God Is Asking The Impossible From JonahAnd we have to realize that what God asks is always impossible from the human standpoint and according to man's judgment. Jonah had very good reasons to refuse and flee.
Anything is better than certain death at Nineveh. Jonah will not accept the impossible from Almighty God. He judges as the world judges. And he does not take into account the fact that he is engaged in an adventure in which it is no longer possible to judge thus and that decisions taken according to the reasoning of the world will lead nowhere and solve nothing.
It is true folly to go to Nineveh in Jonah's way of thinking, that great city which was always in arms against God and His people. To begin with, he would have to make a tremendous journey across the dry desert: about 750 miles on foot. This was the first difficulty.
Then he would arrive at a very large city with far more than 120,000 inhabitants, and he would be quite alone there. This people was a traditional foe of Israel. Jehovah was sending a man to preach repentance to the conquerors. The most cruel people of antiquity.
It was the people which scorched its enemies alive to decorate its walls and pyramids with their skin. It was the place of human pride which allies itself with demons and rejects God. It was the world fast closed against God. Spiritually this was what Nineveh represented. Opposed to God, this city was necessarily opposed to His people.
God orders Jonah to go to the very place he could not go...a light among the darkness. In sum, Nineveh is the 'world' in the theological sense.
Jonah sets off in a direction which is precise opposite of that indicated by God. He can no longer live his life where he is. He must leave, and do so as a fugitive. He flees, the text says. He has a bad conscience and flees like Adam and Cain. He knows that there is no justice for him and that the only solution is to put a barrier between himself and God. He flees "away from the presence of the Lord."
Jonah knew perfectly well that Yahweh is a God who owns the earth. And yet he flees abroad where there are other gods. Jonah breaks with the people which God has chosen. He no longer wants to belong to the chosen people. He prefers to follow other gods rather than the Living God.
He snaps all that which humanly binds him to his living God to end the whole affair. He chooses to damn himself. This is the meaning of fleeing from the face of the Lord. It seems preferable to obedience, so impossible is the order.
To achieve damnation he pays. He pays his passage. The story of Jonah is indeed the story of all of us. What sacrifices are we not ready to make to be far from the face of God, unable as we are to accept that it is God Himself who fulfills His impossible will!
Jonah flees from the presence of God, goes down into the interior of the ship and sleeps. The point is that he refuses even to contemplate this storm. He refuses to see it except as a natural phenomenon about which he can do nothing. He will not see in it God's act, God's appeal, God's pointer. He prefers to know nothing about it. He continues to flee by plunging into unconsciousness in order not to know that it comes from God.
When all the world is in danger, the man who flees from the Word of God seals himself off in his solitude, willing neither to see nor hear anything of what others are doing. He sleeps...
Jonah, like some Christians, is asleep. Lost in the slumber of their activities, their good works, their theology, 'their' communities, perhaps skirting reality. Reality of Gods true calling over them.
When the church is ready to play its part in the world's adventure- and why it is sent- it truly awakens to its destiny. Powerful things happen against all odds. The pagans do not know what the adventure is all about. Jonah does. Christians share the same knowledge.
Christians see how God awakens Jonah...Jonah who is not the least bit interested. God is not playing a game. Jonah did not want to carry salvation to Nineveh. So thusly the storm. God respect man's freedom and yet He makes him fulfill in spite of himself the role assigned to him in God's design.
Today's Christians are resistant to preaching the evangelical message to the world around them. They are asleep as far as this is concerned. Evangelism is God's job they say. I am not called to evangelism they say. Jonah is guilty. Jonah did not want to do God's will. A storm followed Jonah, a storm will perhaps follow us sleeping Christians.
Matthew 5:13
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
Acts 1:8
But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
