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

by Timothy J. Keller

We must realize that since all our social problems stem from our alienation from God (Genesis 3:1–17), the most radical and loving thing you can do for a person is to see him or her reconciled to God.

The Old Testament prophets regularly declared that while you may be religious and fast and pray, if you don’t do justice, your religion is a sham (Isaiah 58:1–7). Isaiah said that if we don’t care for the poor (Isaiah 29:21), then we may seem to honor God with our lips but our hearts are far from him (Isaiah 29:13).

In Christian theology our belief in the God of judgment and grace is the basis for doing justice in our society. In the eyes of those outside the church, it is Christians’ doing justice that makes belief in the gospel plausible. Doing justice for our neighbors, whether they believe in Christ or not is, paradoxically, one of the best recommendations for the faith.

The main purpose of God is to get Jonah to understand grace. The main purpose of the book of Jonah is to get us to understand grace.

The doctrine of the grace of God is that which sets Christianity apart from all other faiths. It is the central message, the “gospel.” “The gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace” (Colossians 1:6).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in trying to understand how so much of the German church was willing to accept Hitler, identified the problem as “cheap grace.”2 They believed that God loved them despite their sins, but that led to an attitude that ultimately it didn’t matter how they lived.

Heinrich Heine, the nineteenth-century writer, was reputed to have said when he was dying, “God will forgive me. That’s his job.”3 If you believe that—that God just forgives us and overlooks sin with a shrug—then you will take sin lightly because apparently God does too.

While the gospel must lead to a changed life, it is not those changes that save you.

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Grace abolishes fear of failure, which may have been part of Jonah’s problem. So many of our deepest longings to succeed are really just ways to be for ourselves what Christ should be for us.

If you say, “I want him in my life but I don’t see him working,” you still don’t understand how fundamental his grace is.

The first kind is “love of home”—love of the places we grew up, of the types of people who live there, of the landscape, the sights and sounds, the food and smells and way of life.

The second kind of love of country is “a

attitude to our country’s past . . . the great deeds of our ancestors.”

Lewis believes that when a nation intentionally suppresses and erases its own historical misdeeds, this can lead, thirdly, to conscious and deliberate feelings of racial superiority.

Jonah’s particular national identity was more foundational to his self-worth than his role as a servant of the God of all nations.

Race and nation are just two of an infinite number of good things that can become idols.

James is referring to mercy on poor believers (see verse 15: “a brother or a sister”). So in this instance James is saying that the sign that we are saved by grace is that we take practical action to alleviate the suffering of the poor in the Christian community. This text needs to be put alongside Galatians 6:10, where Paul tells Christians to “do good” (give practical help) “to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” In other words, compassion for the economic and material needs of all people, but especially of others within the church, is one of the marks of true faith.

It will embrace one of the many particular definitions of “justice,” whether it be the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill or individual-rights justice or the virtue ethics of Aristotle. But none of these views is empirically provable. They are faith-based moral visions grounded in beliefs about human nature and purpose. That means that Christians have every right, as individual citizens, to seek social policies based on their own beliefs, just as all other citizens inevitably will be doing.

The gospel itself undermines extreme partisanship because of the doctrine of sin. It tells Christians that the evil ruining human life on this planet resides in every single human heart, including theirs.

Our doctrine of history undermines both the nostalgia and the utopianism that can lead to extreme political views. Progressives look at the past as filled with darkness and evil and believe our only hope is in a future society we can achieve through politics. On the other hand, conservatives often look back to past “golden eras” and see the present and future as flawed and bleak. But St. Augustine’s great work The City of God shows the biblical view of history, namely, that the past, present, and future were all filled with human evil and God’s sustaining grace, that we can work for a more just society now with both realism and hope, knowing that we will never achieve it until Christ’s return.

It is not being righteous but being self-righteous that leads to constant polarization and alienation within our multicultural, pluralistic societies. One can disagree and critique strongly without demeaning, demonizing, and dehumanizing the opposing view in both tone and language, but self-righteousness engages in these routinely.

the move of people, wealth, and power away from the countryside and into the great cities has left rural communities in great need. There is far more drug addiction, poverty, transience, and other social problems in these areas than there was a generation ago. Ministry in these areas requires new skills and resources. There is a great need for many new churches and for the renewal of innumerable historic churches in those places.