Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Hello, dear ones, on this overcast wet afternoon.

I made a rare blunder this morning: I failed to make tea for Becki and deliver it to her in bed where she’s just waking up or engaged in her devotional routine. I became so spaced out (maybe mad at Jonah) with what I was doing that I hadn’t even seen her till she drove up to the studio door at 6:30am, on her way to go pick up little Nicholas. Oh well—I think she’s still willing to live with me. With her on that excursion, I did a jog alone with the dog. Thano and I were processing firewood when they arrived.

It shakes me up to realize that darkness is only about two hours away! I need to be making some more tracks.

Have a great rest of your day.

Love, Dad/Ray.

What?! Are you kidding me! Please excuse me while I yell at Jonah with my loud imagination. “You turkey, Jonah! What are you thinking! Are you brain-dead? Who do you think you are anyway? Displeased and angry at God?! Man!—if you’re going to step into the ring to take on the heavyweight champion of the universe, aren’t you a little under-weight? You’re no more qualified or invincible than the tiny bug I just squashed on my desktop. Besides, look at where you’ve come from. Look how God has proven Himself to you and preserved you when you sure couldn’t! For this?!—so you can get in His face?!—again?! Get a life!” (I’m really not as good at telling people off as it may appear. Writing like this is so slow-motion that it’s easy to handle. I’m a fairly competent shadow-boxer. In real-life confrontations, I’m a wimp.)

Jonah so irritated me this morning that I began writing a little song. Maybe you can sing it with me (to the tune of the kid’s song, “Only a Boy Named David”):

Jonah’s prayer inside that big fish was sterling. But this prayer here is about as perverse and stupid as anything I’ve ever read in scripture. Let me cite it so we can get irritated together: “He prayed to the Lord, ‘O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live’” (4:2-3). It still amazes me why God didn’t just get out His little fly swatter and end the irritation right there. Loony Jonah was so committed and bound by his stupid prejudice that any good judgment he may have had was scrambled. He may have wanted to argue, “Don’t you understand, LORD, that these lousy people are a bunch of pig-eating, cigarette-smoking, cava-drinking, beetlenut-chewing, uncircumcised gentiles?—and they have been enemies of Israel for as long as anyone can remember?!” (Note: Throwing in those references to cava and beetlenut are influences from our cross-cultural past.)

Twice the LORD asks Jonah to think carefully about his rights. “Have you any right to be angry?” (4:4). “Do you have any right to be angry about the vine?” (4:9). Finally the LORD asks, “Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (4:11). Can you imagine any thought more perverse than the idea that a little cockroach of a human has the self-qualifying right to tangle with the Most High—and straighten Him out?

To be sure, religion without compassion has to be one of the ugliest and most perverse forms of human life on planet earth. If and when you run into it, your best response is to run away. It is NOT of God!—even though the basic message may be.