Jonah: The Other Message

 Who's Side is God On, Anyway?

The Book of Jonah is one of the shorter books in the Old Testament and - I think - perhaps one  of the most misunderstood.  But it also contains an often-overlooked message:  one that is quite relevant for us, today, in America and in our world.   This is the message about God taking sides in human affairs - it asks the question "Who's Side is God On, Anyway?"  The book then offers an answer that surprised Jonah thousands of years ago, an answer that will continue to surprise many of us today.

The first and most widely-known message of Jonah is fairly clear - if God has a mission for you, running away from God won't do you much good.

However, there's another message in Jonah, one that doesn't come across much, but it is also one that has perhaps more relevance to our lives today than the first message.

In a nutshell, God directed His prophet Jonah to go to Israel's hated enemy, Nineveh (capital of Assyria) and preach a message of doom. Though not Jonah's intention, this was a message that invited - or at least allowed - the Ninevites to repent.

Right up front, Jonah doesn't want to go to Nineveh, and he rejects God's command for two very modern reasons.  First, he feared that he'd no sooner show his face in Nineveh than he'd be stoned to death (if he was lucky). These Assyrians were, after all, the sworn enemies of Israel.  The second reason, not quite so immediately obvious, was that because Assyria was Israel's sworn (and much larger) enemy, Jonah really, really didn't want to risk actually helping them. While he was God's servant, he was not a traitor to his native Israel.

So in disobedience, he ran from God, heading to the port city of Tarshish.  There he hopped on a boat, hoping to sail away from God's commands.  Didn't work.  Jonah apparently forgot that God is omnipresent, as well as all powerful.  So God sent a terrible storm, and it wasn't long before the other crew members figured out that somebody's God had been angered. Through a process of elimination, they determined that it was Jonah.  So, after trying in vain to sail back to shore, Jonah realized he wasn't going to have these men's souls on his conscience.

At his own prophetic recommendation, the crew made Jonah walk the plank, doing so to appease his wrathful God.

That worked for the sailors, and - oddly - it worked for Jonah, too.  He was swallowed by a "huge fish" (not a whale, which is one of the first common errors people have in understanding Jonah).  Remember, this isn't the fairytale story of Pinocchio, but a record of God's great works.

After three days in the belly of the beast, God made sure that Jonah was vomited up on the shore by this great fish. But only after Jonah had repented of his folly in trying to run away from God.

That's the beginning of Jonah's story, and that's the message most people take from the book.  "You can't run away from God - if He has a job for you, buckle down and do it, no matter how scary it might be, no matter how much it runs against the grain."

Others, looking more deeply, compare Jonah's three days in the belly of the beast with Christ's three days in the world of death before being restored to life.   In that they are right - the Old Testament is filled with prophecies about the coming Savior, and this is certainly one of those - but that's not the message for us today.

There's another message that is, I believe, far more relevant to us today than running from God and his commands (though that message also obviously has an eternal value and relevance).

As the story goes on, Jonah goes to Nineveh, preaches the Lord's wrath, including a prophecy of total destruction in just 40 days. Then - surprising Jonah and perhaps even themselves - the people of Nineveh hear the word of God from Jonah.  This included everyone, from the lowliest beggar to the King himself.  All begin fasting, wearing sack-cloth and anointing themselves with ashes, the contemporary Near Eastern symbols of repentance.  God, pleased with their response, decides to cancel His plans to smite Nineveh.

At first, Jonah doesn't know this.

Instead, having followed God's command to the letter, Jonah went out and found himself a ringside seat for the upcoming smiting, holing up in a patch of desert overlooking the city.  In modern terms, he had his bucket of wings, his cold six-pack, his remote - and he was ready to watch the Cosmic Super Bowl, God's wrathful smiting of the greatest city of the age.

But despite all of his expectations and hopes - that Israel's great enemy and nemesis, Nineveh, capital of Assyria, would be destroyed by God's wrath - that didn't happen.

And when it didn't happen, Jonah got mad.  Mad at God.

His thinking went something like this.

"Hey, God, we are Your Chosen People, the faithful sons of Abraham and Jacob, of Joseph and Moses, of Joshua and David.  You're on our side. You're our protector.  And Nineveh, capital of Assyria is our sworn enemy. It deserves smiting - you said so yourself.  And let's not forget that Assyria is a lot bigger and stronger than we are in Israel.  So why didn't You do Your warrior-God thing, just the way You promised, and destroy our enemies. 

