Up or Down #A -David Asscherick (The book of Jonah part 1)

teach about um i've really wrestled and i went back and forth between the book of acts the book of galatians the book of isaiah and the book of jonah these are all areas of study that i've been really in in about the last two years in my local church into my own personal study and i wrestled deeply with what to present and i decided finally to talk to you about the book of jonah uh the book of jonah you're going to find at the end of the old testament i'll just tell you very briefly the reason that i went with the book of jonah is that your theme this year in socal is what you tell me what is it yeah it's easy up right or looking up or something it is looking up and the idea of upness if i can invent a word and doubtedness are really important ideas and concepts in the book of jonah you're also emphasizing prayer this year am i right about that or wrong and the book of jonah as we will see over the course of the four nights that i will be with you here revolves and orbits around two prayers two prayers both prayed by jonah unfortunately they're not really model prayers but even the fact that they're not model prayers is going to be massively informative to us and so we're going to spend all of the time that i'm with you here in the book of what everyone say it with me book of jonah very good so if you want to find the book of jonah we'll go there and our presentation tonight is titled jonah part 1 up or down up or down and i'm just going to have a quick prayer i know that there's already been a number of prayers here tonight but i just want to quickly pray center my mind and ask for the infilling of the spirit for me and for all of the listeners father in heaven be with us now as we orient ourself to you and to the word father open us up that we might understand better who you are and who we are and father that we might better understand what our mission is to the world to keep not only looking up but bringing others up and father over the course of my time here as we're in us especially the book of jonah i pray that we would have a better understanding of this little book and then it would be a window into our world and what you're trying to do in our world this is my prayer in jesus name let everyone say amen very good all right so our presentation is titled jonah part one up or down we're going to start with several passages three in fact from the new testament right we'll spend just a little bit of time in the new testament tonight a little bit in galatians a little bit later matthew chapter 12 verses 39 to 41 jesus it says but he answered and said to them jesus speaking an evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet jonah very good for as jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish so the son of man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth the men of nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it because they repented at the preaching of jonah and indeed a greater than jonah is here matthew chapter 12. now here's another one matthew chapter 16 verse 4 a wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign and no sign shall be given it except the sign of the prophet say it with me jonah and he left them and departed not only does the gospel of matthew tease this this comparison between the ministry of jesus and the narrative of jesus with jonah so does luke luke chapter 11 verse 30 for as jonah became a sign to the ninevites notice this phrase that i've underlined for you here so also the son of man will be to this generation so i suppose one of the the answers to the question that you might be inclined to ask or that somebody might be inclined to ask in my local church we did a seven part series on the book of jonah and i had several of my church members come up and say what you might be thinking and that is why would we spend much time at all on the book of jonah it's four short chapters and really it's a story about a guy that gets eaten by a great fish vomited up and we know that story well i suppose the first answer to that question is that it's found in scripture can somebody say man i mean it's at least important enough to have been included but the second part and i want you to really get this is how radically and even how fundamentally jesus ties his own mission his own identity and his own story up with the jonah story i think you'd be hard-pressed to find any other place in the new testament where jesus speaks so radically and so definitively about how his own narrative his own story and what he calls his sign is so intimately tied up with an old testament prophet he says just as jonah was assigned to that generation i will be assigned to this generation we're going to talk about exactly what that sign of jonah is and so let me just give you five reasons why it's appropriate for us and timely of us and smart of us to study through the book of jonah first and foremost as with all theological enterprises so that we can better understand what does it say everyone god of course to better understand jesus mission which as we mentioned just a moment ago he's so radically identified with jonah number three to better understand our own mission in the world in keeping with our theme this year looking up right what does that mean right there's a there's a little bit of vagueness there that's a little bit opaque let's see if we can really tease out biblically speaking how our mission as a church in the modern era is informed by the story of jonah even though it's an ancient story to better understand what i'm going to call here in parenthetical uh not parenthetical but in parent uh in quotation marks the hostile world and that will be a very important idea for us you'll see why in a couple nights and then finally to better understand ourselves and believe it or not the book of jonah is uniquely qualified to put the finger of god on who we are and who we think we are and that will be very important for us as we move forward so that's why study the book of jonah now before we actually get into the only 48 verses in these four chapters just 48 verses of which tonight we are only going to go through one two three verses tonight we're just going to look at three verses jonah chapter 1 verses 1 to 3 and that's going to be it so it's going to be nice and easy tonight but we are going to spend 15 or 20 minutes orienting ourself historically contextually to the book of jonah right so you might be like oh yeah i'm familiar with that story i know that story i've heard that many of you would have