Nice man, got eaten by a big fish. All that. But the story of Jonah is a bigger story than the story of fish, it really is. I know why we all know about the fish, and that's because the story of the fish is the story that we tell the kiddies, so that they can have a fun visual that is interesting and immediately involving. They like stories involving animals, you know. So people know about Jonah as a story with a whale, because they heard that story as a child.
And they stopped reading the Bible after that.
But the story of Jonah, if all you know about it is that he was eaten by a big fish, begs the question as to what he was doing to get fish-eaten in the first place. It's not an accident that he was eaten by a fish, it's not a story of a guy minding his own business and getting swallowed by a big old fish. Or maybe it is.
Maybe it's exactly that, a story of a man who was minding his own business. The story of a man who was minding his own business to the exclusion of God's business. The story of a man who was focused with a tight laser focus on his business, what he wanted vs what he didn't want. A man who knew what he wanted, and when what God wanted was different from what he wanted, he did what any sensible, red-blooded person would do, which is to immediately run away from his responsibilities. God wants him to go to Nineveh, he hops on a boat to Tarshish. If you know your ancient middle eastern geography (which I know you do), you'll know that Tarshish and Nineveh are not in the same area code. They're not even in the same vicinity. Jonah is running away from God's decrees. Why does he do that? You know why. If God was to preach to you that you should go and evangelize ISIS, you wouldn't do it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, that you would be afraid of being violently killed by ISIS, and secondly, that you would actually probably prefer it if God smote them. If you know for sure that God was planning to wipe ISIS off the map, if you knew for sure he was going to microwave the thanksgiving leftovers, would you stop him? Or would you just let it happen?
If you want to go ahead and ask that question but under different circumstances, go and check out any one of a number of ISIS execution videos that are out there, and boy are they out there. Lots of shots of ISIS militants murdering people, straight up beheadings, burnings, running people over with tanks, gunshots, all that. Look at those people, and ask if you want them to inherit paradise. Odds are, after watching a few of those videos, you'd be happy for them to roast eternally. It's hard to look at those videos and think anything else. When Jonah had received the order from God to go to Nineveh, he was clearly not into it. He'd rather the Ninevites were not saved, he'd rather they were killed , swept from the earth and discarded. And when the people of Nineveh repented, when they turned back from their sin, when his message was heard, Jonah wasn't happy; he was furious. Once you get this, once you understand this, then you can understand the reaction of Jonah, as well as the injunction that we get in the epistle reading, which tells us to live as though we weren't attached to this world.
Now I'm going to ask you to think about something that you're not used to thinking about. I'm going to ask you why you think the way you think about God's word. If you're like the rest of us, you think about God's word in the frame and reference of the world you live in. That is, the people you like are righteous, and the people you dislike are sinners. And this kicks in really hard when you consider and contemplate how you make decisions regarding the faith. Think about your judgment when it comes to what you think is right and wrong. Ask yourself why you think certain things are right or at least ethically neutral. Is it because God's word says so, or is it because it's what you see in real life?
This is where we hit maximum overdrive, you know. This is when the scales hopefully fall away from your eyes, and you realize why it is that you think the way you do. For you and I, we like ourselves, we like our friends, we like our families, we like all them folks close to us, and we want them to be righteous. We want them to be godly people, but the route that Jesus gave us to get to that point, by being redeemed by the blood of Christ, that's what they avoid. They stay far far away from it, and avoid it like the plague. And because we want our friends and family to be saved, instead of leading them to Christ, we try to make it as though the commands of scripture already fall in line with what they're doing. And that's wrong. Straight up. It's the reverse of Jonah's story you know. And you know this. You can tell that Jonah's reaction to the Ninevites is wrong and bad, that he was wrong to wish destruction on all the Ninevites, to be sure, but that's just the other face of the mistake that we're making today. Jonah felt as though God should hate the people he hated, while we feel that God should love the people we love, and that his love for them should be conditional on them just being who they are.
Did you get to that by reading the scriptures? Or did you just want the people you love to be spared? Did you do a lot of exegesis, or did you just look at the conclusion you wanted, and ask yourself what the fastest route to that would be? For this is why evangelism is in such a state right now, because we, like God, want all men to be saved, and to get to that point, we sort of had the idea that we could want all men to be saved, by changing the definition of what it means to be saved. However, there is a second half to that Bible verse, which says that God wants all men to be saved, and to come to a knowledge of the truth. These days, we want everyone to be saved by believing in a lie, by believing that they have nothing to change, and they're fine the way they are. In reality, we all have a lot to change, we all have a lot to be different in, we've all made decisions that are bad and wrong, and the worst thing we can do is to just assert that we're all perfect, nobody has anything to change, and we all just need to keep it up. And then nothing gets any better.
The reality is that the word of God wants us to change, all of us. And like Jonah, there are people we like, and people we don't. The people we like, we want them to be saved, and the people we don't, we'd be happy for them to disappear. But the injunction that God gives us is that he wants all people to be saved, whether we're too close to them or not. It's not about changing the definitions to fit those whom you like, or to smash those whom you don't. It's about the law of God, and the gospel of God applying to absolutely everybody. The standards are there, the law doesn't change whether or not you like the people who are hearing it. That's the hard news. The good news is that the Gospel applies to everyone as well. We don't like that the law applies to everyone. Jonah didn't like that the gospel applies to everyone. These are functions of being human, of being too close to the situation, which is why Paul impels us to live as though we were not attached to these things, to live as though we were not too close to these situations, and instead to live like people who can look at the law and the Gospel as right and good, and as things that are for absolutely everybody. Whether or not you want the people around you to be saved, you need to remember that there are no exceptions to the law except the Gospel. That's the big exception, the one way out, and the one way out that provides no other.
If you want all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth, God wants that too. And he wants you to take part in doing it, in accomplishing it. Instead of dwelling as someone who is obsessed with the reduction of God's law, be someone obsessed with the amplification of his Gospel. The only solution to the law's weight.
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