The 3 Paradoxes of Jonah's Story

Thanks very much, Mark. Good afternoon to everyone. Good to see those who are here. Hello to everybody who's on Zoom or perhaps listening later. It's great to have recorded material and sermons out there to listen to during the week. I know I usually listen to two or three recordings over the course of the week and benefit greatly from those. Maricel, thank you so much. That was incredibly beautiful. Music is such a gift and adds a lot to our worship services, and I'll say there's nothing like a Mark Graham Waltz, especially with a little syncopation two on three built into that. I like that. So there are lots of great philosophical questions in the world and in the Bible, and the question we're going to tackle today is not one of them, but I still think it's an interesting one. We're all familiar with the idea that actors get typecast, for those of us who have graying hair, we probably remember a guy named Bob Denver.

Anyone remember Bob Denver? What do you think of immediately after you hear his name?

Gilligan's Island, of course. Bob Denver never really played a significant role after that. In fact, until his death at age 70, he was still doing public appearances and kind of making an extra buck here and there, showing up as Here's Gilligan. Probably another one that we could think of maybe a little more modern, but actually pretty dated at this point would be Mark Hamill.

Anyone remember Mark Hamill? What do you think of immediately with Mark Hamill? You think of Luke Skywalker, right? And he was never really able to get any big notoriety beyond that, and I think he still probably shows up and signs autographs at Star Wars conventions and sci-fi conventions due to playing that role. Mark Graham took us through the minor prophets, quote-unquote minor, a few weeks back, and that spurred some thoughts in my mind about Jonah and the unserious philosophical question that maybe we'll be a little more serious after today, which is, what's Jonah without the whale? What is Jonah without the whale? See, Jonah's kind of been typecast as well, and it's curious that probably among the handful of stories that most children could come up with and adults who are not biblically literate would be Jonah and the whale.

But what if we take the whale out of the story? What's left to talk about? So today our title is going to be, What is Jonah without the whale? Jonah is actually a very unique book and probably not in a way that we would have thought of because that whale gets in the way. I was trying to think of a nice turn on the phrase, you can't see the forest for the trees, you can't see the seaweed for the whale. Not sure what the equivalent expression would be, so we'll move on from that one.

But at its heart, Jonah is a book of paradoxes. Have we ever thought of that? Jonah is a book of paradoxes, and it was used incredibly powerfully in the New Testament. Let me read a short snippet from the Jameson Fawcett Brown commentary that I think does a great job of summarizing this. He refers to a writer named, interestingly, Kim Chi, which I would have thought of a Korean name, but he talks about the Jewish writer, and Jameson Fawcett Brown starts with this. It seems strange to Kim Chi, a Jew himself, that the book of Jonah is among the scriptures, as the only prophecy in it concerns Nineveh, a heathen city, and it makes no mention of Israel, which is referred to by every other prophet. That's something I'd really thought of before looking at this. The reason seems to be a tacit reproof of Israel is intended. The heathen people were ready to repent at the first preaching of the prophet, who was a stranger to them.

But Israel, who boasted of being God's elect, repented not, though warned by their own prophets at all seasons. This was an anticipatory streak of light before the dawn of the full light to lighten the Gentiles. An allusion there to Luke 2.32. Jonah is himself a strange paradox, a prophet of God, yet a runaway from God, a man drowned and yet alive, a preacher of repentance, yet one that repines at repentance. And yet Jonah, saved from the jaws of death himself on repentance, was the fittest to give a hope to Nineveh. Doom, though, was of a merciful respite on its repentance. The patience and pity of God stand in striking contrast with the selfishness and hard-heartedness of man. Nineveh in particular was chosen to teach Israel these lessons on account of its being capital of the then world kingdom and because it was now beginning to make its power felt by Israel. Our Lord in Matthew 12.41 makes Nineveh's repentance a proof of the Jews' impenitence in his day, just as Jonah provoked Israel to jealousy by the same example.

Jonah's mission to Nineveh implied that a heathen city afforded as legitimate a field for the prophets' labors as Israel and with a more successful result.

