Thanks for allowing us to have the week off! We had a wonderful time at the 50th anniversary celebration at our church in Normal! It was a great joy to see some of our friends and friends of my parents and to once again reflect on God’s amazing faithfulness in the past and His desire to continue to do great things in the years to come.
One of the things that was so neat last Sunday was to see missionaries and pastors who had grown up in the church and who are now serving Jesus literally around the world. It was amazing to listen to people in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s talk about how God spoke to them…as junior highers, high schoolers, and students at ISU. It was unbelievable to hear of God’s passionate call on someone’s life that transformed little Roger from going to church because he had a crush on a girl who attended to being an executive VP of Campus Crusade for Christ or a chubby little boy who was “tricked into” going to a Good News Bible Club to get cookies and Kool-aid, and is now the President of Walk Thru The Bible, an international ministry.
Today, we’re going to continue on in our study of some Old Testament books. We spent several weeks looking at the book of Ruth and saw how God is in control of everything that is going on…even when we don’t see that or understand it. I hope that you’ve been able to reflect on that some over the past couple of months…especially when you get into situations where you wonder what is going to happen!
As we get started today, I thought we’d do another quiz since we haven’t done one for quite awhile. This is a VERY easy one, so don’t be shy in answering!
Quiz:
Who has worked in the church nursery during your life?
Who has taught children’s SS, Children’s Church, or Awana?
Who has worked in Vacation Bible School?
Who has worked in youth groups?
Who has helped with Wednesday night meals?
Who has taught/facilitated a small group?
Who has sung in the choir or helped with some other part of church music?
Who has served on a board or committee?
Who has served the Lord in some other way?
Great! All of us have had the opportunity to serve the Lord! Each one of us has been able to do something that we felt that God was calling us to do (or maybe someone twisted our arm to do it) but at any rate, the Lord has used us to serve Him in some capacity.
Today, we’re going to start a series on the book of Jonah. We’re going to look at it in somewhat the same way we did Ruth, going through sections of it each week to see what God wants us to learn from His Word.
So, if you’ll open you Bibles to Jonah 1:1, we’ll get a start on the book. When I started my preparation this week, I thought we’d do the first six verses this week; however, as I got into it, I realized there was so much in the way of introduction and information for us that we’ll just get started, and then we’ll pick up the pace in the coming weeks.
Jonah 1:1 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”
Here we’re introduced to the key person in this story, the man for whom the book is named, Jonah. One of the important things as we study the Scriptures is to work at seeing how it all fits together instead of just pulling things out of the air and looking at isolated elements.
Otherwise, you get yourself into trouble like the man who was trying to find God’s will for his life, and he prayed and asked the Lord to show him what he was to do. He took his Bible and said he’d do what the Lord wanted him to do. As he blindly opened his Bible and put his finger down, he landed on
Matthew 27:5 he departed, and he went and hanged himself.
Obviously thinking he had done something wrong, he quickly prayed, shut his Bible, and opened it again…this time to:
Luke 10:37 And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
Beside himself, the man tried one last time…
John 13:27 What you are going to do, do quickly,
OK…I know, it’s a corny joke, but it does point out the struggles we can have if we take parts of Scripture out of context without looking at what God is trying to teach us in the big picture as well as in the specific passage we’re studying.
So, as we ask, who is Jonah, one of the things we can do is see if there are any other references to him in Scriptures…and guess what…there are! Just like we saw how Ruth was tied together with King David and ultimately with King Jesus, we see that Jonah is connected in other parts of God’s Word
2Kings 14:23 In the fifteenth year of Amaziah the son of Joash, king of Judah, Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel, began to reign in Samaria, and he reigned forty-one years. 24 And he did what was evil in the sight of the LORD. He did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin. 25 He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.
We’re told here that Jonah was a prophet in Israel during the reign of the evil King Jeroboam II. That means that Jonah had been trained and set apart for doing the Lord’s work and that he was a man of bravery who was willing to say, “Thus says the Lord” during a time when the king wanted people to follow Baal instead of obeying the true Lord.
I find it interesting that in a similar way as we saw God doing important things for Naomi and Ruth during the terrible time of the Judges in the life of the country of Israel; God is also still clearly at work in the life of Israel during the evil rule of the second King Jeroboam!
As we talked several times in Ruth, there are terrible times…a famine, the loss of a husband, children who aren’t following the Lord, the loss of children, etc…. Often times, we then respond with questioning whether God is working or not. Just like we discovered in the life of Ruth and Naomi, we see here too that even though the country was living in a very dark time, God was working with Jonah and God used him to be a voice for the Lord to others who needed to hear.
Also, as you responded in the “quiz”, I think this shows that we have something in common with Jonah as well. If I switched some of the questions from, “who has ever taught children’s Sunday school to who is currently teaching”, we’d get two different answers. Likewise, if I asked “who has ever been a youth group leader and asked instead who has helped with youth group in the past year”, we’d get different responses…wouldn’t we?
So, like Jonah, at some point in our past, we too have served the Lord in some capacity. Although he responds in the wrong way, like Jonah, we should be ready and waiting for the Lord to speak to us about how He wants us to minister today.
In the New Testament, Jesus refers to Jonah in Luke 11 and in Matthew 12:
Matt. 12:38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” 39 But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.
