“Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, ‘What is this that you have done!’” Jonah 1.10 ESV
Jonah found out that God will use whomever He will use to accomplish His purpose. He didn’t necessarily find out here, though. I feel like the whole book is a demonstration of how patient God is with His people. Jonah demonstrates the root of the heart of the Pharisee, yet God is still patient with him.
Meanwhile, the people around God’s prophet pay a heavy toll for their proximity to him. How is it that those people, blind and in the dark, showed more reverence for God than His prophet did? How is it that they demonstrated more care for human life than Jonah, a man specifically called into intimacy with the Father of all life?
The pagan sailors’ moral compass was a fine instrument compared to Jonah’s, which had suffered so much abuse that all it could ever do was point to Jonah. Jonah was his own true north. No wonder he was so lost. And today he has many disciples.
We have our rules, alright, and we are obsessed with ourselves, swaggering through life like the customer is always right, and we’re the toughest customer.
But God likes unlikely candidates, and He wasn’t a bit surprised that Jonah chose to run. Since He declares the end from the beginning, He had handpicked the people Jonah would run into and would work through them to correct His wayward son, even though they had not the luxury of the law and the prophets, the worship, the temple, the feasts, and the holy city. What they had was a clearer understanding than Jonah of the difference between light and dark.
Yet the gift and call of God upon Jonah remained. Really, Jonah is the ultimate unlikely candidate in his story, which is testament to how God really can do anything He desires.
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