Faith & Insight: Do you do well to be angry?

We are not the final frontier in the kingdom of God. God has other people where we live he is calling to himself, and we know this because he didn’t save you and then bring you to heaven. He left us here because we have work to do in building his kingdom, not our own.

The prophet Jonah was a person who had experienced God’s loving-kindness as both a faithful Israelite and as a rebellious servant. God tasked him with taking a message of destruction to the city of Nineveh and Jonah, because of his aversion to their sin, sailed to modern-day Spain instead. But through the actions of the ship’s crew and God’s divine intervention, Jonah was returned to the shore and chose to bring the message God had asked.

Once this message was heard in Nineveh (once the largest city on earth), the reaction was not as Jonah predicted. His message was simple, “yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown” and the entire city trusted the word of a foreign prophet, repented and hoped that in their turning from violence, God would turn from his.

And he did. And this angered Jonah as he knew God would forgive them anyway, so what was the point of risking his life? If God forgives anyway and I’m already forgiven, why bother going to others and warning them? This heart isn’t just isolated to an eighth century B.C. prophet, but is found in many Christians who claim Christ but bemoan the implications of it.

God asks Jonah “Do you do well to be angry?” and by extension asks every person who calls him Lord. We have a lot of things that anger us, from politics to pain to possessions (or lack thereof), but our anger always stems from what we perceive as being stolen from us.

I know people have taken from you, money or peace or safety or even years of your life. But if we claim Christ, don’t we abandon every other claim? Is there anything that’s been taken that God will not restore a hundred-fold?

In the end, Jonah decides to camp out and see if God will destroy the Ninevites. In doing so, he camps out on his own sense of loss and sees if God won’t make others pay for it, all the while knowing he won’t. And he knows this because God didn’t make Jonah pay for his.

There’s far too much work to do to count our losses and add to our grievances, as we have a kingdom to build. God’s calling all men and women to himself and inviting you to join him in this work, knowing it will cost you your life as you know it to obtain a life you could never imagine. And in this work, the victories will stand eternally and defeats forgotten and buried in the same ground that held his son, the true and better Jonah who not only heralded the message of the kingdom but went through the deepest darkness for three days to make it a reality.

Fred Kingman is the students pastor at LifePoint Church in Minden.