It doesn’t matter where we go or what we do or how we hide, we cannot hide from God, from His sight, from His love, from His power, from His influence.

No Way God

I received a letter recently from a woman who wrote that in the last few years of her life, things have been just a mess. She has been through divorce, she has been suffering from depression, she’s had illness and been in hospital and you could really feel the pain as you read this letter. And the worst thing for her was “listening to you – (me) and the program called Christianityworks,” she said, “Well, it doesn’t work in my life.” And there was this sense of anguish and disappointment in the words that she wrote.

Jesus promises so much, God makes so many high statements about who we are and how He wants to bless us and how abundantly He wants to fill our lives with good things and then you hear preachers like Berni, talking about God’s blessing. I mean, the last series on Christianityworks that we finished last week, was called, ‘In all that they do, they prosper.’ and this woman said, “I think what a lot of other people sometimes feel – well it ain’t working for me.“ My hunch is a lot of children in God’s family feel that sense of disappointment in their hearts and the worst thing about it is everyone in their church is walking around making like they are a super Christian and so you can’t really talk to people about that. Well, we are going to talk about it, at least one particular reason why sometimes a life in Christ is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Now there are lots of reasons why that can happen, but we are going to focus over these next four weeks on just one of those and that’s when we rebel against God’s will for our lives. The four week series we are starting today is called, “When we run away, God has His way,” and it is based on Jonah’s story – the four chapters of Jonah in the Old Testament. It’s a profound book and I think it’s a profound teaching series because God has a plan for your life and mine. It’s a good and a perfect plan and sometimes, like Jonah, we rebel. Now Jonah’s rebellion, as we will see, was a very obvious form of rebellion. We sometimes manage to be a little bit more subtle about the way we rebel against God and sometimes even we don’t notice that we are doing it, and then we wonder why life, a life that promised so much in Christ, has turned to custard.

As I was preparing for this series, I really had a sense from the Holy Spirit that He wants people to realise, not just you but me, that sometimes we rebel against the good and perfect will of God in our lives and that God does have a plan. He loves us so much; He’ll do some things to get our attention. So let’s do that. Let’s just let the Holy Spirit work through this story of Jonah, to speak God’s will into our lives.

Let’s begin – today we’ll be looking at the first chapter of the Book of Jonah, in the Old Testament, so if you have that, grab it, open it up – its right towards the end of the Old Testament – quite a short book. Jonah, Chapter 1, I’ll just read the first three verses. “One day the Lord told Jonah to go to the great city of Nineveh and say to the people, “The Lord has seen your terrible sins, you are doomed.” Instead, Jonah ran away from the Lord. He went to the sea port of Joppa and bought a ticket on a ship that was going to Spain. Then he got on the ship and sailed away to escape.” The Lord told Jonah – God had a plan to use Jonah to do something in the lives of the people of Nineveh. Now we don’t find out what that is till a few chapters down the track, so we’ll talk about that plan in a few weeks, but right now let’s just stick with what Jonah knew at the time. Jonah didn’t know exactly what God was doing, but he really felt the call on his life to go and follow God and go to Nineveh.

Now Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians in Jonah’s time were the dominant, geo-political force – they were the world power, like America, I guess is today, and the Hebrews, the Jews, saw them as the enemy. They were evil people, they did horrible, despicable things, they worshipped foreign gods, they sacrificed human beings, they conquered countries and God says to Jonah, “I’ve seen their evil, go and talk to them, be my prophet, be my man who goes to Nineveh and speaks to them.” God is up to something and He tells His prophet Jonah, “Get up and go,” and instead, Jonah flees. He gets on a ship and goes exactly in the opposite direction.

We’ll look at the consequences of that in a moment, but what about us. When God tells us to go, or to do or to be, when He tells us about His plan to use us to bless other people – He does that in a lot of different ways. Maybe someone gives us a prophetic word, maybe the Holy Spirit just speaks in our hearts and we know that we know that we know. You just know when God is calling you to do something and God has this very definite path planned for us. We can’t see the whole thing, we don’t know exactly how it will pan out but He has this definite part and then sometimes we wander all over the place, anywhere but the place that God wants us to be in, because well, maybe God’s call isn’t convenient just at the moment or maybe were afraid to go to Nineveh because they’re horrible people. Maybe God is just drowned out by the noise and the business of our lives – we’ve just got too much on and we ignore that little quiet voice, we delay, we put it off.

It might be something at work, or to do with our career, or changing where we live, or what we are doing with our money, or what church we’re involved in, but somehow God’s will just never makes it to the top of our ‘to do’ list. Has that ever happened in your life? It certainly has in mine and I would ask you prayerfully to think back and say, “Lord, are you talking to me here, is there something that I’ve missed, is there something you’ve said to me, you’ve called me to do and I’ve just put you on the back burner.?” We are going to look at how God responded to Jonah’s rebellion and exactly what we can learn from Jonah’s story.

Stormy Sea

We’ve been looking at the story of Jonah and how Jonah rebelled against the will of God. God said to Jonah, “You’re my prophet, go to Nineveh. I know who Nineveh is, I know that they’re horrible people, I know that they do terrible things, but I want you to go to Nineveh,” and he rebelled and of course we rebel sometimes too, don’t we? Maybe you think ‘rebel’ is a strong word, but God’s will, God’s plan for people who call themselves ‘Jesus followers’, that plan is not an optional extra. If we really want to be blessed in that relationship with Jesus, I believe we need to be right in God’s sweet spot. Jonah wasn’t and this is what happens, let’s read it now.

Jonah Chapter One, beginning at verse one right through to verse three, if you have a Bible. Let me read it. “But the Lord made such a strong wind when Jonah got on that ship, such a bad storm came up, that the ship was about to be broken into pieces. The sailors were frightened and they all started praying to their gods. They even threw the ships cargo overboard to make the ship lighter. All this time Jonah was down below the decks, sound asleep and the captain went to him and said, “How can you sleep at a time like this? Get up, pray to your God, maybe He’ll have pity on us and keep us from drowning.” Finally the sailors got together and said, “Let’s ask our gods to show us who caused all this trouble. It turned out to be Jonah and they started asking him, “Are you the one who brought all this trouble on us? What business are you in, where do you come from, what is your country, who are your people?” and Jonah answered them, “I’m a Hebrew and I worship the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land,” and when the sailors heard this they were frightened because Jonah had already told them that he was running from the Lord. Then they said, “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Well, Jonah rebels against God. Jonah hears God say to him, “Go to Nineveh,” and he hops on a ship and he goes in exactly the opposite direction and – surprise, surprise, surprise – a huge storm blows up – a storm so big that the ship was about to sink. Now understand that the Hebrews were not seafaring people, they hated the ocean, so the notion of a huge storm – you’ve seen the waves in a storm, it’s really scary – this was a scary thing for Jonah, to be on the water and for a storm to be there. You see how pathetic it is, for Jonah to run away from God, thinking somehow that God can’t reach him when he is on a ship to Spain. Of course God can reach him, and God reached out to Jonah by sending a massive storm.

