Is It Good?

When Nineveh turned from its violence and God relented, it should have been good news. For Jonah, it was the worst news he had ever heard. In Jonah 4:1–4, the Hebrew is blunt: it was evil to Jonah, a great evil. The city let go of its evil, God let go of the disaster he had threatened, and the only evil left in the story was sitting inside the prophet.

He tells us why. Jonah quotes Israel's oldest confession about who God is, the words God spoke to Moses after the golden calf: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, relenting from disaster. He did not run because God is harsh. He ran because God is good to the people he wanted gone. Then he flips it, calling God's mercy evil and his own death good. God does not argue or strike. He asks a question, much like the one he once asked Cain: Is it good that you are angry?

That question does not only hang over Jonah. It hangs over all of us who know God's goodness by heart. Sometimes God's goodness goes where we would not send it, comes later than we want, or looks nothing like we pictured. How we react when God does not do what we want shows what we really believe about him. When our prayer becomes "God, I'll call you good, if…," whatever follows the "if" has taken the place God is supposed to have. And for those of us in a season of joy, the question is whether our gratitude holds when that same goodness reaches someone else.

Moses saw only God's back, and Jonah had only the words, but we have seen God's goodness in the face of Jesus. Our sin nailed him to a cross, and God made that cross the place his goodness saved us. Because of that, we can trust his goodness even when it does not go our way. God still asks us what he asked Jonah, and he is patient enough to wait for our answer.