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

by Timothy J. Keller

Most of our deepest attachments as human beings are involuntary. Jonah did not look at the Ricinus plant and say, “I’m going to attach my heart to you in affection.” We need many things, and we get emotionally attached to things that meet those needs. God, however, needs nothing. He is utterly and perfectly happy in himself, and he doesn’t need us. So how could he get attached to us?

God speaks about his heart literally turning over within him. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (Hosea 11:8, ESV).

That is an exceedingly generous way to look at Nineveh! It’s a figure of speech that means they are spiritually blind, they have lost their way, and they haven’t the first clue as to the source of their problems or what to do about them. Obviously, God’s threat to destroy Nineveh shows that this blindness and ignorance is ultimately no excuse for the evil they have done, but it shows remarkable sympathy and understanding.

Here is a perfect heart—perfect in generous love—not excusing, not harshly condemning. He is the weeping God of Jonah 4 in human form.

B. B. Warfield wrote a remarkable scholarly essay called “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” where he considered every recorded instance in the gospels that described the emotions of Christ.

by far the most typical statement of Jesus’s emotional life was the phrase “he was moved with compassion,” a Greek phrase that literally means he was moved from the depths of his being.9 The Bible records Jesus Christ weep...

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.

As some have pointed out, 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.

“But the God of this book is not like that at all. He is an extremely complex character. He sometimes blesses believers and judges the pagans, but at other times he blesses the pagans and punishes the believers. He’s not just a being of wrath or love—he’s both, and in unpredictable ways.” How can he be both at the same time?

He says he is “compassionate and gracious . . . forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” but then adds, “yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.”

Why is it that God must punish sin? It’s because he would not be perfectly good if he overlooked evil. But then why does God not want people to be lost? Because he’s too good, in the sense of being loving.

Moses saw only the “back parts” of his goodness. It remained a mystery to him, as it was to Jonah. But we don’t stand where they stood.

In John 1, the gospel writer has the audacity to say, “Jesus Christ became flesh and [literally] tabernacled among us” (John 1:14). Using this term deliberately evokes the story of Moses, since God’s glory dwelt in the tabernacle. Paul likewise says that we see “the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” and that it is “the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4,6).

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.

God sends a storm, a fish, a plant. He commissions him again and again and in the end counsels and debates with him directly. 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.

God does not have a “love” part and a “righteousness” part that must be reconciled. What we see as being in tension is ultimately a perfect unity.

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. He poses one final question: “You don’t want me to have compassion on Nineveh, but shouldn’t I? In light of all I’ve shown you, Jonah—should I not love this city, and should you not join me?”

One commentator, like many others, suggests: “[The book] forces us to contemplate our personal destiny. It remains unfinished in order that we may provide our own conclusion. . . . For you are Jonah; I am Jonah.”13 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.

Adam and Eve did not say, “Let’s be evil. Let’s ruin our own lives and everyone else’s too!” Rather they thought, “We just want to be happy. But his commands don’t look like they will give us the things that we need to thrive. We will have to take things into our own hands—we can’t trust him.” Jonah is doing the same thing. He is recapitulating the history of the human race and showing us how our own hearts operate every single day. Seldom do human beings lie, twist the truth, cheat, exploit, manipulate, act selfishly, break promises, destroy relationships, or burn with resentment motivated by a simple desire to be evil.

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.

Years earlier, God had given Abraham a command that made absolutely no sense. “Take your son, your only son, whom you love. . . . Sacrifice him . . . as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you” (Genesis 22:2). No reasons were given, and God had never before asked for human sacrifice—it was an abomination. Also, he had promised in a solemn covenant to make Abraham’s descendants more numerous than the sand. God’s Word to Abraham was even more inexplicable than his Word to Jonah. Nevertheless, what did Abraham do? He went up the mountain. He refused to act as if he knew best. He reminded himself who God was. Abraham himself had said earlier, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).

He saved us by saying, under unimaginable pressure, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39).2

Yet we see that the storm not only came upon Jonah, who deserved it, but also upon the sailors in the boat with him, who did not. 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.

Another way God works through suffering, Newton writes, is that suffering now “prevents greater evils” later.5 The greatest danger of all is that we never become aware of our blindness, pride, and self-sufficiency. We naturally believe that we have far more ability to direct our lives wisely than we really have, and that we are far more virtuous, honest, and decent than we really are. 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.

Self-sufficiency, self-centeredness, self-salvation make us hard toward people we think of as failures and losers, and ironically makes us endlessly self-hating if we don’t live up to our standards.6

Because the only storm that can really destroy—the storm of divine justice and judgment on sin and evil—will never come upon you. Jesus bowed his head into that ultimate storm, willingly, for you. He died, receiving the punishment for sin we deserve, so we can be pardoned when we trust in him. When you see him doing that for you, it certainly does not answer all the questions you have about your suffering.

And finally, after the deliverance, both the sailors and the disciples are described as more terrified than they were in the storm (Mark 4:41; Jonah 1:16). These parallels can’t be coincidences. By this parallelism, Mark is telling us that Jonah’s willingness to die for the sailors points us to an infinitely greater sacrificial love that brings an infinitely greater salvation. Unlike Jonah, Jesus was not thrown into the waters, because Jesus came to save us from a far greater peril than drowning. Jesus was able to calm the storm on Galilee and save his disciples because later, on the cross, he was thrown into the ultimate storm of divine wrath so he could save us from sin and death itself. Jesus himself says, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40).

In the Bible, writes biblical scholar John Stott, “agape love means self-sacrifice in the service of others.”8 1 John 3:16–18 says, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” 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

Allowing someone to exploit you or sin against you is not loving them at all. It only confirms them in their wrongful behavior and could lead to the ruin of you both. Some people do indeed allow themselves to be browbeaten and used, for many psychologically toxic reasons, all under the guise of being “self-giving.” In reality it is selfish, a way to feel superior or needed. To say that self-giving love must lead to abuse and oppression is to misunderstand it entirely.

A recent book on parenting explains why so many modern people are having fewer children or none at all. 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.

Another area where the modern view is dysfunctional is in that of reconciliation. No society can hold together if there is not an ability and willingness to forgive. Constant blood feuds and vengeance for past wrongs lay waste to civil society. Yet the ability to set aside grievances and work together requires habits of the heart that our culture no longer forms in us.

In 2006 a lone gunman took hostage ten girls, ages six to thirteen, in an Amish schoolhouse. He shot eight of them, killing five, before committing suicide. The Amish startled the nation when as a community they forgave the killer of their children. They came to the shooter’s funeral, expressing support for his traumatized family that he left behind. Also, the individual Amish families that lost children forgave the gunman and his family. While many admired their actions, sociologists studying the event wrote that modern American society can no longer produce people capable of the same response. America, they argued, is now a culture of self-assertion in which all people are encouraged to express themselves and assert their rights. 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.11 Because it has lost the ideal of self-giving and sacrificial love, our society cannot provide its members with the resources for this basic requirement for human life in society.