Jonah 1:1-3

All right, so this is what we're going to cover through New Year's Day here. We're starting with Jonah today, the book of Jonah. It's the overview and call of Jonah. And I'll cover verses 1 through 3. I'll probably touch up on verse 3 again next week. And then next week is we're going to look at the great storm. And then we'll have Bob covered the sea and the fish part of the book of Jonah and then Jonah's prayer and deliverance.

We take a week off for Thanksgiving and then the salvation of Nineveh, looks like Myles will cover that here in early December. And the rebuke of Jonah by God, Myles will cover that and then I'll wrap that up with looking at how this Jonah compares to Jesus Christ as a kind of prophetic picture of Jesus Christ here. And then it's Christmas and New Year's, so we'll be stopping there. And then, Roger, what are we covering? We're going to the Philippians. Hey, I'll be working on that and getting out the information on that soon. So Philippians comes up next, but this is kind of a cool little book, a little break.

I don't think we've done an Old Testament book in a while. So this is Jonah and the overview of Jonah and his call. I want you to pay attention to that picture. Children's, that's what we're very familiar with, with Jonah, like a children's book, and it makes it very kid-friendly. And it would be kind of cool if I could teach the class with that felt, those felt boards, those little cutouts that we used to have at church. and study this book. But I wanted to put that up because several commentators mentioned that that's problem number one with the book of Jonah. I think Kelly said it's the butt of ridicule.

It makes it easily ridiculed, the nature of the miracle of the swallowing of Jonah by the fish. And that's why the world, or the cosmos, comes to dismiss it. You know, they dismiss it as a veggie tales story. And they dismiss it based on that, really, but it's a very important book in the Old Testament. And to dismiss it because of that miracle, the swallowing of Jonah by the fish, and the survival through it, is short-sighted.

That's one miracle of many in the Book of Jonah. The others are the sudden storm that just cropped up very suddenly when Jonah was on the boat going to Tarshish. Then the subtle, sudden removal of the storm. You could even add that the casting of lots and the lot fell on Jonah.

That's a miracle as well. And then the raising up of this sheltering plant when he was outside of Nineveh waiting for it to be destroyed. And then the worm that comes up and destroys the plant, that's a miracle. And then this scorching east wind, that's another miracle. So it's a book fraught with miracles and to dismiss one would kind of dismiss the whole book. So we can't do that.

And throughout the Bible, many miracles occur, right? Not only in the book of Jonah, but all over the New Testament. And so the purpose of miracles in the Bible is to declare the glory of God and the whole volume of scripture depends on these miraculous events, so we can't dismiss them. Even though this one is a big one, right? It's a fishtail. It's quite a miracle, this swallowing up of Jonah by the fish. And the main reason we can't dismiss this book is because the authority of Jesus It's authority, Jesus Christ himself.

He said that this Jonah's testimony is a great sign to be heeded in Matthew 12, 38 through 41. And I have it here. He says, then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, Teacher, we want a sign from you. But he answered and said unto them, an evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign, and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up to this generation at the judgment and will condemn it because they repented and will condemn this generation. He's talking to the current generation. to whom he's talking to, because the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

Here's a few interesting things. A couple commentators noted that James and Jonah, and we just studied James, are very similar. James is a uniquely Jewish book in the New Testament, written to the twelve tribes. who are believers. And then Jonah is a prophetic book to Gentiles. Its audience is Gentiles in Israel's Old Testament. Both books are peculiar in their setting in scripture, but they show that God is not narrow-minded and he goes beyond our pettiness. And Jonah was certainly petty in his aversion to preach to the Ninevites, the Gentiles. But God is vast. His ways are beyond our ways and his thoughts are beyond our thoughts.

William Kelly says this is of the book of James. So far from James being one who slighted grace as Martin Luther kind of accused James of sliding grace. James' epistle is unintelligible unless a man really understands and holds fast to the grace of God. He is the only apostle who uses the remarkable term, the perfect law of liberty. This supposes not law, but grace. Therefore, it was really the feebleness with which grace was apprehended which made people, like Martin Luther, fancy and shrink back from the bugbear of legalism in the epistle of James.

