Jonah 1:1-2 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.”

When you have preached for some years, over time, people remind you of things you have said in your sermons. And we preachers, in our vanity, imagine that people will recall our clever outlines, our alliterated three-points, our perfectly reasoned arguments. But in fact, it usually goes something like this, “It’s like that story you told about the two crows and the canary.” “I remember you once preached about that soldier in World War 2 who forgave his captors.” What people remember most are the illustrations and stories, sometimes even when those weren’t the main point. But that’s how we are. If something is very vivid, or graphic or gripping, it ignites our imaginations, and it’s what tends to stand out.

When I say, the book of Jonah, what stands out to you? What do you think of? Most times, people say, Jonah being swallowed by a great fish. That’s what most people associate with the whole book. In fact, you’ll sometimes see in children’s storybibles, the whole book is covered in one chapter entitled Jonah and the Whale.

The incident with the great fish is very memorable, perhaps miraculous, but if we focus on that, we have allowed one illustration to distract us from the whole message. The message and the meaning of this book has very little to do with fish, and very much to do with the kind of person God is.

I want us to study Jonah, not as a curiosity, but as an inspired book of Scripture, with a timeless message for God’s people. So to set this up, we need to understand the when, the who, the where of Jonah, as well as what happened and why God wrote this down for us.

I. When: The Time of Jonah

The events in the book took place about 250 years after King David’s time, and 760 years before the Lord Jesus was born. This was the time when there was no longer a united Israel. There was Judah, the southern kingdom, and Israel, made up of 10 tribes in the north. Both were separate countries, so to speak, though united by their language, their ancestry, and supposedly their religion.

But unfortunately, that northern kingdom, from which Jonah came, and to whom Jonah preached, never experienced a godly king who turned them back to Yahweh worship. For the more or less 220 years between Solomon and when God eventually ended the northern kingdom by sending them into captivity, Israel never enjoyed one godly king. But that does not mean God gave up on them. Through those years, God kept sending them godly prophets preaching repentance.

He sent them Elijah. He sent them Elisha. He sent them Hosea. He sent them Obadiah. And before Jonah was sent to Nineveh, he was sent to Israel.

II. Who: The Identity of Jonah

2 Kings 14:23-25
23 In the fifteenth year of Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah, Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel became king in Samaria, and reigned forty-one years.
24 And he did evil in the sight of the LORD; he did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel sin.
25 He restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which He spoke through His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath-hepher.

Here you had an evil king, Jereboam II, who was successful militarily, and God allowed him to restore some of Israel’s lost territory. And at some point, Jonah got to be the bearer of this good news. He got to tell an evil king of Israel a happy message, a message filled with patriotic pleasantness – Israel is going to win back some of its land! Israel is going to be victorious! Who wouldn’t want to carry this message of good news, and of God’s mercy on His chosen people? I’m sure Jonah relished the chance, and was probably something of a hero for such a happy prophecy in otherwise gloomy times. Jonah, the prophet of Israel’s victory!

But God had a very different plan for Jonah, and perhaps Jonah, filled with nationalistic zeal was the perfect man to do it. God was going to send Jonah as a missionary to a completely different people – the Assyrians. Jonah was going to preach the message of repentance, of turning from sin, and turning to the only true God, to a foreign nation, and nation of idolaters.

We don’t know if Jonah was the exception, or if Jonah was one of many unrecorded missionaries that God sent to other nations to give them the message of life. Because Israel was at the centre of trade routes, most of the nations came to Israel, at some point, and took back with them the message of the one true God. But who knows if Jonah was just one of many that showed God’s love for the whole world.

III. Where: The Locations in Jonah

To understand Jonah, we really do have to understand a bit of ancient geography and culture. Jonah, as we know, was an Israelite, coming from Galilee. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh.

Now Nineveh was soon to be the capital city of the greatest empire on earth at the time: the Assyrian empire. In fact, just 40 years after this, the Assyrians would come and conquer Israel and lead off the 10 tribes into captivity, from which they never returned.

