"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 Lord Sent the Storm
Jonah prayed in the stomach of the fish…he said. “I called out of my distress…and He answered me”, etc.
The Lord appointed the storm, the Lord appointed the great fish. Now this was a “death experience”. Some argue from the Hebrew text that Jonah may have actually died biologically, from the implications of what “Sheol” could mean. But certainly the connotation would be there of a “death place”. It was the Lord who appointed Jonah to a place of death; the Lord consigned him to it.
In Acts 2:23 we read,
'this man, delivered up by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God.
Isaiah 53:10 it was the will of the Lord to smite him. Jonah was delivered up by the foreknowledge of God to a place of destruction, Jesus was delivered up by the foreknowledge of God to a place of destruction. Jonah “died” in the sea. He died, as it were – his death experience. (Whether he died or not people may debate but his death experience took place in the sea.)
Turn with me please to Psalm 69. This is of course a Psalm of David which is Messianic prophecy in the literary genre of Hebrew poetry. It is in this Psalm, for instance, we read in verse 21,
they gave me gall for my food and they gave me vinegar to drink,
…a prophesy of what would happen when the Lord Jesus was on the cross. However, this Psalm which looks ahead to the death of Jesus begins,
Hoshanna Elohim: save me oh God from the waters that have threatened my life.
Metaphorically then the death of Jesus is represented in Hebrew prophesy as a drowning experience.
Now we just sang this wonderful hymn, "When peace like a river attended my soul; when sorrows like sea billows roll". This was written by Mr. Stockwood but what many people don't know and what I didn't know until five or six years ago is that he composed it after his family drowned where, of all places, a building of the American colony hotel now stands in Jerusalem. It was after his family died that he actually wrote it in Jerusalem. The idea of “sea billows roll” is the drowning experience that happened to his family, but also in biblical typology particularly the Psalms you see, when people are under this kind of death experience, it is alluded to as drowning and points to Jesus.
Jonah 3:8,
But both man and beast in sack cloth and ashes repented after Jonah had told these people, "Repent, repent, repent, God will destroy this city in forty days."
And he goes on to say,
"perhaps if you repent God may turn back - (in verse 8) he may relent."
Recently I actually had a long email from somebody trying to justify people who predict things that don't happen. He was trying to justify Rick Joyner, Gerald Coates and these guys by saying, "Well, was Jonah a false prophet? Look at what Jonah predicted and it didn't happen." That was his argument to justify these false prophets! However, the text of Jonah makes it very clear that it was a conditional prophecy that says "if you don't repent this is what's going to happen." He never said that it was going to happen full-stop. It was conditional. It's an unfit comparison, but they always have to pervert the Bible out of context.
Nonetheless we see that Jonah gave a direct message of “repentance because the judgment is coming.” In the Gospel of St. Matthew 4:17, Jesus began to preach, "repent because the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Jonah gave a message of repentance so that judgment could be averted, so it was with Jesus and his disciples. "Save yourself from this wicked generation."
Jonah 2:4,
So I said, "I have been expelled from thy sight from before Thine eyes. "
The Hebrew says that Jonah was expelled “from before the presence of God”. God could not look upon him, God wouldn't look upon him, he was cast away from before God's eyes. We look at the Gospel of St. Matthew 27:46, "Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani" - "my God, my God why have you forsaken me". Jonah was cast away from the presence of God's sight, God would not look upon Jonah, so God would not look upon Jesus.
Jonah 1: 17, he was three days and three nights in the stomach of the great fish and, as Jesus of course tells us in Matthew 17:39-40, that's a picture of the resurrection. As Jonah was three days in the stomach of the great fish, so Jesus would be three days in a tomb. Jonah is, like all of Israel's prophets, a type of Jesus. He teaches about the Messiah who would come after him; every Hebrew prophet does. When you read their lives carefully, they teach something about the Messiah and Jonah is no exception.
Jonah is given over to this death experience but there were things in Jonah's life that were blocking him from being conformed to what God wanted him to be.
- He resisted God's will. He didn't want to do what God wanted him to do and, again, not without good reason: he knew what Amos had said about this nation that he was been sent to, he knew these people were bad. Who wants to be sent to a place like that where you might get killed?
- Secondly, he lacked the compassion of God. He understood the judgment and anger of God but he lacked the compassion of God and he was very good at something which we say in Yiddish: treching, complaining. Trech, trech, trech, complain, complain, complain. Somebody who with good reason doesn't want to do what God wants them to do. What God was asking him to do was very difficult, to go to a people he didn't even like, a people who were going to hate him because he wasn't one of them. In terms of the ancient world, he was from the West they were from the East.
Just by virtue of the fact that he was a Hebrew, a believer in the true God – not a pagan – and that he was from the West of the known world and they were from the East, that made him a target just by going there. His complaint was not without good reason. The things he was concerned with were valid points, humanly speaking. It was difficult for him to understand how God could have such compassion on such barbarians.
You know for me it would be like, I suppose, going to fundamentalist Muslims who put a bomb on an airplane at Lockerby, or who want to kill my Israeli family, or perhaps like a Jew being sent as an evangelist to the generation of Germans who carried out the Holocaust. There were good reasons, humanly speaking, why he could not feel or experience the compassion of God for these people. These were bad men.
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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.