The God Jonah Thought he Knew (Jonah 3:1-10)

This morning, we look at God – God’s character. 

Our presidential election ended in a result that shocked a lot of people.  Donald Trump had less total votes than Hillary Clinton, but he got the needed number of electoral votes.  By the standards of our system, he is our next president.  Some voters are very happy, others are quite upset.  Many didn’t like either candidate, would have been unsatisfied either way, and are kind of glad the whole thing is over.

All three types of voters are among us.   If you find yourself elated because your candidate won, please be humble, and sensitive with your brothers and sisters in Christ who feel differently than you.  They are hurting and this is church.  Here, our unity is in our identity in Christ.  We build one another up and bear with one another in love.  If your candidate lost and you feel angry, express it, but with dignity.  Respect those voted against your candidate because they are your brothers and sisters in Christ.  Again, we are the church, the body of Christ.  There is a place for thoughtful criticism and for expressing frustration.  We do all of it in love and work through our feelings in prayer, together.

As a church body and as individual Christ followers, we turn to 1 Timothy 2:1 which says,

“I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, ² for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. ³ This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, ⁴ who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 

            The word of God insists that we pray for “all in high positons.”  We will pray for the well-being and effective governance of President-Elect Donald Trump.  We will, out of our reverence for Christ, respect the office.  I have been voting in presidential elections since 1988.  In my voting life, I have voted Democrat, Republican, third party, and write-in.  At times I have deeply admired the occupant of the oval office.  At other times, I have harbored disdain for the person with the title President of the United States.  As Christians, we will respect the office.  As a people obedient to the dictates of scripture, we will pray for President Trump.  As followers of Jesus who turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute us – we are called to love all people. 

It is our responsibility as citizens in a democracy to use our voice to advocate for justice, equal opportunity, and compassion for the least of these.  We can, and at time must, oppose the very government we respect and uphold in prayer.  But our opposition is to be peaceful, modeled after the example of our Master, Jesus.  We speak truth to power and we know our purpose is to be witnesses who point the world to the salvation we have in Jesus. 

Note that at the end of the 1 Timothy reading it says, “God desires everyone to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”  See the relevance of this idea – that God wants everyone to know the truth – to Jonah’s experience in Nineveh in Jonah chapter 3.  I pray that we can take this verse, 1 Timothy 2:4 (God’s desire for all to be saved), and we can hold that up to Jonah and God in Nineveh, and in doing this we will see God’s character.   We see who God is. I pray that focusing on God’s character will relieve us of any painful post-election hangover.  Keeping our minds on God’s identity and God’s character, we remember who we are in Christ.  The Kingdom of God is bigger than the United States, and the advance of the Kingdom of God is unthreatened by American presidential elections.

            Jonah chapter 3 begins the same way chapter 1 began.  God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh with a prophecy of doom.  We remember that Jonah at first ran away, was swallowed by a whale, prayed from the whale’s belly, and was then upchucked up onto the shore by the whale.  We previously mentioned that it is not completely clear why Jonah fled God at first.  Jeremiah also prophesied God’s wrath and hated doing so and suffered for it.  No one wants to be the bearer of bad news.

            When the call comes in chapter 3, Jonah goes as God instructs him.  He thinks he is going to see the city destroyed.  He will later claim that he knew all along that God would spare Nineveh, but I don’t buy it.  In chapter 4:5, we find Jonah sitting and waiting to see what will happen.    He said, “40 days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.’  Jonah sits on the outskirts of the city, watching, waiting for the violent overthrow he’s predicted based on what God told him.

            Jonah believes he is like the prophet Nahum.  Listen to what God had Nahum say when he was called to prophesy against Nineveh.

“An oracle concerning Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum of Elkosh. 

² A jealous and avenging God is the Lord, the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and rages against his enemies” (1:1b-2).

“Nineveh is like a pool whose waters run away.  ‘Halt!  Halt! But no one turns back’” (2:8).

“I am against you, says the Lord of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame” (3:5).

            Nahum didn’t just preach wrath.  He preached humiliation.  On another Sunday, we might even call into question’s God’s ethics – at the least the ethics of the God we meet in Nahum.  Today Jonah is our focus.  He thought he was like Nahum, a preacher of a wrath that was inevitable.   He told Nineveh she was going to burn, and then sat on a hill to watch it happen. 

