by Fred Alberti, Salem Web Network Director of Social Media

But the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.
Jonah 1:17

Being a homeschool family we sometimes have some rather interesting experiments that we get to enjoy as a family. George is one such experiment. George is a goldfish whose bowl-mate sadly perished. My son's task was to teach the goldfish to come to the top of the bowl when he tapped on the glass. After several weeks of tapping and feeding and tapping and feeding the fish finally learned to come to the top of the bowl.

Big deal right? Right, that is until the fish started to do more. Anytime someone would walk by the bowl he would get all excited and start moving his mouth like he was yelling at whoever it was that was walking by the bowl. This became rather normal and we would just ignore him or comment that he was yelling at us in Spanish.

Then one day my kids were listening to an FFH song titled "Big Fish." It was then that George decided to really show off what he could do. When the song played George would begin to swim around like he was dancing in the water and would seemingly move his mouth to the words (move over Ashlee Simpson).

I particularly like the first verse of the song which goes like this:

Are you in the big fish
Are you sitting in the belly of a world gone mad
Have you turned your back in His wish
On His will for your life, have you made Him sad
Do you want to get out of the big fish
Listen to God and follow His plan
And you won't be part of the main dish
He'll spit you out on to dry land

I've sometimes felt like I was in the belly of a big fish. I had decided to do something my way instead of first seeking the Lord's guidance and leading.

You, whoever you are, God has a plan for your life. Maybe you feel like you are wasting your time at a dead-end job. Or perhaps you have no job but would desperately like one. Maybe you think you have the dream job but the Lord has been speaking to you in a still small voice to give it up for something else. Like Jonah, you may not particularly like the mission God has for you but He has the intention of making you ideally suited to carry that plan out.

Will you follow His plan or will you turn your back?

Maybe you've already chosen to turn your back and feel that there is no way out now. If that is the case I've got good news for you. The Bible has this to say about Jonah, "From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God" (Jonah 2:1). God is the God of second, third, and fourth chances.

Commit your way to the Lord today.

Intersecting Faith & Life:

Buy a goldfish if you don't have one already. As you feed it remember that the Lord has a purpose and a plan for your life. Ask Him to reveal it to you daily.

Further Reading

Hebrews 13:20-21

by Harold C. Warlick Jr.

Scripture: Jonah 3:1-5, 10

Many characters in the Bible prove identifiable in our contemporary world. As we sit here today on the downhill side of winter and contemplate the meaning of our lives, one biblical character especially leaps out at us: the prophet Jonah. Most of us associate Jonah with being swallowed by a legendary whale or giant fish. The book of Jonah, however, is actually a poignant parable about the relation of Israel to other nations. The book skillfully and forcefully calls Israel back to her universal mission of preaching the wideness and totality of God's mercy and forgiveness to all nations.

In Jonah's day the Ninevites were enemies of the Jewish people. One day God called Jonah to rise and go to Nineveh for the purpose of preaching to them so they could be saved. Full of disillusionment and hatred, Jonah ran in the opposite direction. According to the legend, he told God that the people of Nineveh were not worth saving. Attempting to flee God by ship, Jonah was thrown overboard and engulfed by a giant fish. He resided in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. In his utter distress he prayed to God constantly but God did not seem to hear him. Finally Jonah was delivered from the belly of the fish. Immediately he journeyed to Nineveh to preach repentance. Alas! the Ninevites repented and God chose to save them. This angered Jonah. He felt that God was turning soft. Embracing his past hatred, he cried out for punishment of the "wicked" people.

The crux of the book of Jonah is to be found in the fact that Jonah emerged from the belly of the fish with the same hatreds and limited perceptions which had accompanied him when he began the confinement. In short, he failed to emerge from a trying situation as a new person.

Fortunately, Christianity is a religion which deals with the sordid aspects of life. Christianity is something to be done. It is a task to be completed, a way of living life on earth. Christianity makes the absurd claim that individuals can live as peaceful men and women in a hate-filled world. It is a peaceful religion. Adolph Hitler, according to his chief architect, Albert Speer, often lamented that Germany had the wrong religion. Christianity's not being a religion of the sword diametrically opposed the Nazi dictator's purposes.

