Jonah 1:1–6

0:00 What are your New Year's resolutions? How are you going to make yourself a better person this year? That's what it's all about, right? Every time the earth makes another revolution around the sun, we're all supposed to make ourselves better people. We're supposed to decide to do things and decide not to do things that are going to make us a better person. We're supposed to decide to eat better or to go to the gym more or to get fit, or to do this, or do that.

0:32 What is your New Year's resolution? Let me give you a suggestion for a New Year's resolution that's not going to make a whole lot of sense to you right at the beginning, but I hope in just a couple of minutes anyway, it will make more sense to you. Here's a New Year's resolution that I would suggest all of us in this room as members of Third Avenue make this year. And that is, when it comes to the Word of God, Determine and resolve that in 2024, you are going to work really hard not to be Neo from The Matrix.

1:06 You know what I'm talking about? Neo from The Matrix? Some of you have seen those movies. A long time ago, there were three movies made called The Matrix, in which a character called Neo finds that he has just been hooked into a simulation. And at a certain point in the movie, they unhook him from the simulation. He finds out about the real world and he learns how to use the powers of what they call the Matrix. And there's one particular scene in those movies in which Neo is being shot at by one of the security guards in the Matrix.

1:40 And there's this hail of bullets that's coming toward the hero, Neo. And for all of us who saw that movie in the theaters at the time that it was made, There's this amazing scene in which Neo leans backwards and dodges in slow motion all of those bullets that are coming toward him. You've probably seen it because in years since the movie was made, it's become a meme, essentially for avoiding things. Working really hard to avoid truth, to avoid some insight about yourself.

2:14 It's a meme that's about evasion. That CGI scene in the movie doesn't look so amazing to most of you now because you're so familiar with CGI that something like avoiding a bunch of bullets just doesn't seem like a big deal. But if you saw it in the theaters back when I saw it, it was amazing because it was one of the first uses of CGI. And to watch Neo evading those bullets was something that we had never, ever seen before. He was a superhero of evasion.

2:46 Well, that's what I want to challenge you with this morning, right here at the beginning of 2024. When it comes to the Word of God, don't be Neo from the Matrix. Don't work hard to avoid the Word of God. That's what I want to talk to you about this morning as we open up to a brand new series and a brand new book in the Bible. Let me invite you to take a Bible and turn over to the book of Jonah. That's where we're going to be this morning. And really for the next six weeks as we unfold the story of the book of Jonah.

3:18 If you're using one of the pew Bibles in front of you, one of the red pew Bibles that you can find either under the pew or maybe under the seat on the pew rack, wherever it is, you'll be able to find the book of Jonah on page 953. That's where it begins. Jonah, if you look at it, is not a long book. It's only four chapters and it's one of the 12 books at the end of the Old Testament. They're all kind of grouped together. And they're called the Minor Prophets. We've studied through several of the Minor Prophets over the last few years. And so if you've been with us through that time, you know that the Minor Prophets are called Minor, not because they have a minor message or because they have an unimportant message, but just because they're short, right?

3:57 In the Old Testament, there are those that are called Major Prophets and there are those that are called Minor Prophets. Really the only distinction between the two is that the major ones are long and the minor ones are short. And so Jonah is one of those 12 prophets that gets called a Minor Prophets because it is compared to a book like, you know, Isaiah that we studied last year, it's short. What we're planning to do over the next six weeks is look at this book, which without a doubt, I think has to be understood to be the most famous of the minor prophets. I mean, my guess is that most of us, if put on the spot, could not even name all of the minor prophets. If you can name all 12 of them, You are like truly a world-renowned biblical scholar.

4:40 But most of us, if asked to name the 12 minor prophets, would start probably with Jonah. And then most of us would try to fit Hezekiah in there somewhere also, even though Hezekiah is not one of the minor prophets. The reason we know Jonah so well, though, the reason it's kind of at the forefront of our minds, is because for most of us, it comes across as mostly just a kind of well-known and super interesting children's story in which this guy Jonah is called by God to go preach to a certain city called Nineveh.

5:15 He decides that he's not going to do that. He's going to rebel against God's will, and so he hops a ship and tries to go in the opposite direction of Nineveh. And the rest of, you know, you know the rest of the story. What happens to him? He eventually gets thrown overboard and he gets swallowed by a giant fish. He spends three days in the belly of the fish and then the fish spits him out on dry land and Jonah decides, well, maybe I ought therefore to go obey the word of God. And so he goes to the city that God told him to go to and he preaches the word of God and the people repent.