We can’t see what all of Jonah’s thoughts were, but he was unhappy with God’s show of compassion.  He wanted the prophecy he delivered to come true.  He had benefited from God’s compassion and forgiveness when he was rescued from the stomach of the whale.  He did not think that compassion would extend to the Ninevites. 

            As I imagined Jonah and God in Nineveh and things not going as Jonah thought they would, the story of Abraham and Sodom and Gomorra came to mind.  That is found in Genesis 18.

            There God, appearing as three men, promises Abraham and barren, post-menopausal Sarah they would have a son.  Sarah laughs off such a promise but God is committed to it and acknowledges but does not punish her laughter.   After Sarah laughs, God appears to have an interior conversation.  It is clear there is one God, but somehow this one God, appearing as trinity, is able to converse within God’s own self.  Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?  No, for I have chosen him” (18:18-19a).

            That thing that God is about to do is inspect two cities – Sodom and Gomorrah.  God will assess just how wicked those cities are.  Abraham already knows it is not good.  Destruction is inevitable, as Jonah said it would be centuries later for another wicked city, Nineveh.  So Abraham does what the great people of faith have done from time immemorial.  He challenges God.

            He asks God, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked” (Genesis 18:23)?  Abraham suggests that if 50 righteous people were found in the wicked cities, God’s own character would not allow such a thing. It is a stroke of boldness, to tell God almighty that He is bound by his own character.  “Far be that from you!”  Declares Abraham (18:25).  God does not chide his chosen one.  Rather, he agrees to Abraham’s terms.  If 50 righteous people are found, God will not overturn Sodom and Gomorrah. 

            Abraham is just getting started.  He asks, would God spare the city if 45 righteous are found?  Yes, for 45 righteous people, Sodom and Gomorrah will stand.  Abraham continues, whittling away at God’s resolve.  Forty, O Lordy, would you spare it for 40?  It reads like a Dr. Suess book.  For 30?  Yes, for 30, the cities will be spared.  Abraham take the number all the way down to 10.  God meets Abraham right where he is in his anxiety over the annihilation of two cities.  God accepts Abraham’s logic, tenacity, and confrontation. 

            The stories are eerily similar.  A man of God stands outside a city about to be razed to the ground by divine fire.  Abraham begs for the city to be spared if there is any way to spare.  God agrees.  But there is no way, and Sodom and Gomorrah are not spared.  They are eliminated by fire and sulfur that rain from heaven. 

            Jonah, like Abraham, stands outside a city.  Unlike Abraham, Jonah does not ask for mercy for the Ninevites.  Maybe he remembered the Sodom and Gomorrah story and thought he was going to see a repeat performance.  Instead the opposite happens.  God had promised Abraham he would spare Sodom and Gomorrah if even 10 righteous people were found there.  No righteous people are found in Nineveh.  But the wicked hear the message of the prophet and repent.

            First, the people hear Jonah, and they believe that he does represent God and is speaking truth.  God is going to destroy them (Jonah 3:4).  Upon hearing this, the people lead the way by putting on sackcloth.  The businessmen and shop owners going into a time of mourning and grief – grief over their own wickedness.  The farmers and the peasants and the homemakers.  Everyone all over Nineveh.  It is a movement – a movement of shame and sorrow. 

            Next, word of what’s happening makes its way to the palace.  The King gets off his throne and acknowledge that while he may indeed be king of Nineveh, he is not the all-powerful one.  He removes his royal robes and follows the lead of his subjects.  He repents of his sins.  He puts on sack cloth and pours ashes on his head. 

            Finally, that king makes a proclamation.  The nation will add fasting to their mourning in ashes.  He even takes the risky move of imposing the fast upon the livestock and children.  Everyone is to go without eating in a period of fasting.  Everyone is acknowledge and to grieve sin.  Everyone is to pray.  In a time of national crisis when the survival of the kingdom is at stake, the Ninevites believe the reluctant Jewish prophet Jonah and beg for mercy from God.  They accept that they are deserving of death.  They never doubt the authority or truth of Jonah.  They simply say, “Who knows?  God may relent and change his mind” (3:9).

