Salvation Is of the Lord | Jonah
Brad O’Dell | July 13, 2025

Good morning! Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to the book of Jonah in the Old Testament, one of the minor prophets.

We have been in a series on the minor prophets, or the Book of the Twelve, this summer, and this morning we get to cover a book that probably all of us do have some background in. In preparation for this sermon, last night before my daughter’s bedtime I read with her in her little rhyme Bible about the story of Jonah, and it struck me that that’s maybe the most substantial foundation that a lot of us have in the book, or something similar to that.

When Jonah comes to mind, we think, “Oh, yeah, that’s that rascally prophet! God told him to go one way, and he ran the other direction, kind of like a toddler before bedtime, giggling as they run away. And God said, ‘Jonah, no, no,’ so he had to send a whale,” and of course it’s a big smiling whale, “and that whale gets Jonah, swims him back, spits him out at Nineveh. Jonah has a change of heart, and the rest of the story is all good.”

A lot of us just don’t know the book of Jonah much more than that. That’s not the end of the story, incidentally, we’ll see today. I do think the book of Jonah has—first of all, it’s a lot more serious and weighty than that, but also it’s a lot more rich and complex than that, and I think there’s a lot to enjoy there.

Jonah is one of the more stylistically-designed books in all of Scripture, and we’re going to try to see some of that today, but we’re only going to see small bits of it. What the author did is he put a lot of effort into letting us see this story with a lot of freshness, a lot of intricacy, so that the story lands on our hearts. So this morning (to look forward at what the sermon’s going to feel like), we’re going to spend some time going through the book of Jonah, making sure we understand the story, making sure we see what the author wanted us to see. Then, about halfway through our time, we’ll transition to some various ways that we can apply this in our lives, but only after we really see what the author labored to let us see in this book.

A few background things before we kick into it. We need to put this in the timeframe. Jonah is prophesying in Nineveh. Nineveh is a great city in the broader nation of Assyria, a big political rival of Israel’s. He’s going to be prophesying about thirty to fifty years before Assyria will actually take over all the northern Mesopotamia area and conquer northern Israel itself. So he’s prophesying about forty years before that.

Jonah is a prophet in northern Israel, and he’s actually prophesying in a pretty unique time in that nation’s history, where he was prophesying some success and prosperity that’s going to happen to the nation under Jeroboam II. Jeroboam II was one of the more politically successful kings in Israel’s history, even though he was still wicked in God’s eyes. But he expands the borders of Israel to something near what actually David himself had expanded them to under his reign.

This is where Jonah’s at. He’s pretty happy, he’s pretty comfortable there; and God calls him out of the situation into a different situation, and we’re going to see how he takes that calling.

Before we start reading, I’m going to read out of the ESV this morning, but I have made some translation changes in various parts that I think help bring out the language in the Hebrew a little more clearly, and also I’ve highlighted some words that are these verbal repetitions that the author wants us to recognize. It’s a little easier to see in the Hebrew than in the English translations we have.

It’s only in Jonah 1 that I’ve translated the word that we see in our Bible “the LORD,” in all caps, to Yahweh, and I think it helps us kind of see the interplay there in Jonah 1 a little bit more. So, verse 1, let’s kick into this book.

“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 [Yahweh].”

Right here at the beginning, if we are an Israelite reader and we have some background in the faith, there are some striking things that come out. First, I want us to see that we get our first instance of a word that’s going to be really key in the book, and that’s the word “evil,” or its cognate form, a different form of the word, “disaster” or “calamity.” So, we’re going to see this theme come up a lot, and we’ll try to track it.

But we also see that there is a striking difference in this prophetic account from all the other prophetic accounts, in the first few verses. It’s pretty common for God to go to a prophet and say, “Arise and go to this place,” and almost always the next words are, “So [so-and-so] arose and went.” He would say, “Arise and go do this and this,” and so the Hebrew actually puts in, word for word, “And so [so-and-so] arose and went and did this and this.” It always puts that specific repetition in there to make it clear that they went and did exactly what God said.

