Learning with Jonah

Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. For God's way of making us right with himself depends on faith. I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead! (Philippians 3:7-11)

A few months ago, our church started to go through a study on suffering based on Joni Eareckson Tada & Steve Estes' book When God Weeps. It has been an eye-opening experience for us to learn from God's Word His attitude toward suffering. One thing we've learned is that He has incredible tenderness & compassion toward those bearing suffering's heavy weight, & that He undertakes great pains to relieve suffering, & calls His church to follow Him in relieving suffering around the world.

In our last session a few weeks ago, we discovered together something new: that God not only allows suffering, but even ordains it in the lives of His children for our good. I have to admit: it was a tough sell for most of us as we contemplated God's using suffering – especially all the suffering we face as the direct result of great evil in & around us – for our benefit. As we explored God's Word, we made a list of these benefits. Suffering…
- helps us appreciate life's graces more,
- makes us more sensitive toward the reality of sin's destructiveness,
- increases our compassion & helps us empathize with others who suffer
- tests our faith, proves its authenticity, & increases it,
- helps us realize our inadequacy, that God is our only hope, specifically through the Cross, &
- allows us to know Christ more intimately.

Regarding the last, most important point, our study called us to meditate on Philippians 3:7-11 (above), which describes the apostle Paul's overarching aim in life – to know Jesus Christ more deeply & fully by any means possible. As I read the passage (one I'd read countless times before), I couldn't help but want to change some of the words (especially verse 10) to suit my own life:
"I want to know Christ, to experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to glory with him, sharing in his victories, to enjoy the admiration of many, to live a smooth & comfortable life, to have a loving family which understands & respects me, to work to help others without ever being misunderstood or overstressed or underappreciated."

It's obvious from comparing the real passage with my own sacrilegious version why it was so difficult for me to accept God's Word as it was: I am profoundly selfish, & I often only want to "know" God on my own terms. The problem, I was finding again, is that when I seek to know God on my own terms, I am not actually seeking to know God at all. To know the Creator truly is possible only on His terms, by His revelation.

This truth hit me again last week when I was continuing my own slow read-through-the-Bible campaign and hit the book of Jonah, a Hebrew prophet during the reign of Israel's King Jeroboam II. I thought I knew this book well, not simply since Jonah lived to tell the tale of being swallowed by a great sea creature, but also because I liked to deride Jonah for being the "worst missionary ever."

When I was preparing for long-term missionary service, I met a lot of missionaries, & read about the lives of many missionaries. Many were faithful, humble, resourceful people who served Christ & His kingdom in ways I wanted to emulate. Some served & shared the Gospel faithfully for decades without much visible fruit for their efforts. Many I read about faced isolation and disease, or even the tragedies of the death of beloved spouses & children. Many missionaries themselves died in service to Jesus.

My reading of Jonah began much like the other times I'd read it. Inside my head echoed the unspoken thoughts, "Here's the prophet whose simple message would bring many in the great city of Nineveh to humble repentance before the Lord, so does he happily share this message? NOPE! Because Jonah knows just how great God's LOVE & MERCY are, he takes off by land & sea in the OTHER direction & puts the lives of others on the boat in peril. When God sends a big fish to rescue him from drowning, Jonah SEEMS to repent, but when he finally obeys in calling God's judgment on Nineveh, & they respond with widespread humble repentance, he has the GALL to become angry at God's mercy!"

I always imagined that Jonah either barely whispered his message under his breath, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah 3:4), or else hissed it out with such vicious self-righteousness that most people would just hiss back with equal hate. Yet God still used Jonah's reluctant declaration to move many in Nineveh to humble grief, and He gave Jonah the grace of seeing that positive response as the Ninevites were spared. Though in some ways Jonah seems to have been "the best missionary ever" (in terms of outward fruit for the amount of effort he put in), in my mind he was also the "worst missionary ever" in that he had the worst heart about it all, & cared little for the God he served.

