Jonah 4: The Heart. God's love, mission and our pain

God's heart for the lost and for us

So Jonah has heard God's call to go to Nineveh.  He has followed his initial reaction to recoil at the very idea of giving an enemy empire the opportunity to turn to God.  Running away from God he has ended up in a fierce storm, and has seen pagan sailors show more of  a heart for God than he had at that point.   He has prayed a prayer of commitment and faith, from the darkest place.  Then he has had a second chance, and has gone to Nineveh and preached – with results that any self-respecting preacher should be thrilled with.  But Jonah isn't thrilled. He is angry. 

So he prays.  It's an interesting prayer: an angry prayer  from a mixed-up and angry heart. But at least he is, in the midst of his darkness, again praying.  God has wide enough shoulders to cope with our angry prayers.   For some of us, if we take nothing else from Jonah 4, we need to hear this.  It's OK – and even necessary – to shout at God, and tell Him what we feel like.

He says to the Lord “I knew it.  It's just typical. I come and preach to this lousy lot of sinners, and what do you do Lord?  You go and send revival.  I knew you’d do it.  You're too soft, Lord, with your your compassion and your covenant love.  I knew you were going to show chesedh (the Hebrew word for Covenant love) to Nineveh....  But I always thought Israel was your covenant people!  I'd rather die than watch Nineveh getting into a covenant with you.”  His heart and his theology were wrong. 

And God challenges him.  The Voice, still and quiet, says “You're angry Jonah.”

“Yes, Lord”

“And you feel you are right to be angry?”  “The purpose” says A J Glaze “was to lead Jonah to reflection so that he could see himself.”  But God doesn't do that by accusing Jonah or pointing the finger.  God could have said,  “Jonah, you disobeyed me once, I have looked after you through all of that, and still you are bitter, and too thick to understand my plan for the nations”.  But he doesn't.  Rather, he gently helps Jonah to see that his heart and theology are wrong.

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And just how wrong.  He ends up sitting on the hillside, makes a bivouac out of a few leafy branches,  and watches to see what will become of Nineveh.  He's thinking, “Maybe they haven’t really repented.  Maybe God can see through all the crocodile tears.  They won't keep it up.   Maybe God will judge them after all.”  So he's watching, waiting for an earthquake, a bolt of lightning, a plague of locusts, or an enemy army appearing over the horizon.  And it's hot up the hill; the leaves on his shelter shrivel up and let the sun in.  Jonah is miserable, exhausted from his adventures, his journey, his preaching.  So God causes a plant to grow over his wee hut, to keep the sun from burning Jonah.  That's better, “Thank you Lord!”

Then next morning, just as Jonah is beginning to feel comfortable again, God sends a worm to attack the plant and it dies, as quickly as it has grown up.  The sun gets even hotter and there is an east wind, the sirocco, blowing across the desert, bringing more heat and dust and drying out the air.  Poor old Jonah is even more miserable than before.  Once again, the depression and self-pity come out: “Lord, take away my life,  it's not worth living!”

Then the still, small voice, again:

“You're angry, Jonah.” 

“Yes, Lord.”

“And you feel you are right to be angry?”

“You bet I do.  I feel so angry I wish I was dead!” 
This guy was really messed up!  There is a connexion between our thinking and our feeling.  Psychology talks about negative automatic thoughts (things that just seem to arrive in your head from nowhere) coming from distorted ideas and dysfunctional beliefs.   Jesus says the truth will set you free – and that implies that deception, wrong thinking, can make you a prisoner. 

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We can see a connexion between commitment to an ugly, violent and hate-filled belief system, and poor mental health: that has become obvious in the actions of the attackers in Nice, Rouen, and Bavaria in the last two or three weeks.  You can see it in ISIS; you can see it in an entity like Westboro Baptist Church; you can see it in racism and white supremacism – and in the “Black supremacism” of Mugabe's Zimbabwe; we can see it in the intolerance that some on both the left and the right in politics have for anyone who opposes their own extreme views.  If we allow hatred, racism, and a feeling of superiority in, it will make us ill.