Here, at the beginning of this book, we hear the same prophetic formula: “Arise, go to Nineveh.” So it says, “Jonah rose and he…fled” the opposite direction. Very different.

There are other prophets in the Old Testament who question their call from God. Moses complained about having a speech impediment. He said, “God, I’m not sure if I can do this.” Isaiah said, “Woe is me because of this commission that’s been put on me.” Jeremiah said, “Lord, I think I’m too young for this. Are you sure I’m the right guy?” But Jonah is the only prophet who outright refuses and does the opposite of what God tells him to do.

So let’s see what happens with this prophet, starting in Jonah 1:4.

“But [Yahweh] 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.”

Skip forward to verse 10. Essentially what they do is they try to figure out who’s responsible for God sending a storm at them. They figured out it’s Jonah, who serves Yahweh. Verse 10:

“Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, ‘What is this that you have done!’ For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of [Yahweh], because he had told them.

“Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?’ For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, ‘Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.’”

Now, this sounds very noble of Jonah, right? “Hey, I know this is about me; I will sacrifice myself for the sake of you all.” However, I think what we’re supposed to see is that this is just another way for him to avoid doing what God has called him to, and he would rather die than fulfill the commission God has given him. In fact, it’s even worse than that, because it seems like he wants to avoid the moral weight of throwing himself into the sea and taking his own life, so he asks them to take the moral weight of it, to throw him into the sea. We’re going to see that they are wary of the same thing, and we’re going to see it in their use of the phrase “innocent blood,” a very important, prophetic phrase, in the next few verses. Verse 13:

“Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land [they don’t want to throw Jonah in the sea], but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Therefore they called out to [Yahweh], ‘O [Yahweh], let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O [Yahweh], have done as it pleased you.’ So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared [Yahweh] exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to [Yahweh] and made vows.

“And [Yahweh] appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”

A few things, before we move on, that I want us to see.

(1) First, the reference to three days and three nights. In my opinion, I think this is the author indicating to us that Jonah actually died in this event, whether in the sea or in the belly of the fish itself. Three days and three nights is the ancient way of indicating a full cycle of death, and it’s a paradigm that carries over into the New Testament. We see it with Lazarus, but more importantly we see it with Jesus, who was in the grave for three days and three nights. That’s important, because it indicates a full cycle of death that the resurrection now makes much more miraculous, coming out of it.

(2) Second, Jonah’s death at the bottom of the sea completes a trajectory that the author’s been trying to key us into with the repetition of the word “down.” It says that Jonah went down to Joppa, then he went down into the ship, then he went down into the lower part of the ship, then he lay down. And if we go into Jonah 2 we see that Jonah sinks down, down, down into the very depths of the sea; in fact, into Sheol itself—that is, the place of the dead in ancient Jewish thought. So we see this is, what the picture of a journey is like when one walks in rebellion against God.

(3) Third, we see an opposite trajectory in what we’re going to call the pagan sailors in this sense—pagan from the idea of the Israelites, and I don’t mean pagan in a pejorative or dehumanizing sense, the way it might come into our minds. What I’m just trying to indicate is these are people who worship false gods or worship as gods things that are not gods in themselves. That’s paganism. So we’re trying to set this in distinction.

What they do is they have an opposite trajectory, where they go from fear—this is the word that’s used—they go from fear of the storm to then a generic fear of gods to then a genuine fear of the one true God. They actually pray a pretty biblically-sound prayer and offer sacrifices to God. The language is very similar to other prophetic accounts; this seems like some type of genuine heart recognition of God’s sovereignty and God’s trueness as the one true God.

The idea is this: in the opening chapter of Jonah, the positive example of godliness does not come from Israel’s chosen prophet Jonah, but instead comes from the pagan sailors who did not even know who Yahweh was at the beginning of this story. What happens is the book of Jonah stands in the Old Testament Scriptures as something like a parable for Old Testament Israel.

