Issue 248
Based on Jonah 3:1-2 and 4:10-11
When someone is trying to run away and hide from God, it is easy to observe the absurdity of the situation. How can you run or hide from someone who is everywhere?
Such running and hiding is often motivated by fear, self-motivated agendas, or out and out defiance. It’s futile but not uncommon.
Such was Jonah’s position. Commanded by God to go east to Iraq, he decides to go west to Spain . You have to be afraid and anxious to behave like that. You have to be worried that going east would be risky or downright dangerous.
Before we write him off, it would be worth doing a ‘running audit’. How many of your co-workers are immersing themselves in a sea of work which enables them to avoid facing up to God? Some are doing it quite deliberately – for workaholism is an addiction to work and an attempted escape from reality. Sometimes we talk about people’s search for God. It is equally true that many are running away – like Jonah – into a Western workaholism instead of an Eastern promise. You may like to do a quick self review of your own situation. Sometimes you hear a call of God – not necessarily to a massive project – but to a small behaviour or lifestyle adjustment, and you run away, ignore it, or try to hide. Some Christians have explained that they are so busy at work that they cannot give much time to church type activity.
This is a fair comment. But these same people have then said that they are so busy at work that they cannot give much time to spiritual matters during the working day. This is not a fair comment.
For all the use that thinking is you may as well be stuck in the belly of a fish….which brings us back to Jonah. God gave him a second chance and this time he did take the road to Nineveh.
There are a number of features of this road. It is a road of changed minds and second chances. You may have made a mistake, got your priorities wrong, ignored your faith, or gone in the opposite direction. But God will keep calling you back. He specialises in second chances, because we specialise in blowing the first ones. The road to Nineveh is a road to results which matter. On the course of this road, people actually took notice of what Jonah had to say and responded. There is no guarantee that all will be easy on this road but people will respect a person who is true to their own calling.
Unfortunately Jonah’s road to Nineveh had not taught him one lesson. He still believed that his agenda was more important and his reputation more significant than the Divine.
Angry at God’s kindness to Nineveh, Jonah sulks at the other end of the road. At the end of the road to Nineveh waits a wisdom which may lie at the end of all roads. God is concerned about rescuing people. People of Iraq Spain , Israel, and everywhere else. People need to be rescued now and forever. Their work, their families, their health, and their well-being matter to God. He will keep calling you to the road to Nineveh, which always will remind you of God’s powerful question: “Should I not be concerned about that city?”
Jonah 3:1-2
1 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”
Jonah 4:10-11
10 But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
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Geoff Shattock
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