We read in the book of Jonah that “the word of the Lord came unto Jonah . . . saying, . . . ‘go to Nineveh’. . . . But Jonah rose up to flee . . . from the presence of the Lord, and . . . found a ship going to Tarshish” (Jonah 1:1-3).
The first recorded account of man fleeing from God’s presence is that of Cain (Genesis 4:16). When we fail to respond to what the Spirit is speaking to us, we put ourselves in the position of not being able to sense God’s presence.
David knew that, as Jesus told us, we are never forsaken by our Father:
Psalm 139:7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. (9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. 11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. 12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.)
But when the prophet Nathan rebuked him for going in to Bathsheba, David lost that sense of sweet communion and in his prayer of repentance seems to indicate that what he said earlier was not the case, that we can indeed be separated from God and His love.
Psalms 51:11 Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.
There is a vast difference between feeling that something is true and it actually being truth. When Adam and Eve lost their feeling of being one with God, that is when “sin” entered and this world was founded, this world that Jesus overcame (John 16:33) and delivered us from. (Galatians 1:4 Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father:)
We continue reading in Jonah, “. . . the Lord sent. . . a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken” (1:4).
Most religions, including the Hebrew religion, believe that God is sovereign and responsible for all that happens to man. They seem to completely ignore the fact that God created man in His own image and gave him dominion over all the rest of creation (Genesis 1:26)—so that he is able to bring upon himself unimaginable evil by his false beliefs. Whatever he believes to be true he brings into manifestation. (Proverbs 23:7 For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he) (see Consciousness Manifested).
Because of the conscience that came in with the law (see Freed from the Conscience), the Hebrews believed that the Lord God, Yahweh, the “law God” (see Elohim or Yahweh?) was a god of wrath and punishment, easily angered and ready to punish man for his sin. So if Jonah had sinned and was on the boat that was about to be destroyed by a storm at sea, then of course the conclusion was that God had sent the storm to punish Jonah. It’s no different today. How many Christian ministers said the same thing about the “sinners” in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina struck that city. Insurance companies often won’t cover “natural disasters” because they are “acts of God.”
To continue Jonah’s story. Because the sailors were afraid, they each began to call upon his god, waking Jonah from sleep to call upon his also (1:5-6).
We see that the “heathen” had the same concept of God that Jonah had. They believed that some god had sent the storm and that it could only be stopped by that god. They just weren’t sure which god it was.
So they decided to “cast lots” to see who amongst them was the cause of this storm.
Casting lots, which we think of as pagan, was used by the Hebrews even until the time of the disciples’ choosing a replacement for the traitor Judas (Acts 1:12-26), the result being that Matthias was chosen. And this is the one and only time Matthias is ever mentioned in Scripture—which tells us something of the value of casting lots. The “black” arts, by means of which man seeks to obtain knowledge rather than seeking God directly, have always been practiced, even to the present day. We see King Saul going to the witch at Endor (who had a “familiar spirit”) to call up the prophet Samuel (with success) as an example. But it is not spiritual, and God has given us many warnings about engaging in such practices.
V7 “The lot fell upon Jonah.” We see that these mariners already knew that Jonah was fleeing “from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.” But when Jonah told them that he was a Hebrew and that his God was the creator of heaven and earth, they became “exceedingly afraid.” Something within themselves (the life of God that is the life of every man) caused them to know that this was not one of the false gods such as they had called upon to still the tempest.
Because of his false concept of the true god who is indeed the creator of heaven and earth, Jonah believed and conveyed to these mariners that this tempest was for sure God’s punishment for his sin and that the only way to appease this God of wrath was for his own life to be sacrificed. (v 12). For the God Jonah thought he knew was one that required sacrifice to be appeased.
It is interesting to note that even these “heathen” knew intuitively that this was not God’s will and made the attempt to reach land without throwing Jonah overboard (v 13). But Jonah’s consciousness prevailed. He didn’t want the storm to abate. We see in chapter 4 that he really wanted to die, that death was to be preferred to seeing the Ninevites repent, be forgiven and restored by God.
This speaks volumes about the Hebrew concept of God and his relationship to mankind. They gloried in thinking of themselves as God’s chosen people who alone were favored by God, not desiring that anyone else should know God’s love and acceptance. Of course we find the occasional exception; but most of the Hebrews, even Peter, thought that God’s salvation should be extended only to the Jews (Acts 10-11).
