Sermon: Jonah: Typical Israelite
A Fractured Relationship With God
#1726B
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 09-Sep-23; 42 minutes
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transcript:
We are going to be looking at the book of Jonah today in this split sermon. This book is unique among the minor prophets in several ways. First, this is more of a story than a prophecy. It tells the reader about Jonah himself and his ministry to Nineveh. In this way, the book of Jonah resembles Daniel more than some of the minor prophets, maybe Haggai is similar.
But most of all, it is a story that is recounted for us rather than a prophecy. And it is no wonder that young kids are taught the stories of Daniel and Jonah because they are stories that can be easily imagined, whereas the other minor prophets cannot. I mean, they are mostly prophecy and that would be pretty hard to do on one of those felt boards that they use in Sunday schools.
The second thing that is unique about Jonah is that his prophecy, believe it or not, consists of one line: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" That is the extent of Jonah's prophecy. It is quite different from Nahum. Nahum, just a few pages away, is also addressed to Nineveh and it has three entire chapters in prophetic form about how Nineveh was going to fall and why.
The third unique thing is that Jonah ends in a question mark. There is only one other book in the minor prophets that does also end in a question mark. That is also Nahum addressed to Nineveh. But most of the other minor prophets end with promises of Israel's restoration or on some other positive note. But Jonah ends in a question mark like Nahum. But in Israelite eyes, Nahum also ends on a positive note despite the question mark because it predicts a serious crushing defeat for all of its wickedness.
But Jonah ending with a question mark ends frustratingly unresolved. We feel as if we need several different additional chapters to finish the story to figure out what happened. How does this actually really end? Why are we left hanging?
If we see the book of Jonah from 30,000 feet, looking at it in a big overview, Jonah resolves as a story about a man's questionable relationship with God. Particularly, it shows us a clash of opinions between them over several things, but primarily over God's will and His righteousness. They do not think the same about what should be done. They do not think the same about how something should be done. They do not have the same attitudes toward what must be done.
And so the book of Jonah, four very short chapters, touches on themes of disobedience, rebellion, petulance—Jonah is the most petulant person in the entire Bible—stubbornness, exclusivity, anger, misunderstanding, and resistance. All of those can be found in the book of Jonah. And what it does, remember we are talking about looking at this from 30,000 feet, it provides insight into typical human thought and reactions to God. And so we can, if we are brave enough, put ourselves in Jonah's place and see what we can learn about the ways we resist God and rebel against Him and flee from Him.
This sermon is going to be a very quick survey of the book of Jonah and we will point out a few highlights or actually, we are going to be pointing out lowlights today along the way. And I am going to assume that you know the story of Jonah, even our youngsters probably know the story of Jonah. They have probably seen it in their little children's Bibles because it is always there because of the big fish. And so we are not going to go into a great deal of detail. We have had a few sermons, sermonettes, split sermons, or whatever on Jonah in the recent past. And I want to acknowledge those that have done so. I picked their brains electronically this week as I was putting this together.
But I want to focus on Jonah's reactions to God here and see that the prophet ends up being an everyman figure. He is a stand-in for all of us and our ways that we react to God. And he is especially a typical specimen of Israelite attitudes toward God. So, in this way, as I have said, the book shines a light on how we sometimes fail in our responses to God because many times—because we are human, because we do not understand things, because we do not have the perspective of God—our reactions to God are negative. We resist like Jonah, we rebel like Jonah, we flee like Jonah, we are pessimistic like Jonah. And it can even get to a feeling of being against God because of the things He wants us to do and expects of us.
And so we come into a great deal of contention with God because we just cannot see why it is good to do this, whatever it is. And so we get into competition with Him. We try to go mind-to-mind with Him. We try to convince Him, actually, that we are wrong. We may never say that in a prayer, but in our private thoughts, we are saying, "I can't see how this is good, but all the signs are laid out here for me to do whatever it is. And it says in the Bible that I should do this. But why? Why should I do this?" And so we put ourselves in a bit of contention and competition with God.
