The Prodigal Prophet

Jonah and the Mystery of God's Mercy

Timothy Keller

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781473690516
• eBook ISBN: 9781473690523
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Most people, even those who are nonreligious, are familiar with the book of Jonah: a rebellious prophet defies God and is swallowed by a whale. Less familiar to most people is the second half of this Biblical story - what happens after Jonah is released from the belly of the fish. Yet it is in this second half of the story that one of the most powerful and important lessons of the Bible is hidden.The famous story shows how, if we would understand the mercy of God, it will always take us in directions we would rather not go, toward people we would rather not care about, and ultimately into the deepest counsels of God. In a time of growing division, The Prodigal Prophet shows us God's love among people, and how Christians must listen to God's call even when it takes them to uncomfortable places.

CHAPTER 1

RUNNING FROM GOD

¹ Now the Word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ² “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim against her, for their evil has come up before my face.”³ But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the face of the LORD.

—JONAH 1:1–3a¹

The Unlikely Emissary

Our story begins when “the Word of the Lord came” to Jonah. This is the usual way to begin an account about one of the biblical prophets. God used them to convey his words and messages to Israel, especially in times of crisis. But already by verse 2 the original readers would have realized that this was a prophetic account unlike any that they had heard before. God called Jonah to go “to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim …” This was stunning on several levels.

It was shocking first because it was a call for a Hebrew prophet to leave Israel and go out to a Gentile city. Up until then prophets had been sent only to God’s people. While Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Amos all pronounced a few prophetic oracles addressed to pagan countries, they are brief, and none of those other men was actually sent out to the nations in order to preach. Jonah’s mission was unprecedented.

It was even more shocking that the God of Israel would want to warn Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, of impending doom. Assyria was one of the cruelest and most violent empires of ancient times. Assyrian kings often recorded the results of their military victories, gloating of whole plains littered with corpses and of cities burned completely to the ground. The emperor Shalmaneser III is well known for depicting torture, dismembering, and decapitations of enemies in grisly detail on large stone relief panels. Assyrian history is “as gory and bloodcurdling a history as we know.”² After capturing enemies, the Assyrians would typically cut off their legs and one arm, leaving the other arm and hand so they could shake the victim’s hand in mockery as he was dying. They forced friends and family members to parade with the decapitated heads of their loved ones elevated on poles. They pulled out prisoners’ tongues and stretched their bodies with ropes so they could be flayed alive and their skins displayed on city walls. They burned adolescents alive.³ Those who survived the destruction of their cities were fated to endure cruel and violent forms of slavery. The Assyrians have been called a “terrorist state.”⁴

The empire had begun exacting heavy tribute from Israel during the reign of King Jehu (842–815 BC) and continued to threaten the Jewish northern kingdom throughout the lifetime of Jonah. In 722 BC it finally invaded and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and its capital, Samaria.

Yet it was this nation that was the object of God’s missionary outreach. Though God told Jonah to “proclaim against” the city for its wickedness, there would have been no reason to send a warning unless there was a chance of judgment being averted, as Jonah knew very well (4:1–2). But how could a good God give a nation like that even the merest chance to experience his mercy? Why on earth would God be helping the enemies of his people?

Perhaps the most surprising element of this narrative was who it was that God chose to send. It was “Jonah the son of Amittai.” No background information is given, meaning he needed no introduction. 2 Kings 14:25 tells us Jonah ministered during the reign of Israel’s King Jeroboam II (786–746 BC). In that text we learn that, unlike the prophets Amos and Hosea, who criticized the royal administration for its injustice and unfaithfulness, Jonah had supported Jeroboam’s aggressive military policy to extend the nation’s power and influence. The original readers of the book of Jonah would have remembered him as intensely patriotic, a highly partisan nationalist.⁵ And they would have been amazed that God would send a man like that to preach to the very people he most feared and hated.

Nothing about this mission made any sense. Indeed, it seemed almost to be an evil plot. If any Israelite had come up with this idea, he would have been at least shunned and at worst executed. How could God have asked anyone to betray his country’s interests like this?

