As we wrapped up Jonah, the narrator finally revealed why Jonah tried to run away from Yahweh in chapter 1; Jonah knew that Yahweh would forgive the people of Nineveh. At this point we not only see how vast the chasm is between God's ways and our own, but we are receive confirmation that the central struggle in the book of Jonah is between God and Jonah himself.

In many ways, there in a New Testament version of this same story, it's Jesus parable of the prodigal son where, a man has two sons, one of whom abandons his father and wastes his inheritance on wild living, only to return and beg for forgiveness which the father grants. However, upset with this gracious response to the "Nineveh son", the son who remained with his father the whole time, the "Jonah son" in irate (and blind to the fact that the father had been equally gracious to him all along).

Yahweh uses a shade tree as one final attempt at teaching Jonah about His nature, but the book ends on a question, forcing us to wonder what happened and inviting us to figure out where we fit in the story.

Discussion Questions:
1. If you were placed into the story of Jonah, would you be Jonah or the people of Nineveh? Why do you place yourself there?

2. What is the amazing grace that God had already shown Jonah and all of Israel? What is the grace He has shown in your life?

3. What do you think happens with Jonah? What should happen to you following a study of Jonah?

Jonah is one of those stories that almost everybody knows something about, even if it's just that some guy was swallowed by a fish. However, when we take time to explore the whole book, it has much to offer to us both individually and as a Christian community.

However, before we being working our way through Jonah, let's ask ourselves two preliminary questions: (1) How does the author of Jonah invite us to read his book? and (2) How does the book of Jonah point us to Jesus?

How does the author of Jonah invite us to read his book?
One of the most obvious characteristics of Jonah is that it clashes with our everyday experience, both in that it has a guy living in the guts of a fish for three days and that it has an entire wicked city repenting at the words of a less than persuasive messenger.

There is evidence that the book of Jonah is set in the context of actual historical events. For example, Jonah is first mentioned in the Bible in 2 Kings 14:25 as a prophet who served during the reign of Jeroboam II which lasted from 786-746 BC. Extra-biblical records indicate that during this same time frame (772-745 BC), Nineveh was in turmoil as a city making it ripe for mass conversion. In addition, Jesus points to Jonah and his experience with the fish and the repentant Ninevites as historical events that compare to Jesus' own upcoming experiences in Matthew 12:38-42 and Luke 11:29-32.

However, a more important question is to ask ourselves is, "How does the author of Jonah invite us to read Jonah?"

One of the characteristics that differentiates Jonah from other prophetic books is the style of literature. While most of the prophetic books open with a historical action where God calls the prophet and then moves into more of a sermon style, Jonah, with the exception of Jonah's prayer in chapter 2, holds to a narrative format. Not only does this imply that, unlike most of the prophetic books, Jonah was written by someone other than the prophet, but it also says that the book is to be understood as historical, much like Joshua, Judges, and Ruth.

In this sense, the author of Jonah invites us to believe in a God who is active and involved in the creation and capable of breaking laws of nature (such as the digestive functions of a fish) to accomplish his purposes in the world.

At the same time, Jonah is filled with satiric irony and is repetitive in nature. This makes it obvious that, while historically rooted, it's been carefully crafted to communicate a specific message.

Given these two realities, it is best to consider Jonah a historical-narrative, much like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament.

How does the book of Jonah point us to Jesus?
In Matthew 12:38-42 and Luke 11:29-32 Jesus is confronted by religious leaders of his day and is asked for a sign to prove that he is who he claims to be. In both cases, Jesus replies that only the wicked would need a sign and that he's only going to give them the sign of Jonah, which he links in Matthew to Jonah's three days and nights in the belly of the fish.

So, what is the sign of Jonah? Given that Jesus only appears to his followers after his resurrection, the only "sign" witnessed by his enemies was his death and burial. Therefore, the "sign" that Jesus offers for them to believe in is the offering of himself to save the lives of many. This makes Jesus one who is greater than Jonah in that Jonah was sacrificed (without actually dying) to save the sailors from danger that he brought upon them while Jesus was sacrificed to save humanity from the wrath of God that we have brought upon ourselves.

This statement by Jesus was embraced in Early Church art, which, of the pieces discovered to date, portrays Jonah 108 times with Noah, the runner up, appearing only 8 times.

Next week we'll begin exploring Jonah chapter 1 in detail.

As the title would suggest, this book is based on the idea conveyed in Ephesians 5:22-27: Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

The basic premise is that men and women are different in ways far beyond anatomy and therefore, the way husbands should treat their wives needs to be different than the way wives treat their husbands because both parties have different emotional needs that only the other can meet.

The primary need of women is to be loved, while the primary need of the man is to be respected. What's even more frustrating is that, as a result of the Fall, these things are not natural. In fact, what we see happening in everyday relationships is that a husband will do something the wife perceives as unloving so she will do something he perceives as disrespectful which will prompt him to be more unloving and the cycle continues.

Because this love and respect dynamic isn't natural anymore, we need to be intentional in our loving and respecting of one another which is what the majority of the book is devoted to.

I'm not huge on the acronym approach used on the how-to of love and respect (thus the book loosing a review point), but the ideas are dead on and backed up by Scripture, human experience, and research.

