"Should I not be concerned about that great city?" Jonah 4:11
The book of Jonah ends with a question that speaks to the heart of what God is trying to do. Can God's Holiness and Righteousness ever be reconciled with God's Love and Compassion? Jonah is angry because he perceives that God has grown soft and wants to relent when God should really smite.
What Jonah, and probably us as well, has failed to understand is that when we ask God to smite those evil-doers we must be very careful because we could very well be the ones bring evil to the world, just as Jonah did to the innocent sailor on the sea. God tries to each Jonah this lesson by growing a vine to shade him (see Psalm 121 'the Lord will your shade at your right hand."] for which Jonah is very happy, but does not appear to thank God for it. It's just expected. When the vine withers, Jonah is angry unto death for what he must endure.
"You've taken it all for granted Jonah" God says. "You didn't make it grow and you didn't make it wither yet you're more concerned about this vegetation than you are real people."
When we get hooked on judgment we blind ourselves to God's other side; that of compassion and forgiveness. So how do we keep a healthy balance.
God's Answer: Jesus Christ
"For the Law was given through Moses, Grace and Truth came through Jesus Christ."
In Jesus we find judgment and mercy finally reconciled. The Good News is that in Jesus God's Judgment and God's Love are satisfied and we live without guilt in life and fear in death. Are you still holding on to God's Judgment waiting, hoping, longing for God to smite the wicked of which we're part?
“Thank You….”
Some might, after reading your entry entitled “God’s Answer: Jesus Christ” wonder why this response begins with the words “Thank You” and to whom that statement of gratitude is being expressed. “God” — answers the latter question first. “For loving us” — offers the reason for gratitude, because when you think about it, we wretched sinners neither deserve nor merit any of the blessings that the Father gives to us His wayward children, least of all His love, His caring, and His grace. How, then, with that realization of our undeservedness in mind, can we not 24/7 say, with the utmost thanksgiving and gratitude, “Thank You, God, for loving us”?
But, “How does God love us?”
“How does He not?” I believe, would be the easier question to answer.
But, for the sake of this response, consider the first sentence in the entry, “For the Law was given through Moses; Grace and Truth came through Jesus Christ.” There are numerous nouns in that sentence: the persons: Moses and Christ; the things: the Law, Grace, and Truth. Those are the ones present; but is there a missing noun? An unstated yet understood noun? Sure. It’s God. The sentence does not say that Moses “thunk and thunk” and then created and, therefore, gave the Law. No three cheers for Moses here. The sentence says the Law was created and given to us “through” Moses — Moses, God’s instrument. God created and then gave the Law, “to His people Israel” because of His love for them and for us, “we who were not yet in our mother’s womb.”
The same holds true for Grace and Truth. Christ — Emmanuel, “God with us” — is His Father’s instrument for telling the world that His Father has never abandoned it, that He NEVER will, and that He continues to love and care for all of His creation and all of the people — all of the people — within it, by sending “His only begotten Son” to live among us on earth as both His human and divine instrument for the sharing of Grace and Truth with we wretched sinners.
But, hold it! This Grace and Truth, given so freely, yet so undeservedly, is not so our lives on this earth will perfect. Earth is not the end, the destination of the journey.
Think about it! God loves us so much, that He wants us to come and live with Him. Does that not just “blow your mind”? It does mine! Me, a wretched sinner, a “more-than-broken piece of pottery.” God loves “me” so much that He wants me to choose to come and live with Him, and so He invites me to do so, and He shows me how. God — the almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth — He wants “me” to come and spend eternity living with Him. How? “Beam me up, Scottie!” No. Through His Grace and His Truth, as lived by His Son and as recorded in His Holy Word — He, through His Son, is truly, “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
Is it any wonder that once we find the missing noun in the first sentence of this entry and think upon what we have been given and the love that has “been shed for us,” that we can do nothing less than say, 24/7, “Thank You, God, for loving us”?