You're on a cruise, and a cruise should be relaxed. This is not preaching. This is not a session on counseling. It's a relaxed look at the book journal. And he was trying to steal a few of my lines there about being on the water or under the water. But really, what I wanted to get you to understand was that since you're on the water, you can realize that everything that Jonah did on land was wrong. He'd do anything when he was on land that was right. He did a little bit better on the water, and we won't even talk about under the water. Not when we're on a cruise. Don't even want to think about that. But the book of Jonah is an interesting book. And what I find most interesting is that when you ask anybody, what's Jonah about, what is the answer? Come on. The whale. Jonah and the whale. Right. And that's not what the book's about. Do you know there are only two verses in the whole book that have anything to do with the fish? And that's what it's called, not a whale, a fish, in both the Hebrew and the Greek when Jesus refers to it. So what do you think maybe the book is about? Got any ideas? If it's not about Jonah and the fish, that was an incident, that was one part of it, but really quite incidental in many respects. What is the book about? Just to speak up loudly. I can't hear. You've got to speak very loudly. What? Doing God's will. Obeying Him when He tells you to do something. How you do something? No, when He tells you to do something. Oh, when God tells you obedience. You're talking about obedience. Yeah. Well, there's that. There's that. But that really isn't. what the book's about either. God's love for the nations? Pardon me? God's love for the nations? Yeah, there's something about evangelism, God's love for unbelievers. That's there. But that's not really what the book's about. Maybe humility. that Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh and preach to those people? Humility? Well, we may come to see why he didn't want to go. It may not be exactly humility, but we'll find out. The fruit of repentance, what happens when there is repentance? The fruit of repentance, what happened to that country when the animals fasted and had clothes, sackcloth put on them as well as the people? Well, yeah. That's part of it, but it's not really what the book's about. Mainly about, it's about all these things, but not mainly about these things. Man can't afford the sovereignty of God. Sovereignty of God. We're getting closer. That's true. And I'm going to talk about an aspect of the sovereignty of God that occurs again and again in this book. Was Jonah a missionary? This was a reluctant missionary for sure. But even though it talks about that, that's not the principal thing that it talks about. There's one thing in this short book that just happens over and over and over again. Ultimately, we'll try. Who's talking now? You're back again. Try again. Try again any time. Now we're getting close. We're getting very close. In fact, we could even put that in different terms if I want to. But let's just keep at it. Maybe we can pull it out. God's decree? God's decree is certainly there behind everything that ever happened, anywhere, at any time, in any place, with anybody. That's for sure. So we can't eliminate that. Providence? Who said it? Where are you? That's it. This book is about the providence of God. Why'd you say that? That's about the only thing left. There's a lot left. This is about the providence of God. Six times in this book, this short book, we either read that God appointed God decided. God did something else. He appointed, first of all, the hurricane, the storm. Then he appointed a fish. Then he appointed what? We skip a little bit, and then we Pardon me? The storm. Well, I got that earlier. Yeah, that was one of the first ones. That plant to grow up? Pardon me? That plant to grow up? Yeah, the plant. And that plant, we're not sure what it was, but probably castor oil plant of all things. Some of you who are as old as I am remember what castor oil was all about. You had to take it when you were a kid. It was the most horrible stuff in the world. Anyway, that and he appointed what next? The worm. Right. Well, we'll get into that. And what happened after that? He appointed something else. The scorching Sirocco wind. Look at all the things that God appointed. That means that God was at work in his world directly doing things. That's what so few people believe. That's what providence is all about. People don't talk about providence enough. I think that it's one of the most important things if you're talking about counseling, just to put a little counseling note in here, one of the most important things you can talk about. So that if a problem occurs and you're counseling somebody, you want to say to people, if they're believers, you want to say, look, God is in this problem. He's not way off somewhere. He's right here. He's in the problem. He's brought it about for some reason or other. And He's up to something in the problem. And not only that, he's up to something good in the problem, Romans 8.28. And not only that, you've got something