Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
By now at least some of you are having problems dissociating this morning’s text from images of an animated stalk of asparagus. The new Veggie Tales feature film “Jonah” is in the theatres telling this story in a way it’s never been told before. And it has been told often. The man swallowed by the whale may be the best known of all Bible characters, next to Jesus. Jonah’s story makes almost anyone smile, young or old. He’s a character we all recognize, in part because in him we recognize ourselves.
Jonah was a man guided by God, reluctantly and unwillingly guided, but guided as sure as traffic is guided to and from Autzen stadium on a football Saturday. In the end, Jonah goes to where God wants him, but God had to set up roadblocks and re-route him drastically to get him there. Though the measures He uses may not be as drastic, I believe that God directs you and me as He directed Jonah.
I’d like to focus on three ways by which God guided Jonah and by which you and I may also find His direction through life. Basically, God led Jonah by speaking His Word to him, by arranging circumstances around him, and by moving other people into contact with him. And much of the guidance you and I receive can be placed under those three headings of God’s Word, circumstances, and other people.
The book starts out, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah.” God spoke and sent him to preach to the people of Nineveh. When Jonah rejects this guidance by Word and boards a ship headed in the opposite direction, to a place called Tarshish, guidance by circumstance comes into play. A storm arises and threatens the ship. When Jonah fails to acknowledge what the storm is teaching him, guidance by other people, the sailors, enters the picture. They confirm for Jonah that he is running from God and toss him overboard. At that point another circumstance in the form of the whale comes along and Jonah is guided still further.
However, an extraordinary story like Jonah’s may cause you and I to be misguided in our understanding of God’s leading. One mistake about guidance is what Dallas Willard calls the “message a minute” view.[1] It’s to suppose that we live every minute of every day like Jonah did in chapter 1. Every time you turn around God is speaking some word of direction in your spiritual ear. Everything that happens to you is a signpost on the road God has mapped out for your life. Whatever someone says to you, it is a nudge from the Lord.
As Willard argues, no one can really live out a moment by moment expectation of divine guidance. It would drive you crazy. And God knows that it would not be good for you. If a gardener plants a plant and then is constantly intervening in its growth – fertilizer one day, pruning the next, then transplanting the day after, never letting it just grow – the result will be a stunted plant. God intends to grow up mature people who know and do His will. He can’t and won’t do that by micro-managing our lives minute by minute.
God’s guidance comes to you and me as it did to Jonah, not at every moment, but at the crucial moments, the moments when faith hangs in the balance, the moments when we are turning away from Him, the moments when He has important work for us to do. His leading comes at those times so that we will grow up formed as people who do His will the rest of the time, the many, many minutes we live without direct guidance from God.
So in the important decisions of our lives we look to God for guidance. And it is easy to say that we should look to God’s Word, to circumstances, and to the confirmation of other people to find that guidance. Yet, like Jonah, we often find ourselves confused and headed in the wrong direction.
The first kind of guidance comes to us in several forms. God can and does speak directly to people as He spoke to Jonah. For a few rare individuals, there might be an audible voice or a vision. For many of us there are occasions when we get a distinct impression that God is speaking a guiding word. Yet God has given us a source of His Word which must judge all of the voices and impressions which come to us. For us, any supposed word from the Lord must be tested by God’s Word in Holy Scripture.
A couple weeks ago through our church web site I received an e-mail message from a woman I don’t know asking for prayer. Her husband had left her for another woman. In explaining his actions, he told her that he had received a message from the Lord. God wanted the other woman to be his new wife.
As the woman who wrote me correctly perceived, what her husband was experiencing was no message from God. A true word from the Lord would never contradict what God has already said clearly in the Bible about the holiness of marriage and His expectation that spouses remain faithful to each other.
It is not always so clear, however. Just because it’s consistent with Scripture, we may not be convinced a word is from the Lord. We may especially be confused if what we’re hearing is not what we want to hear. When God told Jonah to go to Nineveh, it wasn’t what he wanted to hear at all.
Jonah already had a calling he liked. II Kings 14:25 gives us a glimpse of Jonah offering a prophesy of good fortune to the northern kingdom of Israel. And God in compassion for His people made it so. Jonah was doing well at home, preaching things that the king and the people wanted to hear. That’s why he was upset when he heard God sending him off to Nineveh, the capital of the most godless nation the world had yet seen.
