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Running Away from the Lord-Jonah 1:1-17

By Larry Kirk | April 24, 2007

Have you ever seen a small child running away from his father? I remember being down by the beach when a little boy bolted off through the traffic lanes, headed for the water. His dad shot off after him yelling, “Stop, stop!” Now, it’s scary when there’s danger, but it’s funny when everything turns out all right. It’s funny that the little three-year-old hasn’t figured out that he cannot outrun his father. He thinks he’s going to beat the old man. But the old man is twenty-seven, and the kid is three. It’s funny because you know this is a race the kid will lose even if he hasn’t figured that out. It’s funny and foolish and, of course, sometimes dangerous. And then it’s still foolish, but not funny at all.

One of the themes that pop up throughout the Bible is that, like the little boy at the beach, we often foolishly run from God. That theme starts very early in the Bible’s story. Soon after the Fall happens and sin enters the human heart, people start running from God. Adam and Eve hide from Him in the Garden of Eden. It’s interesting; sin makes you stupid. Here’s Adam after his sin, thinking he can hide behind a tree and be so quiet and still that the Almighty, the all-knowing and all-powerful creator of heaven and earth, won’t be able to find him.

A lot of the time people run from God and deny that they are running. What’s interesting is that Jonah runs from God and openly admits it. Jonah 1:10 says the sailors knew he was running away from the Lord, because he had already told them so. Maybe he showed up at the dock and said, “Hey, guys, can we get this ship? I’m running from the Lord.” Here’s a story in which someone acknowledges running from God. This raises an interesting question: What kind of person runs from God?

One of the first things we learn from the story of Jonah is that . . .

Sometimes People You Would Not Expect

to Run from God Will Run from Him

When Jonah 1:17 says, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Ammati,” it’s telling us that Jonah was a prophet.

People Who Have Been God’s Faithful Servants in the Past

May Still Run from Him When a New Challenge Comes

This same Jonah the son of Amittai is mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25. In that passage Jonah is called a prophet. God spoke to him and revealed things that had not yet happened. God used Jonah during the reign of King Jeroboam II of Israel to prophesy that God was going to care for His people and restore the borders of their country even though they had been sinful and rebellious and did not deserve His care. Just as God said, those promises were fulfilled. Jonah knew God was real and His word was true. But now, God calls Jonah to go east to Nineveh, and instead he heads west for Tarshish, running from God.

People Who Call Themselves Worshipers

of the Lord May Still Run from Him

There is artistry to the way the book of Jonah is presented. In this opening chapter the author uses what is called a chiasmus. A chiasmus is a literary pattern based on the Greek letter chi, which looks like an X. Here’s how it works in Jonah chapter 1: First is the introduction to the story (verses 1-3), then the build-up of the danger and the storm (verses 4-8), and then at the center of the chapter Jonah speaks for the first time (verse 9); after that, action is taken to quiet the storm (verses 10-15), and finally a conclusion (verse 16). The point of this structure is to have everything lead up to and then flow from the first statement that Jonah makes.

What is it that Jonah says? Verse 9: “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.” Scholars say that when Jonah’s description of himself as a worshiper of the Lord is placed at the center of the story, in the midst of the storm caused by his own sinful flight from God, we are supposed to notice the irony and get the message. People who know who God is, who claim to belong to God, and who have actually experienced His grace are still vulnerable to the temptation to run from Him.

The Bible frequently tries to get us to see that sometimes the people one would not expect to run from God will run. You might even be one of them. That’s something this story challenges you to consider.

In Jewish synagogues on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a passage from the book of Jonah is read each year. The congregation responds to the reading with the confession “We are Jonah.” The book of Jonah is a mirror in which we are supposed to see ourselves. We are Jonah. When we ask the question, What kind of people run from God? the answer is people just like us.

Why do we sometimes want to run?

