The Jonah Show: Don’t Try This at Home (Part 2 of 2)

6.  Let’s Reason Together

God needed to do something to get this stubborn child’s attention again.  Perhaps it was time to call a family meeting (Isaiah 43:26); time to “reason together,” as He once invited in Isaiah 1:18, regardless of our inferior IQ.  How can a mortal reason with the Omniscient?  The Father doesn’t care.  He understands.

Moses had reasoned with God when the Almighty was so angry that He might have destroyed an entire nation in a flash.  Moses told Him, “Ahh, Lord, You can’t do that.  It will spoil Your great name before the Egyptians and other heathen nations who have come to fear You.  Besides, if I may remind my Lord, ‘Remember’ the promise You made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  You are not a promise breaker ….”  The result?  “And the LORD REPENTED of the evil which he thought to do unto his people … And the LORD said, I have pardoned ACCORDING TO THY WORD” (Exodus 32:9-14; Numbers 14:13-20).  Wow!  A very reasonable God.

Back to the Jonah Show: God was going to give the ‘tribalistic’ and ‘holier-than-others’ Jonah a little sip of the hot tea he wished to serve others, despite their pleas.  While Jonah waited at his camp on the outskirts of town until the fires of judgment should rain upon the city according to his prophecy rather than according to the mind of God, God made an umbrella plant to grow overnight to shield him from Nineveh’s merciless sun.  That made his accommodation a little more comfortable.  Jonah was very grateful.  Overnight, again, God sent worms that ate up his new house.  By the next morning, the beautiful shelter was gone.  Then God sent a blazing sun and a terrible east wind that smashed upon Jonah so terribly that “he grew faint” and wanted to die again.  Yesterday, he was very glad; today, he is angry again.  What a moody child!  What a loving Father!  But, please, don’t try this at home!

Finally, Jonah seemed ready to talk, but he always claimed rights (as if others were wrong), so, for the second time, God asked him: “Do you have a RIGHT to be angry …?” (Jonah 4:9, NIV).  Jonah’s reply was amazingly grumpy.  He retorted that he had “every RIGHT to be angry,” in fact, “angry enough to die” (Jonah 4:8-9, NIV; Good News).  Hmm, I don’t know how you would have taken that.  God has many children; many types.  I wonder how He manages us all.

It was family meeting; time to reason together.  God patiently tried to reason with Jonah, arguing that if Jonah could have pity for a plant he didn’t create, which came up overnight and was gone the same way, didn’t He also have a right to pity a people who had admitted their error and sought His pardon?  Jonah didn’t answer.  I recall Job’s debate with God.  He called for the debate, and when it came, he was speechless, even putting his embarrassed hand over his mouth (Job 23:3-6; 40:4-9; 7:11; 13:13; 42:1-6).

So, why can’t I likewise change what I feel about Nineveh from anger to pleasure, this big city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand childlike people who don’t yet know right from wrong, to say nothing of all the innocent animals?” (Jonah 4:11, Message).

Is that how God saw wicked Nineveh?  As a “childlike people”?  Was God serious that those mature sinners of Nineveh did not know their right from their left?  That had to come from the mouth of God Himself for me to accept it about merciless killers like the Assyrians, who did not deserve the mercy they never showed to others.

In reasoning with the rascally Jonah, God patiently pushed His point “with facts and figures,” as we would say; with “current and accurate data.”  He presented the latest census statistics; the 120,000+ population of Nineveh, and He took note of the animals, too!  Jonah couldn’t reply.

Wow!  Who is this God?  He does not resemble the God I have been shown in many Sunday school classes: never smiling, ever serious, more eager to kill than to save, happier to send people to hell than help them into His heaven, glad to see you sad, mad at merry children dancing unquietly in His holy presence …

That is how the book of Jonah closes, with another question that remains unanswered by the petulant Jonah, wherever in Paradise he is now. But, please, remember, don’t try this at home or at church.  You could end up in the ICU.

