Jonah and Jesus- Part 2 3.26.26

Who was Jonah really? Before we follow him onto the boat, we need to meet him. In part 2 of our series, Jonah and Jesus, we dig into Jonah 1:1–3 to uncover who this prophet was, what he already knew about the God who was sending him, and why that knowledge may have been precisely why he ran.   

And as we read Jonah, we continue to discover how Jesus showed his disciples in Luke 24, the whole Old Testament whispers his name. We're learning to read with those ears — slowly, meditatively, not just for information but for transformation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

So today, what we're going to do is we're going to begin with the word and as we study this book of Jonah. Jonah's kind of like a this single family photo of a much bigger context. It's like this was taken, and yet there's still so much more that we could capture that's outside of the book of Jonah. So we started this series last week and we set the stage for this need that we would read scripture, but not just for information where we're collecting facts along the way, but we're we're reading it for formation. You and I are formed by different people and different things. We're constantly being formed. And so the question is, how does scripture form us in this month of April in 2026 as we read it? How are we formed by it? And I and I encourage you, like, hey, we don't just read it, but we need to do this unhurried practice of meditating and studying scripture as well. And so that's my hope as we go through this short book of the Old Testament. And as we're doing this, I also have challenged us. We must, when we read this, we must be like the first disciples, where Jesus took them and said, Hey, this is how you read the Old Testament. You read it through the lens of me, through Jesus, as we read each part of it. Because the whole of Scriptures tells one great story, and Jesus is a part of that. So the opening words of Jonah is going to tell us this bigger story. And uh, and some of our English translations, maybe you have the Bible that's that's in the back of the seat in front of you, and some of these translations don't tell this little word and in the beginning. It starts off generally, for some of us, it starts off with the word the. And for some of us, it starts off with the word now. But I think this is really important. This this actual the Hebrew text starts with the word and. There's this little symbol that represents and. And that's how this book starts. And the word of the Lord came. Some of you might think, what's the big deal with that? And tells us, oh, we're dropped right in the middle of this. It's like watching the third episode of a show that you really like and not having to watch the first, second, and anything after. You're kind of just dropped right into the middle of it. And so here Jonah starts with this word and and it puts us right in the middle of this narrative, and it's a short narrative. And it's so short that we might think it's super simple. Like this is just a simple story. What do you already know about Jonah? You can call out. What do you already know about it? What's one of the most obvious parts of Jonah? Okay, that's one that we always yeah, there's this Jonah, you know, this whale of a story. Uh what else do you know about Jonah? He ran away. Okay. So we we got him running away.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Anything else? What was that? Was that you, Jake? Sorry, one more time.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

He had a dad. Oh, yes, ooh, yes. And that that's important, that's gonna be an important part of this story. He's he's got this dad, um Amitai. Anyone else?

