Is My God Too Small?

Typically, the book of Jonah is inseparable in our evangelical minds from cute n’ cuddly Sunday school renditions, ridiculous skits, and classes devoid of any real moral substance. We can still hear Mrs. Susan…“Jonah got swallowed by a whale – weird hey kids!?” The end. In my opinion we have done a great disservice to an exceptional book of the bible that demands our reflection and is screaming for our attention. The book of Jonah refers to and addresses real people, neither of whom saw this story as ‘cute n’ cuddly’, but rather intensely practical and challenging. This is true not only for the original audience, but Christians today. The following meditations have been inspired by a recent lecture series I gave on Jonah…

While unknown to many, the events found within the book of Jonah take place in a period of history after the Kingdom of Israel had actually split into two respective nations, the northern Kingdom [Israel], and the southern kingdom [Judah]. (See 1 Kings 12) This was a direct result of the Israelites disobedience to the covenant of Moses and particularly in the northern kingdom lead to a downward spiral of idolatry and sin. God did not allow their sin and separation from Him to take place easily, as he promised; he continually sent foreign nations such as the Aramaen’s or Assyrians to invade and occupy Israel in order to drive them to seek Him once more. The prophets played a prominent role in God’s call to repentance and relationship. Now after many years of subjugation by their enemies, the northern kingdom’s borders had shrunk, but God in His relentless pursuit sent a Prophet with a Promise. His identity may be surprising… 2 Kings 14:23-25 records that by God’s grace the borders of Israel were expanded, their enemies driven back, and a great time of financial and political prosperity ensued. All of this was heralded by a Prophecy spoken by someone we may find familiar; Jonah the son of Amittai. The very same prophet as found in the book of Jonah. Now after this period of prosperity had taken root the prophet Jonah received a second prophecy of a less pleasant nature, and this is where the book kicks off.

The first paragraph of Jonah is action packed yet strangely confusing. This popular and successful prophet is given another assignment to ‘Go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it’. Yet immediately without further ado, Jonah does exactly the opposite. The text reveals that instead Jonah ‘rose to flee to Tarshish’. Now Tarshish is considered to have been a coastal town in the western Mediterranean, most likely as far away as Spain. Nineveh was a landlocked city east of modern day turkey. It doesn’t take the best geographer to realize that this is not a pit-stop on the way to Nineveh. It was essentially the equivalent to the ‘ends of the earth’ at that time, the most remote destination imaginable. What is even more interesting is that two times in this paragraph, and also in 1:1, Jonah is recorded to have been running from ‘the presence of the Lord’. Of all that we have looked at thus far this is the most shocking, because it tells us something essential about how Jonah views God.

Now in the ancient world it was common to believe that gods and goddesses were localized deities. Meaning that if this country had one reigning god, another typically didn’t. The Assyrian gods were in Assyria, and the Aramaen gods were in Aram.  Meaning that they were limited to one location or concerned with a certain people group to the exclusion of all others. Jonah’s action here presupposes that he can actually ‘flee’ the presence of the Lord as if Yahweh was just another localized deity like the gods of the nations surrounding Israel. And as if by leaving he could somehow escape God’s realm of control. Meaning that God was limited to a physical location, only concerned with the people within it, that there is some place’s and people where God has no claim or authority. By doing so he reveals his own misconceptions about God. He implies that Yahweh was not universal, all powerful, all knowing, and ever-present as He had clearly revealed himself in scripture to be. Sadly this was a common false syncretistic belief of the time which stated that ‘Yahweh was the God of Israel alone, and that he was limited to the Temple and his jurisdiction of influence was confined to the geographical borders of the nation’. This is the perspective of both Jonah within the story, and the original Israelite readers after the fact. Many of them have this false view of God, and the fact that God is continually shown as universal and sovereign throughout the book would have been a profound shock and challenge to them. God shows he is sovereign over the sea (1:4), controls the lots of the sailors (1:7), facilitates their repentance (1:16) God controls animals such as the fish and the worm (1:17, 4:7), God is concerned with the sin of Nineveh and desires their repentance (3:1-5, 10, 4:10-11), God controls the east wind and causes a plant to grow in Assyria (4:6-8). None of these fit into the box they have created to confine God.

Now what strikes me about this passage is that we do the exact same thing. Often times we limit God’s involvement or authority to speak into our lives to Sunday, ‘religious activities’, or the personal aspects of our life. Yet we act as if God is not present, active, or concerned with other areas of our lives. We draw a line, point at God, and tell him this is an area of our lives where he has no say. And somehow all of a sudden God is permissible only on Sunday or in church, home groups, and bible studies. Perhaps He has some say in raising our children, and then there is that thirty second prayer window where we may acknowledge Him before a meal or before bed, but for many this is the extent of his influence. This is where the borders are drawn. Do we as Christians limit God’s say simply to the family and personal matters?  Since when has the sovereign God of the universe become ‘irrelevant’ to how we approach business, education, media, art, family, sex, government, and agriculture? Since when have these spheres become ‘secular’? Where has this thinking come from? I promise you that you will not find license for such thinking in the Bible. Like Jonah we all need to ask ‘is our God too small?’ We may be surprised to find that, along with Jonah, He will not fit into our little boxes no matter how craftily we devise them.