Fourth Quarter 2003 Adult Sabbath School Lessons:
"Jonah"

Insights to Lesson 1
Biblical Prophets, Modern Critics
Sept. 27- Oct. 3, 2003

(Produced by the Editorial Board of the 1888 Message Study Committee)

Over 1200 have subscribed to our weekly e-mail “Insights” and asked us to continue (the original plan was only for the first quarter 2003, on the Two Covenants, because the subject was so vital to understanding the 1888 message). Now we ask the question: does the 4th Quarter’s topic on the book of Jonah give us “insights” into the significance of the “message of Christ’s righteousness” that “the Lord in His great mercy sent” to “us” in 1888? Let’s take a brief preview look into what we can learn in Jonah: None of us today was living in the 1888 era; but we cannot divorce ourselves from involvement in that story; we speak of “we” or “us” as though we were there.

In the same way we recognize that “we” were involved in the history of Jesus of 2000 years ago. We “see” ourselves in the story of Peter and of the disciples (God forbid that “we” are “in” the story of Judas!). We see ourselves in the Jews who crucified Jesus. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” asks our hymn, a Negro Spiritual (#158), and the resounding answer of course is “Yes!” We can’t deny it, for that would be the sin of “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans.” The crucifixion of the Son of God is the corporate (and unconscious) sin of the entire human race. “Every mouth may be silenced, and all the world held accountable to God” (Romans 3:19, NIV).

The book of Jonah gives clear instruction illustrating the duty of the particular church to whom “the Lord in His great mercy” sent “a most precious message” in the 1888 era. This is as surely as “the Lord in His great mercy sent” Jonah with a message to Nineveh.

But the leadership of Nineveh reacted very differently to the “most precious message” the Lord in His great mercy sent them by Jonah, than did the leadership of the Seventh-day Adventist church to the “most precious message” the Lord “sent” them in the 1888 era. The two messengers the Lord sent them at that time were what Ellen White said were “special messengers,” “His messengers,” with “heavenly credentials.” But they were fallible mortals, far from “perfect” messengers. So also Jonah; his book details for us how fallible he was! Note the following:

1. When Jonah preached his message, “the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them” (3:5). This is very different from the common opinion that genuine revivals and reformations begin at the grass-roots level and then spread upward. This reformation began at the top of the Nineveh leadership and spread downwards.

2. According to Ellen White’s oft-repeated testimony, the grass-roots people in the 1888 era would have been ready and happy to accept the “most precious message” of 1888, just as the grass-roots “common people” of Jesus’ day “heard Him gladly” (Mark 12:37). The history of the Jews in Christ’s day was backward from the history of Nineveh in Jonah’s day; it was the leadership of the Jewish nation that rejected Him and confused the people.

3. Ellen White’s testimony is clear: in the 1888 era the then-leadership of this church took the lead in rejecting the message, and “kept it away” from the people, and “from the world” (Selected Messages, book 1, pp. 234, 235).

4. Jesus appealed to the leadership of the Jews in His day to lead out in a national and corporate repentance, and offered as an example of how to do it the story of Nineveh’s repentance: “The men of Nineveh will rise in judgment with this generation, and condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonah” (Matthew 12:41).

5. How did Nineveh “repent”? “The king of Nineveh … arose from his throne and laid aside his robe, … and caused it to be published throughout Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, … cry mightily to God” (Jonah 3:6-8). Think how the world would have been blessed if Caiaphas had done the same in the days of Jesus!

6. Think how the world would have been blessed generations ago if “we” had done as “the king of Nineveh” did in his day!

This “insight” goes deep, and forward, into the 13 weeks ahead of us; it could have waited until a later lesson. But perhaps there is an insight here that will heighten our interest in Jonah’s story. Jonah is most surely relevant to our needs today!

Jo Ann Davidson’s book, Jonah: The Inside Story, is excellent. (Get it at your Adventist Book Center.)

Read the study notes for Lesson 2