Jesus used parables to draw you into a story and then have a point that hit you and made you reflect, to see if you actually were against God’s heart and ways, at the end of it. This is the way it works. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan in his day, a heretic Samaritan who actually was more righteous than the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. He did this to show the hypocrisy and pride of the religious leaders, and how they had missed the heart of God.

In the same way, the story of Jonah is in the Hebrew Scriptures to highlight the pride and hypocrisy of Old Testament Israel through the positive example of what they would see as just these pagan sailors who aren’t worth as much to God as we are worth to God, right? Soon to come we’re going to see this happens with the Ninevites as well.

Go to Jonah 2. We’re not going to read chapter 2, but what chapter 2 includes is a thanksgiving psalm. Jonah finds himself alive, or he’s spared, whichever take you have there, and he’s happy about it, and he goes into a thanksgiving psalm. On the surface this looks like a very pious, orthodox psalm from someone with a changed heart; but the song has a lot of issues with it that I think actually present something other than that.

First—this is important—there’s no confession of sin in this thanksgiving psalm. That’s really important. In all the other psalms of thanksgiving, if the reason you have been delivered is because God delivered you out of your sin, it starts with a confession of sin and a recognition that “I’m the one who put myself in this situation.”

Second, Jonah doesn’t do that. He puts the reason for his troubles on God and God alone, and he doesn’t recognize his part in it.

Third, even right after this occasion where it is the pagan foreigners who actually were the ones who had a godly virtue in them, Jonah has a line in the song that makes it seem like he is still superior to all foreigners. I think, when you read between the lines, we get a bit of a foreshadowing of what’s still to come with our prophet in this book.

Pick up in Jonah 3. The fish has spit him out near Nineveh, and we get a repeat of chapter 1. Chapter 3 parallels chapter 1 in lots of ways; I’d love to show it to you, but I’d be pointing to all kinds of things. We don’t have time for it. Jonah 3:1:

“Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.’ So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh.”

That’s the paradigm we're looking for. That’s what we’re used to seeing. He went

“...according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was [a great city belonging to God], three days’ journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.”

Skip forward to verse 10.

“When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.”

So, here we have in chapter 3 where it seems like Jonah is now on the right path. He’s doing what God has called him to. However, when you really look at this short little message, as the author’s presented it to us, we find some more problems. Jonah’s heart is still not in the right place. It’s only five words in the Hebrew language, and it’s about as short of a message as someone could possibly say to indicate that they are doing what God has called them to, but also trying to get out from under it in every way they can. It’s essentially the minimum that Jonah can possibly do to be able to fulfill his commission.

In the words of one commentator, “His sermon is still very subversive of his commission. It does not identify Yahweh as the source of the warning.” That seems really important. What god are we responding to? “It doesn’t explain the reason for the coming disaster or calamity.” That also seems really important. “It doesn’t offer any call for repentance or the hope of God relenting from his judgment.” That also seems really important.

However, despite Jonah’s very lackluster preaching to the people of Nineveh, the people overwhelmingly respond. It’s kind of comical to read. They put sackcloth on everybody, from adults to children. They put it on all the animals! They do everything they can to show God that “we are trying to repent of our sin.” So they hear of their evil and they repent from their evil, and then God relents from the evil that he is going to send on them, or the disaster that he’s going to send on them.

Now, we need to recognize—if we read just a few more pages in the Bible we’re going to come to the book of Nahum, and we know Nahum is also against Nineveh. We realize that within a few decades of this event, Nineveh’s back to its own wicked ways, and this is not a full-fledged conversion of the Ninevites in Assyria to Yahweh as the one true God. However, it still is a shocking repentance event for the Jewish people and the Jewish readers to read about in their day, and it stands as another indictment on them in this book. Because here’s the thing: if even wicked Nineveh could come to repent of their sins enough to receive at least a temporary reprieve from God’s judgment, how is it that the nation of Israel, which has had prophets upon prophets upon prophets and they have access to the word of God and the temple and the whole history as the people of God—how is it that they still refuse to do the same, and they end up receiving the same judgment that Nineveh ultimately will receive?

