Jonah 1.1-3 NLT




The Lord gave this message to Jonah son of Amittai: “Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh. Announce my judgment against it because I have seen how wicked its people are.” But Jonah got up and went in the opposite direction to get away from the Lord.
Most Bibles will have the title “Holy Bible” on the cover and that could easily give the impression that it is a book stacked full of stories of really holy people. The sort of people who never take a step out of line, and who go around being real goody goodies from morning till night. It is surely a relief to us all that the Bible is nothing like that. At times it feels like the complete opposite of such a book! Jonah is a classic example. He is called by God and he is appalled by God’s command. Going to Nineveh was absolutely the last thing that he would ever want to do. The city was, at the time, one of the largest cities in the world and was famous for its sin. It stood at the heart of the great and menacing Assyrian Empire and everything about it would have been repulsive to Jonah. So he went to Joppa and found a boat that was heading in the opposite direction to Nineveh. What could possibly go wrong?
The one factor that Jonah hadn’t taken into account was God. He imagined that he could run away from God and that would be the end of it. But how wrong he was! We all know how the story ends. There was a great storm and Jonah told the crew that they needed to throw him overboard. He was then swallowed by a great fish and spewed up on a beach three days later. It’s a remarkable story but many people can speak of the way in which they ran away from God, only to find that he had been with them all the time.




Running away from God is always a bad idea, because no one knows us or loves us more completely than God. To run away from him is to invite disaster for ourselves and those around us.




Question: What would you say to someone who was trying to run away from God?
Prayer: Lord God, I thank you that you love me so much that however far I run away you will still keep loving me. Amen

Released on 8 Feb 2022