Jonah

LIFE LESSONS
THE PROPHETS: JONAH
DR. JIM DIXON
JONAH 3:1-4:11
FEBRUARY 29, 2004

In February of the year 1891, a whaling vessel was sailing through the South Atlantic Ocean near the Falkland Islands. The whalers sighted a very large sperm whale. This whale was more than 80 feet in length and they would later find out that it weighed more than 150 metric tons, an unusually large sperm whale. The whalers went off of the ship which was called the Star of the East with two boats. The harpooners were in those two boats. They began to harpoon the whale. This whale was huge and it was strong and its tail came up underneath one of the boats and just threw it up into the air. The harpooners just flew out of the boat. The boat came back down and shattered. The sailors in the other boat began to pick up their fellow sailors and rescued all of them but one man and that one man was James Bartley. James Bartley was lost at sea.

Finally, they killed the whale and they brought the whale alongside the Star of the East and they began to cut and work on the whale. They began to cut its blubber. They worked and labored until midnight. Then they went to sleep. They woke up the next morning and they used the derrick on the Star of the East to life this giant whale up onto the deck of the ship. As they placed the whale on the deck of the ship, they noticed that there was a twitching in the stomach of the whale. They cut open the stomach of the whale and to their amazement, there was James Bartley and he was alive. He had spent the entire night in the belly of the whale. He was unconscious and they revived him and he lived. James Bartley became kind of a super hero. He became famous all over the world. From that day forth, his hands and his face were bleached white from the acid in the whale’s belly but he lived. From 1891 to the year 1900, for those 9 years, James Bartley was a celebrity. He was interviewed all over the world by scientists and by the media. He died in 1900. He was called “The Second Jonah.”

To this day, Jewish people and Christian people kind of love the story of James Bartley because it’s provided empirical evidence, scientific proof that a human being can indeed live for a portion of time in the belly of a great fish. I think a lot of people view the book of Jonah and the story of Jonah with a certain amount of skepticism. Of course, the book of Jonah has always been controversial, controversial because of its literary genre. Some Bible scholars believe that God has chosen a parabolic literary genre in the book of Jonah, that the book of Jonah is a parable. These Bible scholars believe that the whole story of the great fish and the whole story of the plant and the worm are parabolic elements and make this a parabolic story.

Other Bible scholars believe that the book of Jonah is historical narrative. There’s no doubt that Jonah is a historical person. He is described in 2 Kings, chapter 14, and we are told that Jonah was the son of Amittai, that he was a prophet of Israel in the 8th century before Christ, that he served as a prophet during the reign of Jeroboam II and that he lived in the town of Gath-hepher which was not far from Nazareth. Certainly, Jonah was a historical person. Many Bible scholars believe that the book of Jonah is kind of a combination of historical narrative and parable. But you see, the problem is, in all of this discussion and in all of this debate, a lot of people miss the message that God has. They miss the message of the book. They miss the life lessons from this prophet Jonah. We don’t want that to be true of us today and so this morning as we look at Jonah, we have two life lessons.

The first life lesson concerns righteousness. The theme of the book of Jonah in a sense is the theme of righteousness. Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.” God would ask you this morning; “Do you hunger and thirst after righteousness?”

Now, there’s no doubt that in a sense, Jonah longed for righteousness. Particularly Jonah hungered for what we would call social righteousness, and this was true of all the prophets of Israel and Judah. They all sought social righteousness. They wanted a society where people were treated fairly, a just society. They wanted a society where there was compassion for the poor and where the oppressed would be liberated. They wanted a society where the laws of God would be implemented and respected. They wanted a righteous society and this is what Jonah sought, a righteous society for his own nation and for other nations as well.

Throughout history, there have been many people who’ve longed for social righteousness. Certainly Plato, the Greek philosopher was one of these. You will recall that Plato wrote regarding the mythical continent of Atlantis. The whole story of Atlantis has fascinated historians to this day. Plate described this continent of Atlantis as somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules, somewhere beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. He said there was this continent called Atlantis and it was in the vast Atlantic Ocean. He described this continent as characterized by righteousness. Plato used the Greek word, “dikaiosune” which is the same word as is used in the Bible for righteousness.

