What happens when we resist God’s will? (Jonah 1:1-9)

There is no question that responding to God’s call and doing His will are demanding. I well remember my trepidation at the thought of teaching and the sense of diminishment I felt after every time I spoke. A sense of inadequacy is, however, not the only reason for struggling with God’s will. I have known women who longed for a meaningful career while they knew their calling was to care for their children. Others, on the other hand, may want the simple routines but end up following God and exchanging familiarity with the inconvenience of a new country or a more demanding job. Some struggle to give up prestige and status to do something that society may not value so much even though God does. Yet others may find exchanging a well-paying job for financial dependence in God’s service difficult. But what happens when we resist God’s will?

Jonah’s motivation

Jonah’s story opens with a conventional call of the prophet for ministry (Jonah 1:1-2), but what follows is far from conventional. We can imagine a first-time audience’s gasp as the next verse unfolds. We would fully expect ‘And Jonah arose…’ (there is no ‘but’ in the Hebrew here, only context demands it; Jonah 1:3) to be followed by ‘to go to Nineveh’. Instead, we read of the prophet fleeing. The silence of his reasons leaves us to ponder his motivation. Feeling inadequate (cf. Exod 4:10-13; Jer 1:6), disliking the inconvenience of travel, worried about his life if he denounces the Assyrians to their face? Are they not worth the effort or too wicked to be given a word from God? There is no dialogue reported as if Jonah had closed his mind to God and did not want to be convinced by Him.

The downward spiral

What follows from such action? We read twice that he fled/went from the presence of the LORD (v.3). In one sense, he cannot escape God. In another, the consequence of resisting God is his loss of the Lord’s presence with him. Whenever we disobey God, that fellowship and intimacy with Him are jeopardised. This downward spiral spiritually is indicated by the narrator: Jonah went down to Joppa (modern-day Jaffa, a port near Tel-Aviv), went down to the ship and down into the cargo hold area (Jonah 1:3, 5). The sea in Israelite thinking symbolises chaos, antagonistic to God, so that Jonah’s desire to escape God by it expresses his willingness to rely on forces resistant to God’s will. It is also ironic that he entrusts himself to and hopes for a resolution of his troubles from an unpredictable, chaotic force instead of the loving God. Yet, the sea is not outside of God’s power (Jonah 1:4) and He will use it for His purposes.

Deep sleep

While the pagan sailors recognise divine displeasure in the storm, Jonah is blissfully ignorant of these spiritual realities (Jonah 1:5). Sound asleep, he is not even aware of the storm his disobedience is causing or its impact on others. It is possible for those who disobey God to be unaware of how their actions are affecting others or how their own spiritual life is endangered by their actions – at least for a while. The word for ‘sound asleep’ (v.5) can mean not only being exhausted and stunned (Judg 4:21), but a precursor to divine revelation (e.g. Gen 15:12; Job 33:15; Dan 10:9). Yet Jonah’s deep sleep only results in the pagan captain shaking him awake and exhorting him to pray to God (Jonah 1:6)! Finally, when Jonah is identified as the cause of the storm (Jonah 1:7), he is unaware of the irony of his words (Jonah 1:9). Fearing the LORD in the OT is a shorthand for a godly person, someone faithful to the Lord, who reveres Him, the very thing Jonah is not. He can recite the creed that God is the creator of both sea and dry land yet try to escape this God by the sea. Many who disobey God can say the right words when those no longer have a reality in their lives. Yet, God is not finished with Jonah and His bringing about a storm will become both a warning and a sign of His compassionate grace.

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