heard the story of jonah perhaps before but let's just orient ourselves to where jonah shows up and what his significance is in the larger canon of scripture and so several things here at the outset just to sort of do due diligence to make sure that we're covering our bases first of all the story of jonah takes place during the time of jeroboam ii he was one of the longest reigning kings of judah right and like his namesake jeroboam the first he was like most kings of judah a terrible king jonah is actually mentioned and this is something i myself didn't know until i got into my study of the book of jone about a year ago he's actually mentioned in second kings chapter 14 verse 25 we'll come back to that and we'll actually read that verse in a moment scholars debate as they do everything and anything but they do debate and discuss exactly what the timing of the writing of the book of jonah was likely not written by jonah himself probably written sometime after the time of jonah consensus seems to be sometime in and around the 6th century bc to orient us to the time it was written at a time of significant and imposing assyrian power on the sort of landscape of the wider world and that will become important for us because of course jonah is going to be asked to go to nineveh which was one of the capitals of the assyrian empire we'll tease that out a little bit later jonah as you might be aware is very unique among the minor prophets if you've tried to read any of the minor prophets malachi or zechariah or amos or obadiah they're tough difficult to understand sort of random prophecies that show up at different times and not always easy to sort of put together those visions and those exhortations of prophetic utterance jonah's very different john is a story right every chapter unfolds this incredible plot this tale that we think on the surface is so simple so facile so easy a guy was eaten by a fish vomited up and went and preached there is profundity here there is sublimity here there is depth here and you're going to absolutely love it whether you like it or not the book of jonah is short 48 short verses four short chapters but it is extremely sophisticated and highly organized in fact i think you could make a defensible case that the book of jonah is maybe the most organized book in all of scripture with the possible tie with the book of revelation you are going to be blown away at the poetic organization and structure of this book frankly it was a revelation to me as well and i think you're going to absolutely love it the book of jonah explores the wrath of god the rulership and sovereignty of god the mercy of god so there's so much going on in the book of jonah lots of reasons to study it scholars have noted in their study of the book of jonah that the book of jonah is absolutely steeped in the imagery of genesis and i don't have time to tease all of this out but i'll just give you just a quick tour to force of some of the similarities contrasts and juxtapositions of the book of genesis relative to the book of jonah we'll just go through 12 of them very quickly so by way of introduction introduction jonah refuses to go to mesopotamia we'll talk about that a little bit later abraham came out of mesopotamia number two jonah is called the hebrew in chapter one verse nine abraham is called a hebrew in chapter 14 verse 13 of genesis number three the wicked world in genesis is under the water and righteous noah and his family are preserved you have the inversion of that in the book of jonah where the wicked prophet is under the water and the worshiping repenting gentiles or what we might call the world are actually preserved so it's an inversion of the genesis story there are several of those noah and his family want to live so they get in a boat jonah wants to die so he's thrown out of a boat water covers the tops of the mountains of course in the flood story of genesis jonah goes down to the bottom of the mountains in the book of jonah number six god remembers jonah in genesis chapter 8 verse 1 and jonah remembers god in the central part of his first prayer which we'll get to probably night after next uh 40 days of rain in genesis 8 and 40 days of repentance in nineveh uh the tree and the snake in genesis chapter three are analogous to the gourd and the worm right at the very tail end of genesis excuse me of jonah four very interesting parallel there we'll tease out a few of these in our time together uh the tree of knowledge was given as a test in the garden of eden and the gourd was taken away as a test in jonah chapter four very interesting uh three more here jonah wants death after mercy is shown toward nineveh and the gourd withers adam and eve were warned of death but they wanted life after partaking illegitimately of the fruit uh 11 god is the creator and lover of the earth both mankind and beast and god shows concern for the ninevites and their beasts in genesis excuse me in jonah chapter 4 and then finally number 12 here god is the creator of the water and of the dry land and jonah says in his prayer i fear god or rather in his answer to the mariners i fear god who made the sea in the dry land so you're already beginning to get a little taste here for how intentional and how organized and how poetically significant and theologically significant the book of jonah is it's not like somebody just sat down quickly willy-nilly and wrote out 48 verses i mean if you look at just the size the real estate of the book of jonah you could write out 48 verses of the equivalent of that in probably a half an hour or less whoever it was that wrote the book of jonah listen to me carefully would have labored over every word over its placement over the story that it's telling there is great intentionality here and as we're going to discover and i'm not going to give it all away tonight of course is we're going to discover the author of the book of jonah is driving driving driving at several very significant and salient points such that if we don't immerse ourselves in the structure of genesis and in the organization of jonah excuse me we will be left high and dry pun kind of intended all right uh continuing on there so steve in the imagery of genesis just a few more points here by a way of introduction one of the most interesting things about the book of jonah is that scholars have noted that there are hints of both parity and of satire it's funny it's designed to make you scratch your head and say what really and that will happen to us there is virtually no historical context or details given in the book of jonah which is