Do you do well?

Jonah 4:1-4

1  But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2  And he prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. 3  Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4  And the LORD said, “Do you do well to be angry?”

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world. 

Really?  Do you believe that?  Why is it that we teach our children to respect other people of all ethnicities while we harbor deep resentment and hatred for people who are different from us even in things such as preferences?  I find that I can be prejudiced against people who like a different music style than my own.  Or people who choose to wear their hat on their head cock-eyed rather than the way ‘it was meant to be’ worn.  Silly me.  Sinful me.  I allow the differences of others to my assumed ‘right ways’ to interfere with God’s mercy by crossing to the proverbial other side of the street.

At the heart of the message of Jonah is a strong sense of provincialism and prejudice.  We know Jonah held such a pride early in the book, but what about now that he has experienced the belly of the fish episode and ‘repented’ and shown his thankfulness to God?  Surely Jonah will be thrilled to see wayward sinners come to know God’s grace!  Wrong . . . so very wrong.  Jonah is not only disappointed, he is ticked.  

I invite you to read Jonah 4 and begin investigating for yourself what it is that angers Jonah.  Meanwhile, ask the Lord to reveal what makes you angry at Him and others and causes His grace through you to be minimized by you.  Do you do well to be angry?

not so blissful ignorance

Jonah 3:5-10

5  And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. 6  The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7  And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, 8  but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. 9  Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.” 

From Thomas Watson’s, “The Doctrine of Repentance”:

The first part of Christ's physic is eye-salve (Acts 26.18). It is the great thing noted in the prodigal's repentance: `he came to himself' (Luke 15.17). He saw himself a sinner and nothing but a sinner. Before a man can come to Christ he must first come to himself. Solomon, in his description of repentance, considers this as the first ingredient: `if they shall bethink themselves' (1 Kings 8.47). A man must first recognize and consider what his sin is, and know the plague of his heart before he can be duly humbled for it. The first creature God made was light. So the first thing in a penitent is illumination: `Now ye are light in the Lord' (Eph. 5.8). The eye is made both for seeing and weeping. Sin must first be seen before it can be wept for.

God chose to have Nineveh see His perfect and righteous justice by exposing their sins.  He did this by His power, through a reluctant prophet, in a few simple words: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”   They came to themselves and found they were wanting.  

I’ve avoided the doctor for years.  Seeing many dear friends diagnosed with many and varied cancers and illnesses, I would rather live in blissful ignorance than risk being found out.  We can often do the same as Christians.  Just as Nineveh lived in sin that grew deeper and more heinous, so we can go without check in sin and misery and miss the diagnosis.  The problem is, we also miss out on health, vitality, mercy, and grace.  We lose out on seeing the many demonstrations of Christ’s love for us.

The life of the Christian ought to be desire to have God’s Word constantly applied to his or her life so that sin would be exposed, grace administered, and the joy of salvation grown up into maturity.  Yet often what we find is that we are lazy Christians.  We long to know Christ and to be known by Him, but we find every excuse to not be confronted by His Word by opening His Word or putting ourselves in places where the Word is administered.  

Lord, I pray that you would reveal ways in which I have avoided having a thorough examination by Your Word and lead me, not only to see my sin, but Christ as the salve for my sin. 

Mist Matters

Psalm 90:4

4  For a thousand years in your sight

are but as yesterday when it is past,

or as a watch in the night.

Today is like a flea on a hair on a wart on a frog on a log on the bottom of the sea when placed as a mere blip on God’s screen.  Psalm 39:5: “Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! “  So why should God care about today, or tomorrow, or even a single life?  Why does He engage with mankind in all of our petty dealings, our silly wars, our worries and woes?  Why would He care if I slept with another man’s wife, or was fraudulent with money, or spoke angry words at my children?  Again, James 4:14, says, “ . . . yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”  

Moses, the author of this Psalm, answers our questions.  “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us” (v. 17).  It has been God’s favor, His delight, to be our dwelling place (v. 1).  He has chosen to enter into the minute details of our lives.  God had every right to ignore His creation and to ignore us, yet He chose rather to invest deeply.

