Jonah - Pursued

Now let's pray.

Father, thanks for being such a great and loving Father.

Thank you for adopting us as your very own children.

We praise you for that.

Holy Spirit, thank you for being our teacher and counselor.

We just ask that you would teach us today that each of us could leave this morning with a word directly from you.

And Jesus, we thank you for saving us, being our friend and our savior.

So it's in your name we pray.

Amen.

You know, life is an adventure with God.

I don't know why.

For some reason, I used to think that uh God was boring and stuffy, you know, and he was all about not wanting anybody to have fun.

And then I got to know him, and I realized it's just the opposite.

It's like you better hang on tight because he has an adventure for each of us.

And so the next for the next four weeks, we're gonna look at an adventure with God.

But uh it might sound a lot like yours.

It certainly sounds like mine.

It's a story we all know.

It's an Old Testament story of Jonah.

Or as we might think of it, Jonah and the well.

And one of the things I'd like to do each year is look at an Old Testament story, or it could be a New Testament story, but a story that we uh consider a children's story.

We did that with David and Goliath last year.

And you know what we find is that there's so much more to these uh great stories in the Bible.

This particular story of Jonah is just intertwined with uh Jesus' life and and and Jonah's life.

In Matthew 12, verse 38.

Matthew 12:38

One day some teachers of religious law and Pharisees came to Jesus and said, Teacher, we want you to show us a miraculous sign to prove your authority.

But Jesus replied, Only an evil, adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign.

But the only sign I will give them is the sign of the prophet Jonah.

For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

The people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it.

For they for they repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah.

Now someone greater than Jonah is here, but you refuse to repent.

It reminds me of one of our uh favorite verses in John 5, where it says, You search the scriptures because you think they will give you eternal life.

But the scriptures point to me.

To Jesus.

After Jesus' resurrection, he met different people, and the Bible says that he opened up their minds so they could understand the scriptures.

So I used to think that he probably showed them prophecies of himself and then how he fulfilled the prophet the prophecies.

Um I would guess that he'd opened up the scriptures and showed them the great plan of God, from the tree of life to the redemptive uh story of Joseph to the story of God's great love and saving power in Jonah.

He just showed him his plan throughout that that finally culminated, converged with uh with Jesus.

The story of Jonah was a really prominent story to the Jewish people.

It was the third most popular subject of ancient Jewish art.

You know, if you look back and see paintings uh from that time, it would be God parting the Red Sea through Moses, it would be Jacob and his son Isaac, and then it would be Jonah and the uh great fish.

All that is to say that the life of Jonah is much more than a children's story or a veggie tell movie.

And so to prove that, I ordered two of the most in-depth commentaries on the book of Jonah.

And the first affected me in a profound way, because it was through this book that I could see the impact and intensity of the storm.

It's here on page three.

See, you can kind of see the ship and the storm.

And the second answer to the question of could uh could a fish really save Jonah?

And right here you can see how Jonah could easily fit in a real fish's mouth.

What first got me thinking about Jonah was a friend of mine who was telling me about them reading the Bible and praying and how God used this story to speak to them directly and in a powerful way.

I know God's gonna speak to us each directly and in a powerful way through the story.

It starts in Jonah 1, verse 1.

Jonah 1:1

The Lord gave this message to Jonah, son of Amitai.

Well, Jonah lived about 700 years before Jesus was born, and he was very popular, you know, for a prophet.

Prophets weren't always the most popular people because they usually had bad news.

But Jonah was different.

He actually had good news, and then it happened just like he said it would.

It was in 2 Kings 14.

Jeroboam II recovered the territories of Israel between Lebo Hamath and the Dead Sea, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had promised through Jonah, son of Amitai, the prophet from Gathefer.

Now God had promised to rescue the people, and he gave that promise through this prophet Jonah.

Just as an aside, uh Jonah says is from Gathafer, that's only three miles from Nazareth, where Jesus was uh was raised.

So he's a popular dude, Jonah.

He's respected in the political world, he's respected in the religious uh world, but God's about to interrupt his uh life with a plan that could transform him from the inside out.

I think if we can experience this story in a fresh way, you know, as if we had never heard it before, like we're hearing it for the for the first time.

I think we'll see something about Jesus in the story of Jonah.

I think we'll see something amazing about God, and I also think we'll see something challenging about ourselves.

We'll also see one surprise after another.

The first surprise comes right out of the gate.

It's verse two.

Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh.

See that one sentence of direction from God had to be the biggest shock of Jonah's life.

Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh.

Nineveh is the largest city, the capital city of Israel's sworn enemy, Assyria.