The Assyrians were known for their brutality. One of their kings was known for tearing off the lips and hands of his enemies. Another one flayed his victims alive and made a great pile of their skulls in front of their city. King Ashurbanipal fighting against Egypt skinned the Egyptians he captured and hung their skins on the city wall. No wonder Jonah didn’t want to go there.
So Jonah reacted like you and I do when God speaks to us in an inconvenient way. We ignore Him and head in the other direction. Nineveh was east and so he went down to the docks and booked passage on a ship headed west, headed as far west as he could get. Tarshish was in Spain, the western edge of the known world at that time. A sailing trip to a pleasant Spanish coastal resort looked a lot more attractive than a long hot walk across the desert to Nineveh.
Our recalcitrance and refusal to listen to His Word is why God also uses circumstances to direct us. Circumstances reversed Jonah’s course. First a storm and then a whale were God’s chosen means to guide Jonah back onto the right track.
Yes, for all you nitpickers like my daughter Susan, technically it wasn’t a whale. It was “a great fish” which chapter 1 verse 17 says God “provided” to swallow Jonah. But the Hebrew word can mean any sort of aquatic creature. It’s physically possible for either of two different sea creatures, a sperm whale or a whale shark, to swallow a man whole. Arguments have been made for both, some even trying to document cases of a person being swallowed by a shark and surviving. But in efforts to give scientific credibility to the story, we must not forget that it’s an act of God, a miracle. For what it’s worth, sperm whales appear in the Mediterranean Sea, but whale sharks do not.
There inside the fish, whatever it was, Jonah knew God was dealing with him. I read his prayer to begin this sermon and in verse 3 he tells God plainly, “You hurled me into the deep… all your waves and breakers swept over me.” He knows his plight is no accident. God has arranged events around him to teach him something, to guide him back into the right path.
In addition to His Word, then, God will use circumstances to guide you and me. He depends, however, on you and I to pay attention to what He is saying through events. This spring our pet hamster learned to escape by climbing on top of her water bottle and pushing off the lid of her cage. So now a couple rocks and a heavy book weigh the lid down to thwart our Houdini hamster. But she keeps trying. She never learns. She has no grasp of the fact that it’s in her best interest to stay where she is. But you and I can be just as slow to learn from the times when we’re headed somewhere and God blocks our route.
Don’t, however, get the idea that all God’s leading through circumstances is negative. The blind hymn writer Fanny Crosby tells how circumstances had once placed her in desperate need of five dollars. She prayed about it and within minutes a stranger knocked on her door and gave her the exact amount she needed. She recognized God’s grace working in her circumstances and sat down to write the words we will sing at the end of worship, “All the way my Savior leads me—what have I to ask beside?” When God speaks to us through circumstances, it is done with love, even when it feels rough.
Yet circumstances remain difficult to interpret. That is why God adds one more element to our guidance. He speaks through other people, even unlikely people. He spoke to Jonah through the sailors. When the storm began, in verse 6 of chapter 1, the captain came to Jonah with some excellent advice, “Get up and call on your god!” It was time for Jonah to pray. But he didn’t. It was only later in the belly of the whale that Jonah would finally recognize it was time to pray.
So God spoke through the sailors again and used them to make Jonah face the fact that he was the reason for the storm. His flight from God was putting them all in danger. Because of them he finally must say, “I know that it is my fault” and direct them to throw him overboard in order to be saved.
If the Lord could use pagan sailors to speak to Jonah, then He can certainly use the people around you and me to get His message across. One good reason for learning to listen more to others is that what you hear might be the voice of God. It is especially important to listen to Christian friends who know you well.
Of course, not everything others say to you is God speaking, even if someone thinks it is. That is why there are three components to guidance. What others say to us can be tested and confirmed by Scripture and circumstances. I remember very well how a Christian college professor once told me that I should not be a pastor because I would never be happy in such work. I can see now how his word to me contradicts God’s Word in texts like Jonah which show very clearly that the call of God has little to do with what we think will make us happy.
A happier example of God speaking to me through a friend came when Beth and I first started dating. More than once then as my friend Jay and I jogged around the lake, he would remark, “You and Beth are a great match. This is a good thing.” Finally, he blew us both out of the water when one day over dinner together, he asked point blank, “So when are you two going to get with it and get married?” We both turned bright red, but I know that God used Jay to confirm what we were already thinking.
