Merciful Storms

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah… Jonah 1:1

…and Jonah rejected the word of the Lord.

OK so that’s not exactly the way it went but it is, I think, accurate. And we think, “Poor sap, that was a bit of a bad move.” Then we move on with the story (and our lives). But feeling bad for Jonah isn’t the point.

Rejecting God’s word is a bad move, true enough. But there are a number of ways to reject God’s word and for most of us none of them will involve being swallowed by a large fish.

So lest we think Jonah is simply a fanciful tale radically divorced from real life, let us look a bit further to see a few ways we may be more like Jonah than we think.

We reject God when we disobey.

God’s word came to Jonah and he disobeyed. We have God’s word in Scriptures. Most of it is pretty clear: love your enemies, obey your parents, do not give up meeting together. If we accuse Jonah of rejecting God’s word in disobedience, let’s at least come clean that we do the same.

We reject God when we don’t care.

Jonah slept deeply amidst a raging storm. We don’t know exactly why he slept, but we do know it was not because he was at peace. It’s reasonable to suppose that Jonah’s conscience was a bit blunted. To put it more strongly, he didn’t care. It’s easy (and foolish) for us to say we would have done differently, but do our lives bear that out? Do you and I care for the things that God cares about? Does evil and rebellion against God (in our lives and others) disturb us? When the answer is no, we are effectively doing as Jonah did.

OK, we’ll stop there. There’s more we could say on this, and I’m sure you have some thoughts as well. You’ll notice I said “we” in the observations above because I am not immune from these failures. But our failures need not be the final word. In fact, I think that’s the big idea of Jonah. We can see Jonah’s rejection and the resulting raging storm but we would be remiss if we didn’t see God’s ferocious mercy. Even the storm was God’s mercy calling Jonah back to himself.

Rejecting God is always a bad idea for all of us. Worse though would be for us to miss responding to His call of mercy through the storms (hearing hard truths, obstacles meant to keep us from disobedience…). Is God calling you to Himself through the storms?