"As You yourself had me preach, the Ninevites have certainly earned destruction."

Jonah was mad that His God hadn't stood by His Chosen People's country, ticked off that the God of Abraham hadn't defended His People.  Instead, God had shown mercy - he actually spared Jonah's hated enemy. In doing so, he left them intact and able to attack and destroy Israel, pretty much whenever they pleased.

Besides, Jonah had 50-yard-line seats for the smiting.

 He even told God of his feelings:

"Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home?  That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish.  I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

God tried to teach Jonah an object lesson about compassion and forgiveness, but finally, in the face of this hard-hearted Hebrew, God realized that He was just going to have to lay down the law.

"Should not I have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons ...?"

That's where the Book of Jonah ends, with God scolding and admonishing Jonah. However, Jonah was showing no sign of understanding God's lesson.  True, God gets the last word, and while that last word is in the form of a question, it's a rhetorical question.

In that question comes perhaps the most important message for us - Americans and Christians - living in our world today.

Jonah expected God - his God, Israel's God, the God who'd made the Israelites His Chosen People - to fight on His People's behalf.  Jonah expected his God to make Israel's enemies His own enemies.

That was Jonah's expectation.  And in many ways, that remains our expectation today.

Consider this.

In World War II, President Roosevelt ended his speech to Congress asking that they declare war on our enemy with the words, "So Help Us God!"  And if you listen to a recording, you'll hear that this is not a throw-away platitude (like one of our more secular Presidents ending each speech with "and God Bless America"). Instead, Roosevelt delivered the thundering proclamation of an Old Testament Prophet or Patriarch, invoking God's Own Help, doing so with every expectation that God would get on board, making our enemies His enemies.

Yet also during World War II, emblazoned on the belt-buckle of each soldier serving Hitler and Nazi Germany, was the phrase, "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us).

That's right.  Hitler's Nazis, as a matter of State policy, publicly professed a belief that God was on their side.  Which meant He couldn't be on our side.

In World War II, on whose side was God, anyway?

More recently, the radical Islamic al Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah and ISIS terrorists have all professed to doing the Holy Work of Allah.  Their God, Allah, presented to the world by his final prophet, Mohammad, is thought by some to be the same monotheistic God who'd first raised up Abraham, the father of Ishmael - founder of the Arab nation which became the first Muslims.  Their Allah is supposed to be the same God as the Israelites' Yahweh, the One True God who sent his Holy Prophets to the Israelites, including Jesus.

I don't believe that Allah is God, if only because of John 14:

 I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me

But the followers of Mohammad believe that their Allah is the final revelation of the Jewish and Christian God.  So, when these radical Muslims suicide-bomb an Israeli pizza parlor or crash hijacked airliners into the Twin Trade Towers and the Pentagon, are they doing God's Will?

Is He really on their side?

No, God is on no man's side - not even (if our God was also Allah) his prophet's side. Instead, this is the lesson from Jonah:

God expects each of us to be on His side.

This is the lesson of Jonah that applies today.  God made it clear to His own prophet, Jonah, that He (God) was not on Jonah's side - nor was he on his own Chosen People's side.

Instead, He expected His Chosen People - from the run-away prophet to the lowliest shepherd boy with a slingshot - to be on His side. On God's side.

God is infinite and eternal - he doesn't take sides in human endeavors unless doing so suits His purposes. He'll do it for his own reasons, but never for "our" purposes.  He has a single, unchanging side. He demands that we repent of our sins, even if we are among his Chosen People or among those Saved by Christ's blood.  But then He is gracious to offer His forgiveness to all who sincerely repent and call on God for His forgiveness.

Just as the Ninevites did, to Jonah's apparently eternal frustration.

God was not on Jonah's side, or His Chosen People's side, or a Christian's side, or a Muslim's side. God isn't even on America's side.  Instead, He expects us to be on His side.


And that is the real lesson of Jonah.

Sometimes the Answer is "No"

It is a tenet of my faith that God answers prayers.  This is something I believe with all of my heart, a belief bolstered by the many times that God has answered my own prayers, in ways that were - to me - put the reality of those answers beyond question.

However - and this is hard for many Christians to accept, as I've seen for myself - sometimes the answer to that prayer is "no."  When you're asking for something that is outside of God's will and plan for your life, God doesn't ignore that prayer, but He might just answer by saying "no." 

