What is the Book of Jonah Really About?

contrary to what Many of us learned in Sunday School, the Book
of Jonah is not about a man who was swallowed by a whale. You may
remember how this Jewish prophet tried to dodge God’s instruction to
go to Nineveh. And honestly, I can’t blame him!
Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, was the largest city in the world at
that time. It was located in modern-day Mosul, Iraq. The Assyrians
were bitter enemies of Israel, and their cruelty and wickedness were
legendary. In fact, Assyrian art contains some of the most horrifying
images ever created. Their panels depict prisoners having their tongues
ripped from their mouths to mute their screams when they were
skinned alive. So, it’s no wonder Jonah was a bit reluctant to visit these
bitter enemies of Israel to call them out on their sins. Imagine how we
might feel if God called us to go to an ISIS camp to pronounce God’s
judgment on them. Besides, God had often warned Israel not to mix
with the pagan peoples lest they become like them and start worship-
ping their false gods.
Instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah sets out in the opposite direc-
tion by sea for a distant land, Tarshish, to try to escape the presence
of the Lord. Who wouldn’t prefer to go to the sunny shores of a pros-
perous Mediterranean seaside town? But the Lord then sent a great
storm. The terrified sailors cried out to their gods for help and cast lots
to see why this evil had come upon them.
They already suspected Jonah was the cause of their troubles
because he had told them he was fleeing the presence of God. The lot
fell to Jonah. After they cast him overboard, God sent a great fish to
swallow him.
There has been a lot of speculation about the kind of great fish or
whale that might have swallowed him. Here is the truth about the fish:
it was actually a “red herring.” In other words, the particular type of
sea creature is completely irrelevant to the point of our story.
In the belly of the great fish, Jonah turns to God
I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice. (Jonah 2:1–2)
And here he has a change of heart:
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord! (2:9)
In the depths, a transformation begins. The great fish vomits Jonah
onto the dry land, and again the word of the Lord comes to Jonah,
calling him to cry out against Nineveh. This time, however, he obeys,
and Nineveh, a bit surprisingly, believes God and repents in sackcloth
and ashes.
When God saw they turned away from evil, he relented from
destroying the city. But this displeased Jonah greatly:
“O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my
country? 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. Therefore now, O Lord,
please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die
than to live.” (4:2–3)
And after the plant that was shading him was destroyed, he became
even more angry and depressed.
God draws him out about his anger:
But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry
for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry,
angry enough to die.” And the Lord said, “You pity the
plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make
it grow, which came into being in a night and perished
in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great
city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who
do not know their right hand from their left, and also
much cattle?” (4:8–11)
No, Jonah is not a story about a man who was swallowed by a
whale. It is a prophetic word to us today. Wouldn’t we also be beside
ourselves if we suddenly lost our homes? Why then should we not
also be concerned for the countless millions who may forever lose any
chance of having a heavenly home? The Son of Man had no place to
lay his head here, so that we might have a home in heaven.
God might well say to us, “And should I not have compassion on
the two billion persons who do not know their right hand from their
left?” As Tim Keller suggested, the father’s pleading here is much like
that of the father of the prodigal son who pleads with the elder son,
“It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead,
and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” (Luke 15:32)1 Here God reveals
his heart of love and compassion for a lost and ruined humanity, and
his gentleness in dealing with his sometimes clueless Church.
The Book of Jonah is a mirror. When we hold it up, we see
ourselves in relation to the Great Commission. God has done great
and marvelous things to advance his kingdom in the two thousand
years since Christ gave us his Great Commission. He has done so
mostly through a relatively small number of dedicated missionaries.
But many of the rest of us—at times, myself included—have been all
too much like Jonah, not just reluctant prophets but prodigal prophets.
But like Jonah, God also subdues us with his love and transforms us by
his grace so that we might become instruments of transformation for
others who are still lost.
The miracle here is not that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and
lived to tell about it. It is that the Father deals with our failure to carry
out our assigned task in such a gentle yet pointed way. In the belly
of the great fish, Jonah came to the deep transformative realizations
about himself and about the wondrous God who had called him. Here
he came to realize he was no different than the rebellious Ninevites
apart from the Father’s grace. And here he came to realize just how
gracious and merciful God was. What he had known before about God
as an article of faith now becomes something he realizes in his heart. It
is in the crucible of suffering rather than the classroom that we learn
the deep things of God—the things that transform us and motivate
us to obedience regardless of the cost. The belly of the great fish was
Jonah’s crucible.
God deals with us in the same way he intends to deal with the lost.
He brings us to his Kingdom by winning us, not by forcing us. To be
sure, he is insistent and firm, and his ways are far above our ways; but
above all, he is loving, merciful, and compassionate. He is willing to go
to extreme lengths to save us—and many from all nations—from the
just wrath that must surely come. He sometimes prods us along with
gentle humor, careful not to alienate us even when we, like the world,
turn our own back on him. How, then, can we not yield to such a
gracious and merciful Father and, in the end, do what he asks us to do?
Beneath the satirical humor lies a profound universal truth. Jonah,
though a prophet of God, was no different than those God sent him to
redeem, both rebellious sinners in desperate need of a Savior. The cry
and confession of both Jonah and the Ninevites is the same: “I called
out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the
belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. Salvation belongs to
the Lord!” (2:1–9).
So what does Jonah have to do with the Great Commission and the
Church’s response to it? Everything. It points to the reason for the serious
problem in missions. The story of Jonah is what theologians call an
“intrusion,” a foreshadowing of the Church-age mission inserted into
the story of ancient Israel. The norm for Israel in the Old Testament
was to avoid dealings with the pagan nations around them. But this
event anticipates and looks ahead to the mission of God’s people in the
Church Age to come. Throughout the Church Age, we, the Church
have often been much like Jonah, a prodigal prophet. As a result, the
number of unreached continues to increase over time. And it will
increase even more unless there is a radical change in how the Church
approaches God’s mission.
But God himself has already provided the answer: Jesus Christ’s
vision for carrying out his mission. The answer has been there all
along in the Last Discourse as recorded in the Gospel of John, chap-
ters 13–17. And he has placed it there for us to recover and follow in
his time.