Refusal with attitude
| 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. (Jonah1:3) |
If Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh, surely all he had to do was ignore God's message? But Jonah doesn't only reject the message, he rejects to Giver of the message. If God is a God who might include the Gentiles in His mercy then Jonah wanted nothing to do with Him!
Let's look at the passage:
- Twice we're told that he wants to escape God: "Jonah ran away from the Lord" and that he had decided to "flee from the Lord."
- Tarshish is as far West from Palestine as Nineveh is East from Palestine. "Tarshish" was also known as the place "where God is not."
- He boards a ship. The Israelites were not a sea-faring nation. The Old Testament speaks of Leviathan, the sea monster of the deep. The Sea of Galilee was the limit of their sea-adventurers. The Mediterranean was too big and scary.
- He pays for his fare.
These actions are quite a statement of rejection and evidence of fairly significant tantrum or prophetic pout. "If that's the kind of God You are then I am not only going to ignore you, but I'm going to head in the opposite direction, even when that's way out of my comfort zone and even if I have to pay good money to go that way."
When we put God in a box which carefully defines what He can and can't do, we can expect that He will break out of that box. And God almost always confounds our boxes with the unexpectedness and magnitude His mercy. ("How can God forgive him/her?") This creates a crisis for us and our typical reaction is similar to Jonah's. We stop going to church. We don't read our Bibles. We rebel.
Maybe Jonah had reason to hate the Assyrian Ninevites. Maybe they had killed someone important to him. Whatever it was, Jonah couldn't stomach the idea of God being merciful to them. He not only ignores the message. He rebels against the Message-Giver.
In 1956 Jim Elliot went as a missionary to the Auca tribe in South America. Shortly afterward he was murdered by the people he had come to share God's love with. A few years later his widow, Elizabeth, stunned the world when she went to live among people who had murdered her husband. She spent years in their midst proclaiming the love and forgiveness of God.
Jonah headed for Tarshish...
I wonder who we are more like, Jonah or Elizabeth Elliot?