5:48 And that's the story. Now the problem though, as with so many stories, especially from the Old Testament, is that we end the story too soon. The way we tell the story, Jonah disobeys God, he gets eaten by the fish, he gets spit out, he obeys God, he goes to the city, he preaches, and everything turns out well. That's not how the story ends. Because as we're going to see over the next six weeks, the book of Jonah is not just a story of how one man heard the word of God, disobeyed, got punished, and then repented and everything turned out well. That's not the story of Jonah. The story of Jonah is actually delving deep into questions of how God governs the world. How does God show justice to those to whom he shows justice? How does God show mercy to those to whom he shows mercy? And what the story of the book of Jonah is doing is opening up those questions to us and really allowing us and inviting us to ask

6:54 questions like that. If you know the story of Jonah a little bit better than just the children's story, you know that by the end of it, it sort of all becomes clear what's going on. Jonah is very unhappy, it turns out, that God is going to show mercy to the people to whom Jonah is preaching. And it raises just a host of questions about why does God show mercy when he shows mercy? How does God show mercy when he shows mercy? Should God show justice instead of mercy to the people to whom he shows mercy?

7:25 It's a book that's just chock full of some of the most important questions that we could ever ask of ourselves. But on top of that and underneath all of that, the book of Jonah is also a story of God's grace and the way the human heart responds to that grace. And not always in the way that we've been taught to expect by children's stories. This story in Jonah is full of twists and turns. It's full of unexpected things. It's full of even humor at certain points.

7:56 Just all kinds of things that we don't expect. It's a familiar story, right? So it doesn't strike us as all that surprising. I mean, I can tell you in the first few sentences of a sermon that Jonah gets swallowed by a fish and then spit out on dry land. And most of you in here are like, yes, of course, that's what happens to Jonah. But if you didn't know that, if you were just reading the story, that would be something shocking and maybe even slightly terrifying on the one hand and funny on the other hand. This guy gets swallowed by a fish because he's disobeying God.

8:28 And yet in the midst of all of those unexpected things, the Lord is teaching us about ourselves and about his own heart of grace. I don't know how many of the minor prophets you've ever read or studied, But if you have ever studied many of the minor prophets, then you know that the book of Jonah is very different from those other prophets. Because it focuses not so much on the message of the prophet of Jonah, so much as the prophet's story. It tells us things that happened to the prophet Jonah. And it doesn't really tell us very much at all about what Jonah's message was.

9:02 That's very different from the other prophets, right? You look at Obadiah or Nahum or Habakkuk or any of the other minor prophets. And the whole book is basically, here's what the prophet said to the people of the time. Jonah's message, the thing that Jonah actually said, is reduced to literally five Hebrew words. That's all he ever says in terms of the prophetic message in the book. It's five Hebrew words. The rest of the book is about the things that happened to Jonah.

9:35 Now, as with so many of the prophets, we know very little about Jonah. What we know about him from one other place in the Old Testament and also from the book itself is that Jonah was a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel. This was after the nation of Israel broke into two different halves, right? You remember that from studying the book of Kings and Isaiah, right? There was the northern kingdom that was called Israel, and then there was the southern kingdom that was called Judah. Jonah was a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of another wicked king called Jeroboam II, who reigned in the first half of the 8th century BC. Now, just to put in perspective so your eyes don't glaze over and you can kind of follow what I'm talking about there, that's like 775 BC. 775 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, which happened roughly, not exactly, you can think of it anyway, as happening at zero, right?

10:31 So if this is the year 2024, and Jonah was preaching and all these things were happening to him in like 775 before zero, then we're talking about events that happened something like 2,800 years ago. This is an ancient, ancient story. These things actually probably happened in the 760s BC. I'm not going to go into all the detail of how we know that specifically, but it has to do with kings of Israel and kings of Assyria and kings of Nineveh that we can see from other historical sources.

11:05 So we're talking about events that happened something like 2,700, 2,800 years ago. Jonah himself is mentioned one other time in the Old Testament, in 2 Kings chapter 14, where he said to be a pretty well-known prophet in the nation of Israel, in the northern kingdom of Israel. He prophesied to the kings, we don't know a whole lot about his message, but what we do know is that at least one of his prophecies was that Jeroboam II, despite his wickedness, despite his rebellion against God, despite the fact that he was a terrible king, Jonah prophesied that he was going to take some territory back that the Syrians had stolen from Israel.

11:42 And so 2 Kings chapter 14 mentions that. Now that little bit of the message of Jonah, that hey, Jeroboam, the Lord says you are going to take some territory back that the Syrians have stolen from Israel. That is much more, it seems, Jonah's style. He seems to have been a prophet that was all about the glory of Israel. He liked to talk about the glory of Israel. And part of the reason we know that is because, as this book famously shows, he was not happy at all with this next message that God gave him. I mean, to say that, Jeroboam, you're going to take back territory that the syrians have stolen from you you're going to expand the boundaries of israel you're going to expand and increase the glory of israel that was a message that jonah was happy to say the message that god gives him here though was not a message that he was happy to preach and the events that take place because of his refusal to preach that message teach us much

12:42 about God and about ourselves. Another New Year's resolution that I would encourage you to adopt pretty quickly is to go ahead and read in advance the text that we're going to be preaching on here at Third Avenue. It's just a good practice for you to read ahead what we're going to be preaching on. It's usually at least printed in your bulletin, usually kind of on the inside back cover, something like that, so you can look ahead and see what we're going to be preaching on for the week. If you read ahead, let me tell you what happens when you read ahead.

