“Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.’ But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD…” Jonah 1.1-2 ESV
Today we begin a seven-week study in the book of Jonah. The essence of this book is that God’s heart is for all men; that all should be saved. Yet we have choices to make. The most important one is repentance, which is the message God gave His prophet Jonah.
We suffer from many delusions in this life. One of the worst is that we can choose anything we want. In truth we choose from a limited array of options as we make our choices, and lots of times our choices are limited by the consequences of other choices we made before. The rebel thinks he is free. Really, he is a slave to his choices, and especially their consequences.
For Jonah it was no different. He very much saw his world through the lens of “us and them;” chosen and rejected, believers and unbelievers. And many of us today go through our lives placing the mark of the beast on the foreheads of some of the people we meet. But is that the gospel? Is not there only one Lawgiver and Judge?
But Jonah demonstrates another crucial truth.
There is no middle ground in the Kingdom of God. We are either in the light or we are in the dark. Either God has revealed His glory to us or we remain blind. Walking with Jesus is not a journey from cold through lukewarm to hot; it is a quickening. The resurrection will happen not in painful stages but in an instant.
Jonah thought he could flee from his assignment to speak eight words of repentance to a city, it turns out, primed and ready to be harvested. He scorned the heat and the light and became a rebel in the middle ground. He wanted to keep the privileges of sonship while rejecting the authority of the Father. But the middle ground is a myth and a lie; it does not exist. Jonah found out the hard way that there is nowhere to stand when we flee from the presence of the LORD. We too risk being thrown into the furious sea when we follow suit. Jonah is in many ways the worst character in his own story. My brothers and sisters, let it not be so with us.
God’s heart is for all men, but we must turn. How amazing is our God, that he could put a word of repentance in the mouth of a prophet who himself needed to find repentance?
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