Good morning.
My name is Brad Burford, and I've been at Village
since before it was Village.
Yeah, so anyway, I'm also on the Board of Servant Leaders,
and so if you have any questions about what's going on
around here, let me know.
Today's scripture reading is from Jonah chapter one.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai.
Get up, go to the great city of Nineveh,
and preach against it, because their evil
has come up before me.
Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord's presence.
He went down to Jabba and found a ship going to Tarshish.
He paid the fare and went down into it to go with him
to Tarshish from the Lord's presence.
But the Lord threw a great wind onto the sea,
and such a great storm arose on the sea
that the ship threatened to break apart.
The sailors were afraid and each cried out to his God.
They threw the ship's cargo into the sea
to lighten the load.
Meanwhile, Jonah had gone down to the lowest part
of the vessel and had stretched out
and fallen into a deep sleep.
The captain approached him and said,
what are you doing sound asleep?
Get up, call to your God.
Maybe this God will consider us and we won't perish.
Come on, the sailors said to each other,
let's cast lots, then we'll know who is to blame
for this trouble we're in.
So they cast lots, and the lot singled out Jonah.
Then they said to him, tell us,
who is to blame for this trouble we're in?
What is your business and where are you from?
What is your country?
And what people are you from?
He answered them, I'm a Hebrew.
I worship the Lord God of the heavens
who made the sea and the dry land.
Then the men were seized by a great fear
and said to him, what have you done?
The men knew he was fleeing from the Lord's presence
because he had told them.
So they said to him, what should we do to you
so that the sea will calm down for us?
For the sea was getting worse and worse.
He answered them, pick me up and throw me into the sea
so that it will calm down for you.
For I know that I'm to blame for this great storm
that is against you.
Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land,
but they couldn't because the sea was raging
against them more and more.
So they called out to the Lord, please Lord,
don't let us perish because of this man's life
and don't charge us with his innocent blood.
For you Lord have done just as you pleased.
Then they picked up Jonah and threw him into the sea
and the sea stopped raging.
The men were seized by great fear of the Lord
and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah
and Jonah was in the belly of the fish
for three days and three nights.
This is God's word.
Well this morning we are embarking on a four week journey
through the book of Jonah.
How many of you are acquainted with the story of Jonah
or what we just read there?
Yeah, yeah.
So if I said Jonah and the, who could finish it?
Whale or big fish or whatever you want to call it, right?
So Jonah, it's like the quintessential kids' story,
Bible story, right?
It's got all of the elements you want in a great
maybe Disney short movie or something, right?
It's got grandeur, it's got thrill, it's got suspense
but that does present a problem actually to us
as we go to study Jonah this morning
and then over the next few weeks
because the book of Jonah is actually quite a bit
more sophisticated and more insightful of a story
than we might have gathered in Sunday school.
The truth is Jonah is not a kids' story at all.
In fact, most kids' stories about Jonah leave out
some pretty important parts of the story
and the parts that they do focus on oftentimes
will oversimplify or attenuate or make the whole thing
into a moralized tale about doing good.
It is a story and a book like none other in the Bible.
And the fish, which is the center of the star, right?
It's actually not about the fish.
Like all other scripture, like the Bible,
the book of Jonah is about God.
Scripture is all about revealing to us God,
his character, how he acts in the world
and what his purpose is and ultimately scripture
is about leading us to Jesus.
And opening our eyes to see what God is doing
in Christ and accomplishing through this world
or in this world.
All scripture is about God and his character
and how he acts.
This book, it's not about entertainment.
It's not a moral reference book.
It's not a personal devotional story.
The Bible is a revelation of God
and that is no different here in the case
of the book of Jonah.
God is revealing who he is to us through this story.
And so that's the eyes, that's the filter,
that's the binoculars or whatever,
the glasses we have to put on to see what's going on here.
This story is full of wit, it's full of irony,
it's full of sarcasm.
The book of Jonah is kind of a sort of ancient
Hebrew satire.
It is written in such a way that it consistently
has people acting contrary to how you might expect
them to act.
Everything is blown up and gigantic in proportion.