really nice actually it lends itself to a poetic timelessness that applies equally to the 6th century bc and to 2019 and you're going to see that this tremendous timelessness there's only two characters named in the whole book jonah and yahweh and what we're going to see is this back and forth this dialogue that takes place around a series of events between jonah and yahweh and maybe one of the most unusual things about the book of jonah is its ending and don't skip ahead if you haven't read it recently i'm going to invite you to not skip ahead right you can't i guess if you want i'm not going to insist on that but the book of jonah ends really weirdly i'm just this odd ending you're like what that's the end of the book where you're turning the page right you're looking for what's next and it's like obadiah or something like what happened to the end of this book okay can't wait okay now that we've transitioned from sort of a theological introduction let's talk about what i've been discussing here the structure of this book okay this is very important i need you to put your thinking caps on here first of all the book of jonah conveniently is divided into four chapters and those four chapters make up two sections how many sections everyone two sections okay so just sort of think section a section b or if you prefer uh part one part two each of those two sections are divided up into three scenes which you see here three scenes each of those sections have a they're remarkably similar in their symmetry there's tremendous symmetry here in fact i'll put a slide up in just a moment to sort of discuss that symmetry and as i've already mentioned there's a very open-ended and unusual ending to the book in scene one which you have here two sections excuse me not seen one two sections three scenes so you got basically the first two chapters is section one and the second two chapters of section two so that's really convenient for us the chapterization basically divides up chapters one and two part one chapters three and four part two now here's the really cool part each of these two parts are divided up into three scenes and the three scenes are the same in both halves of the book okay and those scenes are made up basically of what i'm going to call here three ideas right what i call the set up the build up and the speak up okay now we've got to do our homework here otherwise you're just gonna you're gonna miss a lot of the most important stuff here so what's gonna happen again in this very well organized very intentional book the writer is gonna set up with a context he's then gonna build up incredible tension incredible tension both in part a and in part b or part one and part two and then he's gonna speak up and he's gonna tell you this is the point this is what you should be getting from this and so in each of those instances both in the first and the second half of the book those scenes are made up of the same thing so god with jonah is the set up in both halves jonah with gentiles is the build up in both halves and then god again with jonah is the speak up in both halves and you can sort of diagram that i'll get that in just a second um just a quick quotation here from j.p falkeman in his reading the biblical narrative and introductory guide he says this hebrew prose writers as well as poets like to use the device of what what's that word there everyone repetition very good and they use it systematically and deliberately with great intentionality at the same time they know very well that repetition for the sake of repetition soon degenerates into monotony watch this this is why they developed a sophisticated technique of varied repetition with the primary purpose of expanding the richness of meanings and keeping all sorts of surprises in store for us now one of the major literary devices that's going to be used in the book of genes book of jonah which we'll get to a little bit later is called information gapping now don't worry about that too much right now but we will be discussing that and that gets back to our point here when the author of jonah sat down to write a book he wasn't just telling a story an interesting anomalous story about a guy who gets eaten by no no no he had some very important things that he wanted to say points he wanted to make nails that he wanted to drive home and in doing so he makes this masterful it would not be an overstatement to call it a masterpiece of a book and everything is in its orientation there are two halves each half has its three episodes or it's three scenes in fact look at it right here just very simply so on the left part you have the setup the build up and the speak up that's the first two chapters of genesis on the right part you have exactly the same thing to set up the build up and the speak up in the second two chapters and again those scenes are identical god calls jonah jonah interacts with gentiles there's going to be very important lessons to tease out of that as we will see god's going to jonah will then call on god in response to his interaction with the gentiles and that's going to be the punch line in both cases okay so this is a little bit about the organization it's going to be absolutely great can't wait let's go now to jonah chapter 1 verses 1 to 3. these are the three verses that will be in tonight right so we're gonna have to make up a lot of time in the next three nights but tonight just three verses to orient ourselves properly to this book jonah chapter one verses one to three here we go now the word of yahweh i will be purposefully using what is almost certainly or very likely the the name of god in the old testament if you're familiar which you may or may not be when you find in the old testament the word lord and it's capital l capital o capital r capital d right that is basically the translators alerting you to the fact that this isn't just a title like mr or honorable or something like that no this is the name of god right the problem is is that the vowelings of the hebrew name are not known for certain all that appears there in the ancient manuscripts of the old testament is what's called the tetragrammaton it just means the four letters and the equivalent in english would be y h w h or y h v h right and so this is sometimes read as jehovah or jehovah i'm going to use yahweh we can't be absolutely certain that it's yahweh not suggesting that we are certain but the use of yahweh in the personal name specifically in jonah will become very important for us and you'll see why so throughout the reading of the book of jonah i will usually say yahweh