13:13 What happens is that your mind is tuned to listen better to what the Lord might have to say to you from a book like Jonah. You'll have the categories in your mind. You'll have the story and the characters in your mind. You'll have certain questions that will pop up in your mind. You'll kind of be on the edge of your seat wondering, is Greg going to answer my question or not? Sometimes I will and sometimes I won't. But that's okay. Because it's good to have those questions in your mind. It's good for your mind to be working on the Word of God even before we talk about it in here so that it's not coming to you as a sort of completely uncooked meal, right?

13:47 So make a resolution to yourself to read the story of Jonah in advance. You might even want to, you know, for the next six weeks just read the entire four chapters of Jonah all at once six different times over the next six weeks. That would be a good practice for you to do. If you've done that, if you did have a chance to read the book in advance, then you know that it is a compelling story. What God tells us about the life of Jonah and about these events is utterly compelling. And that's the reason that we're still talking about it 2,700 years or 2,800 years after it was told and after these events happened.

14:26 And the story through all four of these chapters just draws you along as the narrative unfolds. And time after time after time, it surprises you and just kind of makes you shake your head and go, That was not what I was expecting. I mean, you know the outlines of it. God calls Jonah to preach to the ancient city of Nineveh, to call that city to repentance. It was the capital of the ancient empire of Assyria, a wicked, wicked city. And the evil of that city is known to God. And God tells Jonah to go tell them to repent. Jonah refuses to do that and tries to flee.

14:58 He hops a ship to the city that is as far away from Nineveh as it could possibly be. God sends a storm, Jonah is thrown overboard by the sailors, he's swallowed by a fish, he's vomited up on dry land. He finally decides, okay, I'm going to obey God, he goes and preaches. And he is, unlike any other prophet in the entire Old Testament, he is wildly successful in his preaching. The entire city of Nineveh, and actually it's probably the entire region of Nineveh, repents of its sin.

15:31 And then in another twist, at the end of the story, when the people of Nineveh repent, Jonah is not happy about this, but he is ripping angry that this has happened. Just utterly unexpected. I mean, think about the other prophets in the Old Testament. If Jeremiah, for instance, or Isaiah, had seen the entire city of Jerusalem repent of their sins and sit in sackcloth and ashes and call on the whole rest of the city to repent, they would have been ecstatic. In fact, God has to tell them at the beginning of their ministry, look, you're going to prophesy, you're going to preach for all the years of your life, and literally no one is going to listen to you.

16:09 You are going to have zero success in your ministry of preaching to the people of Jerusalem. I mean, they would have been ecstatic to have somebody repent. They probably would have been ecstatic to have anybody repent of their sins. Jonah has the entire region of Nineveh repent of its sins, and he's ripping mad about it. why is that well that's the drama of the story that's the surprising thing of the story and we're going to be talking about it as we go through the entire book because those questions are the ones that the book of Jonah that the author of the book of Jonah wants to put into your lap and into your mind so that you have to deal with them too as we study the book it's going to be important to keep in mind the point of the entire book, which is to teach us that salvation is holy and completely from God. It is completely and utterly up to God to determine who he will save, who he will show

17:10 mercy to, and who he will not. And our opinions, yours and mine, about who deserves that salvation or who ought to receive that mercy and that compassion simply don't matter. That's the message of the book of Jonah. God, and God alone, determines who he will save and who he will show mercy to. Well, today we're looking at just the first six verses of the story, really kind of the, you could say it's just sort of the setup of the story, right?

17:42 It's just sort of setting the scene. It's giving you a little bit of the drama of what's going to happen. But it's just giving you the setup. But even in those six verses, the setup of the story, I think there's plenty to learn. There's plenty, even in these six verses, to see about the way God deals with us as human beings. And maybe even more importantly than how God deals with us as human beings, it teaches us about the way we tend to respond when God does that. When God deals with us, when God confronts us, when God encounters us, These six verses open up a window into our heart about how we tend to respond to that.

18:23 So let's see what we can learn. I'm going to start reading in Jonah chapter 1, verse 1, right at the very beginning. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.

19:00 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his God. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. but Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep so the captain came and said to him what do you mean you sleeper arise call out to your God perhaps that God will give a thought to us that we may not perish all right so that's the setup that's the beginning of the drama and the beginning of the drama is really a fascinating beginning of the story isn't it because even though it begins like so many other Old Testament stories, there's a twist in it that you really don't see anywhere else in the Bible.

19:55 Like no other prophet responds like this in the entire New Testament. I mean, look at the first verse, verse 1. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it for their evil has come up before me. If you're reading that story, if you're just like reading through the Old Testament, You come to Jonah chapter 1, verse 1, and you read that verse, and it's not surprising to you at all. I mean, you're almost yawning because this kind of thing happens over a hundred times in the Old Testament. That the word of the Lord comes to some named prophet, and it's followed by some instruction of what you're supposed to do or what you're supposed to say.