 

Refusing God

In a deliberate parody of God’s call to “arise, go to Nineveh,” Jonah “arose” to go in the opposite direction (verse 3). Tarshish, it is believed, lay on the outermost western rim of the world known to Israelites of the time.⁶ In short, Jonah did the exact opposite of what God told him to do. Called to go east, he went west. Directed to travel overland, he went to sea. Sent to the big city, he bought a one-way ticket to the end of the world.

Why did he refuse? A full accounting of Jonah’s reasoning and motives must wait for Jonah’s own words later in the book. But at this point, the text invites us to make some guesses. We can certainly imagine that Jonah thought the mission made neither practical nor theological sense.

God describes Nineveh both here and later as that “great” city, and indeed it was. It was both a military and a cultural powerhouse. Why would the populace listen to someone like Jonah? How long, for example, would a Jewish rabbi have lasted in 1941 if he had stood on the streets of Berlin and called on Nazi Germany to repent? At the most practical level, the prospects of success were none, and the chances of death were high.

Jonah would not have been able to see any theological justification for this mission either. The prophet Nahum had some years before prophesied that God would destroy Nineveh for its evil.⁷ Jonah and Israel would have accepted Nahum’s prediction as making perfect sense. Wasn’t Israel God’s chosen, loved people through whom he was fulfilling his purposes in the world? Wasn’t Nineveh an evil society on a collision course with the Lord? Wasn’t Assyria unusually violent and oppressive, even for its time? Of course God would destroy it—that was obvious and (Jonah would have thought) settled. Why, then, this call to Jonah? Wouldn’t a successful mission to Nineveh only destroy God’s own promises to Israel and prove Nahum a false prophet? What possible justification, then, could there be for this assignment?

 

Mistrusting God

So Jonah had a problem with the job he was given. But he had a bigger problem with the One who gave it to him.⁸ Jonah concluded that because he could not see any good reasons for God’s command, there couldn’t be any. Jonah doubted the goodness, wisdom, and justice of God.

We have all had that experience. We sit in the doctor’s office stunned by the biopsy report. We despair of ever finding decent employment after the last lead has dried up. We wonder why the seemingly perfect romantic relationship—the one we always wanted and never thought was possible—has crashed and burned. If there is a God, we think, he doesn’t know what he is doing! Even when we turn from the circumstances of our lives to the teaching of the Bible itself, it seems, to modern people especially, to be filled with claims that don’t make much sense.

When this happens we have to decide—does God know what’s best, or do we? And the default mode of the unaided human heart is to always decide that we do. We doubt that God is good, or that he is committed to our happiness, and therefore if we can’t see any good reasons for something God says or does, we assume that there aren’t any.

That’s what Adam and Eve did in the Garden. The first divine command was: “And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die’” (Genesis 2:16–17). There was the fruit, and it looked very “good … pleasing … and desirable” (Genesis 3:6), yet God had given no reason as to why it would be wrong to eat. Adam and Eve, like Jonah many years later, decided that if they couldn’t think of a good reason for a command of God, there couldn’t be one. God could not be trusted to have their best interests in mind. And so they ate.

 

Two Ways of Running from God

Jonah runs away from God. But if we for a moment stand back and look at the entirety of the book, Jonah will teach us that there are two different strategies for escaping from God. Paul outlines these in Romans 1–3.

First Paul speaks of those who simply reject God overtly and “have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity” (Romans 1:29). In chapter 2, however, he talks of those who seek to follow the Bible. “You rely on the law and boast … in God. … You know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law” (Romans 2:17–18). Then, after looking at both pagan, immoral Gentiles and Bible-believing, moral Jews, he concludes in a remarkable summation “that there is no one righteous, not even one. … All have turned away” (Romans 3:10–12). One group is trying diligently to follow God’s law and the other ignores it, and yet Paul says both have “turned away.” They are both, in different ways, running from God. We all know that we can run from God by becoming immoral and irreligious. But Paul is saying it is also possible to avoid God by becoming very religious and moral.

The classic example in the gospels of these two ways to run from God is in Luke 15, the parable of the two sons.⁹ The younger brother tried to escape his father’s control by taking his inheritance, leaving home, rejecting all his father’s moral values, and living as he wished. The older brother stayed home and obeyed the father completely, but when his father did something with the remaining wealth that the older son disliked, he exploded in anger at his father. At that point it became obvious that he, also, did not love his father.

