The Spirit of Jonah

“But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.”

The line that precedes these words in Psalm 130 reads, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” The question is rhetorical, and the intended response is “Nobody.” If God gave everyone exactly what he or she deserved, this planet would be a hollowed-out, smoking husk.

But he doesn’t, and there’s the rub. God “devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast”. “He is not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

Which Way to Tarshish?

The primary takeaway from the psalmist’s statement is that forgiveness is the unique prerogative of almighty God. The scribes and Pharisees understood the theological implications of Psalm 130 quite well, and they voiced them as an objection to the Lord Jesus: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Declaring yourself the forgiver of sins is a claim to deity. It is blasphemy or blessed truth. Either way, it’s a stark and significant claim.

But there’s a second legitimate takeaway from Psalm 130, and it goes something like this: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life.” There are people so angry with their fellow human beings that they would rather die than witness someone they hate reconciled to God and restored to blessing. Their biggest fear is not that God might destroy me, but that he might not destroy my enemies. They would rather burn down the world than let God be God, or at least they’d rather flee to Tarshish than be any part of watching Assyrians repent and be forgiven.

Burn, Nineveh, Burn!

This is the spirit of Jonah, and the Lord Jesus warned against it repeatedly. It may be the murderous hatred of any other object of God’s blessing that drove Satan to lead a world astray. It may be the horror of discovering a secret part of self that believed our own blessing was a product of some kind of intrinsic moral superiority rather than grace alone. That’s the theological lesson of God’s great mercy: we are not only no better than our fathers, we are no better than the Assyrians. We might well be worse.

The spirit of Jonah is virulently racist. It might welcome individual Assyrians into the kingdom if they came begging at the borders in rags, acknowledging the inferiority of their own gods and culture, and their own histories as worthy of damnation. Seeking salvation like Rahab or Ruth. Begging their way into the arms of the blessed as, well, maybe not full brothers exactly, but happy little second-class citizens hewing wood and drawing water for the true Chosen People. The spirit of Jonah would be okay with that. Possibly. But welcome Assyrians who still reek of their native Assyrian-ness? Never. Burn, Nineveh, burn!

Saving a Nation

There is a spirit alive within evangelicalism, and it’s growing. It says God can save individual Jews provided they become just like us, but it refuses to believe God can save a nation as a nation. His grace is big enough to save Abraham, David or Paul, but it’s not big enough to save national Israel or redeem Judaism from the pit. That spirit is wrong not primarily because it’s secretly or overtly racist — some cultures, habits and societies really are better than others — but because it refuses to comprehend the magnitude of the grace of God. It refuses to accept God the way he has revealed himself to be.

Supersessionism or Replacement Theology is not some minor eschatological quirk. The worst theological misunderstandings are not about technical details of what God is doing and how he is doing it, but about the size of his heart. They say God must hate the sinner and everything about him just as much as I do. They say he must get what I have decided he deserves.

Sadly, there really are so-called Christians around who think like that.