Plato believed that this continent had been destroyed by volcanic eruption ten thousand years before him. He described it as a continent where men and women had lived in equality under law and a continent where the government ruled in peace and righteousness. Of course, historians have looked for this continent under the ocean destroyed by volcanic eruption. Oceanographers have looked. Archeologists have looked. They’ve really found nothing.

Some historians believe that Plato was really referring to the ancient Minoan civilization which was destroyed by volcanic eruption with the eruption of Santorini. But of course, Santorini exploded a thousand years before Plato, not ten thousand years. The Minoan civilization was not beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It was not in the vast Atlantic. The Minoan civilization was a Mediterranean civilization; more precisely an Aegean civilization and the Minoan civilization had never been characterized by righteousness. Men and women were not equal under the law in the Minoan society. There was poverty. There was oppression. There was corruption. There was violence. It was not a righteous world.

So, most historians today believe that Atlantis was simply, for Plato, his dream. It was his dream, his dream, his longing, his desire that there might come a righteous society. It was an imaginary dream world kind of like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Xanadu” or James Hilton’s “Shangri-La,” kind of like the modern-day Tibetans who desire and wait for Shambala, a little bit like Martin Luther King’s dream as he gave that famous message where he said, “I have a dream…” before the Washington Monument. He dreamed of a just society, a society where people would be judged by their character rather than the color of their skin. He longed for a righteous society.

We live in a country where we seek a just society. There have always been promises. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt promised a new deal. In 1948, Harry Truman promised a fair deal. In 1952, Dwight David Eisenhower spoke of the Great Crusade for a Better Tomorrow. In 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy spoke of The New Frontier and all of the blessings and all of the equality that would come with it. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson spoke of The Great Society and the promise of a new world. Of course, in 1988, George Bush spoke of A New World Order. We always live in this hope that our society might become just, that righteousness might reign but of course it never happens, not in this age of the world. As Christians, we look forward to the consummation and the coming of what the Bible calls, “The New Heavens and The New Earth” wherein righteousness reigns.

But today it’s a world of unrighteousness. We live in a fallen world. We live in a world where drug lords live in palatial splendor. There’s no justice there. Porn peddlers get rich. Criminals are oftentimes not apprehended. We live in a nation where 40 million babies have been aborted since the passing of Roe v. Wade. You understand the overwhelming majority of these abortions have had nothing to do with danger to the life of the mother or gross fetal deformity or rape or incest. The overwhelming majority of these abortions have simply been belated efforts at birth control and an increasingly promiscuous society and it’s just not just.

We don’t live in a righteous society. We live in a world where poverty is pandemic. We live in a world where bad things happen to good people. This is not a just society. But you see, if you’re a Christian—I don’t mean a nominal Christian—there are lots of those… I mean if you’re a genuine Christian and you’ve actually given your soul to Christ and you’ve pledged your life to follow Him, then you seek a more righteous world. You seek a more just society. Of course, we look at Jonah and we see that he did seek this and he hated unrighteousness.

Jonah was a prophet of Israel but God was concerned with other nations as well. God looked at Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, a gentile empire to be sure. But God saw the wickedness, the evil of the Assyrians and of Nineveh. It was a violent culture. It was a culture of oppression, slavery and bondage. It was a culture of incredible socioeconomic polarity with a massive sea of poverty and with rich people who did not care. It was a violent nation filled with criminals and it was a pagan nation. The chief god of Assyria was called Ishtar, the chief female deity. She was a fertility goddess portrayed with rows of breasts across her chest. The people of Assyria lived hedonistic lifestyles. Their lifestyles were immersed in materialism and violence. Jonah knew these things. When God spoke to him and said, “Go and warn the city of Nineveh that I am about to bring judgement from heaven upon them.” Jonah didn’t want to go. Jonah didn’t want to go because he really believed that the people of Nineveh deserved judgement and he was afraid that they might repent and find God’s mercy. He really wanted them to be judged for their misdeeds. He wanted justice to be served. He wanted the poor to be elevated, the oppressed to be liberated and the oppressors to be slaughtered. He wanted justice. That was Jonah. He wanted justice.

