Why Are You Running?

Brady Bassett

Jonah • Sermon • Submitted 9 months ago • Presented 9 months ago

Jonah 1:1–6

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Man has run from God all our lives. What do we hope to accomplish from that?

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I call your attention this evening to Jonah 1:1-6. I am very excited for this week and I cannot think of anywhere I would rather be than to be here with you all right now going through the book of Jonah. I love the book of Jonah. One of the first series that I did at my first church was the book of Jonah. 7 years ago I preached this as the very first book of the Bible that I would preach the entire way through so hopefully I’ve gotten better in that time. Many of you are likely familiar with the book of Jonah, especially if you grew up in the church so there will likely be a few things over these next few nights that you have heard before. I would say that most people when they think of the book of Jonah, they often think that it is a story about a fish. And that is somewhat true, this is a fish story. I believe that some of the greatest stories ever told happen to be fish stories: Moby Dick, Jaws, the Little Mermaid, Free Willy, Finding Nemo, people seem to be drawn to stories about fish and the sea. Why? Because the sea is mysterious. It’s unruly and can be chaotic as we will see in this book but Jonah is more than just a story about a fish. It’s more than just a story about the sea. It’s a story from history. It’s a story about repentance and second chances. It’s a story about a man that is more like us than we might think or readily admit. Yet perhaps most importantly, as is the whole Bible, as is all of history, this is God’s story. This is a story that we need to know because it is highly relevant to our day. Back in 1531, the great Reformer William Tyndale, the man we have to thank for the English translation of the Bible, translated the book of Jonah into English from the original Hebrew text for the very first time. The first book of the Old Testament that William Tyndale translated into English was this tiny little book of Jonah. Why start here? Why not one of the other 38 books? Because in the book of Jonah, Tyndale saw a message that the nations needed to hear and it was the very message that Jonah was to give to the people of Nineveh: Repent! That word was needed in the time of Jonah, that word was needed at the time Christ walked the Earth, that word was needed in England in 1531, the word that was needed from Genesis 3 onwards, and that word is needed in the United States today. “Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Yet 40 days and London shall be overthrown! Yet 40 days and America shall be overthrown!” We need this message because God can change the fate of a nation at a drop of a dime and if we look at the trajectory of this country, a trajectory that grows more ungodly by the day, surely our time is running out! Surely we could be within the 40 days of our own upheaval! It was Ruth Graham, the wife of Billy Graham who said to her husband one day: "Billy, if God doesn't come soon and bring judgment upon the United States, He's going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah!" There is a word in here for our day. There is a word in this book for you and we are going to find what that word is together because by the time we reach Friday night, we will have read every single verse in this book. So, we have a lot to get through this week but we are going to start kind of small and just read Jonah 1:1-6

Jonah 1:1–6 ESV

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call 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.”

There’s 4 things that I want us to look at tonight in these verses: 1. God’s command. 2. Jonah’s Response. 3. God’s Actions. 4. The Sailor’s Words. What was God’s command to Jonah? Let’s focus on those first 2 verses.

God’s Command

In verse 1 we meet the only named individual in the entire book of Jonah. We see the Lord and we see Jonah the son of Amittai. Every person moving forward that we are introduced to is introduced not by their name but by their occupation. Tomorrow we will see the mariners and the captain. In a few days we will meet the King of Nineveh but that’s the only title given to him. No name is ever said and I think one of the reasons that only the Lord and Jonah are named in this book is to narrow the readers focus to those that are most important. This is God’s story and God’s story is seen first and foremost in the life of Jonah. It is through Jonah that we will first see God’s anger, God’s mercy, God’s love and forgiveness. We will see this in Jonah long before we see it in Nineveh. Yes, we see in verse 2 that Nineveh is an evil and wicked city but the first sin that we see in this book is Jonah’s. We’ll see that mercy and forgiveness and patience is brought forth in Jonah first before it hits the nation of Nineveh. I think one thing worth emphasizing in that is that God often works in individuals first before working in the nations. Big doors swing on small hinges. Changes are made to the one which resound to the many and as we go through this book, we will see the extremes of God’s actions and I say that in a very positive way. We will see God working forgiveness for Jonah, one that is a member of God’s chosen people and God working forgiveness for the outsider and this is the very same method that God will use now and during the time of Christ. God offers forgiveness to the Jew as well as the Gentile! We’ll come back to that later in the week. Let’s get back to what God tells Jonah to do. The Lord says to Jonah, “Arise. Get up. Move. Stand up.” Jonah is told that now is not the time to stay where he is at because the God of all Creation has commanded him to go. This word is likely not unheard of by Jonah because he is a prophet and this is not his first message as Jonah would be mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25 as a prophet that served the Lord during the reign of King Jeroboam II. The abnormality comes in what follows: “Go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” God says, “Jonah I want you to go to the capital city of Israel’s greatest foe, Assyria, and I want you to go and call them to repentance.” Now something that I need to stress is that Assyria was nowhere near as wicked and evil as you are probably imagining. In fact, they were much, much worse. Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, was one of the most bloody and ruthless cities in the entire world. One historian said that “Assyrian history was as gory and bloodcurdling a history as we know.” Tim Keller noted this about the nation of Assyria to give you a hint of what these people were like: “Assyria was one of the cruelest and most violent empires of ancient times. Assyrian kings often recorded the results of their military victories, gloating of whole plains littered with corpses and of cities burned completely to the ground. The emperor Shalmaneser III is well known for depicting torture, dismembering, and decapitations of enemies in grisly detail on large stone relief panels. After capturing enemies, the Assyrians would typically cut off their legs and one arm, leaving the other arm and hand so they could shake the victim’s hand in mockery as he was dying. They forced friends and family members to parade the decapitated heads of their loved ones elevated on poles. They pulled out prisoners’ tongues and stretched their bodies with ropes so they could be flayed alive and their skins displayed on city walls. They burned adolescents alive. Those who survived the destruction of their cities were fated to endure cruel and violent forms of slavery.” This is a wicked and incredibly violent people so it makes perfect sense that a holy, just, and righteous God would call out their sinfulness and because He is just, He allows a chance for repentance. But notice how Jonah responds.

