Albert Barnes Commentary Jonah 1:3

"But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of Jehovah; and he went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of Jehovah." — Jonah 1:3 (ASV)

But (And) Jonah rose up to flee ... from the presence of the Lord - literally “from being before the Lord.” Jonah knew well that man could not escape from the presence of God, whom he knew as the Self-existing One, He who alone is, the Maker of heaven, earth, and sea. He did not “flee” then “from His presence,” knowing well what David said (Psalms 139:7, 9-10), “Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me.” Jonah fled, not from God’s presence, but from standing before Him, as His servant and minister. He refused God’s service because, as he himself tells God afterward (Jonah 4:2), he knew what it would end in, and he disliked it.

So he acted, as people often do who dislike God’s commands. He set about removing himself as far as possible from being under the influence of God, and from the place where he “could” fulfill them. God commanded him to go to Nineveh, which lay northeast from his home; and he instantly set himself to flee to the then farthest west. Holy Scripture sets the rebellion before us in its full nakedness. “The word of the Lord came unto Jonah, go to Nineveh, and Jonah rose up;” he did something instantly, as the consequence of God’s command. He “rose up,” not as other prophets, to obey, but to disobey; and that, not slowly nor irresolutely, but “to flee, from” standing “before the Lord.” He renounced his office. So when our Lord came in the flesh, those who found what He said to be “hard sayings,” went away from Him, “and walked no more with Him” (John 6:66). So the rich “young man went away sorrowful” (Matthew 19:22), for he had great possessions.

They were perhaps afraid of trusting themselves in His presence, or they were ashamed of staying there and not doing what He said. So people, when God secretly calls them to prayer, go and immerse themselves in business. When, in solitude, He says to their souls something they do not like, they escape His voice in a crowd.

If He calls them to make sacrifices for His poor, they order themselves a new dress or some fresh luxury or self-indulgence. If He calls them to celibacy, they commit to marry immediately. Or, on the contrary, if He calls them not to do something, they do it at once to end their struggle and their obedience, to put obedience out of their power, and to set themselves on a course of disobedience.

Jonah, then, in this part of his history, is the image of those who, when God calls them, disobey His call, and shows how God deals with them when He does not abandon them. He lets them have their way for a time and surrounds them with difficulties, so that they will “flee back from God displeased to God appeased.”

“The whole wisdom, the whole bliss, the whole of man lies in this, to learn what God wills him to do, in what state of life, calling, duties, profession, employment, He wills him to serve Him.” God sent each one of us into the world to fulfill their own definite duties and, through His grace, to attain our own perfection in and through fulfilling them. He did not create us at random, to pass through the world, doing whatever self-will or our own pleasure leads us to, but to fulfill His will.

This will of His, if we obey His earlier calls and seek Him by prayer, in obedience, self-denial, humility, and thoughtfulness, He makes known to each by His own secret drawings, and, in the absence of these, at times by His Providence or human means. And then, “to follow Him is a token of predestination.” It is to place ourselves in that order of things, that pathway to our eternal mansion, for which God created us and which God created for us.

So Jesus says (John 10:27–28), “My sheep hear My voice and I know them, and they follow Me, and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My Hand.” In these ways, God has foreordained for us all the graces that we need; in these, we shall be free from all temptations that might be too hard for us, in which our own special weakness would be most exposed. Those ways that people choose out of mere natural taste or fancy are mostly those that expose them to the greatest peril of sin and damnation.

For they choose them just because such pursuits most flatter their own inclinations and give scope to their natural strength and their moral weakness. So Jonah, disliking a duty that God gave him to fulfill, separated himself from His service, forfeited his past calling, lost, as far as it was in his power, his place among “the goodly fellowship of the prophets,” and, but for God’s overtaking grace, would have ended his days among the disobedient.

As in Holy Scripture, David stands alone of saints who, after their calling, were bloodstained; as the penitent robber stands alone converted in death; as Peter stands singly, recalled after denying his Lord; so Jonah stands, the one prophet who, having obeyed and then rebelled, was constrained by the overpowering providence and love of God to return and serve Him.

“Being a prophet, Jonah could not be ignorant of the mind of God—that, according to His great Wisdom and His unsearchable judgments and His untraceable and incomprehensible ways, He, through the threat, was providing for the Ninevites that they should not suffer the things threatened. To think that Jonah hoped to hide himself in the sea and elude by flight the great Eye of God would be altogether absurd and ignorant—a belief not to be entertained, I say, not just of a prophet, but of any other sensible person who had any moderate knowledge of God and His supreme power.

Jonah knew all this better than anyone: that, planning his flight, he changed his place but did not flee God. For no one could do this, either by hiding himself in the bosom of the earth or depths of the sea, or ascending (if possible) with wings into the air, or entering the lowest hell, or being surrounded by thick clouds, or taking any other measure to secure his flight.

God alone, above all things, can neither be escaped nor resisted. When He wills to hold and grasp in His hand, He overtakes the swift, baffles the intelligent, overthrows the strong, bows the lofty, tames rashness, and subdues might.

He who threatened others with the mighty hand of God was not himself ignorant of God, nor did he think to flee Him. Let us not believe this. But since he saw the fall of Israel and perceived that prophetic grace would pass to the Gentiles, he withdrew from the office of preaching and deferred the command.”

“The prophet knows, the Holy Spirit teaching him, that the repentance of the Gentiles is the ruin of the Jews. Therefore, as a lover of his country, he does not so much envy Nineveh's deliverance as he wills that his own country should not perish. Seeing, too, that his fellow-prophets are sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel to rouse the people to repentance, and that Balaam the soothsayer also prophesied of Israel’s salvation, he grieves that he alone is chosen to be sent to the Assyrians, the enemies of Israel, and to that greatest city of the enemies, where there was idolatry and ignorance of God.

