Jonah 1:1-3
There once was a man called Jonah. He was one of God’s people, the Israelites. One day God said to Jonah, “I want you to go to the city of Nineveh. Tell them they are living such wicked lives, I will have to punish them.”
Jonah did not like Nineveh. The people of Nineveh were enemies of God’s people.
But God was willing to forgive the Ninevites if they would just change their ways. The Ninevites were the cruelest people in the world at that time. If God could forgive them, He could forgive anyone.
Jonah did not like this. “Why should God care about them?” he wondered. So Jonah did a foolish thing. He ignored God. He ran away from Nineveh, rather than toward it. That way, the Ninevites would not be warned about how angry God was with them. Jonah wanted the Ninevites to be destroyed.
But Jonah had made a mistake. There is no place where people can hide from God. He is everywhere and knows everything.
Jonah went down to the harbor, a place called Joppa. That is where the city of Tel-Aviv now stands.
In Joppa, Jonah wandered up and down the docks. He was looking for a ship which would take him clear to the other side of the world. Jonah found one headed for Tarshish. That was far enough.
He went as far from Nineveh as possible. Once the ship set sail, Jonah breathed a sigh of relief. “Now those evil Ninevites will get what they deserve,” he thought to himself.
Once on board, Jonah fell asleep. He thought he could relax because he had run away from God. He was wrong. The Lord threw a great wind at the sea. A terrible storm shook the waves. The ship was tossed up and down and rocked from one side to the other. The sailors said, “There must be some reason why this is happening.
Someone on the ship must have made his god angry!”
So each sailor prayed to his own god, begging to be saved. The wind howled louder. The waves reared higher and higher.
The captain went below deck and shook Jonah. “How can you be sleeping through a storm like this?” he asked. “You should be praying to your God. Maybe He will be able to save us.”
When the men on board heard that Jonah was a Jew, they became very frightened. They had heard about this Lord God of Israel. They gasped, “You tried to run away from Him?” Even they knew that was impossible. God sees everything.
“It is your God who is punishing us. Now tell us, how do we stop this storm?”
Jonah said, “If you throw me overboard, the storm will go away. “At first the sailors would not throw Jonah into the sea. But they had no choice. They prayed to Jonah’s God, “Oh, Lord. Please don’t kill us with this storm. We haven’t done anything wrong. Only this man has.” They had no choice. They picked up Jonah and threw him into the raging sea. Suddenly, the wind stopped howling. The waves died down.
When the sailors threw him, overboard, Jonah felt something cold and slimy bump up against him. He would have screamed with fright if he had not been underwater. A giant fish was swimming around him!
Suddenly, the fish opened its mouth wide and “Swoosh!” Jonah was swept into its mouth. The fish had swallowed Jonah!
Because the fish was so large, Jonah could stand up inside and breathe again. It was very dark and smelled sour.
It was not by chance that the fish had swallowed Jonah. God had chosen this fish to teach Jonah a lesson. No matter where he went, he could never run away from God. God wanted Jonah to do what He had been told and go to Nineveh with the Lord’s message.
After a while, Jonah asked God to forgive him for trying to run away. He thanked the Lord for not forgetting him.
After three days and three nights, the Lord made the fish spit Jonah out of its stomach. There was a great wet rush. Jonah held his breath again as he swirled around inside the fish’s mouth. The next thing he knew, he was lying on a dry beach.