Now, before we move on to Jonah 4, I want to address something really quickly. It should kind of confuse us a little bit when we’re reading Jonah 3 to see how quickly the Ninevites respond. It’s almost jarring that they responded so quickly. I think it helps to know a few things going on around that time that might make us understand why the Ninevites would be so receptive to a prophet from one of their national enemies, a nation they planned to conquer, coming to them and preaching at them what they should do. There are a few things we should know that were happening during this time.

Nineveh, and Assyria itself, was in a tight spot. They were in rough conditions for about thirty or forty years here. If we look at the historical records, there are records of plagues that afflicted them, there are records of very high inflation, as much as 400 percent. There are these revolts in the kingdom. Kings did not go out to war anymore because they had to stay home to keep things under control. In fact, one of those kings ended up getting assassinated. There were a lot of natural events that happened here. There are earthquakes, also an eclipse at this time, all seen as bad omens in the heavens. So the people of Nineveh are like, “Ah, we’re not sure we’re doing things right! I don’t know what gods are mad at us, but some gods are mad at us, and things are not working very well.”

Beyond that, I think there’s a connection to Jonah coming to them from a fish. In the Akkadian language, the town Nineveh could be translated to something like “fish town.” In our earliest records of them they are denoted by a fish symbol, and also one of the chief goddesses of Nineveh is a half-fish, half-woman deity named Ananshi; and they have some other fish parallels that get into their divine understanding. So God seems to have been at work bringing Jonah to them, even in Jonah’s rebellion, through a fish. Nineveh seemed to be particularly primed to receive a message at this time from someone who came with a message from a fish. Pretty interesting.

Alright, Jonah 4! This is actually the end of the story, and it’s one that we forget. Let’s see what happens now. After all these events happened and God relented,

“[Now this was exceedingly evil to Jonah], and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’ And the Lord said, ‘[Is it right for you to be angry]?’

To which, of course, Jonah just doesn’t respond.

In the last chapter, the Ninevites have repented of their evil, and in response to that, God had then relented of the disaster and evil he was going to send on them for their sin. And Jonah sees this, and now he’s angry at God, and he considers the actions of God to be evil. Jonah’s heart is still very far from God. In fact, he’s so bitter that he’d rather die than see Nineveh saved.

It’s interesting; Elijah also asked God that he could die, but it was because when he preached his message the people of Israel would not repent. Jonah asked to die because the message he preached actually was successful, and the people do repent.

It’s here, right at the end of the book, that we see what actually has been motivating this staunch, hard-hearted rebellion against God and his resistance to God in Jonah. It’s this: he knew that God was a God of grace and mercy and salvation, and he did not want the possibility of the Assyrians receiving that. He thought, “If anyone doesn’t deserve it, it’s the Assyrians. I will not bring that message to them.”

Now, let’s be a little fair to Jonah here. Jonah has lots of issues, we’ve seen. Let’s be a little fair to Jonah, though. The Assyrians were an exceedingly wicked people. They were very cruel. They were these barbaric conquerors; when they conquered a people, the things that they did to them were just exceedingly wicked and grisly. I think Jonah knew that Assyria’s salvation and thriving would mean that their threat to Israel would increase in kind. If we look at it historically, he was right. Within a generation of these events, Assyria would come across the northern Mesopotamia area and they would conquer Israel in 722 B.C., and the northern tribes of Israel essentially are gone, never to be seen again. They almost conquered the southern nation as well but were held off by God’s grace.

So Jonah probably foresees a little of this. However, what we see from God is that God still wanted to give them a chance to repent, because God is a savior of even the most wretched sinners. That’s something we need to see in God’s character in this book. Even the most wretched sinners, God has a heart for them and a desire for them to repent and come to him. To God, these human souls are just as valuable as the Jewish ones who know him.