Christianity makes the all-encompassing claim that life on earth has a religious purpose. This planet of ours races through the universe at a fantastic rate of speed. It is a transient planet in an exploding universe. Many people take this to mean that life is utterly meaningless, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. They suggest that there is no purpose behind anything that happens in life. They embody Macbeth's haunting description: "full of sound and fury signifying nothing."

If, indeed, Christianity has an all-encompassing purpose, then our eternal future is with all God's children, as diverse as they are in matters of philosophy, religion, race, morals, and earthly status.

Our American electoral process is the culmination of a tremendous experiment in government. A truly diverse people of all nationalities, income levels, philosophical beliefs, races, and religious persuasions yell at each other for months; then tens of millions vote for one candidate and tens of millions for another. Then, they are all governed by the winners, and the losers subscribe to it. After four years the process repeats itself and the winners hope they have maintained enough positive thrust and programs to enable them to win again, while the losers hope they have changed enough, or conditions have changed enough, to enable them to become the winners. It is a truly blessed way to keep all these diverse groups and people united and working together. It is a miracle we should treasure.

But suppose all those different nationalities, philosophies, races, and religious persuasions had to come together and stay together -- forever! When we are thrust together in some urban complex such as O'Hare Airport in Chicago or Kennedy Airport in New York what is most impressive about the horde of people is their differences. It causes us to pause and ask the question, "Will we enjoy heaven?" If God forgives all the rogues and sinners, will we enjoy living with them? If God is that soft, perhaps there is more of Jonah in us than we realize.

Someone once said when he heard of the death of Matthew Arnold, "Poor Matthew, he won't like God."1 That, of course, was certainly unfair, but it does describe the often critical attitude of Matthew Arnold. It is a legitimate question: "Will we enjoy heaven?"

It is no small question. A man came up to his pastor and asked, "When I die and go to heaven, will I know my wife and children and will they know me?" The pastor shrugged his shoulders and responded, "Why?" He exclaimed, "Well, I think I can make it until death! But beyond that I don't know."

Will we enjoy heaven? Jesus appears to have forgiven everybody of everything -- from the soldiers who put him to death to the woman caught in the very act of adultery. He healed Jews, Gentiles, and lepers and even told a common, crucified criminal that he, too, could come into paradise. One can see from our scriptures that Jesus was light years ahead of his time in moving beyond the small walls of prejudice and prohibition.

One of the most profound realities in human existence is the fact that we are all equal down at the foot of the cross. The equality before God of all humans has been a hard pill for humans, especially religious human beings, to swallow. The Lord had said to Jeremiah, "Go into the streets of Jerusalem because Jerusalem is in trouble. But if you can find one truthful person, just one there, I will spare the whole city." Jeremiah did not go. He said, "Lord, the street people of Jerusalem are poor, and because they are poor, they don't have any sense; they are therefore not truthful."

Then there was Jonah. He ran away from God. He said, "I've been running because you told me to go to Nineveh and preach. But, if I did, those weirdos would repent and you are such a soft-hearted God you would forgive and redeem all of them. I didn't go because I want Nineveh to go to hell."

Jonah could embrace God's anger when it was directed against his enemies. But the tenderness of God, especially in the potential repentance of the hated Ninevites, was too much to bear. Jonah was not content to let God be God.

Jonah preferred God to be unchanging and predictable. In this regard, Jonah stands as a warning to the modern church. We must never build our vision of God too tiny to prepare people for living in the mansions of heaven where all the forgiven strangers will come from east and west and sit with us.

Fortunately, even for us, God is not flat and predictable. Our religious response from God is not always nailed down and unchanging. We are not one-dimensional people. Consequently, sometimes we can even be foreigners to our own previous religious perception.

Terminal illness can move us from universal concern into the room of Jesus loves me and the Lord is my shepherd for a while. Family problems and middle-age crises can move a change-the-world activist into the room concerned with family discipline for a period. Good health and even a college education or personal reading and insight can move a self-centered religious enthusiast into concern for the community and its societal victims for a long period of time. We are called to live, to grow, to move around. Jesus is "Lord of the living," not the dead. The saddest thing in the world is to see a group, a church, or even an individual tear down his or her religious house and construct a one-room, one dimensional dwelling, call it a church and insist that if it is to be a church everyone must live in that one room. This greatly restricts the wideness of God's mercy.

