Tasting the Gruel of Love

Running Away From God Part 2

Dr. Larry Thorson
July 12, 2009

Jonah 1:3

3 But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD.

This summer I’m doing a sermon series about that great Sunday School story of Jonah and the whale. Just to refresh you a bit, Jonah gets a word from the Lord to go to the capital of the evil empire of Assyria called Nineveh and preach against it. The Assyrians were kind of like Hitler’s Nazis in that they had killed off thousands of Jews in a sort of ethnic cleansing exercise. To send Jonah into Assyria would be like God sending an American into Nazi Berlin in 1943 to preach against Hitler.

Now can you blame Jonah for not wanting to go? What do you think of a God who would send someone he supposedly loves into such a harms way? Jonah runs away in the opposite direction and it’s a little hard to blame him even though he is running from God.

There’s a little detail that we would flip over nowadays…the text says Jonah paid the fare. This is actually a big deal. In the ancient world, money was still relatively new. It had been a barter economy, and money was scarce especially among the people of Israel. Hardly anybody would be able to do what Jonah did. Jonah had money enough to buy passage for a long voyage, out of his pocket. He had mobility, he had options. Here's one of the dangerous things about money: having money makes it easier to think you can run away from God, because you've got options.

So Jonah runs away and gets on a ship headed for Tarshish. People have been headed for that ship a long time. He thinks he's running towards safety. He thinks he's running towards opportunity and security, but maybe what really looks safe from a human perspective is not actually safe at all. Maybe the only real safe place is to be in the will of God for your life, even if the will of God takes you to a scary place you don't want to go.

4 Then the LORD sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. Pause here…the literal word for violent in the Hebrew text, is great. It's the same word that described the great city of Nineveh, but now it's God doing great or violent things, sending a great wind and a great storm. "5 All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.

You’ve got to understand that this is a major league storm. These are professional sailors who don't panic easily, but they panic now. They're so scared they take their cargo, their treasures and throw them overboard. A ship like that is a big deal, a voyage would take, in some cases, years. In the ancient days when the life span was pretty short, this is your chance, maybe your one chance for great wealth and now they're selling off the whole company. Not even selling it, but giving it away, throwing all their hopes into the sea. This is how bad the storm was.

Next, they start praying but notice who they pray to. “…each cried out to his own god.” Now outside of Israel, the ancient world did not generally have the idea of monotheism, that is one great god. They thought of little tribal gods for each little ethnic group or tribal group. Each one prayed to their own god. When the sea is calm, any old name for any old god is okay, but when a storm hits, everything changes, and now you're hoping one of those gods turns out to be real.

Does anybody know what the prophet Jonah was doing at that point? But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep., 6 The captain went to him and said, "How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish."

Here’s a pagan Gentile ship captain calling the supposed man of God to prayer. The prophet is doing what pagans do…sleeping when it's prayer time.

7 Then the sailors said to each other, "Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity." They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. Of course the lot would fall on Jonah, of course. When you’re trying to run from God it always falls on you.

8 So they asked him, "Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What kind of work do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?"

9 He answered, "I am a Hebrew and I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land."

10 This terrified them and they asked, "What have you done?" (They knew he was running away from the LORD, because he had already told them so.)

This terrified the sailors. Literally this says, "And the people feared a great fear." They had been praying to a bunch of tribal gods. Then they asked Jonah, "What's going on?" Jonah says, there is one God, He is the God of Abraham and Sarah. He is the God of Moses and Miriam. He is the God who wants to be known by people. He is the God who created the seas and the lands. That's language that all Gentiles would know.

Now this is the reason for the parenthesis in the text. The sailors already knew that Jonah was running away from his god, they figured that's just the tribal god of Israel. Assyrians have their god, Tarshish has their god, Israel has their god or their gods. They figured, he's just running away from his own god. Then

they see this storm, and Jonah says, "There is the God. He's the one that sent this storm, far away from Israel. He is real, and He reigns over Heaven and Earth, and He has a name, and He wants to be known." And they fear with a great fear.

See, they come to know Jonah's god, on this ship of Tarshish in the middle of a storm. If Jonah had come to them in pride, as a successful prophet, and said, "Men of Tarshish, I want you to know, my God is bigger than your god, my God is better than your god. He's the supreme being," they would have dismissed him because it would have felt like it was just about ethnic tribal superiority. Jonah comes to them not saying anything about God. He doesn't even want them to know that he knows God. He waited until he had to, to talk about God, and one of the reasons that they are going to believe Jonah is that he comes to them as a screw up, as a knuckle head.

