First let's get something clear about erroneous notions of Paul and his founding a new religion, which he didn't. True, the halakhah of his Judaism switched from the Pharisaic oral law to the Ruach Hakodesh, but his religion was still one of the Judaisms of the time, not a new non-Judaism Gentile religion.

YONAH (JONAH)

The point of the story is that G-d loves more people than know

it, and those that know it don't know the half of it. But the

problem is that His prophets and preachers tend to be

narrow-minded, touchy, selfish, racially biased vindictive little

prima dons and therefore G-d has to work miracles as fast as a

magician (out of his hat G-d pulls a wind, a lottery draw, a

submarine fish, a revival, a quick-growing castor-oil plant and a

worm) to get any use out of his hard-to-manage ministers.

In 1:3 we see that Jonah didn't want to preach to his people's

traditional enemies because he wanted G-d to judge them and he

knew a forgiving G-d like his would not judge them if they

believed Jonah's message and repented. This is so typical today

of the religious feelings of many Christians against Jews, Jews

against Christians, and Muslims against both and vice versa.

Whereas Jonah was a Jew with these kinds of feelings toward

non-Jews, today we are in a reverse situation: we know Jews are

guilty of rejecting the Moshiach so we don't preach to them

because we want prophecy to be fulfilled against them. We know

Muslims are guilty of rejecting the prophetic finality of

Moshiach Yehoshua's coming so we don't preach to them because we

want prophesy to be fulfilled against them. What petty little

religious Jonahs we all are! And no wonder this religious hatred

has desolated Lebanon in our generation and threatens to ignite

the Middle East into World War III. The book of Jonah shows that

G-d wants reconciliation and peace between G-d and man and

between man and his fellow men, and this little book shows the

folly of disobeying G-d and backsliding away from G-d's Matthew

28:19-20 Great Commission. What madness that Jonah would trust

his own opinion and a fragile little boat in a precarious sea

more than the wisdom of a compassionate omnicient G-d who

commends him to preach salvation to even Israel's enemies.

Shliach Sha'ul must have been thinking of what happened to Jonah

when he said, "Woe to me if I preach not the Besuras Hageulah!"

(I Cor. 9:16).

Joppa, where this story really sets sail, is also the scene in

Acts 10 and 15:6-11 where another maggid (preacher) named Simon

Shliach Kefa son of Jonah had to learn Jonah's lesson...a maggid

(preacher) not like Jonah, the man caught by a fish, but like the

other Shluchim, a fisher catching men. Shliach Kefa had to learn

that in this world's Jewish/non-Jewish confrontation, G-d is not

a respecter of persons but draws near to any who are willing to

repent. The author of the book of Jonah ironically emphasizes the

G-d-fearing quality of the pagan sailors and contrasts their fear

of G-d (and that of the Ninevites) with the brazen

presumptuousness of the disobedient and uncompassionate prophet

Jonah. Like the voyage narrative at the conclusion of the book of

Acts, the author is making the subtle point in chapter one of the

book of Jonah that we of the human race are all in this little

boat of life together, and that unless we listen to G-d's

prophecy we will all alike perish. However, we see that very

often G-d has to send a wind of tribulation to get His prophet to

spit out the saving message (just as He had to cause the big fish

to spit out the prophet!), and, since we all tend to be Jonahs

most of the time, we can understand why Shliach Sha'ul warned all

believers that we must go through much tribulation to enter the

Kingdom of G-d (Acts 14:22).

Look at 1:7. Have you ever noticed how the unbelievers who are

in the same existential boat with you always find out you are a

believer--even when, like Jonah, you try to hide it?

There are many unbelievers, even many among college-educated

Bible scholars. Unfortunately, Moshiach Yehoshua was not

college-educated, so he thought this "big fish" story was

historical, whereas our modern college-educated Bible scholars

assure both us and G-d that this "big fish" story did not really

happen. Like Jonah, our preachers trust their own notions more

than G-d's miraculous Word. However, there have been incidents

recorded of people survivng being swallowed by sperm whales,

which could be large enough to swallow a living man "if he

managed to negotiate the air-supply tract of the mammal and reach

the great laryngeal pouch" (R.K. Harrison, Introduction, p.907).

The story of Jonah has the literary density of meaning to provide

a parabolic moral lesson or an allegorical picture of a

disobedient chosen prophet of a disobedient chosen people who

must be chastened in death and resurrection in order to be a

witness to the rest of the world's remnant (which G-d has also

chosen to save). Thus the book provides a subtle rationale for

why the Exile had to happen: to move Israel from idolatry to a

more universal vision of their service to a world-embracing G-d.

Yet, there is no reason to eliminate the spiritual biography of

the historical Jonah, an anti-hero like Shliach Kefa in the

Besuras Hageulahs and Shliach Sha'ul in the early part of Acts.

Those who deny the story any veracity have an anti-supernatural

bias, that is not particularly modern or sophisticated.

