Overview of the Book of Jonah (Typology)

The overview of the week for this Sunday is the book of Jonah. Think of all the minor prophets, Jonah has to be the most well-known, mostly because of the account of him being swallowed by the whale.

Everybody knows that story. But this book goes much deeper than that. It's really a story of God's mercy towards the Gentiles, since Jonah was really the first foreign missionary outside of the borders of Israel.

And here's the main point of the book. Jonah typifies Jesus Christ, who died and was raised, and then his message went out to the nations. If you know the story, at first Jonah was reluctant to go, because in the mind of the average Israelite, God only cared about them.

So this story foreshadows the New Testament teaching that God doesn't just love Israel, God so loved the world. The book begins with these words. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.

But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So the Lord tells him to go one place. What does he do? He gets on a boat and heads in the opposite direction, which causes God to send a great storm.

Long story short, Jonah ends up overboard in the sea, and that's when he's swallowed by the whale, or the great fish, as it's also called. Now there is some question of whether or not Jonah survived. God preserved his life in the belly of the fish, or, as I believe, Jonah died and was then raised from the dead, which would make him a type of Christ either way.

But what does that mean, type of Christ? You've heard this term before, a type of Christ. Well, typology is a method of biblical interpretation whereby an element found in the Old Testament is seen to prefigure one found in the New Testament.

When we say someone is a type of Christ, we are saying that a person in the Old Testament behaves in such a way that corresponds to Jesus in his character or actions in the New Testament Scripture. So in conclusion, the miraculous story of Jonah and the whale, if you think about it, it's a picture of the gospel, which is the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

As Jesus said in Matthew 12 verse 40, for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.