we're going to be looking at for the next several weeks. And again, I started Jonah with a message of introduction, kind of interacting with the book. Jonah is the fifth book of the Minor Prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, and Jonah. Jonah is one of those books that the unsaved world really likes to pick on, you know, because it's like, ah, yeah, right, sure, you know. Do you know that there's actually been people who've had this happen to them in the past century, over the last hundred years, where they've been swallowed by a fish? Have you guys ever heard that before? That's true. I think it was in England where some guy had fallen into the ocean and got swallowed up by some whale or some big fish and spewed him back out sometime later. So it's happened. It's not as though it cannot happen. But people take what it looks like and say, well, that's foolish. And they make a mockery of the Bible. Well, you know, without a doubt, that's what you think about when you think of Jonah as the fifth. But the real message about Jonah is, you know, way beyond that. It's a message about God's compassion for sinful people. It's a message about how God loves all men and He is not impartial. God is impartial to all men. He wants all men to be saved. Now, we're going to look tonight at three introductory issues. Number one, we're going to look at the man. We're going to look at the context or the mood. We're going to look at the message about what really the message of Jonah is all about. And that's what we're going to see is the compassion of God. Now, when we think about Jonah, the man, we don't really know a whole lot about him. If you're looking in your Bible at chapter 1 verse 1, It says that he is the son of Amitai. We don't know a whole lot beyond the fact that in the Book of Jonah we don't know very much about him. His name means dove. We know that he was a prophet to the northern kingdom of Israel and that God sent him to go speak to a foreign nation. the kingdom of Assyria, whose capital was Nineveh. Now, contrary to what the liberals would say, Jonah is indeed factual history. And it wasn't really until about the 1900s, the 19th century, that anybody ever doubted that Jonah was actual factual history. There was a guy by the name of Eichhorn in 1832, a German liberal theologian. And Eichhorn came along and said, Oh, well, you know, obviously this never happened. And the things you have today in our country as far as liberalism that rejects the Bible, really the stuff that came along from the 19th century Germany. It began in the early to mid-1800s. It fully went throughout Germany. It went from Germany over into England, and then from England it came into America. Today we have a lot of what would fall under Christianity. Hey, Heather? Please go to the tab and tell her that she's supposed to be sitting down and not walking around. Thank you, Eric. The liberalism, you know, began in Germany, and then what ended up happening is that basically it made its way to England and then came to America. And today, you know, it fully has taken over a lot of, you know, Christian schools, Bible colleges, a lot of seminaries, are very, very liberal. Why? Well, because, you know, they started going one step at a time, and one of the first things that happened is that they attacked the inerrancy of the Bible. That's the foundation, is they attacked the inerrancy of the Bible, and it was really kind of like these critics that came to the Bible and said, Oh, you can't believe that. That's too unbelievable. Well, I've got three reasons for you why I think we should believe it. Number one, it's in the Bible. Number two, the Jews never doubted it. It was their book, and the Jews never doubted it. Number three, Jesus referred to Jonah, and Jesus said these things happened. Jesus referred to actual events, and so if Jesus said that it happened, that's good enough for me. You see that in Matthew chapter 12, verse 38, 39, 40, 41. Well, some other kinds of attacks would come along and say, well, Jonah didn't really happen way back here in the mid-700s, like about, say, 760 B.C. They would say that it really didn't happen until somewhere after the postage billage period, maybe sometime around the year 500 B.C. or something like that. And when you see these things that really do not fit with the Bible, there's always purposes behind it. It's kind of funny, too, because when you look at these liberals, No matter what the conservative position is, even if it's seemingly not a big deal, it seems like the liberals always take the other view, and they create some kind of weird view. If you've studied anything in terms of in-depth from what people have written, that's what you're going to find. Well, for those who find this story hard to swallow, Yeah, no pun intended there. If you find this story hard to follow, all you have to do is remember that this same thing has happened in our own time period as well. And I can't remember the guy which I had the information on, but there was a guy in England who this actually happened to. So if they believed it, they were there. Now, the context for when this happened, for when these things took place, was actually parallel to the spot that you find in 2 Kings. Go over in your Bible to 2 Kings chapter 14 for just a minute. 