We see this most fully in His Son.  The advent of Jesus upon the earth was a demonstration of God’s willingness to enter into our condition.  Even the life of Christ upon the earth, in regard to eternity, was the smallest of molecules in comparison.  Yet His life impacted all of eternity for us!  Of the very angels He says, “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14)?  Yet Christ is considered far greater, “having become much superior to angels” (Hebrews 1:4).  So how much more, if angels are ministering spirits, is Christ a compassionate Savior?  

We need only to look to the cross to find out.  On the cross we see God’s willingness to dwell near His people and to enter where no other mortal man could enter.  The closest I can get to my bride of one flesh is not near as close as Christ has entered into the heart of His people.  Christ has known sin more than the deepest sin you and I will ever encounter as He has taken the burden of the sins of those who live by faith in Him upon Himself and took on God’s wrath for us.  

Therefore, Lord, “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90:14). I have very great reason to live each day rejoicing and pursuing Your glory and righteousness.  Though my life is a mere vapor,  You have chosen to enter into it.  You care deeply about my each hour and day.  Thank You for revealing Christ as the display of Your love for me and all of Your people who call upon His name.  I ask for the desire, the motivation, and the strength to live today in Your sight because Christ matters above all else.

Spiritual Warfare Re-Visited

What is the essence of spiritual warfare?

My college years were the late 80’s.  It was, what seemed like, the height of an awakened awareness of spiritual warfare.  Frank Peretti had written his novel, “This Present Darkness,” and I began looking for demons behind every bush, person, institution, or creepy looking building.  Ironically, SNL’s sketch “The Church Lady” was also blaming her every sin on the devil.  It also played in 1986, the same year Peretti’s book was published.  Spiritual warfare became an “us-and-them” warfare.  The Church was the spiritual good (us), the world and everything in the world was the “them”.  The goal was separation so that we would not be defiled by the world.  

But the essence of spiritual warfare is not out there but in here.  It is in the heart.  It is a fight to believe, trustingly and obediently, the gospel - the reality that the Christian is so free from his sin and guilt and declared righteous before God that nothing can separate him from the love of God in Christ - nothing.  

Every believer in Christ experiences the battle.  On some days and at some moments we despair our sin and think our particular circumstance is too great a wound to be covered by Christ’s forgiveness.  On other days and at other times, we feel pretty good about our Christian performance and feel we deserve God’s grace.  Spiritual warfare is the fight to believe that God’s grace in Christ is sufficient for the worst of sinners and the best of sinners.    

The “I believe; help my unbelief” of Mark 9:24 becomes the motto of the Christian involved in this spiritual warfare.  

Lord, help me to believe that you are enough.  Do not allow me to despair my condition and run to despair.  And do not allow me to puff up with a pride that trusts in my religious performance to gain your affection and atonement.  I am loved just as much today as yesterday and every day afterward because of Christ’s substitution for me.

Past the Plate

Jonah 1:4-6

“A few years ago I met with a group of twenty-five leading Christian youths, aged sixteen to twenty, from an excellent church.  I asked them, “How many of you would say the essence of your Christian life is this:  First, you don’t do certain things other kids your age do, like drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes or marijuana, or experimenting sexually.  Second, you do some things they don’t - you go to church, read the Bible, and seek Christian friends.  Raise your hand if you think these two things are the essence of your faith.”  All but one raised a hand.  Their doing was the core of their faith.”

• Dan Doriani, The Life of a God-Made Man, p.199).

I would imagine that if a prophet were to poll Israel in the day of Jonah, Israel’s response as a nation would be much the same.  They might add a caveat or two, something like, “Well, yeah, we do have our sins, but they aren’t nearly as bad as the Assyrians.  Man, they’re just plain evil.”

Would a poll of the evangelical church yield any different answer toward those outside the church?  

So let’s take the scenario a step farther.  What if you then pressed these people to step out of their “do good/avoid bad” world into the world of those who “drink alcohol, smoke dope, cook meth, are sexually perverted, etc.” to love them?  I would expect that at the very best we would pull out our checkbooks and ask, “How much do you need to send a professional missionary to them?”  But more than likely, we would yawn, stretch our arms over our heads, say, “Could you hold that thought,” drive home, power down our cell phones, and find a nice warm blanket and a cozy chair in which to hide and fall asleep. 