Those mariners prayed to Jonah’s God before finally throwing him overboard as he had told them they must. When the sea became calm, they were awe-stricken and offered sacrifices and made vows to this God as they would have to any heathen god and I’m sure were instructed by Jonah to do the same for his God. We are told repeatedly that God actually took no pleasure in sacrifices or vows. We see this most vividly when Jephthah “vowed a vow unto the Lord” that if God would deliver the children of Ammon into his hand he would “offer up for a burnt offering” to the Lord “whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me.” And who should that be but his only child, a virgin daughter (Judges 11:30-35).
This sort of foolishness is what comes from being under the law whose curse Jesus came to redeem us from (Galatians 3:10-13). It comes from the belief that we must DO something to earn God’s love and acceptance (the definition of the law). No wonder David said that God doesn’t desire, require or delight in sacrifice, sin offering or burnt offering (Psalms 40:6; 51:16). And Hosea tells us that what God really wants is for us to know Him and extend mercy—not sacrifice (6:6). The writer of Hebrews confirms this (10:5). And when the scribe said that loving God and our neighbor is “more than whole burnt offerings and sacrifices,” Jesus told him that he was “not far from the kingdom of God” (Matthew 12:32-34).
And concerning the making of vows unto God, Jesus said that we shouldn’t swear at all (Matthew 5:33-37).
Yet I do want to note that Jephthah, despite his foolish vow, was still included in the faith “hall of fame” of Hebrews 11. Like so many other Bible characters, this “son of an harlot” whose brothers thrust him from his father’s house and who gathered around himself “vain” or “worthless men” (Judges 11:1-2), Jephthah is remembered not for what he did wrong but for his trust in God (see A Perfect Heart, How We Experience God and Married to Christ the King).
Jonah 1:17 Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
We can see that God did not indeed require the sacrifice of Jonah, but rather his salvation, the same salvation that is free to everyone, no matter what their “sin.” Of course the sin is the same for all, the feeling of being separated from our Father God and having to do something (make some sacrifice) to regain his love.
And the symbol for that salvation is so beautifully illustrated here that Jesus Himself said to the scribes and Pharisees who were seeking a “sign” to prove that He was indeed sent from God:
39 . . . An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: 40 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
Luke 11:30 For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation.
We must always keep in mind that the Bible is a parable of God bringing mankind (individually and collectively) out of the darkness of the carnal mind into a recognition of our true identity as Son of the living God. Jesus’ quoting the Old Testament does not imply that He agrees with the consciousness of God held by either the writers or the people written about in this chronology. As He reveals the “true god” that He prays we will come to know (John 17:3), on more than one occasion He addresses his disagreement. Not only does he tell us not to make vows, but also not to require “an eye for an eye” and not to hate our enemies. He would say “Ye have heard that it hath been said. . . but I say unto you” (Matthew 5:38-45).
Most of Jesus’ ministry was to the Hebrew nation, the people whose view of God is recorded in and taken from the Old Testament scriptures. These are the people who sat in such “gross darkness” (Isaiah 60:2) that they who had been given the task of recording God’s relationship to man had so effectively quenched the Spirit of God that they had not even heard anything to record for 400 years!
But they did know the Old Testament scriptures by the letter, if not by the Spirit as Jesus knew them. And it was only by referring to them that Jesus could begin to awaken them spiritually. When God descended into this world in the form of Jesus to bring mankind back to himself, He came into the culture that had in the past received the most light but now was in the deepest darkness. That’s why Jesus could say to the “chief priests and elders of the people,” “the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matthew 21:23, 31).
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the apostle John’s account of Jesus healing the man born blind (John 9:1-41). This poor, “ignorant” beggar had a greater knowledge of God than any of the Pharisees, who judged Jesus to be “not of God” because He performed this healing on the Sabbath. This is quite understandable if one reads the Old Testament by the “letter” since, according to those Scriptures, God Himself instructed Moses to stone a man for “gathering sticks upon the Sabbath day” (Numbers 15:35-36).
On another occasion, when Jesus’ disciples were being rebuked by the Pharisees for plucking and eating corn on the Sabbath, Jesus said that if they had known what was meant by Hosea’s words, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” they would not have condemned the “guiltless” disciples; then He proceeded to heal the man with the withered hand to illustrate that it was “lawful to do well on the sabbath days” (Matthew 12:1-13).
This action on the part of Jesus resulted in the Pharisees holding “a council against him, how they might destroy him” (Matthew 12:14). But Jesus just continued to heal the multitudes (v15) and cast out demons (v22), until the Pharisees pronounced that He was casting them out “by Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (v24). Jesus said that they could speak only evil things because that was what was in their hearts and that they were “condemned” by their own words (see By Your Words You Are Condemned). Then it is that the scribes and Pharisees step forward and ask for a “sign” and Jesus responds that the only “sign” they will get is “the sign of the prophet Jonas” (v39).
