Introduction

Welcome to our women's Bible study in the Book of Jonah. It's called The Call of Compassion. The Book of Jonah, you might as well just start looking for it right now, because in my Bible, it's just two pages. So if you go past it, you're past it. It's once you find it, put a bookmark in there because it is not easy to find. Just 48 verses is all that it is. You can also open your study guide too, because like I usually do, there's a page there with a few little fill in the blanks. But Jonah is classified as a minor prophet, which we'll talk about in just a minute. Jonah's name means dove. Dove is a symbol of peace. This is going to be interestingly ironic as we go through the book. But before we use Jonah's name too much more, I want to remind us that this book is not about Jonah, even though his name is mentioned how many times? Eighteen times. This book is not about a great fish, even though it's talked about four times. This book is not even about the city of Nineveh, even though that's mentioned nine times. This book is about God. This book is about his heart of compassion, his heart of mercy. It is about his call of compassion, how he reaches out to people to give them an opportunity to respond to him. So that's why I called this Bible study, The Call of Compassion. I would call this the Old Testament companion to the New Testament Book of Acts. Because in the Book of Acts, in the New Testament, we see the Lord reaching out to his own people, and then through his people to the Gentile world. The same thing is happening in this. We see God's call going out to the ends of the earth, really. So I've chosen a verse from Isaiah 45. I'll put it on the screen for you to be a summary or maybe a positioning statement for this Bible study. Isaiah 45.22 says, In God's story of redemption, God always finds a way to call out to his people so that they can experience his mercy, experience his compassion. So what I want to do first is do an overview of the book itself. This is a little bit instructional. Even though I called this a devotional Bible study, this isn't the devotion part. This is the little bit more academic part. But it's super important when we start a study to go through that way. So first of all, Jonah is among the prophetic books in our Bible. This is the very first prophetic book we've studied in Women of the Word. We've never done one before. So I'm really excited about it. In our Old Testament, there's division between the law and the prophets, and then we come to the books of prophecy. There are three major prophets, and they are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. They are the major prophets. Then there's 12 minor prophets. In the Tanakh, in the Jewish Bible, it's one book called the 12. They're all together. So three majors and 12 minors. They're not major and minor because of importance, it's because of the length of their work, the volume of their work. Now, interestingly enough, in the patriarchs, we have three majors and 12 minors. The patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob take up a large volume, and then we have the 12 tribes of Israel. I don't know if that's intentional, but it is an interesting way for us to remember and to think of things, and we do see those kind of repetitions in scripture, and I always think that they're pretty interesting. As far as the author and the style of this book, we're going to assume that this is written by Jonah himself. After the fact, he wrote it in a third-person narrative. Okay? And the style of this book is unique among all of the minor prophets because of the rest of the minor prophets are sort of lists of oracles, you know, different things that God would say. This is a story. This book is a narrative. People love stories. I love stories. I love to just pop in the DVD of scripture and just sort of let it tell itself to me. That's why we love the book of Ruth. It's another story. It's a movie that we can watch, and this is an epic movie that we can watch as we read it. Now, people, the reason people, or I don't know what the reason is, but Jesus used stories all the time, didn't he? He told all kinds of parables because it helps people understand God, understand his kingdom, and understand their place in what's going on. But one problem with stories is that people might get confused as well. If you go to a library and you look at all the classifications of books, there's biographies, and there's these how-to books, and then there's fables. A lot of people would want to take this book of the Bible and file it on the fable shelf. Why would they want to do that? A big fish that swallows a man. This is like Paul Bunyan stuff, or Peter Pan, or whatever. And so automatically, because of the content, they want to turn it into a parable or a fable. There's two problems with doing that. One problem is that Jonah was a real person. We're gonna read in a little bit that he is listed in 2 Kings as being a real person, a prophet of God. Parables and fables don't use real people in their stories. They're made up. The second problem, which is an even bigger problem, is that Jesus talked about Jonah and his experiences as being real. So if