This is the first week of a series on Jonah.  Over the next four weeks we’re going to look at his story and see that God gives second chances.

You pretty much know the story of Jonah.  A lot of people do, the story of a guy who doesn’t do what God wants him to do.  God puts him in the belly of a big whale.  He lights a candle.  The whale throws him up on shore, and he gets to be a real boy for the rest of his life.  Okay, now that’s Pinocchio.  It’s kind of muddled up.

Lots of people consider this story to be a myth for a variety of reasons e.g. the whole big fish thing, or a whole city repenting. I happen to believe it is a true story: partly because the language is similar to other biblical history books; I believe God could make it happen; but mainly because Jesus said it was true.

The story starts with God speaking to Jonah and Jonah doing what most of us would do, he ran away.  To begin to understand why, we need to look at some words from the story.  Jonah is now known by many people as the reluctant prophet.  We know from the Bible God had spoken through him before and that he had been obedient to God, however, this time he was disobedient.  His name actually means Dove or peaceful one.

Amittai, this was his father, and his name means truth.  Therefore, Jonah was the son of truth – a great name for a prophet.

Nineveh, the city he was commanded to go to, was the capital of Assyria, the most feared and hated empire of the time.

In the Bible, Nineveh is first mentioned in Genesis 10:11

Nineveh was the home of King Sennacherib, King of Assyria, during the Biblical reign of King Hezekiah and the prophetic career of Isaiah.

The book of the prophet Nahum is almost exclusively taken up with prophetic messages against this city. Its ruin and utter desolation are foretold .  Zephaniah also (2:13–15) predicts its destruction along with the fall of the empire of which it was the capital.

So, our story starts with, “the word of the Lord came to Jonah”.  I believe that God wants to speak to you today.  God loves to speak.  He created with the spoken word. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

God is a speaking God.  God created Adam and Eve because He wanted to love and to be loved.  He wanted to speak.  He spoke with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day in the garden.  He is a speaking God.  Throughout history, God speaks in different ways.  God has often spoken with the audible voice.  God has often spoken through His prophets.  God has spoken through circumstances.  God has spoken through the voice of His Holy Spirit.  If you’ve never, ever heard the voice of God, you can today, if you simply listen for him to speak through his Word, the bible.  It’s described, self described, as living and active.  It’s sharper than any two-edged sword.  This is His Word that pierces.  It is truth that is living.  It will transform.  The Word of the Lord will come to you, and God will speak to some of you a very specific Word.  His Word will be to change something, to move in a new direction, to be obedient to what He says to you, and you will have a choice.  You can do what God wants you to do, and that is to be obedient to His Word, or you can do what Jonah did and say, “I don’t want to be obedient to You.”

The fact that God speaks is good news, however, when he does speak, it is often to ask us to do something that we don’t want to do.  Sometimes it’s because we think we know better; sometimes we only see the short term while God is looking at what is best in the long term.

God tells Jonah to go and preach in Nineveh because it was a place of total wickedness.  So why doesn’t Jonah want to go?  Well, when you understand the history of Nineveh, and the Assyrian empire, you understand a little more why he hated them.  The Assyrian empire, of which Nineveh was the capital city, was famous for its brutality to anyone they captured.  They would actually bury captives in the desert sand up to their necks.  Then, they would take their tongues and they would pull their tongues out, and they would drive a stake through their tongue so they would go crazy as they were dying of thirst in the middle of the desert.  Then once they were dead, they would behead them, and they would take the heads of all of the prisoners of war, and they would make a pyramid of heads outside their city to say to the rest of the world, “This is a city that we conquered.”  They were so feared that, when it was rumoured that the Assyrians were going to be attacking, sometimes a whole town of people would just commit suicide, because they would rather die that way than experience what was coming.  That’s how feared the Assyrian empire was, and they were hated.

Jonah heated the Assyrians and in his mind, he had legitimate reasons why he didn’t want to obey God.  Maybe you can relate.

