"A Gospel for My Enemies" Jonah 1:1-3 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Well, this morning we start our study in the book of Jonah, but I want to begin in John 7.

You don't need to turn there, but you can listen as I describe the scene in John chapter 7.

John 7 · chapter mention

John 7 is occurring during the Feast of Tabernacles.

Feast of Tabernacles, or also the Jews call it Sukkot, is the one of the biggest holidays in the Jewish calendar.

It's celebrated today, much in the same way it was celebrated in the life of Christ.

Sukkot is really a weeklong festival, a week-long Sabbath, you could even describe it that way, where people come together and as families and extended families, it's a long holiday and they build uh Sukkot or Sukkot, which is these coverings that go above their patios.

Um most often they build them in patios.

Sometimes they'll build them in parks or uh in streets or driveways, but a lot of Jewish houses even have patios precisely for this reason.

And if you've been in uh Israel or even New York City during Sukkot, you've seen these things.

They're thatched together.

They can't be uh you know, they can't be aluminum or anything.

You the rule is you have to be able to see through the roof.

You've got to be able to see, and in typical Jewish fashion, there's a rule about this: you've got to be able to see at least one star through the roof.

And so they'll build them in their courtyards, and sometimes families will sleep outside underneath them.

It's kind of like camping in Jerusalem, camping in inner city camping, you could call it that way.

And they'll hang ribbons and uh make it fest, you know, festive.

Even lights will sometimes be hung on them.

They'll hang fruit on them.

Uh, it's a really celebratory time, and it's supposed to commemorate the forty years that the Israelites wandered through the wilderness, and yet God led them all the way.

It's supposed to commemorate something else that we'll get to at the end of the morning, but for now that's sufficient.

That's the point of the feast, to commemorate God's provision to them in the wilderness, the provision of manna, the provision of the cloud and the fire that would guide them, the fact that God was caring for them while they were in the wanderings.

Well, what makes this festival interesting in John chapter 7 is that Jesus' family, John 7 at the very beginning of the chapter, says his brothers and sisters told him, You should go to Jerusalem during the Sukkot.

John 7 · chapter mention

You should go to the Jerusalem during the feast of the tabernacles.

After all, you're doing all of these miracles.

And this is happening right after John 6, where Jesus had had multiplied the bread and the wine, and then had cut across the Sea of Galilee to the other side, and the crowd followed them, wanting more food, and Jesus rebuked them, and everybody left Jesus, and all that had just happened.

And so you get this idea that his disciples, who were left, you know, holding excess bread and fish, really, is how that story ends.

They're left paying the check, so to speak, and and they're looking for a new a new approach.

And so they they tell Jesus, you should go to Jerusalem.

I mean, Galilee, we've been here for a while now.

You've done the signs, you've done the wonders, get to Jerusalem.

Jesus' own brothers and sisters come to him and say, You should do the signs you're doing in Galilee, do them in Jerusalem.

Understand that Galilee is remote, it is isolated.

It's not, it's even in the Roman Empire, Galilee was a different state than Jerusalem was in.

It's its own world up there.

Had a different king, a different governor.

Everything was different about it.

And Jews looked down on Galilee, and nobody was from Galilee of significance, and so the disciples, except all the disciples, right?

And so they're telling Jesus, you've got to go to Jerusalem.

Take the show on the road, so to speak.

And Jesus says he won't go during Sukkot, he won't go during the Feast of the Tabernacles because it's not his time yet.

And after all, the Jews would likely try to arrest him and put him to death.

And so his family goes without him.

And then John 7 says, But Jesus came a little bit later.

He kind of snuck in.

And so his family is set up.

They got their tents going on in Jerusalem, and a couple days later in comes Jesus.

And Jesus doesn't go to his family, he goes to his, or to his disciples.

He goes straight to the temple and starts teaching.

And this creates quite a scene.

You can imagine his disciples hearing about it and saying, wait, he told us.

And the Pharisees hear about it and they send soldiers to arrest Jesus.

Remember what Jesus was teaching in the synagogue, by the way, or in the temple, by the way?

He was teaching that he's greater than Moses.

That was the sermon for that day.

The Jews were upset that he had healed people on the Sabbath, that he had told the man to take his mat home and walk, and they were upset that he did this on the Sabbath, and so they wanted to arrest him for violating the Sabbath.

And Jesus' response to them was in the form of a question: is it okay to circumcise on the Sabbath?

And the answer is yes, even Moses taught that circumcision could happen on the Sabbath.

