Daily Thoughts from Jonah: Obedience Brings Blessing (Jonah 1:1-3)

Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.  (Jonah 1:1-3 ESV)

As a prophet, Jonah was gifted and called by God to proclaim His word to His people or anyone He wanted to speak to.  Yahweh, God’s personal name used here and translated LORD with all caps, wanted to speak to Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian empire.  He wanted to use Jonah, an Israelite, to tell them how their evil was about to be punished by Him.

You would think Jonah would be happy.  He hated the Assyrians.  The Assyrian people had been oppressing Jonah’s people for some years now.  They often made incursions into Israel, taking prisoners as slaves, killing, stealing property.  Israel was powerless to stop them.  It would be great to announce the coming doom of their capital city, Nineveh.

But Jonah fled from Yahweh and instead of heading north to Nineveh, he headed west to Tarshish.  Why?  Was he afraid to preach the message God sent Nineveh?  Was he fearful that they would be angry with him for preaching it and kill him?  Maybe some, but we’ll find out as we go along what his real reason was.

Whatever his reason, Jonah was disobeying Yahweh.  Are there things God has made clear to us He wants us to do or stop doing that we have failed to obey?  It was a contradiction of Jonah’s calling to disobey Yahweh.  It is a contradiction of our being rescued by Jesus Christ and called to be God’s children to disobey Him.

But I remember distinctly doing it, disobeying something God made clear to me to do.  I had excuses, of course.  Surely He couldn’t mean me.  Surely someone else could do it better.  So I procrastinated and sure enough, someone else did do it, but I missed out on the blessing and someone else received it.

God never tells us to do something that isn’t not only best for us but best for others as well.  We’ll see this play out in Jonah’s life.