On the whole, this is a wonderful book that helps couples appreciate not only their differences, but how those differences are complimentary and, when honored, allow the whole to be more than the sum of the parts.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is typically seen as one of those "givens" when it comes to stories from the Bible. For those who grow up in the Church it's often one of the first stories of Jesus that we hear and it's one we frequently run across throughout our formative years. But it's also one of those parables that transcends the Christian world and breaks into popular culture. In this sense it's one of those stories that lead people to like Jesus but not be so sure about the Church. For those who aren't familiar with the story let me retell it and add in some interesting cultural details.

The story begins with a man who's traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho and is attacked by robbers who leave him beaten, naked, and unconscious on the side of the road. Sometime later a priest who has finished his service in the temple and is returning to Jerusalem notices the man on the side of the road not too far ahead of him. Instantly he's confronted by a moral dilemma, after all, as a priest he needs to keep himself ceremonially clean and the man on the side of the road could defile him on two counts, he might be dead and he could be a non-Jew. So, not wanting to risk uncleanliness, he steers his donkey around the man (it would be rare for an upper class priest to not have ride of some kind).

The priest is followed shortly by a Levite, a man who quite likely could have spent the previous days assisting that very priest in conducting the sacrificial work in the temple. He doesn't have the same cleanliness requirements as the priest so touching the man if he's dead or not a Jew isn't an issue, but he's still hesitant. After all, as a wise traveler he knew who else was on the road because his life depended on it. He knew the priest who'd come before had chosen to pass by this man so, if he, a mere layman helped the stranger, wouldn't he be questioning the priest's interpretation of the Law? Not wanting to ruffle feathers he continued down the road.

Then of course comes the Samaritan, a man who was also concerned with keeping the Law, after all, he wasn't a Gentile, rather his ancestors were a crossbreed of Jews and Assyrians. While this made him unclean and detestable to Jews, he still sought to keep the Law and, in this case, found that the Law compelled him to help the stranger. So, unlike the Levite who could have administered first-aid, the Samaritan bound up the man's wounds. Then, unlike the priest who could have given him a ride, the Samaritan put the man on his donkey. Finally, unlike the robbers who took his money, beat him, and abandoned him, the Samaritan gave the man money, cared for him, and promised to return.

From this basic review of the story we can pull out some seemingly obvious lessons. For example, we shouldn't be like the priest and find ourselves obsessed with the rules and regulations, after all, what really matters is how we live out our faith in everyday life. Similarly we can look to the Levite and think that maybe we should question those who are the supposed experts because they might be leading us astray. Finally of course with the Samaritan we learn that it doesn't matter if you're in the true Church or the heretical sect, what God really cares about is how you treat other people.

While I think there's legitimacy to some of this, I have to admit it makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable, after all, if it's all about how we treat other people then essentially the Good Samaritan is a story about how to earn your way to heaven. After all, if we look at the dialogue that the story comes in (starting at verse 25), the key question being discussed is, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" If we apply the typical interpretation to the question being addressed, then it undermines the very foundation of Christianity.

This past week as I studied these verses as a part of sermon preparation, it was this very point the forced me to take a fresh look at not only the parable of the Good Samaritan, but the dialogue surrounding it.

The context begins with a lawyer, an expert in the Law coming to Jesus and testing him with the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" In good rabbi fashion Jesus responds to the question with a question, "What does the Law say?" Naturally the lawyer responds with a combination of Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. However, as he finished the response it strikes him, who can love God and their neighbor like this ... it's impossible. The look on the lawyer's face reveals his fears to the crowd and everyone stirs with discomfort, discomfort that only worsens as Jesus tells the lawyer his understanding is correct.

Luke goes on to describe the lawyer's next question as an attempt to justify himself, in other words, he's seeking out the, "I'm a good person" argument and trying to make a way that he can earn eternal life. Looking at the options, he decides that the most attainable aspect of self-righteousness would be lowering the bar on who his neighbor is, after all, it's not exceedingly hard to love the people who love us. It's in response to this attempt by the man that Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan as a means to raise the bar on who our neighbor is to the highest level ... our neighbor is any other human being who is in need of our love.

At this point you can almost hear the crowd thinking, "Then who can be saved, after all, the standard for earning eternal life is too high for anybody to accomplish it?" Oddly enough, that's where the story ends, with Jesus telling the lawyer to go and do what he'll never be able to accomplish.

So, if we can't inherit eternal life, then who gets to live? Interestingly enough, there is one man in the parable of the Samaritan who is given life ... the man who lay beaten, naked, and unconscious on the side of the road. He didn't do anything to earn it, rather, it was because of the Samaritan's love for his neighbor that life was literally given to him. In the same way, Jesus, our Good Samaritan, comes to us as we lay beaten by the reality that we can never earn eternal life, binds up our wounds, carries us to the inn of his Church where we're brought back to health as he lavishes us with grace and mercy, and promises to return for us someday. Who can inherit eternal life? Those who are found by the one who does love God and his neighbors ... our Good Samaritan ... the God-man Jesus.

23:03 minutes (3.98 MB)

After establishing that John tells us the same seven part story three times (with three excursions) in Revelation 6-16, this week we continue to explore that story with the first of two weeks on the end of the world. Tonight we focus on the church militant and the 144,000.

Download this week's notes here.