 God doesn't ignore that prayer, but He might just answer by saying "no"

In other blogs I've written here, I have talked about how God said "no" to Jonah (I'm not confused here - this is not about how Jonah said "no" to God). After Jonah realized that he really did need to follow God's command, he went to Nineveh where he preached doom.  To his surprise and disappointment, the people and the king of Nineveh did hear Jonah, and believed in what he was preaching, and repented.  Real sack-cloth and ashes time, honest and meaningful repentance.  God heard their groans of anguish, saw the true repentance in their hearts, and spared Nineveh the doom Jonah had foretold.

Jonah, whose people (the Israelites) considered Nineveh their sworn enemy, had looked forward to God's judgment. When it didn't come, he prayed to God to follow up on that promise, to smite the Ninevites.  God heard Jonah's prayer, but the answer he gave Jonah was a resounding "no."  Even though Jonah had (admittedly, reluctantly) done as God had commanded, and even though Jonah was indeed a prophet of God, God heard his prayer, but told him "no."

God heard Jonah's prayer, but God told him "no"

Which brings me to a very personal side of this issue, personal for me.  In 2007, eight years after our son had died in a one-car accident in September, 1999, my wife Karol was going through unimaginably deep suffering because of that loss.  Many years earlier, she'd lost a son who was born with profound, unsurvivable birth defects.  Following his inevitable death, she had never been able to properly grieve, and that loss festered in her soul.  Then nearly 20 years later, our son died in that awful crash.  Once again, she had been unable to properly grieve, and that loss, too, festered.  Even worse, the two boys' birthdays - and the anniversaries of their deaths - came very close together in calendar terms.

Each year from July through September, Karol went through an anguish that had to be seen to be believed.  This year, for reasons not clear, the suffering seemed to be worse.  Despairing of what I could do for her, I turned to God, and prayer.  Using the Psalms as my focal point - especially the ones in which David cried out to a God he felt had forsaken him - I prayed as I had never done before.  My prayers were daily events, often lasting hours, and filled with all the power of the emotions I was feeling.  And I asked others to pray for her as well - online prayer groups, our local church, friends - and those efforts were not in vain. People did pray for Karol.

People did pray for Karol

Still, her crisis seemed to deepen.  I knew God was listening - He had always listened to my prayers, and had often answered them in ways nothing short of miraculous - yet things only got worse for her.

Finally, I thought there was a change. She seemed more at peace, and things seemed to be returning to normal. We made plans to do things we enjoyed - something we hadn't done in weeks, perhaps months.  She even asked me to go to the store (at her request, and by my own choice, I had literally not left the house for a week - both of us were unwilling for me to leave her alone), so - feeling things had turned a corner, I went to the store to restock on groceries. 

Yet something didn't feel right

Yet something didn't feel right - I felt deeply that something was wrong, but I didn't know what.  I tried to call her, but she didn't answer, and for some reason, my blood ran cold.  I raced home, only to find the bedroom door locked.  It took me five minutes to disassemble the lock, and when I came in, I found Karol dead on the floor.

I called the police, who treated me like a murderer (no surprise there, and not really part of this story). More importantly, I called our priest.  She interrupted her vacation to rush to our home - to say last rites over Karol - and later she told me that she'd felt no evil there, that Karol was now finally at peace, a peace she had been unable to find in this life.

Karol was now finally at peace, a peace she had been unable to find in this life

I had prayed to God to help Karol find peace - in this life - but His answer was "no." 

That was hard for me to accept, and I "took' a vacation from God" as I came to terms with it.  I didn't stop believing in God, and I wasn't angry at God or filled with blame for Him.  Still, I needed to step back and come to terms with this, and God was gracious in letting me know that this was just fine with Him.

In mulling over what happened, I came to believe that His ultimate answer to my prayer was "yes, but on My terms" - Karol found peace she was so desperate to find - not in this life, though, but in the next life.

Romans (If God is for us, who can be against us?) vs. Jonah - Is there a conflict?

Chapter 8:31 of the Book of Romans (New International Version) offers one of the most comforting promises in all of Christianity:  "If God is for us, who can be against us?"  Can there be a greater promise found anywhere in the bible, short of John 3:16?

This can be exemplified by Jonah.  After initially defying God, Jonah repented, and God saved him.  Got was "for him," and not even a monstrous fish could be against him.  Johan had defied God because of two fears he had relating to carrying out God's commandment to him.  God then taught Jonah two lessons that echoes down to us over three millennia.