In fact, the word in Hebrew that we translate great
is used 15 times in 48 verses.
All of Jonah is a very short book.
If you're studying Acts with us, a men's or women's
Bible study, there are chapters in Acts
that are longer than Jonah, at least in verses.
And the central human character in this story of Jonah
is a man named Jonah and is actually more,
Jonah is more of a representative character.
He stands in representing the covenant people of God,
representing the people of God.
God's called out ones, his chosen ones.
And it's through those people, God's chosen people,
that we see throughout the Bible that he is wanting
to move through and act through them to bring grace
and mercy to this world by bringing a message of repentance
to the lost and a call to repentance to those who walk
in wickedness and evil.
But we find out that Jonah is a horrible,
morally defective person.
Full of hatred.
And just when you think you can write him off
as hopelessly flawed and begin to exalt yourself
as spiritually superior, the writer will have you
right where he wants you in order to expose your own heart.
In order that you might make much of what God is
or who God is and what God is doing and make little
of your own self-centered, self-conceited,
own self-centered, righteous superiority.
As one scholar put it, this story, the story of Jonah,
is aimed at exposing the worst tendencies
that tend to form inside of God's covenant people,
which are pride, hard-heartedness, judgmentalism,
tribalism, single-mindedness, and an inability to grow
and change and let God's grace actually surprise you.
And explore the boundaries of what you thought
was possible in this world.
That's what this story is all about.
My hope is that we are all surprised by God's grace
over the next four weeks.
Today will be a bit of background.
We read the whole chapter because in context
we need to see it, but today we are probably not
going to get beyond the first three verses.
The first verse reads, the word of the Lord came
to Jonah, son of Amittai.
And verse one begins in a way that would cue
an attentive Bible reader, and hopefully we're all
attentive Bible readers, and if you're not,
I'll do a plug here.
We have a Bible reading program that we're on as a church.
We post every day on social media the scriptures
that we're studying together as well as there's a chart
out there at the Welcome Center you can pick up
and you can join at any point in time
because we're not stopping.
When we get to the end we're starting over again.
So you can start today to read your Bible.
And any attentive Bible reader who comes to the story
of Jonah would be cued that they are about to read
a book of prophecy.
With this opening line, the word of the Lord came
to Jonah, son of Amittai.
They would go, okay, I'm about to read a book of prophecy.
It's a very common opening verse for a book of prophecy
where the word of God would be revealed to a prophet
and a prophet not being a fortune teller or some voodoo
worker, but merely a messenger of what God's perspective
is on something.
That's what a prophet is.
And they'd be tasked to deliver that message either
in writing or to go to a place and preach that message
to bring God's perspective to the scene.
But this first verse in Jonah chapter one is the only part
that is similar to other books of prophecy.
From here on it gets really interesting.
It is a book about a prophet that only contains
in the Hebrew about five words of prophecy
out of all 48 verses.
The word of the Lord comes to a prophet.
And so here we have Jonah, son of Amittai.
And already if you and I were able to read the Hebrew,
which I have to rely on other scholars to do that for me,
but if we were and we were reading along in our
Hebrew Bibles here, after this first line,
if we knew the story of Jonah already as most of us do
from our childhood, we would begin to laugh.
We would find this very funny, this first line.
Because in Hebrew a lot of the names that were given
to people had significance and meaning.
And so you were not just saying someone's proper name,
you were saying something about them or something that was
tagged to them or attached to them.
And what you have here in this opening line of Jonah is
Jonah, which means dove in Hebrew, dove.
And Amittai, which means faithfulness.
And so you have a story that centers on a human character,
a prophet, whose name is Dove and he's the son of faithfulness.
And this prophet Dove, son of faithfulness,
will act in a complete opposite.
Again, this is that idea that is Hebrew satire.
This overblown character will act in a way that is completely
the furthest away from the gentleness of a dove
or the faithfulness of God.
Jonah is a real historical figure, but as we look at that
from there, there's kind of two orthodox views that develop.
And they emerge from that, the nature in the book of Jonah.
