Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved!

 

Read Joel 2

The first chapter charged those who should have known better to wake up.  Judgment was coming.  Joel continued in the second chapter with what he would label as the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord.

Mostly, he focused on the second part.

Darkness, gloom, clouds, and blackness headline what’s coming.  Let’s add an army like never seen before.  This may be an army of locusts that devour.

If that were not enough, there will be fire that precedes the invasion and is still burning afterwards.

What looked like the Garden of Eden before will be a desert wasteland afterwards.

No place will be left untouched.  People will tremble in fear.

Could this be an army of locusts or is this the battle in which the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords leads the charge?  The answer is yes.

This was prophecy for the near term in Judah.  Calamity was coming.

This is prophecy for the end of the age.  Things will get really bad before the end.

We see the cosmic disturbance that Jesus mentioned to his disciples in Matthew 24. That tells us that this part was still to come.

Who can endure the Day of the Lord?

Joel’s prophecy does not answer so much who can endure the Day of the Lord but how we can endure it.

Even now—at this late date return to God with all of your heart.

Even now—your time is not up yet, so do the things that signal repentance.

Even now—all is not lost.  Do you know God? Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.

That was from Jonah 4.  Let’s see how Joel presents God to his people.

He is gracious and compassionate,

slow to anger and abounding in love,

    and he relents from sending calamity.

God desires none to perish. His desire is for all to come to repentance.

Joel’s prophecy called upon the people to rend their hearts and not their garments. Return to the Lord.

Rend your heart

    and not your garments.

Joel calls upon people to repent with their hearts.  Repent with your very being.

Then the repentant people are to call out to God and ask him to remember them as his prize possession.  Don’t let them be an object of scorn for the world.

Repent, return to God, and call upon him to spare you.

For us today:  Repent, Profess Jesus is Lord, live as his disciple.

But how will the Lord respond?

He will send grain and wine and never let his people be an object of scorn again.

He will drive out all who oppose his people.  It’s going to be a real whuppin—the enemy will be driven into the sea.

The pastures will be green, the trees will bear fruit, you will have abundant crops and plenty of wine.

Your abundance will make those days when the locust consumed everything a distant memory. Paul would say that our present suffering would pale in comparison to what is in store for us.

Then you will know that God is with his people and they will never be shamed again.

Realize that this will take place amidst cosmic disturbance.  The world will be in turmoil.  But God will pour out his Spirit on all people.

His Chosen People will be protected and rewarded and never scorned again, but his Spirit will be poured out all over the world.

Men and women, old and young, people in high and low positions will have visions and dreams and prophesy.

Wonderous things will happen all over the world and even in the heavens.

For some, these wonders will be terrifying.  For others they will know them to be signs of the Lord himself and they will take comfort.

It will be the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord, and it’s not just for show.  Remember what both Jonah and Joel said about God?

You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.

Calamity is finally on its way but it is not for all.  God’s grace and compassion continue to the end even when his wrath will be poured out on those who insist on rebellion. 

For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

Our mission—our commission—is to call people to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ now and know that their eternity with God is secure, but we must know that a time will come when the evidence of God and his love will be so overpowering, that many will repent and believe the good news that we now enjoy in Jesus Christ.

Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

The world will be as evil as it has ever been, but God’s compassion and forgiveness are offered to the very end.  He will send his Spirit and his word will be everywhere.

So what are we to do?

Go into the world.  Preach repent and believe the good news.  Live out your commission every day.  Be known as a follower of Jesus by your love.

Be salt and light and goodness in a world that does not know God, knowing that while the world gets worse and worse, God will give signs and miracles and pour out his Spirit so that many will be saved.

Do your best to share the good news, but the pressure is off. 

Don’t lose hope when things get really bad.  Such things must happen and they might just be that nudge that opens the eyes of those blinded by the god of this age.

Know that God is a God of grace and compassion.  He is slow to anger.  He is abounding in love and he desires none to perish.

Visualize Jesus standing before the world one last time before judgment and wrath come.  See him with his arms wide open calling upon all to take his yoke and learn from him.

We have our part, but Jesus calls people to come home and if the earthly shepherd will leave the 99 to find the 1, how much more will the Lord of Lords do to meet the desire of his Father’s heart?

How much more?

There will be great and terrible signs and God will pour out his very own Spirit upon this world to give all one more chance to repent and come to him.

See the things that must come as one last effort to bring the lost home, to call all to repentance, and to give everyone a chance to call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.

Amen.

Jonah - Part 1

 

Read Jonah 1

So we begin this short book of the Old Testament about Jonah Ben Amittai. And to begin, we go to John’s gospel.  Jesus was getting everyone’s attention.  Some were amazed and some were offended or just ticked off that this man from Galilee was cutting in on their action.

