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Jonah |
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| Chapter 1 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 3 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 2 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 4 | Prayer | Devotional |
Prayers
Father God, You surely love Your people, and You use us as messengers of that great love. Can we refuse You? Are we free to abandon Your calling upon Your servants? Will we be like Jonah, determining by our own counsel that it is wise to run from You? Such a man brings much trouble upon himself and others. It will do us no good to flee from Your presence in the day of chastisement. Surely if we decide to fight against Your purposes, You will win. We bow before You, for You have appointed a Savior for our rescue in Christ the Lord. Who are we to reject Your call to speak for Your kingdom?
Blessed Lord, Your Son called out to You from the belly of Sheol, and You heard His cry. He trusted You fully. Though He died for our sins, You brought up His life from the pit, for He had authority to lay down His life, and authority to pick it back up again. He has vowed to give to You the fullness of Your Kingdom of grace. What He has vowed, He will surely pay.
Lord of Glory, grant us courage to move forward in mission in the most frightening places. Will we have the boldness to cry out, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed?” If we will not speak, we will miss the joy of true repentance in the darkest corners of creation. Angels are ready to rejoice. Teach Your church to call all men everywhere to repent. Perhaps You have granted life to many. Perhaps they will repent like the king and his subjects in Nineveh in the days of Jonah. You have commanded. We must follow Your call upon our lives.
Great God of Israel, You have a plan for the nations of the world. You are a God of grace. Will we hate mercy? We do not do well to be angry about Your kindness. Your Son is our shade and our protection. The scorching heat of Your judgment is coming upon the nations of the world. Make us to pity the people who live in darkness, for there are so many children that are facing judgment with no knowledge of Your Word. Send us forward in Your service, O Lord, that the nations may know that You are God.
Devotionals
The Apostle Paul writes to Timothy that the one who desires the work of an elder desires a good thing. One of the qualifications for this office is that a person be apt to teach. Within this classification that we call “elder” were apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers. Paul tells the Ephesian church that these men who proclaim the truth of the Lord are gifts from God. That does not mean that it is always easy to be an ambassador for the Lord, and it does not mean that everyone who has ever spoken for the Lord did so with a great sense of willingness.
In the case of the Old Testament prophet Jonah, we encounter a man who emphatically rejected his calling. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he rejected the specific mission that God gave to him. The Lord called him to go to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, and to preach against that great city, calling them to repent of their evil. Jonah refused to do this.
The way that we know of this refusal was that Jonah traveled due West by sea, despite the fact that Nineveh was due east by land. Jonah was attempting to sail away from the command of God. For an Old Testament prophet to be perplexed, frustrated, or even overwhelmed is not that unusual. But for a prophet to pick up and run in the opposite direction of God’s calling is not a normal thing, nor is it safe for anyone who is seeking to follow the Lord. God led His own Son into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, and He went. Later He would go to the cross, though He asked if there was some way out of that horrific calling. We are told by the Lord that we too must follow in the way of the cross. This is surely the way that the Spirit truly leads the Lord’s servants. Nonetheless, the cost of the mission may seem to be too much for us, and we wonder if there is a safe way for us to bow out.
There was no safe way out for the prophet Jonah. He brought danger upon his life because of his refusal to follow God. Not only that, those with him were put in danger by this prophet’s disobedience. Even the pagan sailors on board the ship were beginning to wonder what God was doing as they faced such troubles at sea. As they were trying to understand the disturbance that was threatening their lives, there was only one man on board who had been sent out as a true prophet. The God that Jonah needed to obey controlled the seas.
The pagan captain of the ship expected everyone to turn earnestly to some god or other in the midst of this crisis. Amazingly, there was one man who was trying to sleep through it all; the prophet Jonah. Everyone else was turning to a host deities except for the man who knew in his conscience that he was responsible for this dangerous situation. The sailors cast lots in order to identify the guilty party, and they managed to find their man. Was it one of those frantic prayer warriors pleading with some false god? No it was the prophet of the Lord, Jonah, who simply refused to bring the Word of the Lord to the Assyrians; the mortal enemies of Judah and Israel. The casting of lots among the sailors somehow revealed the source of God’s fury, and it was His servant, the prophet who was running away from his true calling.
Naturally the other men on board wanted to understand what Jonah had done in order to bring everyone on the ship into such danger. Jonah plainly told the story of his unwillingness to serve the Lord by going to Nineveh. His solution to the problem was very straight-forward: “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea.” The crew did not want to send Him overboard. Yet they were forced to do so because of their own desperate condition. They did want to live. It soon became obvious that Jonah would have to go if any of them were to survive this strange judicial ordeal; this trial by drowning.
