Rediscovering Jonah: The Secret of God's Mercy

by Timothy J. Keller

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.

The first chapters of Genesis teach that God did not create the world and the human race for suffering, disease, natural disasters, aging, and death.

God is not like a chess player casually moving us pawns around on a board.

This is one of the main messages of the book, namely, that God cares how we believers relate to and treat people who are deeply different from us.

God wants us to treat people of different races and faiths in a way that is respectful, loving, generous, and just.

The Bible tells us we are co-humans with all people—made in God’s image and therefore infinitely precious to him (Genesis 9:6; James 3:9).

In contrast there was the “love of attachment” in which you loved someone because your heart was bound up with them in attraction and loving desire. The Greek Stoic philosophers insisted that God was marked by apatheia. God could certainly do loving things, but a god could not have heart attachment to mere human beings.4 That is why God’s language here is shocking. 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 While this language cannot mean that the eternal, unchangeable God loses any of his omnipotence or sovereignty, it is a strong declaration at which we must marvel.7

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.