That’s what Jonah has yet to learn, and what God will try to teach him in an object lesson here at the end of the book. Jonah 4:5:

“Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city.”

What’s Jonah doing? He goes and sits outside the city, and what he’s hoping for is in this forty-day stretch that all of this will fall apart. The people of Nineveh will fall back into their sin, and God will actually bring the judgment. He kind of wants to just sit and make sure he sees it happen, if it happens.

“Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’ But God said to Jonah, ‘[Is it right for you to be angry over] the plant?’ And he said, ‘Yes, [it is right for me to be angry], angry enough to die.’”

You see where Jonah’s at now.

And the Lord said [this is kind of the point of the book], ‘You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?’”

You see, as Jonah sits and waits for what he hopes will be coming destruction, he essentially experiences what he wants Nineveh to experience. He’s sitting there under the deadly heat and he can’t quite get out from under it, so God comes and he provides some grace, some relief from that heat. But then, just as soon, he takes it away from him, so that that deadly heat comes back on him, and even in a more intense way.

That’s what Jonah wants to happen to Nineveh. God came with a message of judgment, and then he said, “I will relent of that judgment,” and he provided some relief to them. What Jonah wants is for the fire and wrath of God to then come back in on them and to persecute them anyway—righteously persecute them, but persecute them.

So God repeats his question. “Is it right for you to be angry? Jonah, you’re sad over a plant and your temporary discomfort, but are not the lives of 120,000 people who are lost in sin and deception—they don’t morally know their right hand from their left—aren’t they worth so much more? Should I not pity them?”

And the book ends, right there, with that question. It’s a standing question for the Israelite readers. Are their hearts in alignment with God’s heart in relation to the nations around them? And it’s a standing question that we have to ask ourselves about people that we might consider enemies in our life.

So, as we go to application, I think what I want to say is there’s a core application question and some other ways we can ask questions of this book, to apply it.

The core question is this: Do we see our enemies with the yes of God, or, in the language of Jesus, do we love our enemies as Jesus calls us to do?

Some of you might have specific people who, when I say “enemy,” they come to mind, or a group of people that comes to mind. I would say focus in there and try to see, “Lord, where is my heart for those people?”

But I think for a lot of us, our minds don’t really go anywhere. We’re like, “I don’t know, I can’t think of anyone I’d call my enemy; that’s pretty strong.” But here’s where I think in a broader application all of us experience some of this and maybe fall into it in various ways in our culture. I think it’s this: in the political environment we all live in today, I think we can easily fall into enemy thinking without realizing it.

Now, before I get into this, personally I don’t want to minimize the active political issues of our time and their potential real impact on you and on your family and on your values. I don’t want to minimize that at all. I would warn against catastrophizing every single event and issue the way we are called to do by the media out there, but I would also not minimize it. Those things are important, and they’re important to care about and something to take very strong stances on.

However, I think where we fall into error is when, in fear and disdain of our political counterparts, we, like Jonah, are mostly thinking about and wishing for their downfall or seeing them fail or seeing them punished for the wrong things they’ve done. We do this much, much more than, or maybe even exclusive to, thinking about the state of their souls or feeling sadness over the deception that Satan has wrapped them in, or seeking ways to show them love and bring them the gospel.

More practically, I think this is just one danger that we can look out for, and that’s having too heavy a diet in political media. I think if we have too heavy of a diet in political media it can begin to warp our thinking into something less godly and more worldly and ungodly. The thing about political media is, rarely is the tone of it, as it speaks about issues with the other side of the aisle, one that is consistent with God’s heart of compassion towards all people.

I think if we get too much into this, too heavy of a diet, I think that tone can come into our minds and hearts and we can start thinking in that tone, start feeling in that tone, much more than we are thinking with God’s heart. I think that’s something we can all see happen; it’s something to be careful about. Get good media, get good resources, but be wary of how the tone is starting to affect how you’re thinking, if it’s consistent with God’s heart.

