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Reluctant Missionary

II Cor 5: 16 – 21

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 19 Nov, 2006

THE BIBLE contains many kinds of literature. God designed it to speak to us in our different situations. When we read it as “a holy book” we easily miss a lot of what it says to us.

I sat in the train, opposite a Muslim reading his Koran. That is a holy book. It is claimed to be God’s very words, relayed through an angel to Mahomet. It has none of the Bible’s breadth.

Last week, we read parts of an historical romance novel — Esther. That certainly doesn’t make it untrue. After all, Esther’s and Mordecai’s graves are preserved in Iran to this day.

We haven’t read that famous erotic poem, The Song of Solomon yet. I’m just trying to work out how to deliver a sermon inside a plain manila envelope.

The books of Samuel have a similar form to those great family sagas like The Forsythe Saga or Buddenbrooks.

Today our book is a satire. It is the Old Testament’s Forrest Gump and Mad Magazine ro//ed into one. It laughs at wrong attitudes. It derides human failings. It tells how upset the only truly sucessful prophet is when his mission bears fruit.

  If you don’t like satire, just remember that God invented it!

Here’s the story. In Jonah 1, we read,

^{JONAH 1:1} The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: ² “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

You might not remember your geography very well, but Nineveh is roughly north–east of Jerusalem. It was the Assyrian capital, and was famous for cruelty and wickedness.

God saw how bad things were and, instead of jumping in and destroying the people, he told Jonah to go and preach against the city.

Jonah was a real person. He appears in II Kings 14:25, where we read how King Amaziah was a wicked king in Israel, but

He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Sea of the Arabah, in accordance with the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher.

So Jonah was from the town of Gath. And, of course, Jesus also mentions Jonah being three days in the belly of the fish.

So God called a man of good credentials, and gave him an important task.

Jonah wasn’t silly. He could work it out. Why would God send him to preach against the wickedness of Nineveh, if he had a firm plan to destroy the place? Surely, the reason for preaching a message of doom is so that people will hear, will repent, and will be saved.

What could be a better thing to do than that?

But we read,

³ But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD.

Tarshish was the ancient name for Spain. God told Jonah to go East to Nineveh

So Jonah turned west for Spain. In those days, that was about as far from Nineveh as anyone could go. Jonah was absolutely determined not to do what God told him to do. He doesn’t even try to argue with God: he just assumes he can buy his way out.

Do you ever wondered why Jonah might have done this?

There are probably several reasons.

First, he would have to mix with Gentiles, and that was hard for a Jew to do.

Second, the Assyrians had a reputation for being a bit unfriendly. If they didn’t like you, they had a way of pegging you to the ground and running a heavy iron sled over you until you were ground into the dust. From memory, they also invented crucifixion.

And they were not renowned lovers of Jews.

But there was another reason, and that was that he could not accept the idea that God might care for such horrible people, and, if God thought he wanted to associate with them, Jonah wasn't going to encourage him.

Well, you know what happened next. The ship hadn't gone too far before God sent a great storm and the ship began sinking.

The Bible says,

^1:5 All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.

But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. ⁶ The captain went to him and said, “How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us, and we will not perish.”

^1:7 Then the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah.

^1:8 So they asked him, “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?”

And he told them the story:

^1:9 He answered, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.”

And he told them that the only way they could calm the sea and save themselves was to throw him overboard, because he was running away from the LORD, and that was why the storm had come.

Maybe we should pause here.

What storms are coming on your life? What storms are coming on my life? Is it because we are running away from the Lord in some area?

Mike Warnke told a story of a mule which totally refused to listen to instructions. Every time the owner gave an order, he had to whack the mule with a length of 4"x2" timber.

And the mule would sing,

“He touched me —

Oh, he touched me...”

We are all like that mule. And God had to touch Jonah very hard to make an impression.

You remember how the next bit goes. These sailors were better men than the prophet, although they are clearly pagans. Each prayed to his own god. They were sincere. They were earnest. And they rowed as hard as they could, trying to save Jonah’s life, though he had brought such great trouble on them all. They were praying when Jonah was sleeping.

Before we condemn people who don’t believe in Jesus, we should always remember that some of them would put us to shame with their zeal and their earnestness and their confident belief in the god they worship.

That’s the writer’s point. Jonah presents himself as a worshipper of the true God, but it is these pagan sailors who are true worshippers, even if not of the true God. It’s satire. It’s sarcasm — irony, at least.

Eventually, they throw Jonah overboard because they can see that they have no other choice if they are not all to die.

But they plead with God not to hold them guilty.

We read,

15 Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. 16 At this the men greatly feared the LORD, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows to him.