2 Kings 14 verses 23-27. Who was the king during the days of Amos? We just finished going through Amos. Who was the king during that time period? The king of Israel up in the north. Remember? Did I say 2 Kings 14 or 2 Kings 23? The king at that time was a guy by the name of Jeroboam II. And under Jeroboam II, Israel had done very, very well. They were prospering very strongly. Israel's king, that's over the northern kingdom of Israel, that northern monarchy. He was the king from the years, it appears, 793 to about 753 B.C. Notice what it says down here in 2 Kings 14.23. In the fifteenth year of Amaziah, the son of Joash, the king of Judah, Jeroboam, the son of Joash, the king of Israel, became king in Samaria. This is the northern kingdom. And he reigned for forty-one years, and he gave evil in the sight of the Lord and did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nabot, which he made Israel sin. Jeroboam, the son of Nabot, was that first king of the northern monarchy, way, way back, about a hundred and seventy years earlier. But this guy says he was evil. Verse 25. But notice what happened. Look at verse 25. He restored the boy of Israel from the infants of Hamath as far as the sea of the Arabah. So Hamath would take you way, way out into Mesopotamia. So you're going northeast And then the Sea of the Arabah will be way down there at the Dead Sea. And so what happened under Jeroboam II is Israel expanded its borders all the way out to where it had been during the days of David and Solomon. Worldly expanding. And notice what it says here in verse 25. He expanded the borders as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke through his servant, who? Jonah. This is the only other place you find Jonah mentioned. Jonah, the son of Amitai, the prophet, who was a Gap heifer. And so, this is what we see right here, is that Jonah's ministry took place sometime probably in the early part of Jeroboam's reign, and I would say that you probably have his prophecies that are spoken of right here. When it says that Jeroboam predicted that Israel was going to expand during Jeroboam's reign, he probably made those predictions sometimes around 780 B.C., and then when the whole deal with the fish took place, that was probably about 20 years later, maybe about 760 B.C., and he'll see why as we look later on. So this would basically be about the same time that you also have Amos. who we just finished looking at, and Hosea, because Amos and Hosea were all about the same time period as Jonah right here. God was sending His word in a very strong way to those people up in the north. You had all of these prophets coming and saying, God is calling us to repent. God is telling us to turn from our sins. They didn't want to listen. They did not want to listen. Well, we know from this passage that Jonah himself came from the north, because Gath-Peper was a town that was about three miles north of Nazareth, up there in Galilee. So that's up in the northern part. So remember how Amos came from way in the south, from Tekoa? Amos was actually a southerner. He belonged to Judah. Jonah, on the other hand, actually came from the north. He was a northerner. By the way, it's interesting. Remember in John chapter 7, verse 52? that when the Pharisees were talking about Jesus, and they knew that Jesus came from Galilee, they said, check the Scriptures. And they said, see to it that no prophet comes from Galilee. Do you remember when they said that? They were wrong. Jonah did. But anyway, Jonah came from up there in the north in Galilee. Well, we've seen in these verses, verses 23 and 27, that Jonah had prophecies that were recorded in Scripture, but some of them were not recorded. Namely, the ones that weren't recorded were the fact that Israel's borders were going to expand. Well, remember what was taking place during the time period of Gerald Warren II. It had been almost about a hundred years of time period. If you go from, let's say, 760 B.C. and you go back to about like 860 B.C. or so, they had had about a hundred years of oppression from a very mean and cruel people. What country was that? Do you remember? Who was the country of big bad boys on the block, the bullies? Assyria. They were the Assyrians. That was the Assyrians. Assyria was real bad. Now, they were about a thousand miles away. If you went to the northeast, Assyria was about a thousand miles away. The capital was Nineveh, which is what you see right there in, of course, in Jonah chapter 1, verse 1, or 1, verse 2, where God says, Arise and go to Nineveh, the great city. That was the capital city of the Assyrians. and it was located on the east bank of the Tigris River. The very word city, you can actually find it in Genesis chapter 10, right after the Flood, that that was one of the first cities of humanity after the Flood. It was built by the guy whose name was Nimrod. Nimrod was not a good guy either. He was a very godless man. It says that Nimrod, do you remember the expression it uses about him? He was a mighty what? Mighty hunter before the Lord. In other words, the idea is that he was just kind of like in God's face. He was just a real godless macho man kind of guy who was in God's face. He was the one that founded Nineveh way back in Genesis chapter 10 verse 11, and Assyria had always been a pagan town. The ancient historians and classical writers say that it was the largest city in the ancient