The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God's Mercy, 2018

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  Introduction: Prodigal Prophet. How can God be both merciful and just? Jonah wants a God of his own making, a God who smites the "bad" people [wicked Ninevites] and blesses the "good" people [Jonah and his people]. When the real God shows up, Jonah can't reconcile the mercy of God with his justice: How can God be merciful and forgiving to people who have done such violence and evil? Jonah points to the ultimate Jonah (Mt 12:41) who is both just and the justifier of those who believe (Rom 3:26). Only the gospel enables us to be neither cruel exploiters like the Ninevites nor Pharisaical believers like Jonah, but Spirit-changed, Christ-like people. The parallel of 2 stories:
1. 1st half Jonah plays like the "prodigal son" (Lk 15:11-24) who ran away from his father; 
2. 2nd half he is like the "older brother" (Lk 15:25-32) who obeys his father but berates him for his graciousness to repentant sinners. His response to God's mercy shows that he still has a great deal of self-righteousness.
• In both cases he's trying to get control of the agenda.

1. Running from God (1:1-3a). "...the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin." Flannery O'Connor. 
• 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 by just and faithful.
2. The World's Storms (1:3b-4)
• Every act of disobedience to God / All sin has a (mighty) storm attached to it. No one can control the weather. [Wisdom literature, Proverbs.] Every difficulty may not be the result of sin, but every sin will bring you into difficulty. Prov 16:5; 21:7. 
• "Sin...sets up strains in the structure of life which can only end in breakdown." Derek Kidner. Liars are lied to, attackers are attacked, and he who lives by the sword... Sin is a suicidal action of the will upon itself. Numbers 32:23.
• For Christians, every difficulty/storm can help reduce the power of sin over our hearts...driving us toward God.
• Storms can develop faith, hope, love, patience, humility and self-control in us that nothing else can.
• Deep within the terror of the storm God's mercy is at work to draw our hearts back to God.
3. Who Is My Neighbor? (1:5-6) The World Rebuking the Church. Hugh Martin. The Church Before the Watching World. Francis Schaeffer.
4. Embracing the Other (1:7-10) Identity: Person, Place, People. Everyone gets an identity from something. 
• To be "in the image of God" (Gen 1:26-27) means that humans were not created to stand alone. We must get our significance and security from something of ultimate value outside us. To ask, "Who are you?" is to ask, "Whose are you?" To know who you are is to know what you have given yourself to, what controls you, what you most fundamentally trust. Peter failed because his most fundamental identity was in his commitment and love to Jesus, not Jesus' love for him.
• Shallow Christian identities explain why professing Christians can be racists, greedy materialists, addicted to beauty and pleasure, or filled with anxiety and prone to overwork. All this is because it is not Christ's love but the world's power, approval, comfort and control that are the real roots of our self-identity.
• A shallow identity leads to a blindness of one's real self, and to hostility rather than respect for people who are different. Then you can't be honest about your own flaws because you won't have an identity secure enough to admit your sins, weaknesses and flaws [lack of courage, achievement, performance, goodness, virtue, valor, attractiveness].
5. The Pattern of Love (1:11-17)  The truest pattern of love is substitutionary. True love meets the needs of the loved one no matter the cost to oneself. All life-changing love is [some kind of] substitutionary sacrifice. Parents must lose much of their freedom at present, or their children will not become free, self-sufficient adults later.
6. Running from Grace (1:17-2:10)  It is only when you reach the very bottom, when everything falls apart, when all your schemes and resources are broken and exhausted, that you are finally open to learning how to completely depend on God. The usual place to learn the greatest secrets of God's grace is at the bottom. We find grace not at the high points of our lives but in the valleys and depths, at the bottom. God's grace is often an abstraction, not a life changing power [Knowing God, J.I.Packer]. 3 crucial truths to be acknowledged and felt in one's heart:
1. We deserve nothing but condemnation. ["moral ill-desert"] (Jer 17:9; Isa 64:6)
2. We are utterly incapable of saving ourselves. ["spiritual impotence"]
3. God saves us, despite our sin, at infinite cost to himself.
7. Doing Justice, Preaching Wrath (3:1-10)  
• Repentance is always a work of God (2 Tim 2:25).    We seldom see churches that are equally committed to preaching the Word fearlessly and to justice and care for the poor, yet these are theologically inseparable. To work against social injustice and to call people to repentance before God interlock theologically.
8. Heart Storms (4:1-4)  