And so Jesus says, if Moses could do circumcision on the Sabbath, why can't I make the whole man whole on the Sabbath?

In other words, if you're okay doing some ceremonial thing that affects somebody on the outside, how much more should you be okay with me, who is greater than Moses, not just doing something on the outside of someone, but circumcising their hearts, a true circumcision.

And notice that even by going down that road, what Jesus is saying, not only is he greater than Moses, but he's saying that the gospel he's bringing is just categorically better in every way than the teaching of the scribes and the Pharisees.

He's saying that his message is better than what Judaism was offering, which was ritual washings.

I mean, he's going to go on to call the Pharisees whitewash tombs.

He's going to say that the Pharisees are incapable of helping anybody, that they find a demon-possessed person and drive the demon out, and the demon comes back with seven of his friends, and the guy's worse off than when he first met the Judaism of that day.

I mean, that's what Jesus is telling them.

You can see why they're not okay with this.

So the soldiers go to arrest Jesus.

I'm sure most of you remember the story.

They they go to arrest him, and Jesus starts teaching the soldiers.

And the soldiers leave.

And they come back to the Pharisees without Jesus in custody.

And the Pharisees are enraged.

And it gets worse.

They ask the soldiers, why didn't you arrest him?

And do you remember the soldiers' response?

We've never found anybody who teaches as powerfully as this guy.

Wrong answer to the Pharisees.

The crowd starts in an uprising.

The crowd is divided.

I mean, this isn't happening in a corner.

This is the Sukkot, this is the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem with Jesus preaching in the temple, the Pharisees sending soldiers to come fetch him, coming back empty-handed.

I mean, this is a big deal.

The crowd is divided.

Half of the crowd says this guy's got to be the savior.

Because could anybody do the kind of things he's doing?

Can anyone teach like this if he wasn't the savior?

And the other half says he can't be the savior because he is from Galilee.

After all, the Bible says the Savior will be from Bethlehem, not from Galilee.

Can anything good come from Galilee?

And so that's the angle the Pharisees take with the crowd.

They go down the road of, you can't believe this guy.

Well, the first response of the crowd is important.

They tell the crowd, why are you being fooled by this guy?

And they ask this question.

Have any of the Pharisees become his disciples?

No, it's just the hoy piloy, it's just the commoners.

And frankly, and the Pharisees are telling this to the crowd, frankly, it's people who are too ignorant to know any better.

We excuse your treason, so to speak, because you're too easily fooled.

But look at us with our with our robes and our hats and our tassels, and we are the educated class, and we're not buying this.

So, had any Pharisees become disciples of Christ by this point?

And the answer is yes.

There's one.

You remember Nicodemus.

And at this point, Nicodemus speaks up, John 7 says, which has got to be a very awkward conversation when the line before it is, look around, no Pharisees have become disciples of Christ, and you can see Nicodemus over in the corner of the lake.

And Nicodemus asks the question to the rest of the Pharisees.

Does our law allow us to condemn a person without at least giving him the opportunity to defend himself?

Like, can't we at least have a trial before we send the soldiers to kill him?

And obviously the Jews didn't have the authority to kill anybody.

Their plan is, which is what they ended up doing, of course, is sending the soldiers to arrest him, putting him through a sham trial, and then handing him over to the Romans, you know, with a bill of lies attached to him, and hoping the Romans would execute him.

That's going to be the plan they settle on.

They haven't got the details worked out right now, but they've encountered their first obstacle that Nicodemus says, uh, we got to at least give him a trial.

And notice that Nicodemus says that in response to the question, have any of the other religious leaders believed him?

I mean, Nicodemus, he's sometimes a little bit slippery.

He comes to Jesus at nights and nobody sees him, but when he was called out publicly, he spoke up publicly.

You got to give him that.

And by the way, I think at Jesus' trial, when the Sanhedrin voted unanimously to put Jesus to death, I don't think Nicodemus was there.

I think they learned their lesson from John chapter 7 and didn't invite him.

John 7 · chapter mention

You know, his invitation got lost in the mail.

It happened in the middle of the night, and just, hey, we forgot to get Nicodemus.

But for now, in John 7, he speaks up.

And the Pharisees turn on him.

And do you remember what they say?

They don't say, Are you a disciple?

Because that would have undercut their whole argument.

Their whole argument is that none of the Pharisees are disciples.

And so when Nicodemus speaks up, the Pharisees turn to him and say, Not are you a disciple, but instead they say, Are you also from Galilee?

I mean, that's the worst insult you could give somebody.

Are you from Galilee?

Gotta be kidding.

