Jonah 1

Good morning, good morning. Welcome to Coffee and Devotions. This morning, we are starting a new book. We are in Jonah, Jonah chapter one. We are going to finish Jonah and then we will be in Jude. After that, I do not know what we will do next year. Please share your thoughts in the comments or send me a text message. Let me know what you would like to do next year. What book should we study this year? We have already covered many books that begin with the letter J. I am interested to see what you are interested in for next year. Perhaps now that we have completed Jeremiah, we should study Lamentations. We could do some follow-ups on these books, or maybe you would prefer to study something else. Please let me know what you would like to do next year for Coffee and Devotions.
But for now, let us have some coffee, we will pray, and we will explore a remarkable story with Jonah. Let us pray. Father, we thank You so much for this day. We thank You for giving us Your word and for blessing us to be able to read it and to understand it. We pray that we might love You, that we might seek Your glory, that we might turn from the ways that we would want the world to go, and that Your Holy Spirit would teach us to walk in Your ways. We pray these things in Jesus's name. Amen.
Here we go. Jonah, chapter 1. 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." Nineveh deserves to be cried out against, does it not? After all, this pagan city of Assyria does deserve to be cried out against. For their wickedness has come up before Me. This sounds somewhat reasonable to Jonah, the part about preaching judgment. Well, not really the preaching part, but he likes the judgment part. He just does not want to proclaim it himself. We will get to that. I am getting ahead of myself.
But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Jehovah. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He did not go to Nineveh, which would be north and east. Instead, he went down to the seaport in Joppa to get on a boat and get as far away from Nineveh as he could. He also wanted to get away from God's presence. He thought, "I am going to get away from the temple, get away from Jerusalem. I am going to head out west." Then he went down into the belly of the ship.
But the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship was about to be broken up. Then the mariners were afraid, and every man cried out to his God, and threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten the load. Jonah had gone down into the lowest parts of the ship, had lain down, and was fast asleep. So the captain came to him and said to him, "What do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call on your God. Perhaps your God will consider us so that we may not perish." And they said to one another, "Come, let us cast lots that we may know for whose cause this trouble has come upon us." So they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, "Please tell us, for what cause is this trouble upon us? What is your occupation, and where do you come from? What is your country, and of what people are you?" So he said to them, "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." Jonah went down into the belly of the ship and was fast asleep. He tried to flee from the Lord, but the Lord sent a great wind on the sea. There was a huge tempest, and the sailors were terrified. It was a storm of storms, a very bad storm. They were about to be swamped and shipwrecked. It was going to be horrible, and they started throwing stuff overboard. They wondered what was going on and who had offended the gods. The captain said, "We need to go find Jonah." He was sleeping down in the belly of the ship, and they woke him up. "Come on, what are you doing, sleeper?" they asked. They came up and started asking him questions. "Where are you from? What's your job? What's your people?" And Jonah said, "I am a Hebrew. I fear the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. I am not the type of man who serves just one god. I am a Hebrew, and I serve God Most High, who created everything: the land and the sea."
Well, then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, "Why have you done this?" But the men knew that he had fled from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. Then they said to him, "What shall we do to you that the sea may be calm for us? For the sea was growing more tempestuous." He said to them, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea, then the sea will become calm for you. For I know that this great tempest is because of me." Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to return to land, but they could not, for the sea continued to grow more tempestuous against them. Therefore, they cried out to Jehovah, and they said, "We pray, O Jehovah, please do not let us perish for this man's life, and do not charge us with innocent blood. For you, O Jehovah, have done as it pleased you." So they picked up Jonah and threw him into the sea, and the sea ceased from raging. Then the men feared Jehovah exceedingly and offered a sacrifice to Jehovah and took vows.
They were really afraid when they heard from Jonah. They asked him, "What do we need to do to stop this?" They knew that it was the Lord who was doing this, for Jonah had tried to run away from Him. There was this great sea, and they asked, "What do we need to do?" Jonah said, "You have to throw me overboard. You have to let me die." They did the opposite at first, for they did not want innocent blood on their hands. They rowed as hard as they could, but the situation grew worse and worse. Eventually, they listened to Jonah. They did what he said, for he had told them, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea, and then the sea will become calm for you." They did not want to do it, and they rowed as hard as they could, but eventually it became so difficult that they stopped and they prayed.