Circumstances can also confirm or disconfirm God’s guidance in what others say. Decades ago, a minister named Bud Robinson was phoned by a lady in the congregation whose husband had recently died. She said that God had told her to give her husband’s suits to the pastor. So would he please come over and see if they fit? Robinson replied, “If God told you to give them to me, they’ll fit.” [2] Discerning God’s guidance doesn’t have to be rocket science. It can be a matter of simple trust in God and common sense.
It is still hard. Seeking God’s guidance is frequently not the first step we take when faced with a problem. We try our own solutions first and if we think of God it is only to ask him to help us with what we’ve already decided to do. We forget how God guided Abraham and Sarah, Mary and Joseph, Paul and Lydia. We act as if all the big decisions are up to us, as if the Word of God has nothing to say.
So we make mistakes. Like Jonah, sometimes we make huge mistakes. We do the exact opposite of what God wants for us. And when we do, Jonah has something else to show us about guidance. Jonah had been through the wringer. But while he was lying there on the beach covered in whale vomit, he heard God again. Chapter 3 starts out with the words, “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.”
Jonah is a story of grace. Jonah completely rejected God’s guidance and ran the other way. When God stopped him, Jonah prayed and asked for another chance. “What I have vowed I will make good,” he said. And God gave him a second chance.
I’ve never read a book entitled Decision Making and the Will of God by Garry Friesen,[3] so I can’t endorse all he says. But I have learned that Friesen presents a strong case for rejecting the idea that if you miss God’s will in some area of your life, then you have departed from His plan for you forever. The idea of one perfect will of God for everything you do is a myth. Instead, God’s providence in guiding you includes guiding you through and past the wrong turns you make.
I started at my first church as associate pastor. A month or so after I began, the senior pastor came and asked me to meet with a couple who wanted to be married. I was excited. My first wedding! This was the real thing.
Then I met with the couple and heard their story. They had both been married before. They hadn’t been in church for a long time. Their relationship was full of baggage from their separate pasts. I was dismayed. “Why, God,” I asked, “couldn’t you have sent me a nice solid young couple who grew up in the church for my first time through this? Why do I have get involved in this mess?” But I did my best.
I talked with the two of them about what Christian marriage means. I talked about the grace of Christ and how in the Covenant Church we believe God gives people like them another chance at a good marriage. I urged them to worship together and to talk with each other about the past. I counseled them and then I stood up in our chapel one day and married them to each other.
Soon after, that couple moved away. I didn’t think much about them. Then several years later on a Sunday morning I got up to lead the call to worship and there they were – sitting together in the front row. After the service they came up and said, “We just wanted you to know that it worked. We’re still together.” Then they told me where they went to church and how God had blessed their life together. And I was reminded again that God’s business is grace. He gives another chance to follow his direction to anyone who seeks it.
The Lord knows we all need those second chances… and a third and a fourth and on and on. Jonah needed another one. He preached to Nineveh as God told him, but he never expected it to work. When the people of that city repented and turned to God, Jonah was furious. He had expected to see God destroy them all. So chapter 4 tells us how he went out and sat in the desert under the shade of a vine and sulked.
God got Jonah’s attention once again through circumstances. He sent a worm which ate at the vine until it withered up and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head. Then He spoke to Jonah and reminded him of what he should have known. The Lord is a God of grace. Jonah was angry about losing the life of his shady vine, but God was full of compassion for the lives of a hundred and twenty thousand people who lived there in Nineveh. The man who had received his own second chance needed to understand that God was giving that same grace to a whole nation.
As Eugene Peterson so brilliantly points out, “Jonah’s answer is missing from the story.”[4] We do not know if he stomped back to the coast and caught another ship for Tarshish or if he got up and went back into the city to explain to those people how God had shown them grace. We don’t know how Jonah used that third chance God gave him to accept His guidance.
What you can know is how you will answer God’s guidance when it comes. Will you remember God and pray to know His will so that you can hear His Word, see His hand guiding circumstances, and recognize His direction in other people? Or will you run away from Him to all those attractive distractions which are Tarshish for us? If you do, God will come after you with grace. The coming of Jesus Christ is the promise of another chance for us all, over and over. In Jesus God speaks His Word most clearly. You will always have another chance in Him. Why not accept it now?
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj