Van-guard (văn’gärd), noun: “The foremost or leading position in a trend or movement.”
the journey forward... exploring the emerging church... navigating spiritual formation... seeking to transform the world... ...through Christ
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Van-guard (văn’gärd), noun: “The foremost or leading position in a trend or movement.” the journey forward... exploring the emerging church... navigating spiritual formation... seeking to transform the world... ...through Christ |
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Story of Jonah for Grown-Ups, Part 1
Wow! He got ate up by a whale! Cool! Was it slimy inside? Was there all sorts of half-digested fish everywhere? Did it smell gross? And then the whale barfed him up on the beach! Coooool! Jonah just sort of plopped on the beach—according to the images in our books, a two point landing. There is even a picture in one of my son Trey’s books that depicts a happy, perfectly dry and groomed Jonah waving to the whale from the beach, as if to say, “Thanks for the ride!” The creators of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber are coming out with their first full-length feature film to be released in theatres this Fall—Jonah, A Veggie Tales Movie. While I am sure this will be a very entertaining movie, I want to you, as grown-ups, to know the true meaning of this story.
The story of Jonah for kids gets all caught up in the wrong things sometimes. But the fact is this: Jonah is more than a kid’s story. It is a very relevant and dramatic story meant to teach us adults what life as a follower of God is all about. It is the story of a classic battle of wills: God’s will vs. Jonah’s will. And as we read through the story, we are to be astonished at the bravado of this Jonah. He is told what to do by God himself and he says, basically, “Nope. Ain’t gonna do it. So there.” It is a story that has an intended purpose on its readers…that is, on you and me. We are to watch Jonah and realize that what Jonah is doing we do. The purpose of the story of Jonah is to help us wake up to our consistent and insistent denial of the will of God in our lives. This short, four-chapter story is in our Bibles to help us evaluate ourselves in light of the life of Jonah. We are to see that we, like Jonah, know all the right things to say, but when it comes to our actions, we actually (all too often) are doing what Jonah does in this story: we run from God, we pretend to pray, we pretend to share the gospel with people, and then we pout about God not doing things the way we would have done it. What a story! In the next four weeks, we will watch the epic story of Jonah. This story ranks right up there with Lord of the Rings and Star Wars for its drama and action and special effects. So hold on for a terrific story.
Look at Jonah with me. 1The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2“Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” 3But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD. (1:1-3)
“The word of the LORD came to Jonah.” “The LORD” is your English Bible’s way of rendering the name of our God—Yahweh (some of you are familiar with another rendering of this name—Jehovah). Yahweh’s word comes to Jonah—explicitly telling him that he has a calling on his life. “I want you to go to Nineveh and preach—the people in Nineveh have been doing terrible things, and they need to repent of their wickedness and turn to me and ask for forgiveness so that I can show them my mercy and grace.” Jonah hears this and balks. Why do you suppose Jonah decides not to go to Nineveh? Perhaps he thought “Nineveh is a ‘great city,’ a city of many people who will hear this message and scoff at it and ridicule me as God’s messenger. I will be seen as a fanatic and a fool. I will be laughed at and either pushed aside as irrelevant or, worse, hurt or killed! After all, the people in that city do have a terrible reputation!” Perhaps Jonah was apprehensive, perhaps he was afraid. But the text does not say that. We will discover the real reason why Jonah refused to go to Nineveh in chapter 4.
All we are told in this chapter is that “Jonah ran away from the LORD”, and that he “sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD.” Jonah is told to “go,” and he “went”—in the opposite direction!
Why do we run from God? Maybe we do not really believe God when he says that we will find joy and satisfaction in being in His will. Maybe we have bought that age-old lie, the one the serpent told Eve in the garden, that God really is not trustworthy. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how fast we can move to flee from the presence of God.
But wasn’t Jonah paying attention in church when they read Psalm 139?
Where can I go from your Spirit? Even “on the far side of the sea” Jonah will not be able to flee from God’s presence. How can Jonah hope to ditch God in Tarshish?
My Old Testament professor at Trinity, Dr. Dennis Magary, was right when he said, commenting on this verse said, “What destroys the church’s work of ministry? It’s not the liberals. It’s not the feminists. It’s not those Muslims. It’s the Christians who calculatingly run away from the will of God.” If all the people who claim to follow Jesus Christ were to suddenly decide to actually follow their Lord’s command to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20), what would be the result? Even if a small sliver of evangelical Christians would decide to quit running from God’s will to be God’s messengers of grace and peace and love in a wicked world, what would be the result.
But we are apprehensive, we are afraid, or… we are seeking to find a luxury liner to Tarshish instead of the rough road to Nineveh.
The result of disobeying God can be that we find ourselves in a stormy time in our life. But we do the best we can to pretend that the storm is not really there. 4Then the LORD sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. 5aAll the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. The storm hits, the ship is tossed and turned, the water is engulfing the ship and it is beginning to sink! What do the sailors do? What anybody would do in a life-threatening situation: They cry out to his own god, and they throw stuff off the ship to try to keep the ship from sinking.
But what does Jonah do? 5bBut Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. Everybody else is praying and sweating. Jonah has gone down, and is sleeping! Jonah is indifferent to the storm, just like he is indifferent to those precious people in Nineveh. He tried to escape God by getting on this boat, and now he is trying to escape God again by sleeping during God’s storm.
