The main takeaway from yesterday’s post is that it is impossible to run away from God, one can only run towards Him.
Today, I want to expand on this theme a little bit by taking a look at the story of Jonah.
Before we get started, let’s read the first two chapters from the Book of Jonah.
You can do that right now by clicking here.
Did you read it?
Good.
Let’s move on.
Out of the many ancient Middle Eastern belief systems we’ve studied over the years, do you recall me mentioning (many times actually) that it was normally accepted that a god or gods occupied earthly territories just like we humans do?
In other words, it considered common knowledge that every nation of people had their own gods and goddesses whose power and authority was restricted to the boundaries of their nation.
If one traveled across the border from one nation to another, that person was literally moving from under the authority of one set of gods to another.
Now here’s the kicker.
In spite of having the Torah and HASHEM as their God…
…the Biblical Hebrews also held to this idea and…
…there’s ample evidence of this in Scripture.
In fact, the evidence is in the Book of Jonah.
Take a look at the following verse.
“But Jonah, in order to get away from Adonai, prepared to escape to Tarshish. He went down to Yafo, found a ship headed for Tarshish, paid the fare and went aboard, intending to travel with them to Tarshish and get away from Adonai.”-Jonah 1:3
We can see here that Jonah was operating under the assumption that if he just left the territory of Israel and took off to Tarshish he would be able to escape to a land where HASHEM had no power or authority.
Understand however that Jonah was not renouncing HASHEM, he was just trying to escape from the Lord’s national jurisdiction.
BIG MISCALCULATION.
He had to learn the hard way that what the world claims to be common knowledge or politically correct is NOT always the truth.
In Jonah Chapter 2, Jonah comes to the inescapable conclusion that one CANNOT escape God because He is everywhere and His jurisdiction covers the whole planet.
It would seem that Jonah had never read Chapter 28 from the Book of Deuteronomy.
If he had, he would have seen that God made it crystal clear if Israel is disobedient, wherever Israel goes, the curses will still follow after them.
Bottomline, there is no escaping God no matter where one runs off to.
Period.
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