It’s a bit like Adam in the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis – when he’d sinned, when he’d eaten the apple from the tree – trying to run and hide somehow from God. Let’s get a revelation here; it doesn’t matter where we go or what we do or how we hide, we cannot hide from God, from His sight, from His love, from His power, from His influence and when this storm happens and all of a sudden everyone’s petrified of losing their lives and finally the sailors come to him and say, “Jonah, what is it that you’ve done, what’s going on,?” Jonah answers them, “I’m a Hebrew and I worship the Lord God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

You see, it’s just like us when we run away from God, it’s a contradiction between what he believes and the fact that he’s running away. And the sailors hear that and say, “Do you have any idea what you have done.” I’m not sure that they cared about Jonah; I think they were more worried about the impact of Jonah’s actions on their lives. See, Jonah’s story mirrors our own. We rebel against God’s will and His plan; we go in a different direction and God decides to get our attention.

As we’ll see later, God wasn’t punishing Jonah here; God never intended that for Jonah. God sent this storm and calamity, the ship falling apart, to get Jonah back on track – to get Jonah back into His will. So often, when we run from God and then something bad happens, so often we mistake that for punishment. That’s not what this was about. God sent the storm to get Jonah’s attention, to get Jonah back on track, and in the middle of the storm, in verse nine, Jonah declares his faith. Jonah answered, “I’m a Hebrew, I worship the Lord God of heaven.” Well buddy, here’s your problem; you’re not living out your faith. You’re believing one thing but you’re running in the opposite direction.

And so often we go – yea, well, I believe in God but, hey, let’s live together before we get married. Sure, I believe in God but let’s gossip about that woman behind her back. Yea, absolutely, I believe in God but I’m going to rip that guy’s head off – and we wonder why there is a storm in our lives! This mess that Jonah has gotten himself into is not just impacting him but the people around him. Does that ring a bell with you? The sailors were in the same boat with Jonah and they asked him ‘the’ question – “Do you know what you have done.” It’s a good question! We are toddling along through life, we do this, we do that, we marry that person and life looms so large that when God’s Spirit tries to nudge us in this direction or whispers to us, “No, go that way instead,” we don’t listen and little by little the wind picks up. The waves pick up and before we know it, there’s a huge storm raging in our lives and that storm is God ringing our bell. That storm is God saying, “Ahem, excuse me, hello, it’s God here.” Well that’s great, so God gets our attention, but now what?

Man Overboard

So Jonah runs away from God. A huge storm hits his life; he’s rebelled, he’s in the middle of a storm, well, now what does he do? Well, let’s read the rest of the first chapter of the Book of Jonah. “The storm kept getting worse until finally the sailors asked Jonah, “What should we do with you to make the sea calm down?” and Jonah said to them, “Throw me into the sea and it’ll calm down. I’m the cause of this terrible storm.” Now that is a huge realisation, “I’m the cause of this storm.” Don’t we so often try and blame other people, when we rebel against God and God allows a storm to hit our lives; we want to blame everybody, including God. Yet Jonah in the middle of this storm responded to God’s call and said, “It’s me, it’s my fault, I’m the one, I was the one that rebelled against God.”

God doesn’t send these storms to punish; God sends these storms so that we can come to the same realisation in life that Jonah did. It’s a huge realisation. But they were the words, what about the action? He said, “Throw me into the sea,” – that roaring, raging, frightening, frothing ocean. God sent this storm and I am going to throw myself onto His mercy, into His choice. ‘Lord, I know that I’ve done the wrong thing, but do with me what you will.’ That’s how Jonah responds to God. Now the sailors tried their best to row to the shore, but they couldn’t do it, and the storm kept getting worse every minute. God controls that storm, so they prayed to the Lord, “Please don’t let us drown for taking this man’s life, don’t hold us guilty for killing an innocent man, all of this happened because you wanted it to,” and they threw Jonah overboard and the sea calmed down and the sailors were so terrified that they offered a sacrifice to God and made all kinds of promises.

The moment they did it, the moment that Jonah allow himself to be thrown on the mercy and the pleasure of God, what happened – the storm died and these pagan sailors who were worshipping other gods, believed in the God of Jonah, because they saw God’s power. Wow! That is an awesome response, and then we see right at the end of that chapter, in verse 17, the Lord sent a big fish to swallow Jonah and Jonah was inside the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. Now we are going to look at that next week, because that is kind of not a very nice place to be for a few days and a few nights. Can you imagine spending a long weekend in the belly of a fish in an ocean? But for the moment let’s look at Jonah’s decision to be ‘man overboard’ in this huge raging storm.

He said it is time for me to bring my life in line with what I confess and believe and Jonah puts his life on the line for God. Pretty clever thing to do because Jesus said, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will save it. What good is it that a man should gain the whole world yet lose his soul?” What’s the rebellion in our lives? If you’re life is traveling through a storm, one of the reasons could be – and let me say it’s not the only reason – but one of the reasons could be that somewhere in some part of your life, you’ve rebelled. What compromise, what rebellion, what deliberate running away, what treadmill that makes us so busy that we can’t hear God’s Word, what is it in our lives that may be causing a storm that we are traveling through right now?

I know a man by the name of John, and John works very long hard hours in the Information Technology industry. He has a lot of money, he has done very well financially, he has a nice house, he has made a lot of money on the stock market but the man’s not a giver. The man’s life is a mess, he doesn’t spend time with the Lord, he doesn’t have time to do the things that God’s calling him to do and he’s flummoxing through life wondering, “Why is my life in such a turmoil when I have so much money?” Everyone’s story is different, but in that mess, in that storm, while it’s raging, we can be like Jonah and decide to believe in Jesus with our lives; to stake our lives on it, not to believe with our heads and run in a different direction.

You know, when our belief goes one direction and our life goes the other direction, it’s bound to tear us apart. Yet, when we bring them back – when we say, “This is what I believe; I’m going to bring my life to that. My life is going to be lived as a Christ follower. We can decide that bit, and the rest – the rest is up to God, whatever He decides, whatever He does, however He chooses to play out the rest of our days – it’s His choice. I’m through being my own god, I want God’s choice, I will cast myself onto the mercy of God, like Jonah. Now that’s seems to me to be a pretty good decision. It’s a faith step; it’s a huge faith step, because when that storm is raging, it’s not always easy to make that decision. And then what happens to the storm? Well, we will look at what happened to Jonah over the next few weeks. God chose a path for him that he didn’t really like, that didn’t suit him at the time, he had things to go through, things to endure, but the storm went away.

The ‘throw me into the sea’ decision was a turning point for Jonah and it was the end of the storm – it was the start of a new life, doing God’s will. And as we each examine our lives, the question of the sailors needs to ring in our ears. As we consider our rebellion in the middle of the storm, this is the question that should ring in our ears – “Do you know what you are doing?” In the short term, running away from God, may make imminent sense, but when that storm hits, let’s see the storm for what it is. It’s something that’s come out of God’s love and God’s power. When those storms hit in life, maybe, just maybe that’s God knocking on our door, maybe that’s God ringing our bell, maybe that’s God saying, “I love you, I’ve a plan for you. Come back, I want you to enjoy the plan I have for you.” We will look at the rest of Jonah’s story over the next few weeks because I think that as we do, there’s a powerful message of how God can use each one of us, even when we have made the mistake that Jonah made.

God is my God and I will worship Him no matter how dark it is and no matter how bad it feels, and no matter how much I feel like it will never get any better. I will worship my God.