world, which you kind of see described there in chapter 3, verse 3, where it says, And people aren't really sure exactly what that means, if it means three days to walk around it, or three days to, you know, basically cover all the bases to walk through the whole city. It was a big city, though. Look down in the chat for 4 verse 11. It says, God says, Should I not have compassion on none of the great cities in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand? I'm talking about kids. many children that are probably two years of age. That's a big population. We don't know how many people were in Nineveh, but it was a very, very big city. Now, if you look at this ancient city right here, they were almost unstoppable when it came to their oppression. In about the year 860 B.C., they had begun to invade Israel. And if you're looking in 2 Kings, in fact, about a chapter from what we were looking at a minute ago, in 2 Kings 13, it says that they have only a little bit of bullying. In 2 Kings 13, verse 5, it says that God gave Israel a deliverer so that they escaped from under the hand of the Arameans. the sons of Israel lived in their tents formerly. You had two groups of people that were oppressing Israel very heavily during that time. One of them was the Assyrians, then the other one was the Syrians. Syrians were their brotherly neighbors, also called the Arameans. So Israel was basically, for about a hundred years, you had all of this oppression, and they didn't have any kind of breeding room, except for just a little bit of breeding room that God gave them. Well, it was under Jeroboam II where they really started to get some power back. Jeroboam came to the throne in about 793, and what happened is, as we saw in chapter 14 of 2 Kings, is that God took and He expanded the borders out and gave them a lot of territory that they had lost before. And what's interesting is this, okay, and here's what I want you to see, is that as Israel expanded in power, The only reason why they were able to do that is because Assyria was having its own problems at that same time. It's not coincidental. You know, it was all part of God's plan to do the things. Now, when you read 2 Kings, what it says is, God gave them rest from their enemies because he was having pity on them. He was having pity on them because they were getting beaten down from their enemies left and right. And God said, boy, this is horrible. I'm going to take and I'm going to give them a little brooding room, and I'm going to give them protection and let them expand their borders. Now, if you were looking at that from the human perspective, you'd say, oh, Well, I see what's happening here. You know, this country has fallen apart. The Soviet Union has fallen apart. That's the only reason why America is doing so strongly right now. You know what? There's a God who's behind everything that happens. Don't think that He's not. He is behind world affairs, and God is behind what is happening right here. Now, you have to understand that Assyria, when you look at this nation of Assyria, they were almost relentless in their drive to exterminate and to wipe out other people. They were very, very, very... One of the kings, whose name was Shalmaneser III, he came and he attacked even in the time of Ahab, who was king from about 874 to 853, which is only about, well, we're talking here about maybe eighty years earlier. Shalmaneser was one of the first ones who really started coming and attacking, and he attacked Ahab, and in 853 B.C. there was a very fierce battle on what was called, at the place called Karkari. Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R, Q-A-R. But, you know what, they suffered some real heavy losses, and so what happened is that Shalmaneser went back to Assyria, and basically they held them off. Well, you can actually read about these things, and the reason why we know about it is because last century there was a black obelisk you know, like a big stone that was discovered in the palace in, I guess it would have been in Nineveh, where they discovered this one. And on this obelisk it describes all of the things that happened in this battle. And the king of Assyria was talking about the way that he went and he did battle. He didn't really talk about the fact that they suffered a lot of casualties and they weren't able to really attack and conquer their people, but he described the things that happened right here. You go all the way back to 1 Kings chapter 21, 22. Listen, all of these things that you're talking about, what, 2,800 years ago, are recorded. I mean, this is real life history right here. Well, there was another black obelisk that was found as well. There's two of them that have been found in these Assyrian palaces. And on this second one, the same guy, Shalmaneser, he came back a second time. The first time was 853. Then he came back a second time in about the year 814, and he attacked again. And if you look at this black obelisk, it has four sides on it, and then there are rows that show the people he conquered. And one of the kings that is mentioned on there is Jehu, the king of Israel. This was discovered in 1846. It's in the British Museum. And on this you can see it says, Jehu paid me tribute. Jehu paid me taxes. And it shows the king of Israel, the king of the northern part, bowing down before the king of