Prior to throwing Jonah off the ship the sailors turned to the true God in prayer. They wanted Jonah’s Lord to know that they were taking no joy in what was sure to be the death of His servant. But then Jonah did not die. The sea ceased from its raging. It was not the intention of the Lord to end the story of Jonah with the drowning of the prophet. God had a better plan for this reluctant servant. He appointed a great fish to rescue this man, and so Jonah was inside that fish for three days and three nights.
Many centuries later a perfect prophet was raised up to a tougher ministry than that of Jonah. He would not merely announce the judgment of God against an enemy nation. While we were yet sinners, Christ was called upon by God to die for us. He too was beyond the reach of men for three days, but in His sufferings this greatest of all prophets faced the hell that we deserved. Jonah is known for a fish that saved Him. Christ is known for a cross that saved us.
Jonah stands as the supreme example of prophetic unwillingness. He ran away from his mission. Our great Prophet, the Lord Jesus Christ, never ran away from His calling. Even though He had the power to end His suffering and to send legions of angels against His enemies, He played His unique role with a perfectly holy resolve. This was especially confirmed prior to his betrayal in these glorious words: “Not my will, but Yours be done.” Here we find not only the greatest example of dedication ever known. In His death we have the powerful accomplishment of the fullness of our salvation, a salvation that could never have been won for us if Jesus had sailed in some other direction, away from the cross.
When we last left our reluctant prophet Jonah, he had been rescued from the seas through the agency of a great fish, and we were told that he was kept there for three days and three nights. This period of being entombed in that sea creature is compared by Christ to His time in an earthly tomb prior to His resurrection. Almost the entirety of the second chapter of Jonah comes to us from inside the fish. There Jonah is praying to the Lord, not so much seeking deliverance from the animal, as we might have thought, but praising God for the deliverance that He has already received.
Jonah does speak in the opening prayer about crying out to the Lord from a “belly,” but it is not the inside of a living creature that he refers to, but the belly of the place of death, called here Sheol. In other words, Jonah is acknowledging that he was effectively a dead man when he was cast out onto the seas. The prayer that he speaks from the belly of the fish refers to his earlier cry of distress in the waters. From there, as a man who was as good as dead, he called out to God, and the Lord heard his cry.
Jonah recounts his desperate situation. He remembers the waves passing over him. He who ran away from God to avoid a mission he despised, now felt as if he had been driven away from God’s sight. Man may wish to run away from God to avoid His commandments, yet he still likes the idea that God would stay close to him to bring about any necessary deliverance in this dangerous world.
Despite the fact that it appeared that all hope was lost, and despite the deadly sentence that Jonah acknowledges, the words that came out of his mouth were words of faith, and an expectation of divine help. He says, “I shall again look upon your holy temple.” What was his hope? Did he expect that he would again be in the Jerusalem below? Perhaps, but it is at least possible that he was expressing the faith of our fathers who were looking for a better country. Expecting that his mortal life would be over in a matter of minutes, he knew that there was a heavenly temple, where those whose bodies must rest in a watery grave, can yet find their souls to be alive in the presence of the Almighty. Perhaps in the trial of what appeared to be the closing moments of his life, he considered that God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the living and not of the dead. Perhaps he thought that he was going to the place of the living patriarchs, and that there he would look upon a better temple than that built at the direction of Solomon.
This seems to be the case, as the prophet reflects upon the eternal realities beyond this mortal world. He was about to die. He was going down into the world of the grave, where he would be locked up forever. As his life is fainting away, the Lord heard his prayer. Where was God when He listened to Jonah? The prophet says that the Lord was in His holy temple, and that this man’s prayer went up to Him into that most sacred place. As Jonah’s life was fainting away, God heard his cries in the Lord’s heavenly sanctuary.
Through Jonah’s praise from within the belly of the fish we learn that God heard Jonah’s vow. What this means is that the prophet asked for more mortal life, and promised that if the Lord was pleased to give him more years on this earth, that he would pay what he had vowed to the Lord; that “with the voice of thanksgiving” he would “sacrifice” to God. He does this even from his temporary place of rescue inside a living creature. He says these glorious words of testimony, “Salvation belongs to the Lord!” Then God prevailed upon his servant the fish to release his servant the prophet on an appropriate piece of dry land.
When our Savior was facing the end of His earthly days on a Roman cross, He also cried out to God with the words of a vow. In quoting the opening of Psalm 22, Jesus was not merely pointing to His condition as one who had been forsaken by His father. The Psalm is a song of praise. It includes a faithful expectation of deliverance, and a promised payment of praise yet to come, not only from the suffering Psalmist, but from a people who would be under the authority of this King, some of whom He acknowledged as being yet unborn.