SPEAKER_00 3:20

What was said over here? He didn't go where God Oh he doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Oh, so if we just read this first part, we we thought, oh yeah, Jonah got away. But then he ends up doing what God tells him to do. He's Jewish. We got this, it's a Jewish story. It was written to the Jewish people, but we get to benefit from it. We are we it's written for us, but not necessarily to us. It was written to the Jewish people. And so so here we got this simple story. If you just, I mean, you could read it, you probably could read it two or three times by the end of my sermon. It's that short. Or maybe my sermon's that long. Um, so uh it's also a super sophisticated writing. There is a lot in the story that we have to pay attention to. Uh, there are all these little connections between this story and other passages of scripture. Tim Mackey calls those hyperlinks. These are links that point to many other passages of the Bible. And these hyperlinks are all over the book of Jonah. We use hyperlinks in our daily conversations, uh, generally with pop culture. And so anybody have a family member who constantly is quoting a movie? Okay, we have we have a couple of them in our family. They're constantly these different quotes that that point to the current circumstances. So if somebody kind of opened the door and leaned their head through it and they said, Here's Johnny, some of you could point right back to this pop culture movie. If if you are trying to encourage a friend and you just say, just keep swimming, what are we referencing? Finding Nemo, nice, thank you. If if we sat down on a park bench and you say to your neighbor that's maybe a stranger, life is like a box of chocolate. What are we referencing? Force gum. So so these are all little hyperlinks that tell a bigger story in just a matter of seconds. If I said, May the force be with you. Star Wars, yes. When The Mandalorian came out uh uh several years ago, it was kind of like this the spin-off from Star Wars. And I had a really I have a really good friend, Mike Samalis, who knows everything there is to know about the universe of Star Wars. And I'd go to him and and we'd talk about it, and he'd tell me all these crazy facts about happening in the background and these little links, these Easter eggs to other things. And I was constantly going to him and saying, Who do you think this baby Yoda character is? Is it Yoda? Um and uh and he's like, No, I don't think so. No, and he got it right. Um, we do this with a lot of things in our culture. With in our Tuesday morning Bible studies, we're sitting around the table, and uh a couple weeks ago, uh Gerolyn mentions Little House on the Prairie, and then she mentions this character, and most of the people around the table were like, Yes, oh yeah, we know who that is, and I'm sitting in the dark. Like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Uh Harvey did the same thing uh this last week. He was describing somebody in Montana with a name I don't even remember, uh, and everybody's like, oh yes, yeah. And I'm like, I am I am out of touch on this. Um jokes do that too. Have you ever heard somebody tell a joke and you just didn't get it? Like, and maybe you do the courtesy laugh, like, uh yeah. Um jokes will do so jokes require context. So if I were to tell the the age-old joke, uh a horse walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, Why the long face? Um what it would take for you to catch this at all, and I heard some courtesy laughs, thank you. Uh so for you to understand this, you'd have to know our culture for some reason at some point like to talk about people walking into bars. Uh and that became like a joke uh uh constantly. And it's kind of like knock-knock. Uh so then you would also have to know what a horse looks like. You would have to have the context of a horse. And if you'd never heard of a horse or ever seen one, you'd have no idea what this joke's about. And then you would have to know that the long face is not only on a horse, but it's a phrase we use to talk about, like, oh, how somebody's feeling down. There is a lot of context in a few words. The book of Jonah is considered a comedy. Many scholars believe it was a it's a comedy. And it feels a little tragic in one sense, but what it is, it's one of my favorite forms of comedy, satire. Satire is like the best comedy. I mean, you've got to think about as you're reading this, I want you to think about the writer is probably a team on the SNL crew, right? Or like writing for Conan O'Brien. It's that kind of comedy. We're pulling out some things that are that it's the type of comedy that you start to laugh and then you feel kind of the ache in your stomach, like, oh, wait, oh, there's some bit of truth. Oh, that kind of stings. Because some of this joke is on me, the reader. Real good satire is going to make you feel a little tension, like, I don't know if I should laugh here or not. And that's what the book of Jonah is. It is a satire. And what's interesting for Jonah is everything goes wrong for him. The whole book is about things going wrong for him. It's kind of like Mr. Bean, if you remember him, or the three stooges if you remember them. Like it's that kind of story that all the things that could go wrong do go wrong for this poor guy. And so as we're invited into the story, we're invited to identify with somebody where everything goes wrong.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Can you identify with that?

