Jonah Was a Rebellious Prophet

The Welcome

We are starting a summer series on the Old Testament book of Jonah, one of the minor prophets with a big story. In fact, the story of Jonah is one of the most recognized stories in the Old Testament.

Jonah 1:1–6 CSB

1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me.” 3 Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. 4 But the Lord threw a great wind onto the sea, and such a great storm arose on the sea that the ship threatened to break apart. 5 The sailors were afraid, and each cried out to his god. They threw the ship’s cargo into the sea to lighten the load. Meanwhile, Jonah had gone down to the lowest part of the vessel and had stretched out and fallen into a deep sleep. 6 The captain approached him and said, “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up! Call to your god. Maybe this god will consider us, and we won’t perish.”

[pray]

You will find a place on your handout to take notes and there is a scan code there to get it on your connected smart device if that’s your preference.

I. Who Was Jonah?

A. Jonah was a real person

While many modern people consider Jonah’s writings to be fictional, scripture holds him to be a real prophet. He introduces himself at the beginning of his book as Jonah, the son of Ammitai, which agrees with the record in...

2 Kings 14:25 CSB

He restored Israel’s border from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word the Lord, the God of Israel, had spoken through his servant, the prophet Jonah son of Amittai from Gath-hepher.

Jonah was a prophet of God during the reign of King Jeroboam between 800 BC to 750 BC. He lived in the northern kingdom of Israel.

Tradition has always held that Jonah wrote this book, however there is no outside verification of this assumption. Whoever wrote the book they were highly critical of Jonah’s work as a prophet. If Jonah wrote this book, then it can be viewed as his confession of a sinful attitude in response to God. The book is not really biblical prophecy, which is centered around God’s message. The book is actually centered around the childishly stubborn Jonah, who refuses to do the work that God had called him to complete.

While theologians debate the content of Jonah’s book—which is the story of the reluctant prophet who suffers a bout of God’s punishment as he stumbles his way toward in fulfilling God’s call—the book actually contains a rich message for all of us and a characterization of God that reveals his mercy, purpose, and love for people in the world.

Even though the book of Jonah is an ancient text, the message is perfectly relevant for readers in our time and in our cultural context.

B. What is Prophecy?

Prophecy in the Bible is an oral divine message given by God through a chosen individual that is directed to speak on God’s behalf to a specific person or people group for the purpose of eliciting a specific response.

If prophecy is about bringing a message from God to the people of Nineveh, then Jonah could be considered an antiprophet, since his primary focus seems to be escaping the assigned task or arguing with God over the task.

I have labeled Jonah a rebellious prophet, though the words reluctant, resistant, and recalcitrant could equally be applied.

Jonah did not want to do what God asked him to do. This is primarily because Jonah did not believe that the people of Nineveh deserved a chance at redemption. Jonah thought he knew better than God and argued with God about his plan for Nineveh.

C. Who Were the People of Nineveh?

Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria and the evil within the city had come to God’s attention. God tells Jonah...

Jonah 1:2 CSB

2 “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me.”

It is not an unusual thing in the Old Testament to hear of God sending prophets to preach to foreign nations, seeking their repentance. It seems to be the norm that God would send messengers to give the foreign people fair notice that destruction was coming before his judgement was enacted and punishment followed.

Assyria was a dominant empire located in modern-day northern Iraq that preceded the Babylonian empire that followed after its destruction in the 7th century BC. Assyria was a polytheistic and militaristic culture, though religion was not the purpose of their militaristic nature. However, it may have much to do with why God opposed them as a foreign people.

The people of Israel hated Assyria because they opposed God and because of their military conflict and the evil and sadistic nature of how the Assyrians punished their enemies. I won’t go into any detail, but the torturous treatment of their enemies was remarkable and fed a hatred and prejudice against the Assyrian people.

D. Why is this Event Recorded in Scripture?

This event is recorded in scripture for one reason only: to teach us something about God.

