Sermon Tone Analysis

Jonah 1: A great story that’s really not about the fish

Who is Jonah?

2 Kings 14:25–26 (NIV)

25 He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Dead Sea, in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher.

26 The Lord had seen how bitterly everyone in Israel, whether slave or free, was suffering; there was no one to help them.

So a bit of context here.

Jonah lived in the time of a king called Jeroboam II.

He was an evil king.

Yet Jonah was a prophet, someone who heard from God, and God saw the suffering of the ordinary people, and used Jonah as a vessel for his Word.

But here, in the book of Jonah, we have a lot more detail about this man.

And I think there’s a lot in this story for us to learn about what God is like, and how it points to Jesus.

So let’s walk through it together.

v1.

Word of the Lord came to Jonah.

Standard prophetic formula (opens Hosea, Micah, Joel, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Malachi).

v. 2 Ninevah - Great city (first of 7 greats).

Terrible city - torturers.

Their wickedness has come up to God (see 2 Kgs passage).

v. 3 Jonah got up and went, the wrong way!

The word used in the Hebrew is the same.

In other words, God said ‘get up and go’, so Jonah ‘got up and goed’, but in the other direction.

Tarshish, Joppa etc.

MAP SLIDE.

Example of Washington and Kabul.

He is trying to get away from the presence of the LORD.

And remember whenever you see LORD in capitals it’s referring to God by name.

So he’s trying to get away from YAHWEH.

Why does he want to go away?

Surely he wants to go tell it to the evil Empire?

Spoiler for later chapters.

We might be able to subtitle this book ‘I knew you would do that’.

v. 4 SURPRISE.

The LORD is there too - he hurled a great wind on the sea.

The first throw.

v. 5 The sailors are terrified - must be a really great storm to terrify experienced sailors.

So they pray to their gods.

Common reaction to fear.

It was common then for gods to be thought of as attached to places.

So each of these sailors would have had his own local god that he grew up with.

The second throw - all the stuff goes into the sea.

Raising the level of the decks.

It’s not enough.

Meanwhile, Jonah is asleep.

What kind of sleep?

The sleep of depression?

5 verses in, and an unbelievable amount has happened!

v. 6 The captain stirs him.

Again, someone is telling Jonah to GET UP.

It’s one of the themes of this story.

‘You pray too!’

He doesn’t.

Note that he doesn’t ask for God’s help.

Jonah is pretty passive throughout this story, except when he is running away.

v. 7 The sailors draw lots - they want to know why this has happened.

Imagine a bunch of straws, one shorter than the other.

v. 8 They don’t immediately pile on him.

The compassion and care of these sailors is extraordinary.

Instead, they question him.

This odd guy who has fallen into a deep sleep while the storm rages, who hasn’t cried out to his God to save him like all the normal people do, and who has now drawn the short straw.

They question him instead.

He tells them who he is, where he’s from, and the killer line for them:

v. 10 Then they were terrified.

He’d already told them he was fleeing the presence of his God.

But now he tells them that his god isn’t just a local god.

Jonah’s trying to escape the God of heaven, who made the land and sea, by fleeing to the sea.

Do you see the problem here?

Jonah seems to have known all along who God is, and even that He is the God of everywhere, yet he still thinks that there is somewhere he can go to get away from God.

v. 11 The sea picks up, and still these sailors are remarkably polite.

I image them asking awkwardly ‘what shall we do to you?’

v. 12 And Jonah knows.

He has known all along, which I think is why he went to sleep.

He tells them to chuck him in the sea.

He might as well now, as he knows the storm isn’t going to go away.

v. 13 And still, these sailors are reluctant to be involved in murder.

They row as hard as they can, desperately trying to get the ship back to land, but they can’t.

For the third time, the storm increases.

These men are so impressive.

They’re not looking for a scapegoat.

Remember that we find this story in the Hebrew scriptures, in a book that is making the point that there is only one God to worship.

And yet here we are being given a really good moral example from some pagans who don’t know God, who are far less selfish, more god-fearing than the King’s top prophet who hears directly from God.

14.

Then these pagans do what Jonah didn’t.

They cry out to the Lord.

We’re going to do this thing, because it seems like the only thing to do, but we don’t want to be guilty of shedding innocent blood.

15.

As soon as they hurl Jonah overboard, the storm stops.

If the story stopped there, it would be a pretty gruesome, terrifying story.

Disobey God, and you’ll be drowned.

Tell that one to your kids next time they’re being naughty.

But that’s not what happens.

v. 16 As far as the sailors are concerned, it ends there.

They bow out near the end of chapter 1, with even greater fear and awe of the God of Israel.

The fact that the storm stopped straight away has confirmed to them that He is indeed the God of the sea.

That isn’t how storms generally end, and sailors know it.

They gradually peter out.

The wind dies down, the waves last longer, but they gradually get less and less.

Yet here, the storm just stops Notice that the writer tells us that they made a sacrifice.

That’s important, particularly to this writer, because it shows that Jonah wasn’t a sacrifice.

One of the major things that distinguished the Hebrew religion from their neighbours was that they didn’t sacrifice humans.

And here comes the fish.

It’s the star of the show in children’s Bibles, but it doesn’t get much airtime here.

Jonah 1:17