THE PRAYERLESS PROPHET

Nineveh was renowned for its power and wealth. Its fame as the capital of the foremost empire in the region made it great. That was man’s assessment. But God saw its moral pollution, and judged it from heaven as fit for immediate destruction, clearly teaching that Gentile heathen powers have a moral responsibility to the one true God, and will be judged by Him according to the standards of his own holiness, Rom. 1. 20.

Jonah’s name means ‘a dove’. As the dove gives a mournful call, so Jonah was commissioned to be God’s mouthpiece against this Gentile sin-city. It was a message of judgement, 1. 2; 3. 4, but behind the cry of warning was the dove-like undertone of mourning love. Jonah knew God was more liable to be gracious and compassionate, 3. 1, 2, than judgemental if Nineveh repented. So, he fled to Tarshish by ship ‘from the presence of the Lord’, 1. 1-3. At this point of the history (for history it most certainly is, authenticated by the Lord Himself, Matt. 12. 40, 41; Luke 11. 29, 30), Jonah is a backslider outside the will of God. God had commanded him to go east, and he was stubbornly travelling west!

Jonah is an enigma in the ways of service for God. How can such a servant, totally out of sympathy with the heart and mind of God, be used at all? But sovereignty uses him, and his mission was wholly successful, 3. 10, and his message blessed to the wicked Ninevites. Here is evidence of God’s sovereignty in using whom He will, and that success in any particular endeavour for God is not necessarily a sign of divine approbation for the servant. It teaches us to give God alone the glory for sinners converted, and not to glorify the human channel used! Jonah in his experience is a type of Christ, but morally he is a failure.

The wind, v. 4, and the great fish, v. 17, render instant obedience to the Lord of creation, v. 9, and ungodly men honour Him, v. 14 - only His stubborn servant refuses His command! Jonah cannot pray, vv. 5, 6, because he is backslidden and disobedient. No backslider can effectively pray, for like Jonah he is asleep to reality, subject only to the contempt of the ungodly, and exposed to the storms of God’s displeasure.