1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah rose 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 into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
The last 12 books of the Old Testament contain what are known as the Minor Prophets, and it’s probably fair to say that because of the story of Jonah and the great fish, something most of us first heard about when we were children, Jonah is the most well-known of the minor prophets, so today we begin a detailed study of the prophet Jonah.
Jonah teaches us some important lessons about God’s grace for the wicked, His sovereignty over those whom He calls to serve Him, and the struggles we each face with spiritual pride, forgiveness and repentance. The Scottish theologian Sinclair Ferguson wrote, “The book of Jonah is not so much about this great fish that appears in the middle of the book, but that Jonah learns he has a gracious God.”
The book of Jonah challenges us to think about not only what it means to believe the Gospel of grace, but also what it means to live the Gospel of grace.
When we read this story we know so well carefully, we will find that the book of Jonah is extremely challenging, as it addresses many of the prejudices and spiritual pride which lurks in all our hearts.
So if you think the main reason for us spending these next few months studying Jonah is to establish whether the story of Jonah and the fish is fact or fiction, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. The main reason is for us to gain a deeper understanding of the amazing grace of God, while at the same time our spiritual pride, something we all battle with, needs to be exposed and confessed.
One of the central messages of these 4 short chapters for Christians throughout the ages is not that God’s people never sin - we already know this to be true - but that we should be quick to repent of our sin because of God’s grace given to us.
Just like us, Jonah was stubborn and disobedient, so like Jonah, we too have much to learn about the grace of God.
When most people think of Jonah, they think only of the fish that swallowed him. They want to know if this really happened or not, so we do need to deal with this question too. Because the book of Jonah tells of a fish swallowing a man, many have dismissed the story as fiction, but 2 Kings 14 mentions Jonah as living during the time of Jeroboam II, who was the king of Israel in the first half of the 8th century BC. And Jesus referred to Jonah as a real person in Matthew 12 (we’ll look at this in more detail in a moment).
The debates about the authenticity of the story of Jonah, especially whether there ever has been or still is a fish capable of swallowing a man whole, detracts from the real message of this book of the Bible.
James Boice wrote about the authenticity of the story of Jonah. “Those who adhere to the total trustworthiness of the Bible, now as then, rightly insist that Jonah was literally swallowed and was thus preserved alive for three days. To those who believe in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, such an event is not at all impossible. Moreover, there is a direct connection between the two. When unbelieving scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign that might substantiate His extraordinary claims, Jesus replied, (and here he quotes from Matthew 12), ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just 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.’ Jesus referred to the experience of Jonah as a historical illustration of His own literal resurrection, thus reinforcing the truthfulness of this narrative.”
Sceptics of the narrative of Jonah almost always point to the problem of the possibility of a fish swallowing a man whole, who then lived for three days inside the stomach of the fish, only to be vomited onto the shore seemingly unharmed.
But the problem in the book of Jonah is not the fish. It’s Jonah.
God commanded him to go to Nineveh, but he bought a ticket for Tarshish instead. God told him to go east, but in clear defiance of God, Jonah went west.
Jonah knew God and what He was like, and it was precisely because Jonah knew God that he went in the opposite direction. He knew that if he went to Nineveh with a message of judgment and they listened and turned to God in repentance, God would not judge them but would save them. This was the last thing Jonah wanted, so he fled in the opposite direction.
The book of Jonah is unique, in that the narrative focuses on the prophet himself rather than on his message, as with the other Old Testament prophets. When God sent Jonah to Nineveh he rebelled, was swallowed by a fish, repented, and fulfilled his mission after all, but when Nineveh did repent, the reason for Jonah’s disobedience was clear. His great fear was that God would forgive the Ninevites. When his fears were realised, Jonah resented it, as we read in the first 3 verses of chapter 4. “It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’”
Jonah knew God’s grace but was challenged by God to embrace that grace for those he despised.