That's all I'm going to give you on the background of Jonah. I'm not going to do the typical, you know, let's delve into the history and understand all the things that were going on because what I'd like to focus on in the short time of this message is three of the paradoxes that sit within Jonah. How they were used by Jesus Christ and to what effect and what those might mean to us today as we give them a little time to reflect on them in our own lives.

So let's look at the first paradox. I'm going to call it Jonah's complacency.

Jonah's complacency. Now, you might find that one interesting because, again, when we think about the whale in the room, we think not of Jonah's complacency but about his disobedience, his action in running away from God. But that's not all there was. Let's turn, if you would, to Jonah 1 and we'll start in verse 4. Because what we're going to see is a very different attitude that was going on with Jonah once he took his initial step and got on his mode of transport. Jonah 1 starting in verse 4. This is after Jonah is on the ship on the way to Tarshish, depending on which accounts you believe of where that is. It's pretty much diametrically opposite from where he was supposed to go. God told him to go one way to Nineveh. He went pretty much as far in the opposite direction or intended to as possible. And then in verse 4 of Jonah 1, the Lord sent out a great wind on the sea. There was a mighty tempest on the sea, so the ship was about to be broken up. And the mariners were afraid, and every man cried out to his God and threw the cargo that was in the ship onto the sea or into the sea to lighten the load. But Jonah had gone down to the lowest parts of the ship, had laid down, and was fast asleep.

So imagine this scene. You've got a ship that's just falling apart. Everyone has struck with terror. It's all hands on deck, literally, as they're throwing things overboard, just trying to stay afloat. And Jonah's nowhere to be found. He's hidden himself away.

It's basically just kind of given up on the world at this point in time. So the captain came to him and said to him, what do you mean, sleeper? Get up and call on your God. Maybe your God will consider us so we won't perish. And in that world, there were many different gods that were called on by the people. And you can imagine this ship, usually people who are mariners for a living, are a whole literally motley crew of people thrown together from different lands, and they were all calling on their own gods. And so there was a respect or a view there that, you know, there's this pantheon out there, so everybody call on his God. And they wanted Jonah to do the same thing. And then finally, in verse 7, they said to each other, let's cast lots so we can know for whose cause this trouble has come on us. So they cast lots and it fell on Jonah. And they said to him, tell us for what causes this trouble upon us? And what's your occupation? Where do you come from? What's your country? And what people are you? So they're like, what's the deal here? How come God is doing this to us and clearly because of you? And so he told them, I'm a Hebrew. I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. And then the Med were exceedingly afraid, and they said to him, why have you done this?

For the men knew that he had fled from the presence of the Lord because he had told them.

There's an element of, I don't know what you want to call it, lethargy, cluelessness, I'm over it, that just like pours out of Jonah at this point in time, isn't there? Because we don't see anything within Jonah that he's afraid, do we? We don't see any concern on his part that he's defied God. It's almost as though he said, you know, I'm just done with this. And he went and he curled up and he just kind of fell asleep and let's just let whatever's going to happen happen.

And one of the paradoxes that comes through here is in verses 9 and 10. And you can see that the others who didn't even believe in the true God had a greater sense of urgency about being right with God than Jonah did. They're like, what in the world are you doing? If you know that God is against you, why aren't you doing something about it? And they were incredibly afraid because Jonah revealed God not as the God of the sea, one of the pagan gods that they might have thought about, but as the God who is above all gods. There's no other God like him. And they knew from what he must have told them that God was the Almighty. And in some level they understood that. But they had a sense of urgency about that that Jonah didn't have. Also, why was Jonah sleeping? You know, we see a similar but very different account of Jesus Christ when he was on the Sea of Galilee.

If you recall, there was a storm, a tempest that came up on the Sea of Galilee.

The disciples were with him. They were afraid, and Jesus was sleeping. And what did he do? He woke up and he calmed the waters by calling on God. That was a very different thing that was going on. He wasn't fleeing from God. He wasn't sleeping because he'd given up. He was sleeping because he had complete and total faith that God was going to resolve the situation. And there was nothing to be afraid of. In this case, though, this is symbolic of a spiritual sleep. A complete missing of the plot. Not even understanding or having concern about the situation going on around him.