7.  The Jonah Bravado

Sometimes, those who cry the loudest that they want to die are the first to run away and hide when Death comes to them.  They pray a prayer they really do not wish to be answered.  Jonah had three flippant death-wishes.  Every time God told him that he hadn’t done well, Jonah said he wanted to die.  First, he asked to be thrown into the waves during a storm along the Tarshish route.  When that wish was granted, and he got into the belly of the fish, he didn’t want to die anymore.  He begged with everything that remained in him.  Secondly, when God would not destroy Nineveh, he blurted out, “Please kill me, Lord; I’d rather be dead than alive” (Jonah 4:3, the Living Bible).  Finally, when God took away his shade to teach him a lesson or two, again he “wished to die. For he said, ‘Death is better than this!’” (Jonah 4:8, TLB).  God didn’t answer those rants. God knew that he didn’t mean it.  God doesn’t answer every ‘prayer.’  If Jonah really wanted to die, he shouldn’t have begged from the belly of the fish, and he should have gladly gone with the tornedoes that tore his shelter and the tormenting hell-heat of Nineveh that was only a lesser hell for someone who often said he wanted to die.

Come to think of it: while wishing those deaths for himself, did he ever stop to ask, “If I should die now, before whose Judgment Seat am I going to appear?”  If I were God, I might have killed Jonah the next time those words came out of his mouth.  At least, it happened with the murmuring Israelites on their way from Egypt (Numbers 14:27-29), but Jonah got away with his crankiness.  Those Israelites were not as lucky.  Don’t try that at home when you don’t know your God and you don’t have with Him the relationship that Jonah had.  Don’t copy what you cannot keep.

8.  The Friend of God

For all his apparent misbehaviours, Jonah never blasphemed God.  Angry as he got, he always said, “Lord.”  He knew his limits, and never crossed the red lines of profanity.  Like the Prodigal Son, who knew his father better than the ‘holier’ homely boy, Jonah knew his God (or knew something about his God) better than most ‘holier’ others.  Naughty as the Prodigal was, he seemed to have a unique relationship with the father.  The father missed that boy since he was gone, looking out for him longingly through the window and down the street every day, although the sanctimonious elder was ever at home.  Rascally at times, yes, but he was a boy who knew he had a father; one he could truly call “Father,” to whom he could always go without fear of being rejected; a father with whom he could speak without fear of being misjudged; one of whom he could boldly say, “I will … GO … and will SAY unto him, Father …” (Luke 15:17-22).  There was a relationship.  There was fearless access.  There was a connection.

Jonah knew his God, and his God knew him, too.  Intimacy.  They had a relationship beyond the ‘business’ of preaching.  Jonah could bare his heart before his God without fear of being undone.  He could be frank without fear of being thrown into hell.  Like a little baby smiling in the air each time Daddy threw her up and caught her again in his strong hands, Jonah made himself vulnerable, and was sure that he could never crash even if he were thrown into a violent sea by other hands.

Jonah spoke his mind without being disrespectful.  He would rather say nothing than say nonsense.  He would rather walk away than stay and sin.  He obeyed even when it didn’t feel right.  He went even when and where it was not convenient, never exercising his typical ‘rights’ to say No.  The worst he could do was threaten to die, not threaten to forsake God and return to the idols of his fathers or those of his heathen neighbours.  The demons of Mrs Job that often seduced people to “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9) could never hire his lips, no matter how bad it got.  Jonah was a friend of God.

Jonah knew his God, and could say so.  For instance, in his honest conversations with God ahead of the Nineveh mission, Jonah expressed his worries thus: “I know You – always full of compassion, ready to pardon.  I only hope that after I have taken all the pains to go to Nineveh You will not suddenly change Your mind about destroying them when they begin to cry to You.  If that happens, it will make nonsense of all my troubles going there, and I won’t like it.”  When the fires did not begin to fall upon Nineveh as on historic Sodom and Gomorrah, Jonah reminded God of that discussion (Jonah 4:2).  He spoke his mind then, but apparently didn’t wait to hear God’s mind on that matter, because of how strongly he felt about the people of Nineveh.

Can anyone be friends with a Spirit?  Can a mere mortal be friends with the Consuming Fire, the Ancient of Days, the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth?  Can one verily say, “Our Father which art in heaven …” (Matthew 6:9)?