we have a problem with Jonah and his experiences, then we're gonna have to have a problem with Jesus talking about it as well. So we're not going to make it into a fable. Okay, let's talk about the timeframe here. I could just toss out a year to you and say, in the year, blah, blah, blah, BC. And you would go, okay, whatever. Is there a blank for that? I'll just fill it in. It means nothing, right? We need markers to make time mean something to us. Paul and I started a movie the other night, and it starts London, 1874. And right away in my mind, I have to find a hanger for that. I go, okay, about a decade after the American Civil War, I can kind of figure out what's going on. And so I'm gonna try and help us do the best that we can with this. The date range, well, first of all, I wanna say, Jonah was a prophet of God during the reign of Jeroboam II in Israel. By this time, the nation of Israel had been divided years ago, more than 100 years before this, into the northern tribe of Israel, the southern tribe of Judah. Jeroboam II was the king of Israel, the northern tribe. Jeroboam's reign was from 793 to 753 BC. And there's another problem with dates, because the BC dates go backwards for us. And man, my brain has a little trouble with that. The best thing I can do for us is to say, listen, we know about kings of Israel and Judah. So if we drew a timeline of the kings, and we started with Saul, David, Solomon, and we end with Zedekiah, we got about 440 years of kings. Okay, well, that's a good timeline. This falls about 280 years into that, all right? And so maybe that helps us just a little bit. It's about 2 3rds of the way through the entire reign of the kings. I want to read now, and I'll put a slide up for this, from 2 Kings 14. I want to read what we do know from history about Jeroboam II and Jonah, and maybe their relationship together. And it goes like this.

So a few things that we. we learn about this time frame in Israel and about Jonah's relationship. First of all, we have this king who did evil. Like the society wasn't great here. They weren't really God honoring. And yet, because it wasn't time for God to bring discipline to them, God raised up a prophet to help them have prosperity, to help them actually expand their borders. A culture with evil in its core, but yet prosperity on the outside, that resonates with us. We can identify with that. It was God's choice at this time. So we see that the prophet Jonah had gained some success in speaking the word of the Lord there. And the reason God did it, as it says, the affliction of Israel was very bitter. All right, I wanna take the rest of our morning here to look through the first three verses of Jonah. One of the things I like to do is take the first couple of verses. I always say, I want to wet your appetite so that you leave here and you go home and you can't even wait until tomorrow. You just say, no, no, no, I gotta study the first week and see what happens. So that's the point. We're just gonna do three verses and it begins this way. Jonah one, verse one. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai saying, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it for their evil has come up before me. Okay, we have to deal with the first word before we go any further. Look at the first word. It is now, probably in all of our English translations. And the reason the Hebrew word is and, but we don't start English sentences with and, much less do we start English books with and. But the word is and. And the word of the Lord came to Jonah. There are 13 books in the Old Testament that begin with the word and, which reminds us that the books of the Bible are one continuing story of redemption. And this is just another piece in the story, okay? What I want to do is ask the investigative questions that really help us. Who, what, where, and why? So just in that first two verses, we're gonna find out the answers to those questions. The first is who? Answer is Jonah. Jonah, son of Amittai. Now the book is not about Jonah, but Jonah is definitely being the central character in this book. We learned from 2 Kings that Jonah was a real person. He was a prophet. Prophet were men who God raised up to speak to the people about God. We learned that he was from Gaph Heffer, which you can look on your map in your study guide to see where that is. It's the region that belonged to Zebulun. And many of the prophets in the Old Testament, God called these men and they became living examples in their person of things that God wanted the people to know. They had a tough life. I think their reward will be great for the physical life that said they sacrificed in order to prophetically display what God wanted people to know. And Jonah is no exception. What we will see happen to him as a prophet of God is going to help us understand what God wants us to know about himself and how he relates to people. So the next question is where? It's clear that God put a calling on Jonah and it says, go to Nineveh, that great city. You can see that on your map as well. You can see where Nineveh is. Nineveh sits on the East bank of the Tigris River. It is roughly the modern day city of Mosul, Iraq. The modern