God essentially wanted Jonah to engage in God's process of judgment, repentance, and forgiveness. God came to Jonah twice. God comes to every church and every Christian twice. Our initial attraction usually comes when we grasp the idea of the sovereignty of God. God is, indeed, judge of God's creation. Yet God's nature is also one of tenderness and forgiveness. Consequently God's call is to grow, to be enriched by all God's creation, and learn from it. In short, God has made us and our churches co-creators in that process of judgment, repentance, and forgiveness. God is growing and we grow with God and God grows with us. This process so directly laid out for Jonah is a common denominator which is a recognizable line throughout the scriptures and church history.

Jacob returns to embrace Esau who wanted to kill him. Joseph embraces the very brothers who had sold him into slavery, accepts their forgiveness by God, and states, "I am not judge over you." Mary and Joseph take the child Jesus and flee to Egypt from Herod. They find safety in the very nation and among the people condemned to judgment by Yahweh as the waters destroyed the war wagons of Pharaoh. Barnabas takes Saul by the hand, gives him the ministry to the Gentiles at Antioch, and introduces to the disciples the forgiven former persecutor of the Christians. Jeremiah moves from judgment into hope as he purchases land in the very place he had condemned.

The interesting thing about examining all of church history is that at some point the process must unfold, regardless of the time interval, whereby judgment must tenderly acknowledge and live in the repentance of the other. Consequently if God is alive in our generation we may be certain that God will bring back to us the same message and task assigned to Jonah.

We can take heart in the story of Jonah, for in the end God is as forgiving of Jonah as God is of those in Nineveh. In like manner, when Jesus prays to God that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, then speaks of forgiving others, he is painting a picture of heaven as a forgiving place. And in his post-resurrection appearances he comes back to those he has forgiven and even breaks bread and is recognized not as a ghost but as one who shares the common meal with as yet imperfect humans. Apparently forgiveness still goes on in heaven when we bring our limited perceptions and judgments there.

Frankly, that should be a great load off our minds. Will we enjoy heaven? Most assuredly. Armed with that certainty, let us move forward with joy and forgiveness in this wonderfully large and diverse world. So be it!

Reference:

1. As quoted by Halford E. Luccock, More Preaching Values in the Epistles of Paul (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 192.

by Eli T. Evans

How do stories work?

What techniques do authors use to get their point across? And how can we recognize them?

In the last three issues, we have looked at the use of: 1 irony, 2 hyperbole and 3 reversal. In this fourth installment of our four-part series, we look at 4 wordplay.

What is a "bank"? Is it the land beside a river? The act of tilting a vehicle or roadway to the side as it turns? A financial institution? Yes, depending. It's ambiguous until you know the context. Now, if I say I wanted to make some money from my riverboat so I drove it into the bank, I have exploited the ambiguity in meaning to make a (lame) joke. In a similar (but more sophisticated) way, the author of Jonah plays with words for effect.

There is a lot of going up/going down, standing up/sitting down, picking up/casting down in the first half of Jonah. The wickedness of the Ninevites has "risen" up to God, so Jonah is told to "get up" and go there (Jonah 1:2). Instead, he "goes down" to Joppa, then further down into the ship (Jonah 1:3), and further still into the ship's hold (Jonah 1:5). Each time, the author uses the verb ירד(yarad) to connect the three actions into a single act. Even the word used for Jonah's deep sleep in Jonah 1:5 (וירדם, vayeradam), though derived from a completely different word, sounds like yarad. It connects Jonah's slumber to his overall descent into disobedience. Later, he's cast into the depths of the sea. The point is: Things ascend toward God and descend away from Him.

Two sides of the word ירא(yare'), meaning "fear," are considered in Jonah 1: The sailors are at first terrified of the storm (Jonah 1:5). When they ask Jonah which God he worships, he replies that he "fears" Yahweh, the God of Israel (Jonah 1:9), whom he is running from. Hearing this, the sailors become very terrified (Jonah 1:10). After tossing Jonah overboard, they "fear" Yahweh in a whole different sense: They make vows and sacrifices. It's all the same word, with two closely related meanings: terror that accompanies the threat of destruction, and reverence that accompanies worship.

