Is Jonah Real?

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the Apostle Paul said, "...but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.".

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

Mike Abendroth here. I'm down to two steroid tabs a day. Went back to the doctor. He said he didn't have enough, here's some more, and so here we go. Feeling normal. Feeling normal. Abbey normal. What was that from?

I think that was from, what was the show? Mel Gibson. Mel somebody. Mel Brooks. Oh, man. So, anyway, we are going to Israel, 2015, February 17th, and off to Jordan. We'd love to have you come. Go to NoCompromiseRadio .com if you'd like to join us.

You can either meet us in Boston, meet us, fly from Boston, Omaha, New York City, or we'll see you over in the Modest Yahoo Tel Aviv. Do you listen to Modest Yahoo? I like his older stuff better. The other thing that's happening that's interesting is I'm flying to Memphis soon and recording 10 No Compromise TV shows, so branching into TV, Brandon's offered for his TV station some NoCo stuff on the house, and so 10 on the house.

Isn't that nice? See how that works? And we'll have special segments, The Message Moment, of course, we'll have Kooks and Barney's, I don't know, Heroes and Heretics, so if there's a certain segment, so I've got 10 one-half hour shows, and instead of me just lecturing the whole time or preaching, I've got to kind of chop it up, you know, Jimmy Fallon kind of thing, a little monologue, and then the top 10 or something, who knows how it'll work.

If you've got ideas, nocompromiseradio .com, info at or Mike at, glad that you listen. Well, I've been thinking about preaching these days, and what do you preach next when you finish a book? We finished Ruth a while ago, then I was gone during the summertime, highlighting some passages about Jesus and who he is, fascinated with our Lord as I've studied Matthew over the summer, and now it's fall, it's New England, it's autumn, the colors are changing, here it is in October already, and so I think I'm going to keep teaching from the Old Testament in the morning, and so we're going to be going through the book of Jonah, and so I thought today on No Compromise Radio, we would begin a little mini-series and talk some things about Jonah.

Jonah as Prophetic Narrative and the Question of Historicity

Now I'm not going to do a verse-by-verse exposition here on the radio, but there are some important topics that come out in light of the passage in Jonah that will be good for the show today. At least I think it'll be good, and after all, let's say, since this show is for free, you get it for free, if one show out of five is good, then you're set.

So maybe this is the one, maybe it's not. I always remember the illustration, though, about the guy who was on the plane, traveled a bunch for business, and he would read his Bible. So you've got a Christian man, he's on the plane, and so, you know, Bible's pretty obvious.

The guy next to him sees the Bible and kind of laughs a little bit, and you know, you don't really believe all that stuff in the Bible, do you? Well, yes I do. Matter of fact, I do. It's in the Bible.

Well, what about the guy that was swallowed by the fish? Oh, Jonah, yes, that's in the Bible. I believe that. That's true. Well, how do you suppose he survived all that time inside the fish? Well, the guy said, the whale, probably.

And the Christian man said, well, I don't really know. I guess when I get to heaven, I'll ask him. Well, with sarcasm, what if he isn't in heaven? Well, the man said, then you can ask him. The book of Jonah is a fascinating book talking about the saving character of God and his patience and his salvation of not just Jews, but Gentiles.

It helps us when we think about Jonah in terms of our own personal evangelism. This book, as some have called it, A Prophetic Narrative, is a great book to read. What you should do, I'm not going to do it right now, I guess I could, but we don't really need to, is to read the book out loud in one sitting.

And so don't just do a chapter at a time, read the whole book out loud, and you're going to see things in there. You're going to hear things, elements of surprise and of interest, and the way it's written.

This is a fascinating book. And so I think you're going to be motivated to study Jonah and then think about the God of the scriptures more. Now, like the guy sitting on the airplane, Jonah is attacked.

Liberals, anti-supernaturalists, those people say, this is made up, it's Esau's fable, it's a fairy tale, it's ridiculed, and how could you believe that a man is delivered by a fish? The earliest accounts I can find regarding this kind of ridicule is Julian and Pophery, pagans who said, how could you believe that?