The elder brother was not obeying out of love but only as a way, he thought, of putting his father in his debt, getting control over him so he had to do as his older son asked. Neither son trusted his father’s love. Both were trying to find ways of escaping his control. One did it by obeying all the father’s rules, the other by disobeying them all.

Flannery O’Connor describes one of her fictional characters, Hazel Motes, as knowing that “the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”¹⁰ We think that if we are religiously observant, virtuous, and good, then we’ve paid our dues, as it were. Now God can’t just ask anything of us—he owes us. He is obligated to answer our prayers and bless us. This is not moving toward him in grateful joy, glad surrender, and love, but is instead a way of controlling God and, as a result, keeping him at arm’s length.

Both of these two ways of escaping God assume the lie that we cannot trust God’s commitment to our good. We think we have to force God to give us what we need. Even if we are outwardly obeying God, we are doing it not for his sake but for ours. If, as we seek to comply with his rules, God does not appear to be treating us as we feel we deserve, then the veneer of morality and righteousness can collapse overnight. The inward distancing from God that had been going on for a long time becomes an outward, obvious rejection. We become furious with God and just walk away.

The classic Old Testament example of these two ways to run from God is right here in the book of Jonah. Jonah takes turns acting as both the “younger brother” and the “older brother.” In the first two chapters of the book, Jonah disobeys and runs away from the Lord and yet ultimately repents and asks for God’s grace, just as the younger brother leaves home but returns repentant.

In the last two chapters, however, Jonah obeys God’s command to go and preach to Nineveh. In both cases, however, he’s trying to get control of the agenda.¹¹ When God accepts the repentance of the Ninevites, just like the older brother in Luke 15, Jonah bristles with self-righteous anger at God’s graciousness and mercy to sinners.¹²

And that is the problem facing Jonah, namely, the mystery of God’s mercy. It is a theological problem, but it is at the same time a heart problem. Unless Jonah can see his own sin, and see himself as living wholly by the mercy of God, he will never understand how God can be merciful to evil people and still be just and faithful. The story of Jonah, with all its twists and turns, is about how God takes Jonah, sometimes by the hand, other times by the scruff of the neck, to show him these things.

Jonah runs and runs. But even though he uses multiple strategies, the Lord is always a step ahead. God varies his strategies too, and continually extends mercy to us in new ways, even though we neither understand nor deserve it.

CHAPTER 2

THE WORLD’S STORMS

³ He went down to Joppa and, finding a ship bound for Tarshish, he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the face of the LORD. ⁴ But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was such a mighty tempest that the ship expected to break up.

—JONAH 1:3b–4

Jonah runs but God won’t let him go. The Lord “hurled a great wind upon the sea” (verse 4). The word “hurled” is often used for throwing a weapon such as a spear (1 Samuel 18:11). It is a vivid picture of God launching a mighty tempest onto the sea around Jonah’s boat. It was a “great” (gedola) wind—the same word used to describe Nineveh. If Jonah refuses to go into a great city, he will go into a great storm. From this we learn both dismaying and comforting news.

Storms Attached to Sin

The dismaying news is that every act of disobedience to God has a storm attached to it. This is one of the great themes of the Old Testament wisdom literature, especially the book of Proverbs. We must be careful here. This is not to say that every difficult thing that comes into our lives is the punishment for some particular sin. The entire book of Job contradicts the common belief that good people will have lives that go well, and that if your life i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Also by Timothy Keller
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Prodigal Prophet
• Chapter 1: Running from God (1:1–3a)
• Chapter 2: The World’s Storms (1:3b–4)
• Chapter 3: Who Is My Neighbor? (1:5–6)
• Chapter 4: Embracing the Other (1:7–10)
• Chapter 5: The Pattern of Love (1:11–17)
• Chapter 6: Running from Grace (1:17–2:10)
• Chapter 7: Doing Justice, Preaching Wrath (3:1–10)
• Chapter 8: Heart Storms (4:1–4)
• Chapter 9: The Character of Compassion (4:4–11)
• Chapter 10: Our Relationship to God’s Word
• Chapter 11: Our Relationship to God’s World
• Chapter 12: Our Relationship to God’s Grace
• Epilogue: Who Told the Story?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes