Comfort, institutional preservation, and tribal identity can crowd out obedience to God’s call in our lives. Do we hear His call to reach those in need of His Grace and to live in the “risky repentance” that involves?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
Divine Redirection: The sermon opens with a story of a falling rock narrowly missed because an approaching car prompted a sudden move—an unintentional rescue. In what ways have you experienced God redirecting your plans in a manner you initially resisted or resented, and how did that reshaping ultimately prove protective or purposeful?
The Layers of the Sign: Jesus points the Pharisees to the “sign of Jonah,” and the sermon identifies multiple layers of meaning—Jonah’s sacrifice for the sailors, his three days in the fish prefiguring Christ’s death and resurrection, and the universal call to repentance. Which of these layers most challenges your own discipleship, and how should Christ being “greater than Jonah” change our willingness to take risks in sharing faith?
The Comfort Trap and the Yeast: Jonah’s preference for Tarshish and the Pharisees’ defense of their temple reveal the same subtle “yeast”—prioritizing comfort and institutional preservation over obedience to God’s missional call. What modern “steeples” might Christians be tempted to protect at the expense of evangelism, and how can we distinguish between legitimate rest and self-protective comfort?
The Eureka Springs Railroad: The sermon contrasts pleasant motion that goes nowhere with an uncomfortable journey that actually reaches a destination. Where do you see “Eureka Springs railroad” tendencies in your personal walk or church culture? What would it look like to choose the harder route that genuinely advances the gospel?
Pressing the Siren Button: The sermon ends by urging believers to act with urgency rather than merely discuss rescue. Who are the “Ninevites” in your own context—people or groups you’re reluctant to reach? What concrete steps of “risky repentance” and outreach is God calling you or your community to take right now?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Does anyone know that stretch of Highway 79 if you’re going up, say, towards Winfield or Louisiana? It’s really pretty; you have cliffs on one side, farmland on the other. I have a lot of fond memories going up that way with my family as a kid. We’d go to the lock and dam there, stop at the little bitty old country supermarket in Winfield, pick up lunch, and then enjoy some time watching the bald eagles in the winter.
Well, one winter, I don’t remember exactly how old I was—I’m old enough to remember this in any case—but one winter we were going there and there were these just majestic, utterly majestic icicles hanging down off the cliffs. It had thawed a little and then formed these beautiful icicles. We pulled off the road and were going to take some pictures by these icicles.
Then a car started coming up, and I think it was a little narrow, so we rushed out of the way to get out of the way. As we rushed out, right where I had been standing, a giant rock came and fell right in that spot. It was not giant, but big enough that if it hit me, it would not have been good. It was kind of pointy, even. I thought about that car this week that was coming up. That car didn’t have any particular intent of saving me from a falling rock. If anything, as we saw the car coming up, it was a bad thing, right? We were trying to get this picture and then go on to our lunch and see bald eagles. Yet that car was a redirection of route that was really, really important. I’m thankful for that car coming.
Sometimes when we dig into God’s word and His calling in our lives, there are those times when it feels like the map gets kind of odd, and we think, “Well, God, why are you sending me this way? Why are you sending me that way? I think I know where I’m supposed to be going. Why would I turn there?” Yet God knows that there’s something treacherous for us, whether it’s for us individually or us as human beings in the route that we would pick. He blocks it and redirects it.
We turn to Matthew 16, chapter 16, verse 1 tonight. Jesus refers to one of those incidents. It says, “The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven.” He replied, “When evening comes, you say it will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning, you say it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Jesus then left them and went away.
So Jesus is redirecting them, but he also refers to a man who very famously was redirected. If there’s a man in the Bible who was redirected, we know about it as Jonah. We know that, well, let’s say he didn’t exactly head in the right direction. Where are we heading in the wrong direction? Tonight, we’re going to think about what the sign of Jonah is because it seems kind of obvious, and then it’s also sort of like, well, what exactly does Jesus have in mind there? As we do, it also helps us to think more about what God is calling us to do.
Let’s pray that we would be open to that tonight.