If we are to understand why Jonah fled to Tarshish instead of obeying the Lord and going to Nineveh, we need to know something about what the world was like in Jonah’s day. As he is mentioned in 2 Kings 14, we know he lived during the reign of Jeroboam, one of the many wicked kings of Israel, the northern kingdom. It was now some 150 years after the kingdoms were divided, and the north in particular had many problems, beginning with constant idolatry and rebellion against God.
They also had political and military challenges. To the north was the Assyrian Empire, the most powerful nation at the time, so the northern kingdom of Israel’s challenge was maintaining its independence as they faced constant invasions and threats of invasions from Assyria.
This was the context of Jonah’s first mention in the Bible in 2 Kings 14. It was during this time when God intervened and brought a famine on the Assyrian Empire, which gave Israel an opportunity to strengthen its borders. Despite his wickedness, God still used Jeroboam to protect Israel. This was an important detail which Jonah never forgot.
“In the fifteenth year of Amaziah the son of Joash, king of Judah, Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel, began to reign in Samaria, and he reigned forty-one years. And he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin. He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which He spoke by His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher. For the Lord saw that the affliction of Israel was very bitter, for there was none left, bond or free, and there was none to help Israel. But the Lord had not said that He would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, so He saved them by the hand of Jeroboam the son of Joash.” (2 Kings 14:23-27)
All of this helps us to understand something about Jonah. He was privileged to see first-hand the grace and mercy of God. Under Jeroboam’s wicked rule, Israel had done nothing to earn God’s mercy. Their apostasy deserved God’s wrath, yet He was merciful to them, and Jonah saw all of this himself, but as we work our way through the book of Jonah, we see that Jonah had much to learn about the grace of God, just as we do today.
We see Jonah’s struggle with the grace of God in the opening verses of this short book. He was mortified at the call he received from God. “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” (Jonah 1:2)
The call itself was not unusual for an Old Testament prophet. They were often tasked with confronting the wicked with their sin, so what was it that bothered Jonah so much?
It was his knowledge of the grace of God. Jonah had already learned what most people do not know, and that is when God calls us to face our sin His purpose is to show His mercy and to save us. And knowing this, Jonah suspected God’s purposes for the hated Ninevites.
Chapter 4:2 again, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”
Like most Israelites, Jonah feared and hated Nineveh, and the last thing he wanted was for God to show them mercy.
The first lesson for us in the book of Jonah is that God knows what is happening in the world. Most people think that if they ignore God, He will ignore them, but the opening verses of Jonah teach us that this is not true. God notices. He is active in the world, and nothing escapes His attention, especially the evil of human sin.
Nineveh was a city whose people knew little to nothing about the one, true God and was completely given over to evil. However, this does not mean that God knew nothing about them.
The same truth applies today. Many people deny God, but God does not deny them, He does not ignore their sin, and He does not fail to extend His mercy for their salvation.
This is a truth that many Christians struggle with. We are quite happy for God’s mercy to be offered to us, but not to those whom we believe deserve judgment, rather than grace.
The ancient Israelites prided themselves as God’s chosen people. They had the words of the prophets and God’s covenant of grace, but they forgot that these things were not exclusively for them, but for all the nations.
Psalm 67:1-2 says, “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make His face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations.” This uncomfortable truth went all the way back to the covenant God made with Abraham. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:2-3)
So Jonah represents the people of Israel in that he resented the idea of Israel’s God sending Israel’s grace to non-Israelites, and especially to the hated Ninevites.
Nineveh was the military capital of Assyria. It was in the northern part of modern-day Iraq, and in Jonah’s day it was a place of violence and evil.
The story of Jonah’s disobedience disturbs us because he is like Christians today who want God’s grace for themselves but God’s judgment against other wicked sinners, especially those who have hurt them. “Lord, bless me and save me, but please curse and destroy them.” We may not actually pray those words, but they do disturb us, because it is often the attitude of our hearts.
We ask for God’s blessing for ourselves while we’d prefer Him to deal severely with those who have done us harm.
