The story of Jonah is not about a man being eaten by a large fish, despite what children's Bibles would have us believe. Yes, Jonah was eaten by a large fish, but frankly, that is beside the point. Rather, the theme of this short book is that God is sovereign and He is compassionate, not just to "us" but to "them," as the ESV Study Bible puts it.
Jonah was commanded to prophesy to the Ninevites, an evil pagan nation. Rather than obeying God, he boarded a ship sailing in the opposite direction. Have you ever caught why Jonah was running? It was not because he was scared of the Ninevites. Jonah 1:3 says that Jonah was going "away from the presence of the Lord." He did not want to follow God's command. What I find most unusual is that Jonah did not want to do what God told him not because He believed the Ninevites would ignore God but rather because he knew that they would repent! Jonah 4:1-2 reads, "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, 'O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.'" Jonah believed wholeheartedly that the Ninevites deserved divine judgment, not a second chance, and it made him mad.
The great irony of course, is that the Ninevites were repentant while Jonah was not. The man of God was judgmental and self-righteous, while the pagans were broken, "calling out mightily to God" (3:8). Jonah 3:10 says that God saw what the Ninevites did and relented of bringing disaster, just as Jonah feared.
Ninevah's repentance, God's desired outcome, should have been cause for much celebration, but Jonah could find no joy in it. In fact, he was so mad, he asked God to take his life. Jonah's "us versus them" mentality was crumbling around him. His worldview, strongly steeped in justice, was in a tailspin. Jonah went to sit at the edge of the town to see what would happen, perhaps still wishing their destruction. God, in His mercy, caused a plant to grow up over Jonah to provide him shade, but the next day, when God caused the plant to die, Jonah again became mad because the plant died. Mad enough to desire death. The final 2 verses of Jonah (4:10-11), are profound and sum up the book. "And the Lord said, 'You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”
How often Christians wish God's justice upon "them", the outsiders--be they Muslims, democrats, or "the new atheists." Pick your group. Because of our God-given sense of justice, I think we sometimes want to see His destruction come forth. However, in Romans 9:15, we are reminded that God told Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." We don't get to decide.
The reality is that we all deserve God's justice. Let us adopt the perspective of I John 4:19, "we love because he first loved us" and pray for God's mercy to be poured out on those who do not deserve it--like us.
No comments:
Post a Comment