Jonah 1:2 & 3:2 5/30/2023*

Jonah 1:2  “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

Jonah 3:2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”

The first verses of chapter 1 and 3 in the book of Jonah repeat the same instructions…  Why?... What happened in chapter 2?  We get a hint about what took place in verse 2:1:  “From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord...”

Jonah finds himself in trouble because he runs from God. The instructions God issues in chapters 1 and 3 are the same – but Jonah has changed.  His rebellion caused events which taught him that ignoring God is dangerous and futile. 

History would have viewed Jonah differently had he just obeyed God in the first place. He would have been remembered as a powerful prophet had he not been stubborn and self-centered.  But chapter 2 occurs because “Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish”… This decision led to Jonah reluctantly becoming the world’s first Ichthyologists to study the inside of a living fish while it swam in the ocean.  

How could Jonah think he could choose a better path than God?… Probably the same way I do when I rebel against the Lord’s plans for me. And like Jonah, I resist turning back to Him until I  find myself in danger. Why does life have to go completely off the rails before we pray?… Why do we run away until we find ourselves in the belly of a fish and have no other option but to cry out to God?  

We must learn from Jonah’s story. We can’t just focus on the Love of God to the exclusion of His power and authority. He is our loving Father, and He is also the Omnipotent Ruler of the universe and must be obeyed.  Maybe by meditating on Jonah we can acquire a clearer view of God and eliminate the “chapter 2’s” in our lives. The chapters where we choose our own plan over His. If we can reduce our tendency to run from God, it will decrease the number of times we find ourselves lying on a deserted beach in fish vomit. 

“Running from the presence of God has the futility of "trying to shovel smoke with a rake". - Paul David Tripp”