SPEAKER_01 9:29

And as we identify with that, we also think, oh, I need to laugh at myself a little bit. I should not take myself so seriously.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

You know what's ironic about this?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Is that Jonah is one of the most successful prophets in all of the Old Testament. Because nearly basically everybody responds to God in this story. And so that's the irony that everything goes wrong, yet all of these things feel successful. So here's what I promised. I promised us that we were gonna learn how to study scripture using the book of Jonah over the next few weeks. And so we've got old school uh kind of chalkboard here. Anyone remember the smell of chalk? Um, and so so here we're gonna we're gonna go back to school just a little bit. And over the next couple weeks, I'm gonna teach you a little bit of how do we study a passage like the book of Jonah. Uh, and if you want, you can I encourage you to get a concordance. You can buy a concordance for fairly cheap. Um, or in our library, Donna and Tammy, we have a couple concordances downstairs in our library you could borrow. If you can't afford one, I'll I'll be happy to help you with that. You could just see me. Or you buy a book like Tim Keller's Rediscovering Jonah. It kind of, it's not a concordance, but it's gonna kind of help you as you walk through this book uh of what it means to study the Old Testament. So let's go to Jonah chapter one. Here we go. We're gonna study this together, and I want you to take note. If you need, I encourage you to grab the book because I'm gonna reference it in a little bit. One of those black Bibles in front of you, page 916, I think it is, for most of the Bibles in the room. And so I want to identify a couple things as we study this together. Let's look for some hyperlinks. Starting back, and the word of the Lord. Where else in Scripture, if you've grown up in Scripture, do you remember God's word kicking things off? Like that set God's word sets things in motion. Yeah, book of John. So we got John 1 where it says, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Where else? Where else does God's word put things into motion? Genesis. Ooh, right back in the beginning. You're gonna find in Jonah, Jonah's gonna reference Genesis a few times as we read a passage earlier. I'll get to that in just a moment. And so, right away, if I just started reading and just uh went through chapter one in a matter of second minutes, I would miss some of these little uh pointers to other things. So we have the word of the of God starting things out, and this is gonna be a nod to Genesis, and for Jesus followers, it could be a nod to John chapter one. We also notice his name is Jonah, and what's really important in the book or in the uh to the Hebrew culture is meaning of names, as we studied in Ruth back in the fall. And so Jonah's name means dove. Take a second just to think about what other stories in the Bible is there a dove in? Well, we got a couple. Oh, you're all on it. Your brains are just firing away. Okay, so somebody said over here, what Noah! We have Noah. So, Noah, we have this dove, and then the dove represents peace after some chaos. And so, so we have Noah, uh, that story with the dove, and so as we see this name Jonah, we're gonna think of Noah. We usually mess those two names up often. And so we have this dove that flies in, and then somebody else said, I think Bonnie, that was you. What did you say? When Jesus is baptized, the Spirit of God hovers down, he's like the he comes down in a form of a dove that settles on Jesus. And so our brains should fire like, oh, this guy's name is dove, and we're about to go into some chaos and even some waters. And then where do we make it on the other side of this? And so our brains should start firing off some of these different things. And then we got what Jake said is he is he is somebody's son, and this guy's name is Amitai. And so, right away, what we notice is the writer of Jonah, the writer of Jonah assumes you all know who this guy is. Like, hey, you're reading this, of course you should know who Jonah. Jonah, he's the son of Amitai. You should know who that guy is. That's what he's saying. Because if we go down this library, if we walk down one of the hallways of the library of scripture and we grab this scroll called Kings, Jonah's already mentioned in it. And so when we grab Kings, we open up that scroll and we see, oh, this guy has shown up somewhere else. And it's important to know the context of that story so that we can get the joke of what's about to happen. So here, let me let me just tell you where Jonah shows up in one other passage, 2 Kings chapter 14. Got a lot of names in here. I was gonna have our readers read these, and I said, No, let's just do it together here. Jeroboam, son of Jehoash, king of Israel, became king in Samaria. And he