Sermons
Jonah Suffers A Relapse
Series: Man Overboard: Jonah In JeopardyJONAH SUFFERS A RELAPSE
Pt#10 / Man Overboard: Jonah In Jeopardy
Sermon Outline By Terry Siverd
Cortland Church of Christ / April 10, 2016
Jeannie will tell you - - I’m a sucker for stories with happy endings.
Quite often my eager optimism blinds me to reality - - such is the case with the book of Jonah.
Why couldn’t the book have just ended with the close of chapter three? Then we could all go home happy.
The prophecy of Jonah is a brief treatise but it speaks so powerfully about real life.
The book opens with God’s call to Jonah to go on an evangelistic mission to Nineveh.
One might expect that the prophet Jonah would be rarin’ to go, champing/chomping at the bit.
But just three verses into the text we discover that Jonah has issues.
He doesn’t want to preach to the Ninevites because they are bad people - - very, very bad.
So Jonah goes on the lam - - he runs from God. He hightails it for Joppa and charters a seat
on a ship headed for Tarshish (in southern Spain) - - the western extremity of the world of his day.
But God refuses to sit idly by while Jonah ruins his life because of a deep hatred for the Assyrians.
So God intervenes and helps Jonah to re-think his decision to run away.
After being thrown overboard in the midst of raging sea storm (which was sent by God / Jonah 1:4),
Jonah does a personal “gut check” - - in all places, in the gut of a sea monster (also sent by God / Jonah 1:17).
Over the course of three days and three nights Jonah prays (Jonah 2:1). God hears his prayer and God saves
Jonah from a certain death. Upon God’s directive, the whale vomits him up on to dry land (Jonah 2:10).
By the grace of God, Jonah is given a fresh start, a new beginning - - a second call (Jonah 3:1-2).
Jonah makes haste to shake the scum off, and takes his bald and bleached body to the capital of Assyria.
There he begins preaching a very sober warning: yet forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed (Jonah 3:4).
Surprisingly, the people of Nineveh are posed to listen.
They have been shaken to the core by a series of events: a serious plague (765BC) …
a total solar eclipse (763BC) … a second plague (757BC) … and an earthquake (755BC).
They are looking heavenward, wondering why their gods appear to be enraged against them.
And suddenly Jonah appears out of nowhere proclaiming a warning from Jehovah God (Jonah 3:4).
These signs and wonders combined with the spoken word of God thru Jonah the prophet, bring repentance.
Wearing sackcloths and sitting in ashes (Jonah 3:5-6), the people of Nineveh, from the greatest the least of them,
believed in God (Jonah 3:5) … prayed to God (Jonah 3:8a) … and turned from their wicked way (Jonah 3:8b).
Jonah 3:10 closes with these words:
When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented
concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And he did not do it.
Now wouldn’t this be a nice stopping point to an amazing story? “All’s well that ends well!”
As we discover throughout the pages of Scripture, God doesn’t permit the history of mankind to be whitewashed.
The Bible dispenses truth and sometimes the truth can be very painful. Such is the case with chapter four.
Whereas the people of Nineveh seem to have gotten their act together, God is not done with Jonah.
And the reason God is not done with Jonah is because Jonah still has some deep-seated “issues”.
Let’s now read the opening verses of chapter four.
As a sidenote: chapter four may be the strangest (and most puzzling) ending to any book in the Bible,
but in it’s oddity it vouches for the credibility and veracity (truthfulness) of Scripture.
What prophet in his right mind would want the world to read of his own personal and tragic RELAPSE?
Jonah’s not INSANE, but his a man who is IN SIN. And so, with God’s guidance, he tells the rest of the story.
We’ll have a bit more to say about this later.
Jonah 4:1-4
But it greatly displeased Jonah, and he became angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said,
‘Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore,
in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that Thou art a gracious and compassionate
God, slow to anger and abundant In lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.
Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better for me than life.’
Any the Lord said, ‘Do you have good reason to be angry?’.
THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS WRONG HERE - - NOT WRONG WITH THE TEXT, BUT WRONG WITH JONAH.
First of all, Jonah is displeased. Why is he not rejoicing - - that the Ninevites repented and that God relented?
He is not only displeased, He is angry with God (in a huff with God). As one writer has put it, Jonah is “sinfully mad”.
Secondly, Jonah’s arrogance is quite astounding.
He couches his “rebuke” to God with words of reverence - - “please Lord”.
Nevertheless he proceeds to tell Almighty God that he knew better than HIM.