And uh, I thought of some different American analogies to that, but I know that some of you are from those kind of places, so I mean, can a president come from New Mexico?

Poor Governor Gary Johnson.

He ran and like six people voted for him.

Can a president come from New Mexico?

Is it even possible?

And if I were to say, I'm pro-Gary Johnson, you would say, Are you from New Mexico too?

Are you kidding?

That's what they tell Nicodemus.

Oh, the insult.

Now let's talk about Galilee for a second before we finish John chapter 7.

John 7 · chapter mention

In Galilee, as I mentioned, it's a different region.

The capital of it was Tiberius.

Tiberius is a massive Roman city.

It's still there today.

If you go to Israel today, you can go to Tiberius and hang out there.

Jews didn't live in Tiberius.

They rejected it.

It was built on a Jewish graveyard and that was kind of designed to keep Jews out of it.

The Romans didn't want Jews living there anyway.

It was a it was a commercial route.

There are highways coming from the valley of Armageddon came through there.

Nazareth was up on the hill overlooking it.

The highway would go by it out to Syria.

This was a road of commerce.

And the Romans were frankly happy if the Jews had a little presence there, and the Jews didn't want to be up there.

I mean, it's for fishermen.

That's who lived up there.

If you were Jewish up there, you probably spoke Greek, and you were probably a fisherman, and nobody cared about you.

You could come to Jerusalem for the holidays, but then just go back to Galilee and stay where you belong.

And this goes all the way back to the Old Testament history of Israel.

There was a massive civil war in Israel, if you remember, after Solomon died, the nation was split in half, and Jerusalem was in the southern part.

Judah was the nation.

So when you come across the word Israel in the Old Testament, it's usually not referring to where Jerusalem was.

That's Judah.

David was from Judah.

The good kings of Israel are from Judah.

The wicked, villainous, idol-worshiping kings were from the north.

They were from Israel or Samaria.

That's where Galilee was.

It's up in the north.

It's the wrong side of the civil war.

It's where the Baal worshippers were from.

It's where the people who rejected the line of David were from Galilee.

The line of David was from Jerusalem.

The Savior was going to come from Bethlehem, which is down in the south in Judah, outside of Jerusalem, and he was going to reign in Jerusalem.

He wasn't going to be some Sumerian king.

He wasn't going to be some Israelite king from the north.

I mean, that is insane.

It's against the whole, all the prophecies of the Old Testament would be opposed to that.

So obviously, the Savior is not going to be from Galilee.

I mean, that's so clear-cut.

That's their thinking.

Beyond that, those people are idle worshipping villains.

Deep divisions.

And the Civil War was 800 years earlier by this point in Israel's history.

But it's, I mean, the wounds still are fresh, so to speak.

That's where the disciples are from.

And if you could get in a time machine, you could go back to Jesus and say, really, you had to make the disciples all Galilean?

And how'd you think that was going to go?

Imagine how many more people would have believed if you were at least from Jerusalem.

Well, everybody knows that.

And so the Pharisees then turn to Nicodemus and they give him an imperative, a command.

And I want to give us that command this morning.

The Pharisees tell Nicodemus, search the scriptures and see.

Has there ever been a prophet from Galilee?

And so that's our charge this morning.

Let's search the scriptures and see if we can come up with a prophet from Galilee.

So open your Bibles now to Jonah chapter 1.

Jonah 1 · chapter mention

You were pre-warned, so you found it.

Jonah chapter 1, verse 1.

Jonah 1:1

The word of Yahweh came to Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.

But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh.

He went down to Jaffa and found a boat going to Tarshish, so he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish away from Yahweh's presence.

2 Kings chapter 14, verse 25, describes Jonah, the son of Amitai, as being from a town called Gathifer.

2 Kings 14:25

Gathifer is a town as being really kind to it.

It's a collection of huts, a collection of houses, a couple miles outside of Nazareth.

Nazareth was tiny back then, by the way.

So for say Gathifer is like a suburb of Nazareth is kind of funny.

It'd be a joke.

It's a couple of huts, a couple houses a few miles outside of Nazareth.

That's where Jonah is from.

Very much Galilee.

You couldn't be more in Galilee than where Jonah was from.

Now, what's going on in Israel during Jonah's life in our time machine back here to Jonah 1?

Israel is being awful.

And you don't even need to go to seminary or even know who the king was in Jonah 1 to know that in Jonah's life, Israel was being awful, because Israel is always being awful in the Old Testament.

You know, the good kings reigned in Judah.

There were no good kings in Israel other than maybe Jehu, and Jehu and Jonah do not overlap.