reigned for how long? Forty-one years, and he did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and he did not turn away from any of the sins of Jeroboam, son of Nabah, which has caused Israel to commit. He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Labohamath to the Dead Sea, in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah. There he is, son of Amitai, the prophet from Gath Hephyr. All right, there's a lot of words in there. What's basically happening is we've had all of these kings, and some of them are good, and some of them are bad, and some of them are really wicked. This king is really wicked, and he reigns for 41 years, and Jonah is responsible for telling him what God thinks about him. But what's the tension we hold in this passage is Israel is really flourishing in the midst of that. Which is really strange that a king would be so wicked for so long, and yet Israel is being is still flourishing, is successful. There's that tension that we feel when we see wickedness and things still are successful. We see Jonah having to tell a wicked king to stop doing whatever he's doing, and yet he's seeing all around him, wait, everything seems to be okay still. This king does these things, and yet things are okay. It's almost also like Jonah's having to deal with why is God being so merciful to somebody so wicked and allowing that to happen for so long? For 41 years, God is gonna allow this king to reign over and be wicked the whole time. And Jonah, you got to remember this, and when we get to Jonah chapter 3 and 4, Jonah's holding on to God, why would you be so merciful to somebody so wicked? And so we walk into the story with Jonah already feeling that way. Why, God, can you be merciful to somebody who is wicked? Alright, keep going. I'm gonna I'm gonna push us through a few things just to highlight a couple of things here. All right, let's go to verse 2. We're only on verse 2. Uh I promise we're only going through this a few weeks. We could go all year, probably. Okay, verse 2. Go to the great city of Nineveh. What does the Jewish reader know about Nineveh? It's a capital. Ooh, CB, you're on it. Capital city of Assyria. The Assyrians are a pain in with the Israelites. Like they are terrible. These guys, they are known both within the Bible and outside of the Bible as being some of the most cruelest people there could be. In fact, uh, I won't share all of the things, but there's one thing that stood out to me. They would remove the two legs of a person, their enemy. The Assyrians would come in, they would cut off both legs of the person and one of the arms, just so they can shake the hand of the other arm while the person is dying. That's kind of the context of the Assyrians. They would walk in and they were terrible enemies. And so one archaeologist describes the Assyrians in this way Assyrian history is as gory and blood curdling a history as we know. Which takes us to this next line in chapter two. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. What's interesting in the Old Testament, a phrase like that coming up before God, happens a few times. Where like somebody does something bad and it goes up before God. Sarah read it in Genesis. In Exodus, we have a story of Moses, but but right before Moses, uh, we have we have the Israelites coming under under the severe slavery, into the severe slavery. And here's how here's how the writer of of Exodus describes what happens next in Exodus chapter 2. During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out. And their cry for help because of the slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. I'm gonna get to a point here. Stay with me. I know we're going to school for a couple minutes. Let's go a little bit further. So turn to that page 916 if you're using one of the Bibles in front of you. If you have your own Bible, I want you to just look at chapter one for a second. So does anybody love the scratch on a chalkboard? I think the current generation is missing out on a scratching of the chalkboard. Oh, can you feel it, even just thinking about it? Okay, all right. So so let's let's consider. I want you to just scan. You don't have to read it. Just let your eyes just scan over chapter one and see if you see any repeated words in that chapter. I'll give you a second to do that. Sorry, we're going to school here. We've got a little bit of school, but uh we have a point coming up. All right. Any any repeated words that you just kind of see right at the bat? Fell. Ooh. Fell comes up quite a bit. And it depending on your translation. As you can see, I did not write this. Um my handwriting's terrible. Okay. What else do we have? Any other repeated words? Uh who said raise your hand, just oh, oh. Yes. I was expecting that, uh, Lori. Okay. Besides those those common words that you say, what are the thank you, Lori? I appreciate that. What's that? Oh, fear. Did anybody else catch on fear?