            In that most curious of verses, Jonah 3:10, we see the character of God.  “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”

            The book of Jonah is in our Bible to show us a different side of the God Jonah thought he knew.  A lot of people felt as Jonah did that a prophecy of doom would be followed by a fulfillment – Sodom and Gomorrah style.  Many ancient readers of Jonah who anticipated wrath forgot something God said to Abraham so many years earlier.  God told Abraham his descendants would “become a great and mighty nation, and all nations of the earth would be blessed by him” (Genesis 18:18).  Here Nineveh, deserving of wrath, is blessed by that God of Abraham.  Instead of wrath, Nineveh gets mercy and a second chance to live faithful, decent lives of justice and compassion. 

            Instead of seeing the God he expected, Jonah found a very different God.  First, he was rescued from a death in the seas; rescued in spite of his disobedience.  Then, Nineveh received mercy instead of punishment.  What will our country see in the God we actually meet in Jonah?

            If we are scared or at least unsteady based on what happened this week, we see that God is the one with the power to destroy nations, but also the one with the heart to forgive repentant sinners.  We can as a body and as individuals repent of sin.  Knowing God through the crucified, resurrected Christ, we know we will be forgiven.  We know we have new life and hope – hope for today.

            If we are confident in our own identity in Christ, then we are the messengers of today who, like Abraham, can appeal to God on behalf of others, and like Jesus can invite people to repentance and to the heart of the God who will welcome them into His Kingdom.   Abraham was the patriarch and Jonah was a prophet.  We are witness who inherit the testimonies of both men and the Gospel from Jesus.  We share that Gospel by creating space in which we welcome, shelter, and encourage scared people. 

            Either scared or confident, you can put your trust in God this morning.  Things may seem chaotic, but he is with us, always.  He is with us, we are his, and we can be agents of positive change.  Giving mercy, speaking real hope, and helping people meet Jesus is a good place to start.

AMEN

Where God Won’t Go (Jonah 1:17-2:11)

Sunday, November 6, 2016

            Is it odd that sometimes people turn to Jesus after they are incarcerated?  In a child’s way of thinking, people in jail are called ‘bad guys.’  Often these bad guys find Jesus in prison.

            Is it odd that Christianity is growing rapidly in places where faith is discouraged and violently persecuted, places like India, Iran, and China?  Christianity is exploding in those places.  In America, where we are free to go to church and literally have hundreds of choices, church attendance is in decline.  As our population grows, less and less people are go to church even though going to church couldn’t be easier.  In China, attending an unregistered church could get you fired or fined or even arrested, and people keep going.  New churches cannot begin fast enough.  What do we make of this?

            Is it strange that when life is running smoothly, our faith is relegated to a dusty corner?  This doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does.  We find ourselves winning – whatever winning might mean in your life.  And faith isn’t needed.  But, then we lose – because sometimes we do.  In losing moments, pain-filled, then we desperately rush back to God. Why is this?

            Jonah chapter 2, verse 2.  He says, “I called to the Lord out of my distress.”  If you look at a Bible map of the Mediterranean Sea in the days of Jonah and you look all the way to the left, the far west.  There’s Tarshish.  After that it is the Strait Gibraltar and then the Atlantic Ocean which the ancients believed you’d fall off the edge of the earth.  You’d fall to the depths.  Jonah was safe and sound in Israel.  That’s where God called him.  Jonah didn’t need to call God from his distress.  God called him in his comfort.  All he needed to do was obey.

            Instead, he jumped on a ship going the opposite direction, Tarshish, the farthest point in the known world.  He was trying to get away from God all the while knowing one cannot get away from God.  When God whipped up a storm that rocked the ship and showed Jonah the score, he had himself thrown into the sea, into the depths.  Jonah, knew God would be present on the boat.  Jonah knew God would be waiting in Tarshish.  Yet, he tried to go to those places to hide from God. 

Jonah knew that God not would sink to the deep.  The depths of the sea is the one place God won’t go.  Yet when Jonah ended up there, where God was not, then he reached out to the Lord.  When all was lost, Jonah found himself praying.  When all was well, he ignored God.  From that place where God won’t go, he prayed. 

In the latter half of the verse, we read that Jonah was in the belly of Sheol.  Sheol is sometimes thought of as an Old Testament word for ‘Hell,’ but the Old Testament did not have categories of Heaven and Hell.  Those ideas came later, when the Greeks had heavy influence on Jewish thought during the New Testament period.  The Old Testament sense was focused on the living.  If one lived a good life and had children, when he died, would be buried and considered at rest.  He would live on in his descendants.  That’s why having children was so important and going childless such a tragedy.  One with no descendants was lost.