Then there is a much more personal level.  Remember that Jonah was already worn down physically by what he had experienced in the past few weeks or months.  He had been at risk of his life and indeed had been prepared to die during the storm (In chapter 1).  He had gone through a physically trying experience in the belly of the fish. He had been on a journey overland from Israel to Nineveh; he had been preaching to people he didn't know or like or relate to.  He was doing something for God that he didn't understand.  Physically and emotionally, things had happened that were tearing him apart. His world-view began to fall apart – because God refused to hate the people Jonah hated.  He began to feel he had been humiliated and made to look like an idiot – after all his prophecy of doom was not going to happen.  As a result, he began to sink into the mire of “Poor little ol' me!”  Life's not worth living.  

He wasn't the first person in the Bible to be there.  Moses got so tired and overwhelmed with the task of looking after the Israelites, that he said to the Lord “You may as well kill me now!” (Numbers 11.  15).  Elijah got burned out through hard work, opposition and  a sense of failure, and said “Take away my life for I am no better than my fathers”.  (1 Kings 19. 4)

So if that is where we are today, feeling “Life's not worth living” we are not alone.  We may need to get someone to help us.  To listen, to tell us we are loved; to help us explore the roots of our struggles; to pray with us.  And there are some things we can begin to do for ourselves: we can begin to challenge our deeply held and unhealthy ideas about ourselves, the people around us and the future.

God is there for Jonah Gently but firmly, God speaks: “You valued your plant, with its big leaves, although you didn't plant it or look after it.  Shouldn't I value Nineveh and its thousands of people?  I planted and looked after them.  I am their Father, too.  And they are so lost...”

And that's the punch-line. Boom-boom. Abruptly, the book comes to an end.  God has a heart for broken people.  He has a heart for broken pagans in Nineveh.  He has a heart for the nations.  In his sovereignty, God had sent the storm, the fish, the plant, the worm, and the burning sirocco: and the point isn't that we should resign ourselves  to wahtever bad stuff comes along as the purposes of God.  The point is that God exercised his sovereignty and used sometimes drastic means, to bring his message and his grace to Nineveh.   Look outside, down these streets.  What is there?  People who don't know their left hand from their right, morally, spiritually, emotionally.  People who are spiritually hungry and thirsty.  People who may be praying even as we are hankering for the simplicities of the past, sleeping to block out the present and despairing for the future.  God loves our Nineveh. And it’s called Rosyth!

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And he has a heart for broken Jonah.  The book ends here: but his story goes on: whoever wrote the story of Jonah – if it was not Jonah himself – must have information from Jonah.  So Jonah. was, in time,  able to talk about  his story.  He went on to develop an understanding of Yahweh as the God of all nations; and to grow a heart that reflected that understanding: a heart that cares for the last, the lost and the least; a heart that was secure in having God as his Heavenly Father.  God exercises his power to bring his grace and compassion to the lost, and to bring his healing to his people do that we can be able to bring his grace to the lost.

© Gilmour Lilly 2016

Jonah 3: The mission: being part of a move of God

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The call   Verses1-3a.
We have learned (Chapter 1) about the “voices” that surrounded Jonah and about how we must recognise the voices of our own prejudice, God's love, our spiritually hungry neighbours – and find our own voice in testimony; and we have learned (Chapter 2) how to pray, in the darkest of circumstances, a prayer of faith and commitment.  Jonah has come through these experiences, he has messed up pretty badly; and in fact he is still messed up pretty badly; and again the Voice says to him “Go to Nineveh!”.  This time, there is no argument.  “OK, Lord, I'll go!” 

God takes the initiative.  Not Jonah.  God's grace is at work for Jonah – generously calling Jonah to be involved in what God is doing, despite Jonah failings.  God calls Jonah again: he goes, not because he wants to; he goes not  because he sees things differently.  His heart and this theology are still lagging behind – but with his will he decides to go and preach in Nineveh.  God's grace is at work for Nineveh, quietly insisting that the people of Nineveh will have their opportunity to hear God's word, God's warning,and to turn to Him.   

