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this point in the story, “the action is about to come to a full halt to leave Jonah alone with his God.”4 Jonah begins to pray, and at the climax of the prayer, he speaks of chesdh (Jonah 2:9). It is a key biblical word often translated as “steadfast love” or “grace.” It refers to the covenant love of God. It takes the whole prayer for Jonah to get there—to a declaration about God’s grace—but when he does, he is released back into the land of the living.
We live in an age marked by “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.”6 We are taught that our problem is a lack of self-esteem, that we live with too much shame and self-incrimination. In addition, we are told, all moral standards are socially constructed and relative, so no one has the right to make you feel guilty. You must determine right or wrong for yourself. In a society dominated by such beliefs, the Bible’s persistent message that we are guilty sinners comes across as oppressive if not evil and dangerous. These modern cultural themes make the offer of grace unnecessary, even an insult.
Jonah knew that there was divine justice and that he deserved it.
We must admit not only our sins but also that we cannot repair or cleanse ourselves from them. Our culture, again, does not help us here, for it is dominated not only by therapy but also by technology. Even if we accept responsibility for wrongdoing, we believe “we can fix this.” The most common way we try to do that is to apply the technology of morality.
The third truth we must grasp, if we are to understand God’s grace in a way that transforms, is how costly the salvation is that God provides.
The temple and the sacrificial system established all three of these “grace truths” as a foundation: We are sinners, unable to save ourselves and able to be saved only through extreme and costly measures.
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.
He sees the literal idols that the pagans worship and doesn’t see the more subtle idols in his own life that keep him from fully grasping that he too, just like the heathen, lives only, equally by God’s grace.
We seldom see ministries that are equally committed to preaching the Word fearlessly and to justice and care for the poor, yet these are theologically inseparable.
Isaiah did not see social injustice as merely meriting God’s wrath. Rather, the misery and social breakdown, the economic and political “devouring” of one another (yet the inner emptiness and discontent it brings) is all actually the outworking of God’s wrath.
Alec Motyer wrote that in a world created by a good God, evil and injustice are “inherently self-destructive.” The resulting social disintegration “expresses [God’s] wrath. He presides over the cause and effect processes he has built into creation so they are expressions of his holy rule of the world.”
CHAPTER 8 HEART STORMS
How can he claim to be a God of justice and allow such evil and violence to go unpunished? In Jonah’s mind, then, the issue is a theological one. There seems to be a contradiction between the justice of God and the love of God.
When Jonah says, in effect, “Without that—I have no desire to go on,” he means 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.
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.
while love of country and your people is a good thing, like any other love, it can become inordinate. If love for your country’s interests leads you to exploit people or, in this case, to root for an entire class of people to be spiritually lost, then you love your nation more than God. That is idolatry, by any definition.
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. If they value the economic and military flourishing of their country over the good of the human race and the furtherance of God’s work in the world, they are sinning like Jonah.
if we feel more righteous as we read the Bible, we are misreading it; we are missing its central message. We are reading and using the Bible rightly only when it humbles us, critiques us, and encourages us with God’s love and grace despite our flaws.
For what [the Bible] teaches us about ourselves is all to the effect that we are not righteous, that we have no means of justifying ourselves, that we have . . . no right to condemn others and be in the right against them, and that . . . only a gracious act of God . . . can save us. That is what Scripture teaches us, and if we stick to this, reading the Bible is useful and healthy and brings forth fruit in us.
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt concludes from his research that “self-righteousness is the normal human condition.”
As long as there is something more important than God to your heart, you will be, like Jonah, both fragile and self-righteous.
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.
CHAPTER 9 THE CHARACTER OF COMPASSION
On the contrary, “Paul speaks of two men battling in him [the ‘old man’ and the ‘new man’] Jonah shows it too. . . . We continue to be sinners” (cf. Galatians 5:17; Ephesians 4:22–24). Of course, we cannot use this to justify bad behavior, but we can take the deepest comfort in seeing that “God knows the totality of [the human heart] . . . that this does not exhaust God’s love and patience, that he continues to take this rebellious child by the hand.”1
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
Most of our deepest attachments as human beings are involuntary.
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? The only answer is that an infinite, omnipotent, self-sufficient divine being loves only voluntarily.
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.
“I am weeping and grieving over this city—why aren’t you? If you are my prophet, why don’t you have my compassion?” 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 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 was a man of sorrows, and not because he was naturally depressive. No, he had enormous joy in the Holy Spirit and in his Father (cf. Luke 10:21), and yet he grieved far more than he laughed because his compassion connected him with us. Our sadness makes him sad; our pain brings him pain.
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.
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.”
It seems like a striking contradiction, but upon reflection it can be seen that the single word “goodness” binds these apparently contradictory traits together. 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. He would not be perfectly good if he just let everyone perish.
He could not be infinitely and perfectly good unless he was endlessly loving and perfectly just.
At every point in the story, Jonah falls lower in the test not only than other prophets before him but also than the supposedly benighted, profane pagans around him. Yet God continues to save him, be patient with him, work with him. Nevertheless, God does not just accept Jonah and leave him alone. He does not allow Jonah to remain undisturbed in his foolish, wrongful attitudes and behavior patterns.
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 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 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.
CHAPTER 10 OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD’S WORD
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.
“If I obey God I’ll miss out! I need to be happy.” That’s the justification.
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. Specific details may vary, but the deep heart song of “I have to look out for myself”
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.
the central theme of the Bible. There are at least two aspects of it that we can consider. One aspect is the ethical—that love should be self-giving. We can live life well in this world only through sacrificial love.
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.”
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.