This is somewhat emblematic, and I think that's why the account is in here, of what was going on in Israel at the time. If you'll turn with me to Isaiah 29, we'll see just one verse that talks about this. There are other places you can look that you'll see similar types of accounts, similar things spoken about. But Isaiah, in chapter 29, verses 9 and 10, he prophesies, "'Pause and wonder. Blind yourselves and be blind. They are drunk but not with wine. They stagger but not with intoxicating drink. For the Lord has poured out on you the spirit of deep sleep and has closed your eyes, namely the prophets, and He has covered your heads, namely the seers.'" He's talking about the fact that there wasn't going to be any paying of attention to God, what was being delivered by the prophets in Israel for a period of time because they had turned against Him. They didn't care. They were acting as though they were drunk or out of their minds or just asleep because from a spiritual perspective, that's what they were. They weren't clued in. They weren't understanding what was going on. And so here, this first paradox that we see is this incredible level of complacency and lack of understanding from Jonah of the gravity of the situation for whatever reason it existed. And it's set up. It's juxtaposed against the way that the rest of the people who didn't even believe in or really understood God or understand God, how they reacted to the situation. So that's the first paradox. Let's look at the second paradox because we know, skipping over again, the whale in the sea, we know that eventually Jonah made his way to Nineveh. Nineveh was, of course, the capital of the Assyrian nation. And once he got there, he began to prophesy. And let's turn to Jonah 3, verses 4 through 9.

Jonah 3, verses 4 through 9.

Jonah began to enter the city on the first day's walk in Jonah 3, verse 4. And he cried out and he said, yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God. They proclaimed a fast. They put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. And then the word came to the king of Nineveh and he rose from his throne and laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and he sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published throughout Nineveh by the decree of the king and the nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Do not let them eat or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily to God. Yet let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that's in his hands. Who can tell if God will turn and relent and turn away from his fierce anger so we may not perish? So again, this is an incredible paradox that's going on here.

When you think about the centuries of prophets coming to Israel as they wandered back and forth between in the times of Judges, as we read in the book of Judges, that everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Then we go through to the kings, we go to the divided kingdom as Israel and Judah pull apart into two separate territories or kingdoms. And what kept happening was this same story. Sinfulness, turning away from God, turning to pagan gods, turning to false religion, having the prophets come and speak to the point where they often just got tired of them. Jesus Christ lamented Jerusalem, right? Talked about those who killed the prophets. And that's because of the centuries of time during which the prophets spoke and no one listened to them.

And look at the paradox here. A nation of people that God had not chosen, a nation of people that were not part of the children of Abraham. And how many times did Jonah show up there? One time. And he preaches and they repent. And not only do the people fast, their animals fast, and not only do they wear sackcloth, their animals wear sackcloth. It's as though in this whole story it's just showing they're going above and beyond. They're so convinced, the power of God, and they're so focused on saving themselves that they turn to him, and they turn to him in the most sincere way that they can do to try to avoid the judgment of God.

To add to the paradox, who is it that ultimately erases Israel from the map?

We talk sometimes about the lost ten tribes of Israel. Why is that?

Because Israel, the northern kingdom, was taken captive. And after they were taken captive, they were dispersed. And it's very difficult to track where they really are, as opposed to the southern kingdom of Judah, who returned from captivity and continued to keep an identity of what we now know as the Jewish people. The place they went into captivity was Assyria. Turn with me, if you will, to 2 Kings 17. 2 Kings 17. We'll read verses 6 and 7 and verses 13 through 15, again digging deeper on this paradox between the way that the children of Israel responded to God and the way that Assyria did.

Verse 6 of 2 Kings 17, In the ninth year of Hoshiah, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away to Assyria, placed them in Hala by the habor, the river of Gozan, and in the city of the Medes. For so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and they had feared other gods.

