RELUCTANT PROPHETS AND RELUCTANT PRAY-ERS

Some consider the book of Jonah with its story of the whale swallowing Jonah an allegory or a myth. The only problem with those views is that in several other places in Scripture Jonah is referred to as a real person—and one of them is by the Lord Jesus Himself (see Matthew 12:38-42 and Luke 11:29-32).

What we do know from the story is that the prophet Jonah was running away from being obedient to direction he had received from the Lord. God spoke to Jonah and instructed him to take a message of judgment to the city of Nineveh and Jonah’s response to His instruction was to run away. Jonah did not want to do what God had instructed him to do.

Jonah’s disobedience propelled him into a downward spiral. Each step he took in his disobedience was a descending step.

“He went down to Joppa and found a ship . . . and went on board, to go . . . away from the presence of the Lord” (Jonah 1:3, ESV). The ship was sailing in the opposite direction from Nineveh.

“But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down” (1:5).

“So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea. . . . And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish” (1:15-17).                                                                                                                                               

I think we can correctly assume that Jonah’s being thrown overboard and into the sea was another step down.

Finally, Jonah hit the bottom of his disobedience in the belly of the fish, in the depths of the sea.

I don’t know if this was a real fish or if the fish represents the rebellion that had taken Jonah to rock bottom. Whichever it was, it was about to take his life, and without a miracle there was nowhere else to go.

It was there in the belly of death that Jonah finally cried out to God (2:2).

Isn’t tragic that when we are in disobedience, when we are not doing what He has instructed us to, we often stop praying completely? Jonah took a trip to Joppa where he got onto a boat and went to sleep. And then he even tried to have the sailors assist him in committing suicide— “Throw me overboard.” In all of this, he did not pray once—not once!

We cannot wait until our circumstances are desperate to develop a prayer life. Prayer should be as much a part of our daily lives as eating and sleeping. One of the great tragedies of the American church is the abandonment of prayer, and it’s largely because many of our pastors are not praying men. As the old saying states, “As the head goes, so goes the body.”

Hitting rock bottom is when you get completely swallowed/covered up by a problem. The problem becomes so overwhelming that you end up despairing of life itself. In such a situation, your options are limited:

1.  You can try to just “survive” in this “hell” of a circumstance.

2.  You can just give up and die. Jonah had essentially reached this point when he told the sailors to throw him overboard.

3.  The third option is the one that Jonah reached after despairing of the first and the second; he finally “called out” to God in repentance and asked for help.

When Jonah finally awakened to his error and called out to God, he was delivered from the belly of the whale. Actually, he ended up on the beach in a pile of whale vomit. We don’t know if he changed his clothes or took a bath before he proceeded into Nineveh, but his call to repent and turn to God was powerfully received by the whole city. “So the people of Nineveh believed God” (Jonah 3:5).

I call Jonah the “reluctant prophet” because after he had visited Nineveh and the city had repented, Jonah was unhappy with what had happened. Apparently Jonah wanted Nineveh destroyed and he was disappointed with the spiritual awakening that occurred. Listen to what Jonah says when God confronted him with his bad behavior.

“This change of plans greatly upset Jonah, and he became very angry. So he complained to the Lord about it: ‘Didn’t I say before I left home that you would do this, Lord? That is why I ran away to Tarshish! I knew that you are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. You are eager to turn back from destroying people. Just kill me now, Lord! I’d rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen’” (Jonah 4:1-3, NLT).

The Bible account finishes with Jonah’s anger over what happened being unresolved so we don’t know what happened next to him.

One of the lessons that flows out of this story of the reluctant prophet is the modern-day issue of “reluctant pray-ers.” Let me see if I can explain what I mean by this. A lot of us pray only for things that interest us or somehow affect us. We pray for God’s blessing on people, on churches, on issues that we like. We claim God’s promises for our needs and for those we associate with. This is the narcissistic/selfish spirit of the church of Laodicea (Revelation 3).

So what about those people that we don’t like? Do we ever pray for them? What about the Muslims, radical Jihadists, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, those whose political views are different from ours? Do you ever pray for them?

Do you ever ask God to minister to and reveal Himself to those who anger and frustrate you? Or are you a “reluctant pray-er” in the way that Jonah was a “reluctant prophet”?