Jonah: Beyond the fish tale

Oh, I love me some Jonah.

We studied Jonah in my second semester of Hebrew, so it was great to work through it verse by verse, nuance by nuance. I've also trotted it out as a Bible study lesson many times. It's just loaded with wisdom.

What's not to love about this wonderfully constructed tale of a reluctant prophet and that bodacious fish? And it's fun to watch skeptics of the Bible go nuts as they deal with that fish thing. As if believing some kind of great fish swallowing then vomiting Jonah is the litmus test of faith. Ha.

What caught my attention this time reading Jonah is the way God deals with the non-believers in the story. We see the sailors, who realize there's something kind of (sorry) fishy about Jonah, turn to worship Yahweh as they see how He controls the wind, waves, and storm.

Then, there are the people of Nineveh, who were supposedly the baddest group of heathens in Mesopotamia at the time. They received one short, terse message from Jonah ("Forty days more and Nineveh will be overturned") and they repented. That is, they took God and this message seriously and everyone from the king on down to the cattle put on sackcloth, and gave up their evil and violent ways. That's it! They didn't seem to overhaul their state religion and tear down their temples. But because they repented sincerely, God relented and did not destroy them in the 40 day time period.

Friends, how easy it is to repent and receive God's forgiveness.

Now, history shows that the Ninevites didn't stay "converted" very long. They came back as the Assyrians and conquered Israel in brutal fashion. But for a while, they behaved.

The behavior, obedience and salvation of the Ninevites stands in stark contrast to the snarly, recalcitrant Jonah who just wanted to see them wiped off the face of the earth. The compliance of the people of Nineveh also stands in stark contrast to the people of Israel who were continuously reluctant and stubborn about being obedient and faithful to Yahweh.

A couple of other points from Jonah:

That big fish was pretty darn scary, but it was God's means of rescuing Jonah from certain death by drowning. I think the fish metaphor suggests that God sometimes puts very scary things in our path as a way of saving us from spiritual peril.

I have to wonder what Jonah expected to see when he went out on the hillside to watch what would happen to Nineveh. I'm pretty sure he was hoping to see fire and brimstone rain down on the wicked city. After all, the whole reason he tried to run away from his command to go preach was because he feared God would indeed refrain from blowing up the Ninevites. Jonah and God talk about that in the final scene of the book.

But God has the last word. He gently points out Jonah's self-involvement and contrasts with His own heart for the lost world. "But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left [i.e., cannot discern God's truth] and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that city?"

See my blog post about 1 John, which I wrote earlier today. The book of Jonah, ancient as it is, carries the same message as John's writings: God is Love, and God's people are commanded to love one another.