My title for this split is, "Jonah: Typical Israelite," but my subtitle is, "A Fractured Relationship with God." And that is what we see in the person of Jonah and his misadventures. So let us dive into this book right now. I am going to hop, skip, and jump in this first chapter. Like I said, we are going to assume that you know the story. But I do want to emphasize a few things here.
Jonah 1:1-3 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me." But Jonah arose 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 to it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
Let us drop down to verse 10. This is after the storm and all the searching about for who was the cause.
Jonah 1:10-12 Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said to him, "Why have you done this?" [because they figured out he was the problem] For the men knew that he fled from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. Then they said to him, "What shall we do to you that the sea may be calm for us?" For the sea was growing more tempestuous. And he said to them, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will become calm for you. For I know that this great tempest is because of me."
Jonah 1:15-16 So they picked up Jonah and threw him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men [these are Gentiles, the ones who were sailors on the ship] feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
Just stick that in the back of your mind for a moment as opposed to Jonah.
What is significant in the sections we read here is that the phrase "from the presence of the Lord" is repeated three times in just this one chapter and it becomes the theme of the chapter, if not the whole book.
Jonah was trying to get away from God from the get-go. From the very beginning, he is trying to leave God's service. He is moving away from God, not toward Him. This rebellious response exhibits great ignorance and misreading of God on Jonah's part. He did not understand God. He did not understand why He was giving the command that He gave. He did not understand God's character. As soon as God told him to go preach this warning message to Assyria, he lit out, he was gone. "I'm not going to have any part of this. I'm off to Joppa and then to Tarshish. Book me a passage."
Now, he knew—he was God's prophet!—that the God of Israel was the Supreme Being. He knew He was the Creator; He was the God of heaven and earth. I mean, it says that in verse 9, which we did not read, but it is right there. "I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." He knew who he was dealing with, but yet he fled Him.
Can anyone run far enough or fast enough to get away from God? Why is Jonah being so foolish? He is out of his mind. He is not thinking straight. But what we can understand here, what we can get out of this is, Jonas simply did not want to preach God's message to Nineveh. Physical danger in Assyria, that was the least of his worries. I am sure he was a fit man. You know, he could run fast or whatever, avoid the spears from the Assyrians. He probably could not avoid the chariots. But you know, hey, he was not worried about that. He did not want to preach a warning message of repentance for their sins to avoid God's judgment. He did not want the Assyrians to hear that. He did not want them to avoid destruction. He wanted them dead! He wanted them out of Israel. He wanted them out of their hair. He did not want them to have any more influence on Israel.
What we find with Jonah is that as he is presented here in the first chapter, his mindset was not spiritual. He did not have a prophet's mind in terms of, let us say, theology or understanding God. His mindset was national. He was a patriot. "Let's go, Israel! We're the best. We're the world's greatest people." He was xenophobic. He was afraid of everybody else. That was his problem. He was all about Israel's glory, national glory. Just think of "Make America great again." That is a nationalistic slogan. It does not have God in it at all. It is like Jonah is one of these people out on the street who all he wants is America to be the chief nation in the world and remain the chief nation. That is the way he thought. That is why we can consider Jonah to be someone like some of us.
So because God was sending him, this patriot, to Assyria with a warning message to them to repent and avoid the destruction that God was promising, he doubted God's faithfulness. He doubted God's faithfulness to Israel. Why was God giving these uncircumcised Assyrians a chance to repent and to avoid the destruction that is promised? Was God not loyal to Israel anymore? What? Had He forsaken the covenant? Where was His covenant love for Israel? Had He gone over to the other side and decided to take Assyria as the chosen people? I am sure these were kind of the thoughts that were going through Jonah's mind, because his fleeing to Tarshish on this ship was saying to God, "I don't trust You because You've gone over to the enemy. You're giving the enemy a chance."
