E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 272 Seiten
Guthrie The Word of the Lord (A 10-week Bible Study)
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3663-2
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Seeing Jesus in the Prophets
E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 272 Seiten
Reihe: Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3663-2
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Nancy Guthrie teaches the Bible at her home church, Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, as well as at conferences around the country and internationally, including her Biblical Theology Workshop for Women. She is the author of numerous books and the host of the Help Me Teach the Bible podcast with the Gospel Coalition. She and her husband founded Respite Retreats for couples who have faced the death of a child, and they are cohosts of the GriefShare video series.
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I suppose professional counselors in training pay a lot of money to educational institutions to learn how to ask good questions—questions that help us to think more deeply about our motivations and desires. I can remember sitting across from a counselor one time who asked me, “What are you afraid of?” Exploring the answer to that question helped me to unearth the real issue I had to deal with that was making me miserable at the time. I, myself, am not a great counselor. However, I have been known to channel Dr. Phil and respond to someone by asking, “So how’s that working for you?” It’s a good question. In fact, it seems like the kind of question God might ask. When we work our way through the Scriptures, we discover that God asks very good questions—questions that uncover the real issues in the lives of the people he loves.
The first question God asks in the Bible is found in Genesis 3 when he called to Adam, saying, “Where are you?” and then to the woman, asking, “What is this that you have done?” (Gen. 3:9, 13). Of course God knew where Adam and Eve were hiding and exactly what they’d done. He wanted Adam and Eve to face the reality of what they had done and where it had taken them. Later, when elderly Sarah laughed after overhearing God tell Abraham that she was going to give birth to a son, God asked, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the LORD?” (Gen. 18:13–14). The unbelief underneath Sarah’s skeptical laugh needed to be brought to the surface to be dealt with. Wrestling with Jacob in the dark, God asked him, “What is your name?” (Gen. 32:27). Certainly God knew his name. This was a call for confession, as just saying his name, which meant “cheater” or “swindler,” gave Jacob the opportunity to come clean. Each time God asks a question in the Bible, we know it is not because he does not know the answer to the question. Clearly he wants the person being questioned to examine what is really going on in his or her heart.
We’re going to hear God ask some challenging questions as we work our way through the Prophetic Books, beginning with the book of Jonah. For most of us, this is a familiar story. We’ve read the picture-book version to our kids that focuses on the big fish. We know the series of events that make up this book. But what is this book really about? What were the people of Jonah’s day supposed to take away from this book, which is really Jonah’s confession? If we can find an answer to that question, we’ll be able to figure out what you and I are intended to take away from this book. And I promise you that it has very little to do with a big fish. That big fish is really just a bit player in a far bigger drama.
Jonah’s Rebellion
The book of Jonah begins with the Lord entrusting a message to his prophet:
Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai. (Jonah 1:1)
Jonah was a prophet in Israel, the northern kingdom, in the time after the united kingdom divided. We know this because Jonah is also mentioned in 2 Kings 14, where we discover that he prophesied to the northern kingdom of Israel and that he was the rare prophet who got to deliver a word of good news. Jonah prophesied that territory that had been lost to Israel’s northern enemies was going to come back under Israelite control, and the prophecy proved true. So we can imagine that Jonah was popular in a way that most prophets were not, a popularity he probably enjoyed. But then the word of the Lord came to Jonah, telling him to take God’s message outside Israel’s borders:
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. (Jonah 1:2)
Jonah must have thought, Surely I didn’t hear that right. I’m a prophet to Israel. I speak for God to God’s covenant people, not to Gentiles, and certainly not to Ninevites. In Jonah’s day there was one world superpower—the Assyrians. For generations Assyria had been making fierce raids on the lands bordering the Mediterranean, including Israel. Having refined the art of torture, they were known for their brutality. Evidently their evil had not escaped the notice of God himself. He wanted Jonah to go to Nineveh, an enormous city in the middle of Assyria, to declare his coming judgment.