Assyria and paying him tribute, which was the first time that a Jewish king paid tribute to a foreign power. Listen, Assyria was relentless. They would stop at nothing to destroy and to bring people down. I said that was 814. Actually, I think that was probably about 841 is when that took place. if the historians are right. Well, listen, the point is this. Assyria was fierce, and Israel was being beaten down to the ground. Well, God saw all of these things happening. This is what 2 Kings says. God looked down at His people, and God said, I'm going to give them a little breathing room. So what happened is this, okay? One of the kings of Assyria, his name was Adad-Mirari, died in 782. In 782, he died, and when he died, he was a powerful king, and that basically left a vacuum in the power until about 745, when another guy by the name of Tigris-Pileser came to the throne. So you had a gap of about roughly forty years, thirty-seven, thirty-eight years, in which they did not have a strong king. Nineveh, Assyria, did not have a strong king during that time period. Nineveh, what happened is that they had a very bad famine in the year 765, and also another very bad famine in the year 759. So you have no strong king, you have two famines, and 763 B.C. there was a solar eclipse. You know, these people were pretty superstitious, right? You have a famine, you have a solar eclipse. Furthermore, they had internal weakness and all types of rebellions that were taking place, and from the outside they had different, there were about three different tribal groups out of the mountains that were coming and attacking them. So you had internal problems, you had external problems, they didn't have a strong king, Things were falling apart. Well, listen, now here's what I'm getting to. The result of it is that Assyria as a nation, and Nineveh, the capital city, at this point was very weak when Jonah came along. Basically, they'd been getting hurt left and right. They'd been getting whipsawed from problems. Consequently, that's when Israel expanded its borders. That was the very time period when God used Jeroboam II What did I say? Gerald Owen II. I saw an article. I told you about it before. It was called Gerald Owen Clinton. It was in World Magazine, and they were comparing Clinton to Joe Obama II by saying, you know, it's a time period of great prosperity and expansion. And yet, the whole nation of Israel was falling apart morally, just like our country is as well. But here's what happened. The country was doing well, and now was also the time period, this would be kind of a context, when Jonah came along, and when God sent Jonah to Nebra. By the way, Jonah probably didn't look too good when he came to them. After being three days in the belly of an animal, the gastric acids, You know, his face was probably bleached and white and eaten up. I don't know exactly, but he probably didn't look too good. So you have some guy coming to you, and you've already had eclipses and famines, and he says, God ain't going to get you. That's why they listen. I mean, they were only listening to the guy when he came. This is the back off, and it kind of helps you to understand. So what was the message? Here's our third part. We see the man, Jonah. We see the man, you know, the context for what was happening. What about the message? What is the message? You guys tell me, I'm going to ask you a question. What's the message of Jonah? What's that? Okay, that's what he told them. What's the ethical message? If we want to take something home, in other words, if we say, what does this book tell us? What's the message of Jonah? That was really what God told them. What's the message? What's the ethical message? Repentance, and with repentance, if you have repentance, it's God's compassion. It's the compassion of God. This is really the main point. Now, there's another one or two other points that we will see as well in just a minute. But the big, big message here is compassion. Now, here is why this is particularly relevant. Israel hated these guys. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you hate these people if these people were coming in and killing your cousins and your brothers and your family? Bill says, no, I would never love you. Listen, the one thing Israel, as well as many other foreign powers, didn't want, Israel did not want to see these guys saved. You know what they wanted? They wanted to see these guys wiped off the face of the map. There was an article in today's Daily Breeze. It says, Two men found guilty in women's death. And in 1993, there was a murder. And this article says, Ending a family's long wait for justice, two men were convicted Tuesday in the 1993 robbery and murder of a North Hills woman. And she picked up her daughter from a Bible study in Northridge. L.A. Superior Counter Judge No, it's an addictive drug. At TNA, Michael Moore, 25, of robbing and fatally shooting Lori Miles, 37, as she sat in her car with her son, who was nine. The getaway driver, LeCedric Johnson, 23, was also convicted of robbery and murder in the case. Miles' family exploded in cries of joy and relief as the guilty verdicts were read. Her brother, Larry Hicks, had to be led from the courtroom by a bailiff. The repeated guilty verdicts kept him ahead, he said, hit him in the heart like a ton of bricks, he says, until he finally had to