The City  Verse 3b
As he calls Jonah, God refers to Nineveh. as “That great city” (v. 2).  And as Jonah goes, the writer tells us Nineveh was “very large” (NIV) or “Great to God” (Heb)  – three days' journey to cross.  Some people wonder how accurate this all is:  the writer says “Nineveh was huge” (past tense).  Does that mean the Jonah story was written many years after Jonah lifetime?  Not necessarily.  Is the size of Nineveh. exaggerated?  No.  “Nineveh.” can refer to both the walled city – which was fairly small – and to  “the Greater Nineveh” district centred on and governed by the city, an area that would be three days' travel to cross.  (That would make sense of the talk about cattle as well as of the dimensions of the place.)

Therefore Nineveh was  a place of significance: a populous city and region and the capital of an empire.  And it was “great to God” – not just a figure of speech but a statement of theological truth.  Do we need to understand the significance of the place God has called us?  It may be bigger than we think; and it is important to God. 

The message   Verse 4. 
When Jonah arrives in Nineveh, he begins to preach (the only actual prophecy in the book): “In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown!”  Jonah preaches without offering, apparently, any hope of repentance, restitution or reconciliation. But he knew such things were likely to happen; but his heart wasn't in it.  How do we handle a message of judgement in our world?  Does it come too easy to preach a message like that? Too often as Christians we are seen as "against" things: we need to find a better way of being God's people.   How do we preach judgement without preaching an angry, finger-wagging god?  

• We live in a moral universe.  There is a difference between “right” and “wrong”. Right now I am not going to go into the details of where the boundaries lie. Simply to say that there is “right” and “wrong”.  And that is a good thing.  In a world where the rich get richer and richer, and the poor get poorer and poorer; in a world of Hitlers and Stalins and PolPots and Mugabes, a world of polluted rivers and shrinking ice caps, an world where slavery still persists on several continents, a world where the rule of law is simply an excuse for oppression and a euphemism for the survival of the fittest, it is a good thing, that there is a moral dimension. 
• We have a moral God. That moral dimension in the universe is there because God is a moral being. He has standards.  There is a “judge of all the earth” and he “shall do right”.  There is judgement to come for all the evil in our world – and we are all part of that. 
• The Jesus story – his life, death and resurrection – are about the actions of a moral God.  In his life he demonstrated the rule of God: the justice and compassion of God in contrast to the mess in a broken world.  In his death, he dealt with the sin inside us: he judged it.  If you want to know how God feels about evil, look at the cross. Jesus Christ was “overthrown” in our place.  He took our judgement and defeated our enemy.   In his cross the love and the justice of God meet.  In his resurrection, it becomes clear that there is nothing else that anyone can throw at Jesus, the sacrifice and the victory are complete.  “Right” will triumph in the world.  There is mercy for every person who calls out for it – because the judgement has already been handed down.
• And at the end, nations will be overthrown.  All evil will be overthrown.  But those who have thrown their lot in with Jesus and sought his kingdom have an escape, a hope for the future in a Kingdom where injustice and evil have been overthrown for ever.  Salvation and the Kingdom of God are fundamentally rooted in the morality, the justice, of God. 

So we are to preach the justice, the judgement, and the mercy of God.  We live in a moral universe, and every man and woman needs to be ready for that justice. 

The response  Verse 5 -10 
When Jonah preached, the city repented,  “from the greatest to the least”.  This looks like a grass-roots movement:  somebody, somewhere in Nineveh, began fasting in repentance, and before long his neighbours were fasting and telling their neighbours to fast too.  Normally the Government would do something like call the people to fast.  That is is why the NIV fudges the translation by saying “a fast was proclaimed”.  But the Hebrew clearly says “The people believed God and proclaimed a fast."