20:33 It happens over and over and over again. And what follows that sort of programmatic introduction to the story should be in verse 2. And Jonah arose and went to Nineveh and preached. That's what you're expecting. But that is not what happens. Look what happens in verse 3. It's actually interesting, that word but there, at the beginning of verse 3, it's not but. It's just a normal Hebrew word for and. I mean, have you ever noticed in the Bible how many sentences begin with the word and?

21:05 That's especially true in the Old Testament. And it's just because in Hebrew, there's this little word and, and it's got multiple uses. but it starts almost every sentence in the Old Testament. And this happened, and that happened, and that happened. It's just a connector, right? It's not like, but in English is what we call an adversative. So it's adverse. It means that something new is about to happen. That's what but is. And is not like that in Hebrew. It's just a continuative, right? It just, it carries on the story. And that's what that word is in verse three, because the author of the book of Jonah is still just kind of stringing you along so that he can explode the bomb in the middle of verse 3.

21:45 So it just says, The word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying this, this, this, this. And Jonah rose, and you're still expecting it to say, and went to Nineveh and preached, and then the author explodes the bomb. And Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. You see that? Jonah just flat refuses to do what the Lord says. And that is supposed to surprise you. Because that is not the usual pattern of a prophet of the Lord at all.

22:20 Instead of doing what the Lord said, he hops a ship to a city called Tarshish. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. But what you need to know is that it's in the opposite direction of Nineveh. It's not like he's going to Tarshish on his way to Nineveh. It's in the opposite direction, and any reader of the story would have known that. And then in verses 5 and 6, you see the results of that. as this storm threatens to destroy the ship that he's on. Now, that's just the beginning of the story, but there's plenty to learn here. And I think what we see in these first few verses is really, in both Jonah and the sailors that he's sailing with, I think we see two disastrous responses to being confronted by God.

23:00 Two disastrous responses to being confronted by God. So, I mean, to put it in the opposite way, When you are confronted by God, when you are encountered or confronted by the word of God, Jonah and the sailors here in this story tell you two ways that you should not respond to that. Because they'll lead to disaster. So let's look at those two things. Two ways not to respond to being confronted by God. Number one, pretty clear from Jonah himself, don't run from God.

23:33 When you're confronted by God, just don't run away, right? Don't try to evade the Word of God, like Neo from The Matrix. Don't do that. That's the first disastrous response. The second one is don't try to appease God. Don't try to appease God. Listen to what he's saying. Don't just try to knock it away by giving God what you think he wants. All right, let's take a closer look at it. First disastrous response to being confronted by the Word of God is don't run from God.

24:06 Don't try to evade him. That's exactly what Jonah tries to do. The book opens super straightforwardly. We've already seen it. The word of the Lord comes to this man named Jonah, the son of Amittai. I mean, just sort of sidebar for a second. You need to understand that opening the book like that, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, is very formulaic. It's the way the Old Testament tells stories about prophets that actually happened. Now, why do I make such a big deal about that?

24:37 I make such a big deal about that because that is not the way Old Testament authors open up stories or parables or legends. There are a whole bunch of people who have read the book of Jonah throughout the centuries. And they have said, you know, of all the things in the Bible, the parting of the Red Sea and the creation of the world and the falling of the walls of Jericho. The one thing I just cannot stomach is that a guy got swallowed by a fish. So I think, which doesn't make much sense, right? if you believe in a God who does the supernatural. If you believe in a God who can split the Red Sea and who can cause the walls of Jericho to fall, believing that he had a fish swallow a guy is not that hard to believe.

25:14 And yet for some people that, for some reason that throws people. But what you need to understand is that the author of Jonah does not understand himself to be writing legend or parable or story. He understands himself to be writing history. And he opens his book in the same way that all the other Old Testament writers open their narratives about the prophets. The word of the Lord came to a man named Jonah, the son of another man named Amittai, which he would not include in a legend, and told him to go to a particular historical city called Nineveh.

25:57 So there's no once upon a time here. The word Jonah, just by the way, the word of the Lord came to Jonah. The word Jonah there means dove, which some people have tried to read all kinds of meaning in. But it's not exactly clear what that might mean, if it's a kind of made-up name. It's probably not, though, because naming people after animals was a very common thing to do back in the ancient Near East. So there's probably not any name word play going on there. No, it's just history. The guy really was named Jonah. He really was the son of a man named Amittai. The word of the Lord really did come to him and really did tell him to go preach against the city of Nineveh.

26:34 He gets there in verse 2, abrupt instructions from God. You are to go and preach to this city called Nineveh. This was the most important city of the Assyrian Empire by this time in the sort of early 8th century. It was the capital city, which just meant that it was the seat of the king, right? The king of Assyria decided that he was going to live there. He built a palace there. That's where he exercised judgment. That's the place from which he directed the armies and all the rest. And so Nineveh had become the most important city of the Assyrian Empire.