Father, thank you for this evening. I thank you for my brothers and sisters as we gather together here. We find your word ever true and always guiding us towards the path that you want for us. Lord, would you help us to see those places where we are missing out, where we are going in the wrong direction? Would you help us to have the same heart that you do and seek after the things you want us to seek after? We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
So let’s just think about this for a second—the sign of Jonah. People have debated for years exactly what is the sign of Jonah. You say, “Well, Jonah, I mean, just read the book. There’s the sign of Jonah,” and in a sense, that’s true. But think about it for a moment. If Jesus wanted to say, let me point out an example to you that’s going to tell you what I’m going to do, couldn’t he pick out somebody better than Jonah? Maybe, I don’t know, Elijah or Moses. We’ve already seen how they did point to Jesus.
But why Jonah—the prophet who doesn’t want to go, the prophet who tries not to go, the prophet who at the end of the book of Jonah—and one of these days, we need to do a full study on Jonah, it’s such a great book—but at the end of the book of Jonah, and sometimes we forget this because we’re so busy thinking about what kind of fish swallowed Jonah and what he goes and preaches and so on, we forget the fact that at the end of the book, Jonah is not happy. He’s angry, and he’s angry at God. He’s angry at God because God offers mercy to people. So, Jonah doesn’t seem exactly like someone you’d think Jesus wants to say, “Yeah, if you want to understand my ministry, go look at Jonah.”
But you see, as Jesus was speaking to the Pharisees, he was speaking to Pharisees who may not have realized it, but they had the exact same attitude that Jonah struggled with. The way that God worked in Jonah’s life was the exact same sorts of things that were going to happen around them. That’s what we’re going to see here.
We turn to Jonah chapter one. It says, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai. ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me.’” But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.
Jonah says, “Okay, God, I actually, unlike most people most of the time, I know exactly what you want me to do, not just what kind of thing you want me to do. I know exactly what you want me to do. And you know what, God? No thanks, I’d rather do something else.” I have this brochure here, and it says, “See all the sights in Tarshish.” It looks really pretty. I always love the Mediterranean. Tarshish is modern Spain. So, you know, let’s go to Spain. I hear they have good food. I’ll go there. Maybe I’ll watch some bullfighting or something. I don’t know, it’ll be great. God, it’ll be so much better than what you have intended for me because this sounds really, really awful.
But I think it’s more than that. Jonah just has the bug to go in a different direction. Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria. Assyria was the great empire of the time, and incidentally, not a friend of Israel.
Now, there was an act of war at the time that we think Jonah was ministering. If we put him somewhere in the eighth century B.C., which is what we see if we look at 2 Kings chapter 14—he’s referenced there. If we look at that and assume that reference to Jonah is happening as he’s been prophesying and not referring back to it, that’s what it appears to be. Well, they’re kind of in between times with the Assyrians. What they may not know yet, but Jonah is a smart guy, he can maybe see it coming, is that Assyria is going to get a lot worse. In fact, maybe three or four decades after Jonah’s ministry wraps up, Assyria is going to come in and sweep away the nation of Israel.
I think Jonah looks at that and says, “You know, God, I know that you would like me to go and preach to these people, but these are bad, bad people. They’ve done bad things to us. If I help them, they might do more bad things to us. How about I go visit Tarshish? I like the people of Tarshish. They’ve never done anything to me. I don’t think they ever will do anything to me. So why not go there instead?”
Now, we might say, “Well, that makes sense because Nineveh is wicked. God wants him to go and preach repentance,” because the word repentance doesn’t actually even show up here. He’s supposed to go and preach destruction because they’re wicked. Later on, we find out at the end of the book that Jonah assumes that God is looking for repentance. Indeed, that’s what God is looking for, but just destruction because they’re wicked.
We need to keep in mind that Israel was going through a really bad period at that time, too. If you recall, we mentioned this last week, at this point the kingdom is divided into the northern kingdom and southern kingdom. The southern kingdom is Judah, and it’s not great, but sometimes follows the Lord. The northern kingdom is just always a mess. It’s always straying; its best is bad. This is where Jonah’s from.
And it’s interesting: as Jonah looks at Nineveh and says, “Over there, they’re really, really bad.” He can’t say, “I need to protect these really good, faithful servants of yours.” Because as a prophet of the Lord, he can look at his own people and realize, “No, these aren’t good, faithful servants.” What are they? A bunch of wicked people who stray from the Lord just like the Ninevites. They deserve exactly what he’s meant to preach to the Ninevites.