So it was with Jonah.  So it is with us.  If the essence of our faith is not Jesus Christ, but our supposed good behavior vs. bad behavior, then we will run from whatever or whomever rocks our boat of performance religion . . . be it God or our peers.  God’s Word says, “Arise! Go to Nineveh”, and topples us off of our self-made thrones.  If the essence of our faith is our comfort, we will sleep every time.  If the essence of our faith is in the Jesus Christ, we will respond with glad and trusting hearts ready to serve our Savior who has served us.

Six Feet Under

Psalm 90:3

3  You return man to dust

and say, “Return, O children of man!”

Six feet in the ground.  That’s the measurement historically used for the hole, dug into the earth, in which a coffin is placed at burial.  In the United States it’s actually now about four feet which is enough room for the concrete burial box.  This box secures the coffin and prevents cave-ins or the possibility of floating away.  I’m thankful for that.

Genesis 2:7 recounts the amazing creation of the first man:  “ . . . then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 

Life was given out of the the very dust of the ground.  By virtue of our being created by God, we owe Him complete allegiance.  But mankind fell from its allegiance in Genesis 3, rebelling against the Creator and incurring, not only toil and hardship, but death; a return to the dust out of which he was created.  Genesis 3:19 promises,  “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  

It was not sin which returned man to dust, but God (via the curse) who returned man to dust.  It was because of sin that God set the curse of death in the first place.  Romans 8:20 says of the curse,  “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope . . .”  In other words, the earth itself undergoes the curse that God set.  All of the weeds, thorns, and thistles are set in place by the curse which God placed upon the earth.  But see the beauty of the curse - it was cursed in hope.  So too, man is sent to the dust by the means of the curse placed upon man, because of his sin, but by the hand of the Almighty.  But there is hope.

We could say that God de-creates His creation.  Where once He breathed life into dust to create man, He now de-creates by sending man back to the dust.  Acts 17: 26 tells us that God “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their [mankind’s] dwelling place.”  Not only physical land is established in which we live, and boundaries set, but our very lives have boundaries set by the providence of God - our birth and our death.  

Psalm 90 verse 7 says that we are brought to an end by His anger.  The curse of death is a calling out against our sin.  In the garden mankind had everything it could possibly desire including close fellowship with his Creator.  But sin kindled God’s wrath. This wrath is mixed with mercy, grace, and hope.  For God did not leave mankind without hope.  It was in hope that, even in God’s anger, He brings a curse that is a catalyst for hope.  How?

Firstly, man only has to toil in a world of sin and misery (on earth) for a set amount of time.  It doesn’t last forever!  This is a hope for the individual as well as all of society as evil individuals come and go, rule and then die.  Secondly, the resultant effects of sin upon the world and mankind should drive us to look to God in Jesus Christ to reconcile all things in Him (Colossians 1:20).  The frustration of toil and sin should cause us to cry out to our Creator for deliverance.  We are pointed to the Lifter of the Curse.  Galatians 3:13 reveals that, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’—”.  

This brings us to a point of application.  If God sets our boundaries by the curse of death for our sin, then are we trusting His Son the sin-bearer, the curse Lifter, on our behalf?  Have we despaired our sin and misery and run to our Living Hope?  Without Christ we may live in this sin and misery for a time upon earth, but we will live forever with misery apart from God and apart from hope if we do not come to the One who is our Redeemer (Luke 16:25-26).  For those who do trust in Him, we have a great hope of eternal life with our Creator, and that even within the boundary set for us, we participate with the Creator in bringing hope to others and seeing the curse lifted.

Competent and Equipped

Jonah 3:1  Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2  “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.”

2 Timothy 3:16  All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17  that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. 