27:04 The instructions that God gives in these verses are interesting because the northern kingdom was by this time being pressed very hard by the empire of Assyria. Now, Assyria wasn't going to come to its height. It wasn't going to be as powerful as it would get until about 50 years after Jonah was prophesying. And yet already Assyria was on the rise. The kings of Assyria were sort of consolidating power.

27:35 They were putting down lesser kings. And one of the lesser kings that they were trying to put down would have been Jeroboam II, the king of Israel. So Assyria was already pressing really hard on the nation of Israel, which of course was Jonah's home. So it's interesting when God says there in verse 2, Rise, Jonah, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out or prophesy or preach against it, for their evil has come up before me. Seems like, at least, it would have been a pretty cool assignment for him, right?

28:08 I mean, I get to go. I'm a prophet, and I get to go to this great enemy of my people that's threatening to destroy my nation, and I get to preach against that city because their evil has come up before the Lord? That sounds like an awesome assignment. So you're not expecting what happens in verse 3. And Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

28:41 Why on earth does he do that? If Assyria is the enemy, if Nineveh is the capital of the enemy that's pressing against his own nation, if the instruction is to go preach against them because of their evil, why does he not want to do it? It's an amazing assignment. I mean, it's better than what Jeremiah and Ezekiel got, right? I mean, Jeremiah's assignment was to go to the people of Jerusalem and tell them, his own people, that they were going to be destroyed.

29:14 Ezekiel's was the same, except he had to eat cakes made out of human dung. It was not a good assignment at all. Prophets typically don't get good assignments. And yet Jonah's got this amazing instruction from the Lord. Go preach against your enemies and tell them they're going to be destroyed. And he says, no, I'm not going to do it. Why? Well, just leave that question sitting on the table. Because you'll notice in verses 1 through 3, 1 through 6, chapter 1, chapter 2, Chapter 3, the author of Jonah never gives you an answer to that question.

29:50 He leaves it on the table. He leaves it blank until chapter 4. So we're going to leave it sitting on the table for a little while too. What's interesting here is the mention of the city of Tarshish. Tarshish was a city that was famous for trade. And it was also famous, it's mentioned several times in the Bible. And the reason it's mentioned is because it was very far away. So we're not exactly sure where Tarshish was. Probably the best guess is that it was on the Iberian Peninsula. So over in sort of the far western part of Spain, kind of where Sevilla is at this point, southwestern Spain, that sort of thing.

30:27 That's our best guess as to where it was. We're not exactly sure. What we do know is that it was famous for ships, it was famous for trade, and it was famous for being a very far away. So Jonah goes down to Joppa, the well-known city of the Philistines, where they have a lot of boats, and he hires a boat to head there. But look at the reason for his wanting to go to Tarshish. To get as far away from Nineveh as possible. Look at his reason there. He rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

31:01 And then again at the end of verse 3. He went with them to Tarshish away from the presence of the Lord. Now, if you've been a Christian for very long, that sounds very foolish to you probably. To the point that we're tempted to read the book of Jonah a little bit like a comedy. Can you believe it? Can you believe that this prophet thought he could flee from the presence of the Lord? I mean, has he never heard of omnipresence? God is everywhere.

31:34 You can't flee from the presence of the Lord. Doesn't he know that? It's so funny that Jonah tries to do that. But friends, this is not comical at all. And we as Christians even should not be so fast to make fun of Jonah for thinking he could run away and hide from God because you and I try to do exactly the same thing. I mean, we're typically educated enough and we're typically theologically minded enough to know that we can't do that geographically.

32:07 You can't just run off to the Western Iberian Peninsula and think that you're going to escape God. We know that that's not possible. We've read the Psalms. We know you can't do that. But friends, if we're honest with ourselves, if we know ourselves very well at all, we know that we have our own ways of trying to evade God's presence, of trying to escape from God's gaze. Don't we? It's a typical human response to God.

32:41 after the fall, to hide. It's exactly what Adam did, right? Instead of walking with God in the cool of the day, what did he do? He hid. Where are you, Adam? We had all kinds of strategies of doing the same thing just by ignoring God, by not thinking about Him, by filling our minds up with things other than God, by avoiding prayer. I mean, in an ironic way, some of us try to avoid God's gaze, not by avoiding church, but by coming to church.

33:26 It wouldn't do much good for me to preach to those of you who are sitting here in church on the first Sunday of 2024 about the dangers of not coming to church. You came. You came this morning. That's good. But it's important for us to understand that we often try to avoid God's gaze by doing things like coming to church. If I just do this, if I just come to this place, if I'm just present from 10.45 to 12.30 on Sunday mornings, maybe God won't look at this or this or this in my life.

34:03 We don't try to avoid God by going to the Iberian Peninsula, but we try to avoid him in all kinds of other ways. Friends, some of you even sitting here in the middle of a church service need to stop hiding from God. You need to just come out with your hands up and say, Lord, I surrender. There's no getting away from your gaze. There's no distracting you. There's no fooling you.