Jesus was making reference to Jonah not because of his being any kind of spiritual example. No, his heart was as hardened against his brothers (the Ninevites) as were the Pharisees against all who came to Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. But it wasn’t as hardened against God whom he knew to be “a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness,” (Jonah 4:2) a God whom he knew he could pray to and be heard even in “the belly of hell” (Jonah 2:2) that he had caused to come upon himself, the God who “brought up his life from corruption” when his “soul fainted within him” (v7), the God of whom it can be said, “Salvation is of the Lord” (v9). But he also had a concept of God to whom he must continue to make sacrifices and vows (v9), most likely believing that to be the reason God would hear and deliver him.
Although Jonah knew God’s character, we don’t see any of those attributes of grace, mercy, kindness or love (slow to anger) in Jonah’s character or even any desire for those attributes. No, the very reason he didn’t want to preach in Ninevah was because he didn’t want those “heathen” to receive God’s grace. He felt fully justified in being angry at God’s goodness, “even unto death” (Jonah 4:9). He had rather die than be a witness to this, and, even worse, be an instrument through whom God’s grace came to the people who instead of trusting God trusted in their own “evil” ways (Jonah 3:8) and were thereby headed for certain destruction. He didn’t want them to turn to this kind and merciful God and be restored.
Of course Jesus went into “the heart of the earth” in order to restore mankind to his heritage as Son of God by taking His humanity (and that of all mankind) to the death. He “went away” that He might live in each one of us, enabling us to “walk in the Spirit and not fulfill the lust of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16) as Jonah did. He used the “sign of Jonah” because the Pharisees were familiar with the story and might be able to see the parallel when Jesus was resurrected from the dead so that all mankind could experience God’s grace as did the Ninevites after Jonah was “resurrected” from the hell he had descended into.
Jesus knew the Pharisees were also familiar with David’s prophecy concerning His death and resurrection, the prophecy quoted by Peter in his sermon on the day of Pentecost when Jesus returned as the life-giving Spirit to live in man (Acts 2:27-28). Perhaps they would see the parallel in Jonah’s account of his own “resurrection”:
Psalm 16:10 For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell [Jonah 2:2 out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.];
neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. [Jonah 2:6 I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.]
11 Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. [Jonah 2:9 . . . Salvation is of the Lord.]
We are told on other occasions that the Hebrew Scriptures were fulfilled for the purpose of convincing the blinded Jews that Jesus was indeed the Messiah that their Scriptures prophesied concerning and whom they were all looking for (Matthew 26:54, 56; John 17:12; 19:24, 28). For those Scriptures were all they knew of God; and, indeed, those Scriptures were God to them.
The Jews were seeking to “slay” Jesus because he healed a man on the Sabbath (which they believed their Scriptures forbade) (John 5:16) and said that God was His Father (v18)—which they believed their Scriptures taught to be blasphemy. But Jesus told them that they were never going to find the eternal life that they were seeking in those Scriptures, that those Scriptures were pointing them to the One who is Life (v39), that if they had really believed Moses’ writings as they thought they did, they would have believed Jesus since Moses wrote of Him (vv45-47).
This contemplation has gotten much longer than I had anticipated, but I can see now that we cannot receive the revelation of Jesus Christ until we understand that the Father (the “true God”—John 17) that Jesus is revealing is not the concept of God entertained by the Jews (the “law God” Yahweh to whom they ascribe all the attributes of any other tribal god).
Sad to say, that is the same concept of God entertained by most Christians even today. Like the Jews before them, Christians have been given the task of taking the gospel of the “true God” to the world. They have been made “able ministers of the New Testament” (2Corinthians 3:6), but have put their converts “under the law” of do’s and dont’s rather than under the “grace and truth” that came by Jesus Christ (John 1:17), not teaching them to walk by the Spirit inside them where there is liberty (2Corinthians 3:17). God is still seen as a God of judgment, wrath and punishment just waiting to throw into a hell of everlasting torment (away from the presence of the One who is Omnipresent) anyone who doesn’t follow His rules for receiving His love and acceptance.
It is time we heed Paul’s words (and Jesus’ example) about the use of scriptures. If we read them by the “letter,” a veil comes over our minds and they are but a “ministration of death” which only brings “condemnation.” But if we read them by the “spirit,” (allowing the Spirit of truth within us to convey the truth being revealed by that scripture) they are a “ministration of spirit” which brings only “righteousness,” the free gift of the righteousness of God without the law (2Corinthians 3:5-18). For “all scripture is given. . . for instruction in righteousness” (2Timothy 3:16-17). (See The Man Born Blind.)