Some of you will hear clearly from God, “This is what I want you to do”, and you think, “I understand that, but I don’t want to!”  Maybe someone has hurt you and God wants you to forgive them, but you feel they don’t deserve it.  Maybe you have heard or read about tithing, giving 10% of your income as an act of worship, but you don’t want to because, although obedience comes with the promise of blessing,  it doesn’t seem to make sense.  Maybe God has told you who you should invite next week, but you’re embarrassed to ask.  Maybe you thought, “I’ll get to it later.”  But, delayed obedience is really disobedience. 

Aaron McManus, an author and pastor from California, says the mark of maturity is what he calls lag time.  You can tell how spiritually mature person is by the distance between the command of God and their obedience.  A more spiritually mature person has learned to be obedient more quickly, regardless of how stupid, embarrassing, scary or strange the command is.

The second thing is, whenever God speaks, you can always find a boat sailing in the wrong direction.  For Jonah, he decided to go to Tarshish and low and behold, when he got to the port of Joppa, there was a ship waiting to go to Tarshish.  Tarshish was 2 ½ thousand miles away in the wrong direction.  And yet, just at that moment, there was a boat heading there.  That’s a lot of running away!  And maybe you are trying to run today.  Maybe not so much running as drifting.

If you’ve ever been at the beach with children and a little boat or a lilo you’ll know that it happens very easily.  One minute they’re right in front of you, and the next time you look they’re half a mile away down the beach.  Somewhere you may relate to that.  Because maybe months or even years ago, you were really close to God and God would prompt you to do something and you would do it.  His word was valuable to you and you read it every day.  You had divine appointments and conversations with people, and you knew that God was working in your life.  And then, without really being aware, you stopped reading and praying, stopped seeing so much of the God activities in your life, and now you realise that you’ve drifted.

So, the word of the Lord will come, but it may not be what you want to hear.  When you run, you can always find a boat sailing in the wrong direction.  Thirdly, God may send a storm to grab your attention.  When Jonah was on the run the Bible says the Lord sent a great storm.  In order to undertake the journey from Joppa to Tarshish, this must have been fairly large, well-built ship.  But the storm was so bad that the ship was at risk.  The sailors began to ask whose fault the storm was and they decided it was Jonah’s fault.  And so they ask, “Who are you, and what did you do to bring this on?”  Verse 8 reveals the answer.  Jonah answered them and said, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.”  The sailors were terrified because they realised that Jonah was running from God.

But there’s the rub, Jonah’s words don’t match his actions.  He is not worshipping God, he’s running away from God.  He’s being disobedient.  Many of us do the same – we call ourselves followers of Christ, but we don’t live like it.  Just because you’re in church does not mean you worship God.  Worshipping God is not something you do for an hour a week.  It’s a lifestyle.

Jonah finally owns up to his responsibility.  He asks them to throw him overboard and they want to show him mercy, so they refuse.  They even threw the cargo overboard, but it didn’t help, and so eventually, they throw Jonah overboard.

And that’s when we see that Jonah’s worst nightmare was exactly what he needed.  When they threw him overboard, the storm stopped.  At this the sailors feared God and made promises to him.  As for Jonah, God provided a big fish and he ended up inside it for three days.  The Lord provided the fish.  What Jonah would see is the worst possible scenario, God provided.

Some of you right now may be facing what you would consider is your nightmare.  I mean, financially, you may be like, “I’m done.  It’s over.”  And God may say, “Okay, now do I have your attention?”  Some of you may be facing a relationship that you think it just couldn’t get any worse than this, and God may say, “Okay, do I have your attention?”  I’m not saying that everything bad that happens in your life is caused by God, but  there are times where God may cause, or God may allow, what we would consider is our worst nightmare so that He can fully get our attention.

The Word of the Lord will come to you, and you have a choice: obey or disobey.  When God speaks to you, you can always find a ship sailing the wrong direction.  If you do not obey, He may send a storm to grab your attention.  If that doesn’t get it, He may allow you to face your worst nightmare.  When He does, understand this.  It’s all because He loves you, because He has something for you to do, and He has a city or a group of people for you to impact.  You’ve got a choice.  You can run, or you can be obedient. You can’t do both.

In his grace and mercy there is always a second chance with God.  Jonah is about to find that out, but more of that next week.  For today, know that you can never have run so far that God doesn’t care about you.  It doesn’t matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done, he will always offer another chance for forgiveness and relationship with him.

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