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

by Timothy J. Keller

Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been. Yet, of course, he is infinitely more than that. Jesus did not merely weep for us; he died for us. Jonah went outside the city, hoping to witness its condemnation, but Jesus Christ went outside the city to die on a cross to accomplish its salvation.

you have to have had a pretty comfortable life—without any experience of oppression and injustice yourself—to not want a God who punishes sin.

One writer, who had seen genocide in his homeland, wrote that “it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis” that we should desire a “God who refuses to judge.”

He says, “Here is all my goodness. I’m infinitely loving and I want to pardon everybody, and I’m infinitely just and I never let sin go unpunished.”

It seems like a striking contradiction, but upon reflection it can be seen that the single word “goodness” binds these apparently contradictory traits together.

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. If Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, that’s how God can be infinitely just, because all sin was punished there, and it’s how God can be infinitely loving, because he took it onto himself.

Only when you look into the gospel of Jesus Christ does all the goodness of God pass before you, and it’s not the back parts anymore. Now you know how he did it. There’s the glory of God in the face of Christ through the gospel.

As Martin Luther put it, when a Christian believes, he or she is simul justus et peccator—simultaneously righteous in God’s sight and yet still a sinner.

Elijah became desperate enough to ask for death (1 Kings 19:4), but that was because the people had failed to believe his preaching. Jonah also asks for death (Jonah 4:3), but it is because the people believe him.

Here we see God’s righteousness and love working together. He is both too holy and too loving to either destroy Jonah or to allow Jonah to remain as he is, and God is also too holy and too loving to allow us to remain as we are.

jonah is a picture of God's undeserved, electing grace

However, that unity can be seen only in light of the work of Jesus Christ.

God wants Jonah to see himself, to recognize the ways that he continues to deny God’s grace and the ways he holds on to self-righteousness.

It is as if God shoots this arrow of a question at Jonah, but Jonah disappears, and we realize that the arrow is aimed at us. How will you answer?

If you want to understand your own behavior, you must understand that all sin against God is grounded in a refusal to believe that God is more dedicated to our good, and more aware of what that is, than we are. We distrust God because we assume he is not truly for us, that if we give him complete control, we will be miserable.

Yes! Sin forgets thats God has linked the experience of hapiness with the pursuit of holiness.

That’s the justification. 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.

Dang!

One of the main reasons that we trust God too little is because we trust our own wisdom too much. We think we know far better than God how our lives should go and what will make us happy. Every human being who has lived into middle age knows how often we have been mistaken about that. Yet our hearts continue to operate on this same principle, year after year. We remember how foolish we were at age twenty but think now that we are forty we know. But only God knows.

Therefore, because of our deep mistrust of God’s goodness and Word, we do everything we can to get out from under his hand.

Specific details may vary, but the deep heart song of “I have to look out for myself” is always there.

Jonah, however, refused to go, thinking only of himself. The mission God gave Jesus, however, meant certain death and infinite suffering, and yet he went, thinking not of himself but of us.

If you see Jesus trusting God in the dark in order to save us, we will be able to trust him when things are confusing and difficult.

Life in the world is filled with storms—with difficulties and suffering—some of which we have directly brought on ourselves but many of which we have not.

it is only when we are in the most pain that God’s “power, wisdom, and grace in supporting the soul” may become evident, enabling it to hold up and even triumph “under such pressures as are evidently beyond its own strength to sustain.”

These are deadly errors, and Satan would be happy to let you have a charmed and prosperous life for many years so that you don’t see the truth until it’s too late. God, however, out of love, wants to wake you up to your condition so you can do something about it. In many lives he uses storms.

Those were my sticks and stones of love.” God puts sticks and stones of love in our beds to wake us up, to bring us to rely on him, lest the end of history or of life overtake us without the Lord in our hearts, and we be turned to stone.

Because he was thrown into that storm for you, you can be sure that there’s love at the heart of this storm for you.

We can live life well in this world only through sacrificial love.