Verses 16 and 17 of 2 Timothy 3 are some of the most important verses for the Christian.  Paul is reiterating what should already be apparent throughout the history of humanity - God’s Word as necessary, powerful, and completely sufficient for knowing and growing in Him through Jesus Christ.  It was true in the garden and it is true today.  His Word is attacked from within and from without.  Adam and Eve distrusted God’s authoritative Word from a heart of sin and the serpent twisted (took away and added) God’s Word from without.  Since that fateful day, mankind has raised a skeptical eye toward God doing “what is right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).  

Every systematic theology I can think of begins with The Scriptures.  And well should they since the very Word of God begins with God speaking all of creation into existence (Genesis 1) and ends with a warning about not taking His Word lightly (Rev. 22:18-19).  The Word was given that we might know God and know Him well.  The written revelation of Him is our authority of Him.  It teaches us what we are to believe concerning God and what is our duty before Him.  

In our sin we desire and trust everything but His Word.  We trust inclination, what feels right, or what others say.  We desire the extraordinary above the ordinary and set it as the higher guide in our estimation.  

But what makes us complete or competent as Christians is trust and obedience to God’s Word.  Jonah subtracted from God’s Word by adding his own.  Jonah did not trust that God was being just when He commissioned him to preach to Nineveh in Jonah 1.  Instead, Jonah determined his own course.  He was not competent or equipped for the task because he trusted his own inclination.  But God would not have His son’s rebellion and would make Jonah competent and equipped by leading him, through ocean’s depth and fishes belly, back to His Word a second time (Jonah 3:1-2).  

In what do you trust as you seek to make decisions from day to day?  What seems right in your eyes?  Or decisions made from time spent meditating on God’s Word . . . a sanctified heart and mind that has been equipped and made competent?

Perspective

Psalms 90:2: Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

The eternality of God.  It sets God apart from man as One with power, wisdom, and authority that is beyond our comprehension.  His eternality clarifies man’s position in relationship to Him.  We have a beginning place . . .  a starting line.  We were formed, He was not.  He is infinite, we are finite.  He is the Former, we are the formee.  He is the Potter, we are the clay.  He was before the mountains were, we are dust from His creation.  He will always be, we return to our origin, our mark, our mold.  

His past tense declares His present reality.  He had formed the earth and the world, and now is and will always be everlasting.  Looking back at who God is and what God has done informs our present day experience.  He is the same yesterday, today, and forever; thus, the God of all history acts according to His eternality today.  

Moses recounts God’s eternality to both meditate on the weight of his and God’s people’s sin against God, as well as to draw comfort from a God who has the power, wisdom, and authority to show mercy.  We are guilty before an eternal God and only God can cover our guilt in the present.  Our multitude of created coverings are completely inadequate.  Dust cannot make robes white.

The eternal God came in space and time in the person of Jesus Christ to make a people white as snow.  Why?  Mercy.  Grace.  Our Father has seen His soiled children, heard their cry, and come to clean them that they might know His eternal love and care.  

Galatians 4:4-7

4  But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5  to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6  And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7  So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. 

Dwelling Place

Psalm 90:1

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.”

Thus begins Psalm 90 “A prayer of Moses, the man of God.”  The title and the first verse  reveal much about the Psalm.  

First, it reveals the Yahweh’ness of God.  “Yahweh”: the Lord.  The title for God that shows His ever constant care of His people.  His very near care as a person and place for God’s people.  Moses can say with honesty and experience that God has been His people’s shelter/housing ever since He has been their Lord.  God has demonstrated His care for them as they were delivered from Egyptian oppression.  He showed His favor towards His people as He parted the Red Sea and they crossed safely to the other side.  Now, as they are getting ready to cross the Jordan, Moses, the man of God, prays remembering God’s faithfulness in His closeness to His people.  

Secondly, Moses is described as “the man of God.”  He certainly was not perfect.  Yet Hebrews 11:23-29 calls Moses faithful for it was “by faith” that he walked because “He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.”  He looked not to his own faithfulness but to His Lord’s faithfulness on His behalf.  The Lord is the dwelling place in which Moses ultimately finds His eternal reward.  