And that's a refrain that you hear a lot if you look through the chapters of the Old Testament. There's so much that's talked about and says, remember that God brought you out of Egypt. It was by his hand that you came out of Egypt, that you came out of bondage, and as a result of those things, Israel was supposed to live in a different way and rely on God. And so that motif comes out again here, the fact that God did that, and they forgot it. It wasn't in the forefront of their minds, and it didn't impact the way that they acted. And yet in verse 13, the Lord testified against Israel and Judah by all of his prophets, every seer, saying, turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent out to you by my servants, the prophets. Again, it's amazing that the paradox and the irony that's just all the way through here, as he's telling Israel about how over and over and over again, I brought prophets to you. Assyria took them captive, and just a few years before that, it was Assyria that responded to one time of contact with one prophet. Nevertheless, in verse 14, they wouldn't hear. They stiffened their necks like the necks of their fathers, who did not believe in the Lord their God. They rejected his statutes, his covenant that he had made with their fathers, and his testimonies, which he had testified against them. They followed idols. They became idolaters, and they went after the nations who were all around them, concerning whom the Lord had charged them, that they should not do like them. And so here, we see in this account in 2 Kings, all the ways that it was that Israel had gone against what it was that God wanted them to do, including rejecting the prophets, the same type of prophet that, with one message, Assyria accepted, and later was used as a rod of God's anger and punishment against Israel. So, in this second paradox, we see Assyria responding to the message of warning from God, when Israel had repeatedly ignored that same warning. Just gotten tired of hearing it over and over and over again. And Assyria itself, then, meets out the punishment. So, by extension, he's showing Israel that their lack of forgiveness is not a result of God and what he is about.

It's actually a result of their own reaction to God. God was willing to show mercy and grant forgiveness to a nation he hadn't called. In fact, one that he prophesied he was going to destroy with Assyria. And so there's no question by what he did in this account that God is a merciful God, that God is a forgiving God. And it's really amazing when you look across the Old Testament, often you'll hear people especially who challenge Christianity in the Bible talk about the God of the Old Testament is just this God who's always punishing and killing and destroying and harsh.

But there is a motif that goes across the whole Old Testament, which is one of mercy and forgiveness.

Even talking to Israel and saying, after you've done all these terrible things, if you repent and turn back to me, here are all the fantastic things I'm going to do.

And his treatment of Assyria was another one of those proof points, that at the center of what God is about is mercy and forgiveness.

And it was a very strong point to Israel in this case that the reason Israel was not experiencing that from God was not because of him. It was because they weren't accepting him. They weren't listening to his prophets. They weren't respecting him and understanding his ways and his will for them. Let's go to the third paradox. The third paradox relates to Jonah's anger about the forgiveness of Nineveh. Now, most of us have probably read through this story at one point or another. It's not, you know, it's nowhere near the whale thing. It's just a little gourd. Anyone remember the story of the gourd? So Jonah is just beside himself. He ran from God, got thrown in the sea. The other stuff happened that we're not talking about today. He ended up on land. He prophesied to a nation that was a mortal enemy, a rising power that he thought was going to destroy Israel. And God saved them. And so Jonah goes off to the hills and he just kind of pouts.

And the sun comes out and it's getting really hot. And miraculously, this plant grows up next to him, this gourd plant. And it throws some shade for him. So he's got some shelter. If anyone's been to the Middle East, it's an incredibly hot and dry place. And, you know, the central part of the day, a lot of people just go off and sleep for a couple hours. Like we see in a lot of southern cultures, a siesta, because it gets so hot you really can't work. I've experienced days up around 120 degrees back when I was a college student on an archaeological dig in Syria. We would work from like four in the morning until five in the morning until about noon or so. And then we'd go back and just take it easy for a while, nap, and you'd kind of come back out around two or three in the afternoon. And you could start doing some things again because the weather was just that oppressive. So God brings up this plant, brings out this gourd, and Jonah's out there enjoying the shade on it. And then comes another interesting paradox, right? You got the whale and then you got the worm.

