At the end of Romans 9-11, one of the most difficult sections in the Bible to wrap one’s mind around, Paul writes, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:33-36).

After writing of God’s purpose in election, of hardening the Jews so that the Gentiles might hear the gospel and be saved, and of God always saving a remnant from Israel (of which Paul himself was an example), Paul is simply left to say that God’s ways and thoughts are higher than his. We may be created in God’s image but he is not exactly like us.

As we look now for the second week at the book of Jonah, we should be left saying similar things. For this book paints us a picture of God that is hard to comprehend. It shows us a God that though we can know him (as we saw last week), we cannot wrap our minds around him. We should agree with Paul upon looking at God’s nature and ways from Jonah that his judgments are unsearchable and his ways are inscrutable. For we get pictures of what he is like and what he does, but how he can be this and do this our minds are not able to grasp.

So let’s continue this week what we started last week in asking what this book teaches us of our Creator.

God’s nature and acts bring together perfectly judgment and mercy

The way that our minds work, we want these things to be mutually exclusive. That is to say, someone must be just or he must show mercy. We want to think of God as one who is holy or one who is loving and forgiving. But we really do not have a category for holding these two things together – especially at once. But this is what Jonah gives us. It shows us a picture of God’s actions consisting of mercy and judgment woven together.

We see God’s holy judgment as he tells Jonah in 1:2, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” And we see that when Jonah tries to disobey, God sends a great wind so that even Jonah’s peers on the ship are affected, Jonah is thrown overboard, and Jonah is swallowed by a great fish.

We do not get the picture of a God here who says, “Well, okay, you can do what I want or whatever you think seems best.” We get this picture of a holy and just God. So when Jonah goes into Nineveh – finally – his message from the Lord is, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4). He is not a God who simply looks over sin.

However, we also see a God of great mercy. As Jonah cries out to the Lord from the belly of the fish, Jonah says, “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice” (2:2). And God does hear his cry and spares his life as the fish vomits him onto shore. That is God’s mercy.

Then as the Ninevites repent we see God relenting from disaster (3:10). We also hear Jonah saying of such relenting, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (4:2). Finally, we hear God teaching Jonah his concern for his creation in 4:11, as he says, “And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

Yet we also know that about a century later, from the book of Nahum that God will indeed bring great judgment on Nineveh, saying to them through the prophet, “Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him” (Nahum 1:6).

God is not simply a merciful, big fluffy teddy bear in the sky whom you can punch in the stomach and he will laugh. Nor is he one who whose wrath is held back by a hairpin trigger, just waiting for a chance to show itself – otherwise none of his creation would still remain. It is as he tells Moses in Exodus 34:6-7, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 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 fourth generation.

Therefore, we must remember that God is one who is our Father, who has forgiven, who welcomes us as his children and friends, and yet he is not different than the God who told Moses to take his shoes off for he was on holy ground, who killed Uzzah for touching the ark of the covenant, and killed Ananias and Sapphira for lying to him.

Therefore, we must remember that God is a personal God who truly loves us and sings over us while never forgetting that he is transcendent and holy.

In the children’s books written by C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, he pictures Christ as a lion. Therefore, when the children here that they are going to meet him, they are first excited about meeting this great being. However, when they find out he is a lion, their countenances completely change, like a boy approaching a dog wagging his tell who stops in terror upon hearing this seemingly friendly dog bark at him. Thus, one of the children remarks, “Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” Mrs. Beaver remarks, “That you will, dearie, and no mistake … if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.” Lucy remarks, “Then he isn’t safe?” Mr. Beaver then answers, “Safe? … don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”¹ Later Lewis says of him, “He is not a tame lion.”²

The church seems to be constantly in a place of treating God too lightly or forgetting that he is a personal God. However, we cannot relinquish either of these two aspects of his character held together, for the Scripture doesn’t.

Yes, he is a God who cries out through his Son, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers he brood under her wings, and you would not” (Matthew 23:37). He is the God who says of Pharoah, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” To which Paul adds, “So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills” (Romans 9:17-18). He is the God who says, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11). And he is the God will say to those who do not know him on the last day, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:23) and who will cast them into hell.

God’s actions throughout the book of Jonah remind teach us his nature in this way, and we can’t get our minds around him, can we. Is he a God who judges justly or who is merciful? The answer is, “Yes.” Jonah shows us a God who justly judges and will not cease to be just, and yet it shows us a God who is merciful.

And God’s mysterious nature here must have lasting impact on us. We must not grow to such despair that we think ourselves not able to be forgiven. Isaiah tells us, “Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear” (Isaiah 59:1). He is a God who is gracious and longs to forgive and bring you close to himself.

So if you find yourself today coming in here thinking, “I am beyond his good pleasure. I am beyond his friendship. How can I know intimately God even this hour while I still feel the dirt and disgust from my sin – even my sin last night.” Remember Jonah’s words, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (4:2).

God is not waiting over you waiting to strike out against you at any chance. Nor is he a God who says we must first become worthy on our own merit, on our own good works, before we think his love will run deep for us. He is a merciful, gracious God who longs for your heart to be delighting in him and loving him even this hour more than you do. In fact, if your heart is tender or fearful because of your sin, it is the tender mercy of this God making that happen within you. He is the God who runs to meet you in forgiveness. He is the God who tells Jonah, “Should not I pity” my creation? (4:11).

However, we must also remember his holiness so that we are never tempted to become comfortable in our sin. We must remember his holiness so that we do not assume too much with him as if he is simply one of our old pals. We must remember his holiness so that our hearts remember of men, even those who have been a source of great blessing and joy to our lives, if they do not repent and believe, God’s final judgment will not be relented; they will be cast into hell if they die in their sins.

So these two aspects of God which are so tempting to make exclusive and treat him as if he is one or the other and live before him as if he is one or the other, we must hold together and remember them both simultaneously.

But at the end of the day, even if we do look ahead to Nahum and God’s destruction of Nineveh 100 years later, can’t we still say, “But here it looks like he showed mercy and not justice toward the Ninevites.” And indeed it does, at least for this generation, how is it that God can maintain his utmost holiness while showing mercy to a people who only deserve judgment. How can we not read Jonah and say, “Well, sure God’s holiness is declared throughout the bible alongside his mercy, but here he decided to be merciful and not just in his judgment”? Did God simply slip up here? Is he unjust? Of course not.

But how is he then not unholy in relenting of deserved judgment? Here is where the book of Jonah pushes us to the New Testament, specifically to the book of Romans and chapter 3:21-26. Paul writes, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it [as Jonah does, which we will look at more specifically next week] – the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

Therefore, the way in which God could pass over the sins of the Ninevites without pouring out his wrath upon them was because he based it on the punishment of Christ for sins. All forgiveness and mercy stems from the cross where God’s wrath is appeased for all to whom he shows the mercy of forgiveness.

Therefore, in Jonah we see the holiness and mercy of God collide as a foreshadowing of that which would one day meet more clearly in the cross of Christ. To him be glory forever. Amen.

¹C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins, 1978): 80.
²C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle(New York: Harper Collins, 1984): 20

LESSONS FROM THE BOOK OF JONAH - PART 2