The Immutable God: God is righteous, Jonah was not
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Being a prophet in the Old Testament was hard. Nobody listened to Jeremiah. Hosea had to marry a prostitute. Ezekiel had to chop his hair off, lay in bed for just over a year and two months and eat food cooked over cow poop. Daniel was thrown in a pit with lions. Sure God saved him, but I’d take not be thrown in a pit with hungry lions over being saved after being thrown in a pit of lions any day. Of all the prophets in the Bible, one deserved his hardships more than all the other. Jonah was the worst prophet.
In the last chapter of the book that bears his name, Jonah discovers that because of his preaching, Nineveh repented and God decided not to destroy the city like Jonah had hoped he would. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, which had oppressed Israel for years. Instead, God spares the city. When Jonah complains, God asks a probing question, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4). He then shows Jonah his perspective on the matter. Nineveh had more than 120,000 innocent children and even more innocent animals whom God did not want to destroy. We don’t know if Jonah changed his attitude, but the goal of the book seems to be for us to change ours.
Jonah didn’t see the situation the right way, so he didn’t have the right attitude. Because he didn’t see things the right way, he didn’t act righteously.
I’ve been exploring how, in both the Old and New Testaments, God is the same eternal, triune creator whose character is perfectly holy, righteous, just, merciful, gracious and above all loving. In both testaments, he acts to judge, bless and redeem all of creation. In focus this week is the consistency of God’s standard of righteousness throughout the whole Bible.
The concept of righteousness is wrapped up in being and doing what is morally right. To be or do what is morally right, you have to know what is morally right by rightly perceiving reality. God’s answer to Jonah’s warped perspective was to try to help him see the reality of the city he had just saved better.
God, then, is righteous because he invented reality and, being omniscient (all-knowing), he sees that reality clearly. Because he sees all of reality perfectly, he is able to do the right thing perfectly. Jonah, who didn’t see reality clearly, did not do the right thing or even have the right attitude. First he ran away in the opposite direction. Then he gave the shortest, least passionate sermon of any prophet in the Bible. Then he stewed on a hillside outside the city hoping God would destroy it anyway.
But ironically, in response to Jonah’s lackluster sermon, the people of Nineveh saw things a little more clearly. Somehow, they understood that how they were living was wrong and that something needed to change. So they did. They cried out to the true God and grieved over their sin. They acted righteously (for however briefly) because they saw reality the right way for once.
Books could and have been written about righteousness in the Bible, but I want to follow the Jonah theme through to the New Testament. For all the complicated theology and philosophy that can be done over the subject of righteousness, it’s important to see that it all boils down to seeing what’s important.
Jesus actually talked about Jonah a lot, especially when his conflict with the religious leaders of the day really began to boil. When they asked Jesus to prove his authority was from God, he had this to say, “An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment, and will condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matthew 12:39-41). When God sent a second-rate prophet to Nineveh, they listened and repented. They saw reality a little more clearly than before and they responded. When God sent his son, the Godman, to Israel, they did not listen and their understanding of God and moral reality remained unchanged. It’s hard to believe they would have still crucified Jesus if they actually believed the reality of who he was.
Jesus lays out their core problem in the very next chapter of Matthew. Quoting Isaiah, he said, “For the heart of this people has become dull, With their ears they scarcely hear, And they have closed their eyes, Otherwise they would see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, And understand with their heart and return, And I would heal them” (Matthew 13:15, quoting Isaiah 6:10). They didn’t hear or see because they didn’t really even want to. Their hearts were “dull,” so they gave up on trying to see truth. That was the problem in the Old Testament. That was the problem in the New Testament, and that’s the problem today. God saw and sees clearly what we do not, and we do not trust him when he shares what he sees.
Are you still pursuing “truth?” Are you trying to refine your understanding of reality? Or are you satisfied with your own limited view? Righteousness demands that we adjust our perspective by trusting what God says is true because he can see and we cannot.