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Sermonette: Jonah, the Whale, and God's Will
Accept God's Will
#1057s
Mike Ford
Given 16-Jul-11; 18 minutes
summary: People have criticized and ridiculed the biblical story of Jonah as allegory, fiction, or fable. However, Jesus Christ believed that it was fact. Some have debated whether the fish was a whale or some other kind of a great fish. The main point of the Jonah account seemed to be that God's will dominates all other concerns in the resolution of any problem. Jonah was asked to go to the capital of Assyria, Israel's enemy, warning them to repent of their sadistic, brutal, and evil ways. Realizing that Assyria would become God's corrective tool used to punish and humiliate Israel, Jonah did not feel inclined to provide any kind of help to his enemy, but had to yield to God's measured coercion of being swallowed and regurgitated by a large fish. God refused to allow Jonah to resign from his responsibility, having made him a spectacle by his unorthodox rescue. When the entire city of Nineveh repented, even in the wake of his unenthusiastic witness, Jonah became angry and truculent. There is no point in pouting about God's will, even when it moves in directions which displease us. We might be too self-centered and self-absorbed to see or accept the big picture.
transcript:
Well, the story goes that a teacher was lecturing her class about whales, and a little girl piped up that she had learned in church that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. The teacher patiently explained to her that yes, whales were indeed very large, but their throats were very small, they can't swallow a human. Well, one swallowed Jonah, she said. The little girl was steadfast in her belief. They went back and forth. Didn't happen. Yes, it did. Did not happen. Yes, it did. Finally, the little girl said, Well, when I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. The teacher was quite irritated. She said, What if he went to hell? She said, Then you ask him. Mm. Thanks for laughing at a joke I know you've all heard. The story of Jonah has been called fiction, an allegory, a parable, and prose. It is, however, fact, and Christ regarded it as such. So let's start in Matthew 12. This afternoon, Matthew 12:38-41. Matthew 12:38. Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, Teacher, we want to see a sign from You. But He answered and said to them, An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was 3 days and 3 nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be 3 days and 3 nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and indeed a greater than Jonah is here. The Greek word used for great fish here is kos, and it means a huge fish. It can mean a whale. It's translated many times in many versions as whale. I'm OK with that. In the Hebrew, Jonah used dogga. It simply means fish, and with a modifier, a great fish. A tremendous amount of time and energy has been spent by a lot of people debating whether Jonah was swallowed by a whale or a shark or maybe a sea monster of prehistoric type and size. Whales do not normally swim in the Mediterranean. Sharks do not normally eat an entire human, although they have been known to eat parts of them. And even if it was a shark or a whale, how does a man live in the belly for 72 hours and breathe? Whatever fish this was, we missed the point when we get too bogged down in that debate. It was a miracle, pure and simple. And Christ did it for a reason. He knew it was real, and it was the only sign He gave to the world that He was the Son of God, that He would be, was the sign of the prophet Jonah. He had many reasons for putting Jonah in the Bible, the book of Jonah. I want to focus on one today. We do not have time to go more than that, but we are going to focus on the fact that God's will overrides ours, or you might say, that we have to accept, learn to accept God's will. So let's go to the book of Jonah and review the story. We're very familiar with it. We're not going to go into too many specifics, but we will do a bit of an overview. While you're turning to the book of Jonah, Christ mentioned in Matthew the city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Assyria was a world power for about 300 years, from about 900 to 600 BC. Interestingly, it began its rise about the time of the division of Israel into north and south. Now the Syrians gradually absorbed and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. Jonah was up in years a little bit. Don't know exactly how old he was, but he was up in years a little bit when this incident happens. He'd been a prophet and a statesman for some time. II Kings 14:25 mentions his name in regards to restoring some of Israel's lost lands. So he was not unknown. I do not know how many followers he had on his Twitter account. It was probably a lot. Chapter 1, verse 2, we see that God speaks to Jonah and He says, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me. Nineveh was indeed a great city. It was 30 miles long and 10 miles wide, built between the Tigris and coastal rivers. The central area, what one might call today the central business district, was 3 miles by 1.5 miles, and it was protected by 5 walls and 3 moats, and it had walls 100 feet tall, wide enough for 4 chariots to run abreast, in an 8-mile circuit. That's a great city. And God says the wickedness of these people has come up before Me. Now I'm