{"id":5041,"date":"2025-11-14T08:18:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T13:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5041"},"modified":"2025-11-14T08:18:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T13:18:03","slug":"jonah-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/14\/jonah-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonah 1:1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books.<\/em>

So, how did the prophet Jonah end up on a Mediterranean beach smelling like a tin of sardines?

It all began with a call from God that, in Jonah\u2019s mind, was definitely not his dream job:

\u201c\u2018Up on your feet and on your way to the big city of Nineveh!\u00a0Preach to them.\u00a0They\u2019re in a bad way and I can\u2019t ignore it any longer.\u2019\u00a0But Jonah got up and went the other direction to Tarshish, running away from God.\u00a0He went down to the port of Joppa and found a ship headed for Tarshish.\u00a0He paid the fare and went on board, joining those going to Tarshish \u2013 as far away from God as he could get\u201d (Jonah 1:1-3, The Message<\/em>).

Nineveh, which was east of Israel, was the capital of Assyria, one of the ancient world\u2019s evil empires.\u00a0The Ninevites were decidedly lacking in people skills.\u00a0After they annihilated an enemy city, Assyrian soldiers would typically leave behind a pyramid of human heads as a warning to their neighbors.

Jonah was so excited about the opportunity to preach to this stimulating crowd that he immediately headed in the opposite direction.

I have a friend who used to say that his fantasy, whenever he got the blues, was to buy a Winnebago and head for the beaches of southern California.\u00a0Why those beaches?\u00a0They happen to be about as far west as you can go behind the wheel of a Winnebago.

Jonah bought a one-way ticket to the farthest point west he could possibly imagine.\u00a0At that time it was a place called Tarshish.\u00a0In his book Under the Unpredictable Plant<\/em>, Eugene Peterson points out that to this day nobody really knows the exact location of Tarshish.\u00a0Presumably it was near Spain, perhaps Gibraltar.\u00a0In Scripture the very name connoted magic, mystery, and escape.\u00a0

King Solomon imported from Tarshish gold, silver, ivory, monkeys, and peacocks.\u00a0In the popular imagination it became a synonym for paradise \u2013 a kind of prototypical Club Med.\u00a0Going to Tarshish amounted to dropping off the face of the earth.\u00a0

Perhaps God has also called you, in one way or another, to go east.\u00a0But all you want to do right now is head west.\u00a0

Perhaps you made a promise to be there for a life partner in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, in plenty and in want.\u00a0You just didn\u2019t realize how hard it would be to love that person when actual sickness, sorrow, and want showed up.

Now you\u2019re standing in line to buy a ticket to Tarshish, where you\u2019ve heard that relationships are problem-free.

Maybe you feel overwhelmed caring for a needy friend or for aging parents.\u00a0Perhaps you\u2019re stuck in a job that\u2019s breaking your spirit.\u00a0Or you head home every day to a messed-up house and children who rarely speak words of gratitude.

Wouldn\u2019t it be great to have a fulfilling mid-life crisis in a place like Tarshish?

But as the story of Jonah reveals, sailing west when God calls us to go east means heading into turbulence. As Tim Keller notes in his book The Prodigal Prophet<\/em>, \u201cThe dismaying news is that every act of disobedience to God has a storm attached to it\u2026 The Bible does not say that every difficulty is the result of sin \u2013 but it does teach that every sin will bring you into difficulty.\u201d

In Jonah\u2019s case, the turbulence was quite literal.\u00a0A violent storm overtook the boat on which he was making his escape.\u00a0

So Jonah made a life-altering decision, seemingly on the basis of despair.\u00a0He bailed on his trip to Tarshish.\u00a0\u201cThrow me off the ship,\u201d he told the crew.\u00a0They were terrified to do so.\u00a0But Jonah assured them that his absence would definitely improve their sailing conditions.\u00a0

He was right.

The prophet may have assumed that his life was now over.\u00a0But as Jonah 1:17 tells us, \u201cThe Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah.\u201d\u00a0God provided <\/em>the fish.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t a punishment, but a lifeboat.\u00a0Three days later the fish barfed him up on the shore \u2013 one of the really compelling Scripture texts for any kid who\u2019s ever felt bored in Sunday School.

Keller notes that the storms that interrupt our lives (especially when we\u2019re running away) can be very good things: \u201cStorms can wake us up to truths we would otherwise never see. Storms can develop faith, hope, love, patience, humility and self-control in us that nothing else can.\u201d

Best of all, they can stop us in our tracks and prompt us to make an exceedingly difficult choice that will put us back on God\u2019s path:

Stop cheating. Refuse to believe the lies. Face your Nineveh.\u00a0You\u2019re not a victim.\u00a0The running stops today.<\/em>

Those may seem like radical steps.\u00a0But Jonah showcased one of life’s key lessons:

It\u2019s always safer to be treading water in God\u2019s ocean than to be on a cruise ship heading in the wrong direction.


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here \u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books. So, how did the prophet Jonah end up on a Mediterranean beach smelling like a tin… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5042,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1029,1037,370],"class_list":["post-5041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-11-series","tag-call","tag-obedience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5043,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5041\/revisions\/5043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}