Looking for Loopholes

Let’s talk about loopholes. Who loves a good loophole?

Now, from what I can tell there are two types of loopholes. First, there’s what I’ll call the intentional loophole. Think of the tax code, for instance.

Congress sets up the tax structure, but then they make exceptions and adjustments, and they give tax credits that are designed to reduce the tax burden for various groups.

So, for instance, owning a home allows you to deduct your mortgage interest from your taxes. If you’re a homeowner, you can take advantage of that significant loophole in the tax law.

There are similar loopholes for college tuition, for dependents living in your household, and for lots of other things. They’re perfectly legal, as they were designed INTO the system. They’re in the tax structure intentionally.

Then, there’s the OTHER type of loophole. I’ll call it the letter loophole. This is the kind of loophole that follows the LETTER of the law, but violates the spirit of the law.

Maybe you had an 11 p.m. curfew when you were growing up, and before you left the house, Dad said, “Don’t be late tonight.” Well, under the letter loophole, you might come home at 12:30 a.m. and say, “Hey, it’s not late — it’s EARLY!”

Or maybe Mom said not to eat a bunch of sweets before dinner, so you figured it was OK to finish a whole bag of potato chips. They’re not sweet, right?

Or maybe you weren’t allowed to ride your bike outside of the neighborhood when you were growing up. But nobody said anything about riding someone ELSE’S bike — or riding your own bike as far as you were allowed and then walking the rest of the way — or, if you were particularly dumb, hitching a ride with a stranger.

Kids — and perhaps especially teenagers — are masters of the letter loophole. But I’d suggest to you that, even as adults, we continue to look for loopholes. We just call them rationalizations. We’ve loopholed even the word “loophole.”

While I was thinking yesterday about how to introduce today’s message, Annette and her daughter, Desiree were working on a puzzle in the other room.

Annette called out and asked me how my sermon was going, and I responded that I was trying to come up with a story about loopholes.

Then, I heard Desi say, “Loopholes? I LOVE loopholes.” And I responded, “I’m sure you do. We ALL do.”

And that’s a fact. We’d all like to be able to get away with something while CLAIMING — hopefully with just the right amount of self-righteous indignation that we’d done just what we were supposed to do without doing anything we’d been told explicitly NOT to do.

It feels like we got away with something. But if it feels like you got away with something, guess what? You probably did something you SHOULDN’T have done.

Today, as we continue our series in the Book of Jonah, we’re going to see Jonah, the reluctant prophet, seemingly finding a loophole in God’s calling to go to Nineveh and preach a message warning of God’s impending judgment upon that great Assyrian city.

We’re going to see a couple of synonyms for the word “disobedience.” And we’re going to see the seventh of 12 spiritual growth indicators in the life of a follower of Jesus.

Let’s look at the text of today’s passage first. Then we’ll review how we got here. And then we’ll take a closer look at today’s text for some important lessons.

We’re picking up in verse 1 of chapter 3 in the Book of Jonah.

Jonah 3:1–4 NASB95

1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and proclaim to it the proclamation which I am going to tell you.” 3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three days’ walk. 4 Then Jonah began to go through the city one day’s walk; and he cried out and said, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

Now, the last time we saw Jonah, he was lying on a beach somewhere alongside the Mediterranean Sea, covered in fish vomit.

And as an aside, I’m not quite sure what it says about me OR my preaching that last week’s sermon about puke had more people talking than any other I’ve ever preached. Maybe it just says something about YOU guys.

Anyway, I hope you remember that commanding the great fish to vomit Jonah onto dry land was God’s gracious provision for Jonah’s rescue from the sea.

But it was also intended as an object lesson for Jonah, for the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and for us that our disobedience to God leaves such a foul taste in his mouth that it essentially makes Him want to throw up.

God had called Jonah to go to Nineveh and proclaim His message of warning to these people who’d been such brutal and violent enemies of Israel. But Jonah hated the Ninevites, and he didn’t want God to give them a chance to repent and be saved.

So, he took off in the opposite direction, boarded a boat bound for Tarshish — as far as he could go away from Nineveh — and went to sleep down in the hold of the ship.

And then God, who’s sovereign over everything in this story, as He is over everything in our own lives today, sent a storm that threatened to sink the ship.

All the pagan sailors aboard prayed to their own false gods, but the storm raged on. So, they drew lots to try and see who’d brought this calamity upon them, and God made the lot fall to Jonah, who’d had to be roused from his slumber.

But instead of praying that God would forgive his disobedience and then committing himself to the task God had given him, Jonah told the sailors if they threw him overboard, the storm would cease. He’d rather have died than obey God in this task.

So, they did. And the storm stopped. And the pagan sailors prayed to God and made sacrifices of thanksgiving to Him.

And just as he was sure he was about to drown, Jonah was swallowed by a great fish that God had sent to rescue him. During his three days and nights in the belly of the fish, he prayed a great song of thanksgiving that lacked one important detail: repentance.

But God was still showing Jonah His grace. So, after three days, He commanded the fish to vomit, and out pops Jonah, covered in fish guts and bile, and he finds himself once again back on dry land.

