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

by Timothy J. Keller

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?

Many students of the book have noticed that in the first half Jonah plays the “prodigal son” of Jesus’s famous parable (Luke 15:11–24), who ran from his father. In the second half of the book, however, Jonah is like the “older brother” (Luke 15:25–32), who obeys his father but berates him for his graciousness to repentant sinners. The parable ends with a question from the father to the Pharisaical son, just as the book of Jonah ends with a question to the Pharisaical prophet.

But how could a good God give a nation like that even the merest chance to experience his mercy? Why on earth would God be helping the enemies of his people?

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.

Neither son trusted his father’s love. Both were trying to find ways of escaping his control. One did it by obeying all the father’s rules, the other by disobeying them all.

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 and runs. But even though he uses multiple strategies, the Lord is always a step ahead. God varies his strategies too, and continually extends mercy to us in new ways, even though we neither understand nor deserve it.

The dismaying news is that every act of disobedience to God has a storm attached to it.

This is not to say that every difficult thing that comes into our lives is the punishment for some particular sin.

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.

When storms come into our lives, whether as a consequence of our wrongdoing or not, Christians have the promise that God will use them for their good (Romans 8:28).

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.

Jonah had rejected God’s call to preach to Nineveh. He did not want to talk to pagans about God or to lead them toward faith. So he fled—only to find himself talking about God to the exact sort of people he was fleeing!

When the captain finds the sleeping prophet he says, “Arise, call . . . !” (Hebrew qum lek, verse 6), the same words God used when calling Jonah to arise, go, and call Nineveh to repentance.

God uses the lot casting, in this case, to point the finger at Jonah. Yet even now, when they seem to have divine guidance, the sailors do not panic and immediately lay angry hands on him. They don’t assume that they now have a mandate to kill him. Instead they carefully take his evidence and testimony in order to make the right decision. They show him and his God the greatest of respect. Even when Jonah proposes that they throw him overboard, they do everything possible to avoid doing it. At every point they outshine Jonah.

First, we learn that people outside the community of faith have a right to evaluate the church on its commitment to the good of all.

Jacques Ellul writes: These Joppa sailors . . . are pagans, or, in modern terms, non-Christians. But . . . the lot of non-Christians and Christians is . . . linked; they are in the same boat. The safety of all depends on what each does. . . . They are in the same storm, subject to the same peril, and they want the same outcome . . . and this ship typifies our situation.6

But God shows him here that he is the God of all people and Jonah needs to see himself as being part of the whole human community, not only a member of a faith community.

In [this] episode, hope, justice, and integrity reside not with Jonah . . . but with the captain and the sailors. . . . Though blameless victims, the sailors never cry injustice. Finding themselves in a dangerous situation not of their making, they seek to solve it for the good of all. Never do they wallow in self-pity, berate an angry god . . . condemn an arbitrary world, target the culprit Jonah for vengeance, or promote violence as an answer.8

The doctrine of common grace is the teaching that God bestows gifts of wisdom, moral insight, goodness, and beauty across humanity, regardless of race or religious belief.

Common grace does not regenerate the heart, save the soul, or create a personal, covenant relationship with God. Yet without it the world would be an intolerable place to live. It is wonderful expression of God’s love to all people (Psalm 145:14–16).

In the New Testament book of James, the author argues that if you say you have a relationship with God based on his grace, and you see someone “without clothes and daily food” (James 2:15) and do nothing about it, you only prove that your faith is “dead”—unreal (verse 17).9

Peter and Jonah were proud of their religious devotion and based their self-image on their spiritual achievements. As a result they were both blind to their flaws and sins and hostile to those who were different.

To deny God’s wrath upon sin not only robs us of a full view of God’s holiness and justice but also can diminish our wonder, love, and praise at what it was that Jesus bore for us.

A God who substitutes himself for us and suffers so that we may go free is a God you can trust.

you never realize that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.

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.

J. I. Packer is right. 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.

No human heart will learn its sinfulness and impotence by being told it is sinful. It will have to be shown—often in brutal experience. No human heart will dare to believe in such free, costly grace unless it is the only hope. It is a combination of hard circumstances, insight from the biblical gospel of atonement for sin, and prevailing prayer that can move us to wonder and amazement, even in the darkest, deepest places.

Salvation belongs to God alone, to no one else. If someone is saved, it is wholly God’s doing. It is not a matter of God saving you partly and you saving yourself partly. No. God saves us. We do not and cannot save ourselves. That’s the gospel.

Repentance is always a work of God (2 Timothy 2:25).

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.14

Jonah, however, did not turn to God with his anxiety, trusting in him as so many of the psalm writers had 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.

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 to make ourselves into fools or worse, since the Bible says that the mark of evil fools is to be “wise in their own eyes” (cf. Proverbs 26:12).

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.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt concludes from his research that “self-righteousness is the normal human condition.”7

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!).

It is to instead finally recognize that we live wholly by God’s grace. Then we begin serving the Lord not in order to get things from him but just for him, for his own sake, just for who he is, for the joy of knowing him, delighting him, and becoming like him. When we’ve reached bedrock with God’s grace, it begins to drain us, slowly but surely, of both self-righteousness and fear.

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.

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.

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.

If you don’t believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ, you might believe in a God who just accepts everyone no matter how they live or behave. That might be a bit comforting, but is it electrifying and glorious? Or you could have a God who’s only just, and the sole way you can get to heaven is if you live an exceptionally good life. That might be bracing, but is that beautiful? Does it move you and change your heart?

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.”

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.