I would ask you this: when was the last time that you actually prayed fervently for the political counterparts who incense you the most and you asked God to give you his eyes to see their dignity and worth and also asked God to give you his heart of love for them, even in the midst of some deep and real disagreements? I think as the people of Jesus, that’s what we’re called to do.

Further application questions—these are questions that I think you can take to most passages of Scripture, and they just help you kind of glean more and focus more and find some areas of application. It’s these:
What do we learn about God from Jonah?
What do we learn about mankind?
How does this point to Jesus and the gospel?
What are my personal takeaways?

That’s a good paradigm that you can take a picture of and use it in a lot of your Scripture study. I’m going to cover the first three; the last one’s going to be for you.

(1) First, just a few things—what do we learn about God?

I think the book overwhelmingly presents that God is sovereign over all things that happen in the world. I think we make a mistake in the book of Jonah if we see Jonah as the main character in the book, and we definitely make a mistake if the fish is the main character in the book, right? No, the main protagonist in the story is God. God is the active one who makes all things happen in the book, and Jonah is simply a foil for God to fulfill his purposes.

We see this, really, in all the action verbs in the book. We have God even throwing storms around like they’re bowling balls, right? But we especially see it in the repetition of this word “appoint.” God appoints a fish to go do his work, and then he appoints a plant to grow, and then he appoints a worm to destroy the plant, and then he appoints a scorching east wind to blow on Jonah. The idea is that God is in control of everything that happens. He is the sovereign one.

I think God’s sovereignty, God’s control, God’s lordship over everything in the world is one of those doctrines that as Christians we would all say, “Yes, I believe that. I know that. I don’t really question or doubt that.” But I do think, if we’re honest, there are often times that we can live and behave as if it’s not true or just something that we’re not paying attention to and considering. We can be like Jonah in this regard.

What’s really peculiar about Jonah in this book is he makes a lot of true, orthodox statements about who God is, and then everything he does is as if those things that he said were true were definitely not true or just weren’t worthy of him paying attention to. I think we have some aspects where we can do the same. I think sometimes when things are going well in life we can forget that it’s at God’s hand that we’ve received these things, and we forget to be thankful regularly to God. Sometimes we can be prideful and say, “Man, look what I’ve accomplished! I’m pretty proud of myself.” Sometimes where we might see that pride come in is if that thing that we think we’ve earned starts to get shaken or we start to lose it, and we get bitter at God, because we said, “I earned this; I deserve it.” Some of that thinking can come in.

I think, of course, when things in life are hard, again we can forget to come to God. We can forget to seek to trust him and his sovereign hand, even in the difficult things that we don’t understand. In hard times, we can avoid God in anger. Sometimes we forget him because we’re just too wrapped up in trying to fix it ourselves. “I’m the one who can handle this; I’ve got this.” Sometimes we just decide we’re going to do what we want to do to medicate the pain; I don’t really care what God wants. Sometimes we can miss the hand of the author in all those seasons of our lives.

Maybe sometimes it just looks like this: we can maybe go days, weeks, months, maybe even just hours, and never really just stop and ask God, “Hey, for this season of my life, what’s your will? What would you have me prioritize in this season? What would you have me focus on? What would you have me learn?” I think we can all fall into thinking that says we are essentially the main character in our story and it’s our pursuits that are the main thing that’s happening. It’s worth us remembering, as we look at Jonah, that God is the main character in the story of this world. We are in his story; he is not in ours. We are here to fulfill his purposes in the world; he is not there to be our handmaiden to help us fulfill our desires in the world.