The Sanhedrin sent guards to arrest Jesus. They came back empty-handed.  In their own defense, they said that they had never heard anyone speak like this man.

That had to get the goat of these high and mighty leaders who valued their own words so much.  They discounted the people who followed Jesus as an ignorant mob, but one who was more knowledgeable spoke on behalf of sanity.

Nicodemus proffered:

Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?

I thought we were studying Jonah?  Here’s the connection in the answer of the Sanhedrin.

They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.”

Let’s do what the Scribes and Pharisees directed.  Let’s look into it. We go to 2 Kings 14 and find that the Northern Kingdom, basically everything except Judah, had one bad king after another and did evil in the sight of the Lord.  We pick up at verse 23 and an introduction to Jeroboam II King of Israel

In the fifteenth year of Amaziah son of Joash king of Judah, Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel became king in Samaria, and he reigned forty-one years. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord and did not turn away from any of the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he had caused Israel to commit. He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Dead Sea, in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher.

From this biblical and historical account, we see that Jonah came from Gath Hepher, a city about 3 miles north—northeast of Nazareth in Galilee.  Jonah was from Galilee.

We also see that Jonah had been a prophet to wicked people before.  That will have more relevance as we continue through Jonah.

So let’s dive into the book of Jonah.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

In the first two verses, we have the mission statement and intent of the Lord.  Go to Nineveh and preach against it.  Why? Their wickedness is before me.  Basically, God said he could smell the stench of their wickedness.

So Jonah packed all of his scrolls containing his best sermons on repentance and headed to Nineveh.  He was experienced at preaching to the wicked and he was going to give this mission everything he had.

Not exactly…

Jonah ran.  He ran in the opposite direction of Nineveh.  Nineveh was north.  Jonah ran south to Joppa.

Nineveh was in what is present-day Iraq near Syria.  The modern-day town of Mosul might be the closest place near Nineveh that you might recognize.

Nineveh was within the fertile crescent, the route that Abram and his family took when they left Ur.  Abram, Sarah, and Lot continued along the fertile crescent into what would become the Promised Land.

Nineveh was a long trip from Galilee. It was a hike.  It was beyond the Northern Kingdom’s boundaries.

Jonah made sure it didn’t get any closer.  He ran in the opposite direction and boarded a ship bound for Tarshish. That was likely Spain, even the part west of Gibraltar.

Jonah was going to run away from God.  Jonah, the prophet who had spoken for God before, was going to run away from God. 

Do you want the theological term for this?  That’s a half-baked plan right there.  That dog don’t hunt.  Stupid is as stupid does.

We are 4 verses into this chapter and this book and God sent a storm.  It surely was a bad one because the sailors were already discharging cargo into the sea in fear for their lives.

Jonah had gone below deck and was asleep.  There is something to getting rocked to sleep while you are at sea.

The captain would have none of it and told Jonah to call on his god and make this stuff stop.  The captain and crew were obviously pagan but they knew Jonah had a different god.  They did not yet know it was the one true God.

The sailors cast lots—they drew straws to see who was responsible.  Jonah got the short straw.  Even long ago, people wanted to know who to blame.

So the crew decided it was time to get to know this Jonah a little better.

So they asked him, “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What kind of work do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?”

Jonah answered.

 “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

I don’t give Jonah any points for smarts but he does get credit for honesty.  He had already told the crew—evidently before the storm—that he was running away from God.

Who is that honest?  I know that this makes me look like an idiot, but I’m running away from God.  You all don’t have any of those Wanna Get Away fares do you?

The crew was terrified.  They had given passage to a man of God who was running away from God and a great storm comes upon them.

They asked Jonah what they should do.  He told them that they should throw him overboard. That wasn’t their first choice.  Maybe they could row back to shore.

This tells us that this was not a huge ship like a Spanish galleon with huge sales and a high deck.  The ships of this age had decks lower to the water so sail and oar could both be used.  The Phoenicians then the Romans mastered the art of building this sort of ship.

Rowing back to shore didn’t work so they did just what Jonah told them but not before they asked his God to forgive them for killing him.

Jonah went overboard.  The storm stopped.  The crew feared the Lord and made a sacrifice to him.  I don’t know what the sacrifice was, but the pagans had a paradigm shift.

Jonah was swallowed by a huge fish.  Actually, the text reads that God provided a fish to swallow Jonah and he remained 3 days in the belly of the fish.

God provided?  Who would want to be swallowed up by a big fish?  How about someone who was about to drown?

