Outside the Whale
Jonah 3:1 - 4:4; 4:5-10
3 The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2 “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. 4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 5 And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. 6 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7 Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8 Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. 9 Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.” 10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it. 4 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3 And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
5 Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. 6 The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. 7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” 9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” 10 Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
Matthew 12:39-41
39 But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. 41 The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here!
in Luke 7
41 “A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?” 43 Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” 44 Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. 46 You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. 47 Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”
Outside the Whale
Dan Keoppel
May 1, 2022
Please pray with me:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable unto you Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
This past week I was at a retreat with Evangelical Christians and every morning we would have 2 or 3 pastors give an hour long sermon each. It really fired me up! I’m going to take a lesson from them. I hope none of you made plans for lunch, we’re going to be here a while. Just kidding.
I do hope you noticed something missing from this passage of Jonah. That’s right I left out the most well-known part of Jonah. For 2000 years, it was the best fish tale ever until 1850 when Hermann Melville wrote a story about a whale. Everyone knows the prophet Jonah was swallowed by a whale – making him one of the best-known prophets. But that’s almost a child’s understanding of Jonah and if we had a children’s time this morning, I would have introduced them to it. But in our passage today you can hear how he was really flawed in his spiritual development.
Let’s cover some background first. Nineveh was the capitol of Assyria. It lies within the city of Mosul in the North of modern-day Iraq. Mosul, as you might remember, was the US’s northern base of operations during the occupation of Iraq. In the ancient world, Assyria was taking over all the middle east and were a threat to all the nations around them. The Assyrians were brutal and violent. The Israelites hated the Assyrians, felt threatened by them. And viewed them as godless dogs unworthy of any good.
Jonah was so determined to not go to Nineveh, that he boarded a ship to head west in the Mediterranean. Assyria (and Iraq) are east of Israel and Nineveh is far up the Tigris river. After Jonah got spit back out of the whale, he had plenty of time to consider the mission he was on for God. This wasn’t a couple of days walk. (It takes 3 days just to walk from one end of Nineveh to the other). This took weeks.
The other big surprise here is that God is sending a prophet, not to Judah or Israel, not to the Hebrew people. This book works up to a final statement about God’s heart. You could say the book climaxes with a conclusion. And this conclusion is found in the very last sentence of the book.
11 And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left…?
God is asking Jonah a rhetorical question. The point is clear:
• God has a heart for those who have never heard!
• God is pursuing those who have never heard!
• God has a plan to reach those who have never heard!
• God wants ALL people to have an opportunity to hear and respond!
Most of you know that I left my job at the Presbyterian Church in Morristown where I had been working for 4 years. I joined a Mission organization based in New York called the International Project. IP exists to initiate church-planting movements through unreached people groups living outside their homeland. What does that mean? For evangelization purposes, a people group is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering significant barriers of understanding or acceptance. They’re contained by ethnicity, language and culture. Unreached people groups have few, if any, indigenous believers, missionaries, Bibles, Christian resources, or churches within their area. There are over 17,000 people groups in the world, some 40% of them, about 7,400 are unreached. These are typically Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindis. Most of them come from an area we call the 10/40 Window. A rectangle on North Africa, the Middle East and Asia between 10 degrees north and 40 degrees north latitude. So this isn’t your neighbor who doesn’t believe. These are people who have virtually no access to or presence of the Gospel.
At IP we believe that God is divinely orchestrating a great diaspora, a wave of immigration; people leaving their homeland and heading to other nations. Outside of their homelands these people are open to hearing about the gospel. So instead of sending a missionary to a place where they’re an outsider, we send missionaries to cities where these immigrants cluster. NYC is the most diverse city in the world. There are 2 million people here from 52 different unreached people groups living in NY. We send missionaries to spread the gospel to these groups in NY and Dallas and in Rome. We also train missionaries in evangelization: spreading the gospel and discipling individuals to Christ. Individuals and other organizations send us people to learn how to become missionaries. It makes a lot of sense to hone these skills in NY before going overseas.
I am not a missionary. I help run all the back-office programs that support the field teams. Managing their support donations, taking care of payroll, insurance, running the website, looking for grant money that sort of thing. I offload that work from the missionaries so they can spend more time at spreading the gospel. As you can imagine, the missionaries are passionate about serving Christ. They’ve committed themselves and in many cases their families to serve Christ in the Great Commission. They have to raise support from many individuals to help fund their mission. I am not hear to ask for money for them, but I want to share with you how moved I am by their commitment.
Well Jonah wouldn’t be too happy about our mission. As I said earlier, the Book of Jonah is about people having an opportunity to HEAR and respond. It is about God challenging HEARTS! But Jonah didn’t care if they even heard ONCE! Why? What happened to Jonah? He’s a prophet for God. Why didn’t Jonah get it? Jonah knew about God but He wasn’t walking with God.
In 4:2 he says I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from sending disaster.
Jonah intellectually understood the theology of God but he didn’t have God’s heart (didn’t share God’s values).
• He understood God’s character but it didn’t change his character.
• His Faith or Religion became a cultural thing; it became an intellectual experience.
It is very possible to go to church, do Christian activities, even think you are serving God but not be walking with God, not abiding with God.
Spiritual maturity is not the accumulation of doctrine, No, it is the consistent application of doctrine.
• It is when God’s desires become our desires and when God’s heart shapes our hearts.
• It’s when the things God values become the things we value in a way that changes how and what we choose.
• We begin to prioritize things based on how God prioritizes things
Jonah knew about Grace but he was living under law. Chapter 4:1 "But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry".
If they want to follow false gods, then they can suffer the consequences. Jonah’s experience of God’s grace was mixed with Law.
After God rescues Jonah from death inside the fish, Jonah praises Him for his Grace (Ch2), and yet now Jonah is angry that God’s Grace is given to others who Jonah does not think are worthy. Basically Jonah does not understand Grace! Jonah still feels like grace should come to those who are worthy.
• The more you experience Grace the more you worship.
• The more you experience Grace the more you pray.
• The more you experience Grace the more you give.
• The more you experience Grace the more you want others to experience Grace.
That’s where our parable from Luke comes in. Jesus says in v42 "Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”
The more you experience grace the more we will want to give this grace to those who have never had it. But our passion to love and pray and give and go to those who have never heard becomes absent if we don’t experience and live continually amazed at God’s grace. Jonah knew about God’s vision to reach those who have never heard but he was too consumed with his own personal world to care.
4:9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.” But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight."
These ungodly, violent, uncivilized dogs are ruining MY world…my sense of security, my comfort. Jonah was more concerned about his own personal comfort than God’s Kingdom.
Unfortunately, I think the pandemic helped reinforce bad habits. Maybe read the bible, occasionally watch or attend worship, pray now and then. And in the teeth of that storm, it was ok to pull back. But we’re out of that time now and we must put faith back in action. I don’t care if you are here or online, a member, or a deacon, or an elder, or a member of the choir, or the pastor, or even a guest preacher. The time has come to do more than the minimum.
So, what might that look like? Loaves & Fishes is a great mission serving the community, and I know it has some limitations on proselytizing, but I don’t think those should limit our ability to demonstrate our faith to anyone who enters. It’s not just our logistical wizardry that provides, it is God that is providing. Offer to pray over anyone that enters. Take a prayer concern and bring it back with you on Sunday. Or Deacons when you drop off flowers or do a visit, do you pray with or over that family? I tell you this, they will welcome those personal prayers more than any flowers.
We aren’t all gifted to be missionaries, though if you’re interested, I know a place you can get some training. But we are all compelled to share the Good News. That’s not just in here, its out there. May it be so.