There’s a sense in which we too should want justice. Of course, we live in a different nation. We live in a different time, but as followers of Christ we should seek always justice and righteousness. That means we should seek a society where there is compassion for the poor. That means we should seek a society where just laws are enforced. That means we should seek a society where the improperly oppressed are liberated. It means we should seek a society that treats everyone with fairness and justice. That means we should seek a society where the basic laws of God are venerated and respected, and we should seek a society where the institutions established by God are respected. Understand, from a biblical point of view, both the church and the state are institutions established by God for the welfare of humanity—both the church and the state.

I think churches through the years have struggled with church/state relations. Non-Christians as well have struggled with church/state relations. There’s a polarity of feeling. On one extreme you have people who want an absolute wall of separation between church and state, something Thomas Jefferson himself never sought because Jefferson knew if there was an absolute wall of separation between church and state then inevitably there would be a devaluation of the spiritual side of man. On the other polarity, on the other extreme, you see people who want a church-controlled state and this would be equally tragic. As has history itself proved church-controlled states tend to excessively legislate morality and deny human freedoms and civil liberties.

We seek a just society and it’s not easy. We seek a society where all the institutions of God are valued from church to state as well as the institution of marriage because of course marriage is an institution of God established by God. This is pertinent today; a live issue because the gay lobby in America is seeking to redefine the institution of marriage. We live in a nation where most people want to see gay people treated fairly. As Christians we should want to see all people treated fairly but we must also seek a society where the institutions established by God are honored. Understand this. Marriage is instituted by God, regulated by His commandments. The Bible describes marriage as a diatheke. It’s a divine covenant established by God, the terms and conditions of which cannot be changed by man. We do not have the right to change marriage. God has established marriage as between a man and a woman as a foundational unit in society and the marriage union is “until death do them part.”

We’ve already profaned marriage in this culture and nation through rampant divorce, through the infusion of pornography and adultery into relationships. We’ve already profaned this institution of marriage and if we seek to redefine it, I promise you we will invite the wrath of God.

We have a petition out in the lobby today. There are two or three tables out there where you can go and sign this petition that seeks support for a federal marriage amendment. I want to encourage you to seek… This is when Jim was having problems with his microphone and Mark Shupe gave him his. Nothing was recording during this exchange… …Like the prophets of old, we hunger and thirst after social righteousness which means that we treat… we want to seek to create a fair society but also a society which honors the basic laws of God and the institutions of God.

There’s a second theme in the book of Jonah more briefly. The second theme concerns mercy. The book of Jonah is not just about righteousness but the book of Jonah is also about mercy. Jonah hated mercy. He loved righteousness but he didn’t love mercy. Perhaps there were certain forms of mercy Jonah loved because mercy is diverse. Indeed, in the book of Jonah, the Hebrew word for mercy is the word “hus,” which is transliterated into English as hus. In the Septuagint the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Old Testament this word hus is rendered by “eleos,” the Greek word for mercy, the New Testament word. Both of these words can refer to a variety of mercies. Both of these words can be used to refer to compassion, the desire to help someone who is simply hurting. I’m sure Jonah had mercy in this sense. I’m sure he had compassion for the hurting.