day city sits a little bit on the opposite bank, but they're definitely the same place. And verse one calls it a great city. And it was great in this moment in both size and importance, but it was great for another reason. Do you guys remember when we studied Joshua and we got to Jericho and we pointed out that Jericho was great because it was ancient. It was that ancient stronghold. Same thing with Nineveh. Do you know that Nineveh was established, we read in Genesis chapter 10, by Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah. That is how ancient it is. Great-grandson isn't that far down. Some of you in this room have great-grandchildren, okay? It's not that far down. So Noah was on the earth when this city was established. So it is great in importance, in antiquity, and in size. Now in the days of Jonah, right here where we're at, Nineveh was the capital of Assyria. 40 years after this event, after Jonah goes and proclaims to Nineveh, 40 years after this, Assyria is going to come and take away most of the northern tribe of Israel into captivity. 50 years later, Nineveh will be the greatest, the largest city on earth for 50 years. And then Babylon will come and clear it out and take it over. Nothing lasts forever. But it's interesting to see what was happening in the moment. And by the way, when we talk about these cultures, I'll tell you a little trick that I have learned. Fortunately in English, they're in ABC order. Assyria, Babylon, the Chaldeans, which is the Persians, but I call them the Chaldeans to make a C. So I always look for tricks to remember things. When I'm introduced to a large family, the first thing I do is I try to assess, are you all A names or K names, or are your names in alphabetical order? So I have some hope of remembering the names of the children. But ABC, Assyria, Babylon, and Chaldeans, Persia. That's the order of these cultures. So again, like I said, in our day, this still exists. This city exists. It is Mosul. And I didn't want to fuss with copyright things, so I didn't put any pictures for you on the screen. But just go home and Google, like Gates of Nineveh. You will see what we're talking about. You will see these ancient structures. It's amazing. A lot was lost a decade ago when ISIL came into Mosul and really destroyed a lot of antiquities. And it's a really sad thing. But a couple of years ago, Iraq won it back, and it's, you know. But fascinating that we can study things in the Bible. You could go there if you want to and see what we're talking about. Like that is such a neat archeological evidence for what we study in the Word. So again, in the days of Jeroboam and Jonah, Nineveh was a proud city. They were a pagan culture. They were evil. They were barbaric or barbarous in their practice. It was not a place that a nice Hebrew boy would go. But God has always been interested in saving the world, not just nice Hebrew boys. And so God told Abraham this. We know this way back from Genesis chapter 12, and we've brought up this verse in every single Old Testament Bible study that we have taught, Genesis 12, three. God says to Abraham, in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed. My blessing, Abraham, is not just for you and your descendants, okay? This Messiah that's coming from you, in you shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, even the evil, barbarous ones, if they were spawned. Fascinating. So now we get to the investigative word, what? What is happening? Well, God says, call out against it. That was the instructions to Jonah, call out against it. Now, when we use the phrase call out, like we might say, well, I called her out on that, like you caught her in a lie or something, like we've made a verdict. That's not what this is, okay? This is more like when you go to the DMV and take a ticket or the cutting counter at Joanne and you take a ticket and they call out 47. It's like, this is like, I'm talking to you now, okay? This is calling your name, calling over you, accosting a person, drawing your attention to a person. It's not the verdict yet. This is making eye contact with this group. That's what this means, call out. The word call is a really fun Hebrew word. Since I had the time, like I looked up all of this, so like I'm not trying to act smart. I don't know Hebrew, but I know resources. So this word call, it is actually ka-ra, which the first thing when I clicked on the, like say that to me on the computer, pronunciation, the first thing I thought of was when you go camping in the mountains and it's like, what are they, crows or something? Early in the morning, you know, ka, ka. And I thought, oh, ka-ra. You know, when our kids were little, we're in McCall and they're cawing, so we called them McCaws. I know that they're not, but it just seemed. But anyway, I like that. The word call is going to be used like eight times in this book. So every once in a while, I might say, Carol, to help us remember and it's woven into our title, the call of compassion. God makes eye contact. He pulls the number. He says, I'm talking to you now. Here's your chance. I love it. Okay. Why? For their evil has come up before me. Nineveh was consumed by evil. God judges