34:35 I surrender. And I give myself up to you. I want you to notice a couple more things here too. Just ask a couple more questions of this text. And here's one question that's just kind of nagging. It's going to nag for a long time. Why does Jonah decide he's going to run from God? Why does Jonah decide that he's going to run from God? That's actually a pretty finely layered and nuanced question to ask.

35:06 There's a lot of different ways that you can ask that question. Why does Jonah run? Why does he try to get away? So one layer on one hand is just the question, why does he not want to preach to Nineveh, right? That's kind of the driving question of the whole narrative. If they're the enemy, why does he not want to go preach against them? Why doesn't he want to do that? Like I said, the text is very careful to not give us the answer to that question yet. Not going to give us the answer to that question until chapter 4. But there's another layer to it, too. Why does Jonah try to run, especially given what we know that he knows about God?

35:47 Why does Jonah try to run, especially given what we know that he knows about God? I mean, I think you come to this story initially and you kind of think, Well, okay, my initial thought is that Jonah is just this, he's this primitive guy, right? Because obviously everybody 2,700 years ago is primitive in their understanding about who God is and who humanity is. They don't have iPhones. They're very, very primitive people. And so Jonah must be one of these primitive people who just thinks that he can flee geographically from God's presence.

36:24 Maybe he thought God was just a kind of provincial deity, right? Like all the other nations thought about their gods. Maybe he thought about God like that. A God whose power and authority are limited to a certain geographical area. And if he gets outside of the promised land, if he runs away geographically, he can be free of God's gaze and God's sight. That's how we tend to think about it. But does that really make sense? I mean, think about it. Is Jonah really just a primitive guy who thinks of Yahweh as a provincial deity?

37:01 No, he's not. He's an Israelite. He's been trained in the scriptures. He's read Genesis and Exodus and Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Numbers and all of them. He's read everything that is scripture. He knows the scripture. More than that, he's a prophet and a fairly well-known one in the northern kingdom of Israel. He's mentioned in 2 Kings. He knew who God was. He knew that God wasn't just a provincial deity whose authority and rule are limited to a particular geographical area.

37:36 He knew that. He knew he couldn't just run away. I mean, even here in the story, in verse 9, chapter 1, if you look down there, He tells the sailors what he knows to be true, which is that the God he's trying to run away from is the God that rules the entire universe. He knows that. Later in the book, in his song in chapter 2, and then even at the beginning of chapter 4, he even quotes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy.

38:08 He quotes those books. So it's not some lack of theological knowledge that leads Jonah to take this foolish action of trying to run away from God. It's got to be something else. He's not just primitive and uneducated and non-theologically minded. That's not it. What is it that causes him to run? What causes Jonah to run is this right here. Jonah let his own desires overwhelm his knowledge.

38:45 He let his desires overwhelm his knowledge. Let me say that one more time because I think that might be the most important sentence I'll say to you this morning. The reason Jonah ran from God is not because he was primitive. It was that he let his own desires overwhelm his theological knowledge. What he knew to be true about God. I mean, look at that phrase there in verse 3. It's twice used there.

39:18 Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. And then again at the end of the verse, from the presence of the Lord. If you take that phrase and you compare it to other places in the Old Testament where it's used, it's actually not talking about geography. It's far more significant than that. To be in the presence of the Lord was not just to be near Jerusalem, near the temple, somewhere geographically located. That's not what it meant. To be in the presence of the Lord, to stand before the presence of the Lord, was the prophetic office.

39:54 So again and again in the book of Kings, Elijah the prophet often spoke of standing before the presence of the Lord. He'll talk about the Lord and he'll say, this God in whose presence I stand. And what he means is not just, I happen to be geographically in the nation of Israel. What he means is, I am a prophet. I hold the prophetic office. So when Jonah seeks to flee from the presence of the Lord, it's not just that he's trying to get away from him geographically.

40:28 It's that he's resigning the office of prophets. He's refusing to hold it. He's saying to God, I will not fill this office of prophet any longer. I will not do this thing that you have told me to do because it conflicts with my own desires. You see that? Jonah's desire not to preach to Nineveh, which again, we don't know why exactly.

41:00 Yet the story just doesn't tell us why he doesn't want to preach to them. But somehow his desire not to preach to Nineveh conflicts with his theological knowledge about God and what wins. His desires win out over his theological knowledge about God. Does that sound at all familiar to you? Because I think that's something that we, even as Christians, allow to happen all the time.

41:36 We have a deep, deep tendency to do that very same thing, don't we? We have a deep tendency to let what we want win out over what we know to be true and right. We have a deep tendency to let our desires, to let our own preferences shape our behavior more than what we know to be true and right. Look, I've been a Christian a long time. I became a Christian at nine years old, baptized at nine years old in a Southern Baptist church. So I've been a Christian for, I don't know, I can't even count it anymore.