rather than just lord because it will really give a punchiness to the text that i believe the author originally intended so we're back in verse 1. now the word of yahweh came to jonah the son of amitai saying arise which i think is a great name for a school i'm just going to throw that out there this is a great name arise go to where everyone nineveh that great city and cry out against it for their wickedness has come up before me there's the prophetic call there's the prophetic invitation and here is the response it's underwhelming so prepare yourself but jonah arose well he's got the first part right to flee to tarshish from the presence of yahweh he went down to joppa and he found a ship headed to tarshish so we paid the fair and went down into it to go with them to tarshish from the presence of yahweh if you've done much reading and studying in the old testament you might have noticed that there is a kind of pattern in the prophetic call and it looks something like this i've just sketched this out as five points but you might you might be able to recall several stories in the old testament and maybe even some in the new testament to sort of follow this basic template or pattern you have the divine commission or the divine call you then have the objection to the commission or the call you then have god giving a rebuke and a reassurance of his presence followed by a symbolic act or a miracle to reassure that i will be with you and then finally the commission is clarified and eventually carried out does that sound at all familiar with those of you who have read in scripture before right god calls the person that's called protests god says it's going to be all right works a little miracle gives a rebuke and the call goes through right after it's clarified okay so this is exactly the template that happens here in the book of jonah as we are going to see now let's start by noting the obvious thing and this is one of the reasons that i decided to preach on this here at socal this year is that the invitation of yahweh can be summarized to jonah in a single word and the word is up that's what he said he says up arise god's invitation to us is arise now i don't know if anyone here can read that but when i look over here on my left i see my beautiful wife the most beautiful woman in the room sitting next to a dear friend of mine marigold ardron and it was marigold ardron's father who told me what i'm about ready to tell you now i can't read that up there but that's arabic and it's pronounced roughly according to google translate like this ashrik [Laughter] and marigold's dad said to me this was probably five six years ago he said do you know what your name ashriq means in arabic i said i have no idea and i'm nervous and he said it means arise i was like i'll take that i'll take that all day long so there it is ashriq arise to to shone brighten or to radiate god's call in the hebrew it's not in arabic of course god's call to jonah in the hebrew was arise he said get up the hebrew word is kum kum all rise get up now just to sort of orient you geographically as to what's taking place here there's joppa in and around basically like jerusalem right you could find that there on a map nineveh is about 800 miles mostly to the north and a little bit to the east i want you to notice where tarshish is on the map yeah tarshish is over on the iberian peninsula 2 000 plus miles in the exact opposite direction and you have to understand this was before christopher columbus this is before the discovery of you know the sort of next hemisphere over you know crossing the atlantic ocean as far as jonah is concerned and all the bible writers of his day insofar as they understood that's the end of the world i want you to notice that when the prophetic call is given when the prophetic invitation is given arise and go to nineveh now jonah knew that nineveh was one of the primary capitals of the assyrian empire and the assyrians are the sworn hated enemies of israel and god says i want you to go to the capital of the people that hate you and who you hate and jonah wasn't stupid he's like yeah uh i think i'll go to tarshish so he gets a boat we'll get to that in just a little bit and he goes like 2 000 plus miles in the opposite direction you can't get further than tarshish from nineveh as far as the ancient world is concerned it's just like opposite direction here there's a little humor there you're supposed to feel like that's that's funny that is funny now this is the text i mentioned a moment ago second king chapter 14 verse 25 this is the passage that actually mentions jonah weirdly enough it says he restored the territory of israel this is speaking of jeroboam ii the king of judah from the entrance of hameth to the sea of arabah according to the word of yahweh god of israel which he had spoken through his servant jonah the son of amitai so we know that's the jonah that's the same jonah same john same name same dad's name the prophet so he's a prophet as well from gath heifer now what's so significant about this is that jonah's prophecy was the short version here is that israel god's vision and plan and intention for israel has been increasingly encroached upon by foreign powers and by by pagan powers and jonah prophesies a great expansion this is key this is there's an irony here there is a there is a sadness here second king chapter 14 tells us that it was none other than jonah the son of amitai that prophesied great things were going to happen not only would the kingdom expand back to its the kingdom of israel and judah back to its former boundaries but the idea here the implication is that it would expand even beyond jonah is not afraid to prophesy and to preach the great things are going to happen but when it comes time to act upon and to orient oneself to the fact that those things will happen he's like nineveh i'm going to tarshish you see friends it's one thing to say that you believe something and even to prophesy great things in the lives of others and then when god's call comes to you to act upon the thing that you say you believe you're like yeah i think i'm going over there what's the problem with jonah's fleeing i've fled from the lord haven't you

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Keywords: sermons room, Up or Down #A -David Asscherick (The book of Jonah part 1), david asscherick 2020, david asscherick prophecy seminar, the book of jonah, up or down part a, sda sermons 2020, sda sermons 2019

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Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020