evil. We see it in scripture. We see that when there's a line, it's like God establishes a line and he's long suffering and he says, I have this long thread of patience, but there's always a line of justice. We see it in the Bible. Sodom and Gomorrah hit the line and God brought judgment. In Genesis, before Israel was able to go into the promised land and take the land, God said not yet because the iniquity of the Amorites has not yet met its full measure. He had a long line. He was saying, they haven't gotten to the edge yet, but then they did and God used Israel to come in and bring judgment upon them. The call of compassion teaches us that God reaches people before judgment to help them realize that their only hope is his mercy. You have people in your life that you're asking God, call their name. They're entangled in things that are against you. Call their name again. Do it again today. Give them another chance to respond. That is the call of compassion. Every one of us has people that we are asking that of the Lord. Nineveh needed Jonah in order to hear God call their name. You know what? Jonah needed Nineveh in order to understand that God had a purpose for the whole world and not just his nation, because it's easy to get nationalistic. It's easy to get family centric. And so this was something that God was working in Jonah as well. All right, I want to look at verse three here. But Jonah, he rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. You can see those locations on the map too. You can see on your map that Tarshish is the farthest possible opposite direction as where God had instructed him to go. And so now we get to the personal part of this. In this book, we are going to zoom out to what God wants to do in the world and zoom back into the responses. The response of Jonah here in this verse, we'll zoom back out, then we'll zoom into the response of the Ninevites. So one thing I always like to look for in scriptures and point out are repetitive phrases and contrasting phrases. And I want us to look in verses one through three at the repetitive phrase, presence of the Lord, two times in verse three. And then also in verse two, there's a phrase that is the same Hebrew word of presence of the Lord, but it's translated, their evil has come up before me, but it's the same word, okay? So it could say, their evil has come up into the presence of the Lord. So we have a repetition of three times talking about the presence of the Lord. Now, let's imagine for a moment, and I think that this is true, that Jonah was a God-fearer, a God-lover. He enjoyed in his day, in his way, the presence of the Lord. But as soon as God said to him, this evil has come up into my presence, and here's what I want you to do about it. Jonah fled from the presence of the Lord and said, I just, I don't want to do this right now. Don't want to be close to you right now. I'm going to do something else. Has anyone ever done that? But that's what's going on, and that's what's interesting about the presence of the Lord. The contrast that we see in these verses, and we will continue to see, is that, like you read those little preschool books, up, down, okay? Arise and down. God told Jonah to arise and go to Nineveh, and Jonah arose from his place, but what did he do? He went down to sea level, to the city of Joppa, and then he went down into the boat. Again, he did the opposite of what God had asked him to do, away from the presence of the Lord. For us, Jonah, the book of Jonah is about God's compassion. It's a story about God, what God wants us to know about himself. It's also insightful to see the responses. And when we look at a character in the Bible, sometimes it's a mirror, and we can see our current response, we can see a past response. Hopefully, we can file it away to not make a future response in the same way. So, I want to finish by just talking about some of the applications that we have the potential to see in this book. And the first one is, how do we respond to God's call in our life? When he says, I would like you to do this. Now, in this case, we call it a mission of mercy. And sometimes, we would rather be called to go on a mission. Let me just get out of my life. Please, send me on a mission. I'd rather be in Africa than do what I'm doing right here. But the call of what we're doing right in front of us is just as significant of a call. And since we're a group of women, we can resonate with the call of raising children, we can resonate with the call of relationships, the call of doing the boring and mundane over and over again. There is a call of compassion that the Lord puts on our life. And the question is, well, how do I respond to that? How am I responding to what God has called me to do right now? Have I in any way gone down? Have I in any way fled from the presence of the Lord and said, I don't want to talk about this? Please, I'm just going to get out of communication with you so that we no longer have to talk about this. I think that's really what was happening. So that's a good thing for us to process. And then there's one other little fascinating tidbit to me in this. Why was it that Jonah was actually able to get on that ship? He