cry out. Hicks said, let's just say that I've been praying God's will, or Miles' will, or Philip Miles said outside the courtroom. He said, may you lend your dead wife's family in prayers. We thank you, Lord, that you honored your will, that you are a fair God and a just God. You're a fair God and a just God. Do you think these guys wanted to see these guys get off? You know what they wanted? They wanted condemnation. They wanted justice. They wanted to see these guys fried. You know, wouldn't you? If somebody killed your wife, your mother? That's what we were crying out for. This is the way that Israel looked at Nineveh and Assyria. The last thing that Israel wanted was to see these guys get saved. But look at Jonah chapter 1. What did he say? Chapter 1 verse 2. Jonah, alive, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come before me. Jonah, I want you to go preach a sermon for them and call them to repentance. Would you?" I don't know. I mean, let's just think about Jonah, because, you know, it's easy to basically slam Jonah for not obeying God. But, you know, you have to understand the hatred that these guys would have felt about it. You know, we made a video out there in Kosovo. You know how in Kosovo, of course, what was happening is that the Serbians were killing and driving out the ethnic Albanians. Though now, you probably, I don't know, how many hundreds of thousands did they drive out? 500,000 or something like that? I don't know what the number is, but now NATO has put a stop to Serbia, the Serbian military, and the Albanians are coming back into their home area of Kosovo. You know what the Albanians are now doing to the Serbians who are left? They're going back and they're burning their houses. And most of the people that are still there, the Serbians that are still there, you know what, are old people. A lot of them are old and just, you know, weak and helpless people. But, you know, what these Albanians saw, they saw their daughters raped, their, you know, families tortured and killed. Do you think these guys want to see any pity on the Serbians right now? No way. You know what they want? They want blood. They want revenge. They want to get some satisfaction, some revenge, and this is what Israel felt towards Assyria. Israel hated Assyria, and they wanted their destruction. Now, listen. Destruction of Assyria at this point was not God's plan. Would God destroy Assyria? Yeah. Keep your spot in Jerusalem, and go over two books to Nahum for just a second. You've got Jonah and then Micah and then Nahum. Look at Nahum 1.1, the oracle of Nineveh. Nahum was prophesying probably about a hundred years later, roughly in about 650 B.C., and in the book of Nahum, what God says is, I'm going to bring Nineveh down. It's about a hundred years later after Jonah prophesied. In 612 BC, what happened is that the Babylonians came along with the help of the Persians and the Medes, and the Babylonians and the Medes and the Persians came together and they basically destroyed Assyria and put an end to it once and for all. But at this point right here in human history, that was not God's plan. And God's plan was to preserve Assyria for just a minute. Now, I want to ask you a question, okay? We see the way Israel felt about Assyria, and God says to Jonah, Jonah, go and bring them to repentance. Jonah says, no, no, no. What about you? How would you and I respond? How would we feel about somebody who did something to one of our family members? Would we want to see their salvation, or would we want to see them burned at Hell? Now, put yourself in the position of Israel. Tell me why you're an Israelite. Should you think of yourself as being any better than the Assyrians? I don't know. Remember what we learned from the Book of Amos? How about the Book of Amos, chapter 4, verse 4, that they were filled with idolatry? They had abandoned the law of Moses, and they had all these false places of worship. Amos 2, verse 6 says that they were oppressing the poor and weak. even their own people. They were oppressing their poor people, their weak people, putting them down. Amos chapter 8 verse 4, it says they were crooked in their business dealings. They were religious, but they were far from God. But didn't Israel have the Word of God? They had the Bible, and yet they weren't following the Bible. So could we say that Israel was any worse? Was Israel any worse than the Assyrians? I think they probably were. because they had the truth, and they weren't following it. And God spoke to them, and God kept sending all of these prophets, and they wouldn't listen, and so what we find out is this, that Israel really wasn't any better, in fact, they were worse. Well, remember that God had been sending prophets to the nation of Israel for hundreds of years, decades and hundreds of years. They weren't responding, they weren't responding, and so finally what God is going to do is God is going to give them an object lesson, and I think that's what you have right here in the book of is an object lesson to Israel. This is one of the purposes of the book, is to be an object lesson about Israel's destiny. Turn your Bibles to the New Testament. Go to the book of Matthew for just a minute. Turn over to Matthew chapter 12. Remember what happened when Jesus was being opposed by the religious leaders, the Pharisees. In chapter 12, verse 