You know, this is just another story, and we have other similar stories. It's the same tact that people will use when they talk about the flood, oh yeah, the Gilgamesh flood and all these other accounts of the flood, and this is just kind of the Bible's version of the flood.

Andromeda, you've got his rescue from the sea monster by Perseus, you've got Arian, he was a musician, and he was a skilled musician, they toss him into the ocean, that is the sailors do, and he gets to shore, according to Herodotus History 1 .24.

How does Arian, the musician, get to shore after he's tossed into the water by sailors? Answer, a dolphin takes him. So see, this is just common, this is just normal, everyday story time. Hercules, who sprang into the jaws of a sea monster, and is in its belly how many days?

Three days. Interesting. Well, how do we work through this as Christians? What do we believe about this book? Do we say, you know, it's just not in the canon because it's made up, or do we give it a different kind of interpretation?

And so when it comes to the book of Jonah, most people who are liberal will say, it's just a myth, like these other stories. You know, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, like I said, Hercules, that's what they'll do.

This is a myth. Other people will say, and there are some pretty good scholars who sometimes delve into this, they'll say it's more of an allegory. It's kind of a parable, parabolic allegory, allegorical parable.

They would not like that. And so you have things represent something else. So Jonah, for one illustration, he's Israel, and the sea is the Gentile nations. And you can see where some of that biblical comparisons fit in.

Fish, so the fish keeps somebody surrounded, dominated, captivated. And so the fish is Babylon, and this is the captivity of Babylon. And then when you get regurgitated, when you get vomited out, when you get spewn forth, spewn, is that a right word?

You know why I said that is because when I first moved to Los Angeles in 1982 or three ish, I went to the grocery store and they had Alpha Beta. That was an interesting name. You know, coming from Nebraska, we had, what were our stores there?

Hy-Vee, Bakers, out in the sticks, Piggly Wiggly. That was the funny one, right? Some kind of sunshine markets up in Yankton, South Dakota. And so I moved to Los Angeles and they would have Safeway. That seemed good.

Nice. They had Albertsons if you wanted to get some Mormon bread or something. And then they had what? What was the one that just, you know, made you think who would name a grocery store that? Ralph's.

And so the regurgitation is when Israel comes back during Ezra's time. So see, it's a, it's a little parable. It's a little allegory. Don't, you know, make this walk on all historical fours. We just need to learn something.

You know, you can learn something from the Good Samaritan parable and you can learn something from this too. So this particular view, Jonah's not real. The fish isn't real, but it's a real fish story in the sense you can learn from it.

George Adam Smith said, quote, we sin against the intention of the author and the Holy Spirit, which inspired him when we willfully interpret the book as real history. So Jonah, Nineveh, the fish, the sailors, the plant, none of that stuff is real history.

And we're sinning against the intention of the author. But don't allegories usually show themselves as allegories? Give us a little hint. Give us an indication of an allegory with some explanation. I think they do.

G .A. Smith said, the truth which we find in the book of Jonah is as full and fresh a revelation of God's will as prophecy anywhere achieves that God has granted to the Gentiles repentance unto life is nowhere else in the Old Testament so vividly illustrated.

So, you know, Jonah means dove and dove is a symbol for Israel and he's a son of truth. And, you know, we just go on and on and on. But I think the best way to do this is if you were a blue collar worker, if you are someone who'd never read the Bible from a different culture, if there were people who lived on Mars and who could read English or Hebrew for that matter, you just read it.

Normally, you read Jonah plainly, regularly, you'd say, huh, guy's supposed to go do something, doesn't want to do it, goes the wrong way, gets thrown overboard, a fish swallows him. And that's the way the book shows itself.

It presents itself as historical. Oh, it's more than historical, but it is historical. The church believed it to be that, the Jews believed it to be that. No rabbinic tradition of having Jonah not in the canon.

Jonah in 2 Kings and Jesus’s View of Jonah

How about this? In the 15th year of Amaziah, this is 2 Kings 14, the son of Joash, king of Judah, Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel, became king in Samaria and reigned 41 years. And he did evil in the sight of the Lord, Yahweh.

