The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God's Mercy

by Timothy J. Keller

The fish is mentioned only in two brief verses and there are no descriptive details. It is reported more as a simple fact of what happened.3 So let’s not get distracted by the fish.

But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the face of the LORD.

At the most practical level, the prospects of success were none, and the chances of death were high.

So Jonah had a problem with the job he was given. But he had a bigger problem with the One who gave it to him.8 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.

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.

yet God had given no reason as to why it would be wrong to eat. Adam and Eve, like Jonah many years later, decided that if they couldn’t think of a good reason for a command of God, there couldn’t be one.

The elder brother was not obeying out of love but only as a way, he thought, of putting his father in his debt, getting control over him so he had to do as his older son asked. Neither son trusted his father’s love. Both were trying to find ways of escaping his control. One did it by obeying all the father’s rules, the other by disobeying them all.

Flannery O’Connor describes one of her fictional characters, Hazel Motes, as knowing that “the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”

We think we have to force God to give us what we need. Even if we are outwardly obeying God, we are doing it not for his sake but for ours. If, as we seek to comply with his rules, God does not appear to be treating us as we feel we deserve, then the veneer of morality and righteousness can collapse overnight. The inward distancing from God that had been going on for a long time becomes an outward, obvious rejection. We become furious with God and just walk away.

Jonah takes turns acting as both the “younger brother” and the “older brother.”

The story of Jonah, with all its twists and turns, is about how God takes Jonah, sometimes by the hand, other times by the scruff of the neck, to show him these things. Jonah runs and runs. But even though he uses multiple strategies, the Lord is always a step ahead. God varies his strategies too, and continually extends mercy to us in new ways, even though we neither understand nor deserve it.

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.

consequences. If we violate the laws of God, we are violating our own design, since God built us to know, serve, and love him.

If we build our lives and meaning on anything more than God, we are acting against the grain of the universe and of our own design and therefore of our own being.

Sin is a suicidal action of the will upon itself.

Sin always hardens the conscience, locks you in the prison of your own defensiveness and rationalizations, and eats you up slowly from the inside.

Most often the storms of life come upon us not as the consequence of a particular sin but as the unavoidable consequence of living in a fallen, troubled world.

When storms come into our lives, whether as a consequence of our wrongdoing or not, Christians have the promise that God will use them for their good (Romans 8:28).

When God wanted to make Abraham into a man of faith who could be the father of all the faithful on earth, he put him through years of wandering with apparently unfulfilled promises. When God wanted to turn Joseph from an arrogant, deeply spoiled teenager into a man of character, he put him through years of rough handling. He had to experience slavery and imprisonment before he could save his people. Moses had to become a fugitive and spend forty years in the lonely wilderness before he could lead.

Reliable faith must always first go through the refining fire of trials and hardships

The Bible does not say that every difficulty is the result of our sin—but it does teach that, for Christians, every difficulty can help reduce the power of sin over our hearts. Storms can wake us up to truths we would otherwise never see. Storms can develop faith, hope, love, patience, humility, and self-control in us that nothing else can.

B/c they teach us to turn to and trust in God

Nor is it usually clear until years later, if ever in this life, what good God was accomplishing in the difficulties we suffered.

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. His self-regard was rooted in the level of commitment to Christ that he thought he had achieved. He was confident before God and humanity because, he thought, he was a fully devoted follower of Christ. There are two results of such an identity.

If your very self is based on your valor, any failure of nerve would mean there would be no “you” left.

What Jonah is doing is what some have called othering. To categorize people as the Other is to focus on the ways they are different from oneself, to focus on their strangeness and to reduce them to these characteristics until they are dehumanized.

Once the sailors learn that Jonah is the cause of the storm, they reason that he is also the key to quieting it.

As Leslie Allen writes, the character “of the seaman has evidently banished his nonchalant indifference and touched his conscience.”1

Jonah may have been moved by nothing higher than pity, but that was far better than contempt. Often the first step in coming to one’s senses spiritually is when we finally start thinking of somebody—anybody—other than ourselves.

Jonah’s pity arouses in him one of the most primordial of human intuitions, namely, that the truest pattern of love is substitutionary. Jonah is saying, “I’ll fully take the wrath of the waves so you won’t have to.” True love meets the needs of the loved one no matter the cost to oneself. All life-changing love is some kind of substitutionary sacrifice.

Indeed, we can imagine that the reason that this pattern of love is so transformative in human life is because we are created in God’s image, and this is how he loves.

When Jesus speaks of “the sign of Jonah” and calls himself “greater than Jonah” (Matthew 12:41), he means that, as Jonah was sacrificed to save the sailors, so he would die to save us.

The moment Jonah went under the water, the storm switched off as suddenly as a light being turned off.

The sacrifice of jonah into the sea propitiated the wrath of the waves

Since Jesus is not merely a man but God come to earth, then far from depicting a vindictive deity, the whole Bible shows us a God who comes and bears his own penalty, so great is his mercy.

A God who substitutes himself for us and suffers so that we may go free is a God you can trust.

The fear of the Lord is the essence of all saving knowledge and wisdom (e.g., Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10).

The fear of god is to live as though the God of the Bible actually exists

prayers fade away. These men were different. They made their vows after the danger passed. That indicates that they were not seeking God for what he could do for them, but simply for the greatness of who he is in himself. That is the beginning of true faith.

All of this is ironic. 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.

His life becomes the tangible expression of the sermon he refused to preach--he was a picture of God's wrath upon rebellious hearts!

“This carries us farther in the lessons of this book about God’s sovereignty. What God is going to do, he will do.”

As soon as Jonah hits the water, the God whom he did not trust miraculously saves him. This mysterious divine mercy that Jonah finds so inexplicable and offensive turns out to be his only hope. He does not drown. He is swallowed by a great fish. In that prison, Jonah gets his first insights into the meaning and the wonder of God’s grace.

The fish swallowing Jonah was actually an act of God's gracious intervention not an act of the outpouring of his wrath

With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that the most important lessons we have learned in life are the result of God’s severe mercies.

Peter Craigie writes that when we reject and disobey God, as Jonah did, it takes “radical treatment, if it [is] to be remedied.”

“But not until he was all the way down, finally stripped of his own buoyant self-sufficiency, was deliverance possible.”

As is often said, you never realize that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have. You must lose your life to find your life (Matthew 10:39).

The usual place to learn the greatest secrets of God’s grace is at the bottom. But it is not simply being at the bottom that begins to change Jonah but prayer at the bottom.

No human heart will learn its sinfulness and impotence by being told it is sinful. It will have to be shown—often in brutal experience. No human heart will dare to believe in such free, costly grace unless it is the only hope.

He sees the literal idols that the pagans worship and doesn’t see the more subtle idols in his own life that keep him from fully grasping that he too, just like the heathen, lives only, equally by God’s grace.

And the people of Nineveh believed God.

When God examined their deeds, how they forsook their evil way, he renounced the disaster he had said he would do to them, and he did not carry it out.

The Hebrew word for “repent” (shub—to turn) occurs four times in verses 8–10, and that is the striking, central message of this passage.

“This state of affairs would have made both rulers and subjects unusually attuned to the message of a visiting prophet.”