“I Knew You Were a Dirty Forgiver!”
Here is our final video overview of the Book of Jonah. Hope it helps you get more out of your reading this week.
Jonah 4:2-3
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.”
Here we finally learn why Jonah fled—because he knew that the Lord wanted to be merciful to the Ninevites!
Jonah is throwing back in the Lord’s face one of the most repeated verses in the Bible: Exodus 34:6-7. Here’s the context of that Exodus passage: the Israelites have been worshipping the golden calf, but instead of wiping them out, the Lord chooses to forgive. The Lord gives this remarkable moment of self-revelation to Moses to explain why.
“6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’”
This is a richly ironic complaint from Jonah—God’s mercy has been necessary to Israel’s national life from the very beginning, but here Jonah has the gall to complain about it!
How many times have I behaved in the same way?
Lord, help us be grateful today.