sure they were guilty of a lot of different things, as we all are, but they were known as a particularly brutal and warlike people. They had modernized the weapons of war at that time, and they were the first society to make militarism, or a militaristic society, their central policy. Militarism was the central policy of state, I should say. Now they began to put iron in the tips of their arrows and their swords and their shields and their armor, even the tips of their battering rams. And the bronze shields that their enemies had, there was no match. They rolled over them like a steamroller. You could compare these innovations that they had, and there were quite a few, I do not have time to go into them, but their innovations were comparable to the impact of the atom bomb in the last century. Now as they conquered various territories and towns, they made examples of the unfortunate souls that tried to defy them. They would hang their heads on poles around the city. That is one of the things they would do. They thought using excessive brutality would decrease the defiance of people they were trying to conquer. One of their kings, Ashurnasirpal, he wrote about a rebellion he put down, and I want to quote this. It pretty much encapsulates their mentality. This Ashurnasirpal, now quoting: I built a pillar over against his city gate, and I flayed all the chief men who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some I walled up within the pillar. Some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes. Others I bound to stakes round about the pillar. Many within the border of my own land I flayed, and I spread their skins upon the walls. And I cut off the limbs of the officers who had rebelled. End of quote. With that in mind, look at verse 3. Jonah arose to flee to Tarsus from the presence of the Lord. Can you blame him? I mean, what if God said to one of us, I want you to go preach the gospel in the middle of an al-Qaeda training camp or some such similar situation? So Jonah booked a ticket on the first boat out, going to the farthest reaches of normal travel at the time. And any of you that might have grown up in a Sunday school situation, as I did, you heard the simplistic version that he was trying to run and hide from God, which is absurd. He knew that David said in Psalm 139:7, Where can I go from Your spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? He was not trying to hide. No, he was abandoning his post. He was giving up his office. He was refusing an assignment. He was denying God's will. He knew the Assyrians were God's chosen tool of punishment, and he did not want anything to do with the job that God gave him. Now the rest of chapter 1 tells about the great wind that God sent, how the sailors found out that Jonah was the cause, how they tossed him overboard, how he was swallowed by the great fish God prepared, and all this was by design. God's will was paramount. God's will would be done. Chapter 2 is a beautiful prayer, and in this prayer, Jonah shows repentance and humility, and, and humility. Wouldn't you, after what he'd been through? Verse 10, the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land. Pretty amazing occurrence, and that's all he has to say about it. An economy of words here. Now this thing was not done in a vacuum. This thing was known. It's quite likely the fish threw him up right back on the beach of Jaffa where he'd started from. It's also likely that sailors from that ship may have been back in port, given that 3 days had passed. They had tossed their cargo out in the big storm. And I'm, of course, assuming that most of us are all totally familiar with the story. So why would they go on to Spain if they'd tossed their cargo? They would come back to the port they started from to say, Hey boss, listen to what happened. So they get there, they are telling the story about this man that they threw overboard, and the storm ceased, and lo and behold, there he is. They say, other folks on the beach say, Well, this guy got thrown out of the belly of a fish. So his story was known, and it's been passed around. So what's the next move? Did he go to Nineveh as instructed? Well, I always thought so. Go to chapter 3 and look at verses 1 and 2. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach with the message that I tell you. You do not tell someone to arise and go if they are already on the way. So there is a time gap here. Don't know how long. Maybe afterwards, after this happened, Jonah may have gone on up to Jerusalem to pay his vows. Perhaps he hoped that what he'd been through was enough. He'd sinned. He tried to thwart God's will. Be thrown into the sea, swallowed by a fish, regurgitated out again, repented. He probably headed home. Possibly he thought, as I say, this was the end of the matter. We do not know, because Jonah just doesn't say much about himself. I think God allowed time to pass so the story of what happened could be spread around the known world at that time. Now if it happened in these days, we'd probably get an email from John Reid, but in those days, in those days, it took some time. So Jonah's sitting in his La-Z-Boy at the house. He's recounting the story time after time to his family and his friends, and then God says, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city. God's not going to let him resign his responsibility. God had a job for him to do. No amount of running is going to change