That’s where we find him in today’s passage, though one hopes that by now he’s found a place to take a shower.

And once again, just as it did in the first verse of this book, the word of the Lord comes to Jonah. And it’s nearly the same word he’d received way back in verse 1 of chapter 1. “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and proclaim.” Cry out, as it’s translated in chapter 1.

God hasn’t changed His tune regarding the Ninevites, and He hasn’t changed His tune regarding Jonah.

What’s different this time is that JONAH has changed, at least partially. His time in the belly of the fish taught him how terrifying it is to be apart from the presence of God, despite having tried to flee God’s presence earlier int he narrative.

So, when the word of the Lord comes to him a second time, he finally obeys and heads to Nineveh. Jonah finally responds to the word of the Lord. And Nineveh will respond to it even more completely in the passage we’ll study next week.

And we look at this verse and think, “Well, Jonah, it’s about time. You shouldn’t ignore the word of God.”

But let me remind you that we, too, have the word of the Lord, even if we don’t hear from Him audibly, like Jonah did.

We have the very words of God right here in His Word, right here in Scripture. The Bible isn’t just a collection of stories and ideas about how to live a better life. THESE are the VERY WORDS OF GOD.

And if we’re seeking the presence of God in our lives as followers of Jesus, then we need to respond to the very words of God in faithful obedience.

Among other things, that means being IMMEDIATELY obedient to what God reveals to us in His Word.

Here’s your first synonym for disobedience: delayed obedience.

“Stop hitting your sister” doesn’t mean stop hitting your sister in five minutes. It doesn’t mean hit her once more and THEN stop. It means stop hitting her NOW. Right?

But we love the letter loophole. We love to rationalize things.

“Lord, I’ll go and apologize to that person tomorrow; I’ve got too much going on today.” “Lord, I’ll write the tithe check NEXT week, and then I’ll make up the difference over the coming weeks.” “Lord, I’ll go on that mission trip you’ve been calling me to NEXT time; right now, I can’t get away from my responsibilities here.”

Friends, delayed obedience is DISobedience.

Now, the God of second chances MIGHT be gracious enough to GIVE you the second chance to be obedient, as He did with Jonah. But He might not. In fact, the Bible is littered with examples of people who DIDN’T get a second chance to obey.

For one example, God refused to allow Moses to enter the Promised Land after that great leader had just ONE instance of faithless disobedience.

God is sovereign, and in His sovereignty, He is merciful to whom He desires to show mercy, and He is compassionate to whom He desires to show compassion.

He gives us grace when we deserve condemnation, but He also tells us not to test His grace.

In Jonah’s case, even in his disobedience, he received grace. And so, God says, “Arise, go to Nineveh.”

In other words, “Jonah, stop going down. It’s time to come up — up from the depths of the sea, up from the belly of the fish, up from all that vomit on the seashore. It’s time to get back into the center of MY will, Jonah. It’s time for you to share MY heart, even for the people of Nineveh. It’s time to TRUST me.”

So, finally, we see Jonah doing what God tells him to do. He arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord.

He would finally deliver God’s message to the people of this “exceedingly great city.” Actually, the Hebrew here reads, “a city great to God.”

The city’s great population — at least four times as large as that of Samaria, the capital of Israel — certainly made it a great city of that time and place. And its history of oppression and violence made it a city that was greatly feared by the people of Israel.

Indeed, Jonah had legitimate reason to fear for his life. The Assyrians were well known for impaling or skinning alive their enemies. And Israel was one of their biggest enemies. So a prophet of Israel would have reason to be afraid, especially with the message Jonah was bringing them.

But I think none of this is what God meant by calling Nineveh an “exceedingly great city.” In fact, the Hebrew here literally means “a great city to God.”

As much as Jonah hated the Ninevites, God loved them and considered them to be important as people He’d made in His own image.

As an aside, it’s too bad Jonah didn’t pray that God would allow Him to see the Ninevites with God’s eyes, rather than his own. Indeed, that’s a prayer we should all pray — that God would help us to see others with HIS eyes.

If we did that, we’d see a lot less people holding Christian banners and shouting hateful things at those who disagree with them. We’d see a lot less hateful rhetoric on social media.

We’d see a lot MORE compassionate acts as followers of Jesus obeyed His command to love your enemies.

So, Jonah sets off to Nineveh. Now, Nineveh was about 500 miles northeast of Samaria, which was the capital of Israel, Jonah’s home country.

And a journey from Samaria to Nineveh would have taken about a month by camel or donkey — a little longer on foot.

When he arrived, Jonah would have a three-day ministry there. That, I think, is the best way to understand the “three-days’ walk” phrase at the end of verse 3.

In the Hebrew, this literally means “a distance of three days.”

As large as it was, the primary city of Nineveh wasn’t so big that it should take Jonah three days to walk through it. Perhaps this time included the time it would take him to walk through the extensive suburbs, as well.

But one other possibility solves some other interpretive problems: In this era, it was customary for an emissary visiting an important city to “spend the first day meeting and enjoying the hospitality of his host, the second day discussing the primary purpose of his visit, and the third saying his farewells.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Jon 3:3, citing Wiseman.]

