“He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”
When you meet someone for the first time you really don’t have a deep understanding of who this person is. You have some preconceived notions or maybe some background on this person from a friend, but you really don’t know him or her until you sit down and start the journey of understanding.
Jonah knew God. Our verse is God in one sentence. He knew Him because Jonah was a prophet of God. He was tasked with being the Lord’s voice for all of Israel. So, when the Lord told him to go to Nineveh, he knew exactly what the Lord was sending him to do. His understanding of God is spelled out above. God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abundant in lovingkindness and one who relents from calamity. This definition of God was not what Jonah was feeling for the Ninevites. They were an ungodly people who didn’t even know the difference between their right and left hand, nor did they have any knowledge of animals. (verse 11) In short, they were a people group despised by the Israelites and avoided at all costs. This was the people who the Lord told Jonah to go give a message to. Not only was Jonah angry that he had to go, but he was also still angry after being thrown into the sea and swallowed by a fish and vomited out on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This was where he was told a second time to go to Nineveh. Reluctantly, he obeyed and the entire city turned to God. What a huge testimony. You would think Jonah would be excited to see this, but his anger was deep and he tells God that he is angry to point of death.
When you walk with the Lord, you give up your way of looking at things in this world. Paul tells us that we should pick up our cross daily. In other words, we should trust in the Lord with all of heart, mind, soul, and strength to the point where we see things the way the Lord would. This is a constant battle for most of us. When the world is going crazy around us and seems to be affecting us, our self would like to enact some vengeance and get back at these idiots. This was the spot Jonah was in. Nineveh was in no position to follow the Lord and did not seem like they wanted any part of God. The beginning of the book tells us that the sins of Nineveh have come up before God and it was time to do something about it. Judgment, fire and brimstone, a plague or something else would have been warranted, but Jonah knew about the compassion and lovingkindness of God. This is why he ran, because they did not deserve the grace and mercy of God. But Jonah was God’s chosen man to bring this ungodly people a taste of the Lord God who made the heavens and the earth.
You may be in the same spot. Things have not worked out in your favor and moreover your sworn enemy seems to be graced with opportunity that they do not deserve. Or an old boyfriend or girlfriend finds true love in spite of the fact they treated you like dirt. It hurts to see those things, but we must throw those things at the foot of the cross of Christ. We must let it go. Let it go and lift up your eyes to the Lord and trust Him and His ways every day. We may not understand all of the why’s in life or see the vengeance played out. But we must trust in the Lord and know that He is working and putting those pegs in your timeline of life in the perfect spots. Do you trust the Lord with your future or you still sitting on a hill overlooking what God has done and complaining saying, “that is not how I would have done it”? It is time to let it go.
Let It Go 
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