Sheol was a place of disembodied shades cut off from the living.  Former UNC religion Professor Jack Sasson writes, “We have imprecise and sometimes contradictory knowledge on exactly what the [ancient Jewish person] believed occurred after death.  … Israel’s poets generally locate this other world somewhere below terra firma or even below the oceans; occasionally they place it beyond God’s control and assign it to the dead.”[i]

We see an example of this thought in the Bible, in the great lament psalm, Psalm 88.  Beginning in verse 3,

For my soul is full of troubles,
    and my life draws near to Sheol.
⁴ I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
    I am like those who have no help,
⁵ like those forsaken among the dead,
    like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
    for they are cut off from your hand.
⁶ You have put me in the depths of the Pit,
    in the regions dark and deep.
⁷ Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
    and you overwhelm me with all your waves.

            “Cut off;” the singer says.  This notion of complete separation colors Jonah’s prayer at the outset, and then, his lament intensifies with each new phrase.  In his song, in chapter 2, the Hebrew poet uses the technique of intensification.  From Sheol’s belly, he cries, “You cast me into the deep” (v.3a).  And it’s not just the deep, but the heart of the seas.  Waves and billows pass over Jonah.  The abyss engulfs him, kelp wraps around his head, and the bars of the netherworld imprison him. 

            The NRSV, the version I use most of time, translates verse 6 like this.  “I went down to the land, whose bars closed upon me forever.”  Sasson thinks it should read this way.  “I sink to the base of the mountains.  The netherworld, its bars about me are there forever.”  ‘Netherworld,’ is a better translation than ‘land.’ 

Here’s how Sasson describes the Hebrew concept of netherworld.  “The dead [in the netherworld] lead an eternal but dull existence, where the hurt is due to the unbridgeable separation from the loved one left on earth.  It is now recognized that [this is how] [ancient Jewish] poets [described] life apart from God.”[ii]  Nothing could be worse.  This is the end for the prophet who runs from God’s call. 

            What end lies before us?  Is life hard right now?  What poetic intensification would track your downward spiral?  I knew a guy who was complete broke was he got married.  He was also too young.  There was abuse, and then diagnosis of mental illness, and then divorce.  He wound up homeless.  I have, I am sad to say, seen it a couple of times.  Maybe you’ve seen it too.  How would the Hebrew poet use intensification as a technique in his verse to describe what you’ve seen?  Or what you yourself have experienced?

            In the New Testament, in parables, Jesus uses phrases like ‘weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth,’ and ‘outer darkness,’ and ‘unending fire.’  Some Christians take Jesus’ metaphors as if he were describing a literal place called Hell.  Jesus described the world the way ancient Jews described the world.  His metaphors made sense to his listeners.  He used these word pictures, so familiar to the people around him, as a way of depicting the absolute, ultimate horror the Hebrew poet could not abide – being cut off from God. 

To be where God won’t go; there is no worse fate.  That’s Sheol.  When we use the word ‘Hell’ to describe the lowest one could get, the worst pain, then we know Jonah’s feeling when he says he’s crying out from the belly of Sheol.

There, Jonah discovers what I pray my homeless friend and others I have known might discover.  God is there, even there.  Jonah 2:6 is one of those scripture passages demanding to be highlighted, underlined, and noted in the margin.  The Hebrew poet dramatically disrupts the intensification, with reversal! 

“I went down to the Netherworld,” Jonah moans.

“You brought me up from the pit,” he sings one stanza later. 

The ancient Jews uncompromisingly declared God’s sovereignty.  God is all-powerful, so, God can, when God so chooses, go where God won’t go.  Jonah’s praying from the belly of the whale, the belly of Sheol and yet he says, “My prayers came into your holy temple.” 

The Israelites believed that once David established Jerusalem and brought the Ark of the Covenant there and then Solomon built the temple, God lived there – in the temple.  Worshipping there, in the city of Zion, in the temple, was different that worshipping anywhere else.  God was there in a way that He was not in other places.  Yet Jonah, swimming in a fish’s gastric juices, deep in the ocean felt God’s presence and felt his own prayers rise all the way to the temple. 

In the New Testament epistle, Hebrews, chapter 4, verse 16, we are told we can approach God in the heavenly throne room.  “Let us approach the throne of grace with boldness so that we may receive mercy and help in time of need.”  In Christ, no distance comes between us and our God.  Jonah did not know Christ, but he learned that his calamity, brought on by his own disobedience, did not separate him from God’s love because nothing can separate us from God’s love. 