As Jonah was heard in the roaring waves, Christ was heard as He suffered on the cross. As the fish was a place of praise for Jonah, the empty grave has become an astounding fact of evidence for us of the resurrection of our King. But there is something more than this. There is even the victory of the soul over the place of dead bodies. Where was Jesus after the cross and before the resurrection? His body was in the belly of a grave, but His Spirit was in Paradise, together with another man who died on a cross that day. The good news of Christ’s victory was obvious to the inhabitants of heaven even before Mary Magdalene saw her Lord in a garden cemetery. Salvation was already His, and that great victory was then wonderfully displayed in resurrection.
Salvation is of the Lord! Our risen Savior will keep His promise. He will bring forward a great praise in the assembly of the righteous in the heavenly sanctuary. All is well, despite the continuing evidence of the curse of God against Adam’s world. There is a new world that is coming in Christ and is already here in the gospel. That new world will be the fulfillment of what Jonah calls “salvation” which the Lord Jesus Christ has displayed as resurrection.
And now for round two… God had previously given Jonah the instruction to go to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Jonah had refused that mission, and had moved quickly in the opposite direction. That choice led to a storm, a cry to God, a vow, a prayer of praise from within the belly of a fish, and a sort of resurrection with the beginning of something of new life for the prophet. And now here we are in the middle of this brief book right where we began. Jonah is commanded to bring this message of judgment against the city of Nineveh. This time he goes in the right direction.
For a Hebrew prophet to speak a word of judgment from God in the capital city of the Assyrians was something like traveling into the belly of the beast. Here is Jonah, a hobbit from the Shire, and he has something that must be said in the middle of Mordor. Nineveh was apparently a very large city. It took three days of walking just to get from one end of it to the other. More than this it was the seat of power for a ruthless people that had demonstrated their ability to conquer other nations, relocating captive peoples in far-off lands, and bringing a very large amount of territory under subjection.
This is where Jonah is going as a man of God. The Lord sends people throughout the earth as messengers of the good news of Christ. The fact of God’s coming judgment is a part of that gospel. It is perhaps this fact, without which the cross loses its meaning, that makes it uncomfortable still today for isolated individuals or small teams of believers to travel to far off lands where they may feel unwelcome and unwanted. In such ministry situations it is important for the Lord’s ambassadors to remember that they have been called to this task by the God who created the seas and the dry land, who knows how to rescue His servants from great danger. Jonah should have had no doubt concerning these things.
Surprisingly, Jonah shows no sign of fear concerning this mission. In fact there is no indication in this book that concern for his own safety entered into Jonah’s earlier calculus that caused him to disobey the call of God. We find out in the next chapter that Jonah’s real concern all along was that God might show mercy to the Assyrians, which Jonah feared more than whatever trouble the Assyrians might bring to him personally.
With a boldness for judgment that is hoping against God’s mercy, Jonah speaks of the impending destruction of this great city in just forty days. And then the worst happens, at least in the mind of the reluctant prophet. The people believe and repent. This is unspeakably shocking. For anyone who knows anything about the way that people resist the truth of the Almighty, the thought that this people would repent at this preaching from this prophet can only be explained by the power of Almighty God.
What did these Assyrians do? They fasted, humbling themselves before God at the preaching of Jonah. This movement which Christ calls repentance in Matthew 12:41 seems to have started among the people. News reached the king. Instead of trying to stop this zealous reaction to a foreign prophet he joined in the repenting and issued a proclamation not only for fasting, but for a true changing of their ways, a turning away from evil and violence in the hope that God would turn from his just anger.
What makes this especially shocking is that so often the kings and people of the Lord’s covenant nations have ignored the persistent call of the prophets over many centuries. How could it be that all the nobles and people of Nineveh did what the inhabitants of Israel and Judah should have done? This kind of shocking repentance is a powerful illustration that the deliverance of God for lost sinners really is by grace. It is events like this that are also powerful signposts to a coming mercy to the nations of the world, as millions of Gentiles would respond to the fact of a Jewish Messiah, and would by God’s mighty grace repent and believe.
The Lord heard those pagan Assyrians, and did what they requested. This was the very thing that Jonah was afraid of. God showed mercy to Nineveh.
There is a coming Day of Judgment that will be more than the Lord’s previous expressions of wrath throughout history for one group of people or another in one place or time. We do not know when it will happen, but the fact of this Day is absolutely certain. There is only one way out of this devastation, and that is through the Lord’s provision of repentance and faith in the only Redeemer of God’s elect, the Lord Jesus Christ.
