Jonah
is possibly the most known prophets of
the Bible,
aside from Moses,
because of the oft-retold story a huge sea creature swallowing him. Like Obadiah, the
message God
delivered through Jonah was not for Israel, but for a
foreign place. In Jonah’s case, it was Nineveh, the
capital of the rising Assyrian
Empire.
Assyria was a rival of Israel—eventually its empire would include the
northern kingdom—so Jonah was reluctant to go when God told him to head to
Nineveh. Jonah headed the opposite direction, took to see, his ship was nearly
lost in a storm, he was tossed overboard and swallowed. He finally gave up and
the sea creature spit him out on the shore.
Jonah was a whiner. He whined about God calling to him to a place he
didn’t want to go and a people he didn’t like. When the hearts of the citizens
of Nineveh were changed and God showed mercy to them, he
complained that this was the reason he didn’t want to go—he knew God would show
mercy to a repentant people and Jonah would have preferred that they perish.
Jonah is a lot like us: disobedient, petty, vindictive, whiney,
selfish. God used him anyway, triumphantly in spite of Jonah’s bad attitude.
God has mercy on the repentant sinners and rebukes the haughty prophet who is
supposed to be a holy man.
I recommend reading Jonah if you haven’t gotten to it. It says a lot
about the character of God and men. It is an interesting short story, too. The
“whale” isn’t even the most interesting part of it.
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