had money. He paid the fare. His resources allowed him to flee from the presence of the Lord. And that's fascinating to me because I've spent big chunks of my life crying and fussing over not having resources. Not now, we're good. Everything is good. But, you know, like you guys, I mean, do you remember when you were younger? Everyone has gone through a season where they feel like, I don't have enough. And it's like, Lord, you haven't given me. And we see financial blessing as the provision of the Lord. And if God has not blessed us with finances, then we cry and we fuss and we say, I need this, I need this. I want you to think for a minute what would have happened if Jonah hadn't had any money. That door would have been closed. Couldn't pay the fare. He couldn't go. Sometimes, a lack of resources is God's mercy on us. But certain doors are closed. And it's interesting to think about. Maybe that's happening in someone's life right now, a lack of resources. And all of a sudden, the light bulb is coming on. You're saying, oh, perhaps what I need to do is refocus and be content right here. And I'll never know what you have spared me from in my going my own direction. So I want to wrap up. They say people remember the first and the last thing that you talk about. So the last thing I want to talk about is a reminder that this is not about Jonah. This is about God. This book is about God. There's a scripture in Exodus that tells us what God is like. It's one of the earliest and the best revelations of God's character. And I printed it here on one of these pages. It's right below the map. I'll put it on the screen as well. Exodus chapter 34. Don't start reading it yet. Eye contact right here. I want to give you the context. Just remember, this scripture is after Mount Sinai. Moses went up, received the Ten Commandments, came back down, found the rebellion of his people, smashed the tablets. It was a terrible time. And God said, you know what? I will create a second opportunity for my people to live in my presence. Let's do this all over again. And now let's start reading from Exodus chapter 34, verse 4.

And before we get back to the character of God, I just wanna say that I firmly believe that that third and fourth generation is God introducing to Moses and to Israel this idea that when they hit the line of judgment and God takes them into exile, it's not gonna be just for that generation there. He will keep them in exile to the third and the fourth generation. Some people think that this is a whole generational curse thing. I do not. Do we carry DNA from people from generation to generation? Yes, but God does not curse from generation to generation. I believe this is saying when discipline comes upon you, it's going to last for a few generations before I bring you back into the land. Okay, that said, now I wanna look at what does God say about himself in this passage? Mercy, compassion, grace, steadfast love, faithfulness. This morning when you got up, was that your perspective of God? Is that how you thought, oh, I am so blessed because I know the character of my God? Or does this eep into us that God is demanding and God is mean, spirited, or whatever? Sometimes, I don't know why, it must be our sinful nature that this perspective just gets grayed out a little bit. So it's good for us to bring it back up into our memory. This is how God declared himself. This is what we will see in the call of compassion as well. But he is just and he will bring judgment on evil when the people get to the line. Even his own kids, even his own nation, they will be taken into captivity. And that is the beauty of God. He is completely merciful and completely just. So as we wrap up this study, we find in God's character the fact that he calls out in compassion, or I should say we will see in this study that God calls out in compassion and gives an opportunity for the response. That his mission of mercy is to reach all people before the edge of destruction. And we're also gonna see that God wraps up his own kids in this mission of mercy. We're involved. He grabs us to be involved in what he's doing. So come back next week. We're gonna finish, you will finish chapter one in your study guide. I think I wrote a four-day-a-week study guide there. So you'll wanna factor that into your lifestyle this week. And next week I call God Pursues His Kids. Lord God, thank you for allowing us to start this study again. Thank you for allowing us to gather, Lord. And I just pray again, Lord, that you would open each one of our hearts to see what you want us to see in this. That is the beauty of your word. You are working in just thousands of ways in each of our hearts, and sometimes very differently. So Lord, as we just spread out the word, I pray that you would do the work that you want to do. We thank you for it, Lord God. And I pray for each one listening and each one in this room. Lord, I pray that you would help us to carve out that time to spend in your word, to know you better. And Lord, most of all, help us just hold on to what you have shared about your character. Lord, that we believe it, that we know it, that we rest in it, Lord, I pray in Jesus' name, amen. Amen.