A Big ‘Ol Fish

Who knows the story of Jonah?

What did he do?

Most of us have gotten the most information about Jonah from being at children’s church or watching the Veggietales episode, right?

Both of those things are great, but there is a lot to Jonah that you don’t see in children’s church or Veggietales.

Jesus didn’t compare Himself to a lot of prophets, but He compared Himself to Jonah, which is pretty fascinating given Jonah’s history.

So, we’re going to spend four weeks in Jonah (It’s going to take us six weeks, but that’s ok), where we’ll talk about God’s plan for your life and the irresistibility of God

Jonah 1:1-17

The Set Up

So, now that we’ve read the story, let’s get a little bit more information about what we’re talking about here.

Who is Jonah?

Jonah was a prophet of God after Israel had split up, during a time of a lot of tumult in the nation of Israel.

Being a prophet meant that he would go around and tell people what God had to say.

What is Nineveh?

Nineveh was going to be the capitol city of the nation of Assyria, which was the dominating power at the time of Jonah.

Currently, they were just a great city in the nation of Assyria that had a king over the city.

The nation of Assyria, specifically Nineveh was known for being almost legitimately insane with the violence. (if you can’t handle gore, don’t listen to this part)

They would dismember people that they captured except they’d leave one hand left, so that the soldiers could shake the hand of the person they were killing

They’d stack skulls on poles and parade them through cities

They would kill everyone they felt like, and enslave the rest.

And, they did all of that to the Jews!

Probably by the time of Jonah, the northern part of the nation of Israel had been defeated and enslaved, and the southern part was in constant fear of it!

So, Jonah was supposed to go to the scariest people on earth to him and preach about God and grace.

Where is Jonah going?

Jonah, after receiving the command to get up and go, gets up and flees to a place called Tarshish.

This is the difference from Nineveh, where Jonah was supposed to go, to Tarshish, where he was trying to go.

It’s a pretty big difference!

He was trying to run as far away as possible!

The fish?

This is always the biggest deal for everyone, which is fair, because it’s the weirdest part.

A giant fish eats a guy and he lives there for three days? Pretty intense.

All this to say, it’s fairly improbable that a great fish could swallow someone whole and that they could live for 3 days. Not impossible, but fairly improbably.

Do you know what else is fairly improbable?

That a city known for its gruesome violence and hatred of God could turn to Him.

That God would become man and die for us

THat I could have gotten a girlfriend

And yet all of those happened! So, while it is improbable that a fish could be biug enough to swallow a person, it is not impossible, and I have a feeling that if God wanted something to happen, it would happen.

So, now that we have those main questions out of the way, we see in Jonah 1 two main themes: We run and God reaches

We Run

The reason why this story is so interesting is that Jonah runs away from God.

He’s a prophet of God, so He’s God’s guy, and he, knowing who God is, tries to run away from God.

It seems kind of dumb to me, but we do the same thing all the time.

Jonah hears what he has to do, which is to go off and preach to a city full of people that he hates, and so he packs his stuff and runs away!

The wording in s 2 and 3 is actually pretty funny to me, just because it has almost the same wording, but it changes a bit.

“Arise and go” is met with “He rose to flee”

Jonah runs as far away as he can to get away from God.

What we see later is that he really didn’t want Nineveh to be forgiven, and so he runs as far away from them as possible.

We’re just like Jonah.

We run away from God exactly like how Jonah runs away.

Maybe not exactly, I’ve never bought plane tickets to run away from him, but pretty close!

We run from God in at least two distinct ways.

For those of us that don’t know God, or those of us who know about Him, but don’t have a relationship with Him, we run from Him all the time.

We feel that draw to something really good, we know that there’s something in us that likes this whole Jesus thing, but then we go right back to our addiction with the world.

We fill our lives with boys or girls or drama or drugs or stuff because we, whether we know it or not, are running from God as fast is we can.

But there’s also those of us that do or did have a good relationship with Jesus, and we can be just as messed up!

We’ve been doing good with God, but maybe we start hanging out with friends again that haven’t done good to us, and so we start to rely on them more than God

You were trying really hard to avoid it, but maybe you started looking at pornography again, and the shame is intense and you don’t want to be near Jesus anymore.

We know that we’re supposed to look like Christians to our friends, but it’s scary, and so then we start acting exactly like them

Part of our lives is running from God.

On the bright side, we have a God who’s good with runners.

God Reaches

He did it for Jonah and He did it for you!

The storm

God reaches for Jonah in the storm.

God sends this ridiculous storm, and Jonah has hidden himself so deep in the ship, that he can’t hear what Jesus is saying to Him

If that’s not a metaphor, I don’t know what is!

God reaches for Jonah with the lots

To “cast lots” was a way of drawing straws that was used in the ancient near est. So, when the lot was drawn to Jonah, he finally fesses up to what’s been going on.

Two things that I think are awesome here:

First, the sailors flip out when they hear who Jonah worships.

They’re essentially like, “ARE YOU INSANE, YOU WENT AGAINST THAT ONE!!!”

Also, Jonah is a really good prophet even when he’s a bad prophet!

After all of this, we see Jonah 1:16

Jonah 1:16 ESV

Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

So, Jonah, a prophet from God, in talking with people about God, get’s these guys to believe in God, EVEN THOUGH HE’S BEING A BAD PROPHET RIGHT NOW!

God reaches for Jonah with the fish.

Jonah was pretty ready to die.

He tells the sailors to throw him overboard, fulling with the expectation of not making it out alive.

And then he gets eaten!

Sounds pretty rough, but next week we’ll see how God was good in this.

God is reaching for you.

In all things, He is reaching for you.

Have you ever had those moments where you think, “I’m glad that worked out, that could have been bad!”

That’s God providing for you.

Have you ever looked back on your life and realized that if things had gone a different way in a small circumstance, things could have gotten REALLY bad really quick?

God.

God uses our circumstances as a way of calling for you!

He also uses hard times.

If Jonah is any indicator, when we have tough stuff that we’re dealing with, that is an opportunity to dig deep and let God move.

Jonah could have avoided all of this if he just shut his mouth and trusted God and went to Nineveh.

But, God was close to him in the tough stuff, and used those mistakes to bring Jonah to a better understanding

God uses even our suffering (sometimes especially our suffering) to bring us to Him.

Jesus.

The clearest example of God reaching for you is Jesus.

Jesus came and gave everything for you so that you and I didn’t have to be alone. He is the Image of the invisible God who sacrificed Himself on the cross for our sins sthat you have new life in Him.

Questions.

Would you rather always have an itch you can’t quite scratch or a little noise in your ear that you can’t get rid of?

What ways did God reach out to Jonah?

How do you run from God?

How has God reached out to you in the past?