So he can’t say, “Well, I’m from a good people, they’re from a bad people, therefore I don’t want to help them. Why don’t I just minister to my own people? Because if I help them, they might do something bad and they’re bad and they’re going to bring it to the good people.” No, he can’t say that because he’s coming from people who deserve God’s wrath.
More than that, he also forgets what his own people were formed for. When God called them out of Egypt, what did He call them for? He called them as a nation of priests. They were called to go and preach the gospel to others. And okay, that’s a little anachronistic, but not really. Why? Because the grace that is shown in the Exodus, God is already showing what He’s going to do. It’s not completely clear; they may not understand how one person will be both God and man and will come and take on the sins of the world. They may not understand all that, but they do understand that God gives them undeserved mercy. They’re meant to show that to the world. That’s God’s calling to them.
But Jonah says, “No, the Ninevites are bad. We’re not great, but they’re bad. I don’t want anything to do with them.”
And in that, we start to understand the problem for Jonah and the problem also for the Pharisees and Sadducees that Jesus is speaking about Jonah too. Because you see, all of them are about building steeples, so to speak. What do I mean by that? Well, Jonah says, “Yeah, Israel isn’t great. It isn’t faithful, but it’s tangible, and it’s the people of the Lord. If I can protect that, why go and make these other people know about the Lord? Why should they know? Because they’re not the people of the Lord. They’re not the people gathered out of Egypt. They’re not the people that are my people. And why would I want to go and help them?”
Because it doesn’t protect the people here. We have pretty buildings. They might come and destroy them. We don’t have a temple—that’s the Southern Kingdom—but we do have these unauthorized altars that are pretty nice. Why would we want anything to happen to them? We need to protect them because at least they’re unauthorized altars to the Lord and not some other God. Even though he said they’re abomination and they’re bad, at least kind of, sort of, God, can’t you see they’re better than what’s over there?
It’s the Pharisees and Sadducees who are talking to Jesus. They’re basically saying the same thing: “Yeah, we’ve made a lot of compromises. Yes, we’ve kind of given up on really sharing the hope that’s in the Bible with anyone outside ourselves. Those horrible Gentiles, we don’t like getting around them anyway. They’re kind of nasty. They eat pork. They dress funny. They conquered us. Let’s just focus on the law and those people who can follow it really, really well, and then I know what we can do to feel better. We can point at the people that don’t follow as well and say, ‘Look at those sinners out there. They’re the bad people. We’re the good people.’ At least we have an institution here that we can hold on to, right? We have a temple, we have synagogues.”
And Jesus, you’ve been talking about all these things that you’re saying about the coming fulfillment of the age, about God’s grace and His mercy, and you’re talking about the king that’s going to upset the Romans. It’s going to get in the way of this wonderful temple we have here. The Romans are going to get mad at us. They’re smelly and eat pork anyway. We don’t want anything to do with them. They might come and tear down our steeple, our beautiful institution.”
Jesus goes on to Matthew 16, verse 5: “When they went across the lake, the disciples forgot to take bread. ‘Be careful,’ Jesus said to them. ‘Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.’” They discussed this among themselves and said, “It is because we didn’t bring any bread.” Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, “You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread? Do you not still understand? Don’t you remember the five loaves for 5,000 and how many basketfuls you gathered? Or the seven loaves for 4,000, how many basketfuls you gathered? How is it you don’t understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.”
Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teachings of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
What teachings? The very opposition that you see in the Pharisees and the Sadducees had just come up as Jesus had confronted them as he walks away.
Because what do we know when they ask Jesus for a sign? Are they good faith students of new teachers that want to learn from this rabbi who’s come and is doing all these wonderful miracles and say, “We see that clearly you have the Spirit. We don’t know exactly who you are, but we know that something amazing is happening with God here, and we’d like to see a sign because we’re just so excited. We want to see it, Jesus.” No.
What are they doing? Their expectation is to ask Jesus to do something, and if he tries and fails, they’ll say, “Ah, false teacher.” And in fact, if he had tried and failed, they would have been right. But on the offhand chance he actually did do the miracle, what then? Well, they’re kind of putting him at their beck and call. “We’ll tell you, Jesus, what to do. You give us a sign and we’ll decide if it’s a good enough sign. We’ll decide if we can approve of you to teach God’s word.”
