There are a lot of mistakes that we can see other people making, but the hardest thing for us to do is change how we act. When we look at other people, we can see the things that they are doing wrong and the things that they need to change. When we look at ourselves though, we struggle to see what we should do differently. Or if we see it, we choose not to change what we do. When we look at some of the biggest mistakes in history, we can see the things that they should have done. The Titanic should have had enough lifeboats, the people of Constantinople should have closed the gate behind them, and when NASA launched the Mars Climate mission they should have checked what unit of measurement the orbiter was sending out. The issue is that we are not them and they did not have foresight that was greater than our hindsight.
If we were to look at the story of Jonah, we can see a prophet who did not want to do the job of a prophet. His response to being called by God to go somewhere was for him to run away. That brings up red flags to us because we understand that there is no way for a person to hide from God. Jonah would have known that there is no way to hide from God from learning the stories that were in Genesis and Exodus. The issue is that Jonah did not think his decision through. When we look at our own mistakes and the things that led up to where we sin, we can see that we often do not think things through just like Jonah.
The issue comes when we act like Jonah in chapter 1, but do not act like Jonah in chapter 2. After Jonah had been swallowed by the fish, he offers a prayer to the Lord, and in that prayer, he talks about how he was close to death, but God saved him. Verse 6 serves as the transition point from where Jonah was sure about his own death, but God saved him “I went down to the moorings of the mountains; the earth with its bars closed behind me forever; yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God.” When we struggle to see the way out, we should rely on God. When we are lost in sin, we should rely on God. When we feel like there is no other way out, we should rely on God.
Jonah can serve as an example for us because his wounds were self-inflicted, and many of the things that we do that separate us from God are also self-inflicted. In the sports that I played, there were two kinds of bad losses. The first bad loss was the one where the other team was just that much better than we were. There was nothing that we could do because they had some skill advantage or some strategic advantage that we were not able to take advantage of. That one was less painful and more disappointing. The other kind of bad loss is where we had every opportunity to win, but we threw it all away. In this kind of loss, the only people that we can blame is ourselves. This one is much more painful because we must own it. The positive from this loss though is that if we look at it honestly, we can see how to fix the problem. The same thing applies to when we fall short of the glory of God, we can look back and fix the problem. We need to be like Jonah and recognize that God saved us from our sin and make the changes that we need to make.
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