• Jonah's real problem was at the deepest level of his heart (4:1-4): "Without that...I have no desire to go on." He lost something that had replaced God as the main joy, reason and love of his life. There was something else he valued more than his relationship with God. All theological problems play themselves out not merely in our intellects but in our commitments, desires and identities.
• Rightful racial pride can become racism. Rightful national pride and patriotism can become imperialism.
• Inordinate anger of self-righteousness and fear is a sign that the thing loved is a counterfeit god. Jonah is inordinately committed to his race and nation.
9. The Character of Compassion (4:4-11).  The Emotional Life of Our Lord, B.B.Warfield. The Bible records Jesus weeping 20x for every 1 time he laughs. He had enormous joy (Lk 10:21), yet he grieved far more than he laughed.
• God's perfect heart, perfect in generous love is not excusing and not harshly condemning.
• God sometimes blesses believers and judges the pagans, but at other times he blesses the pagans and punishes the believers. God is an extremely complex character. He's not just a being of wrath or love--he's both, and in unpredictable ways.
• All of God's goodness (Exo 33:23): infinitely loving to pardon everybody AND infinitely just to never let any sin go unpunished (Exo 34:6-7).
• God sends Jonah a storm, a fish & a plant. God is both too holy and too loving to either destroy Jonah [& us] or to allow Jonah [&us]  to remain as he is [as we are]. The root of Jonah's disobedience was his mistrust in the goodness of God.
10. Our Relationship to God's Word: Running from God (1:1-3)   Sin always begins with the character assassination of God. God puts us in a world of delights but won't give them to us if we obey him. We trust God too little because we trust our own wisdom too much. 
• Jonah ran from God but a storm pursued him. Life in the world is filled with storms--difficulties and suffering. Suffering now "prevents greater evils later" (Newton). The greatest danger of all is that we never become aware of our blindness, pride and self-sufficiency. We naturally believe that we have far more ability to direct our lives wisely than we really have, and that we're more honest, decent and virtuous than we really are. These are deadly errors.
• Self-sufficiency, self-centeredness, self-salvation make us hard toward people we think of as failures and losers, and ironically makes us endlessly self-hating if/when we don't live up to our own standards.
• To understand yourself, you must understand that all sin against God is grounded in a refusal to believe that God is more dedicated to our good and more aware of what that is, than we are. Adam and Eve didn't want to be evil; they just wanted to be happy. But they didn't trust that God's commands were the only way for them to be happy.
• 3 unhelpful responses when people go through storms [my blind default]: minimizers [things could be worse], teachers [God is teaching you things, so look for the lessons], solvers/fixers [if you just keep your chin up and do X, Y, Z, you'll come through this]. A better way to help sufferers is to simply weep with them and love them, as Jesus did (Jn 11:32-36). 
11. Our Relationship to God's World: Who Is My Neighbor? (1:5-6). Christian identity is received, not achieved.
• What makes a person a Christian is not our love for God, which is always imperfect, but God's love for us.
• Our identities and self-worth come from our achievements, and they are irreducibly based on feeling superior to groups and persons whom we see as inferior. But our security and assurance of being loved/accepted do not rest in our performance. Then we can look into our hears and recognize our flaws and admit them (Rom 7:21-25).
• Abandon everything you rely on for meaning and security. An outline of Abraham's life:
• "Go" (Gen 12:2). Where? Later. Just go. 
• "You'll have a son" (Gen 15:4). How? Later. Just trust. 
• "Sacrifice your only son" (Gen 22:2). Why? Later. Just climb.  
12. Our Relationship to God's Grace: Running from Grace (2:1-10). The main purpose of Jonah is to get us to understand grace.
• Anyone, even a successful prophet [preacher] can be in the dark about grace.
• How can we be freed from our idols, self-salvations and self-justifications, which are so fragile and subject to circumstances?
• How can a Christian feel superior to anyone else if our standing before God is only by grace's riches at Christ's expense?
• Why does God send us [Jonah] difficulties and disappointments? God is only trying to liberate you [me] from the things that enslave you, drive you and control you.
• We live in a world fragmented into various "media bubbles," where you hear only news that confirms what you already believe. The internet and social media repeatedly encourages us to become like Jonah toward "those other people" [the Assyrians]. Groups demonize and mock other groups. Christians are sucked into this maelstrom as much as if not more than anyone else, while claiming to be totally objective and rational. The book of Jonah asks, how can a Christian look at those with deeply opposing beliefs and [voting] practices with no compassion? (Jon 4:11)

The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God's Mercy. 2018.

• Grace can never be earned or deserved. If it is, it is not grace.