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.
As we saw in our brief introduction to the book of Jonah last week, this is far more than an interesting story about a well-known Old Testament character. Jonah represented the spiritual pride of the people of Israel, who resented the grace of God shown to pagan Gentiles, and if the truth be told, this attitude also reflects our resentment at times when God shows grace to people we resent.
Jonah’s call though, just like ours, is to serve God and others, and the primary way of serving and glorifying God, is by presenting the hope of the Gospel of Christ to the lost, regardless of where we might feel they fit on the social ladder. Our problem is that at many times and in many situations, we are just like Jonah, disobeying God and rebelling against Him because we not only misunderstand, but even resent God’s grace for others.
God’s call for Jonah to preach in Nineveh shows not only His grace, but also His sovereignty and authority.
Like most of the Old Testament prophecy books, Jonah begins by stressing that the message given to the prophet is the Word of God Himself. The opening verse says, “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah.” As the KJV records many times, “Thus sayeth the Lord.”
Whenever we see this in the Bible, we should be reminded that the words of Scripture are not just inspirational writings of spiritual men, but the actual words of God revealed through human writers. 2 Peter 1:20-21 says, “No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
So contained in the pages of the Bible are not just the teachings of God, but His sovereign word to us. Just as the word of the Lord came to Jonah and all the other Old Testament prophets, the word of the Lord comes to us as we read the Bible. This means that the correct way to approach the Scriptures is with humility and a willingness to be teachable by the Word of God.
God’s sovereign call to Jonah was brief, it was direct, and it was clear. The Bible doesn’t record many details in God’s call to Jonah. Many people will only obey God’s Word when it makes sense to them, but as Christians, we are to submit to and obey His Word regardless of whether it is easy or difficult.
Jonah’s call was hard. Nineveh was not only far away, but it was in the middle of a hostile, violent and evil country a great distance away, in the heart of a violent empire. At the time, Nineveh was one of the largest cities in the world. God referred to it as “that great city.” Chapter 3:3 says, “Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth.” It was a massive city, even by today’s standards, and not only that, but it was nearly 1000km away, an almost unimaginable distance to travel in Jonah’s day, and God called Jonah to go to Nineveh on his own, proclaiming this simple message recorded in the next verse: “Forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
So yes, Jonah’s call was extremely difficult, but this was not the first time this had happened for the people of God. He called Abraham to leave his father’s land and travel to a faraway country. He called Moses to challenge Pharaoh, the most powerful ruler in the world to “let my people go.” Moses’ reply was much like ours would’ve been. “Lord, please send somebody else.” In Isaiah 20, Isaiah was called to go naked and barefoot and prophesy against Egypt for three years. And we know the story of Mary so well. She was called by God to bring the Saviour into the world, risking not only her reputation, but also her impending marriage to Joseph.
Why does God do this? Why are so many of His commands difficult? The first answer is that He is sovereign. Psalm 135:6 says, “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.” He does what He pleases because He is sovereign, but also to reveal His grace to us.
The Bible is full of accounts where the result of God’s challenging calls to His people were merciful acts of deliverance and salvation. Abraham was sent to Canaan to become the father of a great nation of faith. Moses was sent to Egypt to lead the exodus of God’s people from slavery. Mary as no more than a young teenager, with all the inevitable scandal that went with it, gave birth to the Saviour of the world.
When we find that God has called us to a task that seems far more difficult than we think we can handle, we can look back on the examples in the Bible, putting our hope and faith in the truth that God can and does bring glory to Himself through our willingness to obey Him. As Paul wrote in Romans 8:28, “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
Our supreme example is of course, Jesus Himself. He submitted to the Father’s will with joy, even when it meant a cruel death on a cross. Isaiah 53:10 says of Jesus, “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him; He has put Him to grief; when His soul makes an offering for sin.”
Why did Jesus obey the will of the Father and allow Himself to be subject to such unimaginable physical and spiritual torment? Because He knew our salvation depended on His submission to the Father’s will.
Jesus obeyed because He knew and trusted God the Father, just as we should. He knew that God is faithful and that all His purposes are holy and perfect. Jesus loved the Father and delighted to do His will and in so doing He displayed His glory.
Jesus knew that God’s purposes are His glory as He reveals and brings His mercy and grace. Jesus knew that beyond the cross was the resurrection and a crown of glory. Now of course, we will never be called to suffer as much as Jesus did. Only He can bear the cost of human sin, but through our obedience to difficult and challenging calls from God we too can see His power and glory.
“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” (Jonah 1:2) As we saw last week, God was fully aware of the evil and depravity of the Ninevites, and this is why He sent His prophet to them. Jonah was unwilling to go, but eventually he did go there with a message of warning.
It was the righteousness of God that gave that wicked city an opportunity to repent after hearing Jonah preach to them. As wicked as they were, the people of that city were image-bearers of God. It was a warped and twisted image, but an image nonetheless, just like every human being who ever has or ever will live bears the image of our creator God.
