Jonah: Navigating a God-centered Life

by Colin S. Smith

The source of sin lies closer to home than you or I may want to admit. It’s easy to blame God or the devil for our struggles, but the primary source of our sin lies within our own hearts. Explaining temptation by saying “God is testing me” or “Satan is attacking me” positions “me” either as the victim, if I am defeated, or the hero, if I prevail. But confessing that “My heart is desperately wicked” provides no such comforts. It heads off all attempts to shift blame, and cuts down all the pretensions of spiritual pride. Sin remains in the hearts of even the most mature believers, and it is never passive.

Note on temptation

The source of sin lies closer to home than you or I may want to admit. It’s easy to blame God or the devil for our struggles, but the primary source of our sin lies within our own hearts. Explaining temptation by saying “God is testing me” or “Satan is attacking me” positions “me” either as the victim, if I am defeated, or the hero, if I prevail. But confessing that “My heart is desperately wicked” provides no such comforts. It heads off all attempts to shift blame, and cuts down all the pretensions of spiritual pride. Sin remains in the hearts of even the most mature believers, and it is never passive.

Con'd

The more comfortable you are, the harder it will be. I love the work God has given me to do and so I find it really hard to keep my heart in a place where I can honestly say to the Lord, “If there’s something else you want me to do, I’m willing to do it.” But without that spirit, a job, a home or even a ministry can easily become an idol. When God interrupts your life, He breaks the idol. Nothing that He gives you in this world is yours forever. Your entire life is “a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14). The home that you live in is yours for a time. The work that you do is yours for a time. The people you love are yours for a time. One day, others will live in your home, and others will continue your work. One day, others will have your money and your possessions; the opportunities now entrusted to you will be given to them. Loving my work as I do, it’s good for me to remember that, one day, someone else will sit in ‘my’ office. Their books will be on ‘my’ shelves, and their stamp will be on the ministry that is so precious to me. I need to hold what God has given lightly. It will not be forever. The person who learns to number his or her days gains a heart of wisdom (Ps. 90:12).

Idol

You fall in love with your dream, the dream becomes an idol and God brings the idol down.

Our culture says ‘live your dream,’ but God calls you to place your dream on His altar and to keep it there at all times. It is good to have hopes and dreams for the future, but we have no rights. There are no certainties. Any dream can become an idol and, if it does, God will bring it down. He may interrupt your life at any moment, and call you to honor Him in something you have never faced before.

Prayer is brought to birth through a continuing process in which three dynamics are always in play: awakening, believing and repenting.

God does not owe me a full and satisfying life. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Wages are the payment due for work that has been done and, since I am a sinner by nature and practice, what I am owed is not an abundant life, but an eternal death. This is what I deserve from God. Anything else in this life or in the life to come is sheer mercy and grace. Jonah saw this and owned it right there in the water. With the waves pouring over him, he was confessing, “God, these waves are Your waves. I am under Your judgment. And I deserve to be under Your judgment.” Prayer begins with an awakening in which you own and confess your true position before God. God owes you nothing.

Jonah didn’t find it easy to trust God when he was struggling in the water. His faith came out of a great struggle between his own feelings of failure and the gracious promises of God. People sometimes speak about faith as if it were a small step, easily taken: “Just believe; put your trust in Jesus.” But faith has enemies to overcome. It grapples like a wrestler with Satan’s lies, so don’t be surprised if the struggle to believe seems like the fight of your life. Faith prevails over despair when you fix your eyes on the grace of God rather than your own failure. That’s what Jonah was doing when he said, “I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple” (v. 4). When Jonah looked at himself, he despaired because he knew that he deserved to be banished. But then he dared to believe that there is hope in God and that he could find it by looking away from himself and his failures, and fixing his eyes on God and His grace.

‘Looking’ is a way of describing faith.

See Shreiner's quote for Romans in photo.

Repentance means change: Change in what you think, change in what you desire, change in what you do and say. It is the evidence of authentic faith.

The repentance that Jonah could not find in the boat was God’s gift to him in the fish. This is an important insight for grasping how God brings change in the life of a Christian believer. Grace makes repentance possible.

Just forty years after Jonah’s ministry in Nineveh, the ten tribes in the northern kingdom of Israel were crushed and scattered by brutal Assyrian aggression.1 The book of Nahum describes the atrocities of that time: Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number people stumbling over the corpses… (Nahum 3:3) All of this suffering could have been avoided, if only God had destroyed Nineveh in the time of Jonah. The prophet saw this coming and God’s mercy made him mad! It isn’t hard to relate to Jonah’s problem. If God had wiped out Hitler, or Stalin or Osama Bin Laden when they were young, the world would have been spared unspeakable evil and suffering. But God let them live! Why? Because He is “gracious and compassionate … slow to anger and abounding in love.” That was Jonah’s complaint.

Repentance says: “I did this, and I take responsibility for it. I am sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness.” Self-justification says: “You need to understand the reasons why I did this. Let me give you an explanation.” Even after you repent of a sin in your life, you may find yourself thinking, “Actually, there’s another side to this. Look at the pressure I was under, the difficulties I was facing, the lack of support that I had. It’s easy to understand how I fell. In fact it would have been amazing if I hadn’t fallen!” Do you see what is happening? You are undermining your own repentance.

Explaining sin is big business in America, and the tragedy is that it leads many into the dead end of long-term hostility towards God. The pattern is clear from the experience of Jonah: Explaining sin undermines repentance and undermining repentance leads to anger with God. Thank God it doesn’t end there!

Jonah’s deliverance was the clearest possible example of God doing for one man what He does not do for others. God had exercised His freedom to shower mercy on Jonah and save him from imminent destruction. And now, God had chosen to show the same mercy to the people of Nineveh. So what was the basis of Jonah’s complaint? Do you have any right to be angry? Have you undermined your repentance by offering up explanations of your sin? Do you find yourself blaming God for what has happened in your life? “It’s Your fault, God … You made me like this… You put me in this position.” Have you found that the path of self-justification leads to anger against God? Then listen to God’s question: Have you any right to be angry? Recognize that the path of self-justification can only lead you to a dark abyss, and get back to the path of honest confession and repentance as you embrace again the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. You don’t want to spend eternity in the company of those who are angry about God’s grace.

The strongest love is not a general benevolence but a passion for the good of a particular person. All of us want to believe that God loves us like that. Those who take a lesser view of grace often try to get there by saying, “If I was the only person in the world, Christ would still have suffered and died for me.” It surprises me how often I hear Christians say this and the degree to which they seem to be helped by it. The statement is a theoretical one, relating to a circumstance which is self-evidently not true. I am not the only person in the world. I’m convinced that the reason some Christians raise this theoretical scenario is that all of us want to know and to feel that we are uniquely loved by God, and a general benevolence in which God opens the door of salvation to all people doesn’t feel like God loving me in any direct or personal way. So people who don’t believe that God has taken any special initiative to save them resort to saying that if, in theory, nobody else existed, God would still have sent Jesus for them. Here’s the crux of this chapter: I want you see that God does love you in a unique and special way. The way you know this is not by speculation over a theoretical scenario in which you might be the only person in the world, but by the glorious reality of His grace intercepting your life, to draw you to faith in Christ. If you are in Christ, God has done more than open the door of salvation for you. He has brought you in! Christ has done more than mak...

You might think that God gave the vine, and that He ‘allowed’ the worm and the wind. But the words of Scripture could not be clearer: God provided a vine (v. 6). God provided a worm (v. 7). God provided a scorching east wind (v. 8). Jonah wants us to understand that God’s hand was as much in the worm and the wind as it was in the vine. That raises some big questions. How can the great sorrow, disappointment and loss of your life come from the hand of God? How can He be present in your pain, affliction and distress?

There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with a great purpose, which I may not understand at the moment. But I refuse to panic, as I lift up my eyes to Him and accept it as a coming from the throne of God for some great purpose of blessing to my own heart.

God ‘provided’ the great fish by which Jonah’s life was spared, and He ‘provided’ the vine, the worm and the wind to deal with the selfish anger that lurked in Jonah’s heart. God’s hand is at work in all of the events of your life and there is purpose in all that He does.

God ‘provides’ for your sanctification through gifts that bring you joy, disappointments that bring you sorrow, and trials that bring you pain. He uses the vine, the worm and the wind to reproduce the likeness of Christ in you.

God used the worm and the wind to save Jonah from a vine-centered life. A vine-centered person is one who is so taken up with the joy of God’s gifts that he or she ends up loving the gifts more than the Giver.

It is possible to love the vine so much that when it withers you wonder if there is any reason left for living. The Bible has a name for this: idolatry. If you feel that without a certain person, or position, or achievement, your life would not be worth living, you may be deeper into idolatry than you think. Friends, family, money, ministry and success are good gifts from God that can bring you great happiness in life. But they are not the purpose of life. Thank God for the vine, but don’t live for the vine.

There is a kind of Christianity that is angry with the sinful world, and it is reflected in a brand of preaching that rails against the evils of our time. It is angry because it really does not adequately reflect on the human condition: By nature, we are blind, bound and dead. We cannot see the glory of Christ, we do not have the power to stop sinning, and we will not come to Christ and follow Him. Blaring the horns of condemnation may give vent to Christian frustrations but it will do nothing to solve the problem. Hope lies not in shouting commands from a distance, but in the power of a new life that is the gift of God in Jesus Christ. Grasping this gospel principle will help you to grow in compassion.