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Alright, any others? And? And is gonna show up a lot. Depending on your translation, you're gonna get this word hurl or throw.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Um I'm gonna just write it here. Let me give you one more. You'll see a phrase go down. You'll see down a lot, uh, depending on your translation. So hyperlinks not only go outside of the Bible, but they're all written within a text or in a book. And so you have all of these connections, and the reason an author is doing that is to tell us a greater story, even within that text. So, what does what do these words mean, and why should

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Why are we even in doing all that? Last week Jesus walked with two people who were super downcast.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

The person that they thought they had hope in was just murdered on a cross. And they've been told that he rose from the dead three days later. Some of the women had come by and said, He's alive, he's not there. And they don't know what to do with that. Yet their hearts are really heavy. The guy that's walking with them along the road back home ends up saying, Well, what is this about? Hey, hey, let me just tell you some stories. And he begins to tell them stories that they're very familiar with from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Torah. And as they tell, their hearts start to burn within them. As Jesus begins, and they don't realize it's Jesus until they sit down at a table, but they later will say, our hearts burned within us as he talked about the Old Testament and showed that he was all throughout the passages. And so here's why we're even considering studying these things. Because as we go into the Old Testament, we read it with the lens of Jesus so that he can form us, so that when we go out into the world, we also see Jesus all around us at work. And we don't forget the real truth that God is still in control and that he's still on the throne. And so when we see that in the greater story, it will help translate over into our everyday life. I need to push through now. Let me just highlight a couple more things. We saw that Jonah runs away in chapter in verse 3. Out of that should come like the story of the prodigal son running away. He runs away. And then we also see this very self-righteous older son in the story. So we're going to see, and we'll highlight this in a couple of weeks, where the prodigal son comes into the story with Jonah, that Jesus might have had Jonah on his mind as he tells that story as well. All right. Why does Jonah run away? I mean, you would think that Jonah knows that God's present everywhere. Psalm 139, we read it earlier, says, Where can I flee from your presence? If I rise from uh on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, you're with me.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Didn't Jonah already know that? What is he doing running away?

SPEAKER_01 24:36

He's the only one, the only prophet that really runs away like this. We get a clue of it in Jonah chapter four. Spoiler alert. Anybody hate knowing the end of the story? Yeah. Okay. Jonah chapter 4, I'm going to tell you the end of the story. Verse 1. This is why Jonah runs. Jonah prays to the Lord. Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, that you are slow to anger, and that you are abounding in love. A God who relents from sending calamity. Jonah's super angry with God. And you know why? Because God is so consistently loving.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

That's why he runs. God is so consistently merciful to my enemies. That's why he runs. God is so consistently compassionate. That is why he is so angry.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Tim Keller says, Jonah wants a God of his own making, a God who simply smites the bad people, for instance, the wicked Ninevehes and blesses the good people, for instance, Jonah and his countrymen. You know, a lot of times when we think about the God of the Old Testament, compassion and love and merciful aren't generally the words that come up. I mean, if you've had any conversation with anybody in our cultural context about God and it ends up landing on Old Testament stuff, it usually does not describe God in this way. Yet Jonah, the spokesperson for God, knows God to be merciful and loving. We learned this word Hesed back in the fall with the book of Ruth. This love that's so tenacious, this is the kind of reputation God has to God's spokesperson, Jonah. And then Jesus, God in the flesh, reminds us of this. Jesus was often accused of being with the quote-unquote enemy. He had a meal after meal with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and Samaritans. The most religious leaders counted these people as enemies of God. Yet Jesus spent the most time with them. Jesus even healed a servant of the Roman guard, somebody who is considered an actual enemy of the nation of Israel. Jesus heals for him. One of those religious leaders who were so violent against Christians ended up having an encounter with Jesus, and his life has changed. His name is Paul, and this is what he wrote. Romans 5. You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for the righteous person, though a good person, someone might possibly dare to die. But God shows his love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Paul says we are sinners, we were sinners, and Christ died for us. It is this and that is stunning for each of us in this room today. It tells this bigger story and makes meaning of our individual stories. This says that we were sinners and Christ died for us. This relentless love that pursues us humans, even as we show ourselves enemies of God.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

As we read in the book of Jonah. Would you remind us that you are compassionate for anger? Remind us of the love that you have for whoever we consider our enemy.