Prologue

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The book of Jonah is not about a man being swallowed by a whale. I don’t mean to suggest it is merely some sort of allegory or a parable. It may appear to be at first glance, but it is not. It’s clear from what Jesus said the story is historical:

For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40).

You will remember the story, especially if you ever attended Sunday School as a child. But perhaps as a child you missed something of the deep prophetic meaning in relation to the Church’s mission today.

Jonah is not just the most colorful and memorable story in the Old Testament. It is a literary masterpiece which has very clear relevance for the Church in her mission in the 21st century. Jonah was a Jewish prophet who lived 800 years before the birth of Jesus. Though he was a prophet, he was not immune to the frailties and failures common to us all.

The word of the Lord came to him, saying “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me” (1:2).

Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, was the largest city in the world at that time. It was located in modern-day Mosul, Iraq. The Assyrians were bitter enemies of Israel and their cruelty and wickedness were legendary. In fact, Assyrian art contains some of the most horrifying images ever created. Their panels depict prisoners having their tongues ripped from their mouths to mute their screams when they were skinned alive. So it’s no wonder Jonah was a bit reluctant to visit these bitter enemies of Israel to call them out on their sin. Imagine how we might feel if God called us to go to an ISIS camp to pronounce God’s judgment on them. Besides, God had often warned Israel not to mix with the pagan peoples lest they become like them and start worshipping their false gods.

Instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah sets out in the opposite direction by sea for a distant land, Tarshish, to try to escape the presence of the Lord. Who wouldn’t prefer to go to the sunny shores of a prosperous Mediterranean seaside town? But the Lord then sent a great storm. The terrified sailors cried out to their gods for help, and cast lots to see why this evil had come upon them.

They already suspected Jonah was the cause of their troubles because he had told them he was fleeing the presence of God. The lot fell to Jonah. After they cast him overboard, God sent a great fish to swallow him.

There has been a lot of speculation about the kind of great fish or whale might have swallowed him. Here is the truth about the fish: it was actually a “red herring.” In other words the particular type of sea creature is completely irrelevant to the point of our story.

In the belly of the great fish, Jonah turns to God:

I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,

    and he answered me;

out of the belly of Sheol I cried,

    and you heard my voice (Jonah 2:1-2)

And here he has a change of heart:

But I with the voice of thanksgiving

    will sacrifice to you;

what I have vowed I will pay.

    Salvation belongs to the Lord!” (2:9)

In the depths, a transformation begins. The great fish vomits Jonah onto the dry land, and again the word of the Lord comes to Jonah, calling him to cry out against Nineveh. This time however, he obeys, and Nineveh, a bit surprisingly, believes God and repents in sackcloth and ashes.

When God saw they turned away from evil, he relented from destroying the city. But this displeased Jonah greatly:

O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live” (4:2-3)

And after the plant that was shading him was destroyed, he became even more angry and depressed.

God draws him out about his anger:

But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (4:8-11)

No, Jonah is not a story about a man who was swallowed by a whale. It is a prophetic word to us today. Wouldn’t we be beside ourselves if we suddenly lost our homes? Why then should we not also be concerned for the countless millions who may forever lose any chance of having a heavenly home? The Son of Man had no place to lay his head, so that we might have a home in heaven.

God might well say to us “And should I not have compassion on the two billion persons who do not know their right hand from their left?” As Tim Keller suggested, the Father’s pleading here is much like that of the father of the prodigal son who pleads with the elder son “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:32). Here God reveals his heart of love and compassion for a lost and ruined humanity, and his gentleness in dealing with his sometimes clueless Church.

The Book of Jonah is a mirror. When we hold it up, we see ourselves in relation to the Great Commission. God has done great and marvelous things to advance his kingdom in the two thousand years since Christ gave us his Great Commission. He has done so mostly through a relatively small number of dedicated missionaries. But many of the rest of us —at times myself included—have been all too much like Jonah, not just reluctant prophets but prodigal prophets. But like Jonah, God also subdues us with his love and transforms us by his grace so that we might become instruments of transformation for others who are still lost.

The miracle here is not that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and lived to tell about it. It is that the Father deals with our failure to carry out our assigned task in such a gentle yet pointed way. In the belly of the great fish Jonah came to the deep transformative realizations about himself and about the wondrous God who had called him. Here he came to realize he was no different than the rebellious Ninevites apart from the Father’s grace. And here he came to realize just how gracious and merciful God was. What he had known before about God as an article of faith now becomes something he realizes in his heart. It is in the crucible of suffering rather than the classroom we learn that we learn the deep things of God —the things that transform us and motivate us to obedience regardless of the cost. The belly of the great fish was Jonah’s crucible.

God deals with us in the same way he intends to deal with the lost. He brings us to his Kingdom by winning us, not by forcing us. To be sure he is insistent and firm and his ways are far above our ways; but above all he is loving, merciful and compassionate. He is willing to go to extreme lengths to save us —and many from all nations —from the just wrath that must surely come. He sometimes prods us along with gentle humor, careful not to alienate us even

when we, like the world, turn our own back on him. How then can we not yield to such a gracious and merciful Father and in the end do what he asks us to do?

Beneath the satirical humor is profound universal truth. Jonah, though a prophet of God, was no different than those God sent him to redeem, both rebellious sinners in desperate need of a Savior. The cry and confession of both Jonah and the Ninevites is the same: “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. Salvation belongs to the Lord!” (2:1-2,9).

So what does Jonah have to do with the Great Commission and the Church’s response to it? Everything. It points to the reason for the serious problem in missions. The story of Jonah is what theologians call an “intrusion,” a foreshadowing of the Church-age mission inserted into the story of ancient Israel. The norm for Israel in the Old Testament was to avoid dealings with the pagan nations around them. But this event anticipates and looks ahead to the mission of God’s people in the Church Age to come. Throughout the Church Age, we, the Church have often been much like Jonah, a prodigal prophet. As a result the number of unreached continues to increase over time. And it will increase even more unless there is a radical change in how the Church approaches God’s mission.

But God himself has already provided the answer: Jesus Christ’s vision for carrying out his mission. The answer has been there all along in the Last Discourse as recorded in the Gospel of John, chapters 13-17. And he has placed it there for us to recover and follow in his time.