“And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the
Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” Jonah 1:9 ESV
An interesting thought from the verse above is how will the world respond today to an honest confession of a Christian? Imagine the scenario of you boarding a cruise boat and introducing yourself to the captain and his sailing crew as a God fearing Christian! What impact would this have on them? How would they respond to your proclamation? In all likelihood, they will be politely disinterested.
In Jonah 1:10, the sailors' response to Jonah was as follows, Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!" For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he told them (ESV). Their respond suggests that they had a spiritual awakening, i.e. they saw there is God, he is alive, he is a God of purpose, and a God of wrath. R.T. Kendal, in his exposition on Jonah, wrote that this story shows the inseparable connection between the transcendent power of God and the message of the church.
Can Jonah claims credit for their spiritual awakening? No, on the contrary, Jonah was not preaching the truth voluntarily or
consciously. He was forced to make his confession. He was found out! RT Kendal further wrote that we are not going to see such an
awakening simply because we preach who God is - there must be more! Put it another way, had Jonah made this confession
without the storm at sea such confession would have been utterly meaningless; just like you introducing yourself when you boarded the cruise boat.
We must see God's timing. In other words, it is utterly folly to think that we can resurrect certain sermons or methods of the past and suppose they are going to produce results again. We need to see that the message Jonah preached was timed in such a way that, had he made the confession earlier, it would have been meaningless. It was given at a particular moment. There was the wind; there was the casting of the lots. All these things coalesced and there is no earthly way we can make these things coalesce and bring them about. The timing has to be exactly right.
We must see God's timing. In other words, it is utterly folly to think that we can resurrect certain sermons or methods of the past and suppose they are going to produce results again. We need to see that the message Jonah preached was timed in such a way that, had he made the confession earlier, it would have been meaningless. It was given at a particular moment. There was the wind; there was the casting of the lots. All these things coalesced and there is no earthly way we can make these things coalesce and bring them about. The timing has to be exactly right.
Note that Jonah did not get glory because of this awakening. What happened on the boat was despite of Jonah. There is a sense in which Jonah had
nothing to do with it. Indeed, just because the sailors encountered God, this does not justify Jonah's disobedience and running away from God. The greatest lesson we have to learn from Romans 8:28 is this: merely because something is made right does not mean it was right... we tend to justify ourselves by saying that our disobedience was justified simply because we profited.
