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
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