Why? Because they have to protect the setup they have here, Jesus. We can’t just let you come in and start teaching authoritatively. We can’t let you come in and start proclaiming things that undermine our authority. We spent a lot of time building it up, and yeah, it never goes anywhere. We’re not actually seeing anyone in the rest of the world hear about the Lord of the entire universe who made the heavens and the earth. They don’t know about him because we’re not going anywhere with it. But look at that temple. It’s beautiful. Beautiful, Jesus. You’re going to mess it up.
And so they asked for that sign. Jesus says that he’ll give them the sign of Jonah. Then he tells the disciples, be careful of these people. They look like they’re authoritative. They even know God’s word well, but there’s something in there, small and imperceptible like yeast that you can’t see, but it’s going to rise up and create something that’s bad.
And we can see from, for example, Acts 10, which we looked at earlier during the time of confession, Peter takes a while to get this, right? Because Jesus has been preparing him for years to go and do ministry, and he still can’t get the fact that the gospel is big enough to even go to the Gentiles.
Why? Because he has that yeast in him. It’s been in his heart for his entire life: “We’re the chosen people, those are the bad people. Why would I go and minister to them?”
A little bit further away, years ago, my family went to Eureka Springs, and there’s a little railroad. I don’t know if it’s really an operation, but a little railroad in Eureka Springs with beautiful, beautiful train cars—probably more comfortable than anything you’re going to find today because it’s a beautiful antique restored train car. Certainly more comfortable than hopping on a plane today. More comfortable than a lot of cars, really nice, beautiful scenery down in the Ozark Mountains.
What could be better than that? I mean, there’s the promised land there, right? It’s beautiful. Only one problem with it, which we didn’t realize when we boarded it—we knew it wasn’t going to take us across the country, but we thought, “Oh, this sounds really nice.” We hadn’t been to Eureka Springs before. We can go and get on this train and then see the beautiful Ozark Mountains from a train car.
We get in it, the train whistle blows, the engine starts pulling that train. You can hear it moving. You start to see the landscape move around you. This is really good. We go about 900 feet, and it stops and starts backing up. I think, “What’s that about? Is there a problem? Is there something on the track?” I mean, that’s all the track they had.
It didn’t go anywhere. It went from one end of a lot to the other end of the lot. They backed up to the station and said, “Thanks for coming to the Eureka Springs railroad.” It was really comfortable.
But I’ll tell you, if I need to get someplace, I have never considered hopping on the Eureka Springs railroad to get there because it’s not going anywhere. It doesn’t matter if, for example, a few years ago when I needed to get to a wedding and didn’t have time to drive, I hopped on one of those awful little commuter planes we all hate, right? It was way worse than that railroad, but I didn’t think, “Maybe I should go down to the Eureka Springs railroad instead because it wouldn’t get me there. It wasn’t going anywhere.” The plane did, even though it wasn’t pleasant.
I think a lot of times we’d be perfectly satisfied if we could be the Eureka Springs railroad. The Pharisees were. “Okay, we’re not spreading God’s word. We’re not seeing more people know the Lord, but it’s really comfortable. If we just back up and go back and forth in the lot, it’s really comfortable.”
And here we see the sin of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but also the sin of Jonah.
So what does Jonah say? “We hear this comfortable land. It’s messed up. It’s not faithful. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do for the Lord, but it’s ours.”
And if comfort means not going and seeing anyone else know the Lord, because at least they’re not going to become stronger and more blessed and maybe do something to us, then fine.
I see a lot of people today, a lot of Christians post AI-generated pictures of churches. Not sure if anyone else has seen that happen. It looks sort of Norman Rockwell-ish, maybe, but not quite as meaningful as a Norman Rockwell picture. But you know, it’s a family sitting in an old style church, all in their Sunday best, holding hymnals, and it says, “We need to get back to this.”
I’m probably thinking about that because I think that’s what Jonah would have said. This is a kind of nation of hymns.
And if you find yourself in a church that has beautiful wood floors and magnificent architecture and a giant steeple, is there anything wrong with that? No, there isn’t.
But our goal isn’t to get back to that. Those are trimmings, functions given to us to do something, and they served a purpose. Maybe if someday someone comes up to have a church like that and says, “Little Hills, we’d like you to have that church. We don’t want it to be redeveloped into an office building or something.” And there was a church down the street that said that. And I said, “Oh no, it’s a nice old church. We don’t want to be in there.” No, it could still serve a purpose.