38. Now, if you go back just a few verses in chapter 12, In verse 22, it was brought to Jesus, a demon-possessed man who was blind and dumb. Jesus was here with man, so that he spoke. This man who was demon-possessed, Jesus cast the demon out of him. He couldn't speak. Now he can speak and now he can hear. And all the multitude said, this isn't the plan of David, is it? Verse 24, but the Pharisees heard it and they said, this man cast out demons by the altar ball, by the prince of demons. In other words, this guy's miracles really are satanic. And Jesus, He began reviling them for their misdeeds. Now look at verse 38. Then some of the scribes and the Pharisees answered Jesus, saying, Teacher, we want to see a sign from you. Wait a minute! What did you just do? Cast out a demon. Gave a guy back his speech. That guy couldn't speak. Now they're saying, we want to see a sign. Jesus says in verse 39, and even in an adult generation craves for a sign, and that no sign will be given to him but what? The sign of Jonah, the prophet. What's the sign? Well, just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a sea monster, so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. God says, You know what? You want to have a sign? All right, here it is. Three days, I'm going to raise Christ from the dead. He'll come back out of the grave. Just as Jonah was three nights, three days in the belly of the whale, that's going to be your sign of who I am. Jesus says, You want to know who I am? God will show you by this, by the resurrection. Look, the men of Nineveh shall stand up with this generation, in other words, the generation of Jews who are living in the time of Christ, the men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment, and they, the men of Nineveh, will condemn this generation. Why? Because they regretted that the future of Jonah. Behold, something greater than Jonah is here. What God is telling us is that the Gentiles were more righteous than the Jews. You see? to Gentiles, these men, these wicked cruel people from Assyria, are more righteous than God's covenant nation. And that was true, listen, that was true back in Jonah's day, but it's also a picture of even the very time of Christ itself. God's people were so far off base right here. And this is really one of the methods that God wants right here. So the question is, how should Israel view other nations? To whom God wants to show mercy? Listen, they should be glad that God wants to save other people, don't you think? Shouldn't you and I feel glad when we see even a convicted killer confess Christ and say that they had put their faith in Jesus and become a Christian? Or should we get angry because that person got saved and say, I hope they burn in hell? You know what? It's a hard thing for us to do that, right? And to say, I want that person to have God's mercy. But who are we? Are we any better? We aren't any better. We are not any better. We have to remember this. God loves all men universally, and this is really what Jonah is telling us. You know, we look down here in chapter 4. Back there in verses 10 and 11, when God says, look, shouldn't I have compassion on this city? There's all these children, there's animals, people who don't even really have a part with some of the sin that's taking place. God is a compassionate God, and He wants men to be saved. And that's one of the messages. That's really the prime thrust of Jonah, is God is a God who has compassion on all men. Now, there's a second message that goes along with this as well. Hey, you guys. Stop that. No talking. You're being too loud. Does Jordan really have anything as far as predictive prophecy in it? Not really. I mean, it's not as though you're looking at Isaiah with making all these predictions, but the place where Jonah kind of serves for us is in the sense that it is a type. There are types in the book. In other words, things that point ahead, pictures that point ahead to what God is going to do in the latter days. For example, you saw that in the case of Israel. Look at Jonah chapter 2 for a minute. Chapter 2 and verses 7 and following. Look at what Jonah says. Jonah, in this prayer, he's sinking in the ocean. He says in verse 7, I was thinking away, while I was thinking away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to thee and to thy holy temple. Look at verse 8. Those who regard vain idols forsake their faithfulness. When I translated that verse, I thought, who's he talking about? Those who forsake, who regard vain idols, forsake their faithfulness. Who do you think Jonah's talking about when he says that? That prayer was prayed while Jonah was in the well. Actually, it's when he was sinking in the ocean. I mean, he was drowning, and that's when God saved him with the fish. But when Jonah's talking about regarding vain idols, who's he talking about? Well, I thought, is he talking about the people who were on the boat? In other words, those sailors that he was with? Didn't really seem to fit the context. I think two-thirds. Jonah, I believe, in a certain sense, and I'll be careful with this, but Jonah, in a certain sense, is actually representing Israel, the nation. Okay? Because what happened is that Jonah had God's Word. And I'm not, this isn't something that I came up with. This is something that, you know, theologians, some theologians have, you