Showing posts with label Jonah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonah. Show all posts

Sunday, July 09, 2023

Sermon Starters: Our Annoying God

Silver Lake Wesleyan Camp
July 9, 2023

Scripture: Jonah 3:6-4:2

Introduction
  • Children's church: I feel like I only got the first two, maybe three chapters of Jonah
  • Overview the story
Body
I. Jonah is not really the good guy.
  • Popular preacher, no doubt
  • crowd pleaser
  • Nineveh was really bad -- Assyria (destroyed northern kingdom) -- THE AUDIENCE KNOWS THIS FACT!
  • It's a warning to us.
2. God found the one thing.
  • What’s your one thing? Following God requires total allegiance. Used to be getting called to Africa as a missionary.
  • President Lewis talked about cracks in the foundation.
  • If Jesus isn’t Lord of all, then he’s not Lord at all.
3. He’s both sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son
  • You know the story (recap)
  • He’s the Prodigal that the Father welcomes back.
  • He’s also the elder brother who hates that God forgives.
II. The bad guys are really the good guys.
a. The sailors
  • They don’t know much. They just know that some God is upset. They are seekers. They want to honor God. 
  • Who do you think God was more pleased with?
b. The Ninevites
  • Their repentance seems more genuine than Jonah’s. 
  • Who do you think God was more pleased with?
III. God is the best "guy."
  • (Not literally, of course)
  • Jonah 4:2 – the creed of the OT
  • What a parent! Gives him shade for a bit. Then pushes him to move on. Plant and cattle
  • He does not want anyone to perish. We only perish at our own choosing.
Conclusion
Where are you in the story?
  • Are you running from God?
  • Are you withholding something from God?
  • Are you a seeker?
  • Are you throwing a tantrum?
  • God is gracious and compassionate

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Jonah Adventures in Pre-Modernism

The book of Jonah is a pretty good case study in biblical reading paradigms. I use the term "pre-modern" reading of the Bible in reference to an ahistorical reading of the Bible that doesn't know it's ahistorical (as opposed to an ahistorical reading that is intentional).

1. For example, Jonah is not at all written in a way that would suggest that Jonah himself wrote it. It is all in the third person (he did this, he did that). It is about Jonah but written in a way that doesn't sound like it is Jonah himself telling the story (I did this, I did that). It has a prayer from Jonah in it, but this is quoted not given as the words of the author. Default paradigms for reading Scripture often can't see this because the paradigm doesn't read the way you would normally read something.

2. In the Gospels, Jesus talks about the Jonah story, but he doesn't ever say, "Jonah said." So the NT doesn't even present us with the question the Bible expert asks: "Is this way of referencing the OT a matter of paradigm or a divine indication of authorship?" Since the NT authors spoke in the categories of their day, I personally as a Bible expert do not think that comments in relation to OT authorship were the point of NT statements by Gospel authors and Jesus but rather some of the cultural clothing in which those points came.

3. Another point of paradigm shifting is to point out that when Jonah the prophet lived and when the book of Jonah was written are two completely different questions. So Jonah may have lived in the 700s, before Assyria (the empire of which Nineveh was the capital) destroyed the northern kingdom. But there is a very real possibility that the story of Jonah was not written until much later.

After all, I could write about Jonah even though he lived 2750 or so years ago. When the book was written is a completely different question than when Jonah lived.

4. In fact, my hunch is that Jonah was written long after even Assyria was decimated by the Babylonians. This makes its message even more powerful because the readers of Jonah knew that Assyria was an arch-enemy of Israel. God was willing to have mercy even on Nineveh! I think there are lots of very powerful messages that come out of this thought but I'll leave it at that.

5. Finally, and this is more a point of method, I usually emphasize that the literary context of Jonah is just the book of Jonah. The books of the OT were not bound together originally. Literary context gets a little complex when you think of some of the parts of the OT belonging together as units. Then there is the hypothetical literary context of sources and then the literary context of edited compilations.

But, as far as I know, Jonah was originally written as Jonah, not as part of a collection. So only the four chapters of Jonah are the literary context of Jonah.

If Jonah presupposes any of the other material in the OT, whether as books or as oral traditions, that is part of the historical context of Jonah. We cannot assume off hand that the author of Jonah knew the Pentateuch (or that Jonah did) or any other part of the OT. There are connections between 4:2 and other parts of the OT that are at least suggestive of connections, however.

Finally, the NT is neither part of the literary or historical context of Jonah. Nothing written after Jonah is part of the context of Jonah, at least not from an original meaning perspective. That material didn't exist for the author of Jonah to draw on.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

What is a Miracle 2

continued from yesterday
_______
... Most of Jesus' miracles had to do with people.  In itself, this is a key insight. Sure, he walked on water (Mark 6:47-50; Matt. 14:25-33; John 6:16-21).  He calmed storms (Mark 4:35-40; Matt. 8:23-27; Luke 8:22-25). He multiplied bread and fish (Mark 6:30-44; Matt. 14:13-21; John 6:1-13). Such events tell us that Jesus had power over what we think of as "nature."

And perhaps it is worthwhile to remind ourselves that the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" is a fairly recent one.  It has only been since the rise of science in the 1600's that Western culture came to draw a sharp distinction between events that follow the "laws of nature" and events we might call miracles or the supernatural. Even just 500 years ago, Martin Luther--the one who started Protestantism--still thought of storms as God expressing his anger rather than the result of high and low pressure systems meeting, the exchange of electricity from one polarity to another, and so forth.

We have come to define a miracle as a divine intervention into the natural sequence of events that would have happened in the normal flow of causes and effects following the rules of science. In Jesus' day, they thought spiritual forces were constantly causing things. They did not think in terms of nature following rules like a machine. When the sailors on Jonah's boat encountered the storm, they figured someone on board had ticked off his god.

Today we would give thanks to God not only for the inexplicable but for what seems explicable as well. Sometimes doctors do surgery and it works.  Sometimes we take medicine and it works. Sometimes we undergo chemotherapy, and it works. In such situations, is usually impossible for us to know where the hands of science and any direct intervention of God begin and end, but we are thankful nonetheless. God created the science.

Some Christians have a sense that God directs the minutest details of how such things turn out. I personally think that we must keep God distinct in our minds from his creation.  Otherwise, we will have to explain how a God who says he is love causes so many bad things to happen. It is much easier to think that God allows many bad things to happen but that he has given his creation rules and largely allowed it to continue on its own path of cause and effect. God sees, God knows, God allows.  Sometimes God intervenes. But he is not directly responsible for all the pain, evil, and suffering that happen in the world.

So our sense that Jesus could do things that do not follow the laws of nature is a fairly modern way of looking at them. For them, he was able to do the kinds of wonders that God, angels, demons, and Satan did. Jesus' enemies claimed that he took some of his powers from Satan (e.g., Mark 3:22). Others clearly thought he received his powers from God (e.g., John 3:2).

There were others both in the Jewish and Roman world who were thought to perform miracles...