July 8, 2013
Jonah 4:7 — But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.
I’ve said it before (and I know I’ll say it again, fairly often) — it’s not really right to have favorite bits of the Bible — but you can’t help it, and neither can I! One of my favorites is the story of Jonah and the whale… or as I like to call it, “Jonah and the worm” …
The Book of Jonah is chock full of great lessons, starting with “don’t think you can run away from God’s plan.” The biggie though, the one where the work comes in, is that God really doesn’t play favorites. He cares for all of His creation.
I’d really like to tell you the whole story, because I can’t help thinking that most tellings of the tale – especially in kid’s Sunday School – miss the point. It’s really about God giving the most practical of evidences of His nature; who He really is.
Start by remembering how God introduces Himself:
And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. (Exodus 34:6-7)
The Lord is “merciful and gracious – keeping mercy for thousands” – or in the case of the Ninevites, even hundreds of thousands. In Saturday’s devotional I quoted the Lord as being willing that none should perish. Perhaps there was never a more powerful testimony than His sending of Jonah to be the first foreign missionary, to the Assyrians who were feared as efficient in battle (they were the first to use iron weapons) and ruthless in victory. Jonah, or course, didn’t want the job and headed off in the opposite direction!
The story brings out another aspect of God’s nature. He is longsuffering – he’ll put up with a lot! Jonah gets a second chance – but when he gets with the program and Nineveh repents is he pleased? Not a bit of it!
It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. (Jonah 4:1-2)
That is, “I knew you were a compassionate God and wouldn’t punish these wicked people if you had half an excuse not to!” Now at this point, you might expect God to get angry with Jonah. Instead, the Longsuffering Lord decides to teach him a gentle lesson, provoking him to care about the gourd that provides him with shade. Then ,when Jonah complains when the worm destroys the gourd, God points out that if Jonah gets worked up about a tree he had no hand in the rearing of, he can hardly be surprised when the Lord cares for so many people, all of whom He created in their mother’s wombs. Sadly, the story finishes there, but I bet Jonah stomped off muttering! He never realized that of all those in the story, he might have been the biggest recipient of compassion from the Lord – who could have let him stay in the belly of the whale until he rotted!
I wonder how many times I have muttered when God didn’t do things the way I expected when I should have been looking to see what He was teaching me about who He is?