Three Whole Days

One of the things that happens to everybody at some point in time who has chosen to believe in Jesus, is that at some point we come to faith – at some point there is a decision, whether that’s through childhood, whether that’s a really big decision later in life – at some point the decision to say “Yep”, I’m going to believe in Jesus, I’m going to follow Him, He’s my Lord and He’s my Saviour.” Then time goes on and we walk down the path of God’s plan for us and then we see something off to the left or off to the right, so we wander off and it grabs our attention and before we know it, we’re wandering well off the path that God has chosen for our lives. Sometimes it’s a deliberate act of rebellion against the Lord. Other times, it’s just a little thing – you know, we get too busy, or we let something go on – some little compromise that creeps in and we feel further and further and further away from God. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big thing or a small thing; the end result is still the same. We get to a point where there is a tug of war going on in our hearts; we know that something is not right. We know that God hasn’t gone anywhere but He seems like He’s further away than He should be and there’s this growing gap between where God is and where God wants us to be and where we are and where we want to be and we have a choice.

We have a choice to keep heading off into the wild blue yonder on our own path or turning back to the Lord and say, “Lord, I have strayed off the path that you have for my life, forgive me.” You know that feeling and in a sense it’s not ok to talk about it. We all go round pretending that we’re super Christians and everything’s fine and we are powering on with God and sometimes, inside, we have been through this process of wandering off the track and we’ve wandered away and inside we’re dying, inside there’s a gap, inside there’s a poverty, inside there’s no real relationship happening between God and us. In this series – “When we run away, God has His way,” – is what I have called it. In this series we are talking about exactly this place, because it happens to each one of us. Now I pray that as we learn more and we grow and we become more equipped in our relationship with Jesus, my prayer is that it would happen less and less and less. But you know, some days we just don’t expect it and we find ourselves in that wilderness.

Last week we began looking at the prophet Jonah, a prophet in the Old Testament and God called him to go to a place called Nineveh. We will have a little bit more of a look later in the program about exactly what Nineveh was like. But Nineveh was a pagan city and it was the capital of Assyria, and they did horrible things and Jonah’s attitude, when God called him to go to Nineveh was, “No way, God, absolutely no way!” And so he hopped on a boat and when smack-bang in the other direction, and a huge storm hits the boat and the ship starts breaking up and the crew is afraid and Jonah’s turning point ultimately comes when he says, “Look, guys, it’s my fault. We don’t want the ship to break up. Throw me into the ocean and the storm will cease,” and sure enough, they throw him into the ocean, he casts himself on God’s mercy. He admits that this storm in all their lives is his fault for running away from God, and he casts himself onto the roaring ocean. Remember, the Hebrew’s weren’t a seafaring people, they were afraid of the water and you know what it’s like when there’s a storm on the water, it’s a scary place to be. And so he casts himself on the mercy of God. You know, when things are not going well for us, spiritually inside, when there’s storms raging in our lives, sometimes we want to blame everyone else. Jonah’s first step back from rebellion was taking ownership of his own mistake.

It might be rebellion in our lives, it might just be too busy to spend time with God, it might be just wandering off because something else took our fancy. But the first step back is not blaming other people, it’s not blaming God, it’s taking ownership of our own rebellion, our own sin. That’s the point where this week we are going to pick up on Jonah’s story, because he was cast into the ocean, the storm ceased immediately and the ship sailed on its merry way, and then we see in the last verse of the first chapter of the Book of Jonah, if you have a Bible, grab one. Verse 17, it says this, “The Lord then sent a big fish to swallow Jonah and Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights. At this point in the story it’s real easy to say, “Well, you know, nobody floats around inside a fish’s belly for three days and three nights and gets away with it. It just doesn’t happen. This is a myth, this is an allegory, it couldn’t possibly have happened.”

I have a radical outlook on this. I absolutely believe that God is describing an actual event here. Why do I say that? Well, the first reason is Jesus believes it. Jesus, some centuries after this said this; “Just as Jonah was three days in the belly of that fish, so I will be buried for three days in the earth.” Matthew 12:39 and 40, if you would like to look it up. Jesus clearly believed that Jonah spent three days in the belly of the fish. And the other thing; well, the other thing is that impossible things do happen. How many times have we seen news footage of an earthquake and three weeks after the event, when they can’t expect to pull anybody alive out of the rubble, they have pulled some little child out of the rubble, still alive, barely. Things like that happen and I believe this story here in the Book of Jonah, is all about something that actually happened.

Let’s look at the sequence of events – God commands Jonah, “Go to Nineveh,” Jonah rebels, God sends a storm and in the middle of that storm, instead of blaming God and blaming everyone else, Jonah admits his rebellion and casts himself on God. What does God do? Does God say, “Well, well done Jonah, here is a red carpet back to a relationship with me? It’s all over, let’s get on with it?” No! God sends a fish, a huge fish it must have been, to swallow Jonah and to take him deeper. Think about that place for a minute. You’re in the belly of a fish, it’s smelly, it’s slimy, has a foul air pocket, you’ve got the fish’s digestive juices, all the other stuff the fish has eaten and you spend three days in this slimy hole in the deep of deeps. My hunch is that three days felt like an absolute eternity. It was God’s decision to take Jonah deeper, deeper, and deeper to an unpleasant place; He decided to take Jonah through a process and it took Jonah three days before he prayed. God commands – we rebel – there’s a storm in our lives – ok we finally say, “Ok, I give up, it’s my fault, I own up.” We expect God to fix everything then and there but so often He chooses to take us deeper. We’ll look what happens in that deep place next.

Belly Full of Praise

Well, Jonah has rebelled, he’s repented, he’s turned back and he jumps over into the roaring sea and he throws himself onto the mercy of God and God chooses to have a huge fish swallow Jonah and take him deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Well, what happens next in that place? Let’s pick the story up in the second chapter of the Book of Jonah, beginning at verse one. “From inside the fish, Jonah prayed to the Lord his God – “When I was in trouble, Lord, I prayed to you and you listened to me from deep in the world of the dead. I begged for your help and you answered me, you threw me down to the bottom of the sea where the water was churning around and I was completely covered by your mighty waves. I thought I was swept away from your sight, I thought I would never see you again. I was almost drowned by the swirling waters that surrounded me. Sea weed wrapped around my head, I had sunk down below the underwater mountains. I knew that forever I would be a prisoner there.” Isn’t it lovely how he looks at all of that and instead of blaming God, he acknowledges the reality. He says, “God, you threw me down to the bottom of the sea. I was completely covered by your waves and you know something, God, when I was there it felt like I would never get out of it. It felt like I was lost – I was so deep; I was below the underwater mountains and Jonah says, “I feel I was lost, I feel like I was forsaken, I feel like it was all over – I had sunk so low that I was below the underwater mountains and I thought that for ever I would be a prisoner there.”

Have you ever felt like that? – sunk so low in your circumstances, lost all hope. “It will never get any better – I will never have a great relationship with God again. I’m so far away.” Here’s the radical thought. Sometimes God takes us to that place so deep, like a surgeon taking his knife to a cancer, cutting deep. We’ll take a look in a minute what God was up to, but when God takes us that deep sometimes our reaction is to struggle. Our reaction is to get angry or confused or hurt – we just don’t understand what is going on – we know it feels terrible.