It's wickedness in Jonah's life.

Now the actual king in Jonah's life is a king named Jeroboam.

The first king of Israel was also named Jeroboam.

This is a different Jeroboam, you know, a hundred plus years later, totally different guy.

But he took the name Jeroboam because he's going to worship idols like the first Jeroboam.

He's wicked.

He's a horrible king.

2 Kings 14, that whole passage there in verse 20, all the way down to like verse 30, describes King Jeroboam.

It says that he followed the footsteps of his namesake, the first Jeroboam, you know, way earlier in Israel's history.

That was the guy who built the cows and told Israel, worship the cows, behold your gods that led you out of Egypt, so to speak, brought in the Baals, introduced Israel to Baal worship.

That's the king who's ruling in Jonah's life.

Not the actual king, but the namesake.

He was wicked.

There are other prophets during Jonah's life.

Hosea, Amos, prophesied during Jonah's life.

But Jonah was up there from Galilee.

He was the Israelite prophet.

The other prophets came from the south and went to rebuke Israel.

Not Jonah.

He's rebuking those in his own hometown.

But Jonah has a very interesting message for Israel, as described in 2 Kings 14, and that's that God's not going to punish them.

Even though they're wicked and evil, God is actually going to grow them during Jonah's ministry, which is an outrageous promise.

They should be punished, and that was the idea.

That was the Mosaic covenant.

You reject God, God will reject you, and he will punish you.

But Jonah prophesies that God will actually grow you.

Now we know from 2 Kings that happens because Israel takes on Syria and defeats Syria.

Syria was the big enemy of the day.

They were afraid Syria was going to conquer them.

All through 2 Kings they're fighting the Syrians.

But Jonah says, God's going to show you mercy and grace.

Even though you're wicked, even though you're idol-worshiping evil sinners, God is still going to show you mercy because you are Israel.

So that's the main threx of Jonah's prophecy, described in 2 Kings 14.

But here, something different happens.

And you have to wonder how Jonah's thinking.

Israel's wicked, and God says he's going to show them grace.

How?

Military victories.

If you were a prophet, what how would you want to show God to show grace to your people?

Probably through their repentance.

That's what most prophets preach.

That's why the book of Jonah is unlike any other any other book in the Bible, especially any other prophetic book.

The other prophets that have books named after them, the whole book is their message calling Israel to repent.

That's the point of their book.

Repent, put yourself under God's authority, and God will bless you.

If you don't, God will bring out the day of the Lord on you and destroy you.

That's the minor prophets in a nutshell.

Jonah is the one that stands out.

Jonah doesn't look like the others.

Because Jonah has zero messages in here to Israel.

Which would be the normal, typical prophetic way.

Preach to your people.

But Jonah begins with God calling him and telling him, I want you to go to Nineveh.

Nineveh.

Nineveh.

Nineveh is appalling.

Nineveh is awful.

Nineveh was not the strongest nation in the world at this time, but they were well on their way.

They're the Assyrians, not the Syrians that had their capital in Damascus.

The Assyrians put an A in front of it, and their capital is the region of Nineveh.

And they were growing in military power.

They were going to end up conquering the Syrians.

And they grew in power differently than other empires in the Old Testament.

You know, when the Babylonians conquer somebody, they would move them out and move Babylonians in and kind of take over the city and dwell in the city.

That's the way the Babylonians rolled.

Not the Assyrians.

The Assyrians, when they conquered somebody, their goal was utter decimation.

They didn't want to repopulate the place.

They wanted to destroy the place.

The Syrians would conquer cities and they would take the children and use them as shields.

They would take the women and, of course, violate them.

They would take the men and cut off their hands and their feet and put piles of the hands and feet outside the city gate, and then take their heads, the heads of all the men, and put them as a pile outside the city gate.

So you've got on one side the feet and the hands, and the other side the skulls.

That's how that's what Nineveh did to you.

Then beyond that, they would destroy all the forests.

They would deforest the place around the cities they had captured, which served no purpose other than to keep people from rebuilding it.

They have a wall around the city and a gate around the city, and the the Assyrians would destroy the city, burn the wall, destroy the gate, and then destroy the trees, destroy the farms, which had no wartime value.

It only had, I mean, it would take it would take a while to rebuild the city and the gate.

Their goal was just to send a message to everybody don't mess with Nineveh.

We'll destroy you.

We'll burn the place down.

It would take a generation to regrow the trees to rebuild the city.

That was the point.

So people were terrified of Nineveh.

They didn't have to win the war.