Jonah didn’t want Nineveh to be blessed because of what the Ninevites had done before and what they would probably do again. As we’ve seen, despite Jeroboam’s sin, God had treated him with grace and mercy, and it was Jonah who was tasked with giving them this good news, but it wasn’t such good news for Jonah.
He was quite happy for God to treat him with grace - he was, after all a faithful prophet and a servant of the Lord - but he resented God’s grace for the wicked. This kind of self-righteousness is a struggle for us all, and it helps explain why many Christians are reluctant to share the Gospel and the promise of salvation with those whom we consider unworthy of the same grace we have received.
What is the lesson for us here? Simply put, resentment toward God’s grace should serve as a warning that our hearts might be in spiritual decline. We need to guard our hearts against the same resentment as the workers who’d toiled all day towards those who’d worked far less than they had, but received equal pay in the parable Jesus told in Matthew 20. “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the labourers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’” (Matthew 20:8-15)
We’ve all heard stories of people, convicted of the most heinous of crimes, making death bed confessions of faith in Jesus Christ, often the night before they are quite rightly executed, but how do we react to their salvation? Do we rejoice as the angels do, or are we offended and repulsed at the idea that we might have to share heaven with such despicable people?
If we regard evil people around us as a threat to our Christian culture instead of seeing them as lost sinners in need of the Gospel, and if we pray for forgiveness of our sins but justice for them, that should be a big red flag that our hearts have become hardened to the grace of God and the glory of His Gospel that saves.
Jonah’s resentment reveals a deep ignorance of God, because for him, God was the God of the Israelites, not the God of the Ninevites. And having read the last page of the book, as we stand on this side of the cross, we should know better than Jonah. He, after all, never read the words of John 3:16, but we have. Many times.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
We also see in Jonah a lack of understanding of himself as a sinner and of how God justifies repentant sinners. The apostle Paul wrote in Romans 3:23-24, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
When the truth of those words become clear to us, how can we - in fact, how dare we look at the Gospel offer of forgiveness to everyone with anything other than wonder and joy?
Jonah should have been thrilled to receive God’s call to preach in Nineveh, because he should have thought back to when he was saved out of his sin and justified by God’s grace, but sadly, he didn’t. His problem was his spiritual pride. Jonah had become like those who believe they can stand in the presence of God with claims of their own merit, relying in part on their good works or spiritual heritage just as the Pharisees did in Jesus’ day, rather than relying entirely and exclusively on God’s grace.
Jonah just could not wrap his mind around the idea that God would offer grace to the Ninevites. God’s grace was for Israel. Only Israel had the Passover and other ancient festivals. Only Israel had the temple of the Lord and the sacrifices for sin.
God’s call to Jonah was part of His eternal plan to bring salvation to the whole world. This had always been God’s plan, just as He said to Abraham in Genesis 12:3. “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
But Jonah couldn’t see this. He believed in the grace of God, but he resented it when God showed mercy to the wicked, especially those in Nineveh. The lesson he needed to learn was that the purpose of God’s grace is that God would be glorified and that His glory should be seen throughout the world, not just in Israel.
One of Jonah’s fears was that if God showed grace to Nineveh, His grace to Israel would somehow be diminished, but the grace of God never works like that.
As a simple example, when your first child is born, you love that child with all your heart, but when your second child is born, do you divide that love in half and share it equally between the two, now loving your first child only half as much as before?
The grace of God is not shared out equally like you’re carefully dishing up bowls of ice cream, making sure that each child gets exactly the same as everyone else. His grace is boundless. It has no limits, and Jonah should have known this. He should have known that if God blessed Nineveh, Israel would also be blessed.
If you think about it, one of the best ways of being blessed as a Christian, is seeing the light come on in the hearts of those who were previously lost, but are now saved by the grace of God. As Jesus said in Luke 15:10, “I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
So Jonah’s devotion to Israel, which in itself was a good thing, instead of preventing him from going to Nineveh, should have encouraged and motivated him to do just that, rather than trying to run off to Tarshish instead.