The worm comes out and destroys the plant, and the plant withers up and it dies. And now Jonah is just beside himself. If it wasn't bad enough that God wouldn't punish the bad people that he didn't like, now he took away his shade and he's just out there suffering. And so in Jonah 4 verse 10, the Lord comes to him and says, you had pity on the plant for which you've not labored, nor made it grow. It came up in a night and it perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which are more than 120,000 persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left and much livestock? Pretty much just lays it out on the line in one short bit here for Jonah. You see how much you care about this plant because it gave you some comfort. What are people worth and all the livestock in the city above and beyond this plant? And why should I as God not have mercy on them if I choose to? Especially if they've repented in the way that they did. And he pretty much sets Jonah in his place. And another peculiar thing about this account is we never really understand what happens to Jonah and his frame of mind after this because it's not revealed to us in his book. And he's pretty much gone except for an account that we'll read about in a moment in the New Testament.

We can guess by virtue of the fact that the book was written and eventually canonized that he learned a lesson from it and that he was writing this under God's inspiration so that lesson could be preserved. But we don't know because it doesn't tell us. It's not, for example, like the book of Job where it wraps up at the end. It tells us Job's frame of mind and Job comes around and he understands what it is that God's doing. And, in fact, everything is restored to him in multiples of what he had before. We don't see anything like that with Jonah. We're left to guess what happened to him and his frame of mind as a result of this. So in this paradox, we see how Jonah, as a recipient himself of God's forgiveness, God could have struck him dead in that ship.

God could have simply had him thrown into the sea and drowned.

God could have had him eaten by a big fish and never seen again. All kinds of ways that a different result could have come about for Jonah. But in his own way, gentleness ultimately—I don't know that it was feeling very gentle when he was in the belly of the fish for several days—but he was preserved. He was brought back around. He was given a do-over, like we heard a few weeks ago, given a chance to try it again, and he delivered the message. But even after all of that that he experienced, he wasn't able to grant that same sort of grace and forgiveness in his mind to the people of Assyria. This paradox also shows us the love and the concern that God has for everyone.

This term—I always find these Hebrew terms interesting—persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left. Commentators believe that refers to children. Young children, you know how it is, try to teach them left hand, right hand. First, they look at your right hand and say left, and they look at your left hand and say right, or they get it mixed up, or you give them little ways that they can try to make it out. So the view here is there are probably 120 people, 120,000 people who were young children. And I also find it interesting he mentions livestock, a level of care that God shows about all of the things that he's created. And Jonah had to learn a lesson through this paradox of the fact that God's mercy works in all kinds of different directions. Often in directions we can't understand, perhaps in directions that we ourselves wouldn't grant, but it still does work that way. So how does this all come around? Let's look in the New Testament, because Jesus uses these paradoxes to drive home a lesson to those who would not receive him. In this case, descendants of Abraham, but descendants of the nation of Judah, the southern kingdom, rather than the nation of Israel, which by that point was pretty much disappeared and didn't have an identity anymore as a people. And for those of you who know anything about what Jewish culture would have been at that point in time, anyone who is a learned Jewish person would not only have understood this story in great detail, but likely they would have had the entire book of Jonah memorized, along with other portions of the Bible. Not at all uncommon, as especially boys were growing up, that they would memorize the scriptures. And the ability, the facility to recall and to bring back these stories word for word, was valued very highly in that culture. And so, more than likely, anyone that Jesus Christ was talking to about the Old Testament scriptures who had any sort of training, especially formally in the law, would have not only been able to talk about the book of Jonah, but probably recite the thing from beginning to end, word for word. With that background, let's look at Matthew 12, and we'll read verses 38 through 41. Jonah has a very notable reference point here, and he's actually, in one sense, a symbol of Jesus Christ. And in this situation, scribes and Pharisees coming to Jesus Christ and challenging him, as they did, and in verse 38, some of them answered and said to him, teacher, we want to see a sign from you. So when you think of Jesus Christ, all the things that he was doing, he was moving across that area, as we heard, in the first sermon with his disciples, teaching them as they walked and as they spent time together, working miracles, fulfilling all kinds of things that were prophesied in the Old Testament, which, by the way, they would have known word for word by memory. And those people who knew those things by heart, and they should have been in their heart, said what to Jesus Christ? We want to see a sign from you. It's not good enough.

It doesn't fit the script. We're not ready to accept it. We need one more thing from you.