You could beat Nineveh, you could beat the Assyrians in a war, but if you lost a battle, it would afflict you for a generation.

That was the idea.

So Nineveh was awful.

Nobody wanted to go, nobody wanted to do anything with the I the normal approach to Nineveh and to the Assyrians back then was stay out of their way and hope they stay out of yours.

And then God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh.

Historians call this the golden age of Mesopotamia.

This is the strength of Assyria.

It was flowering during this time.

They had These different provinces that each had their own governors that ruled, and that's important because Jonah's not going to go to the whole nation of Assyria.

He's going to go to one of the provinces, the province of Nineveh.

With its own king.

We're going to see him.

We'll meet him as we go through this book.

But they're particularly beautiful.

Brutal.

Now, you may not know this, but the readers of Jonah most certainly would have known this.

Assyria is the nation that ends up conquering Israel.

So when you read this book, and when Jonah was preached, when Jonah was written and became part of the Old Testament canon, no, the people who encountered it and read it, they knew that fact.

Like this is a story of their God sending their prophet to prophesy to people that were going to end up destroying their nation.

That's the grid for this.

And there is no American equivalent like that.

There is no American equivalent like that.

There's just, you can think of some opposite things in American politics.

Like there was a candidate for British, some British prime minister position, whatever they vote for over there, who said this week, he can't believe how much Americans are allowed to have guns.

He suggested that Americans should have guns less.

And I saw this as I was running on the TV and I was running on my treadmill and I almost fell off of the treadmill.

I thought there's some irony to this.

A British person telling us about guns.

We have our freedom because we had guns against the British.

Do you follow the argument?

I don't mean that with any comment about gun control today.

I just meant there's a certain irony about a British person telling us about guns.

I mean, you gotta be kidding me.

That irony flipped on its head is what you've got in the book of Jonah.

These are the people that destroyed Israel.

And here's a book about Yahweh sending his prophet to them.

Now, why would God send a prophet to Nineveh?

And you almost have to scowl when you say the word Nineveh.

Why?

Because God is giving Israel a message, first of all, that they are not indispensable.

They will be broken off.

And that of course happens in the New Testament.

Israel is broken off, the church is grafted in.

They're not broken off permanently.

There will be a return to Israel in the future, in the kingdom, when our Lord comes back and establishes his kingdom from Jerusalem, but for the time being, they're broken off.

This is, in a sense, a prophecy of Israel's breaking off.

That God, it's almost like God is telling them listen, if you don't get this through your heads, I'm not afraid to break you off and go in a different direction, which is the language of Romans 11, is why I use that language broken off.

That's the language that Paul uses.

They're broken off for a time.

This is an Old Testament prophecy of Romans 11.

That's one part.

A second reason God sends Jonah to Nineveh is to reveal almost the missionary attitude of God.

That God wants the nations to be saved.

Jonah, in that sense, is a treatise for missionaries.

Now, don't get me wrong, Jonah was not a typical missionary.

If you're familiar with the story, you would not use this as a missionary handbook.

You wouldn't say go and be like this.

In fact, you would say, you could use Jonah as the antity for missionaries.

It's not go and be like this, it's go and don't do that.

You want to be a missionary?

Don't do what Jonah did.

At any point, none of this.

He wasn't sent by God to preach the good news.

He was sent by God to preach destruction.

In fact, look at the command in verse 2: Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, call out against it.

For their evil has come up before me.

So Jonah is supposed to go and preach destruction.

And that's what he does preach in chapter 3.

When he does go to Nineveh, he goes there, and you can look in chapter 3, verse 4 is the content of his sermon.

Yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown.

That's what Jonah does.

He goes and he preaches, You guys are going down because you're wicked.

But Jonah was not happy about this call.

God told him to go and preach to Nineveh, and Jonah said, No.

No thanks, God.

Now there have been other prophets that have told God no, Jeremiah.

God tells Jeremiah you're going to be a prophet, and Jeremiah says, No.

I don't think so.

And God tells Jeremiah, if you remember, don't argue with me.

I made you.

You didn't make me, so you're going to go ahead and do what I say.

And if you've got to spend time in the pit to learn that lesson, I can arrange it, Jeremiah.

Moses tried.

God tells Moses, go preach.

And Moses says, No, thanks.

I can't speak.

I'm not eloquent.

Can't do it.

I already fled from the Egyptians once to the wilderness.

I don't want to go back.

They're not, they won't be stoked to see me find somebody else.

And God says, No, I choose you.

So Jonah, perhaps aware of that, doesn't vocalize the word no to God.

