| “Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai … But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish” (Jonah 1:1, 3). |
| Jonah was another prophet of the Lord, who lived about the time of Jeroboam, the great-grandson of Jehu, king of Israel, and while Amaziah was the king of Judah. This would be less than twenty years after the death of Elisha. The Lord had a message for Jonah to deliver to the city of Nineveh, the capital of the kingdom of Assyria. Assyria was the most powerful country in the world at that time, and Nineveh was a very large but very wicked city. It was east of the land of Israel, and the journey was more than 500 miles (800 km.). |
| However, Jonah did not want to go there and give the message the Lord told him to give. He knew that the Lord was merciful, and that if those in Nineveh repented, the Lord would not bring down judgment upon them. Jonah probably did not like the Assyrians. No one liked them, as they were an aggressive and often brutal people! Jonah would gladly have seen them fall under the judgment of God. |
| Because of this, Jonah got into a ship at Joppa, on the Mediterranean coast of the land of Israel, to go to Tarshish. We do not know for sure where Tarshish was. Some feel that it was in southern Spain, while others think it was somewhere down in the Red Sea. However, Jonah wanted to run away, and he headed in a different direction from the one he should have taken. |
| It is a serious thing to run away from the Lord, but the Lord had His eye on Jonah, and was going to put him through a really tough experience, to teach him something about grace. The Lord wants us all to be “growing in grace!” First of all, the Lord allowed a big storm to come into the sea, and it was so bad that the sailors on the ship realized it was from the Lord. Finally, Jonah admitted to them that he was the cause of it, and asked them to throw him overboard. When they did this, the storm stopped, but Jonah was not drowned. The Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow him up. |
