The Futility of the Getaway Car Text: Jonah 1:1-3
Introduction: The Sovereignty of the Hound of Heaven
The book of Jonah is not a children's story about a big fish. If you leave it in the flannelgraph world of Sunday School, you will miss the entire point. This is a book about the absolute, untamable, and inescapable sovereignty of God. It is a book about a God who is not just the God of Israel, but the God of the land and the sea, the God of pagan sailors, the God of great cities, the God of great fish, and the God of His own rebellious prophets. To put it plainly, the book of Jonah is a book about the fact that God always gets His man.
We live in an age that prizes autonomy. The modern man believes he is his own, that his choices are ultimate, and that he can, if he so chooses, tell God to get lost. He might not say it in so many words, but he lives it. He lives as though he can get in a boat and sail away from the presence and the demands of the Almighty. He thinks he can go to his own personal Tarshish. But the central lesson of this book, from the very first verse, is that there is no Tarshish. There is no getaway car. You cannot flee from the presence of the God who fills heaven and earth. As Francis Thompson once wrote, God is the "Hound of Heaven," and He pursues His people with an unrelenting grace.
Jonah is not just some historical figure; he is a picture of Israel, called to be a light to the nations but jealously hoarding the light for herself. And he is a picture of us. We receive the clear command of God, and instead of obedience, we perform a quick cost-benefit analysis. We weigh the options. We check the shipping schedules to Tarshish. We calculate the fare. And we think that our disobedience is a private matter, a personal decision. But Jonah is about to learn, and we must learn with him, that our rebellion is never in a vacuum. It unleashes chaos into the world, and it puts us squarely in the path of a God who will lovingly, terrifyingly, and sovereignly run us to ground.
This is not a story about God's Plan B. God does not have a Plan B. The storm, the fish, the sailors, all of it, are part of God's unalterable Plan A to accomplish two things: the salvation of a pagan city and the sanctification of a pouting prophet. And He will accomplish His purposes, not in spite of Jonah's rebellion, but right straight through the middle of it.
The Text
Now the word of Yahweh came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying,
"Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before Me."
Yet Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, and paid its fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh.
(Jonah 1:1-3 LSB)
The Unmistakable Commission (v. 1-2)
The story begins with the foundational reality of all true religion: divine initiative. God speaks.
"Now the word of Yahweh came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, 'Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before Me.'" (Jonah 1:1-2)
The Word of the Lord is not a suggestion. It is not a polite request. It is a sovereign summons. It comes to a specific man, Jonah the son of Amittai, a prophet we know from 2 Kings 14 who had previously delivered a favorable prophecy for Israel. He was a company man. He was comfortable with a God who blessed Israel. He was about to be introduced to the God who has intentions for the whole earth.
The command has three parts: Arise, go, and call out. This is the essence of the prophetic task. It is not a call to a sedentary life of abstract contemplation. It is a call to movement, to engagement, to proclamation. And the destination is Nineveh. This is the key to understanding Jonah's rebellion. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the brutal, bloodthirsty superpower of the ancient world. They were the enemies of Israel, known for their sadistic cruelty. To an Israelite, Nineveh was the evil empire. Sending Jonah to Nineveh would be like sending a patriotic American preacher to Tehran in the middle of the hostage crisis to tell them to repent.
The reason for the mission is explicit: "for their evil has come up before Me." God is not an absentee landlord. He is the judge of all the earth, and He sees the wickedness of the nations. The sins of Nineveh had reached a tipping point. They had "come up before" Him, a phrase that echoes the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. Judgment is pending. But here is the astounding thing: where judgment is pending, God sends a prophet. He sends a warning. He provides an off-ramp. This is the mercy embedded in the threat. The call to "call out against it" is a summons to repentance. God is giving His enemies a chance to turn before He brings the hammer down.
Jonah understood this perfectly. We know from chapter 4 that the reason he fled was not because he was afraid of the Ninevites, but because he was afraid they would actually listen. He knew God was "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity" (Jonah 4:2). Jonah's problem was not a lack of theological knowledge; his problem was that he hated his enemies more than he loved God's character. He wanted to see Nineveh burn, and he knew that if he preached, God, in His infuriating mercy, might just spare them. So he decides to resign his commission.