It has been the Lord’s good pleasure that the message of judgment and grace would not be limited only to the descendants of Jacob. It is also His great mercy that all of the merit of Christ’s obedience and death would actually be extended to people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, as millions are granted God’s gift of saving grace. It is also apparently a fact that some who should tremble at his Word will not do so. We are told of this surprising fact by Jesus Christ Himself in Matthew 12:41: “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.”
God sent Jonah to preach to the inhabitants of the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the city of Nineveh. Though Jonah originally sailed away in the wrong direction, the Lord prevailed upon Him through the agency of a dangerous storm, a ship full of reluctant pagan sailors, and a very large fish. Jonah did eventually arrive on the scene and presented his no-nonsense message: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Amazingly, the people of Nineveh, from the highest to the lowest, repented. Good news? Not to Jonah. The prophet was very angry, and He expressed his anger to the Lord God in prayer.
In this prayer to God we begin to understand definitively why Jonah did not originally want to go to Nineveh at all. Why was Jonah angry? Jonah knew of the Lord’s character, that God was gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love. Most of all Jonah knew that God might relent from judgment if the people humbled themselves before him. Jonah knew that the Lord God might even have mercy on Assyrians. It was his knowledge of this that made Jonah reluctant to answer the Lord’s call to go to Nineveh and to speak against the city. Jonah wanted to see the Lord’s justice come against the Assyrians, and he was unwilling to allow the Lord’s mercy to get in the way of his dreams. Now the worst had happened. The Assyrians had repented and the Lord would likely extend his great mercy. Jonah was so angry that he wanted to die.
God had a simple question for the prophet. “Do you do well to be angry?” It’s a good question. When God’s servants are angry, the anger is not always righteous. A prophet might do well to be angry. We are told in another place in the Bible to be angry. Specifically the instruction is, “Be angry, but do not sin.” Was Jonah sinning in His anger? The Assyrians were brutal, and treated Israel and Judah with oppression. Their leaders spoke against the Lord and His people with impunity. Jonah would have been right to be angry with that empire. But that was not the specific religious anger in question. Jonah was angry with God for showing mercy to repentant sinners who were part of an evil empire. He did not do well to be angry with God about the Lord’s mercy.
We have no immediate answer from Jonah to the Lord’s direct question, but this conversation was not over yet. Jonah takes his spot outside of the city and seems to wait for the unlikely event that he is hoping for, the destruction of Nineveh. In the meantime, the Lord causes the amazing growth of a plant in order to provide shade for his prophet while Jonah waits for good news of judgment. Jonah was very happy about the plant, but the joy of this provision was short-lived. God appointed a worm to destroy the plant, and Jonah lost his shade. Then God turned up the heat and the wind on his prophet, and Jonah was very angry and ready to die over this indignity. God asks his question again, this time about the loss of the plant. “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?”
Now the Lord managed to provoke a response. “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” It is quite a statement to make. What are you angry enough to die over? Are you angry about some providence; a hot sun, a scorching wind, a loss of some comfort, too much mercy from God for the wrong kind of people? Are you angry enough to die about it?
The Lord spoke to Jonah in a way that suggested that Jonah had some mercy for the plant. Israel was God’s plant. She was raised up by the Lord, and she could be justly taken away by the Lord. It was right to care about Israel. It turns out that it was right for God’s people to also care about the other nations of the world, even the bad ones. It was right to be happy about God’s mercy in that generation for Nineveh. God relented concerning the destruction of that city for a time. He cared for the 120,000 children who did not know their right hand from their left. He even cared for the cattle.
Thus ends the book of Jonah. Here we are given the opportunity to laugh at a prophet who was angry about God’s mercy to bad Gentiles. Does it seem like an impossible story to you? Not just the fish and the plant, but impossible that someone zealous for the Lord would hate the fact of the Lord’s mercy toward the ungodly? It should not seem strange to those who know the history of the New Testament. When Christ came to die for the sins of His people, there were many who were offended by His statements concerning mercy to those who seemed to be unworthy. Later the Apostle Paul would face the wrath of his own kind of people, Pharisaic Jews. Some who had even become a part of the church did not approve of the notion that Gentiles could become true followers of Christ without attention to the ceremonial Law of Moses. These were not small matters to many Jews. The suggestion that righteousness could not come from the ceremonial Law made many people very angry.
Christ was angry, but He did not sin. He was angry with self-righteousness. He was angry with commercialism in the worship of God. He was angry with the abuse of the poor. He was so angry with sin that He did something about it. He paid the price for it, so that it could be utterly defeated for the Lord’s elect. On the cross the Lord’s perfect justice met His perfect mercy. One thing the Christ was not angry about was the gracious plan of God to save sinners. He gave His life for it. When those who claim to follow Him hate to see His mercy toward others with a horrible history of sin, the Lord is right to be angry with them.