Swallowed Up by Fear and Loathing

By Audrey Stallsmith

Since our pastor had to retire abruptly due to his health, I’ve become somewhat ruthless in my pursuit of substitute pulpit fillers. One of those I recently contacted is now working as a trucker. Although willing to help, he was out west somewhere at the time I e-mailed him and didn’t know for sure when he would be back.

He had a heart attack shortly after that, though, and mentioned that he wouldn’t be able to return to the road for at least a month or two. Of course, I immediately pounced with a reminder that—as long as he wasn’t doing anything else—we could use him to cover a couple Sundays in October.

This actually is the trucker’s second heart attack and another of the pastors I contacted had hip problems which wouldn’t allow him to stand for long. Many, of course, are old enough that they should have retired long ago but keep getting pestered by people like me, since we are far from the only church in the conference which is now pastor-less. (One of those retiree wannabees is taking another couple Sundays in October.)

But I imagine there could be some preachers who—like Jonah—are running from their call. One of his reasons was animus against those he’d been asked to help. The Assyrians were Israel’s enemies, after all, and among the nastiest of Old Testament nations. So, his preaching to them would be tantamount to an American being asked to minister to the Nazis back in the 40s or to the Russians today. It might actually be considered treason, not to mention that the Assyrians probably would take him for a spy and the results would not be pleasant.

As Jonah would make clear later, he wanted them blasted off the face of the earth. That was why he’d had no intention of doing anything that would make God change His mind about their destruction. In fact, the reluctant prophet would have preferred to be standing at a safe distance cheering as the fire and brimstone fell.  

Timothy Keller notes in Rediscovering Jonah that, if that prophet “had to choose between the security of Israel and loyalty to God. . .he was ready to push God away. That is not just concern and love for one’s country; that is a kind of deification of it.” 

Keller goes on to point out that Jonah “still felt, to some degree, that mercy had to be deserved, and they didn’t deserve it.” He had somehow contrived to overlook the fact that he didn’t deserve it either.

Cultures without the true God, like the Assyrians, do tend to be cruel—as were those of the cannibals before missionaries began ministering to them. But even those which purport to serve God can turn as cruel as the Nazis did when they stop listening to Him. Would Jonah really have enjoyed watching an entire city go up in flames? In that case, he couldn’t claim to be any better than his country’s enemies were.

Yet, every time our nation is attacked, people talk about bombing the hell out of our foes. Unfortunately, the hell cannot be expelled from anybody that way. Such a change requires repentance and belief in God. And, as Romans 10:14 reminds us, “How can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them?”    

Jonah had to be swallowed by a whale before he would agree to be the one who did the telling. Of course, it is more common for God to use other types of disaster to get our attention, but a whale will suffice.

When I say (in my title) that Jonah was swallowed up by fear, I don’t—of course—mean fear of God but plain old panic added to the fear that God didn’t really know what He was doing. That affects most of us sooner or later. We often say to Him rather plaintively, “But things were going so well. Why would you allow such and such to happen?”

Or not to happen, as the case may be. When Jonah heard about the possible imminent destruction of Assyria, he must have begun daydreaming about how much easier Israel’s existence would be without that oppressor, forgetting that ease seldom turned Israel toward God. Rather the opposite, in fact!

No, fear of God as in awe over his power isn’t all that difficult. In fact, after contemplating the intricacies of nature, I don’t understand how people can’t believe in a Creator.

Believing that he always has our best interests at heart is tougher, even for us non-prophets. Perhaps He sometimes has to toss us overboard to force us to swim or allow us to be swallowed up in darkness before we can understand what light really means. For instance, I suspect God killed the gourd plant shading Jonah simply because Jonah was getting too comfortable falling back into his chosen role as a bystander and not making any further attempt to help the residents of Nineveh.

It may sometimes be necessary for God to jar us out of our inaction too, rather that inertia derives from fear and loathing—as Jonah’s did—or simply from more common laziness or complacency. So, we’ll have to let our fear of God, as in recognition of His omnipotence, conquer our other fear that He doesn’t know what He is doing. After all, His unlimited power means that He understands us better than we understand ourselves and knows what is best for us better than we do.

Meanwhile, I’ve concluded that many part-time pastors find a shepherd-less church about as scary as Nineveh was to Jonah. But we need to keep looking because we need somebody to keep reassuring us about the grace of God.

That unmerited love may be proved most strongly not by the sparing of Nineveh but by God patiently continuing to work with a prophet as determinedly spiteful as Jonah was. If his story proves anything, it proves that you can hear about the grace of God from childhood without really understanding it.