I mean, think about this. While he is in danger there, the ship is being tossed all over the Mediterranean right now, Jonah does not cry out to God for deliverance. He does not trust Him anymore to save him. What does he do? He hides and goes to sleep. This man is utterly out of his mind. He does not even have normal human reactions anymore. He has gone so far from being a prophet that he will not even accept God's warning that he was in trouble. He shows no concern at all for anybody else on the ship, none of the sailors. Remember they were Gentiles. He does not care about them. He is certainly self-absorbed, unfeeling, unhelpful.
He does nothing to help onboard the ship to lighten the load or to do anything else. They have to basically drag him out of the bowels of the ship and force him to admit that he is the problem, because the lot fell on him. There is a little point there. The lot is of the Lord. God said, "This is the guy, guys. This is the one that's causing all your problems." We could even look at what Jonah did here as borderline suicidal or even just not borderline. It is suicidal. "Hey, guys, throw me over the side of the ship. I'm your problem. Go ahead. My life's worthless. My God just deserted me and my whole nation."
So, what is wrong with this man? What is wrong with Jonah the prophet?
While I used the term self-absorbed a minute ago, the problem with Jonah is that from his point of view, this was all about him. This was all about Jonah and his desires and what he expected. He is unconcerned about others, but that is because his universe contains only himself. Even God is outside his universe at this point. He is totally fixated on his own concerns. His desire is to hold on to his sinful ideas. Sinful ideas about God and God's love for all mankind. See, he did not want these other humans, non-Israelite humans, to have salvation by any means. Even physical deliverance he did not want for them.
So his problem was a kind of narcissism. It was extreme self-concern for himself and his ideas, and he was doing everything he could to hold on to them rather than to admit that God was right.
Let us go into chapter 2. We will start in verse 17 of chapter one. It probably should have gone into chapter 2 here, but fallible man made all the verses.
Jonah 1:17 Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
Jonah 2:1-4 Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the fish's belly. And he said, "I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction, and He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice. For You cast me into the deep [notice that You cast me into the deep], into the heart of the seas, and the floods surrounded me; all Your billows and Your waves passed over me. Then I said, 'I have been cast out of Your sight; yet I will look again to Your holy temple.'"
Jonah 2:7-9 "When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer went up to You, into Your holy temple. Those who regard worthless idols forsake their own Mercy. But I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay what I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord."
Now this sounds good if you are not being careful with what he is actually saying and inserting his attitude into this. Because his prayer here is troubling in certain respects. Notice that he prays only when inside the fish's belly and he is about to die. That is a little late. It is only when he is at his worst, at the worst part of all of this danger, that he finally gives in and prays to God. The timing is suspect. In verse 4 when he says, "Then I said, 'I have been cast out of Your sight,'" Notice that is passive. He still really has not taken any ownership for his attitudes or his actions. He actually blames God for it. "You did it. You cast me into the deep."
That is true. But again, he is not saying that he had any part in it. It is like he is a rag doll that God threw into the ocean and he had no way to prevent it. Well, he could have prevented it by owning up to his sin and repenting. He could have done that on the ship.
Now, he is grateful to God for the deliverance and he rightly declares there in verse 9 that salvation is of the Lord, but he fails to acknowledge his mission to Assyria and that God desires to save people other than Israelites. He desires salvation for himself. Oh, yeah, all of us do. But he is unwilling to extend the same opportunity to the Assyrians still. But I guess getting vomited out on a beach was enough to make him do the work.
In fact, here in chapter 2, in his prayer, he condemns them. He condemns the Assyrians because they were still worshipping idols. And he says, "Those who regard worthless idols forsake their own Mercy." What he is basically saying is they do not have a right to be saved because they still worship idols. That is basically one of the last things he says here. He is telling God, he is arguing with God. "Thanks for saving me. But these people don't deserve Your salvation because they're still kneeling down to idols. They forsake their mercy by doing that."