Had they read it in the liberty of grace, they would have seen the real power of God in giving the Christian to realize his liberty. So, as it is with Jonah, he is eminently Jewish in his feeling to the extreme. He is willing to disobey God for his allegiance to Israel. Well, I guess what I was reading, I thought it said main service, but it didn't. I don't know. It's like similarities to the book of James.

Mary, do you have a question? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, you're online with us in our class. I'm sorry. I forgot to turn my mic off. It's OK. OK. Yeah, I thought that was a good, loud question. But that's OK. Well, it took me a while to find you because I saw James. I thought it was the main service. I mean Jonah. Oh, yeah. No, it's Sunday AM class here we're in.

So let's see, so James, like Jonah, Jonah was used of God for a final Old Testament testimony to the Gentiles. So that's kind of an overview of the book of Jonah there. Here is Joppa, if you've ever seen it, the coastal city where Jonah got on the boat to Tarshish. So, that pier right there is, I think, from Roman times, but that probably looked a lot like the pier that he got on, paid that fare and went to, got on the boat to Tarshish, going to Tarshish.

I don't think there were jet skis in his day, but he had a jet ski down there. And yeah, I was there. My mom and I were there in Joppa. That was our first few hours in Israel. So it's interesting. It's a coastal city and it's just south of Tel Aviv. Just right there, south of Tel Aviv.

So that's where it all started, right there, Joppa. Oh, you should, this little chart, Oh yeah, I've cited it. This is from that Rose Publishing book, if you have one of those books, those picture books, which are really cool. Theirs is much better, but I just sort of recreated this.

So at the top you have Saul, David, and Solomon, the three kings. And David was approximately 1000 BC, you see there. and under Saul, David, and Solomon for his life, Israel was united as 12 tribes. After the death of Solomon, the Israel splits into northern and southern, so you have for the teams of Israel. Why don't you ask them to mute their mics again. Everyone mute their mics. If you're on the line, make sure your mic is muted. Except me. Thanks, Bob.

So on the left hand side of this chart there you see that the kings of the northern tribes of Israel. Jeroboam I, Basha, Omri. And that goes down through history. You see where Jonah shows up there in red about 793 BC. And he served Jeroboam II there. And Jeroboam II down at the bottom left of the chart His ruling dates were 793 B.C. to 753 B.C. So, on the right hand of this chart, you see the southern tribes, which is Judah and Benjamin, the two tribes. The first king was Rehoboam, and that was Solomon's son.

But I didn't have all the kings, I just sort of skipped it to Uzziah down there. So we have this, and this is the purpose of this chart really, it's showing that there were prophets to Israel and the northern kingdom. You see that in that one arrow. And then God had prophets to Judah, the southern kingdoms, to Judah and Benjamin. And among those were, you see at the bottom of the bottom right, Isaiah was a Judean prophet and Micah was a prophet to Judah. But the prophets to Israel were Elijah, there you see him, and Elisha. And then right after Elijah comes Jonah. And then Amos comes later and Hosea, he comes later. So this is just showing you about.

So, you know, this story of Jonah must have occurred somewhere where Jonah's prophetic lifeline was there in the red around 700, 800 BC, something like that, 780 perhaps. So I just want to have you guys see when we're talking about this book of Jonah here.

Here's a map of Israel. Jonah was born in Gath Heifer and you see the red arrow and you see where Gath Heifer is. That word says Tiberias. and Gath Heffer was right probably where the T is in Tiberias right there. That's where he was born, really close to Nazareth. You can see maybe just a couple miles, five miles or so from Nazareth on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. You see the Sea of Galilee labeled there Lake Tiberias. And then we have a Joppa. which we just saw a picture of and that's there down just south of Tel Aviv. So that's where he's born and that's where he left on this ship. And we'll look at where he's going later. Oh, here it is.

So we have Israel there on the left. next to the Mediterranean Sea. And you see the red line from about Joppa there to Nineveh. And Nineveh is about 500 miles to the north and east, northeast, in the Assyrian Empire. And it's on the east bank of the Tigris River. And it's shaped like a trapezoid, is what they said. So I put in a trapezoid there. Two parallel sides. And then one set of sides is not parallel. That's a trapezoid.