Eventually the news – a summary of Jonah's message – reached the King.  He was then running to catch up.  He makes the fast “official” – and includes animals as well as people. Verse 8 in the Hebrew is literally  “let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God” (AV) 

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That may seem a bit extreme: how can the cattle pray? Apparently the King and his officials did not see a problem, nor did the person who wrote the story.  The Gospel message calls for action not semantics – quibbling over the meaning of words. Never mind if the grammar isn't right.  Never mind if you didn't like the opening song or  you'd prefer it if the preacher was wearing a dog collar and gown.  If the message of the Cross, the message of God's justice and God's love, makes sense to you, then you need to do what the people of Nineveh did: believe it and repent: turn your life over to God.  

The constant bellowing of hungry cattle would have been a reminder to the people of what they were doing and why they were doing it.  Specific sins including violence are mentioned.  Here is a head of state and a people ready for transformation.  Here is the kind of societal, national transformation that defines “revival”. It's a bit like the impact of the Gospel on the culture of Ephesus (Acts 19).

And God relented and did not judge the city.  It survived – and went on to strengthen its position as the epicentre of a powerful empire (not alwasy a very nice empire!) 

Revival is like that: it can change the trajectory of a nation. It can avert judgement.  Spiritually it is from heaven down: it starts with God.  But socially it is from the bottom up.  But its results are always mixed and never permanent. Nineveh didn't remain a revival centre.   In the 1929 a move of God started that became known as the “East Africa revival”.  It started in Rwanda, and spread to Kenya and Uganda.  But it didn’t prevent Rwanda from having a civil war and genocide in the 1990's.   Each generation must turn to God for itself, in its own way, in its own time. 

So, people of God, like Jonah, we are not perfect.  Our hearts may not be right; our theology may not be right.  But God calls us to go to our Nineveh... to our world... to get out there, out of our comfort zone. Because he loves the world... God calls us to see our city as “Great to God”  and worth reaching with the Good News. Because he loves the world...

God calls us to proclaim this message of justice and mercy, meeting at the Cross.  Because he loves the world...  God calls us to start with ordinary people, and expect him to start there too. 

Because he loves the world...

And God calls us to expect the miracle to happen, people to turn to him – to reach our generation..  The past generation has had its revival.. The next generation will need its own revival.  We want to see revival in our generation.   Because he loves the world...

© Gilmour Lilly 2016

Jonah 2: Prayer – in a dark place

v. 1 “inside the fish Jonah prayed”   I can't think of a more unlikely, unpleasant, or compelling setting for a prayer, than this. 

Let's face it –  it is unlikely.  I guess you have heard, as I have, stories of sailors being swallowed by whales:  James Bartley, buried in Gloucester in 1909 was described as a “Modern-Day Jonah” although his story is disputed and doesn't prove the Jonah story.  Scientists don't think there is air in a fish’s or whale's stomach – though they believe a man could survive in a whale’s lung. The point is not that the story of Jonah is plausible.  The point is that it is implausible: it had to be a miracle.  Either he survived, miraculously.  Or he died and was raise – miraculously.

And in fact, in his prayer Jonah reckoned himself as  a dead man. 

Can we pray in the unlikely places – where it looks like even survival is unlikely.  Can we pray with an eye to the future when we are facing a reality that suggests there isn’t a  future? Can we pray with the faith that says “It's Friday – but Sunday's coming”? (Good Friday, hoep hangs of a cross, waiting for Easter Sunday).  Can we pray for people to turn back to God in an environment where people are turning away from God in vast numbers? Can we pray for the triumph of God's Kingdom in a world where nations including our own seem to be falling apart?  Can we pray for healing when all looks hopeless? Can we pray for that family member to find faith, while they continue to walk away from faith? 

And it is unpleasant.  Just about unpleasant as you could get.  Pitch dark. frightening, filthy and possible stinking; nobody likes to keep company with a part-digested meal – either one's own or someone else's. Can we pray when we are in unpleasant and painful situations?