On the contrary, what happened to Jonah is a key historical

"sign" of the central historical miracle of the Bible--the

sacrificial death and saving resurrection of the Messianic

prophet who is greater than Jonah (Moshiach Yehoshua), and the

men of Ninevah will stand up at the judgment and rebuke the

unbelievers of our generation as worse than them, far they

apparently repented when they believed Jonah's testimony of his

burial-tevilah and

resurrection from the sea, whereas "someone greater than Jonah

(Moshiach Yehoshua) is here" with a greater burial-tevilah and

resurrection (Matthew 12:38-41). The repentant Gentiles of

Ninevah will one day rebuke the Jewish rabbis of our day who say

that the Jewish Bible knows nothing of a buried and resurrected

prophet type of Moshiach; foregleamings of this type of prophet

are found not only in Psalms 16, 22, Isa. 53 and Gen. 37:24 but

also in Jer. 38:5-9, to say nothing of the motif of national

burial-exile and resurrection-return in the pre-exilic prophets

and in places like Ezekiel 37. The picture of death swallowing

and then vomiting up a prophet is the most graphic predictive

sign of the death and resurrection of the Moshiach that we could

expect in the Tanakh. The "three days and three nights" of Jon.

1:17 is the time period after which decomposition of the body

begins (see Yochanan 11:39 and Hos. 6:1-3). The fundamentals of

the Good News entail the fact that G-d raised the Moshiach on the

third day (I Cor. 15:4), since the Moshiach was to die but his

body was not to see corruption (Ps. 16:10). Notice that Jonah

gets to this extreme point of desperation before he even prays

about his condition of being stubbornly out of the will of G-d

(Jon. 2:1; compare 1:5-6).

Since Jonah is an important character in the Qur'an (37:139-148;

68:48f; etc.), here is an important point for witness to Muslims

as well. Actually Jonah, ministering ca. 800-750 B.C. did

prophesy that Jeroboam II (793-753 B.C.) would expand the

northern kingdom (II Kg. 14:25), but what happened to Jonah is as

important as anything he ever prophesied. This is also true of

Yehoshua. This is also true of each of us, and is why we should

never tire of giving our personal testimony of what happened to

us when Moshiach Yehoshua came into our lives.

But apparently Jonah was a small man (small enough to be

swallowed) and in 3:3 he apparently felt swallowed up by a vast

metropolis. He had a great testimony of a great personal

deliverance, but the city was so large how could he be equal to

the task? How many days would it take a street preacher to preach

across your city? How many days would it take a visitor to

minister to people house to house? Verse 4 says that "he started

out" and apparently he took it one day at a time in some

systematic fashion that G-d revealed to him, and G-d gave him an

audience with people who gave him a bigger audience until even

the king had heard and was his ally. Thus a great revival came to

a city because one man finally (end unheroically) obeyed G-d.

Look at 2:7. G-d used an instrument of certain death--a great

fish--to save both his prophet and the Ninevites out of the

primal waters of chaos and death, just as later G-d used another

instrument of certain death--the wood of Golgotha--to save us

"Ninevites."

Look at 4:10. The "Gardener" of Ninevah, the Creator of all men,

rebukes the self-centered and ethnically prejudiced mourner of a

castor bean plant for his lack of compassion and love for G-d's

planting, Ninevah. Jonah is so blind (he is a type of that blind

Servant of the L-rd Israel seen so clearly in the second half of

Isaiah) that he cannot even see his own great personal investment

in G-d's "Garden" Ninevah and all the many trials and tests that

constitute Jonah's personal stake in G-d's harvest. What blind

laborers we are! We cannot even see and properly weigh our own

struggles! So it is that many ministers, after pouring out vast

energy for many years, sometimes backslide at the end of their

ministry, like a rich man stupidly discarding his hard-earned

bank deposit book. The point is that we who have been called by

G-d have been called not as an end in itself but as a means to

call others. G-d wants us to know his heart for the lost and to

share it so that His promise to Abraham (Gen. 12:3) would be

fulfilled: that all the peoples of the earth would not be enemies

but would bless themselves in one another as fellow heirs of

Abraham's faith.

The Moshiach is the Prophet like Moses, the Prophet like Jonah,

whom Death swallows and then vomits up: Moshiach the Firstborn

from the dead, the King of Kings, who does not see death's

corruption. Instead He sees the light of resurrection light and

divides its booty with those He makes righteous by bearing away

the curse of their wicked depravity. See Deut. 18:15-18; Isa.

49:9-10; Hos. 11:1; Ps. 89:27; 16:10; 21:5; 61:7; 89:4; Isa.

53:5, 10-12; Gen. 22:4; Hos. 6:2; Amos 9:11.

Note well: Jon. 1:14. People are perishing because of disobedient

street preachers who don't go.

Jonah has to have reality splashed in his face to wake up. He has

to be reminded of G-d's having personally saved him (Jon. 2:6)

from the pit. He has to repent of stubborn disobedience and he

has to stop forsaking his true loyalty (Jon. 2:8). Read Jon.

chps. 2-3 again. Notice: the street preacher changes his mind,

the people hear and change their mind, and then G-d relents and

changes his mind, all as a result of forsaking stubbornness

regarding preaching on the street.

Notice: the street preacher is often angry, and G-d may put

righteous anger in his heart. However, he may be angry about the

wrong things. Jonah was (see Jon. 4:l-4). Does G-d not have a

right to be angry if his street preachers don't obey Him and

don't show His compassion for the work of his hands, his lost

sheep that he so urgently desires to be found? (See Jon.

4:10-11).

JONAH 1:17b (HEBREW 2:lb)

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three

nights.