Just this past week on Tuesday, Barb was driving home on Daniels Park Road. She was there on the dirt road approaching Daniels Park and she saw a little puppy, a little dog. This dog had no collar, was skin and bone and looked like it was starving and desperate and was kind of violent because it was so distraught and just running loose. There was nobody around. Barb pulled her car over and she chased the dog. Some other people helped her and they found the dog. They caught the dog and Barb took this dog to the Dumb Friends. She wanted to know what she should do. They said if she left the dog there that they could not guarantee that it would not be put to sleep. They encouraged her to keep the dog and they would register the dog as lost. So, Barb brought the dog home and I can tell she’s now wanting to adopt this dog. I’m not sure how I feel about that but she’s wanting to adopt this dog and it’s mercy. It’s all mercy. It’s compassion for an animal that was hurting. Just compassion. I think you all have that kind of mercy and I think Jonah had that kind of mercy.

Hus and eleos can refer to these things. They can also refer to a kind of mercy that’s like tolerance and forbearance and again we all need this kind of mercy. We need tolerance. We need forbearance. This kind of mercy means you forbear or you tolerate people and things you disagree with. You can’t live in this world, you can’t live in society unless—certainly not a pluralistic society—you have some measure of tolerance and forbearance for things you disagree with. This too is hus or eleos. This is a kind of mercy and there’s no reason to believe Jonah didn’t have this kind of mercy.

But, you see, there’s a third type of mercy and it’s the most profound, the deepest type of mercy and it relates to forgiveness. This is where Jonah struggled. He just didn’t have the mercy of forgiveness. It was particularly hard for Jonah to want to allow forgiveness for people who had really been evil. When people were really evil, there should be no circumstance under which they would be forgiven. That’s how Jonah felt and that’s why Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. That’s why he got on the ship and headed for Tarshish. That’s why you had the whole whale deal. It was all about forgiveness. He knew the nature of God. He knew that if he went to Nineveh and he went as a prophet and he walked the streets and he warned the people, there was a chance they might repent. If they did repent, he knew that God was a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, repenting of evil. He didn’t want these people in Nineveh to be forgiven. He wanted righteousness. He didn’t want mercy. God is a merciful God. There’s no doubt about that although His mercy is gravely misunderstood by our culture and by our time but we see the mercy of God again and again in scripture. As we’ve gone through the Life Lessons, we’ve seen mercy, God’s mercy, divine mercy.

Remember when we looked at Manasseh, the King of Judah in the 7th century, perhaps the most wicked king in the history of the world? Certainly, he was the most wicked king in the history of Israel and Judah. Remember how Manasseh ascended the throne at the age of 12 and we saw how he rebelled against the ways of his relatively righteousness father, Hezekiah? We saw how Manasseh rebelled against God. We saw how Manasseh became a king of connoisseur of cultic pagan religions and how he became a student of the occult and practiced occultism. We saw how Manasseh built the high places and erected altars to the Baals. We saw how Manasseh invited necromancers and sorcerers into his city, into Jerusalem. The incense just rose from the rooftops of Jerusalem homes in the worship of pagan deities.

We saw how Manasseh worst of all invited the cult of Molech into Judah. Molech was a religious cult that practiced child sacrifice and child sacrifice began to be practiced in Israel. He would light the fires in the Hinnom Valley and force children to run through the flames and they died in the flames. The Hinnom Valley became the place of human sacrifice so that Gehinnom or Gehenna became a symbol of hell itself. Was not this man from hell? Didn’t he behave like someone who was inspired by hell? And yet an amazing thing happened. You know the story how Manasseh was captured by the Assyrians. The Bible tells us he was taken to Babylon. He was put in a dungeon and there in a dungeon as he was awaiting death, he repented. He cried out to the God of his fathers. His repentance, the Bible tells us, was genuine, not bogus, not phony but genuine.

What did God do incomprehensibly? God forgave him. God responded with mercy. He forgave Manasseh, gave him back to Judah and set him on the throne. Manasseh changed because he repented. “Metanoia” is the Greek word for repentance and it means, “to change the mind” literally, but it means, “to turn and walk a new way.” He lived differently. He had truly repented and the rest of his reign was righteous. He had come into the world of God’s mercy through repentance.

