00:00:00:21 – 00:00:25:28
Clint Loveall
Today. kind of just a final some final thoughts on Jonah, less probably in terms of the text or the meaning and maybe more. Just the question, how do we read a book like Jonah? Jonah’s such an interesting book in that it’s a narrative. It’s very much a story. It’s it’s not a typical book that you would call a prophetic book.

00:00:25:28 – 00:00:50:08
Clint Loveall
One of the other prophets, if you read Micah or Amos or one of those other books that are in close proximity to Jonah, they will sound nothing like this. There will be some narrative in it, but this is a careful, fully crafted, well put together story, and it stands out as unlike the other books that we call prophets.

00:00:50:13 – 00:01:00:36
Clint Loveall
generally named for the main character and what I think makes that a challenge, Michael is.

00:01:00:41 – 00:01:40:00
Clint Loveall
That that temptation to get distracted by the details and many of the conversations that I’ve listened to and been a part of about Jonah through the years have specifically to do with, could it be true? In other words, could a person live in a fish? Could a whale carry someone? Could they, you know, could it happen? And, for people who who want to defend the idea that this is a factual story.

00:01:40:04 – 00:02:12:43
Clint Loveall
I mean, certainly the supernatural is a part of the Scripture. You can you can do that. But I’ve always suspected that when we get drawn into those debates, there’s a good chance we’re missing the bigger and and more important points. And this book, maybe let me think about that for a second, maybe as much as any other book I can think of.

00:02:12:48 – 00:02:28:25
Clint Loveall
raises that question. And, and I think this book is far more than many others leads to distraction of things that don’t really change the meaning, but sort of take over the spotlight often.

00:02:28:30 – 00:02:52:58
Michael Gewecke
I think one of the, temptations of a book like Jonah, to your point, Clint, is that we are tempted to enter into the text and then to fixate on the how to’s of it, rather than the substantial data underneath it. And I think that today’s conversation, we’re going to try to tease out a little bit as readers, how do we navigate those currents of the text?

00:02:53:01 – 00:03:14:27
Michael Gewecke
How do you look at what is here, and you see some of the original intent and ask yourself what what lesson or purpose did this solve in its original context? Why is this put where it is in the context of Scripture and Clinton? I think a detail that’s worth noting is that Jonah is referenced many times outside of the book of Jonah.

00:03:14:27 – 00:03:45:05
Michael Gewecke
In fact, Jesus himself quotes Jonah as an idea, talking about the three days that Jonah was in the belly of the fish, gone down the Sheol, as we have in the text itself in chapter two. And then Jesus talks about in the same way that I will be buried for three days. And in both of those cases, this connection made to the idea that even at the edge of experience, the furthest away from God in those places, God chose faithfulness to bring out.

00:03:45:05 – 00:04:18:29
Michael Gewecke
On the other hand, we both know that that did happen for Jonah. When this whale miraculously both carries him to the place he needs to be, but then also spews him out onto the land. Also, God delivers Jesus from death itself. God delivers Jesus to the other side of death into life. And so I think it’s worth noting that when you when you see a book like Jonah in other places of the Scripture be quoted and referenced using that kind of imagery, it should grab our interest and attention.

00:04:18:29 – 00:04:29:22
Michael Gewecke
That should make us wonder, what if Jesus is reading the book that way? Then there must be a sense in which we should take it seriously in those farther depths as well.

00:04:29:27 – 00:05:02:58
Clint Loveall
I think it’s easy to read the book of Jonah and think this is a story about a guy who got swallowed by a fish, a whale, right? And there are even arguments. Believe it or not, there are arguments over whether it was a fish or whale, as if that somehow changes the meaning of the text. I think what’s harder is to remember that, yes, this story involves a man who gets swallowed by a fish, but this is a story about a God who demands holiness and responds to people who repent.

00:05:03:03 – 00:05:32:06
Clint Loveall
This is a story about a God who invites a man to be a part of redeeming those who are lost, and a man who doesn’t want to. But behind the story of Jonah is the story of a God who loves the people that we struggle to love, and the interaction between God’s grace and Jonah’s hard heartedness, God’s deliverance and Jonah’s judgment.

00:05:32:11 – 00:06:12:49
Clint Loveall
That’s where the lessons, that’s where the power of this book is. And if we’re arguing about whether a person can live inside a whale, I think we’re likely to miss the question of what hard heartedness, what judgment lives inside of us, what is it we carry that is opposed or in opposition to what God wants? What is God inviting us to that we don’t want to participate?

00:06:12:54 – 00:06:42:16
Clint Loveall
And how is God’s grace and God’s patience and God’s redemption? Sometimes even scandalous and offensive to those who think it went to the wrong people, that God has been good to the people that God shouldn’t have graced with his presence. And I just think when you make this about, could it happen or not? You rob the story of its power.