These men were most likely pagan. They headed to Tarshish. They were pagan men. Now they are praying to the Lord. They asked that He would not let them be guilty of shedding innocent blood. They cried out to Him and called Him by name multiple times, "O Lord, O Lord." They said, "Do not let us die because of this man's life." So they threw him overboard. The storm stopped. How did these pagan men respond? They feared the Lord exceedingly. They offered a sacrifice to the Lord and took vows.
In Hebrew, there is a literary device that occurs when somebody's name is mentioned again and again and again. It is used for emphasis. Here, the name of the Lord is mentioned again and again. In verse 1, it is "the word of the Lord," that is capital L-O-R-D, all caps. This is God's divine name, Yehovah. In verse 4, "but the Lord sent out a great wind." Then in verse 10, "for the men knew that he had fled from the presence of the Lord." I never skipped verse 9. Jonah said to them, "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord." Then in verses 13 and 14, their prayers are directed to "the Lord." They said, "Lord, please do not let us perish. For you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you." Then they feared the Lord, offered sacrifices to the Lord, and made vows. The whole point is, it is the Lord who is in charge of all of this. It is the Lord who is to be reverenced. It is the Lord who is bringing this about.
So this is like the introduction to the story. Jonah is told to go preach judgment against non-Israelite people in Nineveh. So he hops on a boat with non-Israelites and heads instead to Tarshish, and he receives judgment. He is cast into the sea, and it is the non-Israelites on the boat who believe. Fear, sacrifice, and making vows are all present. It is a remarkable story. I do not know what I would underline as the best verse. Perhaps I would underline their prayer in verse 14 and then verse 16. Perhaps that is what I would underline in my Bible.
What are we called to do? Well, my mind automatically jumps to thinking about Jesus when you call Him the storm. It is a somewhat different story, but Jesus is in the bow of the ship, and He is asleep. He has been working hard all day doing ministry. The disciples start rowing. The windstorm becomes horrible, and they wake Him up, and they say, "Do You not care that we are perishing?" And Jesus gets up and rebukes the wind and the waves. Immediately, it becomes quiet. The parallel that I am reminded of is that the disciples were afraid, and they said, "What kind of man is this, that even the wind and the waves obey Him?" The same God who could calm the sea when Jonah fell into it is the same Jesus who commanded the wind and the waves to cease. It is remarkable. What an amazing God we serve.
And we get to be, even as non-Jewish people who should receive judgment, we get to enjoy the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We are brought into the story. You know, there is a big story about this animosity between Hebrew and the Goyim, the other nations, as the New Testament Greek will call them, the ethni. The people of other ethnicities, tongues, cultures, languages, and other gods are brought into the fold.
I remember asking my Hebrew professor. I apologize for this digression, but I asked my Hebrew professor, "They threw all the stuff overboard. But then it says they made vows and sacrifices. What animals would they have had left on the ship? It is mere speculation. Is it worth even speculating about that? I wonder if they went back to Joppa and then to Jerusalem to make these sacrifices and vows to the Lord in Jerusalem. I do not know. I have no way to prove it. It does not say so in the text. But I think these men were converted. They believed in the God of the Hebrews. They called on Him by name, sacrificed to Him, and made vows to Him. That is what happens when we come into contact with the living God. When we get to know Jesus ourselves—not the 'Jesus is my boyfriend' type of Jesus, but the Jesus who is the King of the universe, who controls the wind and the waves, and who laid down His life for us. When we get to know the Jesus who has all power and authority, and yet He did not slay us in His anger, but He saved us from sin and death, it changes everything in our lives. He is our Lord. He is our Savior. He is our God. And so we worship Him.
Do you? I hope you do. Let us pray. Father, we thank You so much that You have given us Your Son. You are the King of the universe, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the great I AM. And You have saved us. You have saved us out of the kingdom of darkness and brought us into Your marvelous light. And Father, we pray that we would follow after You, that we would love You, and that we would bask in the light of Your grace, for You are good. In Jesus' name, amen.
May you love the Lord, your God, because He has loved you. May you walk in the way of Jesus. May you be an encourager and one who builds other people up. I will see you next time. Goodbye.