Sermon Tone Analysis

Some of us are perpetually in the state of disengagement, right?

It’s like 80% of your life, and you’re like, “Where did the last 3 months go?”

I don’t know, whatever, keep on going.

And that’s how some of us feel about our lives.

That’s how many of us are in our spiritual lives as well.

And so maybe you’ve been a Christian for a while.

And maybe at one point you had kind of a sense of alertness, a wakefulness to your life and your connection with Jesus, and you know you felt like the scripture spoke to you or prayer was a meaningful practice for you.

But at some point that just kind of fizzled, whatever, and you’re just kind of cruising, and totally say I’m a Christian who loves God, whatever.

It’s fizzled.

And you’re like, “Why did that happen?

I don’t know why that happened.”

There’s lots of reasons for it.

Sometimes it’s seasons of life.

You know, Eugene Peterson has this great line where he talks about the journey of following Jesus is like a long, obedient, in the same direction, a couple of book clubs around here reading that book this summer.

It’s exactly what it’s like.

And so not all of life is thrilling, and exciting, and yes of course, we get that.

But there is something real that’s been lost when I don’t sense any kind of vitality in my connection with Jesus.

And maybe some of you have never had that experience before.

And so we might get there through seasons of life.

We might also end up in that place because of decisions that we’ve made.

They may be small decisions, maybe they’re bad, unwise decisions, maybe they’re bad moral decisions.

We know they’re compromises, but how we justify these kinds of things, and then we find ourselves three months later down this road of decisions, and we’re like, “How did I get here?

What happened in the last three months?

And how am I doing this?

How’d this happen?”

And it’s not rocket science.

There’s a slow process of decisions that landed you at a place of spiritual apathy, of being asleep at the wheel, and all of a sudden, things you never thought you would be, you’re thinking, you’re doing all of a sudden is part of your life now.

How’d I get here?

You’re asleep at the wheel.

This is an experience we all have, and Jonah Chapter 1 really is like a portrait of spiritual apathy.

It’s a portrait exploring why, and how, and what’s happening to us when we’re asleep at the wheels spiritually and a tragedy that that really is.

It’s not uplifting necessarily, but it’s good for us here to hear.

It’s like eating your vegetables.

Asleep is the big image in Jonah Chapter 1.

“The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai..”

Two things to remember when you see LORD in all capital letters in the Old Testament, that’s the English Translators reminding you that in Hebrew, what’s there is not just the generic word, God, but the divine name, personal name, Yahweh, covenant God of Israel, this is going to be important as the story goes on.

So, “The word of Yahweh that came to Jonah son of Amittai,” Jonah means dove son of Faithfulness.

You’re supposed to laugh because he’s not an innocent dove, and he’s the least faithful character in this entire story.

“The word of Yahweh came to Dove son of Faithfulness: Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

So God is surveying His world, He sees these horrible acts of oppression and injustice, and violence arising out of the capital city, Assyrian empire, and we’ll explore more of that in a couple of weeks here when he actually goes to Nineveh in chapter 3. God wants to send His messenger to confront, and name the injustice that’s happening, and what does God’s messenger do?

What does the innocent dove do?

He runs away from Yahweh, headed for Tarshish.

He went down to Joppa, he found a ship bound for that port after paying the fare, he went aboard, and he sailed through Tarshish to flee from Yahweh.

As he flees to Tarshish, so he’s supposed to go east of Nineveh, instead he goes as far west as humanly possible in the ancient world, right?

So Tarshish was on the edge of the known world there before you get to the Atlantic.

So you’re supposed to chuckle.

He’s going as far as you could possibly go from Nineveh at that time.

First step he has to go to is to go south, Israel’s in the northern, little country there of Israel, he has to go south to Joppa, that’s a little detailed, that’s important, you’ll see in a second here.

So he goes south to Joppa, hops on a boat to flee.

“So then Yahweh, He sent a great wind on the sea and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up.”

The word threatened or some of you have, “the ship was about to break up,” in Hebrew, the ship is animated, it’s like a character in the story.

So literally, and the shipped pondered, breaking up into pieces.

It’s like the ship is actually thinking, “Should I stay together, should I stay apart?

I don’t know, the storm’s pretty intense.”

That’s the idea you’re supposed to chuckle.

Our English translation’s kind of covered up a little but that the ship actually has a brain in this line.

So the ship was pondering, breaking into pieces.

And all the sailors, they were afraid, and each cried out to his own God.

They even threw the cargo into the sea so they could lighten the ship.

So Yahweh pursues His man with severe mercy.

So you might think, “Oh, here’s the Old Testament God throwing lightning bolts at people,” or whatever, and so, no.

Remember the bigger picture.

God wants to send Jonah to speak to the Ninevites so that he can bring them to repentance so they can find forgiveness in life.

It’s God’s mission to reach people and rescue them.

That’s pursuing Jonah.

This is a severe love.

This is like the love of a parent chasing after their child who’s going to bring their own ruin if someone doesn’t intervene.

That’s the image here.

This is not the volatile, that’s a different God, it’s not the God of the Bible, the volatile, and perpetually ticked off God who’s just waiting to squash you.

It’s a different God, it’s not the God of the Scriptures.

And so this is the God of a fierce love who pursues His disobedient prophet and so, the sailors… Look at what the sailors are doing.

I mean, are the sailors asleep?

No. They’re wide awake, right?

So they’re yelling, you can imagine they’re throwing their own livelihood over the side.

They’re throwing their cargo, that’s a loss commission now, they’ve lost all their money because this is what they were carrying.

And notice they’re awake and alert to what’s happening here.

What are they doing?

They’re afraid.

They’re throwing cargo, but what else are they doing?

They’re praying, aren’t they?

To whom are they praying?

All kinds of different Gods.

Each to his own God.

So first of all, they are alert enough to recognize, this isn’t a normal storm, and there are divine powers at work here.

Now in their worldview, which is polytheistic world view, they believed in the existence of hundreds, thousands of Gods over all the different realms of life.

So they do the shotgun approach to prayer, which is what you do when you’re a polytheist.

You shout out many prayers to as many gods as you can.

“You take that one,” “You take that one,” “Okay, Jimmy that one,” “Johnny, that one.”

And hopefully we’ll hit the right one, right?

Because we don’t know which one is angry with us.

And that is the perpetual state you live in, in a polytheistic world view is you could offend any of the gods at any moment you don’t know.

They might throw a lightning bolt at you, that’s very much of a polytheist world view.

And so they’re like, whoa, okay, let’s just call in all of the gods and just see what happens then.

But what was Jonah doing?

So with all of this frenetic activity calling, praying, cargo overboard, oh afraid, yelling and so on.

And in contrast, the prophet, man of God, what’s he doing?

He’s asleep.

Jonah had gone below deck where he laid down and fell into a deep sleep.

And there’s a word play that’s kind of a little red thread through this first part of the chapter here that’s all about this language of Jonah going down, down, where did he go to get the Joppa?

What did it say?