to look forward to, if God's at work. So instead of regretting, here's something that you can look forward to in terms of, perhaps you want to put it in these terms, a joint venture with God into the future. You're counseling a person. These are the things he needs to know, that God isn't working this problem. You may not see all the answers in this life, or even right away, but you may see some of them right away, what he's up to and what he's trying to do. But the fact is, he is up to something. So, this book is about God's providence. How God is there at every stage of the game. He is directing what's happening. And that's what we've got to see. We just had a very serious problem down in Haiti, or up in Haiti. I don't know where it is from here, wherever we are from here. I don't know where we are. But it's a pretty serious problem in Haiti. And I have heard a few commentators and even some Christians talk about this on television. And they danced all around the problem. They were unwilling to say that God was in this problem, that God was doing something in this problem, and so on. They would not say that. They danced all around it. They tried to put it in other words, other terms, They played around with it, but they wouldn't come out and admit it. God was in that problem. He is in that problem right now. He's at work in that problem. He's doing something there. I don't know what he's up to. It's not my business to know. That's his business. But I know that he's involved. And that's providence. Providence. It's a very important doctrine that's been neglected in the Church of Jesus Christ. So, now that we know what the book's about, let's go home. Let's enjoy the cruise. No, I guess we better go on because we have a little more time left here on this watch that was so graciously loaned to me, I hope. You don't want me to keep this, do you? It's not good enough. Let's start talking about the book itself. We won't even get into the story at this point. But you know, is it a fishy story is a question we've got to ask at least because the fish does occur and everybody talks about the fish and the critics say impossible. Absolutely impossible. Couldn't have happened. Because this, that, and the other thing. They focus on the fish, which of course is not the thing to do. But since in Mark, or rather Matthew, change that to Matthew rather than Mark there if you're following the outline, which you don't have to follow just as well as you don't because I probably won't. In Matthew 12.40, It agrees that it's a large fish. The Greek word there is a very special word for fish. What's the normal word for fish in Greek? You all know it. It's on every car, a Christian's car. What is it? Ichthus. Well, this is not ichthus. This is a very different word, ketos. And ketos means a very large, a monstrous kind of fish. In classical Greek, it speaks about sea monsters and all those kinds of things. So what it's talking about is a very large fish. That's what this word means. We might call it a monstrous fish, if you want. Now, historically then, Has Jonah been the only one swallowed by a whale, or by a fish, or by whatever it might have been? Well, we don't know. We've got this story about the fella down near the Falkland Islands. Mr. Bartley, who so many people claimed, and then of course it was disclaimed by the sea captain's wife, but then she had her reasons and other people had their reasons, and it's been argued, right? It's been argued, left? But it's probably true that this man was swallowed by some kind of a whale and got through it, came through it. At any rate, there are all kinds of suggestions as to what this fish might have been. It could have been a whale. It could have been the dogfish, which is in the Mediterranean and conceivably could swallow a human being. Actually, we don't know any more about what kind of fish this was than we know what kind of fruit it was in the Garden of Eden. That it was an Adam's apple always makes me concerned a little bit, and I'm sure it concerned you, Jerry Adams. I personally think it was a kumquat, but we'll let that go, because we don't know what kind of fruit, we don't know what kind of fish. And it doesn't matter, does it? because it could have been a fish that simply God doctored up the way he wanted to so as to do what he wanted done. On the other hand, it could have just been very much. a kind of fish that's in the sea somewhere. And I believe the latter is true. I don't think God manufactures something special because all through here we see him using nature in a providential fashion, which is part of what we're hoping to learn about the matter of providence. Now, of course, there are these other emphases of the book, and you have mentioned them. God's grace to a heathen city. God's grace to the city of Nineveh. And we'll talk about Nineveh, because you need to know a little bit about it in order to understand why Jonah did what he did. And the setting right of the thinking of a disobedient prophet. God worked on Jonah. And God did things with Jonah to make him think straight about this matter. And we'll probably