One says that the retelling of Jonah is actual events
that took place in actual time like a historical narrative.
We're just getting the history.
One says that it's the historical narrative,
and then there's another,
orthodox scholars believe this as well,
that this is more of a parable, a story that's been crafted,
that's been borrows from real people in real places
who elicit a certain feeling among the audience
in order that they might present a deeper story,
a hidden meaning that can be discerned as you reflect
and reread and meditate on this story.
Jonah was a real person.
He's recorded in Second Kings in a historical narrative
for sure, and in that historical narrative in Second Kings,
we find that he's ministering during the reign
of Jeroboam II in the northern kingdom of Israel.
And Jeroboam II was a wicked king who did evil
in the sight of God.
And the one reference we have to Jonah outside of this book
that bears his name is that he's prophesying favorable
expansion to the northern kingdom.
The kingdom will expand and gain territory.
And by this time, the people of God in Israel
have already gone through a really great tragedy,
and that is that the first king that bared the name Jeroboam,
he's ministering during Jeroboam II,
but the first king that had that name, well,
he basically began a civil war and split the tribes in half.
Split Israel into a northern and a southern kingdom
of the southern kingdom of Judah.
And both Jeroboam I and II are wicked in God's sight,
and the faithful people of God in Israel
would have not cared much for a prophet
who says favorable things about either one of them.
And so when Jonah's on the scene prophesying expansion,
regardless of your view of whether this is historical narrative
or a narrative parable, the central figure in this story
would not have been liked or loved at all.
In fact, his favorable prophecy is eventually overturned
in a contemporary prophet named Amos.
He, so Jonah prophesies expansion
for the kingdom of Jeroboam.
Jeroboam's wickedness results in God coming to Amos
and saying to deliver a message of prophecy that says,
all that you gained, all that you were given,
will be taken from you now.
And who will be taken from?
The Assyrians, the very ones that Jonah is invited
to go declare a message of repentance to.
Verse two says, get up, get up.
Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it,
because their evil has come up before me.
And here we see this kind of kingly language of God.
God is represented as a king in his court
and a king of the world, and he's looking at his realm
and the wickedness, the news of the wickedness of Nineveh
has come up before him.
And Nineveh is the capital city of the Assyrian empire,
and they are unmatched in the ancient world
and their brutality, unmatched in their oppressive violence.
They are known for defeating their enemies,
they're really well known for defeating their enemies,
and then when they defeat their enemies,
they're really well known for taking the leaders
of their enemies and fileting the skin from their body
as a public display of their conquering.
And among many of the other captives
who they have no business or they have no interest
in taking with them off into captivity,
they would regularly cut off both of their legs
and one of their arms and leave one arm
so that as the troops were filing out of the city,
they could shake each one of their hands
as they died in their pool of blood.
This is the treachery, this is the violence
of the nation of Assyria.
This is what rises before God,
the cries of oppression and violence and brutality.
Anyone who was allowed to live would be deported
back to Assyria to live out their lives as slaves.
Assyria was an enemy of Israel,
and therefore they were despised and hated by all.
Here's the answer, Jewish Virtual Library part.
Bonus material.
Thanks, Brad.
We'll get you your mic next time, hold it up to it.
Assyria, this enemy of Israel, is hated and despised
and God is aware of their wickedness and oppression.
And so what does God do?
He sends Dov, son of faithfulness,
to go and preach a message of repentance.
Jonah, son of faithfulness, go, preach this message,
preach against their wickedness.
And we know later on in this story
that Jonah knows all along God's intention or God's heart.
And that's one of the reasons he doesn't wanna go.
And that is God is merciful and compassionate
and he wants to have compassion on them
if they would but turn.
But you can imagine at this stage in the story,
if God came to you, let's say it's 1941,
and God comes to Lanny and says,
Lanny, I want you to go and preach to the Third Reich.
You're gonna stand in front of Hitler himself
and you're gonna call him to repentance.
You think Lanny's eager to get down the road
and head on over to Nazi Germany?
No, not at all.
So there's a human element to this
of the most brutal, vicious nation in the world
at the time and the stories that come from that.