In what ways do I contemplate and remember the Lord as my dwelling place?  Is He where I find my solace?  Do I run home to Him or do I find my significance, my respite, my identity in other things?  Where is the first place I turn?  Often, I find that I turn first to solitude.  I use my introversion as an excuse to escape the demands of any particular situation.  “If I can just have ‘me’ time for thirty minutes, half a day, a weekend, then I will be replenished and ready to serve others.”  In and of itself, alone time is not bad.  But, how do I use the alone time?  Do I meditate on the Lord’s work on the cross for me and trace its significant power to change me, or does the alone time itself serve as my strength?  More often than not, I depend on the time itself and not on my Lord, my Home, my Dwelling place who has proved Himself over and over.

Lord, Yahweh, my Home . . . forgive me for dwelling in other places and on other things that cannot and will not satisfy my soul.  When I seek other affections, please draw me away from them to sit on Your couch, in Your living room, with You.  Amen.

Stuck in the Mire

II Peter 2:22: What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”

It’s hip to wallow.  There seems to be a breed of evangelical that glories in it’s transparency of sin and struggle to the point of never finding the way out of the grime.  As a friend of mine expressed, it is like embracing the first three beatitudes (blessed are the poor in spirit/blessed are those who mourn [their sin]/blessed are the meek) but never getting to the last five (hunger and thirst for righteousness, showing mercy, purity of heart, peacemaking, even suffering persecution because of the practice of righteousness).  See Matthew 5:1-12.

“Confess your sins to one another” (James 5:16) becomes like the Roman practice of vomiting after meals to make room for more delicacies (enter 1980’s SNL sketch or Monty Python’s, Mr Creosote).  The pleasure of the “getting our sins off our chest” and the competition of “No . . . I am the chief of sinners” holds an attraction.  It can be extremely freeing as a person sees that he is not alone in his deep-rooted struggles with sin, and once you start confessing it’s hard to stop.

This wallowing in open confession probably stems from a Christian culture that has been steeped in covering our sins with a false religiosity.  Where once a person was prideful over their outward religious performance, this new found openness presents a new pride in lack of religious performance and poverty of any good whatsoever; i.e., the first three beatitudes.  

Certainly we are to confess our sins!  And certainly we are to be a transparent people.  We have long fostered a pretense of what it means to live for Christ by keeping our sins to ourselves and encouraging others to do the same.  We put up a good front but eventually “our sins will find us out” and often great harm is already done which could have been avoided if we were willing to express our sins and struggles and have others come alongside to help us.  

To express our sins and struggles is not the end of the restoration of a sinner.  Repentance is two-sided, or maybe two-staged.  A good definition of repentance is first that a person comes to grips with the reality of his or her sin.  Grief and hatred of it is good and healthy.  This is where a wallower stops.  They glory in the self-pity.  But then there is a second part to repentance.  There needs to be a right apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ so that, by the mercy extended to the sinner, the sinner turns from the sin to lovingly trust God.  This in turn leads to a new obedience not based on religious performance of duties, but based solely on the kindness of our Savior to not count our sins against us (Ephesians 4:17-24).  

Several years ago, after pastoring a church for about five years, I came to the realization that I did not love the people in my congregation.  I was angry with them because they were not performing according to my desires.  Each person became a roadblock in my path rather than a work of God’s grace.  My whole identity was wrapped up in how the people of the church were performing, and because they were not (so I determined), I was angry.  

One Sunday morning I took what was for me a great risk and leap of faith and told the congregation as much - that I did not love them.  I openly and publicly confessed my sin to them.  It was incredibly freeing.  The openness and honesty drew hugs and verbal applause from the members after the service.  But is that it?  What if week after week I expressed my lack of love, and displayed for them over and over how much I failed them with no attempt to actually love?  It would be wallowing in sin without the hope of a Savior!

But what followed was a glorious transformation of my heart.  Because of a God-given apprehension that my sins were not held against me because of Jesus for me, I began to desire to tangibly learn to love the members of the church in ways that I had never experienced before (Romans 12:1-2).  Yes, I still saw their sin and lack, but my sin and lack was just as sinful and lacking!  I became more transparent but with a longing to bring the grace of Christ into their experience as well.  Instead of transparency being self-consuming, true repentance turned transparency into active love.  

