Down, Down, Down, Down, Down!

              Jonah is a short book with a powerful message written by an unknown author. This book is probably one of my most favorite ones within the Old Testament due its vast array of back-to-back attention grabbers contained within only 4 chapters… a man on the run, a frightening storm, a giant fish, a dual message of repentance, ironic themes, and so much more! Just visualizing these images makes me want to read the book again!

Today, I want to quickly share with you one part of Jonah’s story that can be easily missed. But first, let me layout some needed background. In Jonah 1, God tells Jonah to go to the sinful Ninevites to preach to them about their need of repentance. However, as most of you know, this didn’t resonate with Jonah! Perhaps, not obvious to new readers is that his hesitation to preach to them didn’t stem from fear but rather from his belief that God would forgive them. You see, the Ninevites were inhabitants of the city of Nineveh, which happened to be the capital of Assyria. If you know anything about the Assyrians, you know that they were violent people who didn’t get along well with Israel. This explains Jonah’s grudge. He didn’t want his enemies to repent and be accepted by God. So, what did Jonah do? He ran!

Now here is the part of the book of Jonah I particularly want to share with you. If you read verses 1-5 of chapter 1, you may notice how many times the word down is used… four times! As we know, the whole Bible is obviously important, but when something is written more than once in the Bible, pay extra attention! The idea that the unknown author is trying to covey to us through his literary device of repetition is that Jonah was trying his absolute best to get as far away from God as he could, both in spirit and location. He traveled the exact opposite way God had told him to go and then decided to take a nap to get God’s still small voice out of his head. Can you relate?  

Maybe you’re in the same boat… or maybe not (pun intended), but like Jonah, we all have run away from our issues and more precisely, the ways God would have us to handle them. We all have gone, down, down, down, down. For some of us, that may have literally looked like moving across the country to run away from our problems. For others and perhaps most of us, it may have involved simply “ghosting” our issues and never truly dealing with them in God-intended ways.

When we do this, it can eventually lead to the fifth down, depression. While we can run away from our problems, the people involved in our problems, and our God who can solve our problems, it will never lead to God’s ideals of fulfilled resolution and joy within our problems. Instead, it leads to emptiness and the awful feeling of being down. God wants to work in our lives and to help us handle the issues and decisions that life presents us. Only then can we experience true joy as opposed to the temporary relief that running away from our problems offers. I don’t know what specific areas of your life that God may be dealing with you, but today, let’s all agree to commit ourselves and to run back to God when we face problems. Remember, God will have open arms to welcomes us into His presence and guide us through the areas of life that need God-intended resolutions. Proverbs 18:10 tells us that “The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe” (ESV).

I’ll leave you with one last little thought. If we decide to run away from God, be on the lookout. We may have a whale of a tale or two to share later on in life which perhaps isn’t anyone’s personally preferred attention grabber. I think we would much rather read about such stories than live them. Let Jonah’s life be an example to us all of how we should respond to God’s various callings upon our own lives and of how we should deal with our problems!