Do the Hard Things
Rev. Res Spears
Jonah: The Reluctant Prophet • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Does anyone here live in a house with growth charts on the doorways?
What I’m talking about is those marks that some parents make on the doorframes to show the growth of their children. Anybody have that at home? Did your parents do this when you were growing up?
Well, mine didn’t. Or, at least, if they did, they didn’t bring that doorframe along with us when we moved to Suffolk when I was 12.
Once in a while, I’ll visit a home with those marks on the door, and I’ll think about how exciting it must have been for some child to step away from the doorway and look back at the mark Mom or Dad just made.
“WOW, look how much I’ve grown,” I can imagine them saying.
The marks on the doorframe create a physical record of growth that kids can look back on as they grow older and see literally just how far they’ve come over the years.
And what a wonderful gift that is to a child, because it’s a tangible reminder that we should always be growing.
When we were children, the most important growth to us was vertical. Of course, once we became adults, the vertical growth had pretty much stopped, but growth is no less important.
Growth in emotional maturity, growth in patience and generosity. Growth in all sorts of things continues to be an important indicator of mental and emotional health, no matter how old you are or how long ago you stopped growing vertically.
This is no less true for the follower of Jesus, except the growth that should matter most to us is spiritual growth.
Are you increasingly walking in the light, rather than straying into the darkness? Are you becoming more and more like Jesus each day? Is it increasingly true that you share His priorities and values?
Unfortunately, tracking one’s spiritual growth isn’t a simple matter of standing with your back against the doorframe while someone marks off the inch or two you’ve gained in height in the past year.
Spiritual growth is more complicated than physical growth. Absent some significant medical situation, vertical growth is always positive, at least until one reaches his adult height.
But spiritual growth often comes in fits and starts, and sometimes it even includes backward steps as we make war on the fleshly desires and attitudes in our lives.
So, tracking spiritual growth can be hard to do. But what we’re going to see over the next several weeks is that the Book of Jonah gives us 12 different spiritual growth indicators. And we can use these indicators to help chart our spiritual growth.
Now, we talked last week about the major lessons we’re intended to learn from Jonah — and chief among those lessons is that, for we who follow Jesus in faith, our priorities should match HIS priorities.
And I warned you last week that we’re not going to take the traditional approach to studying this book. So, instead of this being a four-week study that takes one chapter at a time, we’re going to break things down so we can study the spiritual growth indicators one at a time.
It won’t surprise anybody that it takes me three times longer to cover the Book of Jonah than it does most pastors. But in my defense, my idea for the structure of this study comes directly from Mark Yarbrough, president of Dallas Theological Seminary.
Much of what you’ll hear during this series either comes directly from his book, Jonah: Beyond the Tale of a Whale, or is inspired by it. And I have an extra copy of this book if anyone would like to borrow it.
Today, as we begin our exploration of the Book of Jonah, our focus will be on the first spiritual growth indicator we find there: “A life that is growing spiritually is moving toward God’s commands, not away from them, regardless of the difficulty.” [Mark Yarbrough, Jonah: Beyond the Tale of a Whale, (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), 33.]
We see this growth indicator in verses 1 through 3 of chapter 1. Let’s read them together.
1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying,
2 “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.”
3 But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
Now, one of the things you should understand about this book is that it’s full of irony. Indeed, the irony’s so thick in some places that some scholars consider Jonah to be an example of satire.
I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s important to see the irony when it appears, because the author — probably Jonah, himself — uses irony to teach important lessons.
And the irony starts right in verse 1, where we’re introduced to the prophet, Jonah.
His name means “dove,” which was an important symbol to the Hebrew people. The dove symbolized peace and sacrifice to them.
But what we’ll see as we study through this book is that Jonah’s life was characterized by anything BUT peace and sacrifice.
In our introduction to this book last week, I said Jonah hated the people of Nineveh, because the Assyrians were widely known for their brutality.
Indeed, that nation would soon conquer the northern kingdom of Israel, massacring many of its people and hauling others into exile.
And it’s entirely possible God had already revealed to Jonah that He’d use the Assyrians to bring judgment on Israel for its faithlessness.
So, Jonah had good reasons to fear the people of Nineveh, and it becomes clear very early in the account that he would prefer to see God utterly destroy them.
He certainly wasn’t willing to sacrifice either his own comfort or his preconceived notions about this brutal, pagan people in order to teach them about the one true God.
And so, we see the first clue that this isn’t your typical book of Old Testament prophecy.
The second clue is in Jonah’s response to God’s word.
God told Jonah, “Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it.”
When prophets heard the word of God, they did what God said. That’s a good rule of life for we who have been graced with salvation through faith in Jesus. What God says, you should do.
And there was a SPECIAL obligation of obedience for prophets. It would have been completely unheard of for a prophet to disobey the Lord.
Indeed, we see the Old Testament prophets being commanded to do some incredibly difficult and sometimes distasteful things in pursuit of bringing God’s word to God’s people.
And in every case, except that of Jonah, what we see is obedience. Sometimes they wondered about WHY they were being commanded to do these things, but they were always obedient.
And then, there’s Jonah.
God told him to go into enemy territory and proclaim God’s coming judgment against Nineveh, which was located to the east of Jonah’s hometown near Nazareth.
So, Jonah goes to the port city of Joppa and buys a berth on a boat headed for Tarshish. Now, Tarshish was a city in southern Spain, which is WEST of the Mediterranean Sea.
So, God said, “Go east to this city,” and Jonah’s response is to try to head west just as far as he could go.
I’ve called Jonah The Reluctant Prophet for this series, but the simple fact is that he was — at least in this instance — the disobedient prophet, and disobedience isn’t a good look for prophets of the Most High God. Significantly, it’s not a good look for followers of Jesus, either.
