The Jonah Syndrome

THE JONAH SYNDROME

God wanted to save the great city of Nineveh in Assyria (about 755 years BC), so he sent Jonah, a prophet of Israel with a warning about the harm and destruction they were causing one another that would end up destroying them as a people unless they went through a spiritual conversion of their minds and hearts.
Jonah 1:1 GOD's Word came to Jonah, son of Amittai: "Up on your feet and on your way to the big city of Nineveh! Preach to them. They're in a bad way and going from bad to worse and I can't ignore it any longer." 

However, Jonah had made his own judgement about what God really needed to do with this bunch of people. Jonah was a fierce nationalist, and he could not agree with God’s appraisal of the fate of this despicable Assyrian city, and he tried to escape his responsibility by running away from it. The name Jonah in Hebrew means dove, which speaks of the Holy Spirit’s anointed message through this prophet of God. And that message was being contested by the messenger himself! Jonah's attempt to run away probably has some logic to it because he would/could have assumed that God only spoke to Israel – not so!

God showed Jonah in this experience the magnitude of his goodness and mercy to all people, not only Israel, and that as the Lord over the whole earth he could hold people accountable to his basic covenant standards of blessings and cursing whenever he wanted to. For those ignorant of his covenant, he had respect to a person’s heart of a good conscience towards God (IE, Job and his friends). And he did send prophets to other nations, to Egypt (Moses to Pharoah), and Babylon (Daniel to Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar), and Jesus reaching out to gentiles (the centurion, the woman touching the hem of his garment etc). Jonah didn’t think that way.

When Jonah ran away, he boarded a boat to sail off as far away as he could in the opposite direction to Nineveh, but a huge storm hit the ship and the crew members cried out to their gods to find out who had offended some god for this catastrophe to happen. Then they turned on Jonah because they suspected he was running away from something, hiding down in the hold of the boat. Jonah knew he was the culprit, and he knew he was trapped.
Jonah 1:8 “What have you done,” they asked, “to bring this awful storm upon us? Who are you? What is your work? What country are you from? What is your nationality?”
And he said, “I am a Jew, from Israel,I worship Jehovah, the God of heaven, who made the earth and sea.” Then he told them he was running away from his mission from the Lord.
The men were terribly frightened when they heard this. “Oh, why did you do it?” they shouted. “What should we do to you to stop the storm?” For it was getting worse and worse.
“Throw me out into the sea,” he said, “and it will become calm again. For I know this terrible storm has come because of me.”

That solved the problem for the crew, but it did much more than that. The crew of the ship all turned to God, and the anointing of the ‘dove’ worked through the resistant Jonah, nonetheless.
Jonah 1:15 Then they picked up Jonah and threw him overboard into the raging sea—and the storm stopped! The men stood there in awe before Jehovah, and they sacrificed to him and vowed to serve him.

Jonah then learned the hard way that God was more persistent and determined than he was about the fate of Nineveh. God then arranged for a second chance and another ocean voyage for Jonah, but this time underwater. He ended up in the belly of a whale after he was thrown overboard from the ship, and he cries out to the Lord in prayer.
Jonah 2:7 When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I with the voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!”
And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

God plants Jonah back at the coast from the same place where he boarded the boat to escape from his God appointed mission. He then goes to Nineveh and preaches for forty days, and everyone repents and turns to the Lord.
Jonah 3:1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out within it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them… And when God saw that they had put a stop to their evil ways, he abandoned his plan to destroy them and didn’t carry it through.

This was the last thing that Jonah had wanted to happen. Jonah wanted God to judge them and destroy them. God wanted to save them. It was God’s appointed time of spiritual challenge and godly change for Nineveh and after forty days it was accomplished.
The number forty narrative in the Bible speaks to us of appointed times of challenge and change where God manifests the divine power of his plan at work for us and with us. These number forty appointed times narratives occurred in the forty years with Moses as he led Israel through the wilderness, and with Jesus for forty days in his time of trial and temptation in his wilderness experience of overcoming the devil. 
This was an appointed time for Nineveh, and things were not going well at all for the Ninevites at the time Jonah served as a prophet. There are records of famines and domestic uprisings occurring during that time and there were wars with other nations and a run of diplomatic disasters. It has been recorded that in 755 BC there was both an earthquake and an eclipse, which were both threatening omens to the Assyrians, so a strong warning was what God wanted to give them and that was obviously what they heeded. 
Jonah gets angry with God for this.
Jonah 4: This change of plans made Jonah very angry. He complained to the Lord about it: “This is exactly what I thought you’d do, Lord, when I was there in my own country, and you first told me to come here. That’s why I ran away to Tarshish. For I knew you were a gracious God, merciful, slow to get angry, and full of kindness; I knew how easily you could cancel your plans for destroying these people.