But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD. (Jonah 1:3)
Jonah took off in the exact opposite direction from Nineveh. Why didn’t Jonah want to go to Nineveh? Was it just the inconvenience of a long journey? It couldn’t have been that, because he was willing to journey to Tarshish, which was considered the end of the earth at that point in time. Was it that he was afraid? Certainly he had cause to be afraid. If you go to the British Museum in London, you can see huge stone panels that once decorated the rooms and courtyards in the king’s palace in Assyria. These panels depict the various ways they tortured their enemies. This was their idea of decorating the living room. So certainly, marching into Nineveh with a message of God’s disapproval did sound like a plum prophetical assignment.
However, knowing that they were such a threat, I would think that Jonah would have liked the message he was given to deliver: he was to “call out against it.” If Nineveh was destroyed, the Israelites could breathe a huge sigh of relief. Jonah was a man who loved his country, and, for him, that meant that he hated Israel’s enemies. We could easily imagine Jonah daydreaming about getting home from his trip and telling everyone that, sure enough, forty days after he’d called out against it, God rained down fire on their evil enemies. But evidently that’s not what Jonah pictured in his mind as the outcome of his journey. If we want to know the real reason that Jonah did not want to go and give God’s message to Nineveh, he states it clearly in chapter 4:
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. (v. 2)
It’s not so much what Jonah knew about Nineveh that made him run in the other direction. It’s what he knew about God. He really believed what God had said about himself and had demonstrated again and again in Israel’s history: he is a God who loves to show mercy when people repent. Jonah knew that if God wanted him to go and speak his word to the Ninevites, it was because God intended to bring the Ninevites to repentance in order that he might save them. And, frankly, Jonah did not want God to save the Ninevites. He wanted God to wipe those people off the face of the earth so that his own people, the Israelites, would not have to live in fear of them. So he hung up his prophetic credentials and headed west instead of east.
But God (and isn’t that always how the story of salvation starts, “but God …”?) was so committed to showing mercy to the Ninevites that he not only called his prophet to go but also put a storm in his prophet’s pathway that would halt his flight in the other direction. God hurled a great wind onto the Mediterranean Sea so that the ship Jonah was fleeing on would break apart in the storm. All of the sailors cried out to their gods, yet Jonah had no interest in calling out to his God for mercy. He had no interest in opening up the communication lines again with God; he was done with communicating with and for God.
The pagan soldiers wrote the names of everyone onboard on small pieces of wood and threw them like dice to see whose name would come up, anticipating that it would indicate which person on the ship had angered his god; and sure enough, Jonah’s name came up. When they questioned Jonah, they found out that his god was the God of heaven, the God who made the sea and the dry land, and at that moment they wanted a whole lot less sea and a whole lot more dry land.
We have to wonder why Jonah didn’t drop to his knees right then and beg God to still the storm. But evidently death was preferable to Jonah than calling on God, which he knew would require obeying God. So he told the sailors to throw him into the sea, assuring them that once they did, the storm would be stilled; God’s wrath would be abated by the sacrifice of the one who was guilty.
But these pagan sailors didn’t want Jonah to sacrifice himself for them. They seem to have had more compassion than God’s prophet. They determined to row harder in the storm, thinking that they had it in their own strength to emerge from the storm of God’s judgment unscathed, apart from a sacrifice, just like lots of people do today. But they couldn’t do it. Finally they gave up and threw Jonah into the water. The storm stopped, and they knew Jonah’s God was the true God. And though they had only just heard about Yahweh from arguably the world’s worst witness, they threw themselves upon God’s mercy and acknowledged their complete dependence upon him. They left their pagan gods behind and became believers in Yahweh.
The story of Jonah could have easily ended right there, with Jonah never heard from again. But God. God had worked a miracle of salvation, bringing these pagan sailors to himself, and he was about to do another one in the life of his reluctant prophet.
Jonah’s Resurrection
The scene...