We Run from God Because We Want

Our Will and Not God’s Will

Jonah 1: 1-3: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.” Jonah’s problem was not theological or doctrinal. He knew the right doctrines, and he knows what God wanted him to do. So what was his problem? He wanted his will, not God’s will. It was as simple as that.

Sometimes We Run from God Because

We Don’t Like What He Tells Us to Do

In verse 2 God says: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” It’s not surprising that Jonah didn’t like what God was telling him to do. The Bible says we are all sinners, but when the Bible says there is a particular place and people on earth where the wickedness has come up before Him like a bad odor, you know that’s not a place you would normally want to go.

Nineveh was one of the major cities in the ancient world and undoubtedly a difficult place in which to be a servant of God. It was just a few hours from modern Baghdad, across the Tigris River from the city of Mosul in Iraq. It was, at one point, the capital of the Assyrian empire.

The people of Nineveh and Assyria were known for their immorality and brutality. They were continually attacking and conquering nearby nations simply to expand their power. One of their rulers, Ashurbanipal, was accustomed to tearing off the lips and hands of his victims. Another, Tiglath-Pileser, skinned them alive and then made great piles of their skulls as a lesson to others.The city itself was surrounded by huge fortifications, and the Ninevites thought themselves invulnerable. They were powerful, arrogant, violent, and evil (The New American Commentary, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Broadman, p. 225) God called Jonah to go to these people and tell them He was displeased with the way they were running their nation, raising their families, and living their lives. They needed to repent or face God’s judgment.

Have you seen pictures of those big Nazi rallies in Germany during World War Two? One Jewish writer says, “The Assyrians were the Nazi storm-troopers of the ancient world. They were the pitiless power-crazed foe. They showed no quarter . . . . For Jonah, Nineveh . . . stood as a symbol of evil incarnate” (Hayyim Lewis, quoted by Rosemary Nixon in The Message of Jonah, p. 63) So what God was asking Jonah to do would be like telling a Baptist pastor from Oklahoma to go to Nuremburg at the height of World War Two and preach repentance to the Nazis.

This was a difficult calling, but God wants us to understand that sometimes He will call us to outrageously difficult things. God never promises that if we live our lives in relationship with Him we will be comfortable and safe and He’ll never ask us to do anything difficult. That’s not the Bible’s message. Jesus commands us to take up the cross daily and to follow Him in a life that will not always be easy, safe, or comfortable.

Jesus says He came into this world to redeem us. He died to pay for our sins and rose again to be our Lord and Savior. If we trust Him, we have the promise of safety in eternity, but now, in this life, we are called to trust, obey, and follow Him in a life that, if we are obedient, will be a challenging adventure in which our faith will be tested.

We have a problem in American Christian church culture today. Some, in the name of making God more attractive, have repackaged the Bible’s message so they can offer the world something that is filled with nothing but sweetness and opportunity for one’s wishes to be fulfilled. What we must realize is that when the church offers people a faith that does not involve commitment or obedience or risk, uncertainty, passion, or sacrifice, then what’s being offered is not what God has revealed in the Scriptures.

In an interesting little book titled The Barbarian Way, Erwin McManus says:

We’ve created a religious culture in which–even though we are the most blessed society in the history of the planet–our best selling literature still focuses on how we can be more blessed. . . . The original call of Jesus was so simple, so clean, so clear: “Follow Me.” He wants us to surrender our lives to him and follow him into the unknown.” And if it means a life of suffering, hardship, and disappointment, it will be worth it because following Jesus Christ is more powerful and more fulfilling than living with everything in the world minus him. Have we forgotten this? (The Barbarian Way, p. 49)

God says, “I promise you My love and My presence, but I call you to faith and obedience. I want you to do what I tell you to do.”

Sometimes we run from God because we don’t like what he tells us to do, but what else can we learn from Jonah?

Sometimes We Run from God Because

We Don’t Like Who He Tells Us to Love

We wouldn’t know that this was one of Jonah’s reasons for running from God if we had only Jonah 1. But listen to something that the prophet says at the end of the story in Jonah 4. Jonah eventually goes to Nineveh. What happens is that, when he preaches, the people repent and God shows compassion on them and does not judge them. This makes Jonah angry.