It's on the west bank of the Tigris River.

Today it is the city we call Mosul.

It's in northern Iraq.

You might have heard of it because it's uh kind of a hotbed of uh of our troops in the fighting in Iraq.

Uh Saddam Hussein's two most prominent sons were killed in a firefight in Mosul.

Now, in sharp contrast to that, Mosul most of the time has been famous for its natural beauty.

It's called the uh Pearl of the North.

Mosul is on the east bank, most of it on the east bank, but it spread over to the west bank of the Tigris River.

But the Assyrians that live there today, to this day, they call the city Nineveh.

Now in Jonah's day, Nineveh was not just known for its beauty.

It was known for its wealth and its immoral way of living and its hatred of Israel.

Nineveh was Israel's bitter enemy.

Easily, easily the largest long-term threat to Israel.

And so if you think of the hostility today between the Jewish people in the Middle East and the Muslim world and Iran and Iraq, you might have a sense of how Jonah would have felt about Nineveh.

So Jonah hears God's voice and he tells him to get up and go to Nineveh.

Now we don't know if Jonah was angry or if he was resentful or maybe even frustrated or scared, but we know what he did.

He got up and went in the opposite direction.

It's verse 3.

But Jonah got up and went in the opposite direction to get away from the Lord.

He went down to the port of Joppa, where he found a ship leaving for Tarshus.

He bought a ticket and went on board, hoping to escape from the Lord by selling to Tarshus.

So Jonah heads to Joppa.

Joppa today is a city that we call Tel Aviv.

It's a port city, and that's where he heads.

Well, we just started reading the short book, and already I can relate to Jonah.

God says, I need you to do this, and Jonah doesn't want to, so he goes in the opposite direction.

Maybe you can relate to.

There's many things that God has nudged or told me to do that I just didn't want to do.

Maybe I was selfish or stubborn, but I just had my own life planned out.

See, Jonah is not running from Nineveh, he is running from God.

And he does it deliberately, he does it purposefully.

He went to Joppa, he found a ship, he bought a ticket, he got on board, hoping to escape by selling to Tarshus.

Tarshus was a seaport that was just about as far as you possibly could get from Nineveh.

It's not where he was going, it was that he was going, that he was literally running from God.

Like I said, I've done that a lot of times myself.

You know, the first time that God ever really impressed upon me, I might say convicted me, that I should give back a percentage of what he gave to me, I stiff armed him for about six months.

But eventually went his way, and it really changed Susan and I's whole lives.

I remember when God convicted me that uh that I shouldn't drink.

Not that everyone else shouldn't drink, that's between you and God, but that I shouldn't have drink.

And uh I knew he was right, but it took me about two years to get on his path.

Starting his hands, you know.

It took me a while to surrender to the idea, but now I'm glad we did.

But those are just a few times, and probably not the most blatant or embarrassing.

Um I'm sure I can think of a lot of times where God instructed me to go somewhere.

But I didn't want to, so I went in the opposite direction, purposefully.

Then I would wonder why I kept ending up in the same place.

You know, why I can it uh break out of whatever I was stuck in.

It's because God asked me to go to Nineveh and I was catching the first boat to Tarshus.

And maybe you've done that before too.

Maybe you are on the boat to Tarsus right now.

You know something God wants you to do, but you're heading in the opposite direction.

Thankfully, God loves us enough to pursue us.

To pursue us.

He pursued Jonah.

In verse 4, it says, But the Lord hurled a powerful wind over the sea, causing a violent storm that threatened to break the ship apart.

Fearing for the lives, the desperate sailors shouted to their gods for help and threw the cargo overboard to lighten the ship.

But all this time Jonah was sound asleep down in the hold.

That reminds us a little bit of Jesus, doesn't it?

Remember that big storm that's going on, and he's down in the hold sleeping, and the disciples come down, they wake him up, and he's like, Don't you care?

Don't you care?

And uh he cared.

He just wasn't worried about it.

He had peace and he had faith, and so he calmed us a storm.

Jonah's a little different.

Jonah's sleeping because he's exhausted.

He's exhausted from running from God.

And so everybody's doing all that they can to save this ship, except Jonah.

And the captain is ticked.

So in verse 6, so the captain went down after him.

How can you sleep at a time like this?

He shouted.

Then the crew cast lots to see which of them had offended the gods and caused a terrible storm.

Okay, casting lots was a little bit like drawing straws.

You know, and the the crew would have done it to their pagan gods and Jonah to God, trying to understand what's going on, trying to identify the problem.

When they did this, the lots identified Jonah as the culprit.

