Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
You are about to walk through one of the shortest books in the whole Bible, only four brief chapters, and one of the strangest and most unforgettable. It is not, like the other prophets, a book of oracles and sermons; it is almost all story, and the story is about the prophet himself. God tells a man named Jonah to go and preach to Nineveh, the great and violent capital of Assyria, the cruelest enemy Israel knew, and Jonah does the one thing a prophet must never do: he runs the other way. He boards a ship bound for Tarshish, the far edge of the known world, trying to flee from the presence of the LORD. But the LORD sends a great wind, and the sea rises, and the pagan sailors cry out in terror, and Jonah is thrown overboard into the deep, where God has appointed a great fish to swallow him whole. From the belly of that fish, in the dark, the runaway finally prays, and the God he fled from hears him and delivers him. Then the word comes a second time, and this time Jonah goes, and preaches, and the whole enormous city, from the king on his throne down to the cattle in the stalls, turns from its evil and is spared. It is the greatest revival in all the Old Testament, and it happens among Israel’s enemies, and it makes the prophet furious. The book ends not with Jonah’s triumph but with his sulking anger, a withered plant, a hungry worm, and a question from God that hangs in the air, unanswered, waiting for the reader to answer it.
As you read, hold this: A runaway prophet, a storm, a great fish, and a whole wicked city spared: the book of Jonah is about the wide mercy of God pressing against the narrow heart of man.
The name and what it means
The prophet’s name in Hebrew is יוֹנָה (yonah), pronounced yoh-NAH (Strong’s H3124), and it simply means “dove.” He is called the son of Amittai, and he was a real prophet who lived in the days of Jeroboam the Second, a king of the northern kingdom of Israel about eight hundred years before Christ. We are told elsewhere, in the second book of Kings, that this same Jonah once prophesied good news for his own nation, the restoring of her borders, and the people no doubt loved him for it. So he was no stranger to God’s mercy when it fell on Israel. What breaks him is the thought of that same mercy falling on Nineveh. His father’s name, Amittai, comes from the Hebrew word for truth and faithfulness, and there is a quiet irony in a man of such a lineage running so hard from the truth God gave him to speak. The dove flees, but the God of heaven, as the book will show, is patient enough to pursue a runaway across the sea and gentle enough to reason with him under a wilting vine.
The world of the book
To feel this book you must feel what Nineveh was. It was the chief city of Assyria, the superpower of that age, a nation whose armies were famous for a savagery that turned the stomach even of a hard world. They flayed their captives, impaled the conquered, and stacked the heads of the slain in heaps at the city gates, and they boasted of it in stone. This was the empire that would one day sweep Jonah’s own northern kingdom off the map entirely. So when God says, “Go to Nineveh,” He is not sending His prophet to a neutral foreign city; He is sending him to the doorstep of the enemy, to preach to the very people every Israelite had every earthly reason to hate. Jonah does not run because he is a coward. He runs, as he finally confesses at the end, because he is afraid God will do exactly what God loves to do: forgive.
And that is the deep matter this little book is really about. On its surface it is an adventure, a storm and a fish and a spared city, and children have loved it for three thousand years. But underneath, it is a searching book about the heart of God and the heart of His servant, held up side by side. God is shown to be wide, generous, slow to anger, abounding in love, and ready to relent over any people who turn to Him, even the worst of them. Jonah is shown to be narrow, resentful, more grieved over a dead plant than over a hundred and twenty thousand souls. The book gives us, without a word of scolding, the truest picture in the Old Testament of what it looks like when a redeemed heart forgets that it was redeemed by mercy and begrudges that same mercy to someone else.
The shape of the book
- The flight and the storm (chapter 1). God calls Jonah to Nineveh, and Jonah flees toward Tarshish. A great storm falls on the ship, the pagan sailors pray and are converted to fear the LORD, and Jonah is cast into the sea, where a great fish swallows him.
- The prayer from the deep (chapter 2). From inside the fish Jonah prays a psalm of thanksgiving out of the very belly of Sheol, and it ends with the confession the whole book is built upon: salvation belongs to the LORD. The fish delivers him onto dry land.
- The word a second time, and the great repentance (chapter 3). God calls Jonah again, and this time he goes and preaches eight blunt words of warning. Astonishingly, the whole city believes God, from the king to the least, and turns from its violence, and God relents from the disaster He had threatened.
- The angry prophet and the tender God (chapter 4). Jonah, enraged that his enemies are spared, sits down to sulk. God appoints a plant to shade him, then a worm to kill it, and uses Jonah’s grief over the plant to ask the question that ends the book: should not God have compassion on a great city full of people who cannot tell their right hand from their left?
The one thread to carry
If you carry one thing through these four short chapters, carry this: salvation is from the LORD, and the reach of His mercy is wider than the walls of any heart that would fence it in. That confession is the hinge of the whole book, spoken by Jonah himself from the darkest place he ever knew.
Jonah 2:9 (BSB) — “But I, with a voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to You. I will fulfill what I have vowed. Salvation is from the LORD!”
The tragedy of Jonah is that he could confess that truth in the belly of the fish and still resent it on the hillside above Nineveh. He knew the character of God perfectly well; that knowledge was the very reason he ran. Hear his own account of it, one of the clearest descriptions of the heart of God anywhere in Scripture, spoken here as a complaint by a man who wished his God were smaller.
Jonah 4:2 (BSB) — “So he prayed to the LORD, saying, “O LORD, is this not what I said while I was still in my own country? This is why I was so quick to flee toward Tarshish. I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion, One who relents from sending disaster.”
And the book leaves us with God’s own last word, a question that reaches past Jonah and lands on us: whether we will love what God loves, and grieve over people the way He grieves, and rejoice when mercy falls where we thought only judgment should.
Jonah 4:11 (BSB) — “So should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well?””
There is one more reason this small book stands so tall, and the Lord Jesus Himself gave it. When His enemies demanded a sign, He pointed them to no other than this one, calling it the sign of Jonah: as the prophet was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so the Son of Man would be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth before rising again. Jonah went down into the deep and came up alive, and his coming up became a preaching that turned a city; and a greater than Jonah went down into death itself and rose, and His rising is the salvation the whole book was reaching toward. So read this book of a runaway and a storm and a spared city knowing where it leads. Learn the Word, let the wide mercy of God enlarge your own narrow heart, and give thanks.