"The Book of Jonah"
There is no Hebrew prophet whose life does not foreshadow or typify the Messiah who would come after them, to bring in the Redemption which they prophesied.
Download or email this sermon The Story of Jonah
He was reluctant to go to Nineveh and not without good reason. These were, to say the least, not the nicest people in the world: they were “bad people”; they were total heathens! More than that, as a Bible-believing Jew, he would have read the prophecies of his predecessor the prophet Amos and he would have seen what God decreed and predicted through Amos about Nineveh. So he would even have had a biblical basis for not wanting to go there. It was not just that he knew God would have compassion on them but that they might kill him. He knew that, on the face of it, they were destined for judgment as the prophet Nahum had predicted (and this happened at a later point when they turned back to their pagan ways). He had good reason not to go.
But let's begin with Jonah's name. “Yonah”, meaning, in Hebrew, “a dove”. What images would this conjure up? One is in John 2:16. Jesus drove the people out of the temple who were selling doves. (This comes from Leviticus 14. A dove was an animal deemed suitable for sacrifice and as such it was a type of Christ – as all these animals were). In the Song of Solomon 1:5, he tells the lover that her eyes are like doves.
“Eyes” because doves are monogamous birds and they only have a relationship with their partners, they don't procreate with other doves. So too in Genesis 8, first Noah sends out a bird that the Torah would later decree to be “unkosha” – a raven, but the second bird he sends out is a dove. All these images would have been conjured up in the minds of Jews. In the New Testament Matthew 3:18, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus as a dove. All these images might highlight some aspect of Jonah and his character but probably the most important is found in the Psalm of David 55:4-6,
My heart is in anguish within me,
And the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling come upon me,
And horror has overwhelmed me.
I said, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest.
The idea is this: wanting to escape from the calamity that has come upon you; and Jonah was a man that wanted to escape
But what about this calamity? What does it mean for us? What we have to understand about Jonah is the first thing we have to understand about all the Hebrew prophets: every single Hebrew prophet is a type of Jesus, a type of the Messiah, every one of them foreshadows Him, who he would be and what he would do. There is no Hebrew prophet whose life does not foreshadow or typify the Messiah who would come after them to bring in the Redemption which they prophesied.
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Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.