9/14/22
Today is a spin-off of some things I’ve been writing about the book of Psalms. Last week, I wrote that in Psalms we see people celebrating the faithfulness of God using words like “steadfast love,” “faithful” and “righteous.” Where did they learn this about God? Well, they certainly learned it from experiencing God, but they also learned it because that’s how God described himself in Exodus 34:
"The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation."
But celebrating the faithfulness of God was only one way the Israelites remembered these words. Not only did they pray them back to God when times were good, they also prayed them back to God when times were bad. Many times the psalmists used these words, in whole or in part, to remind God (and themselves) about the way God promised to be with His people.
Today I want to visit a third way they used these words . . . but this isn’t positive.
The prophet Jonah is unique among the prophets. Most of the book is about his disobedience! Ask any child who Jonah was and they’ll tell you: “He was swallowed by a whale.” But this isn’t the point of the story. If you go back and reread this short book (only 4 chapters) and look at how many times Jonah uses “I” and how few times he uses “you” (talking about God), you’ll see that Jonah was more focused on himself and not enough on God.
We all know the story. God calls Jonah to go and preach to Nineveh and, instead of obeying God, Jonah hops a ship headed the opposite way! A fierce storm comes up; he is tossed into the sea and swallowed by a great fish. God keeps him alive for 3 days and 3 nights, and he prays a beautiful prayer of Thanksgiving (ch. 3). The fish coughs him up, and he goes on to Nineveh. Can you imagine how he looked and smelled after being in all those fishy digestive juices for 3 days ? It’s no wonder Nineveh repented! But they do repent and God relents from destroying them.
Finally, we get to the point of the story. God forgives and Jonah is angry, and we find out why Jonah fled to Tarshish in the first place:
“O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
In response to Nineveh’s repentance, God responds with grace, answering and saving the wicked city. Jonah knows this. . . in fact, Jonah knew this before he hopped the boat! Jonah didn’t head for Tarshish because he was afraid; Jonah headed for Tarshish because he knew who God was. Why did he know it? Because this is who God said that he would be, and God is true to his word. Jonah would have been raised on Exodus 34, the story of God’s passing by and proclaiming his character to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Jonah would have sung all those psalms, like Psalm 145, that celebrated the faithfulness of God - that God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” He knew who God was, and he doesn’t doubt God's character or God's actions. What he does, however, is regret God's character. He would rather die than live in a world of God’s grace! The people of Nineveh weren’t the only ones who needed to repent!
Jonah almost sounds like one of the Pharisees, doesn’t he? But Jonah can protest all he wants; God does not change. The Pharisees can grumble against Jesus all they want (“This fellow welcomes tax collectors and sinners and eats with them!”); God does not change.
God says that he is a God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, and relenting from punishment,” and that’s really what God wanted from Jonah as well. By the end of the book, Jonah is praying to die because he lost some shade on a hot day, and he’s still stewing in his anger because of God’s grace. God says to Jonah:
“You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?”
And there the story ends. The question is for us to answer. God loves His creatures – all of us! God doesn’t delight in destroying the wicked, nor is He such a softy that He leaves us where we are.
This character of God, the God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” is the character God wants in His children. We are merciful because we learned mercy from God. We are gracious because we received grace from God. We are slow to anger because God is patient with us. We love because God first loved us. We are faithful because we see faithfulness in God. As for forgiveness, Paul makes it clear in Colossians 3:13,
“Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”
We forgive because we have been forgiven.
And all this brings us back (of course) to our mission. Because God loves us, we love God. Because God loves others, we love others. God set the standard way back on Mt. Sinai and demonstrated exactly what that looks like on Mt. Calvary.
“Loving God . . . Loving Others.”
Blessings,
Pastor Terry