6The captain went to him and said, “How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us, and we will not perish.” The captain is astonished! “Hey! Get up! Are you nuts? We are all calling on our gods, why are you not doing the same? Our gods are not able to help us, maybe yours will!” How can Jonah not be praying at a time like this? Jonah never does pray! During this whole chapter, we never see Jonah interact with God. He is on the run. The last thing he wants is to actually talk with God! Honest confession time: It is far too often that the last thing I want to do is to pray. What am I afraid of? Most of all, I am afraid of God—that his mercy will make me the kind of person he wants me to be and to do the things he wants me to do. It’s easier to run than to honestly confront who I am and allow God to change me from the inside out. But somebody looking at me at those times would say, like the ship’s captain said to Jonah, “Get up! Stop sleeping! Don’t you see the terrible storm in your life caused by your running from God? Pray! God will love you and show his mercy to you!”
7Then the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. 8So they asked him, “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?” The sailors ask Jonah these questions, and notice that Jonah’s answer sounds quite pious. “I am a HEBREW,” he says, and then (literally), “I fear the LORD Yahweh, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” Oh, really, Jonah? He says all the right things. He’s got all the right answers. He sounds pious and godly. But the narrative has made it plain, hasn’t it, that Jonah does not really have a worshipful heart toward God, the definition of that old phrase, “the fear of the Lord.” The sailors ask him honest questions, and all Jonah does is quote a Bible verse to them.
10This terrified them and they asked, “What have you done?” (They knew he was running away from the LORD, because he had already told them so.) Notice, the sailors have more respect and awe for Jonah’s God than Jonah does! They become “terrified” because the God that Jonah’s people know is the real God who created this sea that is now a threat to their lives. They realize that Jonah is fleeing the God who made the sea and land—by fleeing on the sea! They see this for what it is! STUPID! “Jonah, if you know that the LORD made this sea, why would you think you could flee from him on this sea? Duh!” Jonah tells them to throw him into the sea. Think about that for a moment: Jonah would rather die than do what God wants him to do. “Running to Tarshish didn’t work, sleeping didn’t work. Then kill me!” James Montgomery Boice writes, “This is the course of sin. What begins easily with just a step to the west instead of the east soon accelerates into a maelstrom of self-destruction.”
Notice the sailor’s reaction to this as well! Instead of throwing Jonah overboard, they toiled all the more to try to row back to the shore. The last thing they wanted to do was to anger this God Yahweh more by throwing a man overboard! Through this experience, these sailors, these pagans, start to act more godly than the one who is supposed to be the very prophet of God!
14Then they cried to the LORD, “O LORD, please do not let us die for taking this man’s life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, O LORD, have done as you pleased.” Isn’t that incredible? These rough and tough sailors—the last people you would think would humbly pray to God—they recognize that they must put themselves at the mercy of the LORD, Yahweh. They understand what God’s prophet refuses to understand—look at the end of verse 14: “…you, O LORD, have done as you pleased.” God will do as he pleases. Jonah does not get that. The sailors do. But they get something wrong in their prayer: Jonah is not an “innocent man.” He has been disobedient. He is the cause of their distress. This is why it is a lie that we can go about our sinful lives and believe it does not harm anybody else. Our actions, very often, do have ill effects on others. Even our secret sins of disobedience have the effect of hardening our hearts toward what God wants for our lives. Many of us have bought into the lie that we can live one way in private, while living another way in public. But when you live in selfishness in secret it is very hard to live in selflessness in public. This is summed up in the word, “Integrity.” “Integrity” has this dictionary definition: “The quality or condition of being whole or undivided.”
It can tear you apart spiritually and emotionally to live a life without the integrity of your private and your public life.
The sailors pray to God, and then they finally do what Jonah suggests—they throw him into the sea. It is their last resort. And it works!
15Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. Jonah said he “feared the Lord,” but these men really do “fear the Lord!” How ironic. Jonah was not interested in bringing these men to faith in God. But God, in his sovereignty, had ordained that this situation would be used to convert these men. This is a continuing theme throughout the book of Jonah. Jonah does not desire to see people come to know God, but God will not be thwarted in his merciful plan to save people. Jonah runs from God, but wherever he goes, there is God…still doing what God does: Bringing people into a relationship with Himself. These sailors come to “fear the LORD,” the same words in the Hebrew that was earlier translated to “worship the LORD.”
My and your job is simple: Simply tell people who Jesus is, and how he is making a loving difference in our life. Tell your story. If Jesus is central to your life, then it must be central to your life to let others know about your love for him and his love for them.
We can either take part and experience what it means to have true purpose and meaning in life, or we can become Jonahs—running from God and watching as he does his work outside of our cooperation. This is especially significant for us here at Vanguard Church. If we really want to see our church make an eternal impact on people who do not yet know Jesus Christ, it is incumbent on us, if we are running from God’s will, to stop! And to start sharing the love of Jesus with everyone each one of us comes in contact with. If we do not, we will see other churches grow but we will falter. Because God is at work still—he has not stopped reaching people with the Good News of Jesus. The question is this: Are we going to take part in this wonderful activity?
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