But in light of what I was learning from Philippians 3, I began to see that I too am often just like Jonah. Having gone to church all my life, I had sung with fervor the words "Nearer my God to Thee" & "I want to know You more" countless times. I heard many sermons describing how God yearns for us to know Him, & how we are to have a reciprocal yearning. But I was discovering that so often, when the Creator of the universe makes His character clear to me when he calls me to…
- consider others more important than myself (Philippians 2:3),
- love Him above all others, with all my being (Deuteronomy 6:5),
- confess my secret sins to my brothers (James 5:16),
- forgive others as I've been forgiven (Luke 6:37),
- trust Him in taking serious steps to avoid lustful thoughts (Matthew 18:9), or
- be quick to listen, slow to speak, & slow to become angry (James 1:19),
I dismiss His Word as out-of-date or out-of-touch with reality with such silly questions as "Don't you know what I'm going through?" "Can't I indulge myself just a little bit?" "Don't you know what they did to me?" Worse yet, at times I wouldn't put up a fight but simply ignored God's Word. My walking away from God at the very time He was revealing Himself to me showed that I, like Jonah, also often mistrust God's wisdom, His power, & His love.

Perhaps I'd been too hard on Jonah after all, anyway. Sure, he had squandered perhaps the clearest opportunity in the Old Testament to shine forth as Abraham's seed as a blessing to all the nations (Genesis 12:3). Sure, he got to hear God's specific words of calling on his life (while we're "stuck" with reading God's words, though in no less clear a fashion), but perhaps in his prophetic role he saw things that weren't recorded for us to know. Perhaps he saw the future of Assyrian (of which Nineveh was capital) control over Israel. He likely knew their reputation for cruel domination, & how they viciously decimated whole cultures by murdering & kidnapping their foes. Perhaps he saw how his very own descendants would suffer at the hands of evil Assyrian men. Perhaps his mistrust of God, though clearly unjustified, was rooted in the faulty interpretation of very real pain.

And suddenly, I'm reminded of my own faithlessness when face-to-face with the One true God, the God of His Word (& not of my own self-centered version of it). My own mistrust, like Jonah's, also comes out of a self-centered interpretation of my own pain: I'm confused about my life's next steps, I have deep longings for things that continually elude my grasp, I perpetually face things I wish I didn't have to face. Rarely put to words, in my heart I often ask the self-centered questions: "Do You even know what I'm facing God? Will my suffering ever end? Is there any point in all my pain?"

And just as God was gracious enough with Jonah not to leave him in his sin, God is unswervingly gracious with me, & He pursues me even when I flee from Him. He gives me His wondrously God-centered answers to my self-centered questions. He shows me that yes, He does know the suffering I face, but that I face them for the very reason that He loves me (Psalm 34:17,18; Romans 8:17). He shows me that yes, my suffering will end, but in His perfect time according to His immeasurable wisdom (2 Corinthians 12:7-10; Revelation 21:4). He shows me that yes indeed, there is deep meaning in what I face, for there are unnoticed people around me, along with the angels & demons, who are watching & marveling at the fruit of God's faithfulness even to sinners like me (1 Corinthians 1:27-31; Ephesians 3:10). The greatest meaning of my suffering – as well as that of Jonah & others in the world – is in Jesus, the Prophet who was perfectly faithful, obedient, and successful in bringing blessing to the nations. And He brought this blessing to us exactly because He had chosen to bear the heaviest, most unjust, most heinous suffering of all, in bearing our sins at the Cross (Hebrews 5:10; 12:2).

The greatest blessing of all, I am learning, is not the wonderful grace that our suffering will one day end, but that through our suffering we will know the Giver of grace more completely as He is.

This is a trustworthy saying:
If we die with him,

we will also live with him.

If we endure hardship,

we will reign with him.

If we deny him,

he will deny us.

If we are unfaithful,

he remains faithful,

for he cannot deny who he is.

(2 Timothy 2:11, 12)