“Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their evil has come up before Me.’ But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD. But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, ‘What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.’” Jonah 1:1–6
1. Are you running from the Lord and what He wants?
To open the book of Jonah is to ask this one single question, “Am I running from God and what He wants?” Every person should ask this question. It easily happens in many ways and areas of life! It might be that God has told you to do something and you are not doing it, or it might be that God has told you to stop doing something, but you continue to do it. In these ways, we are like Jonah. We know what God wants, but we run from it. In reality, we are not just running from what God told us to do; we are running from Him.
2. What is something that God has told you to do that you are not doing.
Jonah was a prophet. His job (as was the job of all prophets) was to take what God told him and tell it to whomever God wanted to hear it. It was his calling, his purpose, his function in this world. But when God tells him to go to the city of Nineveh to preach repentance, he runs in the exact opposite direction. Nineveh is five hundred miles northeast of Jerusalem (Jonah’s home was in Galilee near Jerusalem). Instead of going east, Jonah turns and heads two thousand miles to the west! It’s safe to say that he went as far as possible from where God told him to go. He not only went far, he went down. God intended for Jonah to travel by land, but he ended up in the depths of the sea, in the belly of a fish. The most well-known part of Jonah’s story is a tragic and enduring picture of where running from God takes us, away and down! This is always where rebellion to God leads: away from all that God wants and so far down into the depths of sin and rebellion.
3. What do you think was going on in Jonah’s heart and mind towards God, that led to this decision?
The book of Jonah alludes to why he ran. The people of Nineveh were Assyrians. The Assyrians were renowned for their evil and cruelty towards the nations around them. They were known not only for strength in war, but also for terrible and frightening practices. Think something like what ISIS did in the Middle East. The Assyrians were known for flaying the skin off of their victims while they were alive, mass beheadings, and long, chain-gang style marches where the chain was connected to a hook that went through the mouth and out the eye of those in the line. Fear gripped the surrounding communities as hundreds of people were paraded in this way as an example of Assyria’s might. Jonah knew of their cruelty and wanted God to destroy them, not forgive and redeem them.
4. Have you ever been reluctant to help someone that you knew did not deserve it?
I am always amazed at the length that we will go to, as people, to rebel against God. I have seen husbands and wives sacrifice their entire families for a moment with someone else. I have seen addicts give up every good thing in their lives for “just one more time” with the thing they love. I have seen teens run from the safety of their homes into the chaos of this world to follow an infatuation. On and on we could go. It seems that rebellion to God has no limits! Jonah’s story is an ancient example of just how far going our own way takes us. It’s always away and down!
5. Would you be willing to share what it was like in your life at a time you were in rebellion to God?
One detail that is often missed in this story is that Jonah goes into the bottom parts of the boat (down) and falls asleep. This tells us three things:
A. Running from God is exhausting. It really is. To run our own way is to run against the strongest headwind. “Good sense wins favor, but the way of the treacherous is their ruin” (Proverbs 13:15). Rebellion to God will wear you out. It’s exhausting and Jonah unknowingly shows us this.
B. Running from God makes us inactive. Again, Jonah’s story teaches this. Here he is, in a boat, going nowhere, doing nothing. He’s not sharing with the people on the boat. He’s not doing what God has called him to do. He is alone in the bottom of a boat, doing nothing useful, completely inactive, entirely ineffective; this is one of the most tragic aspects of rebellion to God—so much lost and wasted time. Years go by like minutes on a clock in rebellion to God, so much idle time, so many wasted days.
C. It actually cost him to get on that boat. Verse 3 says that “he paid the fare,” and this tells us that there is always a cost to going our own way. It’s not cheap. I’ve heard it said that sin often costs us “more than we ever wanted to spend, keeps us longer than we ever wanted to stay, and takes us further away than we ever wanted to go.” As a pastor I often see the cost of people’s rebellion to God. One of the hardest parts of pastoring is seeing others realize the cost of going their own way. Sometimes that cost is the end of a marriage, sometimes it’s the rebellion of kids, sometimes the cost is physical, and sometimes it’s the loss of all the real things in life. The cost of rebellion always scares me. I have stood before too many people that have wept saying, “I didn’t know it would cost this much.” This cost should scare us.
6. How do we get out of this, if we are in this place?
7. Has the Lord told you, moved you, brought people to you telling you what He wants you to do, but you have tried to avoid it? Are you running?
Learn from the sad life of Jonah—it never goes well! If you are, I would ask: How far away will you get? How far down have you gone? What has it already cost? Aren’t you tired? Repentance is always the answer to rebellion to God. Surrender is always the next step. Come to God in repentance and then give in to Him and His will.