Most people understand that the first message of Jonah was simple and direct - if God commands you to do something, even if you find that thing frightening or even "wrong," do as God commands.  When considering Jonah, I find that most of us don't go farther than
"When God says, "go," you'd better go."

When God says "go," you'd better go ... 

Consider the second message of Jonah - perhaps an even more important message in light of the Great Promise found in Romans 8:31.  After repenting, Jonah did just as God commanded, preaching a powerful Jeremiad against the sinful city of Nineveh. He proclaimed God's destructive wrath was coming in 40 days.  But keep in mind that, while he did God's will, this message was not in his heart.  He had two fears buried deep in his heart that had kept him from eagerly embracing God's command.

One fear was for his own life - he and his people despised the city and King of Nineveh, and it wasn't unreasonable of Jonah to assume that the city and the king of Nineveh would return the favor.  In spades!

This fear, however, did not come to pass - Jonah was given free access to the city, unmolested by the people or King of that great city.  However, Jonah's second fear did come to pass.  His powerful message from the Lord was heard, by both the people and the king of Nineveh. They immediate took Jonah's message to heart, donned sackcloth, fasted and prayed to God to spare them.   In His mercy, God did spare them.

Not without pressure, Jonah finally had done just as God commanded.  But when his hated enemy, Nineveh, was spared, Jonah felt betrayed.  He'd done as God commanded, but what Jonah wanted in return was denied him - God, it appeared, hadn't been with him.   

And when you consider what Jonah had done for God, God's response may seem to fly in the face of the promise found in Romans 8:31 - "If God is for us, who can be against us?"  

Jonah had been there (eventually) for God, but in performing God's mission, Jonah's heart wasn't in it.  God desired Nineveh to repent and be saved, but Jonah's most heart-felt desire was to see his hated enemy smitten by Jonah's own all-powerful God, just as he'd preached.

Jonah's most heart-felt desire was to see his hated enemies smitten by Jonah's own all-powerful God

Though there might appear to be a conflict, there is not really one between the Grand Promise in Romans and God's seeming abandonment of Jonah after the preacher's mission had been accomplished. This lack of a real conflict, however, is true only if you understand that there is an unspoken subtext to that Great Promise. 

That subtext comes to light when you read the full story of Jonah, especially that short, powerful book's final chapter.

The Question isn't so much, "is God on our side?" as it is "are we on God's side?"

As I pointed out in my recent blog about Jonah, the question isn't so much "is God on our side?" as it is "are we on God's side?" 

The promise in Romans 8:31 is based on the subtext premise that, through giving our lives over to Christ, we leave the realm of the flesh and enter the realm of the spirit.  In that sense, we are on God's side, and when we are on God's side, God is indeed "for us," on our side.

Though saved, we are not immune to humanity's flaws and failures.  Like Jonah, having given ourselves over to God, we now think and expect that God is now on our side, and will - therefore - do and act on our desires, rather than on his plan.  

But that's got it all backwards.

God planned for Jonah to preach repentance to the Ninevites.  However, despite Jonah's heartfelt desire for God to smite his mortal enemies, God also planned for the Ninevites to have an honest opportunity to repent and be saved.  And when they did faithfully repent, He indeed spared them.  

Jonah was confused, frustrated, angry - and he felt so betrayed that he asked God to end his miserable life.  That's frustrated!  Jonah felt betrayed - when it counted (to Jonah), God wasn't on his side.  

Jonah felt betrayed - when it counted (to Jonah), God wasn't on his side. But in truth, it was Jonah who wasn't on God's side.

But in truth, it was Jonah who wasn't on God's side.  

Though Jonah preached God's doom on the city, the prophet not-so-secretly did NOT want Nineveh to actually hear his God-inspired words.  Jonah was just going through the motions.  He couldn't wait to climb into his ringside seat and watch "his God" destroy "his enemies."  When God showed mercy to Jonah's enemies, this proved to be a bitterly hard lesson for Jonah, perhaps even harder than being swallowed whole by a great fish.

And for those of us 21st Century Christians who revel in the Great Promise as spelled out in Romans 8:31, it is essential that we remain focused on that second vital lesson from Jonah.

To have God on our side, we must first make sure that we are on God's side. 

To have God on our side, we must first make sure that we are on God's side.  Then, God will be for us, and, indeed, who can be against us?








* John 3:16 - New International Version: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life"