Jonah

God’s sovereignty extends over all His creation, but His will is a complex and sometimes (seemingly) contradictory concept. Of course, it is only contradictory because our human minds are too infinitesimally minute to comprehend His infinitely great wisdom and understanding and His all-powerful workings – “what God has done from beginning to end” (Eccl 3:11).

God commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh, but what did Jonah do? He went the other way. He acted in defiant rebellion against God’s direct command, against His revealed will, for God had made it crystal clear to Jonah where he was supposed to go and what he was supposed to do. God’s commanded will was not accomplished in that moment it was given to Jonah. Jonah sinned.

And yet, it was God who willed Jonah’s disobedience. Jonah’s sin was in God’s foreordained plan and purpose. Most would find no difficulty believing that Jonah’s repentance was God’s doing in his heart. But what about Jonah’s rebellion? Was this not also planned by God?

Philippians 2:14 says, “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” God works in us for His good pleasure. It was God’s good pleasure for Jonah to rebel against God. Why? The answer is complex, for God works on multiple levels. One reason is so that God’s infinite wisdom and power might be displayed. God created a great fish to consume but not kill Jonah, and to spew him up when he repented. God mighty arm was bared to show His great power in bringing this wayward prophet to repentance and obedience.

A second reason is that God was intimately working in the heart of His prophet, on Jonah’s character. As a loving Father, He disciplined and broke His child, molding him like clay and purifying him in the furnace of suffering. What was the end purpose of this suffering? For Jonah to realize that God is God and to give Him glory.

These first two reasons work together to show how God works on multiple levels so far beyond our limited understanding. Packer writes briefly on this in his beloved book Knowing God. Packer reflects how in the life of Joseph, God was working on many levels – building Joseph’s character through fiery trials; refining the character of Jacob, who had idolized his youngest (at the time) son; sovereignly overseeing and carrying out His purposes for His people, blessing and protecting the nation of Israel (p. 86). In addition to Packer’s list, there were other purposes, both directly and indirectly related to God’s dealings with Joseph: bringing about foreordained judgment on other nations (e.g. Egypt and the Canaanite nations); withholding His electing love from the nations of Canaan and giving them over to ever-increasing wickedness, and so eliciting the full measure of God’s wrath and judgment upon them (Gen 15:16).

These two reasons worked together in an extraordinary way, demonstrating God’s power and wisdom to work in an intimate, personal level as well as a national and ethnic level.
Now on to the most important reason why it was God’s good purpose for Jonah to disobey, which we find in Matthew 12:38-41:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

God had planned Jonah’s rebellion from before the beginning so that a prophecy concerning Jesus could be fulfilled. God had ordained Jonah’s sinful disobedience so that Jesus could reference Jonah as a prophetic voice and testimony of what God was about to carry out in His own death and resurrection. Jonah was a “type” of Christ – a historical witness to the redemptive work of Jesus written into history by the Almighty, omniscient God. Death swallowed up the Son of God, but on the third day, unable to contain Him, threw Him up. “And death has been sick ever since. And some day, Death will wash up on shore and forever be throne down into the Lake of Fire, along with the devil and his demons” (Paraphrasing Jonathan Edwards)

So, did Jonah violate God’s will and therefore sin against God? Yes. Was Jonah accountable to God for his sinful disobedience? Yes. Did God foreordain Jonah’s sinful disobedience? Yes. Did God sin is ordaining sin? No. Are there two wills of God? It seems to be so. Is it wrong for God to do what He did to Jonah? “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” (Rom 9:20). I AM THAT I AM! God is free to be and do as He wills, and in Him there is no sin.

Jacob, Esau and Two Thieves on a Cross

In Romans 9, Paul makes crystal clear his case that God’s freedom to choose whom He will and reject whom He will is not based on any distinction in them; for God chose Jacob and rejected Esau before they had done anything good or evil, before they were even born. God’s freedom of choice is an application of His being. LORD, or Yahweh, means “I AM THAT I AM.” This name is who God is (whatever God chooses to be). And because God is who He chooses to be, He is free to do as He chooses to do. This application of His name is found in Exod 33:19, which Paul quotes in Romans 9:15: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” In Exod 3:14, when Moses asked God His name, God replied “I AM THAT I AM.” Later, in Exod 33:19, God speaks again to Moses, telling him, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy.” I AM is His freedom in being. “I will…” is His freedom of doing. Out of His absolute unbounded freedom to be is His absolute unbounded freedom to do.

Why two thieves next Jesus? The answer parallels the answer concerning Jacob and Esau. Neither of them had done anything good nor bad. They were both just as unworthy of God’s electing grace. Yet God, in His sovereign freedom, chose Jacob. And God, in His sovereign freedom, chose one thief and not the other. Here again, at the very center of redemptive history, at Calvary itself, we find God’s freedom blasting forth in full force. “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy.” God’s Spirit regenerated the heart of one thief right there on the cross as the crowd hurled their insults at Jesus. His blood must have boiled as he saw this grand injustice. The other thief heard the same insults and blasphemies poured out toward the Son of God, but the Holy Spirit left him in his wickedness. This thief even chimed in, joining in the mockery of Jesus. One was stirred to repentance, the other toward the greatest evil of all, reviling God Himself. And when the elect thief could bear it no more, he rebuked the wicked thief, making his profession of faith right there on a cross. And as he did, he summed up the doctrine of grace in one concise statement:

Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds…

This thief’s heart had been reborn. The veil had been lifted and he saw “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). And seeing this, he saw his own wickedness, his own deserved condemnation, justly due him for his sins. And looking toward the center, He saw Jesus, the justifier, the propitiation of God’s wrath and condemnation. And he fell on Jesus.

This thief’s confession is the necessary confession of every person who ever walked and will ever walk the face of the planet – we are under the same sentence of condemnation, and we will justly receive the due reward for our deeds. We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. And the due reward for this shortcoming is wrath and eternal condemnation! One thief received his due upon the cross and now in all eternity. The other fell upon Christ and received mercy and an entrance into eternal life. Both deserved what one of them received; neither deserved what the other received. For God chose one and rejected the other. And these crosses on either side of Jesus’s stand forever as an reminder of God’s freedom to have mercy on whom He has mercy and to harden whom He hardens.