Listen to what he says. Jonah 4:2: “He prayed to the Lord, “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” When Jonah ran away from God, his problem wasn’t just fearful disobedience; it was also unloving self-righteousness. Jonah didn’t want to be used by God to show grace and compassion to a people he looked down on and considered evil.

What the story of Jonah shows us is that you can be guilty of running from God even when you have no intention of engaging in sinful indulgence. You can be guilty of running from Him even when your only motivation is to avoid an unpleasant ministry. There is no evidence that Jonah was running to Tarshish in order to engage in some scandalous sin. He just didn’t want to serve God in the place God was calling him to serve. He didn’t want to share God’s love with people he would rather avoid. You may look at your life and see yourself as a very moral person, but the question you have to ask is, Are you a person who is saying “yes” to God’s mission for your life? If not, you are running from Him, no matter how moral you may be.

One of the particular lessons of Jonah is that a moral person can be especially vulnerable to self-righteousness, and that self-righteousness can work against a willingness to share God’s love with others.

Human beings all struggle with self-righteousness. We are continually tempted to look down on others so that we can feel good about ourselves. The more people we feel better than, the better we feel about ourselves. That’s a big part of the problem of self-righteousness.

I read of a pastor who took his son with him for a haircut. He said the trip to the barbershop proved to be a cross-cultural experience. The woman who cut his hair was a large flamboyant lady with bleached-blonde hair, a black tank top, bright red lipstick, and tattoos large enough to double as billboards. During the haircut she kept firing questions about parenting. Near the end of the haircut she thanked him for his insight, told his son that he had a good daddy, and then informed them that she was going to be a daddy too. His son stared at him waiting for some clarification for how this woman could be a daddy. So he asked the woman if she was planning on getting pregnant. She said that she wasn’t, but her girlfriend was going to conceive a baby with a male friend, and she’d be there to help.

He said the woman couldn’t have been nicer, yet she saw no difference between his family and her family or the family she was planning to create. He realized that he and this woman were about the same age and lived in the same zip code but in very different cultures. The interesting thing to me is that the man actually referred to the story of Jonah as he reflected on this experience. He said the challenge for him was to remain absolutely true to his Christian message and convictions but without any self-righteousness toward this woman or people like her, or for that matter anyone else (Mark Driscoll, Radical Reformission, Zondervan, pp. 91ff).

It is easy to see that woman as one running from God, not listening to His Word and His laws for life. But what that Christian man confessed that if he looked down on her in self-righteousness and didn’t want to love her or share God’s love with her, he also would have been guilty of running from God—and perhaps would have been more guilty because he was supposed to know better. We run from God not only when we run away from the moral standard He has revealed to us but also when we run away from the mission of love and grace to which He calls us.

At the end of the story of Jonah, the prophet is happy to receive God’s grace but furious to see the same grace freely extended to people he didn’t like. Did the Ninevites need to repent? Absolutely! But so did Jonah for his self-righteousness. And so do we, when we are like him.

The book of Jonah is in part about getting God’s people to face how self-righteously sinful they can be. Throughout the book, we often see the non-believers looking as good or better than the believers.

Did you notice, in chapter one, how much nicer the sailors seem than Jonah? They are presented as pagans. They are not worshipers of the one true God. Their possessions, their ship, its cargo, and their very lives are at risk because of Jonah. When Jonah comes clean with them, they are polite. They ask him in verse 11, “What should we do to make the sea calm down for us?” He says, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea.” They say, “We can’t do that.” Verse 13 says: “Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before.” They’ve already thrown all their cargo overboard; they are willing to risk everything to save Jonah. He is the Christian, so to speak, but he doesn’t volunteer any information, take up an oar, or offer any help at all. They look pretty good. Jonah looks terrible by comparison.

