Michael-Grams: M-G: 9.10.19 // Would You Rather Die Than Obey God’s Will, Part 1 of 2

This is the story of Jonah in a nutshell.

God tells man what to do.

Man runs from God.

Man is swallowed by a whale.

The whale vomits man onto land.

Man does God’s will.

Man is mad at God.

Who wants to raise their kids to be like the prophet Jonah? I didn’t think so. Jonah was conflicted to be sure, but who among us is perfect? Does it excuse his actions or ours because we are imperfect? Absolutely not. One of the things that we learn from Jonah is what not to do (cf. Rom 15:4)! And we definitely do not want others pointing us out as an example of what not to do as believers either!

From such a brief sketch, we can surmise that (1) it doesn’t pay to disobey God, and (2) man learns nothing from the experience! When you reduce Jonah’s story to its simplest terms, these two points stick out like buoys in the water of life. Doesn’t this sound so idiotically true of us at one time or another?! Oh, we may have not been like Jonah and literally scooped up by a huge sea creature in the Mediterranean Sea, but we have been sucked into the mouth of our consequences through disobedience to God more than once!

And check this out; let’s suppose that we were forgiven a long time ago and restored to fellowship with God, but time does not matter for the ripple effects of disobedience in the past are still rippling in the present and will continue to ripple in the future! News of personal rebellion takes up a life of its own; does it not? Is this ripple effect not true of Jonah, too? Consider that he’s been dead since the 8^th century B.C.! How is that for rippling! Along with Jonah, neither you nor I would have been in the belly of something if we had only listened to God! That sounds uncannily familiar to, “If we had only listened to our parents….” We have all been there and done that!

What is more puzzling is why Jonah had such an aversion to traveling to Nineveh and warning the Assyrians of destruction and preaching repentance (Jon 1:2)? It is readily apparent that Jonah had a strong disagreement with Yahweh’s will in the matter for he felt that he had to run as far away as possible from the presence of the LORD (Jon 1:3, 10).

Isn’t avoiding the will of God a common thing among so many believers today in some personal matter? It is interesting to discover when we think we have surrendered all, Yahweh confronts us with a choice that challenges the “all” of our surrender. It is part of the spiritual maturation process. People claim to be sold out to God until something enters their lives and challenges their faith and fidelity to God. How many have you known that were on fire for the LORD then suddenly disappeared from the scene? Hmm. Do you think Yahweh hit a nerve with Jonah? Being a true prophet of God in the Old Testament didn’t mean he had spiritually arrived.

Each believer has his or her reason/s for disobeying God, but it is still sinning. Referring to my brief sketch, disobeying God simply does not pay, and we have to do something about our memory to avoid making the same mistake again in some other area. In this article, I will offer some plausible reasons as to why Jonah may have taken off when God wanted him to go to Nineveh, but you will have to draw your own conclusions as to his motive for running away. All of mine are conjectures, but whatever the precise reason, we know as a believer that doing the will of God should be priority one in our lives in all things, right?

If you have been around awhile, you know that God has a way in His infinite wisdom to challenge our love for Him through our obedience. This cafeteria-style Christianity today of picking and choosing what to obey and ignore is a love problem and a sin problem (cf. Mk 12:30; Jn 14:15). Can we claim to love God and be disobedient? No, love (agape) and obedience go hand in hand; they are inseparable (cf. Deut 5:29; Lk 6:46; Jn 14:21, 23, 24, 31; 15:10).

Jonah’s modus operandi as a prophet was to prophesy as directed by Yahweh. He had prophesied that a very wicked king by the name of Jeroboam II, king of Israel (c. 793-753 B.C.) would have a prosperous reign and enlarge the northern borders of Israel as they had been during the days of David and Solomon (see 2 Kgs 14:23-27).

One day, Yahweh called upon Jonah to do something unheard of while he was probably visiting Jerusalem,

Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me (Jon 1:2).