And he answered in verse 39 and said, an evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. Now, it's interesting how harshly Jesus Christ speaks to certain people, isn't it? Especially as we've just talked about how merciful God is. Why is that? There's a difference—and we're not going to have time to delve deep into it here in this message—but there's a huge difference between the way that Jesus Christ treated people who were teaching error to others versus those who were deceived, or just didn't have a reason to know.

People who were deceived or had no reason to know of themselves, he treated with great mercy and kindness. You think about the people he healed. You think about the Samaritan woman at the well, who is, you know, incredibly sinful, if you look at the things that he accounted with all the husbands she'd had, the guy she was living with.

You think of the woman caught in adultery and how he said, go and sin no more. And you compare that to the way that he treated these people. When they didn't actually sin in one sense, they said, hey, give me a sign. But it was a signal of something much deeper within them because they were teaching the people. In other places, he said, you make them—I forget the exact terminology off hand—but he said, you make them twice the sinners that you are because of the way that you teach them.

And for them, he reserved very sharp words. Something to think about as we look at the society around us as well. Sometimes we're a little quick to condemn people who simply don't know any better because they're doing what they've been taught. They're living the society they grew up in with the values that were delivered to them. And they just don't have the tools to understand and take it apart.

Very different treatment that Jesus Christ gave those different types of people. So this was a scathing indictment. For as Jonah in verse 40 was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish—okay, we did mention it—so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The one sign that Jesus Christ decided to give the people was the sign of Jonah. It's interesting, especially when you think of those paradoxes that we just talked about in the book of Jonah and all of the things that that stood for.

Granting repentance to others, listening the first time to a prophet when the prophet's in the midst and not dismissing that prophet after years and decades and centuries of preaching the message. What was Jesus Christ telling them when he talked about the sign of Jonah? It wasn't just about the time that he was going to be in the grave. Verse 41 is the punchline, The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah, one time hearing the message, and indeed a greater than Jonah is he.

Strong words that Jesus Christ was speaking. He didn't mince words at all. He said, look, I'm the Son of God. And those heathens, those Assyrians, those Gentiles who you believe are less than you, are going to look down on you in the kingdom because you met me face to face and you wouldn't believe it.

All of those paradoxes, all of those messages that come in Jonah, coming home right here in this interaction with the scribes and the Pharisees. So as we wrap up the message, let's briefly consider by extension what these paradoxes can mean to us. We'll just spend a moment. I've picked a passage you can probably think of others, maybe others that are even more applicable that apply to each of these, and suggest that we just give these some thought over the course of the upcoming week as we think of these three paradoxes that we covered in the book of Jonah.

The first one, just as a reminder, was Jonah's complacency.

It seemed as though he'd just kind of given up. He'd just gotten tired of it. He was over it.

Whatever it was, he didn't want to fight the battle. He didn't want to get involved. Turn with me, if you will, to Romans 13. And we'll read verses 11 through 14, in contrast to Jonah sleeping in the hold of the ship. Romans 13, starting verse 11.

Talking here, breaking into Paul's thought about the things that we need to do as Christians, and do this knowing the time that now it is high time to awake out of sleep.

For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.

The night is far spent, the day is at hand, and therefore let us cast off the works of darkness.

Let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry or drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts.

So, capturing this idea of sleep, Jonah there in the hold sleeping, and what Paul is saying here in Romans, the fact that we've got to be awake and not only awake, completely alert, sober, focused, serious-minded about the calling, the discipleship, as we heard earlier, that we've been given, and making no provision for anything that distracts us from it. Something for us to reflect on as we think of that first paradox and the complacency that Jonah showed compared to the others that God hadn't revealed Himself to that were on board that same ship.

Second paradox, Nineveh's repentance versus Israel's unrepentant nature.

Let's turn to 2 Peter 3.

You know, in some ways you can forgive Israel. In fact, God will forgive Israel. He promises He will.