Jonah 3:3-5 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent. And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day's walk. Then he cried out and said, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" [He did his work and that was his prophecy.] So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them.
Jonah 3:10 Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way [they repented]; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it.
So yay! Jonah did his job. The people responded, unlike Jonah, to God. The people responded to Jonah and to God and were saved. They were delivered from the destruction because they repented. All the Gentiles in this book do the right thing. All the Israelites in this book—one, Jonah—does the wrong thing. So these people for whom Jonah has no kind words, in which he sees no spiritual value, listen to God and repent en masse. Hundreds of thousands of people. This is a miracle in itself.
Jonah sees repentance in Gentile people who had never heard the Word of God before and they repent. Jonah, a proud Israelite, circumcised under the covenant, instead had disobeyed and fled God's presence. They, the Gentiles, humbly obeyed. They changed and they drew near to God through fasting and presumably supplication of prayer, none of which Jonah did until he was forced to do it, until his life hung by a thread.
What we see here is that the Assyrians, or the Gentiles, are a foil to Jonah. A typical Israelite always resisting God. These pagan people were more responsive to God than even one of His own prophets. That is how bad it had gotten in Israel. It is what a shameful state that they had sunk to. In Ezekiel 16:44-52, He calls Judah later (but Israel can certainly be part of this), He says they are worse than Sodom. They had gone so far away from God that Jews were worse than Sodom. And so was Israel. We can see here what pride and misunderstanding and exclusivity does to people, even to God's people.
Let us go into chapter 4. We still have a few minutes. We will just read the first four verses. This is Jonah's reaction to this stupendous miracle of 100,000 or more people repenting.
Jonah 4:1-3 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry. So he prayed to the Lord, and said, "Ah, Lord, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish; for I know that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live!"
"I'm going to die when I get back to Israel, You better just kill me! Now how am I going to face my friends? I went to Assyria and converted 100,000 plus people to the Lord, our enemies."
Jonah 4:4 Then the Lord said, "Is it right for you to be angry?"
This first line in chapter 4, verse 1 is woefully mistranslated. It hides the literal Hebrew. I mean here it says, "It displeased Jonah exceedingly" and that sounds like it is pretty bad just in the English. But do you know what it literally says in Hebrew? It says, "But it [that is, God's compassionate sparing of Nineveh] was evil to Jonah with great evil." Do you see his mindset? He is saying that God's mercy on these people was great evil! He was accusing God of sin; not just sin, not just iniquity but great evil. He saw God's grace and mercy to the uncircumcised Gentiles as wickedness and it manifested in rage. "God, how could you do this? They're our enemies! You can't save our enemies. You're an Israelite God!"
The chasm between Jonah and God had grown to its widest point after he did this great work with God's help. He was at total odds with God. His thinking was insane. Absolutely insane. That is what you are when you accuse God of sin. You have crossed over into insanity. He was staring into the spiritual abyss. He knows; he quoted it here that God is intrinsically compassionate, and merciful, and forgiving, and relenting of harm to other people. But in Jonah's screwy thinking, he now thought of God's character as evil because it had been expressed to the Gentiles. God showing hesed, covenant loyalty, love, lovingkindness, mercy toward Gentiles, in his mind, is tantamount to pure evil. As we said, here, it was evil to Jonah with great evil.
Now God's response, I mean, I would have expected the world just to implode upon Jonah. But God's response is surprisingly mild. Because what is being shown throughout this whole book is God as compassionate, loving, forgiving, graceful to all. And so His response to Jonah is like the theme of God in this book. It is a mere question to spur Jonah's thinking: "Is your anger really righteous? Is your fury justified?"
And then, as He had prepared the fish for Jonah's benefit, He prepares the plant that covered him, the worm that ate the plant, and the wind that dried things up, to show Jonah that He was the one in charge. He was taking the initiative with Jonah and trying to change his attitude, and He was acting as Sovereign Lord over the Assyrians, which were just as much His people, eventually, as the Israelites were because they were all made in His image. He would make a covenant with those people in due time. Jonah could not understand this.
