Thoughts on Jonah 3-4

Today's reading: Jonah 3-4; Mark 13

The end of the book of Jonah is a great reminder that God has a very different perspective than we do.

It is easy, at times, to get really hung up on questions of, "How could God allow that?" Or, "Why didn't God stop this?" This gets back to the classic problem of evil: "If God exists, is good, and is powerful enough to stop evil, why does evil still exist?" There are a lot of answers to this question that people may find varying levels of satisfactory, but the short answer you often hear is that God has done something about evil, at the cross, and there will come a day when He eradicates evil once and for all, but He is giving people a chance to repent and to turn to Him, in Christ, before the final judgement of evil. And as true as that is, the book of Jonah adds a bit more to the conversation.

Jonah tells God that His mercy is exactly why he didn't want to listen and go to Nineveh in the first place. He knew that God was patient and merciful, slow to anger, and desiring to relent of disaster, but the people of Nineveh deserved disaster. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria and the Assyrians were Israel's primary enemy at this point in time. How many Israelites had been killed, tortured, raped, or displaced by the Assyrians? What nation had done more violence to God's people than Assyria? What people could possibly more deserve to be judged than the Assyrians? And among the Assyrians, who could more deserve to be destroyed than the people of Nineveh, the political and social elites of this abomination of a nation??

In one sense, Jonah was actually completely right about Assyria deserving God's judgement. The whole reason God declared His judgement against Nineveh in the first place is because they deserved it. More than that, like we saw when we were reading through the book of Isaiah, God declared that Assyria was the rod of His judgement against Israel, but because they were doing it out of pride, rather than for the Lord, He would judge them for what they did to Israel. So the question Jonah is ultimately facing here is, "Do you trust that God is actually good?" Because if God is good, and He will not allow evil to go unpunished, and He has already explicitly promised that Assyria would pay for what they were doing to Israel, then for Jonah to refuse to go is to blatantly disbelieve God.

But the other side of this is what God points out to Jonah at the very end of the book. Yes, Assyria deserves to be judged, but this is a city of over 120,000 individuals. Jonah can hate Assyria for their atrocities against Israel, but should every individual Assyrian be judged for the actions of the nation overall? These are people created in the image of God, and while they are not His chosen people, He still created and sustains the existence of every single one of them. These were not a nameless, faceless conglomerate to God like they may have been to Jonah, but were individuals He desired to see repent and turn to Him rather than be destroyed. God is not permissive, refusing to judge evil, but He is, as Jonah himself said, "a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster."

Jonah had the benefit of God telling Him what He was doing, and why, but most of the time we don't get that peek behind the curtain. Job, for example, never learned, this side of heaven, why all the evil that befell him happened. And this is much more often the case for us. Sometimes we see later in life how God has used the circumstances or evils of our lives for good, but other times we will never see even that. And so we have to do what Jonah failed to do, and trust that our God is good, even when we don't understand the how or the why of what is happening to or around us.