I have a friend who was recently on a ministry trip – he had to drive four or five hours to go somewhere and he had some car problems and he ended up stranded halfway on the way back. It had been such a great trip, he had met with so many wonderful people and all of a sudden God throws this in his way. It was pressure and it was unwanted and he said “Why was this, Berni? I got so angry with God, how could He let this happen to me?” It’s confusing, it can hurt and yet Jonah said “God, you threw me to the bottom of the sea. I was completely covered by your mighty waves.” God is in control. Jonah’s not angry with God, he’s just says, “Even in the depths of the earth, God is in control,” and if the truth be known, that fish was probably God’s way of rescuing him. In that stormy ocean in the middle of nowhere, how else was Jonah going to survive? Was it perfect – was it five star luxury – was it comfortable? No, but it was God’s choice. It was God’s way, it’s was God’s rescue and safety and transport and provision and dark deep place, where some physical and spiritual protection and healing could go on. Jonah goes on to say, “But you Lord God rescued me from that pit when my life was slipping away, I remembered you and in your holy temple, you heard my prayer. All who worship the worthless idols turned away from God who offers them mercy but with shouts of praise, I will offer a sacrifice to you my Lord – I will keep my promise.”

Deep! Deep! Deep! In that ocean, deep in the belly of that fish, deep in his spirit, Jonah died to himself. Jonah came to the realisation, God is my God and I will worship Him no matter how dark it is and no matter how bad it feels and no matter how smelly it is and no matter how much I feel like it will not get any better, I will worship my God. That is the one remedy to a rebellious spirit. It is the one realisation that can set us free. It is the one insight that can be the first step on our journey home and with shouts of praise; I will offer a sacrifice to you. That is profound – that is a deep realisation and it took Jonah three days in the belly of a fish. Now look at our walk – we come to Christ, we wander down that path, we rebel, we wander off and God sends something – a storm, a fish out of His love, to bring us back. Look at what he says in Hebrews Chapter 12, verse 7. “Be patient when you are being corrected. This is how God treats His children. Don’t all parents correct their children? God corrects all of us and if He doesn’t correct you, then you don’t really belong to Him. Our earthly fathers correct us and we still respect them. Isn’t it even better to be given true life by letting our spiritual Father correct us? Now stand up straight, stop your knees from shaking and walk a straight path, then the lame will be healed instead of getting worse.”

Could God have killed Jonah then? Absolutely! Instead, out of His love, He took him deep into a place where Jonah was corrected and disciplined and had a space to come to the wonderful realisation that God is God, even in that dark place.

All Washed Up

Well, there was Jonah in the belly of the whale and he came to that deep realisation, in that deep dark place, and my hope is that we won’t just see it as Jonah’s story because more than that it is a story about God’s grace and God’s protection. God commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh, he rebels against God, goes in another direction and God, out of His redemptive love, sends a storm and Jonah takes responsibility for his actions. He casts himself onto God’s mercy and then this fish, instead of taking him to dry land, takes him down, down, down for three days in a dark place and that’s where Jonah realises God is God and from deep onto deep, he cries out, “You are my God, I will worship you, I will make sacrifice to you.”

Let’s just pause there for a moment. That’s sacred ground, anytime, any time someone comes to that realisation – that is just so beautiful, but God takes us deeper and we call out to Him from there. There God renders an enormous change in us. God knows us, that’s why He takes us there in the first place. It’s a measure of His love and His wisdom to take us through a process, in a deep, dark place where we can make that decision for ourselves, a decision that will last an eternity.

Sometimes we take this simple view that God wants to bless me therefore life will always be wonderful and yet God’s greatest blessing is Himself, His presence, fellowship with Him, a relationship with Him and when we miss that He misses us. Out of His deep and mighty love that beats in His heart, He decides to take us to a deep place. We can fight and rebuke the devil or like Jonah, we can look up from that deep place and look God straight in the eye and say, “Lord, you are my God, I will praise you, I will worship you, I will sacrifice my life to you.” – The moment that Jonah does that, look at how God responds. Jonah, Chapter 2 and verse 10, when that happened, the Lord commanded the fish to vomit Jonah up on the shore and it did – up to the surface again. Was it a salubrious entrance? Was it a red carpet? No, but the moment in that deep place that Jonah came to the realisation – that evil city that God called Jonah to – now Jonah still had a way to go, it was not a perfect walk, because our stubbornness and our rebellion – well, you know something – they can run pretty deep can’t they?

It takes sometimes a process, it takes us time to walk back towards God and let go of our stubbornness. In Jonah’s case it was a stubbornness to say, “There is absolutely no way, God, that I’m going to tell these people how good you are, because chances are they will believe me and chances are they will fall in love with you and chances are you won’t punish them.” But God had a plan; a plan of grace, a plan to use Jonah. You know the word Jonah means ‘dove’. To use this man who was a symbol of peace in the lives of all those people in Nineveh. Jonah’s stubbornness and rebellion still had a way to work it self out, but Jonah rebelled and then he repented and then God decided to renew him and renewal is a process.

Deep rooted problems mean that sometimes God has to take us to deep places. The mightiest works that God works in our lives sometimes, are hidden in secret, no one else sees them. No one else experiences the struggle; nothing else can impact us in that place except God. And God is that one light in that dark, slimy, deep, belly of the fish – that lonely place, that place where we would rather not be, except for the fact that God is in that place too. God is in that place and when that light shines in that dark place, when our circumstances are so black that we can’t see the other side of them. That the blackness is so inky, it’s so frightening, it’s so dejecting, it shouldn’t be like this and we are angry and we’re hurting – God is in that place and we can look at Him and say, “Lord, you are in this place with me, I know that through faith and I will worship you, I will bow my life down to you. I am sorry I have rebelled and walked away and gone my own way and no matter what you do; no matter how you work this out in my life, God, I will worship you,” and right at that point, God brings us back to the surface again because that’s the decision He was taking us there to make.

Doesn’t keep us there any longer than we have to stay. Just wants to see that deep decision happening in our hearts. We can fight and struggle and complain and that’s where He’ll keep us, because God wants more that anything to draw us close to Him and He will use those circumstances to do exactly that, but the moment we make that decision – God is my God, He’s my Lord, He’s my Saviour and I am His creation – the moment we decide to praise and to worship out of that dark place, He brings us back to the surface, back to the beach. Yeh, ok, Jonah was all washed up – Jonah had a way to go. You know something, some days we’re all washed up too, sometimes we have a way to go, but these last two chapters of the Book of Jonah that we will look at next week and the week after, are just so liberating as we see how God’s love and God’s grace works out in the life of a rebellious man. This God hasn’t changed – He’s the same yesterday, today and forever. After this time in the belly and on the beach, God now had someone who would obey Him. God now had someone He could work with. You and I, we’re no different to Jonah. As I said, God is the same yesterday and today and forever and in that dark place, remember, God is there.

What is it that we, right now in our lives, are doing, to run in the opposite direction of that call of God’s will and then we wonder why there are storms and we never have peace.