To get from north Israel to Nineveh, you would have to travel east for a little over 900 kilometres. By land, it took you around 23 days to get there. And when you did get there, it was an impressive city. Like most, it had an inner and an outer wall. The walls were 15 metres thick and 10 stories high – absolutely imposing and impenetrable.

The city was so large that the book tells us it took three days journey to cross it. Within it was filled with gardens irrigated by the nearby Tigris river. At this time in history, Assyria was a world power, so money would have been pouring into the capital, filling it with luxury, wealth, and all the evils that go with that.

In fact the whole book of Nahum is written against Nineveh, said to be filled with sorceries, harlotries, cruelty, violence and murder. And the Assyrians were known for their extreme cruelty.

We have in the recent months been watching and seeing the brutality and the gore committed by religious extremists. The Assyrians were known for extreme forms of torture, dismemberment, mutilation, and cruelty towards the nations they conquered. They even inflicted terror upon their own people in similar ways to keep them all in line.

So as Jonah is called upon to preach to them, he is being called upon to go the capital city of the tyrants that rule the world, and are threatening to destroy and oppress Israel with their cruelty. He must go and offer mercy to people who have shown none to others. He must go and love his enemies.

IV. What: The Story of Jonah

We know the general story of Jonah. We can outline it like this: Chapter 1 – Refusal, Chapter 2 – Repentance, Chapter 3 – Revival, Chapter 4 – Rebuke.

In chapter one, God commissions Jonah to preach to the Ninevites, and he refuses. He runs away, catches a ship going west. But God has His way, sends a storm, exposes Jonah, and in the process converts those pagan sailors, while Jonah is thrown out the boat into the ocean. The fish is actually both a place of safety and of chastening – Jonah is saved from drowning, but the stomach of a large sea creature is not as pleasant as floating on a rubber dinghy.

So in chapter 2, we have repentance. Jonah repents of his actions, and acknowledges the futility of rebellion against God. However, as we find out soon enough, he has not repented of his attitude.

In chapter 3, we have revival. Maybe he said more, but all we have in chapter 3 is a one-sentence sermon, where Jonah prophesies the destruction of Nineveh. And in response, we have a revival that was not seen before this time, and has not been seen since, on this scale: hundreds of thousands of people repent and turn to God. It is a crusade that evangelists could only dream of.

But in chapter 4, we have rebuke, because the only one not rejoicing is Jonah. Jonah goes and sits outside the city, and is furious that the Ninevites have heeded his message and have repented. He now feels justified in having run away in the first place, and would rather die than keep on living and see the Ninevites spared.

So God rebukes Jonah with an object lesson. Jonah sits outside Nineveh, hoping that if God could change from judgement to mercy, maybe He could change back again. And while he is waiting out the forty days, God causes a large shady plant to grow up quickly near Jonah. It provides great relief from the intense heat, and Jonah loves his plant. He rejoices over it. He cares for it, and just relishes in its shade. And then God sends two things – a worm and a wind. The worm eats and damages the plant, so that it withers, and the east wind torments Jonah with its heat. And Jonah just reaches the end, blows up, and one more time, angrily wishes he were dead.

And then God rebukes Jonah this way: “Are you angry that I killed your plant, Jonah?” “Yes, I am furious, God.” “Is it right for you to be angry over this, Jonah?” “Yes it is, I’m so angry I could die of anger.”

God says, “Why Jonah, we have found out what you love. You love a plant. A plant you did not plant or cultivate or water. It was not yours in any real way, but you loved it, relished it, and even felt grief when it died – this inanimate plant that lasted for 24 hours.

But over those walls is a city of 120,000 children, meaning a population of over 400,000 people, with their cattle and possessions. I made those people. I planted them. I let them grow up and fed them every day. I have every right to love them, and I do. I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. I love them and would prefer to spare them than judge them. See what I love Jonah, and see what you love.”