The Jonah syndrome
What had Jonah learned in all of this and what did he not learn?
Jonah learned that God’s love was not only just for Israel but for the whole world. What he failed to learn was how to accept that and to see people the way God sees them. Jonah's reluctant mission had succeeded against all his own hopes. God loved the Assyrians, to Jonah's horror, and he became resentful and went into depression. There is no mention of Jonah ever having a change of heart in this matter. Perhaps he just ended up a cranky old man.

Jonah 4:3 So, GOD, if you won't kill them, kill me! I'm better off dead!"
GOD said, "What do you have to be angry about?"
But Jonah just left. He went out of the city to the east and sat down in a sulk. He put together a makeshift shelter of leafy branches and sat there in the shade to see what would happen to the city.
GOD arranged for a broad-leafed tree to spring up. It grew over Jonah to cool him off and get him out of his angry sulk. Jonah was pleased and enjoyed the shade. Life was looking up.
But then God sent a worm. By dawn of the next day, the worm had bored into the shade tree and it withered away. The sun came up and God sent a hot, blistering wind from the east. The sun beat down on Jonah's head and he started to faint. He prayed to die: "I'm better off dead!"
Then God said to Jonah, "What right do you have to get angry about this shade tree?"
Jonah said, "Plenty of right. It's made me angry enough to die!"
GOD said, "What's this? How is it that you can change your feelings from joy to anger overnight about a mere shade tree that you did nothing to get? You neither planted nor watered it. It grew up one night and died the next night. So, why can't I likewise change what I feel about Nineveh from anger to joy, this big city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand childlike people who don't yet know right from wrong?"

There is a number one hundred and twenty narrative in the Bible, and it applies to the work of God upon the hearts of the people of Nineveh. It speaks of life being reordered from a natural order to a new spiritual order, from ‘flesh to spirit’. God spoke about this ‘one hundred and twenty’ narrative to Noah. 
Genesis 6:2 My Spirit shall not plead the cause of man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be one hundred and twenty years
 
The number one hundred and twenty also speaks of the new order of spiritual life for mankind at Pentecost. ‘Peter stood up among the disciples and the company of persons was in all about one hundred and twenty (Acts 1:15) 

What are we to learn about the ‘Jonah syndrome’ in the troubled days in which we live? We learn that we are left with a choice to either copy Jonah's mean and awkward hatred of his worldly enemies, or to see a world greatly in need of God’s warning and God’s mercy. Jonah was a very privileged man in covenant relationship with God. He was called of God, chosen by God and given a message from God to change a nation and to change history. He finally obeyed God with a lot of arm-twisting and delivered the message and the mission was successful – BUT – he had a lousy elitist attitude. He turned gracious privilege into nasty entitlement. He was going to decide who was going to receive God’s mercy – they would be people who had a worldview most like his, and who shared his iron-clad definition of a censorious God. There are also some people today who would rather shrink God’s atoning grace than magnify it.

Our troubled world is receiving strong warnings from God in the midst of the harm and destruction it is bringing upon itself at this time. The God option is for this world to go through a spiritual conversion of minds and hearts right across the globe. The world today is experiencing both the ‘forty’ narrative of a time of spiritual challenge and godly change and the ‘one hundred and twenty’ narrative of being reordered from a natural order to a new spiritual order in Jesus. 
When by the grace of God, I awoke to the fact that I was not an outsider to the Kingdom of God but an insider in the Kingdom of God through Jesus it had nothing to do with my goodness or badness or anybody else’s opinion of me – it was between God and me through the Holy Spirit. God doesn’t change us from bad to good but from natural to spiritual through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and when we realize that we understand what Paul said about himself and all the rest of us in our basic humanity. ‘For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my human nature. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out (Romans 7:18).
That is why Paul also wrote ‘For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside.’                                                                                                                                                       

This is a time to see the world as a world that God loves, as he did Nineveh, and to see it reinstated into his Covenant blessings through Jesus Christ. This is not just a prayer FOR people, but it is also a merciful attitude TO people, which does not mean that we are not to discern between good and evil and to stand against evil. We stand with all our might against the tyrants and dictators of today who murder thousands of innocent people, but we are not to be spiritual elitists with a Jonah syndrome of being ‘King’s Kids’ trying to impress the people of this world with some kind of superior brand of spirituality – God help us! We are simply a blessed people that have been given the grace and mercy of God. Paul puts this balancing act into context when he describes how God’s love works through us in this kind of situation - ‘Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.’ (1Corinthians 13:6).
So our prayer is that we let the anointing of the dove to cause us to not only have a message of love and hope but to be that message to the people in our world.

Luke 23:34 And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”