The Word of the Lord

Having a relationship with Jesus is just fantastic. There’s so much blessing and there’s so much joy and there’s so much peace in that. For me over the last few weeks life has been really hard. Long, long hours of work and yet there have been so many blessings in different areas of my life; my marriage and my home and with God’s peace and God’s joy. It’s fabulous what God does but not everything He asks us to do is pleasant or convenient. Grace is a two sided coin. Grace is wonderful but there is a flip side which is obedience. God forgives us through His grace but then He calls us to a life of obedience. Actually, when you look at things God says ‘no’ to, there pretty obvious and pretty straight forward – I mean adultery and anger and argument and strife and judging people and criticising them and…..come on! The stuff that God says ‘don’t do it’ is really very obvious.

Yet sometimes, as obvious as it is to us, you know what we’re like. God calls us in one direction and we pull in the other direction. It’s part of our human condition; it’s who we are. As much as we love God, sometimes we just want to run in the opposite direction. On the outside, then we make like we are a super Christian, but on the inside there are consequences, there’s turmoil, there’s strife. When we are not walking in God’s will for our lives – God’s good and perfect and wonderful will for our lives – it just doesn’t sit right inside, does it? It doesn’t work, it’s broken, there’s turmoil, we don’t have the peace that God intends for us to have, and I guess that’s why over the last few weeks, we have been looking at the story of Jonah, because Jonah was called by God to Nineveh.

Now if you have a Bible, please grab it, and open it up because we are going to be spending more time in this very, very short book in the Old Testament, called Jonah. It’s towards the end of the Old Testament and Jonah was called by God to go to a place called Nineveh. We are going to talk a bit more about Nineveh today, so we won’t go into too much detail now. But he didn’t want to go to Nineveh, so he fled in the opposite direction. God said, “Go to Nineveh,” and Jonah said, “Absolutely not, no way God. I’m going to hop in a boat and go in exactly in the opposite direction, to Tarshish.” And when he was on the boat there was a huge storm because God meant for Jonah to go to Nineveh. There was a huge storm and last week we saw that Jonah ended up, of all places, in the belly of a huge fish, praying to God.

And finally he came to his senses and finally the fish spits him out and you think, “Great, eventually Jonah gets it.” There’s been a storm, there’s been this whole experience in the fish, finally Jonah must absolutely get it. Well, this week we will see that God had His way with Jonah but that Jonah still had a way to go. When he was spat up on that beach after that wonderful prayer, that we looked at last week, in Jonah chapter 2, where Jonah says, “Look, God, I called to you and you answered me and I’m going to praise you and thank you for bringing me to my senses.” He’s spat up on the beach, he’s lying there; imagine what it was like; it must have been a surreal experience. Then, after this prayer, the Lord spoke to the fish and it spewed Jonah out up onto the dry land.

Jonah must have felt washed up, he must have felt, “Ooh, where is my life at?” and when we do that – when God takes us through difficult experiences to deal with our stubbornness, to deal with our rebellion, to make us more like Jesus – when we get to the end of that sometimes we feel washed up, we imagine that God’s so angry with us that it’s all over. He’ll never call me to do anything for Him again. I’ve done so badly this time, He called me there and I went over there and dang, this is just not going to work.

Have you ever felt that way? I know I’ve rebelled, I know about grace but grace isn’t for me, here and now. This is really, really important, because we all end up feeling that way at some point in our lives. We start off with all the best intentions to serve God and then we just make a mistake or we rebel and we never feel that grace is for us just at that point. That’s why we are looking at the story of Jonah because today we are going to see that God had His way but that God’s way was a way of grace, and yes, it’s a story about Jonah. Yes, God called Jonah to go to Nineveh and yes he rebelled but he threw himself on God in the ocean and when the storm hit and the sailors on the boat said to him, “Jonah, what have you done, why is this happening to us?”, Jonah said, “It’s my fault, turf me into the sea and the storm will cease,” and that’s exactly what happened. Now being thrown in the sea was a scary thing but Jonah decided to have himself thrown on God’s mercy, rather than fight the storm. How often do we try and fight the storm, instead of throwing ourselves on the mercy of God? And then in the belly of that fish, he praised God. He said, “Lord, when I called to you out of my distress, you answered me, deep, deep down in the ocean.” God made some deep changes in Jonah’s heart and so here he is, he’s washed up on the beach. So what’s God’s story, how does God respond here, when deep calls unto deep, how does God act?

Well, the first thing that happens when Jonah prays that prayer – in chapter 2, which we looked at last week – is that immediately Jonah is spat up onto the beach and this is what God does. I’m going to pick it here in chapter 3, of the Book of Jonah, just the first three verses. Jonah has been spat up on the beach and this is what happens. “The Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city and proclaim to it the message that I will tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the Word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city of three days walk right across. Jonah’s rebelled, he’s run in a different direction, there’s been a storm where he could have been killed, there’s been this whole experience of being in the belly of a fish for three days where he could have been killed, but God’s grace prevails and far from discarding Jonah, the Word of the Lord came a second time to Jonah, saying, “I have a plan for you.” God didn’t give up on Jonah, He had a plan for the people of Nineveh, He had a plan for Jonah. We’re going to see how the whole plan unfolds in a moment, but it was a plan of grace. Jonah was just plain stubborn and you know something, we are just plain stubborn sometimes to. We don’t like to admit that, we don’t like to hear that, but we do make choices sometimes that are against God’s will. Sometimes they are big choices, like God says, “Jonah go to Nineveh,” and instead Jonah gets on a boat to Tarshish. Now that’s a big rebellion, it’s a really an obvious, overt rebellion. Sometimes though they’re just small compromises: “Oh well, no, that doesn’t matter, God won’t notice that.” Whether they’re big or whether they’re small, they have consequences.

I remember once reading A.W. Tozer and he said, “Sin is never small,” and when we are living out those consequences in the ocean, in the belly of the fish, as Jonah was, God is in that place. God’s love is in that place, God’s grace is in that place and when we feel all washed up, God hasn’t lost sight of His purpose.

Turning Point

So Jonah has been on quite a journey to this point – rebellion and storms and fear and admitting his failure and trusting in God and praising God. The deep problem of rebellion meant that God took him deep in the belly of that fish and there he is lying on the beach. It was the most extraordinary ordeal – spewed out by the fish, slimy and smelly and tired and hungry. What a strange experience that would have been and for the second time God says, “Jonah, go to Nineveh,” and this time he finally goes.

Well let’s see what happens when he gets to Nineveh. I’m picking it up in the Book of Jonah, chapter 3 and beginning at verse 4. “Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk and he cried out, “Forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown,” and the people of Nineveh believed God. They proclaimed a fast and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe and covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. Then he had proclaimed in Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles, no human being or animal, no herd or flock shall taste anything. They won’t feed nor shall they drink water – human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth and they will cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows, God might relent and change His mind? He might turn from His fierce anger so that we do not perish.”

Wow, Nineveh is this huge city in the Assyrian capital and Assyria is the dominant empire – the dominant world power. It’s a brutal dictatorship, it conquers, it kills, it didn’t acknowledge God and Jonah, an Israelite; one of God’s people was sent to this greatest city on earth, to a bunch of people who didn’t believe in God, who represented everything anti-God, who did horrible things – with a message of judgement from a God they didn’t believe in. Wow!