Didn’t I tell YOU this while I was back home in Gath-hepher, when You first gave me this assignment?
In essence Jonah is telling GOD - - I knew better than You.
Perhaps to avoid getting struck by a lightning bolt, Jonah dresses up his rebuke of God
by calling attention to God’s grace & compassion and His patience & lovingkindness.
Yet, no matter how we slice it, Jonah arrogance is disturbing.
WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS TO TALK TO JEHOVAH GOD LIKE THIS?
(Sad to say, you and I often display a similar arrogance when things don’t go the way we think they should).
Thirdly, Jonah wants to die: please Lord, take my life for me, for death is better for me than life.
Here, too, many of us have replicated this disposition and attitude on occasions in our own lives.
We’re displeased & angry with the way God has allowed things to happen and we’d rather die than live another day.
Jonah’s state of mind in this instance reminds us of the prophet Elijah.
Like Jonah, Elijah, in a showdown on Mount Carmel (1Kgs.18),
had witnessed a great victory over the wicked prophets of Baal yet he runs from Jezebel.
1Kgs.19:3-4 states, he was afraid and arose and ran for his life ... he went a day’s
journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree;
and he requested for himself that he might die, and said, ‘O Lord, take my life…”
At this juncture, we find ourselves asking, “WHAT’S WRONG WITH JONAH?”
Is he suffering from some form of depression? Is he manic? Not a maniac, but a manic depressive – bipolar.
What has brought on such a relapse? What is Jonah’s problem?
Paul once asked the Galatians (Gal.5:6), you were running well; who hindered you?
It’s only fair to acknowledge that Jonah has been through quite an ordeal.
It’s also important to erase any doubt as to Jonah’s sincerity in proclaiming God’s word of warning.
It’s highly unlikely that the Ninevites would have responded as they did had Jonah not been authentic.
Additionally, we must applaud Jonah for praying - - not only in the belly of the whale (Jonah 2:1),
but also here in the midst of such a sudden and shocking turn of events (Jonah 4:2).
His prayers may have been misdirected and misspoken, but at least he prayed.
So, we have to persist in asking, “WHAT’S EATING JONAH?”
The only logical answer is that Jonah has suffered a RELAPSE.
He has fallen back into His own selfish self.
Jonah is in a state of mind which Sinclair Ferguson calls, “spiritual infantile regression” (Man Overboard, pg.79).
He is a prophet of God, but he is also a sinful human being. Prophets were not immune to sin.
James reminds us that Elijah was “a man of like passions” - - Elijah was a man with a nature like ours (Js.5:17).
Geographically, Jonah was outside of Nineveh (Jonah 4:5);
Chronologically, he was in the midst of a great revival - - a city overflowing with repentance.
But spiritually, Jonah was almost back to square one again.
To get a firmer grasp of Jonah’s condition, let me share the words of Theo Laetsch.
…The Jews were always in danger of forgetting that it was part of their mission to be a light unto the Gentiles.
Too readily they were satisfied with possessing the Gospel for themselves; finally they became bigoted nationalists,
opinionated separatists, repelling the surrounding nations rather than attracting them and winning them for Jehovah.
In this particular respect Jonah was thoroughly a Jew. They very idea that the Gentile nations,
particularly wicked Nineveh, were to participate in the saving grace of God was repugnant to him...
Jonah was merely the representative of Jewish particularism.
(Theodore Laetsch, The Minor Prophets, pg. 239)
This bigoted way of thinking continued to haunt the nation of Israel all the way through their latter days.
I have alluded to Luke 15:11ff in previous lessons in this series.
In case you missed it, this very same point - - Jonah’s hang-up about God’s saving grace being given to
“unworthy ones” (the Gentiles) is at the very heart of the story of the story of the prodigal son told by Jesus.
The elder son represents established Judaism - - members of the commonwealth of Israel.
The younger son (the profligate one) represents the Johnny-come-lately Gentiles.
Seven hundred plus years later, Jesus essentially re-tells the story of Jonah, but presents it in a new wrapping.
As we see in Lk.15:25f the elder brother (I wonder if his name was Jonah) is still resting on his own “roots”
and arguing with God about His dispensing of grace to ones living in a far country doing reprehensible things.
God is not done with Jonah. Our text for today ends with vs.4:
And the Lord said, ‘Do you have good reason to be angry.’
As we will see next week,
God is going to undress Jonah in a manner similar to a mother or a father who scolds and lectures a petulant child.
Jonah may have suffered a relapse, but the grace of God is beyond comprehension.