know, suggested, and I think he's right. Jonah, didn't Jonah have God's Word? God said, Jonah, go to Nineveh. Jonah said, no, I'm not. I'm going to go the other direction. I'm going to go to Spain. I'm going to go to Tarshish. So Jonah was somebody who had God's Word, and resisted God's Word, and went the opposite direction. The consequence of that is that Jonah came into chastisement by the hand of God. Chastisement in the midst of Gentiles. And so he says in verse 8, the ones who regard vain idols forsake their faithfulness. That word faithfulness is the word, root word is hesed. The word, it's a covenant term. It talks about covenant faithfulness, like a Hasidic Jew. Covenant faithfulness. So the person that follows idols, guess what? They're rejecting The true God, God, God is love. They're rejecting the God who is the covenant-keeping God. And Jonah is talking about himself. I may have done this, but guess what? That's what the nation itself is doing at the same time. And some people like Charles Feinberg believe, and I think he's right as I kept thinking about this, is that Jonah himself is actually, in a limited sense, is a picture of what happens to the whole nation for rejecting the knowledge of God, for resisting God's Word. And that's what you see here, is that the nation is resisting God's will, and the Gentiles, OK, they're more righteous than the Jews. Look over in chapter 1, verse 10 for just a minute. It says, the men, talking about the sailors on the boat, became extremely frightened. And Joel said, I'm a Hebrew. They're not. They became frightened. And I said, what are you doing? You know what? They had more fear of God than Jonah did. Look in verse 16, chapter 1. It says that after Jonah ran into the sea and the sea stopped, the men feared the Lord, feared Jehovah greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord, and they made vows. But from chapter 3, verse 5, when Jonah goes to Nineveh, it says, Jonah preached. And verse 5 says, Then the people of Nineveh believed in God, and they called a fast and put on sackcloth. You know what you see with Jonah? The Gentiles, these pagans, are more righteous than Jonah is. The captain, when he came into the bottom of the boat, in chapter 1 verse 6, everybody on the deck praying because of the storm. All the sailors and the captains, and they're praying, saying, Oh God, wherever you are, oh God. Each one praying to his own God. Where is Jonah? He was asleep in the bottom of the boat. And the captain comes in on verse 6 and says, What do you mean? Sleeping? Come on! Pray to your God! Listen, this is a picture here of what would happen to Israel, the fact that Israel was resisting God's Word. And God was going to take Israel and God was going to chastise Israel to bring Israel back to Himself. So that's one of the other kinds of things that point the head. Of course, as we have already seen, Israel is also pictured here in the time of Jesus, right? Because who did Israel represent in the case of later on, when Jesus was there? Remember how a minute ago we painted the preaching? Guess what? Israel did not. Who did we paint in Jonah's day? Israel. So Jonah went all the way to Nineveh. When he finally made it to Nineveh, he preached to the Assyrians. The Assyrians repented, but guess what? What happened when people like Amos and Jonah and Hosea were preaching to the God's own covenant people? Did they repent? No. The Gentiles are more righteous than the covenant people. And then, of course, the third way, so there's kind of three ways that it points ahead, or in some ways prophetic. One of the ways is with the fact that Israel is being pictured by Jonah. Number one, in Jonah's day, But also in the days of Christ, and then also you have the resurrection, how Jonah himself was, you know, a picture or a type of the fact that Christ would be in the belly of her whale, and that's what Jesus said. There's a parallel here, there's a foreshadowing of the fact that that Jonah was foreshadowing the type of Jesus Christ in the resurrection. Well, okay, this is all kind of introductory things. I know we didn't really get to spend a lot of time in the text of Jonah, but there's a whole lot of background, and what I wanted to try to do is to bring some things for you guys that you might never have a chance to study or see about some of the context of what's happening. It kind of gives you a great feeling for what's happening here. What's the implications for us as we close? Well, I think there's a couple. God has compassion for dying souls. Ezekiel chapter 18, verse 23, God says, Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked? He says, No, I do not. God says, I don't take pleasure in men dying with grief and go to hell. He says in verse, Ezekiel 18, He says, He says, rather that they should turn from his ways and live. And Luke 8, verse 132, he says, I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies. Therefore, he says, repent and live. God wants men to be saved. God wants men to be saved. Remember what John 3, verse 16 says, Ted? It says, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Verse 17, where God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. God wants men saved. The Bible tells me that. Some people say, oh, God only has His plan for the elect, and I believe in predestination. I believe that God has His