Yesterday we looked a bit at why Jonah ran, today we’re going to explore what it means for Jonah that he runs.
Read Jonah 1 especially verses 1-3.
We have to begin here with how a good Jew would have viewed Israel. This begins with the question; where does God live? Obviously a Jew would say that God lives in the Temple in the Holy of Holies. So if you live in Israel you live with God. So following that logic, the further you move from Israel, the further you move from the presence of God in a very real way.
If Israel is the presence of God, what is the deep? For an ancient Jew the ocean is called the “deep” and the deep is the leftover chaos from creation, or to put it another way, hell. So taking a boat over the deep wasn’t just a boat ride, it was something deeper, something spiritual. It was to risk facing hell itself. For Jonah this should be a terrifying trip.
In our lives, there are times when we run from God. When we do, like Jonah, we risk facing chaos. Like Jonah our lives are surrounded with chaos
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