Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil. For forty days and forty nights he fasted and became very hungry. [Matthew 4:1-2 (NLT)]
For many in the Christian community, last Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent, a season in remembrance of the forty days Jesus fasted in the wilderness and was tempted by Satan. For them, Lent is a penitential season of repentance, fasting, and self-denial leading up to Easter. The idea of fasting as a form of preparation for Resurrection Sunday comes from Jesus’ statement, “But the time will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them; and when that day comes, they will fast,” found in Mark 2:20.
Pope Benedict XVI referred to Lent as a “long ‘retreat’ during which we can turn back into ourselves and listen to the voice of God, in order to defeat the temptations of the Evil One.” On the other hand, Protestant reformer John Calvin disparaged Lent. Arguing that Jesus taught no specific times of fasting, he called Lent “merely false zeal, replete with superstition, which sets up a fast under the title and pretext of imitating Christ….” Observing Lent isn’t God-ordained; it is a personal decision each Christ follower makes. Nevertheless, I think N. T. Wright’s take on this season makes a good case for some sort of Lenten practice: “Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault-finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store.”
The church I attended as a girl observed Lent. During this pre-Easter season, the cross over the altar was covered with a purple veil (until Good Friday when it was covered in black), the minister wore purple vestments, our church held pot-lucks and Bible studies Wednesday evenings, every night I placed a coin in a cardboard coin holder that would be collected Easter Sunday, and I resigned myself to no more gum or chocolate until Easter morning. Although the way I observe this season has changed, I continue to do so today.
While those who observe Lent may fast from things like certain meals or foods, social media, sweets, coffee, alcohol, television, eating out, or gaming, the season should never be more about fasting than our relationship with God. Lent is more than a season of putting away the unpleasant, unhealthy, harmful, or superfluous; it’s a season of creating good things and becoming better and more faithful. It’s as much about growing as it is about decreasing. Many people do things like donating the money they would have spent at the coffee shop or bakery to charity, doing service projects, or including additional Bible reading, devotions, a book study, or Scripture memorization to their routine.
That forty-day fast Jesus took in the wilderness, however, wasn’t his first one! It merely was a continuation of one that started in Bethlehem when God chose to take on flesh. Rather than fasting from food, Jesus fasted from Heaven to live on earth. He gave up His godliness in all its perfection to subject Himself to the limitations, weaknesses, and indignities of humanity. He knew hunger and cold; He burped, spit up, cried, and even peed and pooped in his swaddling cloths. He had to learn to crawl before he could walk and probably bumped his head and skinned his knees along the way. That was God who had to learn the alphabet and how to count. The One who was there at the beginning of time gave up Heaven to endure stubbed toes, bruises, and blisters. He experienced exhaustion, insect bites, sweating, and runny noses, and probably suffered through more than one case of dysentery. He fasted from the heavenly host’s songs of praise only to be doubted, hated, conspired against, and mocked. By the time Jesus went into the wilderness at the beginning of His ministry, He’d been abstaining from Heaven around 30 years and that fast continued until His last day when He was beaten mercilessly, hung on the cross, crucified, and died.
Giving up that morning latte at Starbucks or giving a few hours a week to the food pantry don’t seem like much when we think of all He gave up for us!
When talking with my husband about the story of Jonah, he said that the fish story was a “little too hard to swallow”— too incredible to believe. Miracles! The Bible is full of them and, since they are supernatural events, they’re all hard to accept as true. Improbability is the nature of miracles. Along with the fish saving Jonah, the story is filled with other miracles: the immediate calming of the storm once Jonah was thrown in the sea, the deliverance of the prophet from the fish safely onto the beach, Nineveh’s immediate repentance, the appointment of the plant, worm and scorching east wind as teaching tools, and even God’s revelation of Himself directly to Jonah! Yet, if we believe the Bible is God-breathed and without error, we don’t have the privilege of picking and choosing which miracles we will believe and which ones we won’t. We have only one choice to make—all or none!
When God sent Jonah to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, it was to warn the people that they would be destroyed for their sins. While we tend to focus on the miracle of Jonah and the sea creature, the real miracle in the Book of Jonah is the city’s response to the prophet’s message—Nineveh immediately repented of its sinful ways. Some forty years later, however, the Assyrians were once again back to their old behavior: rejecting God’s authority and worshipping idols. Around 740 BC, they attacked northern Israel and, in 722, they invaded the remaining kingdom and took Samaria, just as both Hosea and Amos had prophesized they would. The northern kingdom’s population was resettled elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire and Samaria became the center of a new Assyrian province.
Since Nineveh was famous as the religious center for the worship of Ishtar (Astarte), the goddess of fertility, we might wonder why this pagan city repented after hearing Jonah’s prophecy? Jonah was an Israelite not an Assyrian—he believed in Jehovah and the people of Nineveh were pagans. Some speculate that the Ninevites had learned of Jonah’s miraculous delivery from the fish but Nineveh was about 500 miles from the sea and, since the fish delivered Jonah onto the beach, that seems highly unlikely! Was Jonah such an eloquent speaker that the heathen people of Nineveh would respond to him when, more often than not, the people of Judah and Israel ignored the words of warning they heard from the prophets who were their own countrymen? What caused the king and 120,000 of his subjects to make such an immediate turnaround?
The first thing to clear up when writing about the Book of Jonah is whether it was a fish or a whale. Both the Hebrew word (dahg) and the Greek word (ketos) in later translations were used to describe this sea creature. In 785 BC, at the time of this story’s writing, neither language had a word that could identify the exact species so it could have been a fish, shark, whale or some other now extinct large sea creature. For those who choose to use this discrepancy to attack the Bible’s veracity, it’s probably wise to remember that Linnaeus’ classification of living things occurred in the 18th century and not 2,800 years ago when Jonah was swallowed by something huge in the sea. When learning the story in Sunday school, most of us were told it was a whale. Having seen Disney’s Pinocchio with Geppetto living in a whale’s belly, it was easy to picture Jonah doing the same.
The story is told of a Sunday school teacher who was teaching her class about the Ten Commandments. “What is the commandment about parents?” she asked. “Honor thy father and mother,” was the quick reply. “Is there a commandment about brothers and sisters?” the teacher queried. One little boy shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!” While we know we’re not supposed to kill them, how should we treat them?
Devotions of the Heart 