get there when we get to the end of the book, to set his thinking straight. And also, nobody mentioned this, that this became the occasion for a discussion that Jesus had later on. Now in God's providence, he's arranging things from beginning to end. Don't forget, when he's dealing with Jonah, he knows what Jesus is going to be saying years later about the story of Jonah. And as Jonah had to do with the proclamation of destruction to a heathen city which repented, Then Jesus speaks later on about how Jesus brought a proclamation to Jerusalem and to the Jewish nation that they were in serious trouble and they should repent. But they didn't. Unlike Nineveh, Jesus says, they did not repent. And we know what happened in 70 AD. Just 40 years later, the way Jonah talked about Nineveh. Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Forty years, forty days, God seems to work in forties. And there are forty days, forty nights that Jesus fasted and so forth. Forty seems to be a transitional period in the Bible from one thing to another. But now let's think about the book because it's always attacked for being merely some kind of a story that a storyteller got up to make a purpose. We don't think it's fictional. We think that it's true. Because Jesus referred to it as being true, it must be. It's not a folktale. It's not an allegory. There's nothing allegorical about this book. It's straightforward narrative. It's not a parable. It contains a parable. The parable, what is the parable that it contains? The parable of the plant and the worm, which is kind of a parable which you have to figure out. It's not explained. It's like the parables of Jesus that he gives you and lets you hang. You know, many of the parables of Jesus are designed that way to make you think. He tells the parable and then he Stops, and he just lets you hang there mid-air, trying to figure out what he's talking about. Jesus wants us to think. That's one of the reasons why people ought to study the Bible more than they do. What they do is just read the Bible rather than study it. And if you don't study the Bible, you're not going to get the answers to some of these things. And Jesus designs the parables, many of the parables, in such a way that people have to work at it to get what he's talking about. Well, the same is true here of the parable of the worm and the plant. It's not explained. There is a question that's asked about it. But that's all. Jonah is asked a question, and he's left to think. Probably Jonah finally repented and finally got it. Why do you think that that's probably true? Pardon me? He wrote it. Yeah, the book. We have the book, right. We probably wouldn't have it otherwise because he wrote the book. Nobody else knew anything about what went on in the fish's stomach, but he wrote about it, what he had prayed and how before he was rescued by the fish. By the way, he was rescued by the fish, you know that, because he was telling about how he was going down and how the seaweed was wrapping around him and how all the the waves and currents were going over him and how he thought he was being going down in the very pit of Sheol of death and hell and Hades and you know and I'll explain those words in a minute if you wish and and how the bars were being closed the gates were being closed over him it was the end and then suddenly God sends the fish and rescues him By the way, the word Sheol or Hades or Hell and all those words get people confused because of the King James. The King James Version translates two entirely different words, Hell. And that confuses everyone. It's a shame because they always meant two different things. It's not just some kind of modern idea. And one of those words, the word Sheol in the Old Testament and the word Hades in the New Testament, simply means the unseen world. You take the word Hades It's id, which is a Greek word for C, to see, and then you add a letter, an alpha, an A in Greek, which is called an alpha instead of an A, and that negates the word, just like we put UN in front of a word, you know, something is nice, no it doesn't work, something is what? What? Natural. Natural. And then we put the word un in front of it. Unnatural. And that's what the word Hades is. It means seen. And then he puts the a on the front. It means unseen. And that's all Hades means. The unseen world. And you know the story of Lazarus and the rich man. They're both in Hades, it says. That is, they were both in the unseen world. And so sometimes that word's used for death or the unseen world, kind of in the same way. The other word is the word Gehenna. And Gehenna came from the name of a valley. Ge is the Hebrew word for valley and Hinnom is the Hebrew name of a man who owned the valley. So it was the valley of Hinnom. But what happened in that valley? It was also called Tophet. What happened in that valley way back when in Old Testament time? Something happened. I'm sorry. Isn't that where they burned the garbage? They did burn the garbage there later. I'm talking about before they turned it into a garbage heap. You're right, they did. That was the most horrible sight