But our goal isn’t to get there. Our goal is to use wherever we are to get out there to people and to preach the gospel and to see people hear about the Lord.
When I see Christians saying, “This is what we need. This is where we’re trying to go,” no, that’s not where we’re trying to go. We’re trying to go to the world, not inside. We’re not trying to be the Eureka Springs railroad, no matter how comfortable it is, no matter how lovely the music it is playing on.
Steeples are comfortable. They’re beautiful. And if you’re like many of us, certainly myself, I grew up in a church that had a big old steeple and a big bell tower that clanged a beautiful bell. It still speaks to a part of me. I can feel that in me. I mean, it’s really nice.
Maybe it’s not that traditional architecture. Maybe it’s just a beautiful, big, modern, perfectly A/V equipped building with all the bells and whistles. It sounds great. The sound system never decides to adjust volume faders on its own, just randomly.
What is it that would make us comfortable? That’s what we really need to ask because it’s pretty easy if you didn’t ever spend time in a church with a giant steeple and stained glass and whatever to say, “Eh, don’t need that stuff.” But there’s something that makes us comfortable.
For Jonah, it was, “Yeah, there’s people that I live among. They worship other gods. They don’t worship the Lord as they’re supposed to,” even though that’s their whole reason for existence. But I sure don’t want to go and preach to someone else either, because it’s what we have, and it’s comfortable.
What does God want? That’s what we need to ask. What does God want for us as individual Christians, as the church? What does he want? He wants not comfortable building up of institutions or steeples. He wants us to have risky repentance.
There’s a risk to going to Nineveh. One, the people might not like him. There may be some fear. We need to give Jonah credit here. There may be a bunch of different motivations, and one very well could be, “They might kill me.” Yeah, they might.
And they might repent, which in fact, they did. And you know what happens if they repent? God might show them mercy, which in fact, he did.
See, the common thread here that we see, both as Jesus refers to Jonah and in Jonah’s own story, is that risky repentance seems too risky—to actually go and call out to people who are outside of the comfort zone, who don’t act the same, who don’t think the same, who don’t already know the gospel, who don’t already know God’s word. It seems too risky, and maybe we can just kind of stay nice and comfortable.
In fact, sometimes when we do go out of our comfort zone, it doesn’t feel like victory but defeat—because what if they reject us, get angry at us, maybe actually do repent and do better than us then?
So that’s the sin of Jonah. But what about the sign? Jesus didn’t say, “Beware of the sin of Jonah.” He said, “You’re going to receive the sin of Jonah. You’re going to receive the sign of Jonah.” What is it here that God has in mind for them? God wants us to go about rescuing people.
Matthew chapter 12, Jesus actually makes this reference multiple times. If we go back to Matthew chapter 12, verse 38, it says, “Then some of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law said to Him, ‘Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.’” And He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asked for a miraculous sign, but none will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah.”
Then He goes on to explain what that is: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah. And now one greater than Jonah is here.”
God doesn’t want us to be busy building institutions, building steeples, protecting comfort zones. God wants us to go and be about the business of rescuing people.
What’s the sign of Jonah? Well, I think it’s a multi-layered sign, but Jesus lays out the gist of it. Jonah’s going to go preach. Jesus is preaching. What do you know? Well, okay, there are lots of preachers. But also Jonah spends three days in a submarine of sorts—an organic submarine. He was swallowed by a fish. I don’t know if this was some general species of fish or if God had a custom-made fish just for Jonah. It doesn’t really matter. The point was that somehow, some way, God sent a fish to swallow up Jonah.
Because while Jonah didn’t want to do what God wanted him to do, God was going to have Jonah do what God wanted him to do.
In that, we see two other parts of the sign of Jonah. First, he gives up comfort, obviously—not in the way he intended. But let’s move on here.
Unwittingly, Jonah actually previews what Jesus is doing. First, he sacrifices himself, not for the Ninevites—he doesn’t want to do that; he hates them too much. No way, no how. But he does sacrifice himself for the sailors on the boat. As they’re sailing to Tarshish and God brings up a storm to stop Jonah from going, the sailors are panicked. They assume they’re going to die. Jonah says, “Well, you see, I serve the God of the whole universe. He told me to go one way, I’m going the other way, and he’s kind of mad at me. If you throw me over, he won’t kill you.”