Why has this awful storm came down on us?

They demanded.

Who are you?

What is your line of work?

What country are you from?

What is your nationality?

Jonah answered, I am Hebrew, and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.

The sailors were terrified when they heard this, for he had already told them he was running away from the Lord.

Oh, why did you do it?

They groaned.

And since the storm was getting worse all the time, they asked him, What should we do to you to stop the storm?

Throw me into the sea, Jonah said, and it will become calm again.

I know that this terrible storm is all my fault.

Well, that's a little bit heroic of Jonah.

I mean, not totally, because Jonah had to figure that he was going to drown either way.

Either he was going to stay on the ship and it was going to break up and capsize, and he was going to drown with everyone, or he's going overboard and drowned by himself.

Instead, the sailors rowed even harder to get the ship to land, but the stormy sea was too violent for them and they couldn't make it.

Okay, so there's a problem.

And the problem is the crew on the ship cares too much about Jonah.

They don't want to toss him overboard.

And so they row as hard as they can, and they row and they row.

But it just doesn't help.

Finally, there's nothing to do but trust God with Jonah and the sea.

Now, this might be the part of the story that God wants to show some of us this morning.

Rolling as hard as we can to save someone we love and getting in the way of what God is wanting to do.

You know, it's a tough situation, that situation.

You know, and there's not a formula for the for the answer.

We love each other and we should help each other.

But there are times and situations where God is trying to get you to stop rowing so he can rescue the person you care about.

David wrote in one of his Psalms, he said, The Lord alone is my salvation.

We are not the Savior.

We can only point each other to the Savior.

So if your loved one is like Jonah, or someone you care about is like Jonah, you know, resisting God, determined to do it their way, to go their way, how can you save them?

You can't.

We can pray and we can trust Jesus to save.

And so that's what the crew ended up doing.

They prayed.

Then they cried out to the Lord, Jonah's God.

Oh Lord, they pleaded, don't make us die for this man's sin, and don't hold us responsible for his death.

Oh Lord, you have sent the storm upon him for your own good reasons.

Sometimes the only way we can help someone is to let them go and trust God to save them.

We've probably all experienced that.

I've done that before.

And what comes to mind, I guess, because it's the simplest, is financial situations.

You know, where someone's in a real bind and then you help them out.

And sometimes God wants us to, and that's why we need the Holy Spirit to show us what to do and what not to do.

But so many times that we've done that, I look back and I'm like, man, I just postponed what God was doing.

I just got in the way of what He was doing.

And that's the way it is.

Sometimes we've just got to let God be God and ask the Holy Spirit to show us.

I'll say that in that situation, you should move on without guilt or fear.

You can trust God.

Then at verse 15.

Then the sailors picked Jonah up and threw him into the raging sea.

And the storm stopped at once.

The sailors were awestruck by the Lord's great power.

And they offered him a sacrifice and vowed to serve him.

See, there's a group of people already saved.

It's not even the Ninevites, it's the crew on the ship.

They had witnessed God's awesome power.

And they turned to him.

Well, that's kind of an introduction, and that's where we're going to leave Jonah for now.

All alone in the sea, yelling, Wilson.

It's actually a different story.

But he is all alone and in the sea.

And next Sunday we'll see if God can save Jonah too.

And next Sunday we'll see something pretty amazing about God.

And so if the worship team wants to come up, we'll finish singing a song together in a minute.

The thing is that God is not punishing Jonah.

This storm, God is not punishing Jonah.

He is pursuing Jonah.

And we're all in process like Jonah.

And I bet he is pursuing all of us in some way on some thing.

Not long ago, we looked at the 23rd Psalm.

He said, Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life.

God was pursuing Jonah because he loved him.

He loved him way too much just to let him go.

He loves us way too much to let us go.

And so if you've been running from God, I mean he is running to you.

And we can turn to him in our own words, in our own way.

God, I need you.

God help me.

God save me.

I'm tired of running.

It might be the first time.

It might be the hundredth time.

Either way, he's there.

He's there.

Next week we'll see Jonah in that situation.

How he cried out.

He says, I cried out to the Lord in my great trouble.

And he answered me.

He answers us too.

So let's stand and we'll pray and get ready to sing one more song together.

So, Father, we praise you.

We thank you for being such a great God.

We thank you for creating Jonah and preserving the story of him.

For how you're going to show us through through this story something about Jesus and your great love for us and your great love for people.

God, help us to stop running.

Help us to stop running, to trust your way and your direction to turn to you.

We praise you, we thank you, we love you.

And it's in Jesus' great name we pray.

Amen.