They didn't have God's Holy Spirit. That's part of the reason. That's an object lesson in a way for us in terms of what was happening. And the thing that's familiar, consistent, between what Israel experienced and what we experienced is repetition. You know, it's just a human thing, as the same things happen over and over again, the same cycles go on and on. As humans, we just tend to take it less seriously, don't we? And that's really what happened with Israel. If we think, again, through all of those hundreds of years that passed between the time they were brought out of Egypt and the time they were finally taken into captivity and for the northern kingdom, eradicated as a nation, these cycles just kept going on and on and on. And at some point, they just don't get taken as seriously. And we can fall into that same trap as Christians, can't we? As we go on living our day-to-day lives, as we continue to move down that path trying to live God's way, it's easy sometimes to say, you know, not that big a deal. I sinned once, felt bad, I sinned again, it happens, I sinned again, maybe it's not such a big deal, sinned again, forgot to even ask forgiveness about it, didn't really think about it anymore. Do we fall into these cycles where the familiar and the fact that something catastrophic hasn't happened to us makes us think that everything's okay?

2 Peter 3 verses 1 through 4, and then we'll read verses 9 through 12.

Peter addresses this in a way that we all need to think of. I know I certainly need to reflect on this.

2 Peter 3 verse 1, The cycle just keeps going on and on. What are you getting so worked up about?

verse 9 Therefore, since all these things are going to be dissolved, what manner of person's ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for, hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for the new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. A reminder that at some point in time which god has chosen not to reveal, the cycle will stop. And if we don't happen to be alive at the point in time that the cycle stops, we also know as human beings for us individually, at some point in time, the cycle will stop. Whether it's our own mortality, whether it's the return of Jesus Christ, there's an end point for all of us, and a level of urgency and understanding that has to come because of it.

And this describes that resistance that we have to have to this idea that, well, you know, the wheel just keeps turning and it'll all be okay in the end because nothing's happened so far. And so we have to give that level of diligence to our lives and make sure we're not becoming slack and thinking in some way that god doesn't keep his promises or doesn't feel as seriously about his words as he truly does. Last paradox, paradox three, Jonah's anger about god's mercy towards others.

Turn with me, if you will, to Acts 10. Many different places we could go for this. I chose Acts 10. We'll read verse 28 and verses 34 through 36. This happens to be the account of Cornelius and how Peter saw this sheet come down from heaven with all kinds of animals and god said, take and eat. Peter's like, no, I know I'm not supposed to eat except of the things that were considered clean. And then god later in the chapter showed him exactly what it is that the dream was supposed to mean and it wasn't about food to eat. It was about how he looked at people.

Acts 10 starting verse 28. Peter said to them, you know how it's unlawful for a Jewish man to keep company with or go to one of another nation? After he heard about Cornelius, a gentile, who was also described as a god-fear, somebody who wanted to be baptized and become part of the way, as it was known at that point in time. And then Peter says at the end of verse 28, God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean. And so even though Jewish converts who are believers in Jesus Christ, and there are other places in the New Testament that show this controversy about whether a Jewish convert or Peter should sit down with somebody who wasn't of Jewish lineage, and he was even taken to task for avoiding people who were gentiles. In this case now he's standing up and saying, look, God has shown me that it doesn't matter.

What matters is where he's working, who it is that he's calling. In verse 34, Peter opened his mouth and said, in truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. But in every nation, whoever fears him and works righteousness is accepted by him. The word which God sent to the children of Israel, preaching peace through Jesus Christ, he is Lord of all. So just as Jonah was shown in that third paradox, the fact that God could have mercy in that time on a gentile nation, Peter was shown and by extension the entire church, that salvation was being opened to everyone. And that we, by extension, need to understand that everybody, even the people that we might encounter from day to day that live lives so incredibly removed from what we understand as the will of God, are people that God desires to have a relationship with. And he will at some point in time, even if it's not until the resurrection, when he decides to reveal himself to them. So in conclusion, what's Jonah without the whale? It's a story of paradoxes. It's a unique book full of fascinating paradoxes that serve as a strong object lesson, not only for the coming of Jesus Christ and his messiahship, but also important themes for us to consider today as we lead our Christian walk. I encourage all of us to take time with these paradoxes in the book of Jonah and examine them further to enrich our spiritual lives.