Jonah 1:2 CSB

2 “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me.”

It is not unusual to find people that think the book of Jonah is a fictional account. They might label it a parody or an allegory. Almost always their reasoning for this position is that they just cannot believe the story as it is recorded in the Bible. They will often characterize the biblical writing as a fairy tale or children’s story.

And in fact, the Book of Jonah is included and told in story books, though very rarely without the inclusion of a moral to the story. The children’s story version focuses on Jonah running away and being tossed in the ocean to be eaten by the fish (or whale as it is often told). The children’s story will often end with Jonah being spit out on the shore with no further explanation.

Jonah’s story is one that is included in our canon of scripture for a couple of reasons. The New American Commentary gives us a good reason for its inclusion:

The New American Commentary: Amos, Obadiah, Jonah (1. God’s Instruction and the Prophet’s Flight (1:1–3))

Many people in the world today ignore God and assume that he also ignores them. Many believe that God set the world into motion and allows it to continue along unnoticed. This text portrays God as one who notices, as a God who is active, and as a God who takes sin seriously

While this book is a narrative account of how Jonah resisted God, it is ultimately about how God pursues and provides redemption in places that don’t always make sense to us.

Principle: God notices and takes action against sinful behavior.

Jonah’s story tells us something else about God: While God is separate from sin. And God must judge sin. God is also compassionate and provides a way of redemption that leads to salvation from sin.

E. Jesus Believed in the Story of Jonah

Jesus taught his disciples truths about himself that was based on the belief that Jonah was a real person.

When the scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign, he pointed to the story of Jonah for verification...

Matthew 12:39–41 CSB

39 He answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation demands a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. 41 The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at Jonah’s preaching; and look—something greater than Jonah is here.

Jesus pointed to the redemptive story of Jonah and said, in effect, “If you can believe in that, then I am even greater.” In an alternate record of the same conversation in Luke 11, Jesus said that Jonah was a sign of redemption to the people of Nineveh just as he himself was a sign of redemption to the people of Israel.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time debating the truth of the story of Jonah. We are going to approach this book as Jesus approached it, as a true story that tells the story of the compassion and mercy of a judge that judges our sinful ways and calls for our repentance, so that we might be saved from our own destruction.

We’ll spend the next few weeks looking at the account of Jonah. As we look at this, we’ll be looking specifically for the relevance of this story to our modern lives.

II. What Did the Prophet Do When God Called Him?

Jonah was a prophet. He had one job. His job was to listen to God’s message and deliver it to whomever it was that God wanted to hear the message. And the Word of the Lord came to Jonah. Let’s look again at verse 2...

Jonah 1:2 CSB

2 “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me.”

The message is clear. God gave Jonah three actions to take… he said 1) Get up! 2) Go to Nineveh, and 3) preach against it. And he gave a reason for the task: he had heard of the evil practices in Nineveh.

Apparently God’s role as judge spurred him to action and his next step was to send a prophet to preach the truth to Nineveh.

But what did Jonah do? That’s right, he ran away.

Jonah 1:3 CSB

3 Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence.

Again, Jonah had one job and he failed to do it. He ran away! In fact, he ran fast and far from the place that God sent him to. He ran in the opposite direction and book passage for a place about as far away as he possibly could have gone.

Tarshish is about 2500 miles from Nineveh. While this number is probably speculative, one commentary said that it might have taken him as long as a year of travel to arrive at Tarshish.

Have you ever done anything like that in your own life?

Has God ever asked you to do something and you did the exact opposite?

God speaks to us all the time. We receive the Word of the Lord through scripture and through hearing the message here in church and in Sunday School. God can sometimes bring a word to us through our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Have you ever received a word from God?

The word of God is an active word. It speaks to us at our deepest place...

Hebrews 4:12 CSB

12 For the word of God is living and effective and sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Let me say this:

if you never open the word of the Lord

if you never study it

if you never seek to understand it

if you never seek to apply it to your live

if you never look to discuss it with others

if you never practice it

What good is it to your life if you’re going to ignore what it says?