The Calculated Disobedience (v. 3)
Jonah's response to the divine summons is immediate and decisive. He obeys the first word, "Arise," but in service of total rebellion.
"Yet Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, and paid its fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh." (Jonah 1:3 LSB)
Notice the geography of rebellion. Nineveh was about 500 miles to the east. Tarshish, likely in modern-day Spain, was about 2,500 miles to the west. This is not a momentary lapse in judgment. This is a calculated, premeditated act of defiance. Jonah gets up and heads in the exact opposite direction. He is putting as much of the known world as possible between himself and his calling.
And look at the downward spiral. He went "down" to Joppa, the port city. Then he went "down" into the ship. This physical descent mirrors his spiritual descent. When you run from God, the only direction is down. Sin always takes you down, further than you wanted to go.
He finds a ship, he pays the fare. Everything seems to be working out. The devil will always make sure there is a ship leaving for Tarshish. Circumstances are never a reliable guide to God's will. The fact that the door is open does not mean you should walk through it. Jonah's disobedience was not cheap. He "paid its fare." Sin always has a price tag. It will cost you your money, your integrity, your peace, and ultimately, your life, if not for the intervention of grace.
But the most theologically potent phrase here, repeated for emphasis, is that he fled "from the presence of Yahweh." What does this mean? Did Jonah, a prophet of God, actually believe he could find a place on the map where God was not? Did he forget the psalms that declare God's omnipresence? "Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?" (Psalm 139:7). It is unlikely he had a merely geographical lapse. More likely, he was fleeing from the "office" of the prophet. The "presence of the Lord" can refer to the special place of service and communion, like the tabernacle or the temple. Jonah was trying to quit his job. He was running from his vocation, from the place where the Word of the Lord came to him. He was essentially saying, "I refuse to be Your man in this matter. Find someone else." He was trying to escape the pressure of God's manifest presence that had placed this intolerable demand upon him.
But this is the height of folly. You cannot resign from a post you did not apply for. You cannot escape the presence of the one who made the very sea you are sailing on. Jonah's flight is an act of profound theological stupidity, but it is a stupidity we are all prone to. We think we can create little pockets of our lives, little Tarshishes, where the writ of God does not run. Our work, our finances, our sexuality, our entertainment. But God is the Lord of all of it, and His presence is as inescapable in the hold of a ship as it is in the holy of holies.
Conclusion: The God Who Pursues
Here the first scene ends. The prophet is in the boat, money paid, heading for the horizon. He has made his choice. He has rejected the call. From a human perspective, his plan is in motion. He has successfully run away.
But he has not accounted for the protagonist of this story. And the protagonist is not Jonah. The protagonist is God. Jonah thinks he is sailing away from God, but he is actually sailing straight into the next phase of God's sovereign plan for him. God is not wringing His hands in heaven, wondering what to do now that His prophet has gone rogue. God has already prepared the storm. He has already appointed the fish. He is the great playwright, and even the rebellion of His actors is written into the script.
This is a profound comfort and a terrifying warning. The comfort is for the believer. When you are in rebellion, when you are in your own boat to Tarshish, God's pursuit of you is a sign of His covenant love. He will not let you go. He will send storms into your life not to destroy you, but to arrest you. He will hurl a great wind not to sink you, but to save you. He will lovingly wreck your plans for disobedience in order to bring you back to Himself.
The warning is for anyone who thinks they can successfully defy the Almighty. You cannot. Your every attempt to flee His presence is futile. You are using His air to breathe, His matter to build your boat, and His ocean to sail upon, all in an effort to get away from Him. It is absurd. The question is not whether God's will is going to be done. The only question is whether you will be a willing participant or whether you will be brought along in the belly of a fish. Either way, God is getting you to Nineveh.
And this points us to the greater Jonah. Jesus Christ was sent by the Father on a mission to His enemies. But unlike Jonah, He did not flee. He set His face like flint toward Jerusalem, the Nineveh that would kill Him. He willingly went "down" into the earth, into the belly of the grave, for three days and three nights. And He did this so that rebels like us, every one of us with a ticket to Tarshish in our pocket, could be forgiven. He took the storm of God's wrath so that we could have peace. He was thrown into the sea of judgment so that we could be brought safely to shore. Therefore, let us abandon our foolish flights from His presence and run to the one who makes flight unnecessary.