Today is the 14th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It's great to be here. Welcome back to the Global Campfire.

We're all here. We're all cozy. We're all ready to take the next step forward together.

As we continue to take steps forward toward the end of the year and steps forward in the Bible each and every day to lead us toward the end of the Scriptures for this year.

And we are moving our way in the Old Testament through the portion of Scripture known as the minor prophets.

These are shorter works of prophetic utterances that are in the Scriptures. So we're moving through them rather quickly.

Yesterday we talked about Obadaya and then we read the whole thing. All of Obadaya, which happens to be the shortest book in the Old Testament.

Today we aren't embarking on the next to shortest book in the Old Testament, but we will read the entire book today, the Book of Jonah, which is a super famous story in the Scriptures.

Jonah was a prophet. He lived in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. We've talked about this since we started the minor prophets. Just remembering that after Solomon the kingdoms split into two and there was the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah,

but Jonah was from the Northern Kingdom of Israel. He lived practically, practically due west of the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee and he lived during the reign of King Jerobo in the Second.

Jonah is a little bit different than most of the other prophets in the Bible because most of the other prophets in the Bible were instructed to speak to God's people, the children of Israel. This is not who Jonah was sent to speak to. He was instructed to go to the city of Nineveh.

At the time Nineveh was one of the largest cities on the face of the earth. This is like any of the largest cities on the earth today like Mexico City or New York City or Los Angeles or London or all of the major cities in the whole earth.

But if we think about the largest cities, at this time Nineveh was one of the largest cities. Although considerably smaller than the cities that we have of today, it's still one of the major cities in the known world.

The ruins of Nineveh still exist. They're located near the modern city of Mosul in Iraq and a lot of the ruins of ancient Nineveh have been damaged or destroyed during the time of ISIS there.

Anyway, Jonah did not want the assignment. He did not want to do what God was asking him to do. He did not want to go to a people who were the enemies of Israel and speak to them on behalf of God because of their enemies of Israel, their enemies of God.

So rather than obeying God, Jonah went in the opposite direction. Literally, the opposite direction went to the Mediterranean coast and got on a ship in Japa, which is basically the coastal suburb of Tel Aviv today.

And we probably all generally know what happened to Jonah after he got on that ship. He ended up not on the ship, but rather in the belly of a great fish.

And after three days of repentance, he was spewed out on the shore alive, which, as Christians, we can see the obvious foreshadowing of Jesus in the story and Jesus even talks about the sign of Jonah being the only sign that this generation will receive when he was walking upon the earth and doing his ministry.

But Jonah doesn't just parallel Jesus or foreshadow Jesus. It parallels our own lives. When we are instructed to do something that we don't want to do, or we let pride or our fear of obeying, getting away, and we find ourselves in disobedience or rebellion.

Then basically, we can't do anything but find ourselves on the run from God, which is incredibly foolish. Maybe stupid isn't even too strong of a word. It's a really foolish thing to do because it's not possible.

And so Jonah had a lot more difficult time of things than he needed to have, even though he ultimately obeyed, he was swallowed in the open sea by a fish.

Ironically, we look at the fish and go like, holy moly, what was that must have been miserable, and certainly it must have been miserable.

But the alternative was that Jonah would have been dead. And so the fish that came along actually became Jonah's salvation. God used the fish as a vehicle to get Jonah back on track and save his life.

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