But maybe we should cut Jonah a break. What do you think? After all, God had called him to do something incredibly hard, something that would have been extremely distasteful to him. Something he just didn’t agree with.
But there’s a pattern of such callings in Scripture.
God called Noah to build an ark so he and his family and all the animals on the ark would be protected when it began to rain, a meteorological event the world had never seen at the time.
God called Abraham to leave his home and his family and go. Where, Lord? I’ll tell you later. Just go.
God called Moses to be the one through whom He’d rescue the people of Israel from captivity under one of the strongest kingdoms in the world at the time.
God called Daniel and his friends to eat only vegetables in Babylon, when they had their choice of the best foods in the kingdom available to them.
When the Babylonian besieged Jerusalem, God called Jeremiah to try to convince the people of Judah to remain there, instead of fleeing to safety in Egypt.
God called the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute and remain faithful to her, even when she refused to give up her old life.
God called the prophet Ezekiel to lie on his side and stare at a brick for 390 days and then to turn over and lay on the other side for 40 more days.
And, since the prophet would get hungry during this prophetic act, God commanded him to make bread and bake it over human dung. When Ezekiel objected, God relented on this point and allowed him to bake it over cow dung, instead.
And in what must be the supreme example of God calling His people to do hard things they’d rather not have done, He called Jesus, His uniquely beloved and eternal Son, to willingly give Himself as a sacrifice on a cross at Calvary.
Jesus surely understood the point of this calling. He surely understood that His substitutionary death — for us and in our place — would provide the means for our justification and forgiveness for our sins.
But in most of the other cases I’ve mentioned — along with many others in both the Old and New Testaments — those who are called by God have somewhat less than a complete understanding of God’s purpose.
And that’s OK, because, guess what? He’s God, and you are not. And neither am I.
We don’t HAVE to understand everything about His plan to trust that He is good and that His plans for us are better than any we might devise for ourselves. As He put it through the prophet Isaiah:
8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
Friends, let me tell you this: Whatever it is that God calls you to do, if it’s GOD calling you to do it, it will probably not be easy.
Scripture is full of God commanding people to do hard things. But you’d be hard-pressed to find many examples of Him calling people to do easy things.
In fact, that’s one of the ways I gauge whether something I’m considering is a calling of God. The easy things — the things my flesh really would prefer to do — aren’t usually from Him.
And I shouldn’t dishonor Him by trying to claim I’m being led to do something that I’m doing just because I want to do it. Sadly, that’s a tactic I hear people taking all the time.
But it’s interesting to note that Jonah actually DID know God’s purpose for sending him to Nineveh.
The wickedness of that city had become too great to allow it to continue, so God sent Jonah with a message of coming destruction.
And Jonah knew that it was likely this message would be met with repentance and that God would relent from destroying Nineveh.
And this tells us something about our desire to understand God’s designs. Even if we knew and understood everything about God’s plans, we’d still have to choose whether to obey or not.
And when we allow that decision to be colored by our own preconceived notions and our own priorities, disobedience is right around the corner.
That’s what appears to be going on with Jonah as he boards the boat in Joppa. He knows what God is up to. He understands the importance of this calling. And yet, he can’t get past his hatred of the Assyrians.
And so, he gets up and he goes down.
We see the phrase “went down” twice in verse 3, and it serves as something of a red flag in the text. Jonah “went down” to Joppa, and he “went down” into the boat.
Notice God says in verse 2 that the wickedness of the Ninevites “has come up” before Him. The picture we’re given is of God seated above the circumstances of Nineveh.
Which way would Jonah have to go — at least, metaphorically speaking — to be where God was? UP!
So, God says, “Arise!” Get up! And Jonah rose up. Good work, Jonah! But then we see he didn’t rise up to go to Nineveh, but rather he rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
He didn’t WANT to be where God was. And listen: This is EXACTLY the situation we find ourselves in when we willfully sin, when we sin even though we know what we’re doing is sinful. When we do that, we’re demonstrating that we don’t really WANT to be where God is.
And maybe Jonah knew that trying to flee from God was absurd. But the fact is that when we’re intent on sinning, we’ll do and say all sorts of absurd things to try to justify it.
Husbands blame their wives for cheating on them. Businessmen blame the government for cheating on their taxes. Children blame an imaginary friend for stealing the cookies.
I’d suggest that we’ve all been Jonah at some point in our Christian lives. And just like Jonah, when we take the absurd positions we do to try and justify our sin, what we find is that we’re moving AWAY from God. He’s UP, and we’re going down.
And since spiritual growth requires us to be walking in the Spirit, to be walking in the light, we can’t be growing spiritually unless we remain close to God through faithful obedience.
“A life that is growing spiritually is moving toward God’s commands, not away from them, regardless of the difficulty.”
Folks, I don’t know what God is calling you to do. I hope it’s hard, because that’s one indication it’s from Him. But whatever it is, don’t be like Jonah. Don’t be going down when you ought to be going UP.
Look, if you’ve followed Jesus in faith, then you BELONG to Him. And that’s OK, because He’s GOOD, and He loves you. And whatever it is that HE calls you to do will serve to bring you closer to God and to spread the life-giving message of the gospel to the world.
Obedience in faith. That’s the calling for every one of us who bears the name of Christ. Obedience to God’s commands in faith that He will use our obedience to build His kingdom.
What IS God calling you to do today? What is it that you’ve been struggling against, despite being pretty sure that God has commanded it? Why have you pulled out the map to look for Tarshish, when God has told you to go to Nineveh?
Don’t make God send a big fish to swallow you just so you’ll learn to be obedient.
Keep your eyes on Jesus, be where He is, and do the hard things He calls you to do, even though they’re hard. Don’t be like Jonah.