They are Jonah’s first converts — they see that God is the God of storms and seas, and the worship him and offer sacrifices. But Jonah doesn’t even know what he has done. He wouldn’t have believed it if he had seen it. Pagans worshipping God?

But God had provided a great fish to swallow him up.

Don’t get too worried about how these things can be. The Hebrew text is deliberately vague. You can’t even be sure if this is a male or a female fish — it changes!

The point is that Jonah set off in one direction, and God caught him in mid–fall and took him in another direction.

While Jonah is in the fish, he begins praying, and in his prayers we catch a glimpse of what is wrong with Jonah, why he is such a bad prophet.

He prays,

^{JONAH 2:3} You hurled me into the deep,

into the very heart of the seas,

and the currents swirled about me;

all your waves and breakers

swept over me.

^2:4 I said, `I have been banished

from your sight;

yet I will look again

toward your holy temple.’

and again,

^2:7 “When my life was ebbing away,

I remembered you, LORD,

and my prayer rose to you,

to your holy temple.

Jonah is fixated on the temple. He is like John Wesley, who was shocked at the idea of preaching outside an officially consecrated church building. For Jonah, God is not really the God of the whole world, but he is the God of the Temple in Jerusalem. Wesley changed — Jonah didn’t.

How could people in Nineveh, who can’t come anywhere near the temple, ever understand God? What is the point in preaching to them? If God truly waned them saved, he would have given them a temple of their own.

When David wanted to build a house for God, God told him he had too much blood on his hands. But God told David that he would build a house for David. David wanted to trap God and use him for political ends. God wanted to capture David’s heart and use him for the salvation of the world.

Later, when Solomon built the temple, he begins his prayers by saying that God does not live in buildings made by human hands. Solomon is wiser than his father, and understands that God is enthroned in the heavens and has no need of our works.

Jonah has fallen into exactly the error that Solomon wanted to avoid. He wants a national God, a God who reflects the Israelite values. He can’t handle a God who is God of all people and who accepts all who truly repent.

When Jonah prays, God hears him and the fish vomits him out on a beach.

Just to get this situation clear, the fish didn’t vomit Jonah onto Nineveh Town Beach, because there is no such place. The fish didn’t even bring Jonah near to Nineveh. It couldn’t possibly have travelled from somewhere out in the Mediterranean right out the Straits of Gibraltar, around Africa, and up the Persian Gulf in three days.

Essentially, Jonah had to pay his $300, and go back to Go. He had to restart his jouney from scratch, but poorer for the money he paid to go to Spain.

When he got to Nineveh, this is what we read:

^{JONAH 3:3} Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very important city--a visit required three days. ⁴ On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” ⁵ The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

^3:6 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust.

These Assyrians may have been pagans, but they didn’t muck around deciding whether to repent or to try to run away. They fasted, they prayed, they put on sackcloth, they sat in the dust. They took God at his word, and acted in response, and you can’t get much better than that.

There will be many pagans in God’s kingdom ahead of self–righteous Christian believers. I fully believe in evangelism. And Jonah’s story is about evangelism. But even when people have a pretty screwed up idea of God, he will save those who truly repent, and who believe him when he speaks. They are like the pagan Abraham who believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.

But here’s the sad thing.

120000 Ninevites repented in sackcloth, yet Jonah can only whinge to God. He has no appreciation of God’s mercy to the Ninevites. He is angry because God didn’t wipe them all out. And, to make matters worse for Jonah, the plant that grew over his campsite outside Nineveh and gave him shade suddenly died, and Jonah is nearly sick from anger and disappointment.

God finishes by taking Jonah to task.

^4:10 But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. ¹¹ But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”

Jonah teaches some important lessons.

First, we can choose whether or not we will obey God when he calls us; but he will not be defeated or caused to abandon his plans if we refuse to obey.

We might still do what he called us to do, anyway. After all, God can cause us to change our mind and become willing. But there can be a lot of pain along the way. Jesus said it well to Paul:

It is hard for you to kick against the goads.

Second, and most importantly, God does not play favourites. He doesn’t have a special love for people like us. In fact, if anything, it is more likely that the people God most loves will be people who are not much like us. God loves the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the people whose jobs prevent them coming to church, the people who are unwanted in the circles of power.

God loves our enemies. But we are the ones he has called to declare his word to them. God loves our enemies so much that his love might reach them before we even finish declaring his love to them. Jonah only finished day one of his three day preaching tour around Nineveh when they repented.

Finally, throughout the entire story, we see how much more concerned God is for his people than Jonah was, more concerned than any of us can ever be.

In our dealings with the world around us, let’s learn to reflect the love of God.

We are called as Christ’s ambassadors, God declares his love through us. Our message is,

Be reconciled to God!

God still calls sinners to himself, and he does it through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Turn to him today: why perish?

He will save you, just now — just now!

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)