And it was so big it took three days to walk the city from one end to the other. So they said about 60 miles in circumference was Nineveh. And it's about, again, 500 miles from Israel, about that. And then Nineveh fell to the Babylonians 539 BC. So about 250 years after, you know, about 790 when Jonah's time was. So everyone got that where Nineveh is compared to Israel? And we've looked at what Joppa looks like. Okay, let's learn more about Jonah here. Born in Gath-Hephir, His name means dove.

His existence is kind of cool, I didn't know this, but in 2 Kings 14.25 it says that this King Jeroboam II restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath as far as the Sea of Arabah according to the word of the Lord who the God of Israel which he spoke through his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath Heffer. So there is a historical reference directly to Jonah. Jonah was the son of this Amittai. And there's where he's from, Gath Heffer. So this is in 2 Kings. So he was a real guy. So, he was a legitimate prophet during this Jeroboam II's reign. You know, I always thought that just Jonah shows up in the book of Jonah and that's about it. But, you know, he was among the minor prophets here and confirmed in second Kings.

I say normal prophet work, which is And there's what it looks like when you read the other prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, it'll always begin with the word of the Lord came to whoever the prophet is. And God says, speak thusly to Israel and he'll lay out this thing he wants to say to Israel, all the prophetic utterances that God has. So that's normal prophet work. But this book of Jonah, this is an outlier. It begins with the normal language. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it, for the wickedness has come up before me.

So, more on this accepted prophetic style, like in Zechariah 6.9, the word of the Lord also came to me saying, that's Zechariah speaking, so that's a normal prophetic style utterance or statement. But after this first verse here in Jonah, God throws a big curveball, right? He supplants something that should be directed to Israel or Judah or the tribes up in northern Israel and he supplants it with a message to a Gentile nation which is the only thing like it in the Bible in the Old Testament.

So this is what sets up Jonah and this sets up our story. This makes his brain go on tilt and he doesn't recover and he buys a fare to Tarshish and he flees God because he's so shocked by this that he has to go to Nineveh of all places. So that's our story. That's how we all begin. in this book of Jonah. So verse 1 here, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.

Again, that's a normal prophetic call in the Old Testament. Here's some more other normal calls, I say normal calls, but just so we know what this normal call looks like. To Jeremiah, now the word of the Lord came to me saying, to Isaiah, the vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz concerning Judah and Jerusalem, which he saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. And then he goes on and gives, God speaks to the prophet and says, this is what I want you to tell these people. So that's the normal call.

Um, this, yeah, this, uh, in verse one here it's, or verse two, I'm sorry. It's very, Along the lines of Genesis 18, when God calls the people of Israel or a king to repent, in Genesis 18 we have Sodom and Gomorrah and God says there, and the Lord said, the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is indeed great. Their sin is exceedingly grave. And you see the same sort of language here in Jonah verse two, for the wickedness has come up before me. So wickedness sort of rises to the level and it comes to, you know, nothing is beyond God's attention, but he speaks like that, that it rises to the level where he gets his intention and then he has to deal with it in some way. Or like in 1 Samuel 5, chapter 5, verse 12, we have regarding the Philistines who took the Ark of the Covenant and of them he says, and the cry of the city went up to heaven. So same thing, this Nineveh's sin was so great that God takes notice of it and the wickedness has come up before me is what he says.

Nineveh first appears in Genesis chapter 10 right after the ark lands and the narrative goes through the genealogy of the sons of Noah. Ham is the father of Cush and Cush is the father of Nimrod, that mighty hunter. And it says of him, from that land he went forth into Assyria, that's where Nineveh is, and built Nineveh.

And Rehoboth, Ere, in Kalah, that's Genesis 10 and 11. So, Nineveh occurs way back in Genesis chapter 10. In Genesis chapter 11, the very next chapter, It's the Babel chapter. It describes the wickedness of Babel and its destruction. So it's interesting that in Genesis 10 you have Nineveh mentioned and then the next chapter in Genesis is the story of Babel. And so you see where Nineveh is going because Nineveh is, you know, kind of not sister city but a city like Babel from way back when.