In these two parallel passages in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we have Jesus claiming that he will be dead for three days…just like Jonah spent three days in the great fish. Jesus also makes it clear that people need to respond to Christ’s message. It is strange that the “pagan Ninevites” repented after Jonah’s preaching, but the religious leaders wouldn’t respond properly to Christ…Who was obviously way more important than Jonah was!
So, we have these two key references to Jonah. Earlier in the Old Testament, we see that he is a prophet who clearly speaks the truth in a tough time, and then later, we see that Jesus Himself recognizes Jonah as a real man who preached the Word of the Lord faithfully such that the people of Nineveh listened and repented.
As we come back to these first verses in the book of Jonah, let’s see what else we can discover:
Jonah 1:1 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”
I don’t know exactly how the Lord passed His word down to Jonah. Did God speak to him in an audible voice? Did He just impress something on Jonah’s heart? Did He send him a text message or email? Did He send an angel? I really don’t know, but there are over one hundred times in the Old Testament where we’re told that the word of the Lord came to one of the prophets. So, God was an expert in speaking to His prophets! He had a lot of experience in doing this, so we can be assured that when God spoke, Jonah was able to clearly understand his directions!
Sometimes, I’ve heard people talk about how confusing the Bible is or people say it’s hard to understand what God’s will is for them. However, Jonah was unable to use either of these excuses after God talked to him! He was to get up and go to Nineveh and preach about their sin.
It’s not a complicated phrase. It’s not a complicated command. It’s really quite simple! Have any of you ever given one of your children a command like this? Take the garbage out. Load the dishwasher. Make your bed. Be home by 10:30.
Each of those commands is pretty clear isn’t it? Even if you throw in a couple of things your kids should figure it out: After supper, go to your room and take your dirty clothes to the laundry and get them started. Go outside now and mow the yard and then sweep the driveway and sidewalks.
Likewise, God’s directions for Jonah were just as clear for him. Get up, go to Nineveh, and preach. You should be able to remember that!
What was special about Nineveh? It was the capital the world power of that time, Assyria. The Assyrians had conquered much of the world, and were not very popular! They were a city that was known for its idolatry and its cruelty to others. They were kind of the “the worst of the worst”. Yet, God was very concerned about them! We’ll talk more about some of the specifics of Nineveh in the coming weeks.
One of the commentaries that I read this week talked about how despite the wickedness of Assyria, God wanted to remind the Israelites that God’s desire was to reach out to other countries and other people groups. It was never in His plan for the message of salvation to be shared with only the Israelites. Rather, believers were supposed to be telling others around them about the True God.
I think that’s an important reminder for us as well! God’s message of salvation is meant to be freely shared, not closely hoarded! For us, that can take on many different forms…talking to our family, friends, and co-workers about Christ. It can be as simple as offering to pray for someone when they’re going through a tough time…whether they’re a believer or not. It’s when people ask you tomorrow what you did over the weekend sharing that you had a great time at church and heard a GREAT sermon ☺. It’s taking the time to verbally tell your friend about Jesus and His free gift of salvation!
As a church, it’s sharing Christ in many of the ways we have in the past: VBS, Wednesday night meals, concerts, bread ministry, etc….
At any rate, God’s message to Jonah is clear and direct: get up, go to Nineveh, and preach.
There are a couple of interesting statements here to me in verse 2. God tells Jonah the message to preach and the kind of message he’s supposed to preach. In today’s politically correct world where we try to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt, God is clear that Jonah needs to go to these people and call them out on their sins! He is to call out against it or maybe your version says to cry against it.
Perhaps, it’s like Christ’s comments to the religious leaders, that we’re so much more easily offended than we should be and that we should be listening to Jesus and making life changes. Just think…if I came in here week after week preaching against the evil things you’re doing, what would your response be? OK…not your response…the person who isn’t here…what would their response be? As American Christians, we don’t really like hearing that what we’re doing is sin do we? Yet, in this passage, we’re told that the evil deeds of these Assyrians is causing enough problems in God’s eyes that He calls up a semi-retired prophet to go and boldly confront them.
I’m not going to hammer on you today…so you can all exhale, but this would be an excellent time for you to personally reflect on issues that need to be dealt with in your own life.
Another phrase in this verse interests me too. The reason that God enlists Jonah is that the evil of the people in Nineveh was so bad that it made it’s way to God’s throne. Do you ever stop to think about how the sins of your friends and neighbors impacts God Almighty? Do you get angry with that neighbor who is living with her boyfriend or with someone down the street who you hear getting drunk every weekend? Do you get mad at a friend who is cheating on their spouse or at the people who are dealing drugs (YES…it even happens in small towns in Central Illinois!)?
Do you ever move from your own thoughts and feelings to evaluating what God is thinking? Is your heart ever moved with compassion over the lostness of the world around us instead of anger about how others are hurting ME?
A friend of mine sent this quote out this week with the prayer chain email at The Baby Fold: We must move from asking God to take care of the things that are breaking our hearts, to praying about the things that are breaking His heart. ~Margaret Gibb
I think that’s an excellent quote for us as we evaluate how we’re serving the Lord.
So What????
I know, we’ve only looked at the first two of about fifty verses in this short book, but even here as we start out, there are a three key thoughts for us to wrestle with:
1. Since God has used me in ministry in the past, what is keeping me from serving Him fully today?
2. Who is God calling me to Get up! Go to ________! Preach (share, serve, etc….)!?
3. What evil around me is breaking God’s heart that I need to pray about and work to help?
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