Wednesday of the 27th Week in Course
Have you ever been angry with God? I don’t mean you feel inconvenienced by something that happens–a fender-bender, a sudden rain shower that leaves you without an umbrella, an extra-long work day–no, I mean really upsetting things. A sudden death of a good friend or relative, a financial emergency, a lost job. Those are the kinds of things that could cause you to look up and say “why, Lord? I’m really hacked at you right now!”
Here’s Jonah, who’s a kind of joke of a prophet, and he is really ticked. He’s gone to a lot of trouble to come to sin-city, to Nineveh, to reluctantly give them the word of the Lord. And just a few words sends them to prayer and repentance. Have you ever worn sackcloth? I mean like a potato sack? That’s rough material next to your skin, and CBD cream won’t do much to help you wear it. So, if you were here yesterday, you hear that they even set their animals to repentance, top to bottom, king to pauper.
And God relented and did not destroy the city. Was Jonah pleased that his anemic words, delivered under protest, were incredibly effective? Of course not. Here’s his prayer: “I pray thee, LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Therefore now, O LORD, take my life from me.” He’s telling God that he is so embarrassed at his effectiveness, saving the lives of his enemies, that he wants God to kill him. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, then maybe you can get a sense of how we ought to look at ourselves when there is a catastrophe in our lives and we want to scream at God.
Jonah’s problems were all self-manufactured. He heard God call him to go east, so he took a ship bound west. He and the boat were caught in a tempest clearly aimed at turning Jonah around, so he asked them to drown him instead of helping him do what he’d been told to do. He finally obeyed God and then in unprecedented, undreamed of success, he just griped and asked for death. There was no more pathetic prophet in history.
So when we want to yell curses at God, perhaps we first should ask if our peril has somehow been brought on by our own stupid decision somewhere. I know that’s something I’ve had to repent of from time to time. Aren’t we all needing to make a list of people who have done wrong to us, and then make sure our names are on the top of the list. Pray for your enemies, starting with yourself.
And how do we pray? Luke records a slightly different version of the Lord’s Prayer than Matthew. “Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread; and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation.” It does teach us how to pray. First, we praise the Father for His goodness, then we petition Him to make His kingdom, his Lordship, present on earth. We ask for our daily sustenance, recognizing that even if we earned the paycheck, God made it possible, and God is responsible for the crops and the shelter and the whole goodness of creation. Finally we pray that we can treat our enemies with forgiveness in the hopes that God will treat us identically, and keep us from the temptations of the devil. Praise, thanks, repentance and petition. Isn’t that the essence of prayer?
Does all your family realize that we all have that responsibility to Our Lord?