John MacArthur observed that Jonah was the only prophet in the Old Testament commissioned to preach repentance on foreign soil.1 Jonah was a missionary and a prophet. This observation may lend insight into why Jonah made off for Tarshish when receiving his commission from Yahweh.

Between stressing about Nineveh and fleeing from the presence of the LORD, Jonah was exhausted mentally and physically by the time he hurriedly reached the seaport town of Joppa (modern, Jaffa) approximately 34 miles NW of Jerusalem, which may help to explain how he could crash below deck and be oblivious of the storm topside (Jon 1:6)! Rebellion (or being in a place we don’t belong) does take a toll on you, spiritually, mentally, and physically (cf. Psa. 32:4).

Hosea (cf. Hosea 1:1) and Amos (cf. 1:1), fellow prophets of the LORD during the days of Jeroboam II, were contemporaries of Jonah. God had used Hosea and Amos to warn the northern kingdom of impending judgment. It is not out of the realm of possibility that the prophecies of Amos (Amos 5:27) and Hosea (11:5) were known to Jonah. However, if the year Jonah entered Nineveh is correct, ca. 759 B.C., he could have very well preceded the prophecies of Amos and Hosea. Hosea would see firsthand the destruction of Samaria by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. under Shalmaneser V and the mop-up operations and deportations under Sargon II.2

If Jonah knew prior about the prophecies of Amos and Hosea before going to Nineveh, he may have felt conflicted in obeying Yahweh to offer salvation to a people who would be the future destroyers of the northern kingdom of Israel.3 But if that was the case, it would suggest that Jonah had some serious misunderstandings about the sovereignty of God and His attributes.

I tend to give Jonah the benefit of the doubt about this. We can be theologically correct about God’s Person and still foolishly disagree with Him on a matter. We do it all the time whenever we willfully sin. Finite challenging the Infinite is always an exercise in futility, and this is precisely what we do when we rebel against His will in a matter as born again believers.

Jonah’s motive for avoiding God’s will would be more compelling if he didn’t know that God would use the Assyrians to punish the northern kingdom rather than knowing. In the former case, he may have found it objectionable to go to another foreign land and preach repentance (cf. Jon 2:8; 4:2) but were not the northern and southern kingdoms guilty of idolatry, too? It could have been a bias toward all Gentiles, generally. There is no claim that any true prophet of God was perfect anyway.

What makes me tend to think that he knew that Yahweh would use a Gentile power to judge his people sometime in the immediate future was that he knew both kingdoms were plagued with idolatry, begging for Divine judgment! Second, the statement he made in Jonah 4:3 (cf. Jon 3:10 with Jon 4:2),

Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live!

This sounds reminiscent of Elijah (1 Kgs 19:4). This response by Jonah that it is better for me to die than to live intimates that somehow Jonah knew that Yahweh would possibly use the Assyrians or some other Gentile power to invade the northern kingdom for its sins of idolatry. He didn’t know the when of it, but it would happen. You get the impression that Jonah would rather die at the hands of Yahweh. Again, all of this is conjecture; what we do know is that he attempted to skirt God’s will by taking off to Tarshish. The contention had something to do with going to a foreign land and Jon 4:2.

If he was told to go to Nineveh before the Amos and Hosea prophecies, and he knew that those who regard worthless idols forsake their own mercy (Jon 2:8), he may have disagreed with Yahweh in offering salvation to any Gentiles, which would include the Assyrians. Now that presents another problem. If his theology was right about Yahweh, what did he think he would accomplish by running to Tarshish anyway? That God would get another prophet to go to Nineveh? The results would be the same. That God might reconsider sending a prophet to Nineveh? That he could actually run from the presence of God (cf. Psa 139)?

He had to have known from Scripture that God is omnipresent. The best he could do was run from the will of God, but it looks like he didn’t think that through before skedaddling. It never pays to disobey God. Strangely enough, we fail to stamp an impression of that truth into our minds because we seem to have a misunderstanding of the love (agape) of God and sin. <><

You cannot run from the presence of God, only from obedience.