He did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, which he made Israel sin. He restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath, as far as the Sea of Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke through his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet who was of Gath-Hefer.

And so here's Jonah from Gath-Hefer, north of Nazareth in Galilee. Interesting, when the Pharisees said, no prophet has risen out of Galilee, John 7, 52, they were mistaken because Jonah was. And so we take Jonah as a literal account, mainly because this is the best way to read it, the normal way to read it, the plain way to read it, but mainly because of Jesus Christ.

Now, often I say on the radio show that the best way to think of the Old Testament in terms of how you read it, how you trust it, how you view it is if you would view the Old Testament the way Jesus did, you would be very safe.

Doesn't that seem to make sense? Christians are Christ followers and they follow Christ's person. They believe in his work. They believe in the one who sent him. They should have the same view of the Old Testament that Jesus did.

I mean, if I was on the earth, if I was Peter and Jesus said, by the way, I've got to clear this up. For a long time, the Jews have thought that Jonah really described a fish swallowing a man three days and three nights, belly of the fish.

That was all wrong. It was supposed to be mythological. It was supposed to be allegorical. It was supposed to be only a parable. It was supposed to be just a satire. It was just a modern day Hercules, Arion kind of thing.

But Jesus didn't do that. Here's what Jesus says of Jonah in Matthew 12. Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him saying, teacher, we want to see a sign from you. But he answered and said to them, an evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign.

And yet, excuse me, no sign shall be given to it, but the sign of Jonah, the allegorical prophet, sorry, of Jonah, the prophet. Verse 40 of Matthew 12. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Now it's interesting to me. I just want to stop there for a second. It's No Compromise Radio. You can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com. Mike at nocompromiseradio .com. Tuesdayguy at nocompromiseradio .com.

Any threats or negative letters, Josh, at nocompromiseradio .com. I don't use it anymore, but I have some old notes. Remember the Ryrie Study Bible? The Ryrie Study Bible. When I first got saved, that was the Bible.

At least that was the Bible at Grace Community Church. People had New American Standard Ryrie Study Bibles. That was really, I don't want to say it was the first, but that was a real popular one. And here's where I will give the Ryrie Study Bible credit.

The notes that Ryrie did at the bottom of the page, we're trying to get you to understand the meaning of the text. And so that's what I think a study Bible should do. Contrary to Life Application Bible and Romans 12 and self-esteem and feel this way or feel that way.

There are some exceptions, of course, because sometimes it tried to help you understand the meaning that is the Life Application Bible. But the study Bibles that are the best are the ones that help you understand what does God mean when He says this?

And so I think Ryrie did a pretty good job. Now he had his own issues. And even though I think he was, or is, not anti-lordship, but non-lordship, he would have things in James chapter two. Excuse me, I need another steroid.

You know what? I actually have some Pete's coffee here from the Keurig, Pete's Keurig in my Harvest House mug. Where's Harvest House? What are they doing? Things that would go bump in the church part two.

It needs to be out there, but phone's not ringing off the hook. And so anyway, what am I talking about? Ryrie studied Bible. That was the Bible that people often used. And here's what Ryrie says for Matthew 12, 40, three days and three nights.

The phrase does not necessarily require that 72 hours elapse between Christ's death and resurrection for the Jews reckon part of the day to be as a whole day. Okay, that's right. And so we'll talk about that at a later time.

But if you have one minute on Friday, 24 hours, the full day on Saturday, and one minute on Sunday, you've got Jewish reckoning. And even when you think about it, and Jesus rose on the third day, it didn't say after three full days, Jesus rose.

So you go from Friday night to Saturday night, Sunday night to Monday night. And so the way the Jews would reckon any part of a day counts as a day. That even seems to make sense for us too, doesn't it?

You've got to count how many days on a calendar, 24 hour days, must it be? So he's got this right. So any part of Friday, all of Saturday and any part of Sunday, we would have faithfully, it would be a faithful demonstration in the scripture.