42:10 But it's a long, long time, 35 years or something like that. and one of the sad realities that I have learned over those 35 years of being a pastor is that there is a whole list of things a whole list of motivators and drivers that determine how Christians are going to behave in any given situation there's a whole list of them we like to tell ourselves that there's not a list we like to tell ourselves that there's a list of one right I am driven and determined my behavior is determined by what the word of God says is right That's what we like to tell ourselves.

42:45 It's not true. There's a whole list of things that determine our behavior in any given situation, even as Christians. There's family. There's friendship. There's routine. There's assumption. And there's the Bible. But the trouble for most of us is that for most of us, the Bible, when push comes to shove, ends up falling only at about fourth or fifth on that list.

43:21 That's exactly how it was for Jonah. Jonah knew what was true. He knew what the Bible said. Not all of the Bible existed when this was happening, but some of it did. He knew what the Bible said. He knew who God was. He knew the ways that God acts in the world, but his actions, when push came to shove, were determined by his own desires far more than they were determined by what he knew to be true. Brothers and sisters, let's not let that be true of us in 2024. We ought to be a people that we claim to be, which is a people of the book, a people whose actions and lives are shaped by the truth, By the truth of who God is and what he said to us in his word.

44:05 Friend, make sure, make sure right here at the beginning of this year, right here at the beginning of this particular revolution of the earth around the sun, make sure that that's true of you. Make sure you're a person of the book and not somebody that's driven more by your own desires than by what God has showed you is true. That's the first disastrous way you can respond to God. By running from him. By evading him. Second way is, don't try to appease God.

44:40 Don't try to appease him. Okay, so picking up the story, soon after the ship sets sail, starting there in verse 4, it became clear that Jonah's brilliant plan just was not going to work. And there's this amazing set of events that follows. Today we're just kind of looking at the beginning of it, right? The movie is kind of starting up, but we're not getting to any sort of resolution this morning. We just kind of get to see the climax of the danger of what's going on. The text tells us there in verses 4 to 6 that Jonah went down into the bottom of the ship.

45:13 He was exhausted. We don't exactly know why he was so exhausted, but he went down into the boat and went to sleep. And meanwhile, God sent this huge squall against the ship. I want you to notice that there's no doubt at all in the story about who is doing this. I mean, sometimes the Bible will say things like, and a great storm arose against the ship, right? It'll be in the sort of passive voice. Not here. There is no doubt about it. Verse 4, the Lord, and you even get this very colorful word, hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty storm or tempest on the sea, so much so that the ship threatened to break up.

45:52 This is not just nature. It is not just chance. This is God who's sending the storm, and he's doing so for a reason. Well, up on the deck, obviously, the sailors are terrified. This is not just a normal storm. And so they did what any group of, you know, good group of pagans would do. They started praying to all of the different gods that they all served. They were from different places, going to a place on the edge of the world. They were all from different religions, and so they start praying to all of their gods. Religion at the time was basically syncretistic, which means that you can stick a bunch of stuff together and even law of non-contradiction aside, you just put it all together and see what works, right?

46:30 And so that's what they did. They just called out to every god that they could possibly think of in the hopes that one of those gods would listen to them and get them out of this scrape. Meanwhile, the captain in verses 4, 5, and 6 goes down, finds Jonah asleep and basically just rips into him, tells him, look, why are you asleep? You know, what are you doing down here in the bottom of the ship asleep? You need to come and join in the prayers, right? So whatever God that you worship in your religion, cry out to him.

47:01 And maybe that God is the one who's going to hear us and get us out of this deathly problem that we're in. So they don't want to miss any, right? It's not that they have any allegiance to Yahweh. It's not that they think Jonah is special. They just want him to join the prayer party. Let's pray to all of them. And maybe one of them will listen. It's important to pay really close attention to what's happening here. Once the storm sets in and the ship starts threatening to break up, this whole thing becomes a profound religious experience for these men.

47:41 Which is not at all unusual, right? Prior to the storm setting in, it was probably a fairly run-of-the-mill economic experience for most of these men. They had goods. They were going to sell them in Tarshish, in Spain. They were going to make money. It was an economic thing. Once the trouble started, it became a profound religious experience. I mean, that's us, right? When things start to get out of hand, when we realize that there's a storm happening in life, whether literal or figurative that's when we get religious you can see this religiosity in a couple ways here so you've got the obvious mention in verse five that the sailors are crying out to their own god there's a captain in verse six calling on jonah to you know join in the prayer party and call out to his own god and then there's this thing in verse five what looks like a very practical action of hurling the ship's cargo overboard in order to lighten the ship.

48:48 Okay, but hold up. I have looked into this just a little bit. I am not a navigator. I am not a mariner. I haven't spent a whole lot of time on boats, but I know from research and experience that ballast in a ship or weight in a ship is actually a really important part of keeping that ship upright especially in rough seas you don't want less weight on a ship because like james says that's when it starts getting tossed to and fro by the winds and the waves right less weight means lighter and the ship the ship capsizes what you want is more weight in the bottom of the ship to hold it down in the water and stabilize it so why are they throwing stuff overboard and why does the author of Jonah tell us, as if we're all supposed to know it, that the thing you want to do in a storm is lighten the ship, when that's exactly the opposite of what you want to do?