south of the east of Jerusalem that a Jew ever saw. But before that, something happened there. Was it a place of pagan sacrifice? Yes, they made child sacrifices there. They sacrificed to the god Moloch and ran their children through the fire in that valley and later during a time of repentance, of the people, because of what had happened there, they turned it into a garbage heap. In the time of Jesus, that's what it was. And in a garbage heap, what they had, of course, were a lot of worms and maggots crawling around, eating the refuse. And they burned fires to burn up the trash. And when Jesus looked at that valley, he said, you see that place where there's a worm? Well, there's a place where the worm dies not. And you see that place where there's fire, there's a place where the fire never goes out. And we heard about that this morning, about that place called Hell. And that's the proper word for the place of punishment, Gehenna. not Hades. So get those things straight, though it has nothing to do with the Book of Jonah except where he talked about himself going all the way down into the very bottom of the Mediterranean and He thought he was about ready to be locked up in Hades, in the place of death. All right, so the book has historical qualities. Parables don't contain historical references. But Jonah is full of historical references. For example, there are persons. You read about the king and nobles. Jonah himself is a historical person. In 2 Kings 14.25, 2 Kings 14.25, you'll find a reference to Jonah as a prophet who was in favor of doing good things back in those days before he ever got involved with the fish. Three cities are mentioned that are historical cities, actual cities that existed, and we'll talk about them in a minute. Phoenician words are used that Hebrew would not have used otherwise unless he had been in that position on that boat doing those things that you do on that boat that they were involved in. For example, the word for sailor, the word for sailor, which ought to be spelled differently, the word for sailor They're all misprints and we won't worry about them. I don't know whether he fixed those up in his... I'm looking at my original notes. He probably fixed them. But the word for sandler, literally in Phoenician, was salts. man who is a salter, and we even use that word today, and the word for ship and so on. Words that Jonah would not have used as a Hebrew, but that he came to hear when he was on that boat. So we have historical language and also We have the style in which this book is written. It's a narrative style. It's just straightforward, what took place. That's a narrative. This happened, and this happened, and something else, and something else. And at the end, we have the narrative of what occurred. If you were going to write up the story of what took place on your trip here, you would use a narrative style, presumably, because it actually happened. That's why you use it. It's not a parable, as I said, because it contains a parable about the Gort. Now Jonah is mentioned as a prophet in the historical record, not only in 2 Kings 14.29, but also in the Apocrypha, in the Book of Tobit, chapters 14, 4, and 5 we have him mentioned. And in Josephus, Jonah is mentioned as a historical person. Josephus was a historian. He was a historian who wrote up the annals, the stories of the Jewish nation. He wrote it up in his language, in his style. And then he wrote up also the wars of the Jews, which tells us so much about the destruction of 70 AD. But most of all, he mentioned Jonah as a historical person. And then the clincher, of course, is when Jesus calls him a historical individual, speaks about what took place as a historical fact. And you find that in Matthew 12, 39 to 41, and in Luke 11, 29 to 32. And the fact that Jesus calls what Jonah did a sign. He's using it as a sign. All of Jesus' miracles That is, events which really took place are what he called signs. So what Jonah did was a historical thing if it can be called a sign. So all these things were historical events that are important for us to understand. Now there were places, as I mentioned. The first place is Joppa. Joppa was the only seaport that was usable in Palestine. Now, up above in Tyre and Sidon, where the Phoenicians were, they had great seaports there. But we're talking about where a Jew would have gone in order to get a boat. The only place he would have gone is to Joppa. And that's exactly where he went. And there were Phoenician sailors who were based there who spoke Phoenician. And also, he was going to go to Tarshish, which we'll mention next, in southern Spain on the Atlantic coast. Let's think for a moment about Tarshish. It's a historically known city in southern Spain. It was probably on that southeastern part of Spain, which was the Spanish Riviera, nice and warm. a nice sunny place, unlike where you are at the moment. So people were out there bathing and so forth. Well, this was Tarshish, but there was a city there that was a colony of the Phoenicians. And it was a place where Phoenician sailors then would have gone. We have record in the