Rediscovering Jonah--Jonah 1:1-3
Day 1
I don’t think I can be blamed for my only mental association of the prophet Jonah is that of him being swallowed by a whale.
Can I? Doesn’t everyone think that?
I CAN be blamed, though, for not ever once looking past that initial mental image to explore the lessons from the book of Jonah.
So, I aim to rectify that giant hole in my biblical knowledge.
I first wondered about Jonah when Holly Ordway devoted a whole chapter in Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography to Tolkien translating the entire book of Jonah for a scholarly Bible translation project spurred by Pope Pious XII’s encyclical that included Catholics producing new editions of the Scriptures.
I’m not sure how Tolkien was assigned the book of Jonah to translate, but he didn’t hesitate.
Ordway writes:
“Translating the book of Jonah meant that Tolkien approached the text in much the same way that he would have done any other literary work for translation. However, he retained his basic orientation toward the text as inspired and authoritative–something with direct relevance to him as a Christian.”
Inspired and authoritative are two words I wouldn’t ordinarily associate with Jonah’ tale of the whale.
In fact, the association with the whale sort of warned me off of Jonah.
I can’t really see the Apostle Paul being swallowed by a giant fish in the middle of Romans or Ephesians.
I looked around, then, for a resource in addition to the Bible and settled on Timothy Keller’s Rediscovering Jonah: The Secret of God’s Mercy as a way to sort through the lessons of the book of Jonah–including being swallowed by a big fish.
Whatever Keller’s critics say, (like he preaches a false gospel and he uses flawed methods of biblical interpretation), I appreciate his efforts to explain and teach Scriptural concepts clearly and simply.
Besides, all the Christian denominations spend a good bit of their time constantly excoriating each other, to Satan’s delight.
Satan chortles every time a Christian gets branded an apostate somewhere down the line for some doctrinal error or another according to some other denomination’s interpretation of Scripture.
Plus, Keller died last May so God fixed whatever Keller was in error about.
Keller starts off at the beginning of the book of Jonah:
Jonah 1:1-3a 1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry out against it, because their wickedness has come up before Me.” 3 But Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
Well, I can see already that I have an affinity for Jonah.
He’s apparently as dumb as I am.
Keller writes:
“Jonah concluded that because he could not see any good reasons for God’s command, there couldn’t be any. Jonah doubted the goodness, wisdom, and justice of God.”
From what I can see of the geography of this time, Nineveh was a capital city of Assyria which would be in parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey today.
The Assyrians were not nice people. They were cruel and bloodthirsty.
Erika Belibtreu writes about the Assyrian cruelty in Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death:
“In strife and conflict I besieged [and] conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword … I captured many troops alive: I cut off some of their arms [and] hands; I cut off others their noses, ears, [and] extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living [and] one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.”
So Jonah going to Nineveh would be like an Israeli schoolboy strolling into downtown Gaza City.
No damned wonder Jonah turned on his heel and headed off in the opposite direction of Assyria!
I’m sure Jonah was fond of his head.
Keller describes Jonah’s disobedience:
“When this happens we have to decide–does God know what’s best, or do we? And the default mode of the unaided human heart is to always decide that we do. We doubt that God is good, or that He is committed to our happiness, and therefore if we can’t see any good reasons for something God says or does, we assume that there aren’t any.”
I’m not a prophet so I can’t claim that God has ever spoken to me outright, but I’d like to think that whatever God told me to do; I would do it.
But I also know that I would probably come to some of the same conclusions Jonah did–God doesn’t know what I know.
Charles Spurgeon offers up a more spiritual and moral reason Jonah refused God, but I don’t know if people like Jonah and I get this deep.
(I only seem to be relating to Jonah because I feel like I have denied God’s wishes in my life):
“But still there was a higher and a better motive, though even that was a bad one; for anything is bad, however true and excellent in itself, that leads a man to run contrary to God’s mind. It was this. He thought that the character of God himself would suffer; for if he went down to Nineveh and proclaimed, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” then the people might repent, and Jehovah would suffer them to live; and then, after a while, the people would say, “Who is Jehovah? His word does not stand fast. He does not carry out his judgments. He lays his hand on the hilt of his sword, and then pushes it back into the scabbard.” Thus the Lord himself by his mercy, would lose his name for truth and immutability. Jonah would have preferred the destruction of Nineveh to the least dishonor to the name of the Lord.”
Jonah thought the Assyrians were too nasty and evil for God to handle; that God should destroy them rather than save them.
This is the same logic that led me to pronounce that God could have SAVED Dawn during her terrible illness that took her way too soon if He had WANTED to.
Was God distracted then? WHERE was He, when Dawn needed Him?
Jonah got up to flee God–like I have, like we all have.
Lord, we recognize that we are hesitant to heed your call, like Jonah, preferring the comfort of familiarity and safety over the uncertainty of obedience.
Lord, forgive us for the times we have been disobedient and have sought to flee from Your presence.
Amen.