V. Why: The Theme of Jonah

As I said, the book of Jonah tends to be misunderstood. People focus on Jonah being swallowed by a fish, but that is just one incident in the book, which contributes to the big picture. What is Jonah really about? Why is this book in the Bible?

I disagree with some commentators. I don’t think Jonah is about running from God. Certainly Jonah does that, and it is a sub-theme. I don’t think Jonah is about God’s sovereignty, though that’s also very clear in Jonah– God is control of the waves, the wind, the hearts of men down to plants and worms. And although this is much closer, I don’t think Jonah is primarily about God’s desire for the whole world to be saved, though the book certainly illustrates that.

The book of Jonah is about learning to love what God loves. In the book of Jonah we find out that not only did God love Israel, but He also loved Israel’s enemies, the Assyrians. He was just and would judge them for sin, but in mercy He wished to spare them.

So who does God send to Nineveh? Someone who loves Assyrians? Someone with a compassionate heart for the enemies of Israel? No! God selects Jonah, a man who hates the Assyrians! Jonah, even though he is a prophet, even though he has been used by God, is in fact, a man who hates what God loves. In fact, he hates what God loves so intensely, he is willing to run away, and even commit suicide to avoid having to love what God loves. The book of Jonah is not merely about what God did through Jonah, it is about what God did in Jonah. God patiently, powerfully and decisively teaches Jonah about Jonah’s heart. He teaches Jonah how different His heart is to Jonah’s heart, and gives Jonah chance and space to come around. Not only did the Ninevites need to repent of their great wickedness, but this one prophet needed to repent of loving what God hated – cruelty and racism and indifference, and he needed to repent of hating what God loved – men made in the image of God, grace, mercy, salvation, redemption.

This is what the book is about: God lovingly teaching one man to love what He loves. And the message for everyone who reads it is that God does not merely want us to do God’s will, but to learn to love what He loves. Jonah at first refuses to do God’s will at all, by running away. But when God has him near shipwrecked and swallowed by a fish, Jonah submits to doing God’s will. He prays a prayer of repentance in chapter 2. And though Jonah now submits outwardly and goes to Nineveh and preaches, Jonah still has not changed inwardly to love what God loves. He still hates the Ninevites. He preaches, they repent, and Jonah goes outside the city, waiting for, and hoping for, its destruction. And God has to use a plant which gives Jonah shade and then dies to illustrate to Jonah how callous his heart is, how Jonah hates what God loves.

It’s not enough to simply go through the motions as Christians, avoid the most scandalous sins, generally try to be well-behaved, but inwardly do no work on what we actually love. God is not satisfied with mere outward compliance; He wants inward conformity – to be like Him in the deepest part of us – our loves!

Think of when couples are dating or courting and getting to know each other. What kind of things do they ask one another? The conversations at the beginning are all about discovering one another’s loves. “What do you love to eat? What is your favourite food? Where do you love to go? What is your favourite hobby? What music do you enjoy? What books do you love? What you most enjoy doing?” It would be a strange first date if the man said to the woman, “So what do you want me to do for you?” When seeking to know someone, we don’t simply try to do their will, though we will want to please them. If you really want to know someone you ask him or her about loves.

It is no different with God.

Micah 6:8
8 He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justly, To love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God?

Loving what God loves is the way you love God. When you love what He loves, you truly know Him and His heart. So what does God love? God tells you in His Word if you are interested to know Him. He loves His glory. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, and they each love the Spirit who love them. God loves righteousness and justice. He loves mercy. He loves the church. He loves Israel. He loves a cheerful giver.

In fact, you could summarise this by saying, loving what God loves is what the Bible calls holiness. The more you love what God loves, the holier you are becoming, the more like Christ you are becoming. Holiness, Christlikeness, sanctification is not merely outward change, or behavioural modification, it is change from the inside out, at the deepest level, at the root of your desires, your affections, your loves.

But here’s the part we might not like to hear, which the book of Jonah teaches us: learning to love what God loves can be a painful process.

