, deliver them from Egypt, and lead them into Canaan, and still their bodies fell in the wilderness. It was God’s own promise, and yet 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 hardened their hearts and grew stubborn; they lived as they pleased and did not obey his word. Always going astray in their hearts and never understanding God’s will, in the end they did not enter the rest God had given. From this it becomes clear that God’s plan from the beginning was not Egypt, nor the people who came out of Egypt, but Canaan.
Who enters Canaan is, in the end, decided by those who enter it. Those who kept their faith all the way through the crossing of the wilderness are the people of God. God led Joshua and Israel into Canaan not by the law Moses received but by his grace. If we do not grasp God’s deep providence, we see only what is in front of our eyes, and we may end up drifting further from him.
God always warned a people who had sinned, and gave them a chance. Since he has never once judged without warning, when we are warned we must turn back, for unless we move from the place of judgment to the place of faith, the judgment God sends will fall on us in full. Even if the move is painful and demands patience and effort, God’s command must be obeyed. Had there been no one like Jonah to tell them that judgment was coming and call them to repent, Nineveh would probably have been judged.
God spoke to Jonah about Nineveh’s sin, and Nineveh heard God’s word through Jonah. Nineveh was already in distress, and what enabled it to repent was that it did not receive Jonah’s warning as the word of a man; the city heard it as the word of God and was afraid. When God saw them turning from the way of sin, he withdrew the judgment he had set against Nineveh and poured out his grace.
Grace is God’s gift, but only when there is someone to preach, as Jonah did, can those sitting in the place of sin hear, see, and turn back. Jonah, however, knew that the judgment he proclaimed would not come to pass, so he had no wish to go to Nineveh. For a prophet who has delivered God’s word, seeing it go unfulfilled would wound his self-respect and make preaching the gospel something to dread.
Watching Nineveh repent, Jonah grew very angry. He said he had known all along that the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, and would change his mind and not send disaster. Then he asked God to take his life, so that he would not be put to shame.
Because God knew what was in Jonah’s heart, he prepared a wonderful surprise to show him how precious it is to save life, and how treasured a calling Jonah had fulfilled.
Jonah built himself a booth and sat in its shade to see what would happen to Nineveh, and God prepared a vine for him. When the vine grew up and gave him shade, Jonah was overjoyed. Here we can see what a playful God he is. Seeing Jonah delighted with the vine, God prepared a worm and made it chew the vine, and the vine soon withered. Once it was gone, the fierce sun beat down on his head; unable to bear the heat, Jonah grew angry with God and said it would be better for him to die.
When God asked him whether it was right for him to be angry about the vine, Jonah sulked and insisted that he was right, even if he were angry enough to die. Then Yahweh asked him this: if he cared so much about a vine he had not labored over or made grow, a vine that perished within a day, how could it be wrong for God to care about Nineveh, where one hundred twenty thousand people and all their livestock faced death? A splinter under our own fingernail hurts us more than another person’s death. To Jonah, the vine that kept him cool was worth more than one hundred twenty thousand lives. Do you see how wicked we are? And it is God who called such self-centered people his children.
Jonah seemed to know God, yet he himself stood at the center, and that is what made his disobedience possible. To help this Jonah understand God’s love more fully, God taught him through the task of preaching to Nineveh and through Nineveh’s salvation. Though the world sins, God is telling Jonah, and telling you, to understand his heart, which longs to save their lives, and to preach the gospel. This is not a command; it is love.
You have received the same calling Jonah received. If you have boarded a ship bound for Tarshish, I hope you will get off quickly and head straight for Nineveh. If you dig in your heels and refuse to leave the ship, you cannot escape the storm, nor suffering like the belly of the huge fish. But if you obey, then just as the father told the elder son that all he had was his, God will thank you for obeying by faith and will share his glory with you. If you obey as though you saw what is unseen, and respond at once when God commands, as if you had been thinking the same thing all along, God will tell you that he is entrusting more souls to you.
May you not judge in advance as Jonah did, nor press your own righteousness as the elder son did. May you search out God’s will, give yourselves to him, and come to know his love, as saints precious in his sight.