[Faith-talk] {Spam?} 7/25/16 Baffling Bible Questions Answered Column, Answer to Yesterday's Bible Trivia Game Poem and an Announcement of Possible Interest

[Paul Smith]

Hello and greetings to one and all.  I hope that your day is going 
well, by God's matchless grace and His providential care.

Let's begin with the answer to yesterday's Bible trivia game poem for 
those who didn't yet figure it out or couldn't.  It was Ephesians 3.

Now to today's baffling Bible questions answered column, focusing on 
the prophet Jonah.



Question:  Who wrote this book, and what themes and issues does it deal with?

Answer:  Jonah is identified in II Kings 14:25 as a prophet who lived 
in Israel during the reign of Jeroboam II (793-753 B.C.).  He predicted 
the expansion of the kingdom under this strong but wicked ruler of the 
northern kingdom.  But when Jonah was commanded to go to Nineveh to 
announce impending judgment, the prophet fled in the opposite 
direction.  At the end of the familiar story, Jonah's flight is 
explained.  The patriotic prophet feared that, if he preached in 
Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, its people might repent.  Jonah wanted 
Nineveh destroyed, but this expanding northern power not only 
threatened his country but had been identified by earlier prophets as 
its destroyer.

Jonah was disciplined and given a second chance.  At last the reluctant 
prophet did go to Nineveh.  And the people of that great city did 
repent, and the city was not destroyed.  In this, Nineveh served as a 
powerful object lesson to Israel.  If only a doomed people will repent 
and turn to God, impending judgment can be avoided.  Tragically, the 
people of Israel were as slow as Jonah to sense the meaning of the 
prophet's mission.  Within a very few years, in 722 B.C., the Assyrians 
did sweep into the northern kingdom and put an end to Israel's 
existence as a nation.

The reference to Jonah in II Kings and the historical setting of the 
ministry described in this book make it clear that Jonah is not 
intended to be taken as a parable but as a historic account of the 
prophet's ministry.



Jonah 1:17

Question:  Could Jonah have been swallowed by a whale? And if he was, 
how could he have lived?

Answer:  In the first place, the Hebrew text never says that Jonah was 
swallowed by a whale.  This verse, however, speaks of a great fish that 
God specially prepared to swallow the drowning prophet and thus save 
his life.  Despite a host of suspicious stories from the nineteenth 
century of people supposedly swallowed by whales and later recovered 
alive, we should not look for natural parallels to support the biblical 
account.  It is clear from the text that Jonah describes a miracle, and 
the great fish was specially prepared by the Lord for its mission.



Jonah 3:3

Question:  Nineveh was not large enough in the eighth century B.C. for 
Jonah to have taken three days to cross.  The Bible clearly is wrong here.

Answer:  Nineveh in Jonah's day was a very large city with a population 
of at least 120,000 (4:11), some four times larger than the 30,000 in 
Samaria, the capital city of Israel.  It is also true that cities of 
the flat Mesopotamian plain spread outward, rather than concentrate 
their population in the cramped, hilltop sites common to the Holy Land. 
Even so, a distance of three days does seem extreme, as the inner walls 
of the city had a length of only eight miles.  The best explanation is 
that Jonah refers to the wider administrative district.  We might call 
this "greater Nineveh." This view is supported by Genesis 10:11-12, 
which refers to an area that includes the cities of Rehoboth Ir, Calah, 
and Resen within "the great city" of Nineveh.



Jonah 3:10

Question:  How can Jonah be accredited as a prophet when the 
destruction he foretold did not happen?

Answer:  Jonah himself recognized that there is a conditional element 
built into every Old Testament prediction of judgment.  When the city 
was not destroyed, Jonah was angry and begged God to take his life.  He 
had fled to Tarshish because he knew God as "a gracious and 
compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who 
relents from sending calamity" (4:2).  When the ruler and people of 
Nineveh repented, God was able to deal with them in grace rather than 
in judgment.

It is very important when reading prophecies of divine judgment to keep 
this "implicit condition" in mind.  The principle still operates today. 
All people are lost and doomed by sin.  But all who turn to Christ will 
avoid judgment and instead experience the grace of our compassionate God.

And there you have this week's baffling Bible Questions answered 
column, but we have one more thing to lay on you.

Several weeks ago I donated two usable musical instruments that haven't 
been used for some time to the Radio Reading Network of Maryland, our 
radio reading service here in the Baltimore area.  They are in dire 
need of equipment to rebroadcast local programming.  Currently they are 
doing all local productions live.  However, in talking to the director, 
I mentioned that I have quite a bit of uplifting literature and he 
asked if I'd be willing to read some of it over their facilities.  In 
replying affirmatively, we set up a date and time for a 30-minute "dry 
run" to see if it would work.  So on Friday, July 29 at 12 noon 
eastern, the undersigned will be hosting his program called "This and 
That," because that's where my material will come from, various 
sources.  For all interested outside of the Baltimore area, will give 
you the Internet URL to where hopefully you can hear our programs.

And that will do it for today.  Until tomorrow when, Lord willing the 
articles will resume, may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep 
us safe, individually and collectively, in these last days in which we 
live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Paul