Secondly, we see God’s heart for the nations. This is important, and I think it’s very clear in Jonah. The book of Jonah, really interestingly, records one of the only positive responses to God’s preaching of repentance—it’s one of the only positive responses that we get in the whole Book of the Twelve, and really in prophetic literature broadly. What we see is that, though in the Book of the Twelve we’re going to see lots of judgment oracles that come against the nations that surround Israel, and lots of “day of the Lord” proclamations against them that judgment’s coming, we also see that the nations are a part of God’s plan of salvation, where all peoples, languages, and tongues will be brought into God’s chosen people. Though Nineveh doesn’t get there all the way, the sailors might have gotten there, and what we do see is God has a heart to reach out to them and to bring salvation to others as well.

This is a big theme of the Bible. This isn’t a new revelation in Jonah; it’s not like we haven’t seen this in the Old Testament. God said this to Abraham himself, right at the beginning of the nation of Israel. The prophets have many sermons talking about bringing the Gentiles in, even some of these nations that were great enemies of Israel. However, this is something that the nation of Israel greatly missed, and they especially never had any concerted effort to try to truly be a light to the nations, those who brought people to a knowledge of the one true God.

So the question for us is this: is this heartbeat of God to bring the gospel to the nations, is it a heartbeat of ours as well? I mean truly. Is it actually a heartbeat of ours, or is it something that we kind of think is nice but it stays out here and it never really lands on our hearts? Is it something we think about here and there when a sermon comes up but not something we really feel that often?

I think many of us have gone good portions of our Christian lives, and if we’re honest we could say, “I kind of scarcely thought about those who have never heard the gospel and have no access to it. I’ve scarcely thought about those who are still stuck in darkness and in the deception of the evil one.”

Like Jonah, who was pretty comfortable in his prosperous nation, we also live in a prosperous nation that’s pretty comfortable, and we have pretty stable, biblically-grounded lives. Those are all good things, by and large, right? But what can happen is that because of this comfort and peace, we might forget to think about those who are still far from God. As those who have been sought out by grace and saved by God’s kindness, I think it’s incumbent upon us to regularly try to bring our hearts into alignment with God’s in this area and just stop and pray somewhat frequently for those who don’t yet know the gospel, and let our hearts break for those who are still lost, without hope and without God in the world, as Paul says in the book of Ephesians.

(2) Second application question: What do we learn about ourselves?

First, in our sin we can be like the pagan Gentiles. Sin makes us so that, like the people of Nineveh, as God says, morally we cannot tell our right hand from our left hand. This is a good lesson for us to remember. Even if we are Christians and we’re saved now, this is what continued sin in our lives does to us: it warps our reason and our understanding. It darkens our hearts. It produces in us all kinds of wickedness; it produces in us perverseness, it produces in us anger, it produces in us violence. It will twist our wills to actually pursue the things that we used to know when we were in our sober minds, we used to know would destroy us, and to desire those that when we’re more sober-minded those things would have disgusted us. This is what sin does to us.

Like Paul says in Romans 7, those things that we know are good we start to see as constraining and undesirable, but those things that we know are evil we somehow love and we keep giving ourselves to. “Wretched [people who we are]! Who will deliver [us] from this body of death?” Our only hope is in God, who gives us the victory in Christ. We’re not any better than the Ninevites. In sin, we can fall into the same errors.

Also, sin makes us like Jonah. I think all of us, if we’re honest, we can say, “I can be like Jonah in my life.” We all have pretty strong preferences for what we want our lives to be, what we want them to look like, the things we want to do, the things we don’t want to do; the things we want to give our time to, the things we really don’t want to give our time to. We can be pretty jealous of those, and when we feel God pressing on those things at different seasons of our lives, let’s be honest: sometimes we can dig in and we can resist. We might try to run the other direction and see if we can get away with it.

I would just ask—and the book of Jonah is a good time to stop and ask—what’s that area for you right now, in your life? Is there an area like that for you in your life right now that the Lord brings to mind? What’s an area that God has been calling you to or you’ve been resistant or neglectful to actually do it? Or maybe, what’s something that God has been telling you to give up in your life, but you keep holding onto it and cherishing it because you’re not ready to give it up yet?