Of course, we look at the prodigal son and Jesus told that story. You all know it and you know how the elder brother, the oldest son, rebelled against his father and his family, demanded his inheritance, went to a foreign land, lived a debauched life, squandered his money, become broke, wound up feeding pigs and swine. Ultimately he came to his right mind and he repented. He repented and he resolved that he would change. He came back to his home and said to his father, “Make me as one of your hired servants. I repent,” and his father forgave him.

Jesus reminds us that God is like that. God is always willing to respond to repentance with mercy, but here’s the problem. Here’s the problem in our culture, even in our churches. We want mercy without repentance. Isn’t that the problem? Don’t we want mercy without repentance in this culture? I mean, Nineveh did not receive mercy until they had repented in sackcloth and ashes. From the greatest of them to the least of them, they repented and thereby they found mercy.

We live in a time where people want to live how they want to live and they just hope that God will have mercy. God may indeed forbear sin for a season but not forever. The only way to come into God’s eternal mercy is through repentance. A Christian is someone whose life is in a sense summed up by repentance and a resolve to change—if we’re genuine Christians, if we really believe. Understand we live in a world where there’s a lot of nominal Christianity, nominal Christianity everywhere, but genuine Christianity is relatively rare—people who really believe, people who have really made a commitment to follow Christ.

A week ago, Sunday I preached a sermon and portions of it offended a number of people where I talked about heaven and hell and the divine judgement in the context of the ancient of days in the book of Daniel. I related it to money and giving. Understand that in the Bible the soul and money are often joined. Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money. You cannot serve both God and mammon” which means money. Of course, mammon is the great god of our culture, I think the great god of our nation.

I received many e-mails, many letters, phone calls and responses. Some of you were encouraging and supportive and I’m extremely grateful for your encouragement. Some of you were very upset. I’m grateful that you communicated to me and wrote to me. Some of you were very angry with me but don’t be angry with me because it’s God you need to deal with. I’m nobody. You will not stand or fall before me. You will stand fall only before God. Understand as a pastor my responsibility is simply to be a good steward of God’s Word and faithfully convey the promises of God and the warnings of God as they’re contained in Holy Scripture to the people of God or at least to the people who claim to be of God.

I believe most of you are Christians and have given your life to Christ, but you see a lot of us need to repent. We just need to repent. If you’re not giving anything to Christ and the cause of Christ, the answer isn’t to get mad, certainly not at me. Repent! That’s what the call of the Bible is. Repent! If you’re living in sin in any way, repent. If you’re having sex and you’re not married, repent. If you’re guilty day after day of slander and gossip and you just enjoy gossip, repent. If you’re not giving money, if you’re not seeking first the kingdom of heaven, repent. That’s the way we enter the world of Christ’s mercy. That’s the true gospel. I sometimes wonder what Bible are people reading. What Bible are they reading?

Yesterday Barb and I went to see “The Passion of the Christ.” We went with our family. I thought it was really powerful and hard to watch in places certainly. The violence was just over the top but understand, historically, that Roman persecution, Roman crucifixion, Roman whipping and scourging, these Roman disciplines WERE over the top! The reality is the movie accurately portrayed what our Lord Jesus Christ went through. Understand, He went through it for you and He went through it for me. As I was sitting there, I couldn’t help but think of the words of the old hymn, “My Jesus, I love Thee. I know Thou art mine. For Thee all the folly of sin, I resign. My precious Redeemer, my Savior art Thou. If ever I loved You, my Jesus is now.”

We need to live every day like that, resigning sin, repenting of it, just recognizing how precious His redemption is and loving Him. For the Christian there’s really no other way. We cheapen the cross of Christ when we preach mercy without repentance. That’s cheap grace. It’s like cheapening the blood of Jesus Himself so we preach repentance. Jesus came preaching the Gospel, Mark, chapter 1, saying, “Repent.” If you’ve never done that, if you’ve never asked Jesus to be your Savior and Lord truly, today is the day to repent and embrace Him as Savior and Lord. If you’re calling yourself a Christian but your life isn’t lining up, today is the day to repent. Today is the day, so let’s look to the Lord with a word or prayer.