Someone Greater Than Jonah

Someone Greater than Jonah

We tend to think mostly of Jonah’s failure to obey when God sent him to Nineveh. Yet when Jonah was given a second chance at obedience, he went to the evil city of Nineveh, shouting, “Forty days from now Nineveh will be destroyed!” (Jonah 3:4). The people believed Jonah’s message and God didn’t carry out the threatened destruction.

Jonah had an amazing response to his preaching in this Gentile city. They believed God and repented in sincerity. In contrast, when Jesus preached to the covenant people of Israel, the majority of them remained hardened and would not repent. Jesus said to them, “The people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it, for they repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah. Now someone greater than Jonah is here—but you refuse to repent” (Matthew 12:41).

So how was Jesus “greater than Jonah”? We see his superiority in many ways. While Jonah ran away from his calling to preach the gospel of repentance to those far away from God, Jesus embraced that calling, beginning his ministry by calling people to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” And while it was Jonah’s disobedience that put him in the belly of the fish, it was Jesus’ obedience that put him in the grave. Jesus was “obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:8, NIV).

Jonah wept because the people of Nineveh repented, but Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem because they would not repent.

Jonah desired to die rather than embrace God’s will because his heart was so hard and his hatred for the Assyrians was so strong. Jesus submitted to God’s will, saying, “I want your will to be done, not mine” (Matthew 26:39), not because he wanted to die, but because his love for sinners was so great.

But perhaps most significantly, while a guilty Jonah was thrown off the ship into the raging sea by sailors who were saying, “O LORD, . . . don’t make us die for this man’s sin” (Jonah 1:14), an innocent Jesus cast himself into the storm of God’s judgment to die for the sins of guilty people. He died so we don’t have to.

Sinless Savior, my disobedience deserves nothing less than being tossed into the stormy seas of your judgment. But instead, you have absorbed that judgment and granted me mercy. Your obedience covers my disobedience.