Wisdom 31 The 21st Century's Key Issue

[HKHaugan]

Wisdom 31 The 21^st Century’s Key Issue

I can’t seem to leave Jonah quite just yet. I started reading it in my third day in the hospital. I’m not sure why I was led to read it until the words began to take on a new meaning for me. New in the sense that a constant spiritual theme I’ve been dealing with for years was right there in Jonah.

Aloneness.

I’m not talking about feeling lonely. It’s a much deeper reality. It’s about living in a body that is unique, individual and self-containing out of which one cannot escape no matter what strategy is chosen. It’s the realization that no one can know, understand or fit into anyone else’s mind and heart experience. Conjecture is simply that, guesswork and limited perception. I believe aloneness is a timely timed timeless theme in our time that disciples of Jesus need to be concentrating on. Why? Aloneness is what makes us vulnerable to temptation, fear, being exploited, manipulated, self-conscious, searching for an identity, meaning and purpose; all this apart from God. We need to pursue the reality of aloneness for three reasons:  

First, every human being is an image of God born alone apart from God and others.  

Second, aloneness is the primary evidence of sin separating every human being from God.

Third, overcoming sin and its aloneness are the primary reasons Jesus became a human being.  

Jesus’ mission was to expose the source of sin, neutralize its power and, through faith, restore us to the Father through a relationship with Him. What Jonah does is to illustrate the problem of aloneness and set the stage for our minds to accept God’s plan of restoring our individuality from aloneness to a relationship with Him, personally. Jonah’s prayer, 2:2-9, is a kind of Declaration of Independence from sin and the world of fear as well as a Declaration of Dependence on the Lord God.

As I was reading Jonah there seemed to be a sense of something more than what I considered was my prior shallow acceptance of it. That is, I simply accepted it as the story of a man’s refusal to obey God and avoid spiritual responsibility. But it’s more. In order to let the Word of God sink in, you have to ponder it, wait on the Spirit for a deeper spiritual view unique to you. I happen to be someone who reads, writes and ponders at the same time. For me, the three are inseparable. I bounce from one to the other. So, I reread Jonah’s prayer and found the need to, as the Brits say, unpack it.

To begin, I counted Jonah’s personal references---I, me, my---numbering 23. His references to God were 16---you, your, Lord, God. Both were in just nine verses. They pointed to three overall themes, Jonah’s self-conscious aloneness, his personal belief and the internal conflict that results. These in turn reflect his intense sense of aloneness, his personal need for a personal God fighting against his desire to live life on his own terms. This is the basic stuff that goes on in every human being. Jonah is a believer who sins and a sinner who believes. Sound familiar?

Let’s move along. Jonah begins his prayer with a consciousness of distress. He is alone in his spirit aware of being in distress. Consider that word. There is stress but, dis-stress is a negative pressure that divides the self within. When we feel a stress that causes us to deal with conflict, the choice is the pressure point. You know within that the pressure of any choice is a ‘dissing’ experience unless of course, you have an external source of moral confidence that enables you to discern the difference between good stress and bad stress, ‘dis’stress. Jonah pleads his case before God after realizing his morally bad choices, the ‘dis’comfort he felt, running from God and the mission God gave him.

Jonah believed but he didn’t trust. His mind was in the right place, but his heart was nowhere near God. Consequently, he didn’t have the faith to follow God’s calling. He was religious about God, but he wasn’t relational with Him. Perhaps he was afraid not only of God but what God had called him to do. He just fled. We can also assume from the text that he had been raised a Hebrew, so he knew the history and heritage of his people, but it hadn’t become a personal experience.

I know in my own past I had been introduced to God through a local church. However, it was the ritual and the fellowship that got me involved, not the personal relationship. That came much later. Many come into a church fellowship, like their experience and take part in its activities believing they believe. That becomes their plateau and spiritual growth stops. They have an institutional relationship but not a personal one with God. Again, the whole point of Jesus coming into our human neighborhood was to restore us relationally to God and one another by bearing our sin and its aloneness on the Cross. This was done in the only way an image of God can respond to the Lord God, by faith.

Why faith?

Because God is faithful (Deut.7:9, Ps.33:4, 2Tim.2:13, Ps.91:4, 2Thess.3:3, 1Jn.1:9, 1Cor.1:9, 10:13). All human beings are images of God and therefore designed to be relationally faithful. Jesus is the living example of faith, faith to limit Himself to live alone in a human body, faith to live day by day obeying His Father’s will, faith to die alone on the Cross to fulfill His Father’s will for us, faith that raised Him from the dead to reign as King of Heaven. Then to give us the Holy Spirit that we may be reborn spiritually through a relationship with Jesus and live relationally with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit forever.

When Jesus said He was the way, the truth and the life (Jn.14:6), the way was being faithful from one moment to the next in the Spirit (Mt.4:1). The truth was His mind being faithfully guided by His Father’s Word (Mt.4:4). His life was His faithful heart trusting His Father in every next moment (Jn.14:20). He accepted death faithfully fulfilling His Father’s will to die in our place to restore us to Him and then rose from the dead having been faithful. “Yet to all who receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God…born of God (Jn.1:12-13).”

Jonah’s internal struggle was one of the building blocks in the Old Testament foundation preparing for the coming of Jesus, the cornerstone, our Restorer. More to come on Jonah’s prayer. It’s about extending ourselves beyond ourselves.