A Commentary in Simple English on Jonah |
Chapter 1 Verses 1-4: God speaks to Jonah God spoke to Jonah. (verse 1) Jonah was quite clear that it was God who spoke to him. If we think that God speaks to us, we shall be wise if we pray about it. We should and talk about it with other Christian friends. God speaks to us through His Word. He speaks to people in different ways. But we must not go to people who will always say: ‘No. That is not God. He would never say that to you.’ Jonah needed a good friend who could help him to understand what God wanted him to do. It is the word of ‘the LORD’, Jehovah which comes to Jonah. In verse 2, God tells Jonah to get up and go to Nineveh. Instead (verse. 3) he goes down to Joppa, and then goes down into the ship. In verse.5 he goes down ‘below deck’; in verse 15, he goes down into the sea, and then (verse 17) down into the great fish. If we do not get up and do God’s will, we shall go down and down. God tells Jonah to preach ‘against’ Nineveh. In 3:2, God only tells Jonah to preach ‘to’ Nineveh. The other Old Testament prophets only had to speak. They only had to speak to their own people, the Jews. Jonah had to make a long journey to Nineveh. This journey was full of danger. He had to go to a city, which was far bigger than any other that he knew. He had to go to the Assyrians. who lived in Nineveh. They were a cruel and violent people. They were great enemies of Jonah’s people. Israel were God’s people. The Assyrians were not. He would be alone, and he would bring a message that the people there would not like at all. Jonah might have said to God ‘There is still plenty for me to do here in Israel.’ The Jews had not listened to his teaching; surely the people in Nineveh would not listen to him either. If you look at 4:2 you will see what Jonah said to God later . We cannot be sure that Jonah really had it worked out like that when God first spoke to him. Perhaps he was frightened to go to Nineveh. He ought to have trusted God to look after him at Nineveh and on the journey. God knew just how wicked the people in Nineveh were. He knows everything. He rules over every time and place. But God is good too. He knew how bad the great city of Nineveh was. He is ready to do something about it. He is ready to send Jonah to Nineveh to make the people change their ways. People say: There is trouble in the world. Why does God do nothing about it? There is so much that is wrong’. God has done something. He sent His Own dear Son, Jesus. What people really say is: ‘We want to forget Jesus. Why does not God do something else?’ They forget that there is nothing bigger or better that God could do. In verse.3, Jonah gets up to run away from God. Now Jonah knew that he could not really escape from God. God knew what happened in Nineveh, 500 miles away. So Jonah knew that he could not get away from God, even if he went to Tarshish. (See Psalm 139.) Jonah was a servant of God and he wanted to get away from God’s service. (See 1 Kings 17:1, where Elijah is God’s servant.) It is the service of the LORD, Jehovah, which he wants to escape from. The easy way is often not the right way. Jonah went from his home village about 90km. south to the little port of Joppa. His home was closer to a great port called Tyre. Another great port called Sidon was further north. It was from Tyre and Sidon that big ships sailed on long journeys or ’ voyages’. So Jonah had a big surprise. He found a ship at Joppa that would take him to Tarshish. [1.1] Jonah knew that he fought against God’s will, but he thought at this point that perhaps he was right after all. Any one can make a mistake such as this when we know what God’s will is and we do not want to do it. We can find signs that we are right after all. The Jews did not like the sea and they spoke of going down into a ship. (See Psalm 107:23; Isaiah 42:10). In many languages, you go up into a ship. So the ship sets sail from Joppa with Jonah on board. The journey to Tarshish was about 2,400km. and would have taken some weeks. In verse 4 the LORD Jehovah throws a great wind down on the sea. The wind and the sea obey God. In the Book of Jonah, everything obeys God except Jonah. These ships were well built to stand storms. This storm was so bad that the ship ‘thought it would be broken to pieces’. In verse 5, we have a strange prayer meeting. We sometimes call sailors ‘salts’. The sea is salt water, and sailors get salt on them. The Hebrew Bible calls these sailors ‘salts’. They had sailed these seas many times, but this storm was so bad that it made them afraid. They were heathen. Probably they came from many different places round the Mediterranean Sea. So they stood on the top of the ship, ‘the deck’. They shouted prayers to all their different ‘gods’. The wind carried their shouts away. They threw everything that they could out of the ship. This was to help the ship float on the rough sea. There was one man on the ship who did not worship a false ‘god’. Jonah knew the one living God. God would have heard by his prayers but he did not pray. This is often a picture of the world. The church should pray, but it does not. The world prays, but it prays to false ‘gods’. Jonah went down again. He went down below the deck of the ship. He was in the ‘hold’. Perhaps he did not want to mix with the heathen sailors. It was strange that he was able to sleep. The noise of the storm should have kept him awake; so should the rough way that the ship moved in the storm and