So God is telling Jonah with these little things that happened in chapter 4, that He can do whatever He wants because He is going to be doing things within the bounds of His character and it will all be good. It will all be right. He could do this for whomever He wills or against whomever He wills and human judgment means absolutely nothing. Jonah did not have the spiritual acumen to see God and what He was doing because he was blinded by his own ideas of what it meant to be God's people and what God was doing in His plan of salvation.
God always acts according to His character, and if we disagree, something is wrong with us.
So God's test and rebuke of Jonah in verses 5 through 11 are designed to arouse concern in the prophet for people who need God's help. Yes, the Assyrians were their enemies, but they truly needed the help of God and the wisdom of God and the mercy of God. But that is not how Jonah saw it. He only had compassion for the plant because it was benefiting him. He cried big crocodile tears when that plant went away. But he had no empathy for the lives of hundreds of thousands of Assyrians and all their livestock, which got included in this. I mean, Jonah is showing that he and every other human being is a piece of work because they just will not submit to God. They stand on their own principles that have no foundation instead of submitting to God and doing His work.
Now, did God's argument convince Jonah? The book ends with a question mark. We do not know. I kind of take a pessimistic view because he had gone a long way from God. He was so full of anger and pride that he is in no state to admit that God wants to save all humanity and that Israelites like him were supposed to facilitate their salvation. They were supposed to be priests for God and witnesses for God before the nations. But because they had become so proud and xenophobic by this point, they did not want to have anything to do with the Gentiles.
Israel never got the point. They fell in judgment under God's judgment to the same Assyrians not too long later. And Jews, they felt the Assyrian wrath as well, and later they felt the wrath of Babylon—and did not change the way that they treated Gentiles. Even by Jesus' day, they were still treating the Gentiles contemptuously. And Jesus said there in Matthew 23:13 that they shut God's Kingdom against them.
Let us go to Matthew 12. We will end here. Matthew 12. This is the sign of the prophet Jonah.
Matthew 12:38-41 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, "Teacher, we want to see a sign from You." But He answered and said to them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For 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. The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and indeed a greater than Jonah is here."
Now, we often simplify the sign of the prophet Jonah to simply the three days and the three nights that are mentioned there specifically. That Jesus would be in the tomb three days and three nights. But there is more to it, especially since Jesus points out that the Jews' lack of repentance, despite God in the flesh preaching directly to them, was a major part of the sign. How?
First, the sign warns that judgment would fall on them soon because they had failed to repent like the Ninevites had. Second, the sign indicates that God would turn to Gentiles, who would repent and accept Him. They would be saved ahead of the Jews. And as Paul says in Romans 11:11, "provoke them to jealousy" because they still have this attitude that they are the best in the world; and they are Christians, God's Christian nation, and they do everything right. Third, the sign should be taken personally by each of God's people that we have no right to question God's sovereign acts of grace and salvation. Because that is how He is at His core. He desires all men to be saved, which Paul tells us in I Timothy 2:4. His plan of salvation is for all humanity, not just the Israelites.
If you want to jot down Exodus 34:5-9. This is the original statement by God about His name and what He is. But I just want to quote it from Jonah because he said it. He says, "I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm." That is Jonah 4:2. God, our God, is a God of compassion, and forgiveness, and salvation, and grace. And you know what? He applied all of those, all of those qualities, all those characteristics, to the Assyrians.
And you know what? I am pretty sure that the chapter that we are missing from the end of the book of Jonah shows that He applied all those same attributes to Jonah—to allow him to repent, to give him the right mind that will allow him to be in God's Kingdom. Perhaps he repented. I think that we should be optimistic knowing God, knowing what He is, that He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm. And He would do that even for Jonah.
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