Have you ever noticed that God asks us to do crazy things sometimes? No wonder Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh – would you, would I? But when God asks us to do crazy things, well, if it’s in His plan, somehow it just won’t go away. The most powerful city, in the most powerful empire and this nobody, Jonah, is sent to say this, “If you don’t listen to God, in forty days you will be overthrown.” I mean, come on! What kind of message is that? This is a powerful city – who’s Jonah, who’s this God that’s going to overthrow us? And yet verse 5 in chapter 3 says this, “And the people of Nineveh believed God.” See when God asks us to something that’s crazy like this, that doesn’t make sense, that’s not logical, He has already gone ahead of us, He’s already prepared the way. Do we think somehow that these people would have believed if the Spirit of God hadn’t gone ahead of Jonah to Nineveh and prepared their hearts?

The Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 10, that we have been created in Christ to do good works that God prepared beforehand for us to do. That’s exactly what has happened here with Jonah. God prepared this work beforehand and God made Jonah to do this, that’s why He was so insistent. What plans has God got in your life? You just know that He wants you to do this thing or go here or be this or say that, but somehow these plans seem crazy and yet, they just won’t go away. What is it that we, right now, in our lives are doing to run in the opposite direction of those plans; of that call of God’s will? And then we wonder why there are storms and we never have peace, but yet, when we step out in God’s plan, crazy as it may seem to our limited human understanding – as scary and as uncomfortable and as inconvenient as it may be, when we believe with our lives, then what happens is, doesn’t matter what the physical circumstances are – there’s peace, there’s blessing.

The Assyrian king, the most powerful man in Nineveh, bows down to God not just himself, not just his household but his whole kingdom. Why? Because Jonah finally bowed down to God with his life and the amazing thing is, that when we believe God with our lives, that has a huge impact. It has ramifications in the Kingdom of God that we cannot begin to imagine. We can say we believe, that’s easy, but doing it – that’s where the rubber hits the road, that’s where the action is, because faith without works is dead.

Heart of Grace

Well, it’s been a long and winding story, this story of Jonah. This next little bit, just this one verse that finishes off chapter 3. This is where it all happens for me, and this is where I discover that this is not Jonah’s story at all; its God’s story, it’s a story about God’s grace. When we look at this and put ourselves in Jonah’s shoes, and relate how God behaves towards Jonah, into our own lives, we discover something about God here and now. Remember twice God calls Jonah to Nineveh and finally Jonah goes, finally he delivers the message that God wanted him to deliver. Nineveh responds, the king responds. Question is how does God respond? He’s the one that’s delivered this message He’s the one that’s insisted that Jonah go, He’s the one that’s gone to all the trouble to finally get Jonah to come to his senses. How does God respond when Nineveh turns from its evil ways? Well we see that in verse 10 of chapter 3. This is what it says, “When God saw what they did – that’s the people of Nineveh – when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed His mind about the calamity that He said He would bring on them and He didn’t do it.” When God saw the Assyrians, the dominant world power, the evil, the murder, the things that they were doing wrong and God has a plan and God says, “This can not go on. Either you turn from your ways or I am going to destroy you in forty days,” and His plan was to send Jonah – and the name Jonah literally means ’dove’ – a symbol of peace, a symbol of God’s Spirit and yet when God finally gets His messenger into Nineveh, there’s not some namby-pamby, soft worded message. There’s a harsh message of judgment – very direct. God says, “You may be the world power but I‘m God. This can’t go on,” and the king puts on sackcloth and ashes which is a symbol of turning back to God. He proclaims a fast to all the people, even the animals. It is such a complete submission. So miraculous! They turned from their evil ways, which is what God wanted. God wanted grace, God wanted blessing, God wanted Jonah to be His servant, to bring that grace and blessing, not only on Nineveh, but on all the other nations around that were suffering, under what the Assyrians were doing.

Next week we’ll be looking at the final chapter, chapter 4 of the Book of Jonah, where God explains His actions to Jonah. But I’d like to bring just one verse forward to this week, which is the first verse of chapter 4. After all these wonderful things happened, this is what it says – ‘but this was very displeasing to Jonah and he became angry.’

Jonah was an Israelite; a small, rag-tag little tribe compared to the Assyrians. He’d experienced their global tyranny; he didn’t want them to receive mercy. It may have been God’s plan, but it wasn’t Jonah’s plan, yet Jonah did it anyway. That’s the other part of God’s grace, He had a heart for Jonah, He used this difficult task to bless Jonah – to grow Jonah. Now, Jonah didn’t agree with God, yet he had been through enough to know that God was God and He would do it anyway and God said, “Look, I know, Jonah, you have got more to learn and I’ve got more to teach you and this is a process, because stubbornness takes time to deal with and we really see that.

This week God has His way, but next week God has His say. God tells us why He did a whole bunch of these things and yet, by God’s grace, God honours Jonah who does what God calls him to do, even though he doesn’t agree with God. Jonah didn’t agree with God but he did it anyway; he obeyed and God honours that. We somehow labour under this misapprehension sometimes, that in order to obey God, we have to agree with Him. Well, let me set you free from that. I have a word for you today that will absolutely set you free. We don’t have to agree with God to obey Him; we just have to do it. Sometimes we are going to see things differently to God, it’s any relationship, that happens, and we have this kind of ’democracy’ attitude – we think that our relationship with God is a democracy, let me tell you something – it’s not! God is God and we are His children, we are His creation and He calls us into a relationship with Him by grace. But obedience is the way that we express our love to Him. That’s what love is of God, to obey Him; to enjoy Him and obey Him.

It happens I was an officer in the Australian Army, in the military. You know, when you are an officer and you tell a soldier to do something they just have to do it – there’s no argument. They don’t have to agree with you, they just do it. The same is true of parents and children. Often children don’t agree with mum and dad, they just have to do it. The same is true in the workplace. God’s plan, God’s timing, God’s will is so perfect and we just see these little windows and little bits and we sometimes don’t operate out the same love and mercy – we sometimes don’t agree, but let me set you free today on the subject of obedience. We do not have to agree with God on everything in order to obey Him. That’s what happened here with Jonah and God blessed Jonah and God blessed Nineveh because God is a fantastic God.

Our stubbornness is so deep rooted sometimes; it feels like it’s ingrained into our DNA. We don’t really see it often; we see through it but we don’t see it.

Jonah Spits the Dummy

Well this is the last message in a series of four programs that I called, “When we run away – God gets His way.” We have been looking at the story of Jonah in the Old Testament. If you have a Bible, go and grab it because we’ll be looking again at the last chapter; the forth chapter of this very, very short book, the Book of Jonah; and the Book of Jonah is about Jonah’s own struggle with God.

Now any relationship; a marriage or a friendship, at some point, people in the relationship want to pull in separate directions; we don’t agree; we see things differently. Well it’s not a whole bunch different in our relationship with God. There comes a point – I think for everyone who wants to follow Jesus Christ as their Lord and their Saviour – where they think, “Hang on God, I actually don’t agree with what you are doing. I don’t really like much what you’re talking about.” Everyone around us, on the surface, seems to be together in their relationship with God, yet somehow we are experiencing turmoil in that relationship with God. Who do we talk to, where do we go?