So Jonah gets this call and he's of a contrary mind. Feinberg says, Charles Feinberg, says the prophets were not mere machines. They had the power to resist the will of God. However, this is the only instance where a prophet refused to carry out his mission. So, if you think about that, that's true. The only time that this has happened.

So, in verse 3 we have, but Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So, he went down to Joppa and found a ship that was going to Tarshish. and paid the fare and went down and got into it with them, two Tarshish, from the presence of the Lord." So, God wants Jonah to go east. He does the exact opposite. He goes west to escape the presence of the Lord. Now, Jonah knows that God is omniscient and omnipresent, he knows that he can't escape the presence of the Lord.

But what he was likely doing was getting away from, you know, HQ or the headquarters of God, which is the temple of God. So he, I guess in his mind, he thought, if I can get away from HQ, I sort of resigned my commission and God would leave me alone. So that's why he wanted me to get as far away as he could.

Tarsus, when you hear most people, most commentators say it's southern Spain. So he's going to southern Spain. But then there's evidence in Ezekiel and that it's southern England. Cornwall, England, if you know where that is. Roger, where were you in England? We were north of London, Leeds, Bradford, Harrogate, York, North Yorkshire. Okay, so you were way north. The English, I listened to this like podcast yesterday and these three English guys, very good by the way, they gave the gospel beautifully and they were talking about Tarshish and they can maybe because of their English pride, but they're saying that Tarshish is Cornwall, England.

There's no doubt about it. Because they say that in the Bible it mentions tin and what comes from Cornwall, England, but tin. And nowhere else produce this tin. So they're saying And they also said that the ships of Tarshish, and that's a common phrase in the Old Testament, the ships of Tarshish. You'll always see that phrase in the Old Testament.

It's a very specific ship. It's built for long range. It's a specially designed ship. Because the Mediterranean Sea is a, you know, a nice sea. You can get through that pretty easily. But then to go through the Strait of Gibraltar, And up into the Atlantic, that takes quite a ship. So that's a ship of Tarshish, and that's what they were saying. This is no ordinary ship.

England, they said, figures into end-time prophecy in Ezekiel 38. You have the Tarshish, it's mentioned as bringing up an objection to to rush or invading Israel in that Ezekiel 38 war, Tarshish raises an objection. So, they say, you know, Spain wouldn't raise an objection to that. It would be England. England is an ally of Israel.

And very much so now as well. So it makes sense that Jonah would go as far west and then as far north as possible from this call from God. But it's, you know, so here I have the, I have quite a track. Yeah. So there you in the bottom left, you have Israel.

Tried to land it on Joppa right there. So there would have been his route. I couldn't get that line above the coastline of Tunis and Algiers, but they would have gone through there to southern Spain. And that's where they would have ended up. But you see, that's kind of easy seafaring sea there. And wasn't Paul trying to get to Spain too? He mentioned that and he went to Rome, you know, and he sailed all around that Mediterranean Sea.

But they say that the ships of Tarshish would have gone through down at the southern tip of Spain where the Green Line is. That's the Strait of Gibraltar. So you can get a ship through there, the Strait of Gibraltar, and then go up around Spain and go up and you see where Cornwall, England is, I have it in red there, that little tip of England, the southernmost tip, southwest tip there, that's where another possible place for Tarshish is. Mainly, people think it's somewhere in southern Spain, Tarshish. So, I think it's Cornwall, England.

Sounds good to me. These guys were convincing. So, there you go. So, here's Jonah's response to this call and some possible rationales for his disobedience. And this comes from Feinberg. So this is Jonah's thinking. Number one, if Nineveh repents, this will save Nineveh and will certainly lead to a future downfall of the people of Israel. And that's because Nineveh was, the Assyrians were Israel's number one enemy. You know, so why would he do that? Why would he go? Nineveh is his thinking.

Some say that Jonah feared that the repentance of Nineveh would distract from the position and privileges of Israel as the chosen people of God. So that's why he didn't want to go and preach to Nineveh. His nationalistic pride You know, he was an extremely nationally proud man, Jonah was, and he could not rejoice that God was going to show grace to a heathen people. Number four, Jonah knew from previous prophecies from other guys that the Assyrians were to be a chastening scourge on Israel.