I alluded to my friend whose life fell apart.  His story has the makings of a Hebrew lament poem or a country music song.  I mentioned that maybe you knew of people in similar despair, or, perhaps yourself are in such a state of loss, pain, and defeat.  We go through seasons in life where problems become so large, the problems are all we can see. Arrested in depression, we are incapable of seeing anything except evidence that all is lost.  In this condition, we miss the most obvious thing.  God, being God, can overcome all difficulties.  This is not just fluffy church talk.  I know people whose pain has landed them in deep ditches of despair.  I have seen God pull them out.

Earlier I used a word – sovereignty.  It is a theological term describing God’s unrivaled might.  God is all-powerful.  In the Jonah this aspect of God’s character is displayed in three ways; first, in God’s presence.  God is with Jonah on the boat.  God hears Jonah’s prayer from the fish’s belly.  When the sea creature vomits Jonah up on the shore, God is waiting for him there.

Last week when we prayed over backpacks to be sent to needy children in Appalachia, God was with as we prayed.  God went with me on the road as I drove those backpacks to a church in Apex, NC.  God was waiting for me there.  God will travel with the people of that church when they take those backpacks to a depressed coal mining town in Southwestern Pennsylvania.  God is already in that town, with each child who is waiting to receive a backpack.

I cannot explain the omnipresence of God except to say that you and I can never reach that place where God won’t go.  He is with us always.

A second way sovereignty is seen in Jonah is in God’s supernatural authority over nature.  The winds of the sea obey him when he needs a storm to get his prophet’s attention.  A fish works for him, swallowing that prophet so he won’t drown.  Later in the story, we’ll see a plant grow because God told it to, a worm eat the plant because God told it to, and then a hot desert wind scorch Jonah’s unshaded head because God told it to do so.

In addition to omnipresence and authority over creatures and the weather, a third way God’s sovereignty is on display in Jonah is God’s freedom.  God is free to save the Pagan sailors we meet in chapter 1, even though they do not know the Law.  God is free to give his obstinate prophet second chances, even though he ran away at first.  In chapter 3, God is free to spare the lives of evil kings when they repent.  We’ll get to that next week. 

            Omnipresence, authority over nature, and freedom all show God’s might and power and authority.  Thus Jonah ends his Psalm in chapter 2, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord” (2:9b).  It’s a great statement, but it’s not worth a bucket of doodle if it just serves as the climax of talk about Hebrew poets and Hebrew prophets.  A famous professor of preaching demanded that he students ask and answer, so what?  In Jonah, we see God’s sovereignty through the brilliant poetic techniques of intensification and reversal.  So what?

            Here’s what!  Verse 6 is the center of the Psalm.  In order for us to get to that critical center where everything turns around for Jonah, we have to catch the shift in the latter half of verse 2.  In the first stanza, Jonah says, “I called to the Lord out of my distress, and He answered me.”

            In the second stanza, the pronoun changes.  “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice.”  In Jonah chapter 2, we enter a prayer from a lost, hurting man that reach across the impossible distance from the depths of Sheol straight to the heart of God. 

            Jonah’s prayer becomes real when you and I shift pronouns in our own lives.  This prayer is the first step in reversing the course of a life hell bent on destruction.  When we move from descriptions of God to conversation with God, everything changes.  Theology, words and ideas about God, is important, very needed in the church’s expression of faith.  Theology matters and must be practiced.  But when we’re hurting, when we’re broken, theology doesn’t help much.  We need to move from theology to encounter.

            Jonah shows us that the encounter with God can happen anywhere.  Your encounter with God can happen anywhere because there is nowhere God won’t go.  God is here now.  We all need him.  And He wants us to turn to Him.

            As we sing a closing song, if you especially need God to reverse the trajectory of your story, come to Him.  Come this morning.  Come to the present God, the Almighty God, the God whose love is seen on the cross and in the Holy Spirit who hovers over us in this very moment.  We’re going to sing.  If you need the life change that only God can give, come to Him.  He wants you to.  He wants your heart.  Let the pronoun change so that you are focused on God directly.  Come and give yourself to God right now. 

AMEN

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[i] J. Sasson (1990), The Anchor Bible: Jonah, Doubleday (New York), p. 171.

[ii] Ibid, p.188.