God tells Jonah to go to Tarshish and to go to Nineveh, and Jonah instead, look at verse 3, goes to Tarshish.

Now look how many times the word Tarshish is in this.

Chapter 1, verse 3, one time Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish, a second time in the middle to Tarshish, a third time at the end to Tarshish, three times in one verse.

And it's not because the author of this book forgot that he had just mentioned it.

Like he wants you to harp on the fact that Jonah is getting out of town.

First of all, he's from Galilee.

He goes to Jaffa.

That's not the right way to go.

If you're on your way, if you're going from Galilee to Nineveh, you wouldn't take a boat, first of all.

You would go on lands.

It's really not that far.

There's a highway that goes right through Galilee that goes right up to Nineveh.

Walk on it and go there.

Not hard.

Instead, Jonah goes down to Jaffa, the opposite direction, by like 50 miles out of the way.

40 miles.

I don't know exactly how far, but he goes the wrong way.

And the equivalent, the American equivalent, would be like me telling you, I want you to go to New York City.

You know, you could, there's lots of ways to go there.

Amtrak, maybe, you could even take a little flight from DCA up there.

You could take the bus, those little megabuses that hardly ever crash, and they're like five bucks a person.

Why don't you take that or drive?

You know, there are tolls and everything.

Lots of different ways for you to go.

And you're like, okay, I'm going to go to New York City.

I'm going to go down to Virginia Beach and get on a boat.

Well, not really.

I mean, maybe there's a boat that could get you there, but it's just not the right way or mode of transport.

Tarshish, on the other hand, it's the edge of the world.

It's past Gibraltar.

It's far it's as far away.

If you go out of the Mediterranean Sea, where the place where Morocco and Spain come together, Gibraltar today, around that corner is that that Eracides and that region of Spain, that's where Tarshish is.

It's as far away as you could be.

You don't go.

There's no beyond that, there'd be dragons.

People didn't take boats down to Africa back then.

They didn't take boats up to England.

If you went to England, you'd cross the land of nobody went out in the Atlantic back then.

This is the edge of the world.

You can't get further away.

I mean, if, again, to use the analogy, if I said you should go to New York City and you go down to Virginia Beach to take a boat, you're going the wrong way.

But then if you said the boat's going to Miami.

Okay, that's about as far away in our country as you could get.

Or to like Corpus Christi.

That's where the boat's going.

Okay?

Still not the right way, still very far away.

But that's still not even in the right world of an analogy here because our world's bigger than even Corpus Christi.

The more American analogies would be you're supposed to go to New York City and you go to Virginia Beach and take a rocket to Mars.

Like it's the most far away place it's conceptually possible for a human being to travel.

That's what Jonah does.

And it's meant to be ironic.

It's meant to be a little funny.

That's why it's repeated three times there.

You're supposed to chuckle out of it a little bit, Tarshish.

Okay, let's see how this goes.

Can you run from God?

I mean, yes or no?

Can you run from God?

No.

Jonah's gonna give it a go, though.

I mean, if you're gonna go down, go down swinging.

And that's what Jonah's gonna do.

He's gonna get out of Dodge.

Now, before we get in, we'll save verse four for next week, but before we go get into his boat ride and all that, it's so helpful to ask yourself, why did Jonah not want to go to Nineveh?

And it's not an easy question to answer.

It's not an obvious question.

You get a little bit of an answer in chapter four.

There's some foreshadowing where he kind of tells you why, and you're forced to wrestle with how honest is Jonah being.

But did he not want to go to Nineveh because he was afraid of dying?

It's a reasonable fear.

They'd likely kill him.

Maybe he doesn't want to go because they're such wicked and barbaric people.

I don't think so, though, because he's going to get thrown into the water to die pretty soon.

It doesn't seem like Jonah's afraid of dying.

That's kind of like propheting 101, you know, they die.

I don't think it's his fear of death.

Some people say he doesn't want to see God working through Nineveh.

And I think that's that's along the right lines.

Because there's a very real threat that God will break off Israel and use Assyria now, and use the Ninevehes to bring his kingdom into the world through them.

I mean, I I think that's a little far-fetched, though.

Now, the answer he gives in chapter 4 is that he knew God would show them mercy.

But there's a lot that goes into that little brief verse, because notice what God told Jonah to preach to Nineveh.

He didn't say go preach forgiveness of sins.

He didn't say, go preach repentance, by the way.

He doesn't even say that.

He says, go and tell them they're going down.

That's the command.

