Our sermon series on the Minor
Prophets has been called “Who Are These Guys?”
But if there’s one minor prophet that people know about, it’s
Jonah. Lots of people, even people who
would not consider themselves Christians, have heard about the story of Jonah
and the whale, or the “big fish” if you prefer.
Now, let’s get one thing out of the way right off. You’ll hear people discuss whether this story
is literally true or if it’s simply a story.
As far as I’m concerned, you can think whatever you want to about that,
because to me that question misses the point.
The point is, what are we supposed to learn from it? Because really, that’s the question we should
ask about all the Bible stories. The
stories that are in the Bible are not just there as matters of historical
fact. The Bible is the inspired word of
God. God, acting through people of
course, wanted certain stories in the Bible to teach us things. So the questions we should as are things
like: What does this story tell us about
God? What does it tells us about
ourselves? What does it tell us about
our relationship with God? What does it
tell us about how we should live our lives?
So let’s take a look at the story of Jonah with those
questions in mind. And as we do, it’s
kind of interesting that, alone among the Minor Prophets, the main focus of the
book of Jonah is not the prophecy that Jonah is given to deliver. You remember, when we’ve looked at these
other books like Joel and Amos and Obadiah, the focus of the book was the
specific prophecy that they were given by God to deliver to certain people of a
certain nation. That’s not true
here. The prophecy is part of it,
obviously, but the book really deals more with how people reacted, both to the
prophecy and to the call by God to deliver it.
It deals with how God reacted to all this, too.
So Jonah is told by God to go to the city of Nineveh and
preach against it. And Jonah runs
away. We’re not told why at this
point. Later Jonah gives a reason, and
we’ll come to that, but right now all we’re told is that God told Jonah to do
something and Jonah ran away.
Does that strike a chord with anyone? I’ll bet it does, if we’re honest about
it. I’ll bet most of us, if we really
think about it, can think of a time when God told us to do something and we
tried to run away from it. It may not
have been as big a deal as what Jonah was told to do, but I’ll bet there was
something. Maybe we felt God calling us
to go help someone who needed some help, and we made an excuse and stayed home
instead. Maybe we felt God calling us to
pick up the phone and call someone who we thought might be lonely, but we told
ourselves we were too busy and did not do it.
Maybe there was something going on at the church that we felt God
calling us to help with, but we decided we did not want to be bothered and
besides, somebody else would probably do it.
We could go on and on and on.
If we’re really honest, and we really dig, we can
probably think of lots and lots of times God told us to do something and we ran
away. And the thing is, sometimes we get
so good at running away that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We start to feel that prompting from God, and
we shove it out of our minds before we can even start thinking about it. We don’t even want to consider doing what God
is prompting us to do. We don’t want to
admit it, but we’re running away, just like Jonah did. You might say we and Jonah are in the same
boat.
Of course, running away did not work for Jonah. It just caused him more trouble. And eventually, running away really does not
work for us, either. Because, as Jonah
found out, there really is nowhere we can run that God cannot find us. And God will find us. God always finds us. And God won’t quit working on us until we say
yes.
So that’s one lesson we need to take from Jonah’s story. When God is calling us to do something, we
need to say yes. Running away won’t
accomplish anything. God will keep after
us until we eventually have to say yes anyway.
All we’ll have done by running away is cost ourselves some time and some
trouble.
But of course, Jonah’s story does not end when he said
yes. If you’ve read the rest of the
story, you know that Jonah eventually did go to Nineveh and proclaim God’s
message to them. He went through the
city saying, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” And this brings us to another difference
between Jonah and most of the other Minor Prophets. The people Jonah was talking to, the people
of Nineveh, believed him. They declared
a fast, they asked God to forgive them, they promised to change their ways, and
they begged God for mercy. And it
worked. God was merciful. God did not destroy the city of Nineveh.
Now, you might think Jonah would be pleased about
that. But instead, Jonah was upset. In fact, he was more than upset, he was angry. He says to God in Chapter Four “Isn’t this
what I said, Lord, while I was still at home?
This is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and
compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from
sending calamity.”
Think about what Jonah’s saying here. He’s saying, darn it, I knew if I gave them
this warning they’d change their ways and you’d forgive ‘em. I did not want you to forgive these
people. These people don’t deserve your
forgiveness. If you had not sent me here
to warn them, they would not have changed and you’d have given them what they
deserve.
Now, we could talk about how Jonah should’ve been
gracious and compassionate too, just like God was, and what it says about Jonah
that he was disappointed that God was not going to wipe out the people of Nineveh. But that’s not the direction I want to go
here.
What I want to talk about is this: when we say yes to God, we have no guarantee
that what we want to happen is actually going to happen. In fact, what happens may turn out to be the
exact opposite of what we wanted to have happen.
Have you ever had that happen? You thought you were doing the right thing,
you thought you were doing what God wanted you to do, and then what happened
was nowhere close to what you wanted to have happen?
It’s frustrating, right?
And this is not necessarily done with bad intent on our part. We may very well be convinced, just as Jonah
was convinced, that what we wanted to have happen was the right thing. We may be convinced that what we wanted to
have happen was what God should have wanted to have happen. And yet, it did not happen. And we wonder, what’s going on here? What’s the point of trying to follow
God? We tried to do the right thing, we
tried to do what God wanted us to do, and nothing worked out the way we think
it should have. In fact, it worked out
the exact opposite way. What good did it
do us to say yes to God if this is what happened?
The thing is that when we say yes to God, God does not
guarantee us any specific result. In
fact, God often does not tell us anything about what’s going to happen. For the most part, God did not tell the Minor
Prophets what was going to happen when they gave the messages God told them to
give. God sometimes gave them some
information, but often God did not. God
just said go to these place, talk to these people, and tell them this. That’s it.
That can be frustrating.
But if we look at it the right way, it can also be kind of freeing. Because what it tells us is that, when we say
yes to God, we are not responsible for what happens as a result. God is.
God does not call us to be successful, at least not as humans would
define those terms. God calls us to be
faithful. God calls us to be faithful
and to do our best to serve God and love God.
If we do those things, God will take care of what happens next. And if we do those things, we will be
successful in God’s eyes, whether we’re successful in human terms or not.
When we try to fight God, when we try to ignore God, when
we try to run away from God, we can make things really hard on ourselves. But when we say yes to God, all kinds of
things can happen. And sometimes,
wonderful things can happen even though those wonderful things were not part of
our plans. When Jonah said yes to God,
he helped save a whole bunch of people even though he really did not even want
to. Think what he might have been able
to do if he’d said yes to God willingly, rather than grudgingly.
Let’s stop fighting God.
Let’s stop ignoring God. Let’s
stop trying to run away from God. Let’s
stop making things hard on ourselves.
Let’s say yes to God, and let’s say yes willingly. When we do, all kinds of wonderful things may
happen.
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