49:46 Well, here's the answer. Verse 5 there is not talking about just a practical, physical move. It's another religious move that they're making. Verse 5 is just continuing on this line of this profoundly religious response that these men have to this storm. Let me show you. Look at that phrase in verse 5. To lighten it for them. Then the mariners were afraid.

50:18 Each cried out to his God and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. Lighten what? Lighten what? You assume it's the ship. but ship is actually not even the noun that's closest to that verb, right, or that pronoun, lighten it. What if it's they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten the sea for them?

50:52 Okay, a couple things to think about. That word lighten, most of the time, sometimes in the Bible, it literally means to make something lighter, right, to make it way less. sometimes. Most of the time, though, most of the time, it has this figurative sense of lightening the pressure of one's hand in oppression. Lighten the hand. Lighten the hand. Relieve the oppression. Relieve the pressure. That's usually what it means. So, you know, when Moses is talking to Pharaoh, for instance, one of the things that he says to him is, lighten your hand off of the Israelites.

51:29 That's usually what it means. Lighten the pressure. Okay, next thing. It means lessen like a hand. Also, that phrase there in 5, they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them is actually not for them. It's from them. It's from them. They hurl the stuff into the sea to lighten the sea's pressure, to lighten the sea's danger from them, to take its hand off of them.

52:09 So do you see the sense of it? They threw stuff overboard into the sea to lighten the sea's hand and pressure from them. You see the point? They're throwing stuff overboard as sacrifices to the sea. They're taking their goods and their cargo, the things that are valuable to them, the things that they're going to sell, and they're throwing them into the sea as a sacrifice in the hopes that whatever God is in control of the sea will accept those sacrifices and lighten his hand from them.

52:46 This is a religious action. They're trying to appease the sea, to make the sea, or maybe the sea God, whoever it is, they're trying to make that God happy with them again. which is why in verses 15 and 16 it makes perfect sense to them once they find out who the problem is to throw Jonah overboard that's not an utterly different thing they've already been doing that first they try their goods they try their valuables they try their cargo oh it's you we throw you overboard too because the goal here is religious it's to appease the God that commands the sea look it it is a frightening thing it was a frightening thing for these men and it is a frightening thing for you when you realize that God has finally caught up to you. It's a terrifying thing to realize that. When all your strategies and plans for this life has failed and you look up and all of a sudden recognize that the storm is finally up on you. And when you realize that,

53:47 when people see that the storm is on them, that God is finally caught up to them, whether that's in early life or midlife or on their deathbed, what people will try to do again and again and again is immediately start to try to appease God. Got a lot of strategies for that. Sometimes like these sailors, it's by throwing stuff overboard. God, I know you're on me now, so I'll stop doing this. I'll stop doing that. I'll give this up. I'll fight that sin.

54:21 Other people try to appease God by taking things on. I'll do this. I promise to do this. I'll make a vow for this. But the trouble, as Jonah and all these sailors learned, is that appeasing God by throwing stuff overboard or taking stuff on board is not at all the right response. It's like I said earlier, the right response is just to come out with your hands up and surrender. Because God doesn't want your sacrifices.

54:55 He's already made the one sacrifice that counts. His son Jesus dying on the cross to pay the penalty for your sin and my sin if we believe in him. You're not going to save yourself. You're not going to appease God by chucking stuff overboard. You're not going to appease God or save yourself by promising to do this or that extra thing this year.

55:28 You know what propitiates God? You know what has propitiated God? The blood of Jesus on the cross. God put him forward as a sacrifice of atonement so that everyone who believes in him will be saved. Friends, ultimately, that's what Jonah's trying to teach you. That's what the whole Bible is trying to teach you. Is it any other way of trying to escape God or trying to appease God leads you nowhere but down?

56:11 Have you noticed that yet? Even in the first six verses of Jonah? Have you noticed that again and again and again, Jonah goes down after he disobeys God? Look at verse 3. Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to flee from the presence of the Lord.

56:43 Look at verse 5. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and lain down. It was fast asleep. You never go up. You never go up when you're living contrary to God's will. Like Jonah, you only ever in that situation go down. Don't let that be your story this year. Come to the Lord.

57:16 Obey Him, hear Him, and do what He says. Let's pray. Our Lord God, we thank You and we praise You for this brilliant and fascinating book of Jonah. Our Lord, we thank You that You have spoken to us in Your Word. We thank You for the lessons that You have taught Your people through all these millennia, and You will teach us over the next few weeks from the book of Jonah. We pray, oh God, that You would help us to pay attention unstop our ears open our eyes so that we can hear and see and receive what you would have to say to us from this book we pray all of that in jesus name amen