We hear those words, “love what God loves’ and it sounds so positive, so inviting. Love is a warm word, and we rather welcome that idea – love what God loves. But what Jonah shows us is that it can be a huge internal struggle to love what God loves. Because we don’t love what God loves. In fact, before we are saved, Scripture says this of us.

John 3:19
19 “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

2 Timothy 3:2-4
2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money,… despisers of good…lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,

And even after we are saved, our new hearts are only beginning to be open and to change.

Unlearning old loves, and coming to have a distaste for them is a painful process. Learning to love what we formerly had no taste for can be difficult. And the more we resist and fight, the more painful and difficult it will be.

Which of us in our Christian walk did not come to one of those unhappy moments when we found out that something we cherished and loved was offensive to God? Some activity, some movie, some joke, some habit, some way of dressing, or speaking, or spending we found out from Scripture was not God’s heart. Let’s be honest – what was our first response? We got angry. We tried to say the messenger had misinterpreted the Bible. We tried to say this was a too extreme application. We inwardly got angry with God that He would want us to give up something like this. We got upset at the idea, we took revenge on God and did it even more, and we fought and wrestled with the Holy Spirit’s conviction. But until we submit, not only outwardly, but inwardly, coming to agree with God that it is ugly, and that His replacement way is beautiful, it is a painful Jonah-like struggle.

And what about those unhappy moments when we found out that there was something God did want us to love, and we found the whole thing distasteful? Some habit in the Christian life, like prayer, or regular fellowship and corporate worship, some required involvement with other Christians – requiring time and money sacrifices, some call to love the lost and put your reputation in the chopping block and own Christ publicly, some involvement in missions or mercy, some kind of worship that didn’t on the face of it seem entertaining and fun – these and others make us queasy and unhappy. We don’t like the idea that we have to learn to love what God loves, we like to imagine that by being saved we are already there, and that we automatically have those loves.

The book of Jonah shows how tenderly and individually God works with us. God spent a lot of time and effort on Jonah to get Jonah’s heart, not just his outward obedience. Jonah shows us how hard we can make it on ourselves: running away, hiding, wanting to give up, commit suicide, begrudgingly obey, pout, sulk, get angry, argue with God. But when you do that, you are fighting against the gentle but irresistible hand of God. You are climbing that escalator going down, you are rowing your boat upstream the current of God’s river. God’s love for you will not stop seeking to get your heart to be like His. God will keep at it, laying siege to your pride, eroding your defenses, until you submit outwardly and inwardly to God’s heart.

Till you become like Christ. Jonah is really an anti-type of Christ, he points to Christ by contrast, not by similarity. Our Lord Jesus was sent to a rebellious people and He went willingly, Jonah was sent and he refused. The Lord in asleep in a boat and then calms the storm because He is in God’s will and doing what pleases His Father, Jonah is in a storm and then a storm is calmed by his being thrown overboard because he is displeasing God. Our Lord is in the earth three days three nights through his ultimate act of obedience and rises in vindicated triumph, Jonah is in the fish three days and three nights through his disobedience and is vomited out in shame. Jonah preaches and everyone repents; our Lord preaches and very few repent. Jonah is outside Nineveh, waiting and hoping that God will destroy it; our Lord is outside Jerusalem, knowing that God will judge it and weeping over it. The contrasting heart of God with the heart of Jonah.

As we prepare to study Jonah, let me ask you some application questions. What are you doing to learn what God loves? God has revealed what He loves in His Word, so how attentive are you to that Word? How much do you desire to know what He loves?

What struggle is going on in your heart right now between God seeking you to unlearn loving something that He hates, or to begin to love something you do not? Think of the area in which you most feel resistance, resentment. What part of God’s heart do you not have?

What is the most sensible thing to do with a God who cannot lose a contest against you?

I believe the book of Jonah was written by the prophet Jonah. It ends on a note of rebuke to Jonah because I think that is what he wanted the world to know – his callous heart had been rebuked and he had come to understand what it means to love what God loves. Let’s make that our pursuit.