If that’s what Jonah means he did here, he would’ve started (and, perhaps, concluded) his visit to Nineveh by meeting and speaking with the king, which would help explain why the king led the eventual repentance of Nineveh.

Somewhere along his journey to Nineveh, God gave Jonah the message he wanted delivered to the people of Nineveh.

And I think it’s likely he started by telling the king that message, rather than simply wandering into the city and standing on a random corner with the equivalent of a sandwich board reading, “The End Is Near.”

So, when Jonah finally arrived there, we’d expect to hear some finely crafted sermon. After all, he’d woven together bits of the Psalms in just three days and nights to sing his beautiful and God-glorifying song of thanksgiving from the belly of the fish.

But what’s the message he delivers?

“Yet forty days, and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

Just five words in Hebrew. Five words about God’s judgment. Not a single word calling the Ninevites to repentance.

Perhaps that’s the entirety of the message God had given him. If so, then Jonah’s being obedient here. But that would be a big change for a guy who’s been almost exclusively DISobedient, a guy who couldn’t bring HIMSELF to repent, even in the belly of a great fish.

As one of my seminary professors put it in his commentary on this book: “Both the announcement and the specified delay show God’s mercy. It was this mercy that bothered Jonah.” [Earl D. Radmacher, Ronald Barclay Allen, and H. Wayne House, Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary (Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1999), 1069.]

Jonah didn’t WANT to obey God if it meant the people of Nineveh might repent and be saved. I think he was looking for a letter loophole, and he thought he’d found it.

The only reason God would’ve sent Jonah there in the first place, and the only reason He would’ve delayed the promised judgment was to give the Ninevites TIME to repent.

And I think Jonah had figured that out. So, he obeyed just enough to be able to rationalize it to himself as obedience.

But here’s another synonym for disobedience: partial obedience. Partial obedience is disobedience.

Obedience in action without submitting the heart is a recipe for misery. God can and might still use your actions to bless others, but YOU won’t experience the blessing He had for you.

As one commentator puts it: “Jonah had just experienced the unmerited grace and goodness of God in his own life. Now he turns right around and makes it as difficult as possible for the Ninevites to experience God’s deliverance … a graceless message delivered by one living in the shadow of an experience of grace.” [Billy K. Smith and Franklin S. Page, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, vol. 19B, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1995), 259, quoting Fretheim.]

And all of this brings us, finally, to the seventh of the 12 spiritual growth indicators in the life of a believer: “A life that’s growing spiritually responds to God in [complete] and true obedience.” [Mark Yarbrough, Jonah: Beyond the Tale of a Whale, (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), 109.]

Being faithful to your wife certainly means not sleeping with other women. But it ALSO means not allowing yourself to become emotionally intimate with other women.

Keeping yourself from drunkenness certainly means not drinking too much alcohol. But it ALSO means not getting high on marijuana, even if it’s legal to do so.

Anything else is just letter loopholes. Anything else is just rationalizing.

Brothers and sisters, what God called Jonah to do was a hard thing. No doubt about it. And what God calls US to do are hard things.

Just Friday night, I was sitting in my office, thinking about the people we used to visit at Autumn Care prior to Covid. None of them are there any more.

Most, if not all, of those people we ministered to back then have passed away. And in a year or two, most, if not all, of the people we ministered to yesterday will be gone, too.

And all of a sudden, the emotional weight of all that loss hit me like a ton of bricks. And I quite literally cried out to God: “Why can’t you give us EASY things to do?!”

Well, that’s just not how God works. In fact, I’d almost venture to say that if what you’re doing is EASY, then it’s probably not God’s calling for your life.

You can certainly do the easy things to His glory — and you SHOULD. But one of the hallmarks of God’s calling seems to be that it’s hard. So hard that you can’t do it without Him.

I don’t know what God’s calling you to do today. Maybe He’s calling you to teach Sunday school or children’s church. Maybe He’s calling you to learn to play an instrument so you can help lead worship. Maybe He’s calling you to the mission field. Or even to be a pastor.

Most of you know that I used to sit on THAT side of the pulpit in this church, and I was content to do that. And when I heard God’s calling into the ministry, I KNEW it was going to be hard.

I knew there’d be hurdles and roadblocks along the way. I knew we’d have some painful adjustments to make in our lives. I knew I’d have a hard few years of juggling seminary and a part-time job, along with, eventually, the pastorate.

But all those things merely confirmed the reality of that calling to me.

And even when I obeyed and quit my newspaper career and started seminary — even after I started pastoring this church — things didn’t miraculously become easy. They still haven’t.

But the blessings I’ve received because of my obedience to God’s calling have FAR outweighed the difficulties and the heartbreaks.

I don’t know what hard thing God’s calling YOU to do. But I believe He’s calling every person here who follows Jesus in faith to do SOMETHING, even if it’s simply knocking on the door of that jerk of a neighbor and saying, “Hey, God loves you, and so do I. Why don’t you join me in church on Sunday, and then let’s go to lunch?”

Whatever it is, let me encourage you toward immediate and complete obedience to His calling.

Don’t look for loopholes. Don’t be like Jonah.