And you're telling me to go stand in their presence
and tell them that they're sinful, wicked,
and they need to repent to a God
that they've never heard of and they don't worship?
Craziness.
But God says, get up and go.
Get up and go.
And so what does Jonah do?
It says he got up and ran.
He got up and ran.
The exact opposite direction.
Nate, go ahead and put up that graphic really quick.
He ran as far as he could go away.
Now if you know about, like,
if you read some histories on shipping
and how they explored the waters,
you know that the Strait of Gibraltar
was kind of this end-all for a long time.
And while we have ancient stories
of possible exploration outside of that,
it wasn't until the times of, you know,
Christopher Columbus where they're still,
they're still starting to make their way
down the African coast to the left here past Tarshish.
So you have Jonah who says, I'm out of here.
I could go 500 miles that way to Nineveh
or I could go 2,500 miles that way
and I could go to the end of the known world
and get away and I'm out of here.
He literally goes to what we would call 10 buck two.
The furthest you can get.
Jonah, God says get up.
And so the verse actually says Jonah got up.
Same word, Jonah got up
and did the opposite of what God said.
The cry, and here's some,
here's some interesting little Bible tidbits.
The Bible, this passage in throughout Jonah,
it says that the cry of oppression goes up to God, right?
So cries go up to God.
And so he tells his people to get up and do something.
And in the image of the Bible, right,
elsewhere in the Bible we see that prayers go up to God,
right, and what do the godly people of Israel do
when they're ready to worship God?
They go up to the temple in Jerusalem.
They go up.
Up is the right direction they're supposed to be moving.
They get up and they go.
But here Jonah gets up and runs.
And where does he run?
It says he goes down to Joppa.
He doesn't go up, he goes down to Joppa.
And after he secures his fare on the ship, what does he do?
He goes down into the ship.
And later in the story we'll see
that he goes down
again and again to the, he goes to the bottom of the ship,
and it says that he goes into a deep sleep.
A deep sleep.
And later he will go into the depths of the water
and into a great fish where he'll spend three days
and three nights, right,
which in ancient Near Eastern thought was actually the time
it took to travel to the underworld.
Three days and three nights.
And so it's basically saying Jonah was good as dead.
To death.
Down, down, down.
The cries go up.
God says get up.
God says go.
And Jonah goes down, down, and further down.
Jonah's first step in rebellion is the beginning of a down
world's word spiral.
Down, down, and further down.
Did Jonah think he could run away from God's presence?
It says that he went away from God's presence,
but did he think he could escape it?
Did he think that God was like all those other terrestrial
deities that had kind of boundary lines
and they wouldn't move beyond them?
For sure he did not.
He certainly studied the Torah.
He certainly understood who God was.
If he had even heard something in the sentiment of Psalm 139,
he would hear that where can I go to escape your spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to heaven, you are there.
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I fly on the wings of the dawn or settle down on the
westernmost horizon, even there, your hand will lead me.
Your hand will hold on to me.
Surely the darkness will hide.
If I say surely the darkness will hide me and the light
around me will be night, even the darkness will be
not dark to you, is not dark to you.
The night shines like the day.
Darkness and light alike are to you.
It's most certainly that he did not think he could
escape God's presence, God's providential rule,
his sovereignty.
It's actually more likely that this was a term that
was used for a courtier.
This was someone who served in the courts of a royal.
He served God.
He listened.
He was there when God spoke and he was to act.
That's what he was to do.
That was the job of the prophet, to hear God's
perspective and to deliver it.
And he says, I'm abdicating my calling.
I'm leaving the presence of God.
Basically, I quit.
No thank you.
Find someone else.
Disobedience.
He received a command, a call, and he's disobeying.
And that's where we're gonna go ahead and park for a
minute before we conclude this morning.
As I said, we weren't gonna get very far into it,
but more of an introduction.
Our relationship with the idea of obedience is
probably a mixed bag of thoughts and feelings.
Obedience probably isn't the most positive trait
extolled in our culture.
In some places maybe and other places not.
In fact, a lot of people, and maybe even you, have a
view of God that is something like this.
