HelpFinder Bible - Flipbook - Page 1184
Jonah
W H AT W O U L D Y O U like to run away from? What escape routes
have you planned out? All of us long to run away—more often than
we’d like to admit. What do we run from? Marriage, job, friends, pressure, criticism, responsibility, failure, abuse, loneliness, boredom, fear.
There’s much in our lives from which we’d like to escape.
The book of Jonah is the story of a person who
What you will be
reading about
ran away from God. God wanted Jonah to travel
to the wicked city of Nineveh in a foreign land
1:1-17
and preach to the people there. These were not
Jonah runs away from God
just any people: They were the Assyrians, the
2:1-10
greatest enemies of Israel, known for their gloJonah prays inside the fish
rification of evil and their brutal torture prac3:1-10
tices. Jonah’s assignment was to call the people
Jonah goes to Nineveh
of Nineveh to repent, to turn to God. Jonah was
4:1-11
afraid that they actually would and that God
God’s mercy makes Jonah
angry
would forgive them. He could not imagine the
evil Assyrians getting out of the judgment they
so richly deserved. He could understand forgiveness supplied in full measure
to his own people, but this was too much to handle!
Why did Jonah have such a hard time with this? We don’t know, but it is
easy to imagine that one of his family members may have been the victim of a
brutal Assyrian attack or war crime. When we think in terms of our own feelings if someone in our family were attacked or molested, we can empathize
with Jonah.
Jonah wasn’t ready to deal with this prospect, so he ran away. Instead of
going east toward Nineveh, Jonah boarded a ship toward Tarshish in Spain, far
to the west. He didn’t just run away—he fled in the opposite direction!
Of course, it is not possible to run away from God. When Jonah boarded the
ship, God was already there. When he sailed the high seas, he was sailing on
seas God had created. There in the storm, he met God. And in the belly of the
great fish, he understood the mercy of a tenacious God who pursues all people
with undying love.
Jonah’s is not a fish story but a story of trying to run from God to avoid obeying him. It is a story of finding God wherever we go, no matter how far away
or how remote. For Jonah, it took a storm and a great fish to learn obedience.
For us, God may send an entirely different classroom where we learn to obey
him. It may be an accident, a near-death experience, or a terrible disease. It
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