Up to the New Testament, Abraham is acknowledged as “the Friend of God” (James 2:23).  God Himself described that man as “Abraham MY friend” (Isaiah 41:8).  It was such intimacy between God and man that, occasionally, God left His throne in heaven above to visit Abraham at his home on earth below, as He used to do in the evenings with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, before the jealous Serpent came between them with the lying fruit (Genesis 3:8).  Sometimes, during those visits, God and man shared an earthly meal prepared by the man’s wife, and they discussed family issues, their cordial manly voices loud enough for the wife to overhear their conversation from her kitchen and laugh secretly at their ambitious tales (Genesis 18:1-13; Revelation 3:20).  The Heavenly Friend didn’t care that Abraham’s apartment was a humble house without the state-of-the-art paradisical ‘home accessories’ where He was coming from; a common earthly dwelling incomparable to the mansions of gold in His Kingdom above.  All those things didn’t matter to the Almighty, who could say of his friend, “I know him …” (Genesis 18:19).  Does He know me, too?

Between Abraham and God, it was friendship unhidden from wife and children.  God’s angels also knew Abraham’s address (Genesis 18:1-2). Thousands of years after Abraham, his offspring, whenever they got into trouble, often turned to their “Daddy’s Friend” to remind Him of His covenant with their late dad – “Abraham THY friend” (2 Chronicles 20:7).  That usually touched His heart, and He would go out of His way to help them, explicitly stating that it was “because” of their father, His ancient friend (2 Kings 13:23; Psalm 105:42).  A remarkable transgenerational friendship that was.

So amazing is God’s friendship bond that the Psalmist wonders, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4).  Does God still make friends with mortals?  I wish to apply.  Can I be His friend?  Like Abraham, like Daniel, like Job, like Elijah?

Jesus called His disciples “friends” (John 15:15), highlighting the intimate nature of their relationship.  To Mary Magdalene, He said, “Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17).  He called them His “brothers,” not His ‘boys,’ although He was the Ancient of Days.  He said that God was as much ‘their God’ as He was His God; that ‘His’ God was not specially different or superior to ‘their’ God.  It was one big family of brothers and sisters, of spirits and mortals, and one Abba Daddy over all (Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6; Hebrews 12:22-23).  Wow, God really sees me as family?  What intimacy, what a relationship, what a God!

I faintly recall watching the YouTube video of a Muslim woman in a Middle Eastern Islamic country tell her story.  She was a depressed widow, alone at home, then she heard a knock at her door. She opens.  It is a heavenly visitor, smiling at her.  He introduces Himself.  Jesus. She lets Him in.  He dines with her.  Later, she comes upon this Bible verse: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).  The ancient songwriter was very correct: “What a Friend we have in Jesus …”

9.  The Lost Prophet

Until Mission Nineveh, Jonah was a local prophet tucked away in one verse in 2 Kings 14:25, the prophet from Gathhepher village, whose voice the world was destined to hear from the unpopular international podium of Nineveh, capital of the unliked Assyrian Empire.  Nineveh was the unusual project that ultimately put Jonah on the world map.  Mission Nineveh was God trying to put the name of His friend on the eternal and international pages of history and scripture.  But for that one mission that he nearly missed, the world would never have heard of Jonah, and the many that bear his name today would have borne other names, maybe yours.

Alas, how many Jonahs never got to the world stage because they missed or fled the ferry that Destiny had designed to take them there!  And the many Ninevehs lost, not because God never gave them a chance, but only because the messenger He was sending never went.  Today, God is blamed for many Ninevehs destroyed, but few have heard His side of the story, of the men He sent who rather fled, and rotted away in the belly of a fish somewhere off the coast of their cherished Tarshish unreached, somewhere between the two extremes of destiny and duty, commission and convenience, human choice and divine agenda.  May you not be that lost prophet the world never knew.  Amen.

And say to Archippus, Take heed to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord, that thou fulfil it (Colossians 4:17).  Amen.

From The Preacher’s diary,

December 15, 2025.