GodSprings - January 14, 2016

Nothing But His Grace

The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.

Jonah 1:1-3 (NIV)

We had a prayer meeting yesterday at the residence of Dr. Satish Thomas and I took the Book of Jonah for a brief study. Before delving into the portion I wanted to know what my parish members felt about this book. I began with a question – If you had to explain the book of Jonah to a person who is not aware about the story what would you say or in simple terms what is the message of the Book of Jonah.

Many answers came – some said it talks about disobedience, some said it talks about God’s love that cannot be measured, some said 3 days in belly symbolized Jesus’ death burial and resurrection, some said it talks about redemption and it went on.  All are in a way correct. What do you think this story speaks about?

I feel more than anything it speaks about grace. The doctrine of grace may be the hardest doctrine in the Bible to accept. It’s not that grace is hard to understand. We know what the word means. Our problem comes in the application. Grace asks us to accept two things we don’t want to accept:

1. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves.

2. If God doesn’t save us, we will never be saved.

Nothing more clearly summarizes the true meaning of grace than the simple phrase found in Jonah 2:9, “Salvation is of the Lord."

You may wonder, “Where is the grace of God in this story?” The answer is simple. He let Jonah disobey. He didn’t kill him on the spot. He gave him the freedom to mess up his own life. That didn’t seem like grace at the time, but it was. God works even in the midst of our disobedience to bring us to himself. Sometimes God lets us go way off course so that when we finally see our sin for what it is, we are ready to return to the Lord.