Jonah’s Response

What does Jonah do? He runs away. He hears this command from the Lord and he runs to the city of Joppa with the intention of going to Tarshish. In Jonah’s mind, he is pretty much going to the furthest possible known point from the city of Nineveh. Tarshish was 2,500 miles away from Nineveh. Jonah was going to go across basically the entire Mediterranean Sea. He does the very thing that Adam and Eve did when they sinned, they fled and tried to hide from the presence of God but you can’t escape the presence of God! Jonah knew that but he still tried anyway! This is a good reminder that we all do irrational things when we’re terrified and we do irrational things when it comes to sin. Trying to hide from God is like playing hide and seek with a 2 year old. What does the 2 year old do? Benji would do this, he would lay face down on the ground because he thought if he couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see Him. Did I lose him as he did that? No because he is clearly there. This is what it is like when we try to run and hide from God. The author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 4:13 “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” God sees us at our best and He sees at our worst because there is no escaping God’s sight. We do irrational things when we sin because sin itself is totally irrational! We all have done what Jonah did. We have all fled from God’s sight. John Calvin said, “All flee away from the presence of God, who do not willingly obey His commandments; not that they can depart farther from Him, but they seek, as far as they can, to confine God within narrow limits, and to exempt themselves from being subject to His power.” Sinners flee from God and as we see from Jonah, even believers can sometimes run from God and I think that is largely because we are still fleshly people. We still do things that we shouldn’t do and we often find ourselves at war with ourselves over that reality. This is the very message from Paul in Romans 7! Romans 7:15 “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Then in Romans 7:18-20

Romans 7:18–20 (ESV)

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

Why do we run? When God knows what is best for us, why do we always seem to run? Because there is still that little part of us that still loves the old self. As Christians we are redeemed by Christ, we are His now, eternal life is secure for all true believers, but we are not glorified just yet. We are not yet perfected fully even if God does see in us the righteousness of Christ. There is still a war with sin that we wage and as we see in Jonah, it is not just the baby believers that struggle with this and unbelievers that struggle with this, we all struggle with this. Jonah is acting in a very human way. It would be like if you were told, “Go to Moscow, walk straight up to Vladimir Putin and say, ‘40 days and Moscow will be destroyed. 40 days and Russia will be overthrown’” would you do it? Would you balk at it? If God Himself said, go and do this thing that on the service seems totally irrational, would you do it? I think we are starting at one area of extremity so let’s bring it down to something simpler. If God were to command you to do anything would you do it? Or would you attach certain strings to it? God commands us to do several things that I believe are significantly easier to do than to walk to the most vicious and ruthless nation in the world and call them to repent. God commands us to love Him, He commands us to love our neighbor, He commands us to love our family, He commands us to share the Gospel, why don’t we do it? Because from the most extreme command to the simplest, our sins get in the way. As Christians, you go to war with your flesh every single day. From dusk to dawn, you are doing battle with the prince of Darkness. One other thing that I want to mention is this: Jonah arose when God told him to but he still didn’t do what he was commanded to do. You could argue that Jonah partially obeyed God but partial disobedience is really total disobedience. You cannot serve God partially. You can’t give in to some but hold onto the rest. You don’t get to pick and choose what commands of God you want to follow when Christ demands your whole, your life, your all. So, we see what Jonah does: he sins, he runs away, and he disobeys. What does God do? What are God’s actions?