that. So He says, preach to Nineveh, or preach to it, meaning Nineveh, the message that I tell you. That's about as much of a rebuke as Jonah tells that he received. All right, so, um, this time around, what does Jonah do? Verse 3, he arose and went to Nineveh. His mother did not raise a dummy. He did what he was told this time. In verse 4, he preaches God's message. He says, Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overcome. He's very stingy with his words. Was that the sum total of his sermon? I hope it was a little more than that. But understand, at this point in time, he's a very famous man. The whole world knows what's happened to him. It's like he's the winner of Survivor and American Idol all rolled into one. Or Northern Israel Idol, or whatever their comparable would be. But he's very famous, and so, because he is a celebrity, you might say, he was convincing, and the people believed him. Verse 5, the people believed God, proclaimed a fast, put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least. They took the warning to heart as soon as they heard it. Verse 6, the king left his throne, and he put on sackcloth. He sat in ashes. In verse 7, the king decreed a fast for man and beast. That was a little unusual. Verse 10, God saw their works. God relented from the disaster, and He did not do it. And you all know what happens next in chapter 4. And verse, or I lost my place. OK, chapter 4, verse 1, it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry. He began to pout, really. Now let me read verse 2 from the Amplified Bible, because this pretty much ties it up as to him not accepting God's will. Verse 2 from the Amplified: And he prayed to the Lord and said, I pray You, O Lord, is this not just what I said when I was still in my country? That's why I fled to Tarsus, for I knew that You are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and when sinners turn to You and meet Your conditions, You revoke the sentences of evil against them. And that bothered him. He said, Isn't this just what I said was going to happen? I, I can't believe that he would, that he would talk to God that way, but he did. Now he was a prophet and a statesman, and now he was a celebrity, and maybe he was just a tad bit full of himself at this point. So he leaves the city. You know how the story goes. He goes out, sits on a hill, and he's going to watch to see what happens. It's hot. God gives him a shade plant to protect him from the heat. He's very pleased by that as he sits there and pouts. And then the next day, God made the plant wither and die. Jonah got angry again. You know, he strikes me as somewhat of a cantankerous old coot. God finishes the book, the last verse, chapter 4, by pointing out to Jonah that he was, that he was upset over the shade plant dying, sympathetic to a little plant that he had nothing to do with its creation of. But there are 10,000 infants in the city of Nineveh, and he's OK with their destruction. He's so mad that he lost his ability to see the bigger picture. He wanted things done the way he wanted them done. He wanted Nineveh destroyed. That's the point of the whole story. God had a plan. Jonah did not like that plan. So first he bailed out. He tried to quit, and that did not work. He went forward with a warning, but he was ever hopeful that God would still kill 120,000 infants. That's perhaps a city of a million people. And when they repented, he pouted. He got angry with God for being merciful and forgiving. It's OK if You're merciful with me, God, but not with those people. You know, there is no point in fighting God's will, pouting over it, or getting upset over it. It's God's will. We have to accept it. I know, if you're like me, many times in my life you try to play God. You try to make others do right. You try to make situations work out right, as you perceive them to be right. And then it dawns on me, I have to accept God's will. I have to have the faith that God's in charge, and that these things that are happening are His will. I do not mean that you roll over and play dead, that you do not strive to be faithful and obedient, that you do not pray for the things you fervently believe in, but that you step back from time to time and look at the big picture. You know, sometimes you have to accept the situation for what it is, knowing that God's in charge, that He's working out His plan. Now, Jonah, it is perhaps an extreme example of what I'm talking about, but it's a vivid illustration nonetheless. Perhaps down the road you find yourself in a stressful situation, in a trial of some sort. Step back and ask yourself, am I trying to subvert God's will? Am I refusing? Or maybe God has told me no. Or that maybe He wants me here and not there? Or that maybe He's working with other people as well, and not just yourself? That He's directing the actions of others? Ask yourself, am I pulling a Jonah? I think you can gain some peace of mind if you realize that it's not about us at all. It was not about Jonah. The story about Jonah is there so that we can learn that lesson. I'm not sure Jonah ever fully realized what God was telling him. It was not about him. It was not about what he wanted, no matter how famous he was. So I pray that we can see this point, that we can accept that God works this way, that we can accept His will, so that God doesn't prepare a great fish for you or me.
MRF/aws+/
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