Jonah …. Aaahhhh Jonah.  I am not certain I like the fact that I can so easily and quickly relate to this man.

Jonah was given direction by God– he was told to go to Nineveh and “preach against it”.  Nineveh was a very large and important city in that day.  It would soon become the head of the great Assyrian empire.  It was also a city of great sin.

In the book of Jonah, we are not given very much information about the town or the people of this place.  Because I love the history of the Bible, I’m almost tempted to seek out what was going on in Nineveh during this time.  However, when God was speaking to me about Jonah, it wasn’t the “other people or the other place” He was talking to me about.  It was all about me.  And this book in the Bible is about Jonah.

We are not told specifically in God’s Word what it was that offended Jonah so much about his assignment.  Was it the people he disliked?  They were not “his people”.  The Assyrians were a very fierce and wicked people at this time in history.  They were about to become a world power and the prophet Nahum does tell us they conquered viciously and took over lands everywhere they went.

Maybe I can understand … am I supposed to admit this?  Maybe they looked different on the outside… Heaven forbid they had a different skin color.  Perhaps they had a different “culture” and just weren’t raised the same as Jonah was.  We don’t know why Jonah had such a distaste for these Assyrians.  Maybe it went back generations and he was just raised to dislike them… Continue reading “Racing Jonah or Embracing God?” →