But it is compelling, isn't it.  The very horror of it, the very unpleasantness of it, the very real danger and unlikeness of survival, all makes it the more urgent to pray.  There isn't very much you can do.  (No internet; no-one else to talk to; you can't read your bible, you have no chance of cutting your way out even if you have a knife.)  All you can do is call out to God.

And how Jonah prayed!

This is very much a prayer of faith. 
It is written in the past tense.  Verse 2 sums it up. “in my distress I called to the

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Lord, and he answered – Lord, you answered!   It's both a statement of faith, a testimony and a prayer of praise.

In fact the Old Testament doesn’t' recognise our slightly artificial separation between praise and prayer, as though they were different things. To pray is to reach out to God, to connect with him.  How can you connect to God without acknowledging who he is, praising and worshipping him? 

Jonah is able to recognise that his experience of the last few days, the last few minutes – running away from God, the storm, being thrown into the sea,  has been a time of separation from God, of being spiritually and physically at death's door.  He quotes a great deal from the Psalms, including Ps 42. 7:  “all your waves and breakers swept over me.”  His inner life and his very physical life have been in mortal danger. 

In the midst of it, Jonah recognises God's sovereignty.   (v. 3) “You threw me into the sea. Your waves; your breakers.”   (v. 3)   And “you, Lord my God,  brought my life up from the pit.”  (v. 6)  In the midst of it all – even Jonah's own sin and blindness – God has been at work.  And God is still on Jonah's case. 

So Jonah is able to be confident that God who has been at work, will continue to be at work. “You have, so I will...” (v. 4, cf v 8)   The story of God's salvation in his immediate past, of God's sovereignty that is able even to encompass Jonah's mistakes and sin, means that Jonah is able to anticipate God's continuing salvation – even in the place where he finds himself, in the stifling airless atmosphere of the fish's stomach.   So in this dark place, he looks for help from God's holy temple – maybe the temple in Jerusalem, though more likely for  an Israelite, the dwelling of God in the heavens. 

This is a prayer of confession, repentance and commitment.
Verse 8: Those who worship false gods turn their backs on all God’s mercies (NLT)  But the words s translated “ worthless idols” mean literally “Lying vanities” - the word is the same one used at the beginning of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity”.  It can mean a  mere breath,  vapour, something fleeting, useless, or worthless.  Calvin says they are  “all inventions with which men deceive themselves”  including Idols and false gods but also including the emptiness of going our own way, trying to run our own lives, without God,  as Jonah had done.  

So Jonah is not making a jibe against the sailors with their false Gods, or against Nineveh: he is admitting that he has put himself in the same boat as they, turning away from his covenant relationship with the Lord, for a mere breath.  He has traded the permanent lasting gift of a relationship with God for the perishable goods of his own pleasure. 

But God has kept his hand on Jonah. So Jonah is back into his relationship with the Lord:  (v. 9) “But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you.  What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, 'Salvation comes from the Lord.'”  He doesn't want to be among those who chase after lying vanities.  I is emphatic: “I will praise you and sacrifice to you...

Jonah wants to worship the Lord – with his voice, and by bringing a sacrifice to the Lord. 

He wants to keep his vow to the Lord.  Whatever obedience the Lord requires, Jonah will give. 

His testimony is that “salvation is from the Lord.”

So that is Jonah's prayer, in a dark place.  Praise, faith, confession, commitment.  Not a word of pleading for help.  Now there is  place for saying “Lord, help!”   There is a place for making your requests known to God.  There is a place for being specific in our prayers. But there is also a place for  a prayer like this.   “Over to You, Lord!” It's the spirit of Ps 118. 17:  “I shall not die but live...” 

That's how Paul was:  At midnight, in jail in Philippi, “Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them”. (Acts 16. 25) and the prison walls collapsed in an earthquake.  No wonder, later on, in other difficulties, Paul wrote to the Church in Philippi  “For I know that as you pray for me and the Spirit of Jesus Christ helps me, this will lead to my deliverance.” (Phil 1. 19 NLT)

You could sum up Jonah's prayer in this way:  “Lord, I have been in a dark, dangerous and frightening place – indeed I still am.  But you're in charge, not me.  You can even use the mess I make, and I can already see you at work; so I know you will bring me through this. And Lord, we all need to put you, not temporary things, first – and I've been chasing the wrong things.  But Lord I will worship you.  I will do what you want.  Salvation is from you.” 