00:06:42:16 – 00:07:04:19
Clint Loveall
And I know if you happen to live on the side of the fence that that thinks literalism is important. In other words, if the Bible said that it must have happened that way, that’s okay. You can. Certainly there’s no reason you can’t think that about the book of Jonah. Just don’t stop there. Because I don’t think ultimately that’s the the mountaintop.

00:07:04:19 – 00:07:19:26
Clint Loveall
I think that can be a step along the way. That’s fine. But the peak is not what this says about people living in fish, but what it says about the biases that live in each of us. And I think ultimately that’s the lesson we should struggle with.

00:07:19:30 – 00:07:36:39
Michael Gewecke
I think, to raise that point even more clearly. Clint, let’s very quickly look at Matthew chapter 12 here. I think it makes this point really clearly. Jesus. This is from red letters. Jonah was three days, three nights in the belly of the sea monster. So for three days and three nights, the summer man will be in the heart of the earth.

00:07:36:39 – 00:08:05:40
Michael Gewecke
Just mention that. But then you’re looking. Verse 41, the people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they, being the Ninevites, repented at the proclamation of Jonah and see something greater than Jonah is here. And I think that this serves your point. Just to say that Jesus, when referencing this story, uses that as a slight against the religious leaders who see the Son of Man.

00:08:05:40 – 00:08:36:50
Michael Gewecke
In other words, not just Jonah the the unwilling prophet sent out, but actually God’s Son who arrives and proclaims the kingdom of God that they do not respond with repentance, with sackcloth, with ashes, with fasting, no, with Jesus, they are ultimately going to kill him. And here Jesus says, the Ninevites could do better than that. And I think that only underscores even more so how radical that story was, that the enemy of Israel would be the recipient of God’s grace.

00:08:36:50 – 00:08:55:10
Michael Gewecke
They would hear good news. It would renew and transform their hearts, and they would be willing to truly change and be transformed. And it’s a danger, as you’ve already said, the danger of reading a text like Jonah looking for House, which is a very scientific and modern way to look at a text for us to become fixated on.

00:08:55:15 – 00:09:33:39
Michael Gewecke
Well, when this happened, how did that happen? And how could you explain that thing happening? What what you get stuck in or quagmire in, in that way of addressing a text is, you know, you strip from it the opportunity to have something to teach you, you, you take from it the opportunity to to not only be telling a story about something that happened or a conception of a story, but rather you make it then the same time locked onto itself, and you don’t let it have something to teach you about yourself, or about your own deeper spiritual life, and about what it has to say about how God desires to interact and relate to you.

00:09:33:39 – 00:10:09:27
Michael Gewecke
And in some ways, I think we would all do really well to come to texts like this with inquisitive spirits, and to just simply ask, Lord God, what character in this story do I identify with most right now? And then ultimately asked, and what is God’s reaction and relationship with that individual throughout the story? And I think most of us who have been in the church where people of faith, we we can all relate to Jonah at some point we’ve been called by God to do something we are unwilling and uninterested in doing it.

00:10:09:32 – 00:10:21:58
Michael Gewecke
And yet God is able to bring about God’s purposes even in the midst of that, and also and simultaneously. God often does that in spite of us, instead of with us.

00:10:22:03 – 00:10:40:21
Clint Loveall
What I think is part of the timelessness of this book, Michael, is that there were most likely hundreds, perhaps thousands of things that God could have asked Jonah to do, and it would have been a different story. It would have been. So Jonah got up and went and did it right at go preach to the Israelites. Go do this, go do that.

00:10:40:26 – 00:11:07:18
Clint Loveall
But faithfulness lives, obedience lives in those gaps in the places where God calls us to things that we don’t want to do. When God calls us to love people, that we don’t want to love and forgive people that we don’t want to forgive. And the question that hangs over the text is the question of God. If we have some grudge in our lives, some anger in our life towards another person.

00:11:07:22 – 00:11:28:55
Clint Loveall
This question that God asked Jonah here in the fourth chapter, is it right for you to be angry? Is it right for you to be hard hearted? Is it right for you to carry that grudge? Is it right for you to be stubborn and refuse to forget and forgive a person for whatever they did that offended you or wronged you?

00:11:29:00 – 00:11:57:22
Clint Loveall
And that ultimately is where faithfulness lives. Because all of us can be obedient in the places where that’s easy. All of us can walk a path of faith when it doesn’t ask hard things of us. But when God gets to the core of our own biases and our own bigotries and our own grudges and says, do you have a right to carry that?

