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October 25 - October 25, 2018
If you accept the existence of God and the resurrection of Christ (a far greater miracle), then there is nothing particularly difficult about reading Jonah literally.
Jonah wants a God of his own making, a God who simply smites the bad people, for instance, the wicked Ninevites and blesses the good people, for instance, Jonah and his countrymen. When the real God—not Jonah’s counterfeit—keeps showing up, Jonah is thrown into fury or despair. Jonah finds the real God to be an enigma because he cannot reconcile the mercy of God with his justice. How, Jonah asks, can God be merciful and forgiving to people who have done such violence and evil? How can God be both merciful and just?
Jonah did the exact opposite of what God told him to do. Called to go east, he went west. Directed to travel overland, he went to sea. Sent to the big city, he bought a one-way ticket to the end of the world.
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.
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.
One group is trying diligently to follow God’s law and the other ignores it, and yet Paul says both have “turned away.” They are both, in different ways, running from God. We all know that we can run from God by becoming immoral and irreligious. But Paul is saying it is also possible to avoid God by becoming very religious and moral.
Unless Jonah can see his own sin, and see himself as living wholly by the mercy of God, he will never understand how God can be merciful to evil people and still be just and faithful.
Jonah runs but God won’t let him go.
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.
Sin always hardens the conscience, locks you in the prison of your own defensiveness and rationalizations, and eats you up slowly from the inside.
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.
There’s mercy deep inside our storms.
God wants us to treat people of different races and faiths in a way that is respectful, loving, generous, and just.
God sent his prophet to point the pagans toward himself. Yet now it is the pagans pointing the prophet toward God.
We are all—believers and nonbelievers—“in the same boat.” (Never was that old saying truer than it was for Jonah!) If crime plagues a community, or poor health, or a water shortage, or the loss of jobs, if an economy and social order is broken, we are all in the same boat.
His private faith is of no public good.
Essentially they were asking three things—his purpose (what is your mission?), his place (from where do you come? what is your country?), and his race (who are your people?).1 These are identity questions.
Everyone gets an identity from something. Everyone must say to himself or herself, “I’m significant because of This” and “I’m acceptable because I’m welcomed by Them.” But then whatever This is and whoever They are, these things become virtual gods to us, and the deepest truths about who we are. They become things we must have under any circumstances.
Shallow Christian identities explain why professing Christians can be racists and greedy materialists, addicted to beauty and pleasure, or filled with anxiety and prone to overwork. All this comes because it is not Christ’s love but the world’s power, approval, comfort, and control that are the real roots of our self-identity.
Here is Jonah, a prophet of God with a privileged position in the covenant community, who is at every turn obtuse, self-absorbed, bigoted, and foolish. Yet he doesn’t seem aware of it at all.
Often the first step in coming to one’s senses spiritually is when we finally start thinking of somebody—anybody—other than ourselves.
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.
Their intellectual and social skills, and their emotional well-being, are massively shaped by how much time we spend with our children. This entails sacrifice on the part of the parent. We must disrupt our lives for years. Yet if we don’t do it, they will grow up with all sorts of problems. It’s them or us. We must lose much of our freedom now, or they will not become free, self-sufficient adults later.
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.2 Of course, the differences between Jonah and Jesus are many and profound. Jonah was cast out for his own sins, but that was not true of Jesus (Hebrews 4:15). Jonah only came near to death and went under the water, while Jesus actually died and came under the weight of our sin and punishment. Yet the similarity is there too.
A God who substitutes himself for us and suffers so that we may go free is a God you can trust.
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.
Peter Craigie writes that when we reject and disobey God, as Jonah did, it takes “radical treatment, if it [is] to be remedied.” He points out that the text has been depicting Jonah as descending—going down to Joppa, down into a ship, down into the depths of the ship—and now, finally, he goes even further down into the very depths of the ocean. “But not until he was all the way down, finally stripped of his own buoyant self-sufficiency, was deliverance possible.”2 There was a fatal flaw in Jonah’s character, and it had lain hidden from him as long as his life was going well. It was only
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It is only when you reach the very bottom, when everything falls apart, when all your schemes and resources are broken and exhausted, that you are finally open to learning how to completely depend on God. As is often said, you never realize that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.
The way up was, first of all, down. The usual place to learn the greatest secrets of God’s grace is at the bottom.
Not the labors of my hands Can fulfill thy law’s demands. Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears forever flow, All for sin could not atone. Thou must save, and thou alone.8
Many people sing “Amazing Grace” and give lip service to the idea, but that grace has not profoundly changed them. God’s grace becomes wondrous, endlessly consoling, beautiful, and humbling only when we fully believe, grasp, and remind ourselves of all three of these background truths—that we deserve nothing but condemnation, that we are utterly incapable of saving ourselves, and that God has saved us, despite our sin, at infinite cost to himself.