So to Jonah’s credit, rather than taking down the whole ship, he has them throw him over. He realizes at that point he’s not going to defeat God; he’s not going to outrun God. He goes into the fish.
Let’s take a look at how he says it: “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he replied, “and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.” So he’s buried at sea. If you’re thrown into the ocean and the ship hightails it away from you, you can assume that you are being buried at sea.
Then he goes into the fish’s stomach—he’s in with all those wonderful digestive juices. It’s kind of a cosmetic treatment of sorts. Commentators have speculated on that and said, “Jonah probably was quite a sight to see when the fish finally vomits him up.” He’s been in that fish for three days. His skin’s probably bleached, his hair is bleached, and he’s probably wild-eyed from the experience.
Can you imagine when he walks into Nineveh, smelling like the stomach of a fish and looking like that and saying, “I have a message for you guys”? Can you imagine what the Ninevites think? In a sense, it might be kind of like what you might think if you run into a man whom you saw crucified, dead, and buried—here’s a man brought to life.
No, Jonah didn’t actually die in the fish. But he certainly was “dead in himself” when he returned to land.
Just as he only sort of symbolized what Jesus did by going and dying and then triumphing over death itself—actually going fully. Jesus was actually dead and then raised to life—the whole analogy is somewhat partial. Because Jonah offers himself as a sacrifice, but he can’t actually offer a genuine sacrifice to appease God for anyone else.
God has to accept that to stop the storm. He chooses to; He doesn’t have to. He has to decide to accept it; He doesn’t have to.
Notably, all the sailors still died. Every one of them.
Every man, woman, and child in Nineveh and the many cattle that are referred to in chapter four. Always an interesting phrase—they all die too. Every single one of them.
Jonah, at his best, couldn’t actually die for them. But being sent to the grave, so to speak, and then brought back, and then preaching repentance, turning to the Lord, he models the pattern by which Jesus is going to work.
He’ll come from something even more shocking than the belly of a fish. It’d be more shocking in appearance than a man bleached by the belly of a fish. He’ll be a dead man who isn’t dead any longer. He’ll preach repentance.
The question is, are they going to listen? Are they going to take that and do something with it?
The very obvious part of the sign is that God has power over death. But the two other parts that we often miss are the call to sacrifice for others and God’s universal call to repentance.
God didn’t just save Jonah from the fish so we can talk about it and have a neat flannel graph in Sunday school. (We really need to get some flannel graphs. Carolyn, we have to have some flannel graphs at some point. I mean, it just makes it officially Sunday school, right?)
But that’s not why God did that. Why did He do that? He did that so that He could call people to Himself, even the people that were the enemies of His people. Because indeed Israel was His people, and He called them, but He didn’t call them to remain just His people. He called them to bring in more people through them. Called them to understand the point of why they were called.
There have been some interesting news articles over the last few months about a woman named Sarah Russell, who worked for the city of St. Louis. She was the head of the emergency management board of the city of St. Louis. I’m talking in the past tense because she was the head of the emergency management board for the city of St. Louis when the deadly tornado hit.
You don’t fire someone from being the emergency management person because a tornado hit. We can’t stop tornadoes. But notably, even though there had been storms predicted all week, even though they knew that there could be storms, she decided to go off-site two hours away and have a conference with the other members of the team who do emergency management.
When the tornado hit and took an unexpected turn and actually hit the city of St. Louis, there was no one to press the button, turn on the sirens to warn people.
You see, I think she’d come to the conclusion that she existed in the role of director of the emergency management team to have a comfortable little team that had things comfortable little teams like to do—go and have committee meetings and workshops, talk about what we might do if something ever happens. She forgot the fact that something was actually happening and that they needed to go and do something about it.
Jonah knew God’s word. He was a prophet of the Lord. He presumably knew that God had called the people to be a nation of priests, a holy nation that goes out and proclaims to the world repentance and calls them to turn towards the Lord. But he says, “Let’s talk about it instead. Maybe I’ll get my team together in Tarshish, and we’ll have a beachside workshop and team-building experience. And in that, we can talk about what we’ll do if we ever go and preach.”