I read one commentator that said Jonah wanted to see them destroyed immediately without the benefit of the fire alarm being pulled.

He wanted them to burn down in their house with no smoke detectors going off, no fire alarms, and God's telling Jonah to go pull the fire alarm in Nineveh and let them know the fire from heaven is coming.

And I think that's closer, even.

But if you really hated somebody and you wanted to watch them burn inside their house, would the fire alarm bother you?

Like, would it be an act of blessing to pull the fire alarm before you burn their house down?

And it depends.

Does the person have a legitimate chance to escape?

And if the answer is yes, the fire alarm would bother you.

If the answer is no, the fire alarm would probably intrigue you.

Watch them panic before they die.

And this phrase, by the way, go to Nineveh and preach because their evil has risen up before me.

We have seen that phrase twice before in Scripture.

Does it ring any bells to you, I wonder?

Their evil has risen before me?

Does your mind go anywhere?

Maybe it goes to Genesis 18, where God tells Abraham, I'm sending angels to go destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because their evil has risen before my face.

Or maybe it goes to Genesis 19, where the angels tell Lot, hey, grab your family and get out of town because we're going to destroy this place.

Its evil has risen up before Yahweh.

That's the same line here.

And so Jonah knows this.

Jonah's mind, I think, goes to Genesis 18 and 19, and he's told God's telling him, go pull the fire alarm, which means I'm going to burn the city down.

It's all going to be destroyed.

But with Sodom, remember, there were a few that got out.

Three and a half.

Remember, if you count Lot's wife, she got halfway out.

That was the half on that tally.

And that's too much for even Jonah.

Jonah wants zero.

Jonah doesn't want anything to do with this.

This whole project is wrong-headed from the beginning.

I mean, God is not acting in a right way right here.

The Nineveh's deserve to burn without a fire alarm, without a fire department.

In fact, if Jonah's the firefighter, he wants to be on vacation on a Spanish beach.

He wants nothing to do with this.

And so he flees as far away as he can.

Still doesn't get to the why, though.

Why does God want to pull the fire alarm in Nineveh?

And I think the best answer I can come up with is because it teaches us this basic point.

Not only does God want to save the nations, but particularly God wants to demonstrate that he can save whoever he wants to, whenever he wants to, and however he wants to.

And that really becomes the main thrust of the book of Jonah.

God can save who he wants, when he wants, and how he wants, and you are not consulted.

You don't get to veto whom God's going to save.

You don't get to offer your two cents.

This is the doctrine of election.

And this is how it's taught in Romans 9, verse 18.

Romans 9:18

So then God can have mercy on whomever he wills, and he can harden whomever he wills.

And who are you to talk back to God?

If there was a council of the prophets of Amos and Hosea and Jonah, they would have huddled together and said, Who should we preach the good news to?

Who should we preach that God is a savior and a light to the nations?

To whom should we go?

They would have ruled out Nineveh, obviously.

Romans 9:16.

Romans 9:16

It depends not on human will, not on human effort, but on God who has mercy.

That is the basic truth about salvation.

It does not depend on man's will or man's effort.

It doesn't depend on man who runs or man who works.

It only depends upon God who saves.

And God can save whoever he wants to.

And I think honestly, most of us wouldn't have a problem with the doctrine of election if it were just that simple.

If God can save whoever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants, okay, he's God, I'm not.

Our problem comes in when God uses the doctrine of election to save the wrong people.

Like in the abstract, we're totally cool with God saving whoever he wants.

After all, he saved me.

Praise God.

He chose me, he saved me, I'm in.

He saved my wife, I'm in.

I'll pray that he saves my children.

I love this doctrine.

So good.

But wait, he turns around and saves Nineveh?

He turns around and saves people from a nation that is an enemy to God's people?

May it never be.

Now God can save whoever he wants, and don't get me wrong, God only saves people through the preaching of the gospel.

The Bible makes that clear.

He can save whoever he wants, and he uses means, and the means is the preaching of the gospel.

Nobody can get saved without the preaching of the gospel, without hearing the good news of the gospel.

And Jonah understands that point too.

He understands Romans 10.

Romans 9 is that God can save whoever he wants.

It doesn't depend on man, it depends on God who chooses.

Romans 10 is that God chooses to have them hear the gospel first.

Jonah understands both of those passages.

And so God says, go to Nineveh, and Jonah says, well, if they can't hear the word preached to them, they can't be saved.

That's how he's going to stymie God's plan of election right here.

You want to save Ninevehes?

Well, it's not going to be from my lips.

God do what you want to do, but it's not going to involve me.

