Can I pray for you in any way? Send any prayer requests
to OurChristianWalk@aol.com.
In Christ, Mark
In Christ, Mark
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** Follow The Christian Walk on Twitter @ThChristianWalk
** Like posts and send friend requests to the author of
The Christian Walk, Mark Cummings on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mark.cummings.733?ref=tn_tnmn
** Become a Follower of The Christian Walk at http://the-christian-walk.blogspot.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy
word.
But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry.
He prayed to the Lord, “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. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better
for me to die than to live.”
But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the
city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what
would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it
grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah
was very happy about the plant. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm,
which chewed the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a
scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint.
He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry
about the plant?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”
But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this
plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and
died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in
which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell
their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”
Jonah 4:1-11
This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks
be to God.
Have you had an experience or ever heard a story concerning
someone who did something terrible and then wished the worse for them?
In our humanity, I’m afraid that we sometimes think we’re
fit to determine who deserves mercy and who doesn’t.
In other words, most everyone misunderstands the true
essence, nature, and origin of mercy at some time or another.
As we come to the end of the Book of Jonah, we find God’s
messenger in the midst of such a struggle, wrestling with his feelings about
God’s decision to spare the Ninevites despite their history of wicked and evil
ways. Our scriptures today open a window into Jonah’s raw emotions and God’s
response to them. Look again at these words:
But to Jonah this
seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “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. Now, Lord,
take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
But the Lord
replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Jonah had gone out
and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat
in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God
provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his
head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. But at
dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it
withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun
blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It
would be better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to
Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”
“It is,” he said.
“And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”
But the Lord said,
“You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make
it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have
concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred
and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and
also many animals?” Jonah 4:1-11
Jonah is in a state of confusion. We know this because of
the way he is processing all that has happened since that fateful day when he
received the Lord’s tasking and decided to flee from it. Jonah’s words try to
convince the Lord that the very reason he chose to go to Tarshish was because
he didn’t believe the judgment of Nineveh would really be carried out. This is
because Jonah saw the Lord as being “gracious and compassionate”, “slow to
anger and abounding in love”, “a God who relents from sending calamity.”
Jonah had things part right.
Indeed, God was a gracious and compassionate God, slow to
anger, abounding in love, and willing to relent from sending calamity. He was a
God of mercy and there was no disputing this fact as it was God who rescued and
saved Jonah from the depths as he sank ever close to his death after being
thrown overboard.
But God was also a God of judgment, a God who would
punish His people for their willful, sinful disobedience. He would have carried
out that judgment on Jonah had he not turned from his sinful ways and surely
the same fate would have come on the Ninevites if they had not repented.
This is what Jonah was missing, the concept he was not
getting. He was happy to receive God’s mercy for himself but angry that the
same mercy was being extended to the people of Nineveh. He didn’t realize that
it wasn’t his place to decide who did and didn’t deserve mercy.
As I said earlier, maybe we’re more like Jonah when it
comes to this life attitude of misunderstanding mercy than we want to admit.
Of interest, we find the Lord trying to use a real life
experience to get his point through to Jonah, raising up a plant to give him
shade and then taking the plan away just as quickly as it had sprung up. Note
that Jonah was happy when he had the shade of the plant, a merciful shade that
took away the scorching heat of the sun. But as soon as the plant died, he
returned to his anger as the rays of the sun returned to beat down on him.
As long as things were the way Jonah wanted them, he was
happy. But when things weren’t, he raged against life in general, even going as
far to believe it would be better to die than live. He could not deal with the
fact that people outside of Israel could be spared, although the God of Israel
was equally the God of all people for God was indeed the Maker and Master of
all.
This is what gave God every right to extend mercy or
remove it and Jonah (or person for that matter) no right to dispute it
God had been in the business of taking the lost and
leading them to His righteousness when they found Him. It had been true for the
ancestors of Jonah and it would be true for the Ninevites as well who had been
living in sin, unable to tell their right hand from left. It was what defined
them and yet when they awakened to the wrongs of their ways, repented, and
acknowledged the God who brought them to life as being the same God who could
also remove them from it, they found themselves spared, blessed by God’s grace
and compassion.
Friends, we have no more right than Jonah to pick and
choose who deserves mercy and who doesn’t. For the Lord is never going to allow
His actions to be predicated on what we think but rather what on He deems
appropriate to do. This goes for all things but in light of this devotion, it’s
particularly applicable to the matter of mercy, a mercy we will never
misunderstand when we realize that it is always given perfectly when
administered by a perfect God, a God who is the only One worthy enough to judge
justly.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.
Send any prayer requests to OurChristianWalk@aol.com
No comments:
Post a Comment