Dear saints of Campbelltown,
My assumption is that most/all Growth Groups will have a two week break in line with the public school holidays. This is helpful to give the leaders a breather as well as the group members. It’s not that we go on holidays from God but that we can sustain a better all-of-year program by having these scheduled breaks.
During this time, perhaps you’d like to start reading through the book of Jonah. This is where we’ll head next in our sermon series. It is a short book and so reading it several times through would make such a difference to your preparations. Over these two weeks, I aim (God willing) to write ahead for the Jonah series so that the blogs may come out in a timely manner. Please pray that I can get ahead in this way.
Reading through Romans has been a great spiritual growth time for me personally. I hope that you, as a leader, have grown through preparing your group time. What an amazing book! It has sharpened my picture of God’s great plan and how we as a church fit into it. I have also loved thinking through and reflecting on the words joy and peace – both of these the world craves and both of them God gives freely and affectively if we stop and listen and trust him.
On the 5th of October, at your usual Sunday church service, we’ll be celebrating the time we have spent in Romans together as a church. There will be some people reflecting on what they have learned, there will be time to stop and meditate on what you have learned and a good memorable service is being planned. We are aiming to praise God for this chapter in the life of our church and thank him for his love and mercy and abundant grace lavished on us Gentiles – who are now called saints!
So, enjoy your small breath from Growth Groups and I’ll write again toward the end of this break.
Your brother in Christ,
Simon Twist
Thanks Simon!
Simon,
Raised with Nigel some background reading I have done. Reading some Jewish commentaries that read Jonah as midrash. Doesn’t sit quietly with me, but does raise an interesting perspective.
Thoughts about the validity of that approach?
Thanks Chris for this excellent question. Please accept this slightly late coming response :o)
I’ll admit straight away that I wasn’t familiar with the term, midrash, until you brought it up. Thank you, again, for adding words to me vocabulary. After coming to terms with this word, here is one link that I think was most helpful for the definition because it is to the point (for the benefit of others reading this):
http://judaism.about.com/od/glossary/g/midrash.htm
There are three possible conclusions to come to with a book like Jonah (Daniel and perhaps Ruth fit the same profile)…
1) It is completely true including the people, the places and the things which took place
2) It is an imagined story written so that we could still learn theology from it
3) It is based on true events but has been exaggerated over time (like a fisherman’s story)
I’ll deal with options 1 and 2 only.
Those who take the story of Jonah as historical are likely to do so on the basis that it is set in a real time and place with a person who has a genealogy and is referred to elsewhere in scripture (2 Kings, Matthew). Such folk will accept the extraordinary features of the book such as the big fish, the three days, the one man preaching to a whole city and the sudden growth of a plant as miracles just like creation, the 10 plagues, the red sea, the fire from heaven for Elijah and so on. The biggest support for this position is that Jesus speaks of both Jonah and the repentance of Nineveh as though both were reality.
Those who take the story of Jonah as fashioned and invented in order to teach theology (a fine technique that preachers use all the time) do so because it is unlike any other book in the bible – Jonah is almost unknown and we are expected to know him as the book begins, no other minor prophet is written like this, Jonah contains no predictive material, the miracles listed in the last paragraph are of a comical or satirical nature – a bit like a political cartoon in the newspaper. The biggest, perhaps, support for this view is that the city of Nineveh doesn’t appear to have been as big in reality as it is described in chapter 3.
Both parties need to examine themselves to be aware of their preconceptions. I suspect that those who fall into category A have adopted a view of scripture that says that everything must be as it appears to be – end of story. Those who align with category B have been influenced (probably without knowing it) by a generation of sceptics which flooded the world with bible commentaries in the early 20th century.
Although I align myself with the first category, believing the events in the story to have happened, I marvel most of all in the way that the story has been carefully crafted. I believe that the whole bible was written by a very impressive author. I am constantly blown away by the craft of the scriptures. Jesus taught often through story-telling and the Holy Spirit has used that technique right from the beginning of human time.
One last point, which probably comes closer to answering your question, is that there are different levels to read Jonah on. I alluded to this in the blog above but wasn’t very clear.
1) Jonah is a story about a prophet who had to learn how universal Yehweh was with his love and compassion.
2) Jonah is a story about judgement, mercy, patience, compassion and the power of God for salvation which describes the gospel
3) Jonah is a story about the nation of Israel and their involvement on the world stage – A nation priviledged to know the one true God but is willing to deny the truth and is therefore sent into exile (the big fish) but is given another chance to be a city on a hill for the whole world only to find that Israel is unwilling to watch God be compassionate for anyone other than Israel.
It is quite possible for a story to be both historically true, yet retold in such a well crafted way that the reader sees, not the historical facts, but the glory of God. All of scripture is like that.
Thanks again Chris for opening this can of worms – very important for us to have our eyes open to other ways of thinking about things and to wrestle with them together. We don’t want to be blind followers but people who are seeking the truth.