Now we see why we find grace not at the high points of our lives but in the valleys and depths, at the bottom.
In other words, despite his breakthrough here, Jonah has not grasped grace as deeply as we might at first think he has. There is still a sense of superiority and self-righteousness that will cause him to explode in anger when God has mercy on those Jonah sees as his inferiors.
God releases Jonah from the fish even though, as will become obvious soon, his repentance is only partial. Yet the merciful God patiently works with us, flawed and clueless though we are.
Imagine if a house were on fire but you couldn’t see the flames. As the house crumbled and collapsed, you would wonder what was happening. Only if someone enabled you to see the fire would the dissolution of the building make sense. Without understanding the wrath of God, it is impossible to fully understand why so many societies, empires, institutions, and lives break down.
The summary that the text gives us of his sermons was not “In forty days, Nineveh might be overthrown” but “In forty days, Nineveh shall be overthrown!” That was what Jonah enthusiastically wanted and predicted. He enjoyed preaching wrath. He did it with glee, not tears, because he couldn’t wait for God’s hammer to fall on them. But God responded with mercy.
Of all the books of the Bible, Jonah has the most unexpected and overlooked final chapter. Most people have heard the story of Jonah, but they think of it as ending at Jonah’s repentance and release from the fish. A smaller number of people may be able to tell you that the story goes on and that Jonah went and preached successfully to Nineveh. Almost everyone thinks the story ends right there. Yet there is a final, startling chapter in which the real lessons of the entire narrative are revealed.
However, that is what happened. It shows that the Word of God is more powerful than we can imagine. This would lead us to expect that the book would end in chapter 3 on a note of triumph, with “and Jonah returned to his own land rejoicing.” Instead, events take an unexpected turn.
Readers are now let in on the ongoing argument Jonah has been having with God all along. Verses 2 and 3 give us a brief sample, but it is not hard to imagine the rest of it. “I just knew you might do something like this! These people are evil, and they only changed because they were scared. They didn’t convert and start worshipping you. They merely promised to start changing—and you bestow mercy on them for that! It’s good that you are a God of mercy, but this time you’ve gone too far.”
The name “Yahweh” (translated “the Lord”) has not appeared since chapter 2, but now Jonah literally cries, “Alas, Yahweh!” This is the personal, covenant name of God, which he reveals only to his people Israel, and it is the covenant of God with Israel that is much in Jonah’s mind. The Lord had promised to preserve Israel and accomplish his purposes in the world through them. How can God keep his promises to uphold his people and at the same time show mercy to his people’s enemies? How can he claim to be a God of justice and allow such evil and violence to go unpunished?
When he says he wants to die (verse 3) and God, with remarkable gentleness, chastises him for his inordinate anger (verse 4), we see that Jonah’s real problem was at the deepest level of his heart. Perhaps we could say that all theological problems play themselves out not merely in our intellects but in our commitments, desires, and identities.
he has lost something that had replaced God as the main joy, reason, and love of his life. He had a relationship with God, but there was something else he valued more. His explosive anger shows that he is willing to discard his relationship with God if he does not get this thing. 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. Here is Jonah saying to God, who should be the only real source of his meaning in life, “I have no source of meaning!”
What was it for Jonah? Nineveh’s repentance was pleasing to God, but it was threatening to Israel’s national interests.
done. If he had to choose between the security of Israel and loyalty to God, well, he was ready to push God away. That is not just concern and love for one’s country; that is a kind of deification of it.
When Christian believers care more for their own interests and security than for the good and salvation of other races and ethnicities, they are sinning like Jonah.
When Jonah begins to berate God, he quotes God’s own words to him. They are from Exodus 34:6–7, where God reveals himself to Moses and says he is “compassionate and gracious” and that he “forgives wickedness.” “Jonah sets God against God . . . all to justify himself.”2 He reads the Bible selectively, ignoring the latter part of Exodus 34:7 that speaks of God not leaving “the guilty unpunished.” He creates a simplistic picture of a God who simply loves everyone without judgment on evil. He uses the sacred text to justify his inordinate indignation, anger, and bitterness.
It is possible to use the Bible selectively to justify oneself.3 One example is the scholar who “dissects Scripture to set it against Scripture” in a way that undermines the Bible’s authority so we don’t have to obey it. Another is “the simple Christian who opens his Bible to find himself justified . . . against non-Christians or Christians who do not hold the same views, arguments which show how far superior my position is to that of others.”4 Whenever we read the Bible in order to say, “Aha! I’m right!”; whenever we read it to feel righteous and wise in our own eyes, we are using the Bible
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In hindsight, there was a clue to Jonah’s future meltdown within his prayer in the great fish.
Therefore, in the belly of the fish Jonah received a deeper understanding of his need for grace. However, at the very end of his prayer he said that those who cling to idols forfeit God’s love (Jonah 2:8). Jonah had seen some of his need for grace, but there was still some pride left.