Just like those who deny God today, the Ninevites were created by God, and whether they knew it or not, God was their sovereign king too, so why shouldn’t God send His prophet to them to call them to repentance?
How should we respond to God’s call on our lives, remembering that He is sovereign, and He does all things for His glory? Christians who know the Lord and understand His ways should receive the word of the Lord in humble, submissive, and joyful obedience, but sadly, we often don’t, just like Jonah.
God told Jonah to arise, and he arose, but he didn’t go to Nineveh. Instead, he went in the opposite direction to Tarshish. Biblical historians agree that Tarshish was on the far side of the Straits of Gibraltar, on the western coast of modern-day Spain. It was at the end of the known world for Jonah, about as far away from Nineveh that he could possibly go. Verse 3 tells us that he did this to get “away from the presence of the Lord.”
If Jonah wanted to get away from the Lord, Tarshish was the perfect place for him to go. It is mentioned in Isaiah 66:9 as one of the places “that have not heard my fame or seen my glory.” The Bible commentator Douglas Stuart wrote, “Jonah attempted to flee to a place where no fellow believers would be found, hoping that this would help ensure that God’s word would not come to him again. If he stayed in Israel, he could expect to hear more from God, but if he left, he might hear nothing further.”
It’s interesting to note that Jonah began his journey by going south to the Philistine port of Joppa, which was nearly 100km from his hometown of Gath-Hepher. Why Joppa? There were other places much closer where he could have boarded a ship, but Joppa was not an Israelite port, so Jonah would have avoided some awkward questions from his fellow Jews.
He began his attempt to get away from God by going to a place where no-one else knew the one, true God. In many ways, Jonah was just like Christians today who having rebelled against God and find themselves caught up in temptation and sin, will then avoid other Christians by cutting themselves off from the fellowship of the church.
You often hear excuses such as, they were hurt by other people in the church, they don’t like the minister or the music is too old-fashioned or it’s too modern, but the reality is that once we are caught up in sin, we would rather stay in the darkness than risk having the true state of our hearts exposed by coming into the light.
Jonah sinned by trying to evade God.
Firstly, he was sinning against his confession of faith. He was a Jew, a worshipper of Yahweh, the One True and Most High God. Look at the conversation he had with the crew when God sent the storm during his journey to Tarshish. “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” (Jonah 1:8–9)
The fact that Jonah was on his way to Tarshish instead of Nineveh makes a mockery of his confession of faith, and the same is true of confessing Christians who deliberately and wilfully disobey the Word of God.
We know that we are not perfect, and God certainly knows it too. We will never achieve perfection in our Christian walk for the simple reason that we will continue to struggle with temptation and sin, but our desire should be to obey God, rather than wilfully rebel against Him. Just as Joshua challenged the Israelites shortly before his death, we need to decide who we are going to serve and obey.
“Fear the Lord and serve Him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:14-15)
It is one thing for professed atheists and other non-believers to deliberately choose sinful lifestyles, but it is quite another when those who profess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour do so. Our profession of faith should reflect a life yielded to God. John Calvin wrote, “All flee away from the presence of God, who do not willingly obey His commandments.”
A true profession of faith, when God grants repentance and saving faith is reflected in a transformed lifestyle, and when we don’t see that transformation, there is evidence of a false conversion and an empty confession. This was what was at stake for Jonah as he sinned against his confession, but as we know, he did eventually repent.
Secondly, Jonah was sinning against all that he had known and grown up learning. Not only was he a prophet, but he had been raised as a devout Jew. He knew God and He knew what God was like, but now he risked losing it all by his disobedience. One of the great sadnesses we see in our day is young adults who, having been raised in the church and have Godly parents, leaving the fellowship of the church, and in some cases even their faith in God. Again, they may have many excuses, but the bottom line is that they have made a choice to disobey. The message to us is that we cannot stop praying for our loved ones to return to God and receive His grace and mercy.
The third mistake that Jonah made was thinking that he could flee from the presence of God. God knows all things, and Jonah knew this. David wrote in Psalm 139:7-12, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.”
Jonah lived long after the psalms were written, and as a devout Jew, he would have known the words of Psalm 139 very well, yet he had somehow fooled himself into thinking that he could escape from the Lord.
If we think there are places we can go and things we can do which God will never know about, we, just like Jonah, are fooling ourselves. The world is hurtling down a slippery slope of depravity and sin, the likes of which we have never seen before, and many sinful, deviant lifestyle choices are celebrated not only by those who do not believe in God, but incredibly by many who profess to be Christians.
What are these people thinking? Do they really believe that God doesn’t see or doesn’t care? There are churches and church leaders all over the world who openly defy the law of God, while at the same time they lie to their deceived followers, saying that because God is a loving and forgiving God, we can live as we please, and there will be no consequences for our sin and rebellion.
These people deliberately ignore passages of Scripture like Galatians 6:7-8. “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.”