You know, God was going to use them to, like he used the Babylonians as a sort of a blunt weapon against Israel to kind of get them back into shape. So why would he want to go and preach the good news of repentance to these people? This Assyrian empire who were going to beat down Israel for their history. Why would you do that?

Jonah standing is a prophet of Israel to the Israelites. Now think of this. If he goes and preaches to Nineveh, a heathen nation, his fellow Israelites would say, how could you go and preach the gospel of repentance? to a nation that is eventually going to destroy us. So he would lose credibility in the eyes of his fellow Israelites. So that's a possible rationale for this disobedience.

But here's Jonah's own words in Jonah 4.2.

He says to God, therefore, in order to forestall this, I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. So you see, you notice that the word for grace there, is there? Gracious, slow to anger, loving kindness. That's an Old Testament word for grace.

So that's Jonah's own words there. So the bottom line is Jonah was an astute observer of God's unmerited, undeserved favor towards mankind. And he knew that God would carry through with this merciful act. And he was right, right? Those are the possible rationales for disobedience, but the one that Jonah mentions there in 4.2. So finally, the purpose of this Book of Jonah.

It's not a book of prophecy. It gives no call to Israel or Judah to address anything or it doesn't give any words of prophecy concerning their future like other books of prophecy in the Old Testament. However, the actual story in itself, the transactions within the book are prophecies themselves. So, the story is a prophecy in and of itself. It's the story of God dealing with future gentile nations in grace with a savior. The savior to the world would spend three days in death. and would be resurrected to life.

As the Ninevites were saved through faith, through Jonah's message, so would future Gentile nations be saved through Jesus Christ. The main theme of Jonah is God's love for all nations. He's willing that none should perish and that all come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. It foretells of the future prophecy of Genesis 12, 3, in which God says to Abraham, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. Well, how can he do that except for to save the Gentile nations? And he does that with Jesus Christ, but before he does, he gives us this book of prophecy, Jonah, to show how he will do that. The story of Jonah is how God is to accomplish the worldwide blessing, yet future, from Jonah's time.

And there we go. So that's our introduction to Jonah for this or this morning. That's good, Andrew. Yeah, Jonah is looked upon as being kind of not too significant and kind of a nice story. But, you know, it's really the interactions that happen in Jonah are very interesting. Right. And important stuff too. Exactly. And that people would sort of dismiss it. But I think we'll see it with this study and we'll take it very seriously and we won't make it a children's kind of novel like they say.

Yeah, I just happen to think maybe the reason Jonah went so far away is so that maybe God would choose somebody else. Oh yeah? Because he's so far away that he knows that God knows where he is. But, maybe, it just occurred to me, I thought, that's probably why, and maybe he did go to England. That's really funny. That he's, God would give up just because of the distance? Yeah. I'm saying that's Jonah's thinking, maybe. Yeah, well, yeah. He knows that God knows where he is, but maybe God will choose somebody else if he's so far away to go to Numagal. What if he just went up to, like, Lebanon? Yeah, then he wouldn't, yeah. He'd be too close to Numagal. Right, right. Oh, that's a good... Yeah, something in his mind...

But who knows? Who knows why? Oh, and I wanted to... Think of this, and if you think, well, Jonah, he should have obeyed God, and you know, how can he disobey God? With this clear call from God himself, right? Go. And I just thought, you know what? I would have done the exact same thing. And you know why? And it's just happened. It's contemporary. It's just happened in the news. If God came to you, any of you and said, and you're Jewish, and he said, go to Gaza City. Right. And reach out to them. Hamas. Which gospel to Hamas? Would you do it? Yeah. Heck no! After what they did on October 7th, it's the same thing. Nineveh, I think, he looks at the same, it's the parallel thing, so it's kind of an interesting thing to think about. So, yeah. Alright. Well, closing prayer here. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the book of Jonah and for this testimonial that we have in your Old Testament foreshadowing grace and foreshadowing Jesus Christ's salvation to the world. And we thank you for all our blessings here on earth. Amen.