This morning I read the book of Jonah with my beige flaky cereal while at the same time in my life I'm reading Moby Dick...howzzat for providential coincidence?!! Anyway, didja ever wonder what happened to the guys in the boat after they chucked Jonah into Davey Jones' locker? The Bible says in Jonah 1:15-16, "So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows."This 'feared the LORD greatly'...was it only 'scared witless' or 'scared witless and reverently in awe of' the Lord? In their Old Testament way, it looks to me that they may very well have had a viable 'conversion experience' which resulted in the sacrifice and vows. Granted, they may simply have just been doing obeisance to placate and show a tip of the hat to one more god in the panoply of their polytheistic world, but what, exactly did they 'vow?' It just could be that they vowed to follow only the Living and True God of Jonah who had made the earth and the seas.
Think of it, that could possibly mean they sailed on to Tarshish and did some personal evangelism akin to what the woman at the well did when she went back to her town in John 4 of the New Testament; which, of course would have the twin results of converting some and hardening the rest, based on God's election of the Tarshishians!! After all, the original reason Jonah was ship-bound for Tarshish was that he didn't want to evangelize the pagans in Nineveh; which he knew would work to their repenting and becoming true believers even though they were UNCIRCUMCISED GENTILES... what's the original Hebrew for 'yick?!!' ;p
Well, this is another one of those Bob Wonders deals that will have to be answered on the 'other side of the river as we sit under the shade of the trees'...like, was the Captain's name 'Bob?'
I wonder...
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