We cannot escape God. There is no place where He is not found, and no path of sin we can choose which will escape either His presence or His judgment.
Verse 3 tells us that instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah went “down” to Joppa as his first step of disobedience. It is always a step down when we rebel against God’s will. As we saw last Sunday, Jonah used the excuse that he didn’t want God to show mercy to the Ninevites, but in reality it was the presence of God that he was trying to escape from. One of the main lessons we can learn from Jonah’s story is that we can run away from our home, Christian fellowship and the church, but we cannot flee from God. This was a lesson Jonah was going to learn the hard way.
Our profession of faith in Jesus Christ demands a life that is yielded to God in obedience. Our sin always denies something about God and who He is. Sin either denies God as our provider, Father, Saviour, or judge. Sin denies God’s perfect attributes of His goodness, power, holiness, and love.
And our sin, without exception, will take us in the same direction it took Jonah: Down.
God told him to arise, but in his deliberate disobedience, he went down to Joppa, down into the hold of the ship, and eventually down into the depths of the sea. The final destination of unrepentant sin is down into the eternal depths of hell, far away from the presence of God’s mercy and grace, but not away from His wrath and judgment.
It’s been said many times that hell is a place where God is not, but that’s not true. His wrath and fury at sin and rebellion is the constant and eternal companion of those who are not saved by the blood of Jesus Christ.
There is a small, yet interesting detail in verse 3. We’re told that Jonah paid the fare before boarding the ship. Donald Grey Barnhouse wrote, “Jonah did not get to where he was going, since he was thrown overboard, and he obviously did not get a refund on his ticket. So he paid the full fare and did not get to the end of his journey. It is always that way. When you run away from the Lord you never get to where you are going, and you always pay your own fare. On the other hand, when you go the Lord’s way you always get to where you are going, and He pays the fare.”
Eternal life is the destination, and Jesus has paid the fare.
We’ve already seen that Jonah couldn’t bear the thought of God extending grace and mercy to Nineveh. He said so himself in chapter 4. He knew about and had experienced for himself the grace of God, yet it was his bitterness towards the people he hated that caused him to fall into sin, so what can we learn from this, and how can we protect ourselves from making the same mistakes as Jonah?
Firstly, Jonah proves to us the value of Christian fellowship within the family of the church. Sin had deceived him, just as it will deceive us if we’re not careful. Because of his sin, Jonah convinced himself that he was right, and God was wrong.
The writer to the Hebrews, using the example of the rebellion during the exodus wrote, “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.’ For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was He provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” (Hebrews 3:12-19)
One of ways we are able to protect ourselves is by being with fellow believers. Instead of going to Joppa, Jonah should have gone to the temple, a place where he could talk about his fears about what God had called him to do. Christian accountability is such a valuable thing. Get connected to and stay connected to your brothers and sisters in Christ, because there will be times when you need their ministry and counsel, and other times when they will need yours.
Asaph wrote in Psalm 73:2-3, “As for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” I won’t ask for a show of hands, but how many of us, like Jonah with the Ninevites and Asaph with the wicked people around him envy the “prosperity of the wicked?”
What made the difference for Asaph? He gives the answer in verses 16 and 17. “When I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end.”
As I mentioned at our Wednesday Bible Study last week, even though this life is hard and quite frankly, unfair at times, within the fellowship of the church we are called to encourage one another and remind each other that we live in this world with one eye on eternity, and the hope of Heaven because of the grace we have received.
Whenever we are discouraged, or our fellow Christians are discouraged, we look to the cross of Jesus Christ, and what God has promised us through the sacrificial death of His only Son. He is our great hope.
There is a clear warning for us in Jonah’s story. If he, a man of God and one of His prophets could fall into such grievous sin, what sins might we be capable of committing?
God has given us His Word, the Bible, the blessing of our Christian family as we meet together regularly to worship, plus of course, the gift of prayer, which we will see was sadly lacking in Jonah’s story.
As I said at the outset, the book of Jonah is far more than an interesting story about a well-known Old Testament character. It was not written to condemn Jonah but to warn us against the pitfalls and consequences of temptation and sin. There is also tremendous hope for us, just as Jonah had, because our God is patient, He is faithful, He is loving, and He is gracious to His children.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read Jonah 1:1-3
We’re told in verse 1 that “the word of the Lord came to Jonah.”
God may not speak audibly to us today, but what does this verse teach us about the authority of the Bible? (See also 2 Peter 1:20-21)
There is no doubt that the call Jonah received was extremely hard, which was part of his reason for disobeying the call of God. How have you struggled with believing and obeying His word?
Read Isaiah 53:4-10
Discuss the obedience of Jesus to the will of the Father. While we will never be called to suffer as much as Jesus did, what can we learn from His obedience?
Verse 3 says that Jonah “went down” to Joppa. This provides a picture of how rebellion against God will always take us down and away from Him. How have you experienced this truth, and the grace of God despite your rebellion?