book of Ezekiel and elsewhere of the fact that this was a city, it means smelter, a place where smeltering went on because there was a lot of metallic, a lot of metals that came from that area that was smelted and they brought them back, the Phoenician sailors brought them back. Now he was from Joppa He was going to go, instead of going to Nineveh, which was about 1,000 miles away from Joppa, he was going to go to Tarshish, which was about 1,500 miles in the opposite direction. So he got a boat going about as far as he could possibly go away from where he should have gone. So we have a historical city of Joppa, historical city of Tarshish, and now we have a historical city of Nineveh, about which so much is said in the Book of Jonah. It was the capital city of the greatest empire of the time, the Assyrian Empire. You know how the empires went, the Assyrian, the Babylonian, and all the way down through Daniel's image. And so this was one of the old, old cities, post-flood cities that had existed nearly since the flood itself. And so it was a great city. It was a huge city. It was located on the east bank of the Tarragus River. And the suburbs of the city just strung along the river for about 30 miles. And the walls of this place were phenomenal. They were 100 feet tall. Can you imagine 100 foot walls? And then on top of them, they were so wide that they could drive four chariots side by side along the top of those walls. almost something unbelievable when you think about it. But they had architects, and they had builders. They had people that were fairly smart back in those days. We often think of those days as so primitive that nobody could think straight. So a story like Jonah's was just something that somebody dreamed up. No, these were people who had a lot of finesse in many ways, way back. in the days in which they built this city. Well, the capital of Assyria, but it was also the chief opponents of the Hebrew people at that time. That city was looming on the horizon. for the Jews. Here was their city and here were the Assyrians with the capital in Nineveh about ready to come down, or at least that was what the Jews were afraid of. They would come down and destroy their land as they had so many other places. And so you could see for that reason why Jonah didn't want these people to be saved. But far more than that, It was the kind of city it was. It was called in Nahum 3.1 the Bloody City. For good reason. They skinned people alive. We have all the historical records of these things. Its streets were lined with the skulls of the captive people from the nations that they had destroyed. Now imagine that. All your children, all the adults, everybody else going down day by day and seeing the skulls of these people lining the sides of their roads. What kind of city it was. The devil reigned in Nineveh. It was a terrible place. It was a horrendous group of people. And to think of people like that coming in and destroying your people, destroying your children, your husbands and wives, your, you know. I think this is what was behind Jonah's thinking. This is why he didn't want to go. In fact, he tells us later on why he didn't want to go, and we'll get to that. It was a huge city. It was called Great to God in 3-8, which means large in God's sight, great in God's sight. And it had an inner wall of eight miles in circumference. That was the inner wall, not talking about the outer one. It had a library of over 100,000 tablets, clay tablets. They used a stylus and soft clay, and they would press it in in various ways to make the marks of their alphabet, the kind of alphabet that they had called cuneiform. And so most of those, or half of those at least, are in the British Museum today. You can go look at them next time you're over there in London. There are a lot of interesting things that the Brits brought back that people are trying to get back to where they originally came from. So you better go fast before they get them all. And so the Lord hurled a violent wind on the sea. And the interesting thing is it might have been, it must have been something, I think I skipped a page here, yes. No, I didn't skip a page. Yes, I did skip a page. It had a total population of about 120,000 people. And God says, when he talks to Jonah, aren't you concerned about those people? The animals, and the animals, kind of interested. That God was interested in the animals. Now, Jonah's previous ministry, from the evidence we have in 2 Kings 14-25, he was a prophet. We know that. He was called that. And we know that he was in good shape, good condition, with everybody around him. The king was happy with him. Jeroboam was happy with him and no reason to think that he would be a bad prophet or a reluctant prophet at all until this assignment came. This assignment made the difference to Jonah's wife. Go to Nineveh and tell them 40 days and the city will be destroyed. The account of Jonah's flight is what we will take up as soon as we come back, because it's exactly, according to this watch, quarter after where we're to take our break. And Joe will tell us when we will assemble again.