Bible Text: Jonah 1:4-16 | Preacher: Pastor Joe Ricchuiti | Series: Cruise to Nowhere, Jonah

Recap of 12/8/13:

1.  God would not let Jonah go.  He had chosen him  In John 15:16, Jesus said to those present as well as to His future disciples “You did not chose Me, but I chose you.”  Oswald Chambers said: “’I have chosen you.’  Keep that note of greatness in your creed.  It is not that you have got God but that He has got you.  Here, in this College, God is at work, bending, breaking, molding, doing just as He chooses.  Why He is doing it, we do not know; He is doing it for one purpose only—that He may be able to say, This is My man, My woman.  We have to be in God’s hand so that He can plant men on the Rock as He has planted us.  Never chose to b e a worker, but when God has put His call on you, woe be to you if you turn to the right hand or to the left.  He will do with you what He never did with you before the call came; He will do with you what He is not doing with other people.  Let Him have His way.”

2.  “This wind was sent after Jonah, to fetch him back again to God and to his duty; and it is a great mercy to be reclaimed and called [back to God] when we go astray, though it be by a tempest.” (M. Henry)

3.  In Jonah’s great confession of 1:9 he claims to worship the LORD, but it was worship without obedience.  “It may seem strange that Jonah claimed to worship this God when he did not obey Him, but this is often true of believers” (Dr. John Hannah).  “It is thus part of the purpose of the book to warn against a life and practice which falls below our grasp of the truth” (D W. B. Robinson).

4.  Jonah calls Yahweh the God of Heaven, meaning the one true sovereign in contrast to polytheism who is the Creator God who thus has power over the elements, especially the sea.

5.  “When God sent distress and hardship into Jonah’s life it was not to punish him as an offender, but to discipline him as a well-loved child” (Wilkinson).  The goal of God’s discipline is to restore us.