Welcome
to Tuesday and The Notes!!! This is the place where the temp and the
tunes get cooler with the season. Hopefully you made the jump through
the "Daylight Savings Time" hoop and landed squarely between loving the
light at 6am and hating the dark at 5pm. In our current 24 hour news
and everything else cycle, is this still a necessity....but I digress.
Since we are falling back in time, let's go ahead and do it right by
falling back to 1982. Que flashback music....
1982
was a huge year for the combination of music and recorded images. In
August of the previous year, a TV network unlike any other was launched
to the applause of fans who were looking for the best place to combine
the musical sounds they loved with accompanying visual stimuli. By
1982, fans could hardly wait for the next video debut. For the band, A
Flock Of Seagulls, this would mean being amongst a handful of videos
available to a market that was demanding more. In fact, at the height
of popularity of their #9 hit, "I Ran (So Far Away)", A Flock Of
Seagulls would find their video in the MTV rotation every 10 minutes
giving them the record for most video plays by a band on MTV. The band
would receive a Grammy award for a later instrumental song, but it would
be "I Ran" that places the band A Flock Of Seagulls at #2 on VH1's Top 100 One-Hit Wonders of the 80's.
The
most famous example of a Biblical character that ran far away was the
story of Jonah. Yep, he got swallowed by a big fish.....
Many
Sunday School stories and children's Bible story books focus on the
whale part of the story of Jonah. It seems this part of the story
ignites the imagination just like adding video to a song did for MTV.
But before the great fish, there is a story of great disobedience on the
part of Jonah.
Jonah 1 NASB
To
really get an idea of just how much Jonah was disobeying the command of
the Lord, we must realize that the boundaries of Jonah's world were
significantly smaller than our current global perspective.
To
Jonah, Tarshish represented the other end of the world. His hope was
to get as far away from God as he possibly could because he just didn't
want to do what God had commanded. It is estimated that Nineveh at that
time would have encompassed 48 miles. That is a pretty large city.
The Bible description gives us the idea that there were not any
righteous people there at that time. Jonah's fear is understandable.
He was to go to a large city of unrighteous people and proclaim
righteousness through belief in the One True God, of which many
Ninevites would have never heard. Does this task sound familiar to the
one Jesus called us to do? Mark 16:14-15 NASB
One of the reasons the story of Jonah is so popular is that we can find
ourselves doing the exact same thing as Jonah. When God calls we run.
As we are running away, God provides discipline and a second chance.
When we obey, folks get redeemed. And we pout because God doesn't do it
the way in which we expected. It is so easy to beat up on Jonah. But
the Bible calls him a prophet. This moniker is not given to every
character that we encounter as we read through the Bible. It is
reserved for those who have a calling on their life to be God's
spokesman to the people. Jesus commanded all of His disciples to
"Go". Keith Green put it like this:
Our
obedience makes us God's modern day spokesmen to the people. How are
we to be remembered with regard to this command......can we say that we
went......or will we say......I just ran, I ran so far away.....
'Til Tuesday
Serving HIM by serving you,
Randy
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