Jonah 1:6

Jonah 1:6 says, So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not.  Jonah was the cause of all their problems, but they had to wake him up to get him involved in trying to save the ship.  When God's people are spiritually asleep today, and the world seems to be coming apart, someone needs to wake us and tell us to call on our God.  Jonah was the only one who knew the true God.  Jonah may have felt that he could sleep because he had outrun God.  Whatever our excuse for being spiritually asleep today, we can be sure that we cannot outrun God, nor hide from Him.  Matthew Henry points out that Jonah should have been rebuking the King of Nineveh, but instead he was being rebuked by the shipmaster.  When we fail to follow God, even the lost of the world will rebuke us.  Our only power comes from God, and if we begin to live by their values without the morality of God, they are going to question how we are different.  We shouldn't need the world to wake us up.  If we are following God, we are already spiritually awake. Verse seven adds, And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.  They had prayed to their gods and had gotten no answers.  Now, they were looking to the casting of lots to reveal the source of their problems.  We see no evidence of Jonah stepping up and acknowledging that he was the problem.  We also see no evidence of his praying to God.  If we today know that we are out of the will of God, we need to acknowledge it it and pray to God for forgiveness.  Jonah was a man called by the heavenly Father, but he wasn't ready to admit that he was the source of the problem.  Each of the others must have felt they weren't the problem, so they were looking at one of the others as the guilty party. We today can only be sure of our own relationship with God.  Casting lots was a way God's people determined His will at one time, but here it was being used by those who weren't His people.  The truth was still revealed.  Jonah was the source of their problems.  Today, the lost people of the world may be quicker to recognize when we a source of problems when we are out of God's will than we are quick to confess it.  God will reveal the truth to us, and we must then confess and ask forgiveness.