Yet more he feared lest, on the occasion of his preaching, they being converted to repentance, Israel should be wholly forsaken. For he knew by the same Spirit by which the preaching to the Gentiles was entrusted to him that the house of Israel would then perish; and he feared that what was one day to happen should take place in his own time.”

“The flight of the prophet may also be interpreted as representing humanity in general who, despising God’s commands, departed from Him and gave himself over to the world. There, subsequently, through the storms of misfortune and the ruin of the whole world raging against him, he was compelled to feel God’s presence and to return to Him whom he had fled.

From this we understand that those things also that people think are for their good, when against the will of God, turn to destruction. Help not only fails to benefit those to whom it is given, but those who give it are also crushed, just as we read that Egypt was conquered by the Assyrians because it helped Israel against the will of God. The ship is imperiled that had received the imperiled; a tempest arises in a calm; nothing is secure when God is against us.”

Tarshish - named after one of the sons of Javan (Genesis 10:4), was an ancient merchant city of Spain, once proverbial for its wealth (Psalms 72:10; Strabo iii. 2. 14), supplying Judah with silver (Jeremiah 10:9), and Tyre with “all kinds of riches,” with iron also, tin, and lead (Ezekiel 27:12, 25).

It was known to the Greeks and Romans as (with a harder pronunciation) Tartessus; but in the first century, it had either ceased to exist or was known under some other name. Ships destined for a voyage so long at that time, and built for carrying merchandise, were naturally among the largest then constructed. “Ships of Tarshish” corresponded to the “East-Indiamen” which some of us remember. The breaking of “ships of Tarshish by an east wind” (Psalms 48:7) is, on account of their size and general safety, cited as a special token of the interposition of God.

And went down to Joppa - Joppa, now Jaffa, was the one well-known port of Israel on the Mediterranean. There the cedars were brought from Lebanon for both the first and second temple (2 Chronicles 3:16; Ezra 2:7). Simon the Maccabee “took it again for a haven, and made an entrance to the isles of the sea.”

It was subsequently destroyed by the Romans as a pirate-haven (Josephus, Jewish War 3.9.3; Strabo 16.2.28). At a later time, all describe it as an unsafe haven. Perhaps the shore changed, since the rings to which Andromeda was fabled to have been fastened, and which probably were once used to moor vessels, were high above the sea. Perhaps, like the Channel Islands, the navigation was safe to those who knew the coast but unsafe to others.

To this port Jonah “went down” from his native country, the mountain district of Zebulun. Perhaps it was not at this time in the hands of Israel. At least, the sailors were pagan. He “went down,” as the man who fell among the thieves is said to “have gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho” (Luke 10:30). He “went down” from the place that God honored by His presence and protection.

And he paid the fare thereof - Jonah describes circumstantially how he took every step to achieve his goal. He went down, found a strongly built ship going where he wished, paid his fare, and embarked. He seemed now to have done all. He had cut himself off from the country where his office lay. He had no further step to take. Winds and waves would do the rest. He had but to be still. He went, only to be brought back again.

“Sin brings our soul into much senselessness. For just as those overtaken by dullness of mind and drunkenness are carried along aimlessly and at random, and, whether there is a pit or precipice or whatever else below them, they fall into it unknowingly; so too, those who fall into sin, intoxicated by their desire for the object, do not know what they are doing and see nothing before them, present or future.

Tell me, are you fleeing the Lord? Wait then a little, and you will learn from the event that you cannot escape the hands of His servant, the sea.

For as soon as he embarked, it also roused its waves and raised them up on high. And just as a faithful servant, finding her fellow slave stealing some of his master’s property, does not cease from giving endless trouble to those who take him in until she recovers him, so too the sea, finding and recognizing her fellow servant, harasses the sailors unceasingly.

It rages and roars, not by dragging them to a tribunal, but by threatening to sink the vessel with all it contains unless they restore her fellow servant to her.”

“The sinner “arises” because, willy-nilly, he must toil. If he shrinks from the way of God because it is hard, he still cannot be idle. There is the way of ambition, of covetousness, of pleasure to be trodden, which are certainly far harder.

‘We wearied ourselves,’ say the wicked , ‘in the way of wickedness and destruction; yes, we have gone through deserts where there lay no way; but the way of the Lord we have not known.’

Jonah would not arise to go to Nineveh at God’s command, yet he nevertheless had to arise to flee to Tarshish from before the presence of God. What good can he have who flees the Good? What light, who willingly forsakes the Light?

“He goes down to Joppa.” Wherever you turn, if you depart from the will of God, you go down. Whatever glory, riches, power, or honors you gain, you do not rise in the slightest; the more you advance while turned from God, the deeper and deeper you go down.

Yet all these things are not obtained without paying the price. At a price and with toil, he obtains what he desires; he receives nothing gratis but at great price purchases for himself storms, griefs, and peril.

There arises a great tempest in the sea when various contradictory passions arise in the heart of the sinner, which take from him all tranquility and joy. There is a tempest in the sea when God sends strong and dangerous disease, by which the body is in peril of being broken.

There is a tempest in the sea when, through rivals or competitors for the same pleasures, or the injured, or the civil magistrate, his guilt is discovered; he is laden with infamy and odium, punished, and withheld from his usual pleasures. (Psalms 107:23–27) They who go down to the sea of this world and do business in mighty waters—their soul melts away because of trouble; they reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man, and all their wisdom is swallowed up.”