It does happen and when it happens, it can be a shock. It’s like a husband and wife who have just been married and they’ve been through their courtship and they have never had an argument and it’s when the first argument comes; it’s such a shock to them because they thought, well, we didn’t think we were ever going to have an argument – we didn’t think we would ever disagree and so many people in their walks with Jesus, think, “I’m always going to agree; I’m always going to see eye to eye with Jesus,” and one day comes and we see things differently, we say, “Hang on God, I just don’t see it your way.” That’s hard; that’s a shock that can be difficult, especially when we don’t feel as though we have someone that we can talk to about it. It does happen and we see in this series, over the four chapters of the Book of Jonah, how God had a plan for Jonah’s life and Jonah just wanted to go in the opposite direction. He did that; he got on a boat and when God said ‘head over to Nineveh,’ he headed in exactly the opposite direction to a place called Tarshish.

So as we look at Jonah’s story, I think it will help us here and now, in our walk with the Lord, on those days when we’re struggling and somehow we don’t have anyone to talk to about it. Let’s do a quick recap. Here we have this story of Jonah and it‘s tucked away – it’s one of the books of the minor prophets, as it’s called. You’ll see the book of Joel, Hosea, Amos, Obadiah and then Jonah and it begins with God’s call for Jonah to go to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire. The Assyrian empire at the time was the dominant world power – they were a brutal bunch. They did some awful things in dominating the countries around them. They killed people and they tortured people and so not surprisingly, Jonah, coming from this little rag-tag nation called Israel, didn’t much like the people who lived in Nineveh, but God called Jonah to Nineveh, to go and proclaim God’s message to those people there and Jonah said, “No way, God.” That was the title of our first message in the series, “No way, God.”

So Jonah hops on a boat, as I said, and goes in the opposite direction, to Tarshish, instead of Nineveh, and a storm hits that boat – it’s a massive storm and in the middle of that storm, Jonah admits that it’s his fault and he says to the people on the boat, “Look, if you toss me off the boat, the storm will stop because God is after me, He’s not after you.” And sure enough, they throw him in the ocean and so Jonah throws himself on God‘s mercy in this storm, which would have been a frightening thing to do and then this fish comes along and swallows Jonah and some people think, “Well, that’s got to be just a myth. No one spends three days in the belly of a fish.” But it’s clear in the New Testament, as we looked a couple of weeks ago, that Jesus believed that Jonah spent three days in the belly of a fish and if it’s good enough for Jesus – I’ve got to tell you something – it’s good enough for me!

And here he is in the belly of this fish with seaweed and slush and smell and goodness knows what else, and he prays, he cries out to God and he gives thanks and deep calls unto deep and God hears him and has the fish spit him out on a beach and there’s Jonah on the beach – all washed up. And last week we saw in chapter 3 of the Book of Jonah, that God again says to Jonah, “Right, now go to Nineveh and tell them the message I’m going to give them, and he does that and it’s a message of judgment. It’s a message that says, “Listen, if you people don’t turn from your evil ways, you’re going to be overthrown.” Would have seemed quite bizarre – I mean here’s the dominant world power, the biggest city in the most dominant power in the world, as it was known then, and some ‘nobody’ from Israel walks in and says, “Another forty days and you will be overthrown.”

Quite a bizarre message when you think about it and yet God had prepared the way and the people listened and the king listened and the whole of Nineveh turned from their evil ways and God changed His mind and decided not to punish them. God had a plan for Nineveh, to stop their evil, to stop their oppression, to bless them. The plan involved Jonah – there was a blessing planned for Jonah as well. Yet Jonah ran away from it, he struggled, he suffered the consequences and God pushed him. The storm, the fish – they’re pretty drastic! You’d think he was all sorted out after those but, no way. Jonah got out, he went to Nineveh, he did what he went to do, he said what he had to say and God blessed Nineveh. But now look at his reaction – in the last verse of chapter 3, we see that when God saw the people of Nineveh turned from their evil ways, God changed His mind about the calamity that He said He would bring upon them and He didn‘t do it – and here is how Jonah reacts.

Let’s read it – chapter 4 beginning at verse 1. “But this was really displeasing to Jonah and he became angry and he prayed to the Lord and said, “Lord, is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That’s why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning because I knew that you were a gracious God, I knew that you were merciful, I knew that you were slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and ready to relent from punishing these people and now, God, just take my life from me. Its better that you do that that I die, than I live. And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city and made himself a tent and he sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. Jonah didn’t like what God did, because Jonah wanted them punished. Jonah had seen the awful things these people had done and yet God blessed them. Now this is a great lesson for us, because in the sort of democratic, self-centered world ideology we live in, we kind of think that we have to agree with God to obey Him. Jonah bitterly disagreed with God – he hated the people who lived in Nineveh – yet for a second time God called him there and he went, even though he disagreed.

Now, there are some things I would do differently to the way God does. Maybe you would too, but God calls us to obey Him and God’s objective was to bless them and Jonah says, “I knew it! I knew… That’s exactly why I ran in the other direction. You’re gracious and you’re merciful and you’re good,” and there’s this big dummy-spit. Jonah saw Nineveh from a human viewpoint. He wanted them to get what they deserved and they got God’s grace instead. It’s almost comical isn’t it? – For Jonah to be berating God for being so good.

Most of the time when we disagree with God we throw little tantrums, you know, we just see the little picture from our selfish point of view, but God sees a big picture, from His heart of grace. In this story, who had the better motive; who had the better plan? – God or Jonah? It’s just like us, isn’t it? But now look at how God treats Jonah. God could have crushed Jonah here but all He says to Jonah is, “Jonah, do you think it is right for you to be angry?” That’s grace, that’s an invitation to dialogue. Instead of shutting him down, He opens the door to Jonah.

Hot Wind of Judgment

You know what I love about Jonah’s dummy-spit? Here is Jonah, a prophet from God and he says his bit to God in no uncertain terms. “God I just don’t agree; I just wish you wouldn’t have done that; that’s why I ran in the opposite direction. You shouldn’t have done that.” God could have crushed him then and there. But no! God simply said, “Jonah is it right for you to be angry?” He asked Jonah a question; He gave Jonah an invitation to a dialogue. Come on Jonah, is this right? On the one hand, we have Nineveh, this evil place, that’s just experienced the hugest blessing from God and not just Nineveh – but they dominated all the other nations – they brutally oppressed them – these other nations have just been blessed. This is huge and Jonah should be rejoicing. He rebelled, he went through the storm, he went through the fish, he did the tough job he had to do, there was success; there was blessing. Yippee! Instead, Jonah’s throwing a little tantrum. He storms out of Nineveh – why? Because God is gracious, God is merciful, God is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, which are exactly – exactly – the qualities that God is applying to Jonah right now.

Jonah is one of God’s people; Jonah is one of God’s prophets. Jonah is spitting the dummy. God could have punished him, but no, God is gracious, God is merciful, God is slow to anger, God is abounding in steadfast love. God’s gracious forbearance is exactly what stops Him from punishing Jonah. And somehow the irony of that escapes Jonah in his anger and his tantrum. It escapes us in our anger and in our tantrums.

