Jonah 1:2-3
Well, Jonah, “got up” alright, but not to do what God told him to do. He made up his mind he was going to Tarshish. Now, don’t confuse “Tarshish” with “Tarsus”—that’s where Saul (Paul) was from. Tarsus is inAsia Minor, at the northeast corner of theMediterranean Sea. Tarshish, on the other hand, is 2,000 miles away from our hero’s hometown, on the southern coast of Spain. You have to go all the way across the Mediterranean Sea and through the Strait of Gibraltar to get to it.
In the ancient world, it was pretty much as far west as you could go before you fell off the edge of the earth. Jonah didn’t just hop a bus for the next town, he was getting as far away from Nineveh as he possibly could.
Tarshish was a bustling seaport, a hub for exports to Israel and other points east. During Solomon’s reign (about 200 years before Jonah), ships from Tarshish arrived about once every three years carrying “gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks.” (I Kings 10:22). (Why on earth anyone would want to import apes is beyond me. Were they eating them? Keeping them as pets? Training them to be servants? The possibilities intrigue me, but I digress.) Unless the “Tar-ships” had begun coming around with greater frequency by the 700’s, Jonah wasn’t planning on coming back for a while, if ever.
Why did Jonah think going to Tarshish would be the solution to his little dilemma? There might have been a couple of reasons. Hiding out where God couldn’t find him, however, as children’s Bible storybooks sometimes put it, was not one of them. Jonah may have been rebellious and pig-headed (Wait—not the right term for a kosher Jew. Let’s go with “stubborn as a mule”.) but he wasn’t stupid. He was a prophet. If anybody knows that God sees you wherever you go, it’s a prophet. More likely, what was in Jonah’s mind was trying to get out from under God’s hand—the mantle of prophecy God had laid on him.
Jonah could have held to an ancient Jewish belief (later debunked in Ezekiel and Daniel) that God’s spirit of prophecy could only rest upon a person who was within the borders of Israel. Get out of Israel equals get out of the prophet business.
He might also have simply been operating on the same “I’m in control here and God won’t intervene and make me do something,” principle the rest of us operate under. For example, if I stand by my back door and decide that I’m not going outside, my experience tells me that God isn’t going to physically pick me up and shove me out the door (even though I know that He’s quite capable of doing so and would if He wanted to). Maybe Jonah figured the same thing about deciding not to go to Nineveh. Little did he know…
Now, you know what I find to be a glaring omission on Jonah’s part in this passage? God told Jonah to do something, and Jonah didn’t talk to God about it (at least, if he did, it’s not recorded here). Jonah didn’t ask any questions, seek an explanation, offer excuses as to why he couldn’t do it, ask God to enable him to do it, or anything else. He just got up and went another direction without a word.
When God told Moses to go speak to Pharaoh, they had a nice long chat about it (Exodus 3:10-4:16). When Jeremiah had questions, God had answers (Jeremiah 12). God gets that we don’t always understand Him and His ways and that sometimes we need to talk things out with Him. But Jonah didn’t even give God a chance.
If Jonah had sat down and had a simple conversation with the Lord before he headed down to Joppa, his story might have turned out completely differently. Maybe he would have come around and seen things God’s way and gone straight to Nineveh. We might not have gotten a spectacular “fish tale”, but God would have gotten from Jonah what He desires from each of us: trust and obedience.
Journal Time:
Compare Jonah’s response to God’s calling on his life with Moses’ (Exodus 3:10-4:16) and Isaiah’s (Isaiah 6) response to God’s calling on their lives. How does God respond to the concerns and questions of His servants? In the end, what did each of these men decide to do? Considering these Scriptures, how can you best respond the next time God gives you instructions you don’t like?
Have you ever flatly refused to obey God’s instructions to you? What were the results?
Prayer Points:
Repent: of any areas in your life where you know you’re running away from obeying God.
Request: that God will keep you immersed in the Word and in prayer daily so you will be more inclined to trust Him and be obedient to Him in the future.
Seek God: for the wisdom to know how to approach Him in reverence and submission with your questions and concerns.