Or in the powerful words of the Lord's prayer: “Father, in Heaven may you Name be honoured.  May your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is done in heaven. Give us today the bread we need, forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil , for the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, Lord, forever”. 

So how do we pray in the dark place? The place where -- like the sea in Hebrew

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thinking -- demons are all around?  God is OK with us simply praying "Help!"  God is OK with us presenting our requests to him. But he doesn't want us to panic or to plead for help. He wants us to pray with a robust faith that's rooted in who he is and what he's already done. And he wants us to pray with submission: with repentance and commitment.

And two certainties will follow:
1. Jonah trusts God and wants to obey him. But he still has issues with Nineveh. He is still doing God's will through gritted teeth (as we shall see.)   Like Jonah, we will still have stuff that needs sorted out.
2. And the miracles happen. Jonah survives and is eventually puked up onto a beach in Palestine, to continue his journey.  God will answer! God's on our case and will act.

© Gilmour Lilly 2016

Jonah 1.

Voices: Jonah and his world

“See Nineveh?  It's pretty bad: they are evil, mean, immoral. Their sinfulness is right in my face,”  God says.  

And Jonah is like “Yes. Amen Lord!  I agree.  They deserve your judgement Lord!”

And God says “Go there.  Tell them.  Warn them.” 

Now Jonah lived some-when around 800-750 BCE, in Israel,  when Jeroboam II was King.  Israel didn’t have the Temple: that was in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah.   Israel was always the first to rebel against the Lord, though usually Judah wasn't far behind. As kings of Israel go, Jeroboam was not as bad as some,  He continued to worship false gods, but on the positive side, he bad tried to rebuild the nation that had lost power and prestige.  To make Israel great again.  (Sounds familiar?)   And Jonah was there, bringing words from God about “Restoring the boundaries of Israel” (2 Kings 14. 25)

500 miles North East of Samaria, the capital of Israel, was Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire.  As Jeroboam worked to get Israel back almost to the strength of Solomon's days, there was this empire to the north, getting bigger and bigger.  Demanding tributes and taxes.  And God was telling Jonah, “Go there”.  So Jonah says “What?  You cannot be serious?”  (A quote from John MacEnroe as it's Wimbledon week!)

And God says “Go there, go to Nineveh, and read out the charges against them.”

Now, as I said, Nineveh is 500 miles north-east, overland, across fields and deserts.  So Jonah went and found a boat.  He went to Joppa (Jaffa) and booked  a passage to Tarshish – possible Tarsessus (around modern Cadiz) in Spain, the other side of the straits of Gibraltar.  About as far away as he could go, in the opposite direction.

And (he thought) he had done it.  It looked like he had shaken God off.  Got away from his disturbing, nagging presence,  It wasn't as though he imagined God was limited to one place: Jonah wanted to get away from intimacy with Him.    Jonah 1.  God Nil.  Or so Jonah thought.   But God really isn't limited to one place.  On a ship, crossing the Med, God could still reach Jonah.  He sent a storm, (sovereignly using the forces of nature, as he did again in verse 17.)

Huge, frightening waves... slippery decks, timbers groaning beginning to split, everyone soaking wet, sea water in the hold...  

Picture by G Lilly

So the crew start to get religious. They're from different places and they are praying to different gods.  But Jonah is asleep.  Snoring (the Greek OT tells us!).  Possibly had a few glasses of wine to keep him warm, and drown out that voice.... Sometimes the people of God are running away, sleeping, drowning out God's voice, and people who are not the people of God, are praying, each doing their own thing to try to contact God and find an answer to the challenges they face...   