elect who are going to be saved, because the Bible teaches it. And they'll say, well, God only wants the elect saved, and the others, well, basically He predestined them to be damned to hell. That's God's plan. You know what? That's not what the Bible teaches. The Bible says that God has compassion for all men. He wants all men saved. Now how that fits together as predestination, I don't know. But that's what the Bible teaches. And we have to take both doctrines together. We have to see all of those things. Listen, God has a heart. God has a heart for people who are perishing. Shouldn't we? What are you doing about it? OK, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Not personally, but I'm going to put you on the spot. Are you doing something about the fact that God wants people saved? You know what? You've got to step out of your comfort zone to do that, don't you? You've got to take a risk that this person is going to say, you know, look, man, don't bother me with that stuff. The other night, last Friday, when I went down there to that fair at Lomita, it took me a few minutes. When I was first there, I was kind of like, you know, I should just start walking up and, you know, start, you know, kind of breaking into people's you know, space. And I was a little bit hesitant. I confessed. And then after a few minutes I said, you know, what am I doing? And I just went out and I said, hey, hi, my name's Tim. I'm a pastor at Anaheim Baptist Church. Handled a crack in a Bible, or a brochure, and I said, you know, you ever read the Bible before? And, you know, that was kind of it, to break the ice for myself. And once I did it, you know, I was like, who cares what people think? You want to approach people with respect and all of these other things. But listen, what I'm saying is that you have to step out of your comfort zone. Be willing to take a no. I've had a lot of no's in the life insurance business. You know what? And you never make a sale if you don't go up and start asking people to buy, right? You've got to ask people for the sale. And you're not going to lead a person to Christ unless you go up and, so to speak, you ask for the sale. And you do that by opening up the Bible and bringing in the knowledge of Christ. So slip out of your comfort zone and listen. And here's the thing, in terms of attitude, when you see other people and you say, oh man, you know, look at that person. Don't have the attitude, that person is not in need of mercy. I'm going to close with an article. How many of you know who painted The Last Supper? Anybody know? The artist? You know that famous one? Leonardo da Vinci. It's a true story. Leonardo da Vinci, a noted Italian artist and painter. And the message here is about this. It's about our heart towards other people, not judging by what they look like. But remembering this, we're the same. That's our heart as well. If it weren't enough for God's grace in our life, that would be us. Leonardo da Vinci, a noted Italian artist, painted The Last Supper. And the time of Joseph's completion was seven years. The figures representing the Twelve Apostles and Christ Himself were painted from living persons. The life model for the painting of the figure of Jesus was chosen first. When it was decided that Da Vinci would paint this great picture, hundreds and hundreds of young men were carefully viewed in an endeavor to find a face and personality exhibiting innocence and beauty, free from the scars and signs of dissipation caused by sin. Finally, after weeks of laborious search, a young man, nineteen years of age, was selected as a model for the portrayal of Christ. For six months, da Vinci painted on the production of this eluding character of this famous painting. During the next six years, da Vinci continued his labors on this sublime work of art. One by one, fitting persons were chosen to represent each of the eleven apostles, both being left for the painting of the figure representing Judas Iscariot as the final task of this masterpiece. This was the apostle, you remember, who betrayed the Lord for thirty pieces of silver. So at least when she searched for a man with a hard cow's face, with a countenance marked by scars of avarice, deceit, hypocrisy and crime, to think that now would delineate a character who would betray his best friend. After many discouraging experiences and searching for the type of person required to represent Judas, word came to Da Vinci that a man whose appearance fully met this requirement had been found in a dungeon in Rome, sentenced to die for a life of crime and murder. Da Vinci made the trip to Rome at once, and this man was brought out from his imprisonment in a dungeon, led out into the light of the sun, and there Da Vinci saw before him a dark, swarthy man. His long, shaggy and unkempt hair sprawled over his face, which betrayed a character of viciousness and complete ruin. At least the famous painter had found the person he wanted to represent the character of Judas in his painting. By special permission from the king, this prisoner was carried to Milan where the picture was being painted. For months he sat before da Vinci at a point of hours each day as a gifted artist. diligently continued his task of transmitting to a painting this base character representing the prayer and betrayal of our Savior. At last, he finished his last stroke.