00:11:57:27 – 00:12:52:30
Clint Loveall
Do you have a right? Having received my grace to keep it from someone else, do you have a right, having been forgiven and delivered not to hope for the deliverance of others? Is that your right? And ultimately, I think this wonderful story about a man who who knows God and and believes in God, but doesn’t obey, isn’t willing to take that next difficult step and do the thing that God invites him to do, not just because God, you know, oh, it we said this early in the study, it is, I think, almost comedic, the idea that of all the prophets that could have taken this job and, and been the title of this book, God

00:12:52:30 – 00:13:12:29
Clint Loveall
selects the one who’s willing to drown instead of go. I mean, there is something telling in that God is most interested in the places that we are least interested to give him the things that we’re least interested to give him. And and I just think that’s wonderfully illustrated here in Jonah.

00:13:12:34 – 00:13:48:24
Michael Gewecke
The thing that comes to mind as you lay out the mammoth nature of the call that God gives to Jonah in light of Jonah’s predisposition, is that in many ways, Clint, that thing that God is trying to do is way bigger than any whale in the story. It is so much more substantial that the idea that God’s desire to show grace to the enemy, that God convicts and compels us in our own hearts when we would seek to retain grace and keep it from another person, that that dark temptation.

00:13:48:28 – 00:14:24:12
Michael Gewecke
This is a huge spiritual lesson. And the the interesting thing is that there have been many times in Christian history where we’ve missed this monumental lesson for what we think of as a monumental fish, and there’s some irony in that. There’s a kind of lesson in that about the human heart is that we are, I think, biologically prone to miss the the point for other points, especially when that point is hard, especially when that point is pointed, when it’s pointed at the reality of our own brokenness and difficulty.

00:14:24:12 – 00:15:00:00
Michael Gewecke
When we understand intuitively if this has something to say about me and the assumptions that I’ve made my life, or the assumptions that I’ve made my faith and the people that I would be unwilling to go visit. Those are the moments, I think, where text like this really get into our hearts, and they pry a little bit. They pry open things that we would like to keep closed tight, and they invite us to reconsider that God’s cosmic economy may be larger than what we’re willing to admit, that God’s love and compassion may extend beyond where we’re comfortable going.

00:15:00:00 – 00:15:22:19
Michael Gewecke
And when we get there in a text like this, we can both look at a thing like a great fish, or we can go look at the miraculous growing of this plant and then the miraculous dying of that plant. We can say, wow, those may be large, but they’re nowhere in comparison to the size of transformation that God is calling the people of Nineveh to, or the sailors on that boat to.

00:15:22:19 – 00:15:49:19
Michael Gewecke
And then ultimately, nor are they as troubling as the question that we’re left that book with. How will Jonah respond to the ultimate question? What will Jonah say at the end of verse 11? Here, when God asks him if he shouldn’t be concerned about this great city with all of these thousands of people and and these animals, you know, ultimately, what is the outcome then that we are going to see happen in this one man’s life?

00:15:49:19 – 00:15:53:48
Michael Gewecke
And ultimately, the question for ourselves, what will that be for us?

00:15:53:52 – 00:16:27:07
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I’m sure Jonah would affirm it is both comforting and maddening that God is more gracious than we are. And the very affirmation of God’s grace is Jonah’s complaint. And I think you know, again, that that just gives this book such a unique flavor, such a beautiful story. And I think the depth of wisdom and challenge in this book is, rare, even among the scriptures.

00:16:27:12 – 00:16:57:42
Clint Loveall
I mean, it’s not alone, certainly, but it stands out as, as wonderfully crafted to raise challenging, difficult questions about God and faithfulness. And I hope that something in this study has brought that across to you because, it truly is, I think, one of the the crown jewels of our scriptures. And, just every time you go back to it, I feel like there’s something else that unfolds for you.

00:16:57:46 – 00:17:18:09
Michael Gewecke
So this does conclude our series of Jonah. If you’ve missed the previous studies, you’ll find that all in the playlist on our YouTube channel. You find it in the podcast. Also one. Make no. The fact that when we return, not tomorrow, but Thursday of this week, we’re going to begin another Old Testament book, Ruth, which is also a narrative story and also does some unbelievably interesting things.

00:17:18:09 – 00:17:36:01
Michael Gewecke
It’s going to challenge us in very different ways than Jonah, but it has challenges in it, so I hope you’ll join us for that. Like this video if you found it helpful, certainly subscribe if you’d like to stick with us as we turn to the Book of Ruth together starting this Thursday. And of course, we’d love to have you join us as we continue along studying the scriptures together.

00:17:36:16 – 00:17:37:39
Michael Gewecke
Until then, be blessed.

00:17:37:39 – 00:17:38:18
Clint Loveall
Thanks everybody.