Now here's what he says though. This prophecy can be fulfilled if the crucifixion occurred on Friday. Good. Now here's the thing that just out of nowhere, Ryrie's pretty conservative, very conservative.

However, the statement does not require a historical Jonah who was actually swallowed by a great fish. That's me chewing on the microphone. What? I mean, that's probably the wildest thing in all the study Bible.

Forget some seven dispensation wild stuff. How about this? The statement does not require a historical Jonah who actually was swallowed by a great fish. That's bad. Matthew 12, 41 goes on to say, the men of Nineveh, this is Jesus talking, shall stand up with this generation at the judgment and shall condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

You people that are listening to me, you have hard hearts. You have calloused hearts. You have seemingly impenetrable hearts. Just like Nineveh's hearts. You think you're Israelites and you're somehow better, but you're not just like Nineveh.

Nineveh had soft hearts and you've got hard hearts. I don't know what Ryrie was thinking, but I do know this, that if you look at Jesus's words about Jonah and then say, well, we've got an allegorical Jonah, then pretty much you could easily get to the allegorical view of Christ.

And then you've got an allegorical solution to your real sin problem, because you know you're sinful. I certainly know I'm sinful. That's not an allegory. I wish it was, but I've got a real problem. And so it is hard for me to have someone say, this is not that big a deal because the words of Jesus make it a big deal.

Jonah, the Minor Prophet, and the Main Themes of the Book

So Mike Ebenroth here, Jonah, we're talking about Jonah. And Jonah is a minor prophet. And it's just a minor prophet because there's not much written, that is to say, it's not like Daniel or Ezekiel where there's lots of chapters, just four short chapters.

And interestingly, this is not full of a bunch of prophecies. You'd think a prophet would have a lot of prophecies. Not much of what Jonah said is here. Oh, we've got the prayer in chapter two, the Psalm.

But here we're focusing on Jonah a lot. We're focusing on God's love and concern for mankind. We're focusing on salvation is from the Lord. We're focusing on how God's committed to his program and to his people.

And those people aren't just the Israelites in the sense that the Abrahamic covenant goes beyond Israelites. You're going to see in this book, the sovereignty of God and the supernatural nature of God.

It is all about the Lord. And that's what it should be about. It should be about the Lord. J. Vernon McGee, he didn't miss it. The fish here is not the hero of the story. Neither is it, it's villain. The book is not even about a fish.

The fish is among the props and does not occupy the star's dressing room. Let us distinguish between the essentials and the incidentals. That's a good little phrase right there. Let us distinguish between the essentials and the incidentals.

Incidentals are the fish, the gourd, the East wind, the boat, and Nineveh. The essentials are Jehovah and Jonah, God, and man. And when you start reading Jonah, now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai saying, you are just thrust into this passage, into this message, into this situation from the very get-go.

You know, once upon a time, here's some background. Here's a little warmup. Help me kind of feel better. Pull me into the story. Get my attention. It is like whack before you know it. You just boom. Charles Reed said this, it contains 48 verses and 1 ,328 words.

One does not get far in an English novel of 1 ,328 words. There is growth of character, a plot worked out without haste or crudity. Only a great artist could have hit on a perfect proportion of dialogue and narrative.

And that's all true. And it all happens so fast. God's word, Yahweh's word came to Jonah. Son of Amittai. Bang. Even the way the Hebrew, it says here in English in the ESV, now the word of the Lord kind of comes to pass.

And it's just kind of no preparation. God is going to speak to Jonah and there's some work to be done. Jonah's name probably means dove and he is son of Amittai, son of truth. The dove of truth. Jonah, son of Amittai.

So anyway, time is fleeting. That is on the show. You can go find some YouTubes if you'd like. We've got some NoCo 90s. Lots of things happening. Looking forward to ministering a pillar of truth. Conference with Jimmy Carraway, David Doran.

That's coming up late October as well. We'll talk more about Jonah next time on No Compromise Radio. Don't forget the Israel trip and you can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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