The Hebrew word רעה(ra'ah) occurs ten times in Jonah, in several connotations: wickedness (Jonah 1:2; Jonah 3:8-10); destruction (Jonah 3:10; Jonah 4:2); calamity (of the storm, Jonah 1:7-8); and distress/discomfort (Jonah's, Jonah 4:1-6). In Jonah 3:10, there is a play on both senses of wickedness and destruction: "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil (ra'ah) way, God relented of the disaster (ra'ah) that he had said he would do to them" (ESV). They stopped their ra'ah, so God stopped His. Finally, the ra'ah that Jonah experiences (Jonah 4:1-6) has a double meaning. Jonah finds God's mercy to be upsetting (literally, "it was evil to Jonah, a great evil"), which itself is wicked.

In Jonah 3:7, there is a pun: "By the decree (מטעם, mita'am) of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste (יטעמו, yit'amu) anything" (ESV). The word טעם (ta'am) has two unrelated meanings: The first, more common, meaning is "to taste" (as a verb) or "flavor" (as a noun). For example, Jonathan tasted (ta'am) a little honey with the tip of his staff (1 Samuel 14:43). This is the meaning used in the phrase "Let neither man nor beast … taste anything" (ESV). The second meaning is "decree," which is borrowed from either Assyrian (which would make sense!) or Aramaic. This rarer meaning occurs only in Jonah 3:7 and in Daniel 3:10. The author of Jonah turns this into a witticism: What comes out of the king's mouth (the decree, ta'am) keeps the people from putting anything into theirs (tasting food, ta'am).

Another word that is explored by the narrative is אלהים ('elohim). When the God of Israel is referred to by name (Yahweh, "the Lord"), there is no ambiguity. But the word 'elohim can refer to either Yahweh or some other divine being. With the exception of Jonah 3:10, the narrator of Jonah always refers to the God of Israel as Yahweh, "the Lord." The sailors first pray to their individual (unnamed) gods ('elohim), but once the storm is calmed, they call out specifically to Yahweh by name. This is a central issue in the book: The pagans have gods they worship, but they don't have a relationship with Yahweh, the one true God.

Jonah 1:6 and Jonah 3:9-10 are the only places in the book where 'elohim is used with a definite article ("the"), ha-'elohim. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, this means the God, par excellence. The words ha-'elohim occur twice in the phrase "perhaps this god (the God of Jonah) will relent," spoken by both the captain of the sailors and the Ninevite king. At this critical moment, each leader switches from saying "your god," or just "god," to saying "the God." The change in language is subtle (less so in Hebrew), but it suggests a change of attitude: "Unlike our other gods, perhaps this god (of Jonah's) is decent enough to spare us if we repent." In Jonah 3:10, the narrator echoes the king: "When 'this god' (ha-'elohim) saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, 'this god' (ha-'elohim) relented." By breaking from his regular habit and echoing the words of the king, the narrator tacitly approves of the king's conclusion.

The story of Jonah is, on the one hand, a very simple one. The plot is not difficult to follow, the characters are engaging, and the issues are clear. The author did not indulge himself by using complex grammar or showy turns of phrase. But, a close look at the text reveals the hand of a subtle artist who knew how to use words for maximum effect.

Source: Today's Topical Bible Study

by Dave Miller (tenger)

LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy.
- Habakkuk 3:2b

This is an interesting and overlook-able four words right in the midst of Habakkuk's prayer to God. First he praises God for his awesome deeds, asks Him to make those deeds known, then he takes a twist and asks God to have mercy when He's doling out His wrath. It's almost as if Habakkuk's saying, "go easy on those who can't really see your awesome deeds!"

Contrast this with another prophet, Jonah. After Jonah preached to Nineveh, he sulked because he knew that God would spare Nineveh if they repented. And God did spare Nineveh (one instance of Habakkuk's prayer being answered).

I find that I fall into Jonah's camp of desiring God to completely destroy civilizations much more often than Habakkuk's view that God should exercise mercy when He's angry. It's a tension we need to experience occasionally to keep our emotions and thoughts in check. It probably wouldn't hurt us to err on the side of mercy.