We’ve spent the past seven weeks studying through Jonah here at WhiteNoise Studio, and I’d like to share one of the standouts here.
I believe one of the reasons Bible study is profitable is because we can learn so much through the examples we see there. There are plenty that show us how not to do a thing, and Jonah is one of these. By the end of the book that bears his name, it’s clear that Jonah is invested in pretty much anything that opposes God. I don’t think I have to tell you that this position is extremely dangerous.
Hatred
Jonah wasn’t just reluctant as a prophet of God, he actually hated those whom God had called him to.
He saw them as the enemy because of his fierce patriotism and a particularly long memory of Assyrian abuses. Jonah was unable to step away from his own highly charged and limited perspective, and it produced in him a hatred as fierce as his passion for justice. But justice is God’s office, not ours. We can certainly mete it out, but only if it is sourced from Him. I’ll get into that in just a sec.
What I want us to understand is that Jonah was so invested in his own limited perspective, he shifted away from grace. This refusal to forgive as he had been forgiven took him on a journey that snatched him away from the light. It was his own decision, and if it proves anything, it’s that waging a war against God is the surest way to lose.
Judgment
Not a popular word, this one. But we need to understand it properly if we’re to be functional and healthy.
The Christian faith doesn’t prohibit judgment, at least not insofar as it abstains from condemnation. Judgment is simply stating the difference between good and evil, and we need to be able to know it in order to walk uprightly before God. Condemnation goes further than this, though, not only stating the difference between good and evil but commanding and prescribing punishment for crimes committed. That’s God’s office, not ours. I’ll explain.
The trouble is, we are unjust judges. All our judgments are unjust because, in order to gain the knowledge of the difference between what is right and what is wrong way back at Eden, we broke the law. But that’s not the only thing that derails us. Any judge, in order to render a just verdict, needs to know everything about the case. We don’t, and we prove this fact every time we learn something. Now whenever we pronounce a verdict, our lack of knowledge and lack of innocence defile it, making it unjust. Imagine a judge who had committed murder presiding over a murder case. There is a blatant conflict of interest.
We are required to make judgments between right and wrong, but we can only rightly do this as the Holy Spirit makes the difference plain to us. Since God is God and we aren’t, straying over the line into condemnation is a foray into dangerous places that are way beyond our pay grade. Jonah didn’t just stray into condemnation; he built his empire there.
Death
The destination becomes clear in Jonah chapter four: death. Jonah actually asks God to kill him. Stop and think of that for a moment. Why would Jonah, prophet of God, do that? Didn’t he have access to the light and the life in knowing God? He proves that he knows Him by confessing His goodness early in this chapter.
But death is the inevitable journey’s end that Jonah chose from the beginning, when he chose to flee from the presence of God (as if such a thing is possible). He doesn’t admit it until chapter four, but his whole motive in fleeing from God was his knowledge of the fact that He is merciful.
Get this: Jonah’s whole basis for complaining against God is the fact that He knows His character but doesn’t want Him to show Himself to the Ninevites because he can’t get over his hatred for them.
Mercy
God’s whole motive in sending Jonah to Nineveh with a message threatening overthrow and destruction was to initiate a turn. Objectors to reconciliation with God always point to messages like this as justification for their resistance. They say God is a bully.
But sin’s end is death. It can only lead us to one place. And guess what God doesn’t want for us? Maybe it’s possible that strong language is justified in the battle to free us from our own terrible decisions. Maybe, if it takes the threat of violence to get us to wake up and turn from sin, the threat of violence is completely righteous—from conception through motive to outcome.
Nineveh was “a great city to the LORD” whose sin had "come up before" Him. Jonah knew that God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, so he knew that what God wanted to do there was start a wildfire of repentance that would move Nineveh from wrath to grace. Nineveh’s example is instructive to us even today. God’s mercy is a thing He eagerly and zealously desires to give.
But Jonah’s example is perhaps even more instructive. When we’re so invested in our own ways that we move ourselves out of position with God into hatred and judgment, death becomes inevitable because resisting the Holy Spirit is sin.
There are many ironies in the book of Jonah. Perhaps one of the greatest is that Nineveh drew closer to God than His own prophet did—or perhaps could—and all because they chose humility in the light of revelation and Jonah did not.
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