This will be the greatest mass Gentile conversion he has ever seen, and it is Jonah's failure that God uses to bring these people to faith. Whatever else this book is, it is not a story about a human plan. The Bible is not a story about a human plan.

Well, the sea keeps getting worse, it keeps getting rougher. The storm keeps getting stronger. The sailors ask Jonah, "What should we do to make the sea calm down for us?" I can imagine Jonah saying something like "Pick me up and throw me into the sea and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you." Now for the first time, Jonah says, "I'm not going to run from God anymore. God, whatever it takes, whatever the cost is, I will not run from You anymore."

The next amazing development of the story is that the sailors won’t throw him overboard. They don't want to sacrifice Jonah. Instead, the text says, "The men did their best to row back to land. But they could not for the sea grew even wilder than before." Their lives are at stake, but they don't want to sacrifice the life of this Hebrew stranger. It's amazing, because again, these are the Hebrew Scriptures. These sailors on the ship of Tarshish have more compassion, more raw humanity on the Hebrew prophet than the Hebrew prophet had on the people of Nineveh.

Part of what the writer is telling us is that you have to be real careful about judging who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, who is on God's side and who is not on God's side. You have to be real careful in making snap judgments about that kind of thing. There is no room for pride and a spirit of superiority

or exclusitivity or judgmentalism on the people of God.

So the sailors of Tarshish, demonstrate all this compassion and humanity, are willing to risk their own lives, try to row the boat onto shore, but the storm is unrelenting. So they say a prayer. Now, they had already been praying, each to their own god. Notice who they prayed to now, "Then they cried out to the Lord, 'Oh Lord, please do not let us die for taking this man's life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man. For You, oh Lord, have done as You pleased.'" You are sovereign. You reign.

Who were they praying to? The Lord. Notice how many times? Three times. The writer is hitting us over the head

with this. They take him to the side of the boat. Now you imagine this moment. Awesome storm, terrified sailors, runaway prophet, capsizing boat... Don't you wonder what's going on in Jonah's mind? He's going to die. He knows he is going to die. But he's tired of running from God. He would rather die than keep running from God, and his body is thrown into the water. Then all of a sudden everything is calm. The storm is gone.

One day Jesus would be in a boat when the storm hit and calm the storm. He still does that for people. "At this, the men greatly feared the Lord." There's that word again. They feared the Lord with a great fear, "…and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord." That's an act of worship. "…and they made vows to Him," as an act of commitment, as an act of devotion.

This is unbelievable, a pagan boat becomes a place of worship. The ship of Tarshish becomes a temple of the Living God. That wasn't Jonah's plan. That's the last thing Jonah was planning on. It turns out that Jonah thought he was running away from God. Jonah thought he would thwart what God wanted to do. It turns out that God is at work in ways that Jonah cannot even begin to dream of. What a God. Now how odd to all the readers of this story in Israel, at this point, pagan Gentiles worshipping the God of Israel on the ship of Tarshish, and Israel's prophet, the man of God, sinking down into the ocean.

If you’re familiar with the Sunday school version of the story you know it doesn’t end there. Next time we return to this book we’ll get into what you’ve all been waiting for…the belly of the whale.

For today I want you to think about whether you've been running from God. Maybe people around you who know you and love you can see it. Maybe you've been running in secret, hidden ways thinking you’d never be caught.

I’ve been fascinated by the story of the fall of the governor of South Carolina. First he said he was just taking a personal hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail when in fact he secretly slipped off to Argentina to meet up with his mistress. Eventually we learn he’s been caring on this affair for five years. Didn’t he think he’d one day get caught? How did he sit in his Episcopal Church week after week and not think he was going to be caught?

We always have the freedom to run from God and God always has the choice to go after us. Maybe a great storm has hit you or is coming. Don’t try to figure out whether this is God sending this storm to bring you back. If you’re running from God you better hope he’s sending a storm after you. Stop running and turn around. That’s what repentance is. Don't wait for the storm to get any worse. Jesus always has the same invitation, "Just come running to me." Running away does not work in life. It just doesn't work.

So let's do this this week: Let's all ponder and reflect and wait and listen. God, is there any place that you're calling me to go like Nineveh? Is there something you're asking me to do that I've been resisting you on? Have I been running from you? Let's really look at that, and maybe three little words “Go to Nineveh” will come to you, your own calling, your own Nineveh. The adventure is just starting. Let's pray.