Please don’t get me wrong.  I still have a long way to go in learning how to love.  I have years ahead of me of confessing my sins and repenting.  I still do not fully love.  I will be an actively chiseled sculpture in God’s hands for many years to come.  

Romans 6 challenges us to see our sin buried with Jesus, but also to see new life produced by virtue of our union with Him in His resurrection.  To remain stuck in the mire of sin and dread is to deny half of what Christ has accomplished and desires to accomplish in His people.  Oh! that His daily mercy would lead us by the hand to see our sins put to death and new life in Christ produced!

Psalms 69:14: Deliver me

from sinking in the mire . . .

The Pretender

There is an episode of The King of Queens where an accountant visits Doug and Kerry Heffernan.  As they are going through preparation of their tax information, the accountant asks what charitable contributions they have made that year.  After much consternation, they came up with about $15.00.  After the accountant left, Doug and Kerry, had an exchange of justifying themselves insisting that they aren’t bad people but in reality have a giving spirit of generosity.

We all like to think well of our ourselves, but what we think or believe about ourselves sometimes is not the reality.  We like to think that we are financially benevolent, but when we investigate our checkbooks, we find that we spend a lot but give very little.  We like to think that we are gracious hosts but find that, within a year’s time, we have had very few people into our home.  We like to think we care about the spread of the gospel, but when asked how we have graciously and intentionally shared the news of Christ or promoted the gospel, we find that we have not done so to any great degree.  Like Doug and Kerry we believe that we are, deep down, good people in spite of all evidence against us.  The evidence shows that we just flat out don’t obey the positive commands of God’s Word.  

The late James Montgomery Boice, once pastor of 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, wrote, “Those of us who make a point of affirming the Bible’s authority must take note of this especially, because it is very easy to make a crusade of something while not actually allowing it to influence your life.  You can wave a banner.  You say say, ‘Oh, yes, I believe in the Bible.’  You can get people to cheer.  But then you can go out and do something that is perfectly contrary to what the Bible says.  You can even know the Bible enough to quote it back to God and yet disobey it.”

Jonah was a preacher who knew the Bible and went out and disobeyed it.  Why?  The real reason was that Jonah knew God’s Word and chose to ignore it.  He knew that “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7), was true to His Word and was going to exercise mercy to Nineveh.  Jonah, bold-faced before the Lord, disobeyed.  It was not a question of not knowing the Word or not believing the Word.  It was disobedience to the Word.

When the peeling is pulled back from our hearts and we are exposed for the disobedient people that we truly are, it is then that we begin to see our need, Lord willing, for Christ for us.  Jonah had to be taken to the depths of suffering and completely out of any control of his own, before he would cry out to the Lord of mercy recognizing that only the Lord saves.   When we see the magnitude of Christ for us, we should desire to trust and please Him rather than ourselves.  When we understand Him as our Deliverer, we also should recognize that He is our King.  

How are you reading, hearing, believing and responding to God’s Word?

In what areas are you least likely to respond positively to God’s Word to you?

Spend time in prayer asking God to reveal His mercy to you that you would be wooed from your self to His gracious calling.

The Map of Jonah

Jonah 1:17:  And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Luke 11:30: For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation.

The purpose of the book of Jonah is to point us to Jesus.  It is no coincidence that Jonah was thrown overboard, gulped into the belly of the fish three days and nights, and then vomited on dry ground.  It is death, burial, and resurrection.  It is a sign to Nineveh, a sign to Jesus’ generation, and a sign for ours.  It is a picture of the Word incarnate come to earth to suffer and die that we might live eternally.  It is the Sin-bearer taking on our sins carrying them to the pit of hell to cast them away forever.  It is the Savior, risen to life that we might have new life.  It is Jesus prepared to be the perfect testimony of God’s love to His people.  It is the power we now possess as we read, hear, trust, and respond to God’s Word.  

I would encourage you to ask yourself how the Word of God is tangibly being made effective in your life.  Is your own suffering bearing fruit of life through your knowledge and response to Jesus’ own death, burial, and resurrection?  

If you are hearing it, are you responding to it in trustful reliance on Jesus for you?