Jonah is not naive enough to think he's going to change God's mind.

That's why Jonah doesn't pray to change God's mind.

Jonah doesn't argue with God.

Jonah is in control of whatever he's in control of, namely his mouth, and it's going to go that way.

See you later.

The Ninevites don't deserve God's word.

They don't deserve salvation.

They just don't.

Do you see how a little bit of nationalistic pride creeps in on Jonah here?

God, I'm so thankful I'm an Israelite.

I mean, they're bad.

Israelites are sinners.

I'm not saying they're not God, but I'm so thankful I'm one of them and not one of those pagan Assyrians.

Are God?

And you see, I've I'm telling you, it comes up even in our own world today.

God, I'm thankful that I'm an American.

I know America has sin.

I know there's problems to it, but I'm just so thankful it's a true Christian nation.

And that attitude, if left unchecked in your heart, becomes a stumbling block to you preaching the gospel to those from other nations.

And you should ask yourself, I know you're too good to be a Jonah, I know that.

But ask yourself, what if God chose in his sovereign will and plan to use other nations to send missionaries, to use other nations to educate pastors, to use other nations to preserve the gospel instead of the U.S.?

Would that be okay with you?

If he broke off the U.S., so to speak?

I know it's not a one-to-one correspondence because, you know, we're not a theocracy and God the promise doesn't dwell in the United States.

It dwells in Israel, not in the United States.

I get that.

But nevertheless, I still see some of that Jonah pride coming up.

God, you can save whoever you want to, as long as it's not those people who are enemies.

And we're even okay with some of them being saved.

It's okay.

I understand that people from all the nations get saved.

Even my enemy gets saved, that glorifies God.

But God, don't you shift what you're doing in the world to those other nations, because that would be too much.

But this is the heart of God, Isaiah 42, verse 6.

Isaiah 42:6

I am Yahweh, I've called you in righteousness.

I will take you by the hand and keep you.

I will give you as a covenant for the people, as a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, and to bring out the prisoners in the dungeon.

God gives his message to the world to open the eyes of the blind, and it goes as a light to the nations.

So much more I wanted to say, but let me end with this.

We're not going to get through this book in four weeks, that's for sure.

Do you know Jonah is quoted by Jesus more than any other book?

By any other name.

Jonah mentions Jesus, or Jesus mentions Jonah's name nine times in his ministry.

He mentions Isaiah once or twice.

Now he quotes Isaiah many times.

He quotes all kinds of books, but not by name.

When it comes to name-dropping, Jesus loves to drop Jonah's name.

And it's worth asking yourself why.

And this goes back to what is going on at the Feast of the Tabernacles.

What's going on to Sukkot?

What's going on there?

And I said there were two things.

One, it celebrates God's provision in the wilderness.

But the second thing it celebrates is that God is going to be a light to the Gentiles.

You see the light through the roof.

God is a light to the Gentiles.

It's this Solomon dedicated the temple, 1 Kings 8, at the Feast of Tabernacles, and in the temple dedication, he says, the nations can pray towards this place.

So Sukkot becomes a festival about God's love for the Gentiles.

Now I hope you see the irony then of Jesus going to Jerusalem on that holiday and preaching his message that he can change the hearts, not through circumcision of the flesh, but through the heart, and the Pharisees losing their minds.

And Jesus saying, Have you not read what Jonah did?

And them saying, Search the scriptures and see there's no prophet from Galilee ever.

It's too much for them.

And this is why Jesus loves the book of Jonah.

Because it becomes a testimony that God will go into the world and save whoever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants, through the preaching of his word.

Even wicked pagan people in Nineveh, or wicked pagan people in Alexandria, Virginia, can be saved through the preaching of God's word.

Lord, we're thankful that you sent Jonah to be a light to the nations, even though he wouldn't go.

Through this, we see your heart, it shines like a bright light in a dark place.

If your heart of love and salvation can light up Nineveh, we pray that it would light up our world today.

We're grateful for our Savior Jesus Christ who gave his life for ours.

Not so that we can be good people, but so that we can be sense people.

I pray for the hearts that are here today.

I pray that we would be convicted of our own pride, that we would wrestle in our own hearts and come to terms with the fact that you can use any nation you want to, anywhere you want to, at any time you want to.

We're not concerned about nations so much, Lord.

We pray that you would use us.

And we pray that you would use us this week.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You have been listening to Emmanuel with Pastor Jesse Johnson.

You can find more resources like this at IBCVA.com.

Here is a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, iBCVA.com.

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Now may God bless you this week if you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.