When John says that “this is how we know what love is,” he is arguing that, on this side of the cross, love is ever after defined as self-giving. “Just as the essence of hate is murder . . . so the essence of love is self-sacrifice. . . . Murder is taking another person’s life; self-sacrifice is laying down one’s own.”9

Our society defines love basically as a transaction for self-fulfillment.

We are “free to choose or change spouses . . . to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change [who are] our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.”10 In our individualistic society even marriage has been reshaped into a consumer relationship that exists only so long as each party benefits and profits. As soon as the relationship requires sacrifice on your part—more giving than receiving—society says it can be discarded. Parenting, however, stubbornly resists this modern attitude. It still requires substitutionary sacrifice. You can suffer voluntarily, in love, in a way that gives them life, or they’re going to suffer involuntarily for their whole lives.

No society can hold together if there is not an ability and willingness to forgive.

While many admired their actions, sociologists studying the event wrote that modern American society can no longer produce people capable of the same response.

The Amish Christian community, by contrast, had created a culture of self-renunciation, patterned on Jesus’s self-sacrifice, renouncing rights in the service of others.

In Ernest Gordon’s memoir of being a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, he recounts how at the end of a day of forced labor the guards counted the shovels, and one was apparently missing. A furious guard threatened the British POWs that unless the guilty person confessed, he would kill them all. He cocked his gun to start shooting them one by one. At that moment, one prisoner stepped forward calmly and said, “I did it.” He stood quietly at attention, and “he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7) as he was beaten to death. When they all got back to the camp and counted the shovels again, it turned out that they were all there. The man had sacrificed himself to save them all.12

Why do these stories move us? It’s because we know from the mundane corners of life to the most dramatic that all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice. We know that anybody who has ever done anything that really made a difference in our lives made a sacrifice, stepped in and gave something or paid something or bore something so we would not have to.

What happened on the cross was that God came and substituted himself for us.

Jesus’s blood is God’s blood.

The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us. The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.16

A God who suffers pain, injustice, and death for us is a God worthy of our worship.

To the degree you grasp what Jesus did for you, and rest in the salvation he bought for you, to that degree this pattern of substitutionary sacrifice and love will be reproduced in your relationships.

We need to think and reflect more on this expression of substitutionary love!

Calvin replies that even those who in themselves deserve nothing but contempt should be treated as if they were the Lord himself, because his image is upon them all.

Remember not to consider men’s evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.”

What does this all mean practically for us? It means that Christians cannot think that their role in life is strictly to build up the church, as crucial as that is. They must also, as neighbors and citizens, work sacrificially for the common life and common good.

First, we must not think it really possible to transcend politics and simply preach the gospel. Those Christians who try to avoid all political discussions and engagement are essentially casting a vote for the social status quo. Since no human society reflects God’s justice and righteousness perfectly, supposedly apolitical Christians are supporting many things that displease God. So to not be political is to be political.

However, as soon as any group of Christians decides exactly how to best pursue these moral ideals in our particular society, they are usually moving beyond biblical prescription into the realm of wisdom and prudence.

He realized that thoughtful Christians, all trying to obey God’s call, can reasonably appear at a number of different places on the political spectrum, with loyalties to different political parties.

For example, following both the Bible and the early church, Christians will be committed to racial justice and the poor but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage.14 One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. Christians’ positions on social issues, then, do not fit into contemporary political alignments.

In fact, if we are only offensive or only attractive and not both, we can be sure we are failing to live as we ought.

The gospel gives us the ability and the resources to love people who reject both our beliefs and us personally. Think of how God won you over. Not by taking power but by coming and losing power and serving you.

It is common for us to insist that everyone “respect difference”—allow people to be themselves—but in the very next moment we show complete disrespect for anyone who diverges from our cherished beliefs.

One author wrote that “one of the most troubling aspects” of human identity is that “the formation of any ‘we’ must leave out or exclude a ‘they,’” so that our identities are inevitably dependent on the people we exclude.