By Tim Keller
Excerpt from “The Prodigal Prophet”
God’s compassion is not something abstract but concrete. It plays out not just in his attitude but in his actions toward human beings. It is intriguing that he speaks of these violent, sinful pagans as people “who do not know their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11). That is an exceedingly generous way to look at Nineveh! It’s a figure of speech that means they are spiritually blind, they have lost their way, and they haven’t the first clue as to the source of their problems or what to do about them. Obviously, God’s threat to destroy Nineveh shows that this blindness and ignorance is ultimately no excuse for the evil they have done, but it shows remarkable sympathy and understanding.
There are many people who have no idea what they should be living for, or the meaning of their lives, nor have they any guide to tell right from wrong. God looks down at people in that kind of spiritual fog, that spiritual stupidity, and he doesn’t say, “You idiots.” When we look at people who have brought trouble into their lives by their own foolishness, we say things like “Serves them right” or we mock them on social media: “What kind of imbecile says something like this?” When we see people of the other political party defeated, we just gloat. This is all a way of detaching ourselves from them. We distance ourselves from them partly out of pride and partly because we don’t want their unhappiness to be ours. God doesn’t do that. Real compassion, the voluntary attachment of our heart to others, means the sadness of their condition makes us sad; it affects us. That is deeply uncomfortable, but it is the character of compassion.
There are many people who have no idea what they should be living for, or the meaning of their lives, nor have they any guide to tell right from wrong.
God’s evident generosity of spirit toward the city could not be a greater indictment of Jonah’s ungenerous narrowness, what John Calvin calls his greatest sin, namely that he was “very inhuman” in his attitude toward Nineveh.
“They Don’t Know What They Are Doing”
If you are acquainted at all with the New Testament, it is impossible to read about this generous God without remembering Jesus. God is saying to Jonah, “I am weeping and grieving over this city — why aren’t you? If you are my prophet, why don’t you have my compassion?” Jonah did not weep over the city, but Jesus, the true prophet, did.
Jesus was riding into Jerusalem on the last week of his life. He knew he would suffer at the hands of the leaders and the mob of this city, but instead of being full of wrath or absorbed with self-pity, like Jonah, when he “saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace — but now it is hidden from your eyes . . . because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you’” (Luke 19:41– 2:44). “Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Luke 13:34).
On the cross, Jesus cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” (Luke 23:34). Jesus is saying, “Father, they are torturing and killing me. They are denying and betraying me. But none of them, not even the Pharisees, really completely understand what they are doing.” We can only look in wonder on such a heart. He does not say they are not guilty of wrongdoing. They are — that is why they need forgiveness. Yet Jesus is also remembering that they are confused, somewhat clueless, and not really able to recognize the horror of what they are doing. Here is a perfect heart — perfect in generous love — not excusing, not harshly condemning. He is the weeping God of Jonah 4 in human form.
Over a century ago the great Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield wrote a remarkable scholarly essay called “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” where he considered every recorded instance in the gospels that described the emotions of Christ. He concluded that by far the most typical statement of Jesus’s emotional life was the phrase “he was moved with compassion,” a Greek phrase that literally means he was moved from the depths of his being. The Bible records Jesus Christ weeping twenty times for every one time it notes that he laughs. He was a man of sorrows, and not because he was naturally depressive. No, he had enormous joy in the Holy Spirit and in his Father (cf. Luke 10:21), and yet he grieved far more than he laughed because his compassion connected him with us. Our sadness makes him sad; our pain brings him pain.
By far the most typical statement of Jesus’s emotional life was the phrase “he was moved with compassion.”
Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been. Yet, of course, he is infinitely more than that. Jesus did not merely weep for us; he died for us. Jonah went outside the city, hoping to witness its condemnation, but Jesus Christ went outside the city to die on a cross to accomplish its salvation.
Here God says he is grieving over Nineveh, which means he is letting the evil of the city weigh on him. In some mysterious sense, he is suffering because of its sin. When God came into the world in Jesus Christ and went to the cross, however, he didn’t experience only emotional pain but every kind of pain in unimaginable dimensions. The agonizing physical pain of the crucifixion included torture, slow suffocation, and excruciating death. Even beyond that, when Jesus hung on the cross, he underwent the infinite and most unfathomable pain of all — separation from God and all love, eternal alienation, the wages of sin. He did it all for us, out of his unimaginable compassion.
Reprinted from THE PRODIGAL PROPHET: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy, by Timothy Keller. Published on October 2, 2018 by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Timothy Keller, 2018.
Posted at: https://medium.com/redeemer-city-to-city/the-god-who-is-generous-7e83d26406f1