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August 14 - August 19, 2019
Jonah concluded that because he could not see any good reasons for God’s command, there couldn’t be any. Jonah doubted the goodness, wisdom, and justice of God.
When this happens we have to decide—does God know what’s best, or do we? And the default mode of the unaided human heart is to always decide that we do. We doubt that God is good, or that he is committed to our happiness, and therefore if we can’t see any good reasons for something God says or does, we assume that there aren’t any.
The dismaying news is that every act of disobedience to God has a storm attached to it.
The Bible does not say that every difficulty is the result of sin—but it does teach that every sin will bring you into difficulty.
All sin has a mighty storm attached to it.
This is one of the main messages of the book, namely, that God cares how we believers relate to and treat people who are deeply different from us.
God wants us to treat people of different races and faiths in a way that is respectful, loving, generous, and just.
He did not want to talk to pagans about God or to lead them toward faith. So he fled—only to find himself talking about God to the exact sort of people he was fleeing! When
His private faith is of no public good.
We are also shown that the way to “love” neighbors is not merely through sentiment but through costly, sacrificial, practical action to meet material and economic needs.
“Since Jonah identifies himself first ethnically, then religiously, we may infer that his ethnicity is foremost in his self-identity.”
“Why, of course I’m Lutheran—I’m Norwegian!” even though she never attends church at all.
Of course im Christian, Im from Arkansas.
Unfortunately, many Christians today exhibit the same attitudes. This is not merely the result of poor education or cultural narrowness. Rather, their relationship with God through Christ has not gone deep enough into their heart.
For example, you may sincerely believe that Jesus died for your sins, and yet your significance and security can be far more grounded in your career and financial worth than in the love of God through Christ.
The answer is that Peter’s most fundamental identity was not rooted as much in Jesus’s gracious love for him as it was in his commitment and love to Jesus.
Jonah’s pity arouses in him one of the most primordial of human intuitions, namely, that the truest pattern of love is substitutionary.
True love meets the needs of the loved one no matter the cost to oneself.
Jonah was fleeing God because he did not want to go and show God’s truth to wicked pagans, but that is exactly what he ends up doing.
In each case, God orchestrated a circumstance in history to teach Jonah something he desperately needed to know.
Abraham, Joseph, David, Elijah, and Peter all became powerful leaders through failure and suffering.
We are “barred” from God, and the doctrine of grace resonates deeply only if we admit we cannot save ourselves.
It is when a person comes to acknowledge his or her sin and confesses it before God and when, as a consequence, God restores the broken Creator-creature relationship.”10
When you say, “I won’t serve you, God, if you don’t give me X,” then X is your true bottom line, your highest love, your real god, the thing you most trust and rest in.
If love for your country’s interests leads you to exploit people or, in this case, to root for an entire class of people to be spiritually lost, then you love your nation more than God. That is idolatry, by any definition.
In other words, if we feel more righteous as we read the Bible, we are misreading it; we are missing its central message.
We are reading and using the Bible rightly only when it humbles us, critiques us, and encourages us with God’s love and grace despite our flaws.
“You weep over plants, but my compassion is for people.”
For God to apply this word to himself is radical. This is the language of attachment. God weeps over the evil and lostness of Nineveh.
The only answer is that an infinite, omnipotent, self-sufficient divine being loves only voluntarily.
Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been.
Through Jesus Christ, and only through him, we can see all the goodness of God that Moses wasn’t allowed to see and that Jonah couldn’t discern.
Sin always begins with the character assassination of God.
We believe that God has put us in a world of delights but has determined that he will not give them to us if we obey him.
One of the main reasons that we trust God too little is because we trust our own wisdom too much.
What makes a person a Christian is not our love for God, which is always imperfect, but God’s love for us.
Mission is not only for a spiritual elite, or for the well rested, or for people with the gift of gab, or for outgoing personalities, or for those with theological training. It is for every person who belongs to him.
If you were a hundred times worse than you are, your sins would be no match for his mercy.
“everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
Whatever you live for actually owns you.
There is no need to inflate our self-image by excluding others.
The final verses of the book tell us that the mark of those who have been immersed in the grace of God is compassion and love, not contempt, for people who aren’t like them.
God asks, how can we look at anyone—even those with deeply opposing beliefs and practices—with no compassion?