God’s Actions

Look at Jonah 1:4 “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.” The Lord responds dramatically to Jonah’s disobedience. The storm is no coincidence. It is sent by God Himself because the very winds and waves are at the Lord’s command. The storm is so severe that the boat is on the verge of falling to pieces. Understand this, God always gets His man. Even if He uses unconventional means, He always accomplishes that which He desires to do and God uses the storms of our lives, actual and otherwise, to get our attention. There may be things going on in your life right now that on the surface seem out of control that may actually be God forcing you to look beyond what you are capable of controlling and looking to Him. God is able to use darkness, storms, trials, and suffering to accomplish exactly what He wishes. We see this clearly demonstrated in the death of Christ. As we go through this book, we will be reminded that Jesus is the greater Jonah! Where Jonah fails, Jesus stands above and beyond! Tim Keller wrote, “Jonah could not see that deep within the terror of the storm God’s mercy was at work, drawing him back to change his heart. Those who watched Jesus dying saw nothing but loss and tragedy. Yet at the heart of that darkness the divine mercy was powerfully at work, bringing about pardon and forgiveness for us. There’s mercy deep inside our storms.” God is at work in the storm but the people to first notice something is not Jonah, it is the unnamed sailors and ship captain.

The Sailor’s Words

Jonah 1:5-6 says: “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.”” With the few minutes that we have left, I want you to look at what the captain says to Jonah. He pretty much says to him, “Buddy wake up! Don’t you see what’s going on out here? How can you sleep in a time like this? You’re religious! Call out to your God and maybe he’ll help us out here.” There is such an irony in what he says. They have exhausted calling out to all their other gods, all the other gods they can think of until they get to Jonah. They think, “Well ours didn’t help, maybe his will!” Do you not see that this is the world we live in today! The world is desperate that we would call out to the Lord for it. The world is in a panic all the time and we would be foolish to not say anything! We need to pray to God on behalf of the people. Deep down, man longs for deliverance until they realize that Jesus is the way to get it! Every man is in the midst of a struggle, the world is caught up in the great storm of sin, but we hold the key to the answer! God is the answer and as God’s people, we need to wake up! Are you sleeping while the world descends to madness when you know the One that holds it all together? How can we keep it to ourselves? What we also see in the actions of these sailors is what seems to be the natural thought process of man when it seems like they have run out of options. Doesn’t it seem like people only seem to call out to God when they realize that they cannot fix the problem on their own? After medicine fails, after therapy fails, after government fails and job fails, that’s when people say, “God help me!” The sailors are in the storm and after they do everything that they physically can to help their journey, that’s when they start praying! Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t we pray first? I think we also see in Jonah the sad state of the church today. We are asleep when the world around us is suffering and the church needs to wake up. Revival I believe needs to start here in the church before it ever goes outside of it. We need to realize the storm that is happening all around us. James Montgomery Boice even said that the Christian cannot ignore reality forever, eventually he must wake up. Do you need a wake up call? Today might be the day where God is trying to wake you up. Have you been like these sailors? Have you been calling out to anything and everything to help you when the answer you really need is in the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you been like Jonah and have you run away from what God has called you to? Are you running from a life of faithfulness and service to the Lord? Is there something in your life that you are attempting to hide because you don’t want God to see it? Or maybe are you even like the city of Nineveh? Are you so deep in sin that the time has now come where God has said, “You need to repent because if you don’t, your time will be over.” Where do you see yourself in this because I promise you, we have all had some element of this in our lives? Jonah is a story from history and history tends to repeat itself. What do you need to do today? In what way do you need to finally wake up? My prayer is that as we go through this book this week, we all come face to face with God in some way and we all wake up from the sleep that we are in. One last thing before we wrap up our first night: I mentioned earlier that Jesus is the greater Jonah and a time would come many years later where the disciples find themselves on a boat in the midst of a terrible storm and during this storm, Jesus is asleep. The disciples wake Him up and they say in Mark 4:38, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Perhaps no words have ever been more ironic in history. The very reason that Christ came was because they were perishing and they needed a Savior! But with a word, Christ calms the storm and with a word, Christ can calm the storms of your life. Jesus Christ really is enough. Where Jonah fails, where the captain fails, where the sailors fail, Jesus stands above and beyond. The sailors were powerless to do anything with the storm but Jesus calms the storm like it was nothing. What we will see tomorrow night is the continuation of Jonah’s battle with the storm but we will also see what Christ does when it comes to our storms. We will see that as Jonah was cast into the sea to calm the storm, Jesus was sent into the worst storm of all: the storm of suffering, the storm of sin, the storm of death so that we would have everlasting life. Let’s pray.

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