Here’s another direct application right in this point. There might be someone here who’s actually being called to foreign missions, to the unreached. Like Jonah, it could be you just don’t want to go. For some reason, you’ve felt the call of God, but you don’t want to bring your family into it, you don’t want to endure the difficulty, the danger, the discomfort. But you genuinely—you know it—you have a sense that God is calling you to go to those who have not yet heard in the world. I would just ask, are you like Jonah, and are you resisting? Are you running the other way?

Or—this is for all of us—have some of us just turned a blind eye to God and we’ve just never asked the question of him because we don’t want to hear the answer? That’s also resisting and being hard-hearted, in a different way.

(3) Third point: How does this point to Jesus and the gospel? I think we see two things.

As Jonah was a prophet to these foreign nations, Jesus is our perfect prophet. From the foreigner’s perspective, the story of Jonah is really the story of the gospel for us. Jonah was this prophet of the one true God, who came from his homeland to reveal a God who is holy and sovereign, yes, but he’s also a God of grace and salvation. This is what we experience with Jesus. Jesus came from heaven, his homeland, and he came to reveal a God who calls us to repentance from our sin, yes, but also he comes with a message of salvation by God’s grace.

As we believe in the message of our good prophet, we are saved from the punishment of sin, and we actually get to become partakers of God’s glory along with Christ. There might be someone here that that’s you. You haven’t made that step. You have not believed in the message that Jesus has brought, that there is salvation in his name, that he can be Lord of your life, and this is what you’re called to, and you’re called to follow him in faith and give your life to him as Lord.

I would just say, don’t resist anymore. Don’t be like Jonah. Let today be the day of salvation. Catch someone—catch me after church and let’s start that conversation about what it looks like to follow Christ.

Last point: he is our substitute. Like Jonah, we said in our sin we’re all hostile to God. We’re all running from him, we’re all resistant to him. We want to be lord of our own lives, with God being subject to us; yet even while we were enemies of God, God saves us in his mercy. However—this is important—unlike Jonah, we do not get thrown into the sea and into Sheol to experience the punishment of our sin first. No, Jesus, our substitute, goes into the crashing and chaotic seas for us, and he goes all the way down to death and the grave. And he doesn’t stay there! He rises to new life, in victory over sin and death, and he gives us that new life.

This is what that looks like. It says that, in the language of the prophets, he will take our sin-hardened hearts that are resistant to God and he will replace them with hearts that love God, that know God, and that desire God’s lordship in our lives. Now, with the Westminster Confession, we can say we can glorify God and enjoy him forever, as we were designed to do all along. Amen? It’s a great joy, what Jesus does for us as our substitute and as our prophet.

So those are my application questions. There’s one left, and that one’s for you. What are your personal takeaways? What did God put on your mind, your heart as something for you to pray about? Jot down some thoughts in our reflection time. Let’s pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the gospel of Jesus. God, we confess we can be like Jonah. It’s striking to read how stubborn, hard-hearted, bitter, angry, proud he is, and then it just takes us two seconds to realize, “I can be all those things.” God, I deserve to be thrown into the sea; I deserve death; I deserve the rebuke of the Lord. But God, you, in your grace and your kindness, sent Jesus to take the punishment for my sin against a holy God for me, and you come to me in compassion and in kindness and salvation and you saved me. You changed my heart when I couldn’t change it myself, and then you called me to a purpose that is full of joy. You grow me fully into the image of Christ over my life, which is what I was always called to be. That’s all of our stories if we’re believers in Christ this morning. We thank you for your grace, that you are a God slow to anger but abounding in steadfast love. Lord, would you encourage us in those truths again this morning? Would you call us to your purposes? We don’t want to be resistant. We don’t want to be proud. We don’t want to be acting like we are lord of our lives. You are the Lord of our lives, Lord. What are you calling us to today? Give us the courage and the strength to follow where you’re leading. It’s in your name, Jesus, we pray. Amen.