If I were the captain, I’d take an oar all right, but I’d be tempted to take it to Jonah for risking my life, my cargo, my friends, and my livelihood. These sailors don’t do that. It’s only when they are convinced there is no other option that they throw Jonah into the sea and into the hands of God. And when the sea calmed, they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and worshiped Him.

The story of Jonah is convicting because it asks us as Christians to look at ourselves honestly. Have we justification for the self-righteousness that causes us to think we are better than others? Jonah had answers that the sailors didn’t have. He knew what the sailors didn’t know about God. But he wasn’t a better or more worthy human being. One of the ugliest things in the church today is the foolish self-righteousness that kills our compassion for the world and our willingness to be used by God to reach people who are loved by Him.

In Daytona Beach there are people who don’t claim to be believers but who are nicer, more enjoyable, more prayerful, and more moral than some Christians. Somebody asked, tongue in cheek: “What are we going to do if they legalize gay marriage and then the homosexuals start criticizing Christians for undermining the sanctity of marriage because we have so many professing Christians getting divorced in Jesus’ name?” A lot of Christian dads are present in church on Sunday but are not emotionally and mentally present to their wives and children on Tuesday evenings because they must faithfully nurture a beer buzz every evening after work. A lot of young Christian women are flirting with the boundaries of immodesty and young Christian men are risking addiction to internet pornography because we are surrounded by a culture consumed with sex and have allowed ourselves to be swept up in it. Materialism, consumerism, selfish ambition, self-indulgence: these things are not just in the world but in the church. We need to fight those battles and conquer those sins, but as we fight we also need to repent of our self-righteousness.

We aren’t better than others or more deserving of grace. The point of grace is that it is given to the undeserving. We are all sinners, and we all need God and His grace through Jesus Christ. We need to get rid of self-righteousness and stand before God in the humility of the righteousness of Christ, which we receive through faith in Him alone.

The more we understand that, the more we will see how ugly and foolish self-righteousness is. Then we will let go of our self-righteousness so that we can rejoice in the grace of God and serve Him in His mission to share His mercy, doing His will wherever He calls us to share and serve and obey.

God doesn’t want you to run off to indulge in sin, and He doesn’t want you to run off to avoid ministry. He doesn’t want you to run off at all. He wants you to stay close to Him and share His mission in this world and His purpose for your life.

You can trust Him because, as Jonah 4:2 says, He is “a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.” The same grace, compassion, and abounding love that sent Jonah to Nineveh sent Jesus to earth for you and me. Our own sins are such an offense to God’s justice that Jesus had to die on the cross to pay for them so that we could escape God’s judgment and be saved through faith in Him.

So, believing in His gracious compassion and His abounding love, let go of self-righteousness and self-will. Trust God. Without self-will or self-righteousness, do what He tells you to do without procrastination or deviation. Live in His abounding love, serve His sovereign purpose, and do what He says.

I want to acknowledge that through out this series of messages I drew freely from several sources. First the book, Salvation Through Judgment And Mercy: The Gospel According to Jonah (Gospel According to the Old Testament) by Bryan D. Estelle (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing) This is one installment of the very helpful series The Gospel According To the Old Testament D.A. Carson says that “one of the most urgent needs of the church is to grasp how the many parts of the Bible fit together to make one story-line that culminates in Jesus Christ…(and) this series of books goes a long way to meeting that need”. Sinclair Ferguson was quoted as saying “at last a series on the Old Testament designed to provide reliable exposition, biblical theology, and a focus on Christ”. O Palmer Robertson’s little book on Jonah, Jonah: A Study In Compassion, published by Banner of Truth, also proved especially helpful. While preaching this series I also listened to sermons on Jonah by Dr. Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll. Their sermons often suggested helpful ideas which were adapted to fit my approach and my congregation’s needs. Both of their sermon series are available through their web sites at www.redeemer.com and www.marshill.org respectively.

Topics: Jonah |

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