But God had another reason for calling Jonah to go to Nineveh. By sending His grace into the heart of paganism and displaying to them His power to save, God intended to provoke His own people to jealousy. All the way back in Deuteronomy 32, God told Moses this would happen if His people disobeyed Him and turned to idolatry.
God, through Moses, had promised blessings on His people if they stayed faithful to Him, but He also warned of the consequences of apostasy, which happened throughout their history, including during the days of Jonah. “They stirred Him to jealousy with strange gods; with abominations they provoked Him to anger. They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded. You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth. The Lord saw it and spurned them, because of the provocation of His sons and His daughters. And He said, ‘I will hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be, for they are a perverse generation, children in whom is no faithfulness. They have made me jealous with what is no god; they have provoked me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are no people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.” (Deuteronomy 32:16-21)
And now it had happened. God was about to make His people jealous with those who are no people (the Ninevites), with a foolish nation (Assyria).
John MacArthur wrote, “Jonah was sent to Nineveh in part to shame Israel by the fact that a pagan city repented at the preaching of a stranger, whereas Israel would not repent though preached to by many prophets.”
This, in a nutshell, is the bigger picture of the story of Jonah, and beginning next week, we will look closer at the details of this book, but hopefully we have already learned some challenging lessons from a story we are familiar with. The story of Jonah is not just something to keep Sunday School children occupied as they colour in pictures of Jonah and the great fish, or whale as the case may be.
God’s grace must always be the chief joy of His people, and the message of the Gospel should remind us that our salvation is a sovereign, merciful, and unmerited gift from God.
His grace should both humble us and lift us up in saving faith. To know God is to know His grace, and part of living in that grace is to tell the world, the Ninevites of our time.
It was an act of grace for God to call Jonah. Is God challenging us with His grace? Is He challenging you, your attitudes toward Him, the church, toward people whom you fear or possibly resent? If He is, it is not only because of His grace for them but also because of His grace for you.
In his commentary on Jonah, James Boice quotes Philippians 1:6. “I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
Then he writes, “Quite often we look at that verse merely as a statement of the eternal security of the Christian, which is correct. God will certainly continue His work with us, regardless of what happens, and will preserve us for heaven. But this verse also means, and we must not miss it, that God is so determined to perfect His good work in us that He will continue to do so with whatever it takes, regardless of the obedience or disobedience of the Christian. Will you go in His way? Then He will bless your life and encourage you. Will you run, as Jonah ran? Then He will trouble your life. If necessary, He will even break it into little pieces, if by so doing He enables you to walk in His way once again. If you disobey, you will find your initial disobedience easy. But after that the way will grow hard. If you obey Him, you will find the way paved with blessing.”
And finally, from the Reformation Study Bible, “Despite the narrative’s focus on the prophet, the book of Jonah is a story about the mercy and love of God. The Lord was the God of Israel, and that nation had been the special recipient of His covenant mercy and salvation. But Jonah, along with many of his countrymen, had responded with a national pride and ethnic particularism that blinded him to the grand scope of God’s grace. Jonah was to learn, along with the nation, that Israel did not have a monopoly on the redemptive love of God. The story affirms the words of Psalm 145:8. ‘The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.’”
Homegroup Study Notes
(Please read the whole of the book of Jonah on your own before you meet, as this will help to understand the “bigger picture” before we go into more detail in the weeks ahead.)
Read Jonah 1:1-3
Assuming you are familiar with the ancient story of Jonah, and having read all 4 chapters beforehand, what are some of the features which were familiar to you, and which parts might you have forgotten about or possibly noticed for the first time?
The usual debates and discussions which centre around the book of Jonah are whether the story is fact or fiction, and if true, what kind of fish or whale it was.
What is really the “main point” of the text?
What was the greatest lesson Jonah needed to learn about a) God and b) himself?
What can we learn about God and ourselves from the story of Jonah?