Sometimes God asks us to do things we don’t want to do.

Sometimes he tells us things we don’t want to hear.

Sometimes we think we know better than God.

Sometimes we resist authority or we have a feeling that “we don’t want to do that” or “I think I know what’s best for me.”

I know that I can think of events that happened in my life when I was a younger man where I resisted what God was telling me to do. God called me to ministry and I said “Yes, Lord.” But I wanted to put my own requirements on God’s call. I said, “God I’ll go overseas as a missionary, but please don’t send me to Africa.” Do you know where I wound up going?

I responded to a call to ministry with no idea what God wanted, but I began to tell him, “God I don’t want to be a pastor. They have a tough time of it with all the arguing that happens in their churches. I don’t know if I want to do that. God, I tell you this much, I’ll do whatever you want, but don’t ask me to be a pastor.” And what did I wind up doing?

I just delayed the inevitable by resisting what God wanted from me in my service to him.

What about you? What is it that God has asked of you that you don’t want to do?

Some of you ...

God has put a calling on your life to ministry and you have told God no.

God has asked you to forgive someone who hurt you and you have told God no.

God has asked you to serve your church in leadership and you have told God no.

God has asked you to tithe and give sacrificially to your church and you have said no.

Some of you need to right wrong relationships

I can see that some of you like nice things, some of you go on fancy vacations, some of you have for all of your wants, but some of you don’t give to your church the way that you should.

I can see that some of you have been asked to step up and serve in this way or lead in that way, but you decide that you are busy and respond that you don’t have time to take on something else.

So your church goes wanting without enough to meet its needs financially or service-wise.

Some of you have bitter and distant relationships in your lives that need to be restored and covered with grace and peace. But you don’t want to do what God is asking you to do in restoring those relationships and bringing forgiveness to the table.

So, I ask you again, what about you? What is it that God has asked of you that you don’t want to do?

Are you willing to resolve some things in your life and make some changes?

We’ll see as we go on further in this study of the Book of Jonah, how God uses circumstances in our lives to get our attention and move us in new directions.

I left my pursuit of ministry as a young man because of turmoil and drama in the Southern Baptist Convention. I focused on my career and my business and God called me back to ministry many years later.

I sometimes wonder where I would be and what I would be doing now if I had not left what God asked me to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to be here today and thrilled that I get to serve as the pastor of this church. But I do wonder what it was that I was refusing all those years ago.

I wonder what would have been different for Jonah if he had just responded positively to God and done what he was asked to do.

And I wonder what could be different for you if you would say yes to God and do what he is asking you to do?

Conclusion

Noah said yes to build the ark

Abraham said yes when God asked him to sacrifice his only son

Moses said yes when God told him to go to Pharaoh and ask him to let the Israelites go

Esther said yes to save her people

Jacob said yes when God appeared to him in a dream

Joseph said yes when God asked him to forgive his brothers who beat and sold him into slavery

Isaiah said yes when God willed for a voice to cry out to the people on His behalf

It was Jonah that said “no” to God and when he did finally say “yes”, he did it grudgingly, as you’ll see in coming weeks.

Saying “yes” to God means that we are willing

to be who God wants us to be.

to do what God asks us to do.

and that we are willing to become exactly what God wants for us to become

as he forms us and shapes us in his image,

to do his works,

and accomplish his plan for this world.

I want to open up the altar this morning to give you a chance to say “yes” to God. There are as many ways for you all to respond to this as there are people in this room.

Some of you may need to say “yes” to an invitation to know and follow Christ.

Others of you may need to say “yes” to baptism or membership in this church.

And still others of you may need to do business with God working through your own personal path of responding positively to God’s invitation to join him in his work.

How will you respond?

I will open the altar and invite you to spend this time reflecting and praying with God to respond to his invitation.