The Pharisees and Sadducees spent all kinds of time poring over the Lord’s word, and yet they had the same conclusion. “Yeah, we know exactly what we need to do, and we’re surrounded by all these people that don’t. It would be really inconvenient if too many of them got involved because they’ll just mess up the place. Some might get mad at us and destroy the place, even if we’re actually seeing other people come and know the Lord, the God of the universe. We can’t take that risk for them.”
Too often with God’s people, the button’s right there to turn on the siren. We’re all going to die. We’re all going to face judgment. But there’s hope. There’s rescue from the storm. That button sits there, and no one presses it.
I think when Jesus refers to the sign of Jonah, he’s basically asking us a question: Are we going to fall into willingly following the sin of Jonah? Are we going to follow the sign of Jonah and be those who preach about the risen Lord?
Do we live with those who believe we serve a better Jonah? Because the first Jonah was a very imperfect man who didn’t want to do what God called him to do. God still used him, but we follow the better Jonah—the Lord himself, God in the flesh, who came and faced something worse than being swallowed by a fish and did it so that we could actually be rescued from the far worse storm of eternal death.
Sometimes it’s going to look like defeat when we follow Him. Think about the grandeur of Solomon’s temple that still has not been rebuilt, the place where God actually manifested visibly His presence, coming upon the temple so people could know, “I’m here.” The grandest cathedral ever built, the grandest church, the most high-tech worship center—you will never find one where God has actually lowered His visible presence down upon it and said, “I’m here.”
So in a sense, it feels like defeat when we go and do what God has called us to do. It was better when you could just keep the Romans happy and they didn’t tear it down.
Having that tangible thing, whether it’s a country like Jonah was trying to protect, or having that tangible thing like the temple, like the Pharisees and Sadducees were trying to protect, that isn’t victory. It looks like it, but it isn’t.
Real victory is following the One who has power over death itself and helping others hear the siren, hear the storms coming, and hear that there’s hope.
We confuse the temporary comforts for achieving real victory. I think that’s where it’s so important to keep asking ourselves, “Where have I fallen into comfort?” I’m not saying comfort’s always bad. We need times of rest; we do. But the point of Jonah isn’t that he was an overworked prophet who needed a little R&R at Tarshish, so he didn’t want to go and do what God had called him to do.
The point for the Pharisees and Sadducees isn’t that it was bad for them to study God’s word and try to follow it faithfully. No, on the contrary, that’s exactly a good thing to do. We should come together like we are tonight and study God’s word and try to learn from it.
But the question is, are we going to take it and be ready to hit the button?
Because we don’t know when the storm’s going to hit for different people. We don’t know when someone’s death is going to come. That means we’re hitting the button right now because people urgently need to hear the gospel, and there shouldn’t be a single moment longer that we wait.
Jesus didn’t come to raise a taller steeple, to keep building up our little kingdoms and be able to say, “Oh, look at how magnificent this particular church is,” or “Look at how magnificent this group of churches or this country of churches is.” He didn’t come to raise up a taller steeple. He came to rescue His people. That’s what you and I are all called to follow Him in doing.
Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, too often we get focused on what will make us comfortable and safe. We see the things maybe in our own past that we’ve experienced, and we’d like to have those again, and we forget the fact that when we gather as your people, the point is that we can be strengthened to go and proclaim, to press the siren button and warn of a hurting and dying world, of the desperate need for your gospel, not to sit back and see how comfortable we can be and see if we can reinforce our comfort.
Lord, 2,000 years ago, you confronted the Pharisees and Sadducees, the leaders of your people at the time, and whether they were going to turn away from their own comfort and embrace what you were doing in your kingdom and go and proclaim and hold on to that, or whether they were just going to double down even if everyone else got hit by the storm.
Lord, please don’t let us do that. We are out in the stormless here of the God who can rescue the people of Nineveh, who can take a man and have him swallowed by a fish and then brought back to life, as it were, on land; who indeed is the God who actually came in the flesh on this earth and lived and suffered and died and triumphed over death for us, that we have the opportunity to serve that God.
And Lord, if we haven’t yet turned to You, would You make tonight the night that we do? But then, will You take all of us who have and not let us decide to follow the path of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and Jonah but follow the path of the Savior, to follow the path of His disciples who were sent out, and even when they weren’t quite there yet, You kept pushing them and sending them out so that the gospel would be proclaimed around the world.
Would You help us to be a people ready to do that at every moment? We pray in Jesus’ precious name, Amen.
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