Was it a fish or a whale?  I don’t recall the taxonomy addressed in scripture.  You can get a genealogy or two along your way through the Bible, but nothing definitive in this area. I don’t think the Old Testament authors took high school biology, so a big fish is as descriptive as the author knew to be.

Kingdom Animalia

Phylum Chordata

Class Mammalia

Order Cetacea

That gets you close to a whale, but we don’t get that degree of specificity.  We don’t get genus and species. The whole binomial nomenclature didn’t come about until the 18^th Century.  Over the years that was sometimes a heated discussion.  We will just go with a big fish.

This is already a whale of a fish story.  It’s a big fish.  Not the one that got away but one in which Jonah found himself within as the chapter ends.

This running away from God business had not gone so well.

He had not pleased God.  He was thrown overboard and now was in the belly of a big fish. And not mentioned in the scripture, he was out the fare for his trip to Spain. You never know when you need to buy that travel insurance.

Praise the Lord that we never run away from God!  We don’t kick against the goads. We don’t walk on the other side of the road.  We obey his commands and they are not a burden to us.

We tithe. We give cheerfully.  Our entire lives are given to God as a living sacrifice.

We are always known by our love.  We are never afraid.  We are never discouraged. We are always people of hope!

Did anyone have to grit their teeth or roll their eyes through those affirmations?  I suspect that even as we try to follow Jesus, we all have some things in which we are still running away from him.

For now, we will leave Jonah in the belly of the fish, but let’s take some time this week to see if we still have areas in our lives where we are running away from God. 

Jesus said: Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.  You can’t follow and run away at the same time.

Let’s take some time to see if we have places in our lives where we are running away from God.  When we find them, go to God immediately in prayer.

Amen.

 

Wanna Get Away? Get Away Fares to Tarshish Now Available

 

  

Read Jonah 1

Wow!  These are some short chapters.  Some of you are wondering how is Tom going to get 2 messages out of each chapter?

Not to worry.  If I can’t get 2 messages from each chapter, you will get the Parable of the Talents again.

Teshuva is the Hebrew concept of repentance.  It means return.

Return to what?  To God and the ways of God, of course.  We have expanded that concept of repentance in this age to include not only returning, but the act of turning away or around from the sinful direction that we were headed.

Even more, as we turn we must leave behind not only the ways of evil, but the thinking and mindset that embodies them.  It is a total change—or exchange of heart, mind, and soul.

Jonah is sometimes contested as to whether it is fact or a fictional story with a moral, not quite a parable but surely with multiple lessons.

Jonah Ben Amittai means Jonah son of Amittai.  Amittai means truth.  Jonah is the son of truth. 

Jesus said that he was greater than Jonah.  OK, we get that, but why Jonah.  Why not Moses or Elijah?

The story of Jonah was read every year on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.  Some scholars consider Jonah a type of Christ. 

That sounds strange.  A reluctant Christ? I could write book or Netflix series on that.

Jonah is mentioned in the Quran.  Though his father is not mentioned there, Muslim scholars generally agree that is was indeed Amittai, and even note that Mohammed held Jonah in high regard.

But who is Jonah?  He is a prophet from Galilee who was called by God to preach a message of repentance to the people of Nineveh.  Nineveh lies beyond the Promised Land.

What did Jonah do?  He ran away from God.

He ran away from God?  How crazy does this sound to us.  Nothing is hidden from God.  You can’t hide from him.  What a knucklehead.

Then we have to consider the planks in our own eyes. 

What?  We are not running away from God.  We have not been sent to Nineveh. 

That’s correct.  We have not been sent to Nineveh, but we are commissioned to go everywhere else.  I know you have read the whole book of Jonah.  It’s the easiest reading that you have committed to for a while.

So you know that Nineveh does repent.  I don’t think I ruined the ending for anyone, but did you know that over a hundred years later it was destroyed by the Medes and Babylonians.

So, there is no Nineveh for you to go to, but there is everywhere else.

But do we carry a message of repentance everywhere else?  Do we reach out to people and charge them to turn away from evil and follow God?

Do we sing Jesus loves me this I know, but forget that part of that love is calling us to repentance?

Jonah ran away from God in the opposite direction of Nineveh.  He was trying to go to Spain from there.  You know what happened.

Are we running away from our commission?  As we go through this short book on Jonah, whom we consider among the minor prophets but the Hebrew people still hold in high esteem and is given a prominent place on what might be considered the holiest day of the year, let’s pull out a few things for ourselves.

Let’s start with are we running away from our commission?  Are we writing our own first chapter of Jonah when it comes to delivering a message that says:

Repent and believe the Good News!

Amen.