Ok, Jonah’s had his tantrum. What next? Let’s have a look at in chapter 4, from verses 6 to 8. “The Lord God appointed a bush and He made it come up over Jonah to give shade over his head, to save him from discomfort. So Jonah was very happy about the bush, but when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm to attack the bush – so the bush withered. 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 he asks that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

Jonah storms out of Nineveh, he makes himself a tent by the side of the road and he sits down in the shade and he waits to see what’ll happen to Nineveh. Do you see the picture? He leaves in a huff, he’s angry – typical male – goes and withdraws to his cave and God knows it’s going to be hot so God causes this bush to grow up over his tent to give him shade. That’s what it says – God appoints a bush to grow quickly to give Jonah shade, to save him from discomfort. How does Jonah react? Well, how would you and I react? Jonah was very happy, why wouldn’t he be? God had just installed an air-conditioning system. Finally something for him; finally some good luck after this bad luck. Does Jonah say to God, “Well, thanks a lot!”? No! Does he acknowledge that the shade is a blessing from God? No! No, he just enjoys the creature comforts. Does that remind you of anyone? When things are going badly sometimes, we want to blame God, and when they go well, we just want to enjoy it, and sometimes we forget to give God the glory and the thanks, and yet the next day – the next day God sends this worm to kill the bush and God prepares a sultry east wind and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head. It was so bad that he wanted to die.

In the context, God has just used this guy in the most powerful, amazing way, not just in the life of the hundreds of thousands in this great city of Nineveh, but in all the other countries that Nineveh impacted on with its brutality. Now in this success, Jonah could have gone to Nineveh and gone to a coffee shop and had coffee and cake or an ice-cream; He could have gone and enjoyed the blessing with the other people; they would have blessed him because they felt blessed. No, Jonah was so stubborn, he decided to sit it out in the sun and he would rather die than go and share in the blessing that God has poured out on Nineveh.

And the tree comes and the worm hits the tree and the sun beats down and the sultry east wind blows. What’s God up to here? Is this some cat and mouse game? – This big macro blessing on Nineveh and now this micro thing that He is doing with Jonah and the tree and the worm and the sun and the wind? We are going to look at God talking with Jonah, but right here, through the tree and the worm and the sun and the wind, God is talking graciously to Jonah, using circumstances to lead Jonah out of his stubborn rebellion. He uses the hot wind and the sun and circumstances that we can’t control, to talk to us. That’s what God does and God is saying to Jonah through this bush and this worm, “Hey, listen, I’m the one who makes the bush to grow, I’m the one that causes it to die, I’m the one that causes the sun to shine, I’m the one that causes the east wind to blow, I am who I am. I am your sovereign God.

God Has His Say

Well, it’s been a long journey that Jonah’s been on. He was called to Nineveh, he rebelled, he went on that ship through the storm, he was cast into the ocean, in the belly of the fish, up on the beach and a second call and he went to Nineveh and here he is, at the end of it all, throwing a tanty.

It strikes me, that this is not just a single story. There are three stories interwoven in this Book of Jonah. The first one is the story of Nineveh – God had a plan for Nineveh, to bless them, to set them free from their evil ways. But God had a plan for Jonah too – a plan that was somehow wrapped up with Nineveh and all around that is wrapped God’s story; God’s plan. Nineveh, Jonah, God! A plan for Nineveh, huge global story of blessing, but through it all, God’s hand is on Jonah. He takes him through danger and peril, He protects him, He puts up with his rebellion and to me, I see God gently, gently, using the circumstances of life, sovereignly in Jonah’s life, to bring Jonah home, to turn his heart and move him from his rebellion. The storm, the fish, the powerful proclamation at Nineveh, the tree, the worm, the sun, the wind; all tools in God’s hand. God has brought them all to bear on Jonah, because Jonah has been in stubborn rebellion and the Book of Jonah is the story of God guiding him on a journey back home to God.

Our stubbornness is so deep rooted sometimes; it feels like it’s ingrained into our DNA. We don’t really see it often; we see through it but we don’t see it. I mean, Jesus said that when He was talking about judgment, He said, “How is it that you can go to your neighbour and say, “Let me remove the speck out of your eye,” when you have a log in your own. First, remove the log in your own eye and then go and help take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye, when you can see clearly. Jonah had a big log in his eye. It was the fact that Nineveh didn’t deserve God’s grace – they’re a rotten bunch of people, they should receive God’s judgment and they shouldn’t have a prophet from God like me, come to them and proclaim God’s good news so God can bless them. It clouded his whole judgment and God used the storm and the fish and Nineveh and the tree and the sun and the wind and the worm to engage Jonah in a process – to bring Jonah to a point where he is ready to listen.

So far God has only spoken three times in this story. The first time was that very first call to Nineveh, at the beginning of chapter 1. The second time was the second call to Nineveh, at the beginning of chapter 3 and the third time, we just talked about earlier, is when in chapter 4 verse 4, when God says, “Is it right for you to be angry, Jonah?” But finally God has His say; this is where the story culminates. We are going to read it right now – chapter 4 of the Book of Jonah, verses 9 to 11. This is what it says, “But God finally said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” and Jonah said, “Yes, angry enough to die,” and then the Lord said, “You know, your concerned about that bush; you didn’t labour for it, you didn’t grow it, it came into being overnight and it perished in the night. Shouldn’t I be concerned about Nineveh, that great city which is full of hundreds of thousands of people who don’t know their right hand from their left?” God holds a mirror up to Jonah and says, “Look at your petty concerns; you’re concerned over your comfort, your well being, you’re one person. I grew a tree; it grew in a night – I did it, you didn’t – I took it away – you didn’t – and you want to die over a crummy bush? Me, I’m concerned about the people of Nineveh.” In fact, as Jonah is prepared to die, I think that is pointing forward to the fact that, in brackets, God is saying, “I am so concerned about Nineveh; you know something, I’d send my Son to die for them.”

Sometimes God calls us and we rebel but God is good and gracious. That’s what we see in this story of Jonah and Nineveh and God. When you read this, I would encourage you to sit down and read this story from beginning to end – it will take you all of ten, twelve minutes to do and we can see how God’s mercy and grace is woven through the story. I love the fact that Jonah is able to express to God exactly what he thinks. You know, God doesn’t fall off His twig when we’re angry. If anything, God wants us to express our feelings to Him in prayer and that’s what Jonah did. He prayed to God, saying, “Lord, this is why I didn’t go,” and yet God uses all the circumstances of life, He musters the sun and the wind and anything that He has to and everything that He can; just to teach us, just to give us the space to un-work our stubbornness, to let it flow out, to give us the room to live through our consequences, to come to our senses.

God is so faithful – He was there the whole way – to teach and to guide and to call but at the same time, God is God. He will realize His plans because He is sovereign, He’s above all things. We can argue with Him, we can disagree with Him, but we’ll never win. We will never overcome God because God is God. Obedience is how we show Him we love Him, whether we agree with Him, whether we don’t agree with Him. He call us to do His will and to live out His plan and to be obedient to Him and yet to struggle sometimes, but, here’s the good news – God is faithful, God is merciful, God is slow to anger, God abounds is His steadfast love. The question is, do we want to be a part of His plan – will we take the space and the adverse circumstances of life – the consequences of our own stubbornness and rebellion? Will we take that opportunity that God gives us to work it out of our system, to get on with life, to enjoy the life that God has given us and to do what He has called us to do?