The sailors do a bit of divination to find out why this disaster has overtaken them.  They recognise that this is no ordinary storm.  And the dice they throw, tell them the problem is the passenger, Jonah.  So they go to the hold.  They shake him, wake him up, and demand to know what is going on.  He confesses it all.  He's a fallen preacher.  He's been running away from God, but God has caught up with him.  At last, it looks as if Jonah is beginning to get the message.  He is beginning to show some interest in speaking out for God – even if that means speaking to foreigners.

As the sea gets rougher they asked him, “What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?’”

“Throw me in. It's not you God is after, it is me.”   At last there is a change in Jonah himself. He is willing to take his punishment.  Here is at least some sign of a conversion, however incomplete.  “He meets again not only God, but the truth from which he fled. He not only meets that truth, but he offers his life for it.”  (Expositors Bible Commentary)

Understandably, the sailors were reluctant to throw a passenger overboard in cold blood.  So they continued rowing for the shore – but the storm only got worse, and eventually they did what Jonah said, threw him overboard.   They were praying “Lord, don't judge us for this.  We're doing what Jonah told us.”  And God comes through:  when Jonah goes overboard, the storm stops.   When they do throw Jonah into the waves, the sea becomes calm.. And immediately, there's a prayer meeting on board.. These sailors from all over the place, with their different gods, begin to fear the Lord. 

That's what we want, isn't it?  In our messed up and godless world, to see men and women – maybe some of them “spiritual”, some superstitious, everyone doing their own thing – beginning to “fear the Lord” and turn to him in surrender and faith.  If it's going to happen, we need a Jonah moment.  We need to hear and deal with the different voices that are shouting at us...

1. We hear the voice of our own prejudice, bigotry and disobedience, and turn from that.  That is perhaps the most difficult bit to sort out.  Jonah wasn't through on this one by any means.  It would take several miracles, a lot of prayer, and listening to God's voice, and a big step of cold, intentional obedience when he didn’t feel like it, before he beat that one. 
2. Responsiveness to the voice of the missionary, compassionate God.   We have to sober up.  We have to get more spiritual.  We cannot afford to drown out the voice of God.   Not with  busyness; not with clever ideas.  Not by surrounding ourselves with people or noise.  Not by substances including our won adrenalin!
3. Understanding the voice of our neighbours – the pluralism, the spirituality as well as the superstition.  Can we understand a world where “everyone prays to his or her own God” and where that is seems as OK?  I'm not asking you to agree with it (far from it!)  But we need to understand it.  We may see superstition, but we may also see an element in belief in the Supernatural.  Are we in the place where we can respond effectively to that?   Heaven help us if we make Christianity all about “believing ideas” rather than about an encounter with God Himself. Many people have abandoned the church not because it is too spiritual, but because it is not spiritual enough. Heaven help us if the world is praying and we are sleeping.
4. Finding our own voice – speaking honestly and faithfully.  The bad news and the good news.  “I am a runaway prophet” is not a great way to be starting, but it was honest.  It is that honesty about his own failure that gave Jonah the opportunity to talk to the sailors about who God is and how the could be saved from their predicament.  We need to find our voice – admitting we have as a Church in the Western world messed up, failed to live the life of jesus.  And we need to find our voice, pointing to who God is. 

So it's not all over for the sailors.  And it's not all over for Jonah, either.   God stepped in again.  He appointed a huge fish to swallow up Jonah (which should not create a problem for people who believe in God:  we don't need to “prove it's possible” and we don’t need to spiritualise it away.)  It's simply a  “miracles of divine intervention.” Chapter 4 tells us the Lord also appointed a Plant (v6) a worm (v7) and a scorching wind (v8). 

God uses things he has made to carry on his work with Jonah.  He is still on Jonah's case. 

Picture by G Lilly

  And he is still at work to bring us to the place where he wants us to be: a place of trust, obedience, intimacy, and engagement with his mission in the world.     Jesus said “unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.”  (John 12. 24 NLT)  that's the Jonah experience.  That's what the people of God need. As we surrender ourselves to Christ and to his mission, then the harvest will come.

© Gilmour Lilly 2016