“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” Psalm 139.7 NKJV
Jonah would have done well to remember this psalm, and I personally believe that he did, only in the sense that he was aware of it but not in agreement with its truth. I say that because I have often been humbled and shamed by my own stupidity in light of the irresistible truth of God. Sometimes things happen that take us well past the outer reaches of what we think we can handle, and we flip. Yet the Word of God remains, a rock in the wilderness.
If Jonah would have remembered that there is nowhere God isn’t, he might have canceled his trip to the end of the world, gotten in the harness, and submitted to wisdom. Instead he went off on his fool’s errand and chose to learn the hard way.
And this would make no difference in the final analysis if God didn’t care, and if each of us lived in a vacuum, but God does care, and our choices affect the people we live around. Jonah’s life choices carried immense collateral damage for a ragtag group of ignorant sailors who, it will turn out in our study next week, knew God better and feared Him more than Jonah did. So if they were ignorant, what did that make Jonah, the prophet of God on a mission?
Only two verses later, the psalmist pens a line that should have been a scourge to Jonah’s willfulness: “…If I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me…” There is no escape from the genius and wisdom of God. The fact that we spend so much that is of value trying to escape anyway—even the valuable stuff that belongs to others, without their consent—demonstrates our hardness to the One who calls us to Himself.
Jonah’s pointless disobedience nearly wrecked a ship and its crew. Can you imagine the damage to the families of these people, who were made in the image of God, if all were to be lost? But God would prove Himself to Jonah, and Jonah would prove that he could, if begrudgingly, learn. I can’t wait to preach about it in the coming weeks.
When Jonah embarked for Tarshish—the end of the world—he saw the sailors as not much more than a means to an end. When he disembarked that vessel in the middle of a raging sea, he at least understood that nowhere is still somewhere God is. And he acknowledged, if by his actions alone and not also his lips, that God was right to send him to the Gentiles: because He cares about “them” too.
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