How To Get Revival

This is a very funny post over at AIM. It's about how to use the Book of Jonah as a guide for personal and corporate revival. Good times, good times...

The Anti-Itch Meditation: How To Get Revival

I really like Jonah's story a lot. It is so weird. Jesus likes it too and refers to it directly in Matthew 16:1-4 as He excoriates the Jewish religious leaders for asking Him to do magic tricks. Forget saving mankind from eternal damnation and misery, these guys wanted to see some Him do the Water-into-Wine gag or the Walk-on-Water trick.

Excoriate is an especially good word, if I do say so myself, to describe what Jesus does to the Pharisees and Sadducees, by the way. It comes from the Latin excoriare which means to "flay or strip off the hide".

Anyway, in the Matthew passage, Jesus tells them that the only magic trick they are going to get is what He calls the "Sign of Jonah". He is giving props to Jonah for breaking that trick in with the old "three days in the belly of the fish" act that Jonah was (and still is) so famous for. Jesus is, of course, referring to his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection (after three days) that is coming up a few chapters later.

Stupid Pharisees and Sadducees...they never did figure out how He did that.