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October 25 - October 25, 2018
Jonah’s self-righteousness had been diminished somewhat but not destroyed. He cried, “Salvation comes only from the LORD!” yet also, in effect, “But I’m not like those awful pagans!” (Jonah 2:8–9). That is why he was still susceptible to the spiritual crash that happened to him after God showed Nineveh mercy. He still felt, to some degree, that mercy had to be deserved, and they didn’t deserve it.
We learn from Jonah that understanding God’s grace—and being changed by it—always requires a long journey with successive stages. It cannot happen in a single cathartic or catastrophic experience (like being swallowed by a fish!).
As long as there is something more important than God to your heart, you will be, like Jonah, both fragile and self-righteous. Whatever it is, it will create pride and an inclination to look down upon those who do not have it. It will also create fear and insecurity. It is the basis for your happiness, and if anything threatens it, you will be overwhelmed with anger, anxiety, and despair.
the thing Jonah loves is a counterfeit god. He is inordinately committed to his race and nation. God will have to deal with this idolatry if Jonah is ever to get the infinite peace of resting in God’s grace alone.
Jonah seemingly had a conversion experience in the fish. He grasped God’s grace and obeyed the command to preach God’s Word fearlessly. He predicted that the wrath of God was about to fall—but then nothing happened. He felt like a fool. They deserved God’s judgment. So why extend mercy to them?
Even though God declared a stay of execution, Jonah still wants to see “what would happen to the city,” meaning he still had hopes that God would not spare Nineveh for a long period of time.2
God directs a gigayon—a shade plant—to grow up. Commentators have identified this as the Ricinus or castor oil plant, which grows very quickly and provides shade with its broad leaves.
The word used in verses 10 and 11 for “compassion” is a word that means to grieve over someone or something, to have your heart broken, to weep for it.5 God says, “You had compassion for the plant” (verse 10). That is, God says, “You wept over it, Jonah. Your heart became attached to it. When it died, it grieved you.” Then God says, in essence, “You weep over plants, but my compassion is for people.”
For God to apply this word to himself is radical. This is the language of attachment. God weeps over the evil and lostness of Nineveh. When you put your love on someone, you can be happy only if they are happy, and their distress becomes your distress. The love of attachment makes you vulnerable to suffering, and yet that is what God says about himself—here and in other places (cf. Isaiah 63:9). In Genesis 6:6 it says that when God looked down on the evil of the earth, “his heart was filled with pain.”6
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.
So how could he get attached to us? The only answer is that an infinite, omnipotent, self-sufficient divine being loves only voluntarily. The whole universe is no bigger to God than a piece of lint is to us, and we are smaller pieces of lint on the lint. How could God be attached to us? How could God say, “What happens to Nineveh affects me. It moves me. It grieves me”? It means he voluntarily attaches his heart.
God’s compassion is not something abstract but concrete.
There are many people who have no idea what they should be living for, or the meaning of their lives, nor have they any guide to tell right from wrong. God looks down at people in that kind of spiritual fog, that spiritual stupidity, and he doesn’t say, “You idiots.” When we look at people who have brought trouble into their lives by their own foolishness, we say things like “Serves them right” or we mock them on social media:
When we see people of the other political party defeated, we just gloat. This is all a way of detaching ourselves from them. We distance ourselves from them partly out of pride and partly because we don’t want their unhappiness to be ours. God doesn’t do that. Real compassion, the voluntary attachment of our heart to others, means the sadness of their condition makes us sad; it affects us. That is deeply uncomfortable, but it is the character of compassion.
God’s evident generosity of spirit toward the city could not be a greater indictment of Jonah’s ungenerous narrowness, what John Calvin calls his greatest sin, namely that he wa...
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Jonah did not weep over the city, but Jesus, the true prophet, did.
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. He concluded that 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.
he grieved far more than he laughed because his compassion connected him with us.
Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been.
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 ...
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When God came into the world in Jesus Christ and went to the cross, however, he didn’t experience only emotional pain but every kind of pain in unimaginable dimensions. The agonizing physical pain of the crucifixion included torture, slow suffocation, and excruciating death. Even beyond that, when Jesus hung on the cross, he underwent the infinite and most unfathomable pain of all—separation from God and all love, eternal alienation, the wages of sin. He did it all for us, out of his unimaginable compassion.
This second statement is the part of God’s declaration to Moses that Jonah wrongly left out. God said to Moses that he is both compassionate and committed to punishing evil. These are both aspects of his goodness that God declares. 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.”
If we lived at the same point in redemptive history as Moses or Jonah, we would, like them, see no real way forward. 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.
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.
On the cross both the justice and love of God fully cooperate, have their way, and shine out brilliantly. “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith . . . so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:25–26).
On the one hand, Jonah receives grace upon grace. Perhaps no other Old Testament prophet looks as bad as Jonah. Jeremiah and Habakkuk often struggled with the messages God gave them to convey to the people. However, Jonah literally ran away from the Lord rather than declare his Word.
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.
the most notable features of the book of Jonah is its surprising “cliff-hanger” ending. The entire story has been one of God pursuing Jonah, first with a fearsome storm, then with gentle questions and reasoning. Yet even though the methods vary, the purpose remains the same. 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.
“[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?
write our own final paragraphs and chapters. That is, God calls us to apply this text to our own lives, in our own time and place.
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.
He is recapitulating the history of the human race and showing us how our own hearts operate every single day.
Sin always begins with the character assassination of God.
One of the main reasons that we trust God too little is because we trust our own wisdom too much.
because of our deep mistrust of God’s goodness and Word, we do everything we can to get out from under his hand. This is really the most fundamental temptation that there has ever been in the world, and the original sin.
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.
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.
In the first Harry Potter novel, the evil Lord Voldemort can’t touch Harry without being burned. Later Dumbledore explains it to him. “Your mother died to save you. . . . Love as powerful [as that] . . . leaves its own mark. . . . [T]o have been loved so deeply . . . will give us some protection forever.”13 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
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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. And you will become the kind of person the world desperately needs.
Who is my neighbor? By depicting a man helping his enemy and saying, “Go and do likewise,” Jesus is telling us in the strongest terms that anyone at all in need, regardless of race, religion, values, and culture, is your neighbor.
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.”4 Calvin’s
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.
What makes a person a Christian is not our love for God, which is always imperfect, but God’s love for us.
God called Abraham to leave his familiar culture (“your people”) and his personal and emotional security (“your father’s household”). That is, he is called to abandon everything he has relied on for meaning and security. Here’s an outline of his life: “Go.” Where? “I’ll tell you later. Just go.” (GENESIS 12) “You will have a son.” How? “I’ll tell you later. Just trust.” (GENESIS 15) “Offer up your son on the mount.” Why? “I’ll tell you later. Just climb.” (GENESIS 22)
Yet God had the audacity to tell them to become deeply involved with the city, seeking its peace and prosperity, all the while not compromising on their beliefs and faithfulness to him at all. Either withdrawal or assimilation is easier. Seeking the common good, yet without any compromise of faith and practice, is much more difficult. Yet that is God’s call to his people.
even a successful prophet (or preacher), can be in the dark about grace.
Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God’s grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.1
Whatever your problem, God solves it with his grace. God’s grace abolishes guilt forever. You may be filled with regret for the past or you may be living with a sense of great failure. It doesn’t matter what you have done. If you were a hundred times worse than you are, your sins would be no match for his mercy.