He is an arbitrary dictator commanding people to do
this or that, and he's always borderline angry,
volatile, and picking fights.
And what does he demand?
He demands absolute total and complete submission.
No questions, no comments, no complaints.
That's God.
And a lot of us probably picked that up from
authority figures in our lives and how we were treated
and what was demanded of us.
But consider what God is actually doing here in Jonah.
Consider not your own projection onto the story,
but what is actually taking place.
God is sending his servant, a representative of his
covenant people, his treasured possession, the
people that he has chosen to reveal himself through
his word, through the law, and through the temple
worship and the priesthood, a place that he's chosen
to reveal himself to them to go preach against the
evil that is prevalent in another society.
And that evil is destroying that other society from
within.
That evil is leading them to ultimate ruin, and God is
sending one of his dear covenant children to go make
an appeal to them, to turn from their wickedness.
And Jonah knows, he says it later, he knows that God
is looking actually to show his great mercy to them.
He knows it, that in their repentance he is going to
offer grace.
Jonah's call to obedience isn't some arbitrary
dictator's power trip, but an invitation for Jonah
to participate in the bigger story of grace.
Jonah has too small of a vision for his life.
He sees self-preservation, he sees tribalism and
comfort as the vision for the good life, and he's
going to protect that, even if that means running to
Timbuktu.
And God is inviting him into a bigger, riskier, but
grace saturated story that would place Jonah in what
God is doing in this world.
It's not just Jonah living out his own small little
world.
And I think this is where the rubber meets the road
for us.
We are often too content with our small little world.
We are content, maybe if you're a believer, you're
content with being a part of a church and coming on
Sunday morning to get your fix, to get your hit.
And then back to whatever small little world you
live in all for yourself.
Do you see that God's word, the word of the Lord, the
word of God comes to you?
The word of God is there, it comes to you through his
word.
And some people see that as ruining their life.
God's word came to me and he ruined my small little
me life.
This life that I sketched out for myself.
As one pastor points out, the sad irony of Jonah
running is that he thinks he is running for his life,
but he is actually running from life.
I love my three boys as pastor.
They often get used in examples, right?
I'm looking at them right now.
Two of them at least.
And I want nothing but good for them.
I want nothing but good.
I want, I don't want them to be in pain.
I don't like when they are depressed or they have
mental agony.
I want them to flourish.
I want them to abound in joy and I want them to
experience love that is rich in life giving.
And there have been times and continue to be times
where I can see that something that they want,
they want so bad, is going to work against that
vision of life that I see for them.
I see a vision of life for them, of flourishing,
and I see something that they want, and they believe
that it is life and they think that it's everything
to them as they've grown up.
And I see that it could derail, it could destroy,
it could steal the life they could have.
If they were free to indulge in it, what they believe
was life giving, it would actually bring them hurt
and harm and pain or worse.
And so I have many times had to ask for their trust
in their obedience so that I could help them avoid
the harm and they could find the good stuff in life.
And I'm imperfect.
I'm very flawed and fall short.
In fact, last night I had to call two of my two
younger boys in and I had to repent for something
and ask for their forgiveness.
But if that's how it works for a flawed, imperfect
father to his kids, how much more so with a perfect
all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good father in heaven?
To be a Christian, to follow Christ, is to have a
radical view of God's grace.
And it's to embark on that journey of loyal,
trusting obedience.
It is to let God lead you into a spacious, big,
great, and exponentially larger life than you could
ever dream of having.
It is to be caught up, caught up in God's work of
salvation in this world to see the most unlikely
discover his grace and love in the most unlikely
ways through you.
Don't have a small view on life, a small view that
you must protect even from God and his word and his
calling on your life.
Instead, run to life that is found only in relinquishing
that and finding it in God and his word.
Jonah, the book of Jonah is like a mirror.
And occasionally we will hold it up and we will see
the worst inclinations of our own heart.
But we will also see the most grace-filled invitation
from the heart of God to each one of us.
And I pray that we answer that invitation with,
yes, Lord, take me where you want me.
Use me how you will.
I'm ready to go.