great waves. [1.2] The ship’s captain is ‘the master of the ropes’. Ropes are still important on ships even today. They were much more important on ships in those days. So in verse.6 the heathen captain tells the man of God to get up. He is to pray. If only Jonah had obeyed God’s call! Jonah would have been telling the King of Nineveh what to do! The captain does not know who Jonah’s God is, but he still tells Jonah to pray to Him. Jonah goes up from the ‘hold’ to the ‘deck’. Perhaps he prays. In verse 7 the sailors throw down ‘lots’ to find out who is the person to blame for this violent storm. This is not a way that we should ever use to find out God’s will. We must look for help in God’s Word, the Bible. Still, God was at work, and the sailors picked out Jonah. When Christians do wrong, people who do not believe quickly find out about it. We cannot hide it from them. Then in verse 8, the sailors ask Jonah four questions. We can see from verse 10 that verse 9 only gives the most important part of Jonah’s answer to them. a) He says that he was a Hebrew, a Jew. This may not have meant much to the sailors. b) Then he says that he worships or ‘fears’ God. If we say that we ‘fear’ God then we ought to obey him! Jonah does not obey his God. c) Then Jonah tells the sailors the name of his God. He is the LORD, Jehovah. That name means that He is the God of His people. God is also given another name. He is the God (‘Elohim’) Who lives and rules in heaven. He is the God who made the sea, which gives so much trouble. He made the dry land too. Jonah knows that he cannot get away from God. And no doubt Jonah wishes he was back on dry land. Now we can see that Jonah tells these heathen sailors about his God. Jonah should have been in Nineveh. He ought to have preached to the heathen people in the streets there. Instead, he stands on the deck of a ship. It jumps about as the waves hit it and break over it. He must have shouted to make himself heard. It was not easy to tell these heathen sailors that he had done what was wrong. But Christians who tell people about their own sins may do good. Jonah has to do what God wanted him to do. It would really have been much easier to go to Nineveh. The storm frightened the sailors in verse 5. Now what Jonah has said frightens them. In verse 15, they will again be filled with great fear. We shall see why this is later on. Now we would expect God to be angry with these sailors who prayed to false ‘gods’. God did not send the storm because of their sins. God sent the storm because His servant Jonah did not obey him. We may look at people and say: ’How very wicked they are! God should do something. God should punish them’. If we think like that, we should ask: ‘Do I really obey God?’ It may matter much more to God that I do not do His will. [1.3] So the sailors ask Jonah what they should do (verse 11) . He tells them to throw him down into the sea (verse 12). He knows that he cannot live in the rough sea. He is ready to die to save these few heathen sailors, when he would not go to Nineveh to save a whole great city. Perhaps the sailors did not really believe what Jonah said to them. We can see from verse 13 that this ship had oars. It probably had one big sail, which the captain would use only if the wind was not too strong. If there was no wind, or if the wind did not blow the right way, the sailors had to row with oars. So now they dug their oars into the sea. They tried to break through the great waves to get back to land. Now a ship will usually come safely through a storm at sea. There is much more danger in a storm if the sailors try to go back to land. So we can see how much they wanted to save Jonah from the sea, but they wanted to get rid of him too! In verse 5, all the sailors had cried in prayer to their own gods. Now in verse. 14 they cry to the LORD, Jehovah. They do not want God to blame them if they throw His servant Jonah down into the sea. They do not see that Jonah has done anything very wrong. He is ‘innocent’. So in verse15 they throw Jonah into the sea. Now the sea always takes some time to become quiet again after a storm. This time, the sea became quiet or ‘calm’ as soon as they had thrown Jonah off the ship. The sailors saw this. They knew that it was God who had made the sea quiet again. So (verse 16) they felt the fear of the LORD, Jehovah. They no longer felt bad about what they had done to Jonah. They made promises to serve God and they made an offering to God. If they killed an animal as an offering or ‘sacrifice’, this must have been after they got back to land. The ship probably needed repair, and they had thrown the ‘cargo’ into the sea. Now we can see that these men heard what Jonah had to say about his God. They saw that Jonah was ready to die so that they could live. This makes us think about Jesus. He gave His life on the cross. He died so that we could live. But not many of the Jewish prophets had any success in teaching their own people. Jonah has had success in teaching these heathen sailors. We cannot be sure that they left off the worship of false ‘gods’ or that they only worshipped the LORD from then on. 1:17 tells us that the LORD, Jehovah has prepared a great fish. It is there at the right time and in the right place to catch Jonah and to save him from the sea. This great fish was a special one, so there is no point in the question whether a fish or a whale could do this. [1.4] |
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