Mad At God

Have you ever been mad at God?

I have.

I became a Christian in my 30’s, which is a little unusual. Quite a number of people recommit in their middle years, as they start looking around and wondering what it’s all about, but they were usually raised at least nominally Christian, while I was taught to think of faith as a crutch for the inadequate. Which it is, of course, but that’s another sermon. So God really had to hit me hard to wake me up, and I resented it.

It happened like this. In my personal life a long-standing relationship broke up, while at work I got a promotion and a transfer. My new boss was not only a Christian, he had gone to seminary and really knew his stuff. We soon found ourselves arguing theology, and I started rethinking my former poor opinion of Christianity. It looked like maybe being born again wasn’t just a last resort for drug addicts and alcoholics after all. In the meantime, having spent about a year with the personal ads going out with at least one new man a week, I began to get serious about one of them - who was a Christian. He started talking marriage, and I realized that I would have to come to terms with this Jesus stuff if we were going to go any further. So when I asked myself the big question, I understood that I had been looking for God all my life and that if Jesus really was “the way, the truth and the life” [Jn 14:6] as my friend had told me over pizza and beer the previous night, then I wanted Jesus.

No sooner had I come to that realization than my guy decided he wasn’t ready for a new relationship, sold his business, and moved to California. I was FURIOUS. At God. I spent the winter yelling at him, accusing him of bait-and switch tactics, kicking and screaming and crying “It’s not fair!” And finally I went to church - the one my friend had gone to, since I had liked what he told me of the pastor there, and the rest is history.

I did eventually figure out that if God hadn’t removed Bob from my life I would probably have confused the two in my mind, and never really gotten clear about which one I really loved. And I really did want God more. But once I had that figured out, I thought, why couldn’t I have both? Surely God could see how mature and well-balanced I had become, and reward me appropriately.

But he didn’t. I wasn’t getting what I wanted, and I resented it. I knew I was behaving badly, but I didn’t seem to be able to help it. And the more I sulked, the more I worried about whether or not God was going to give up on me. And the more I worried, the less I trusted, and - well, you can see it was not a shining moment on my spiritual journey. And then I discovered Jonah.

Now, most people think that the book of Jonah is a book about a reluctant evangelist being chased down, chastised by the boss and given one last chance to make good. And I suppose it is, really. But what spoke to me at that moment in my life was the last chapter.

Because, you see, when we read Scripture there’s always more than one layer of meaning, and more than one angle at which you can approach the story. God is very efficient - he can cram an awful lot of lessons into a fairly short space. We can choose to look at Jonah, and in so doing understand more about ourselves, or we can accept as given that we’re a whole lot more like Jonah than we want to admit, and turn around and look at God instead.

There are three ways people tend to be like Jonah. Listen and consider which one is most like you. First, Jonah ran in the opposite direction when God called him to Nineveh. Have you ever run away from God’s call on your life? Second, Jonah wanted bad people to be punished, not saved. The Ninevites were about as nasty a crew as you could ask for, and they were Israel’s enemies. Jonah had reason to dislike them. But God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways, are they? [Is 55:8] Does there lurk in your heart somewhere the conviction that some people are more worthy of God’s redeeming love than others? And third - Do you resent it when God takes away your comforts? Jonah was delighted when God caused the vine to grow up and give him shade. I’ll bet he thought he deserved it, after all, he had gone and preached to the Ninevites, hadn’t he, God got what he wanted, why did he have to go and pull the rug out from under Jonah again?