In my continued variation in reading, I have been reading “Surprised by Grace” by  Tullian Tchividjian, in which he takes a look at the story of Jonah as a vehicle for the gospel.  I really like Tchividjian’s writings because as a teacher, his thought and theology is firmly planted in the primacy of Jesus’ gospel, and in grace.  And in this little book, that foundation of his thinking remains abundantly clear.

From this morning’s reading, I gleaned a few items from his words.

The gospel was not meant to make bad people good, but dead people alive.  The gospel was not given to us to be a moral remedy;  it was given to us to wake us up, and to alter our very being.

God brought a storm into Jonah’s life not as judgment, but as an intervention.  God is ever working trying to help us find freedom and liberation from our sin nature and our self-dependence and self-reliance.  The storm in Jonah’s life, like the appearance of Jesus in the world, was offered as an intervention by God to Jonah, trying to shake him out of his running from God and into spiritual isolation.

Jonah is much like the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son.  Tchividjian points out there are two ways people run from God.  As a non-believer, we throw off the law and run into lawlessness, thinking it is where life is found.  As a “believer”, we may also nonetheless flee god by running into legalism, trying to hide in the folds of the law and our own self-efforts as a way to justify our own goodness before God.  The elder brother in the prodigal son story did this: he fled from God by hiding in his own self-reliance and self-effort.  He tried to hide in the goodness he thought he was making in his life.  Jonah does not flee from God into immorality.  He flees from God, well, by literally fleeing from God.

Flight is a normal tendency of the self-justifying human heart.  We find it easy to flee from God, others, and ourselves when we cannot or will not accept the reality of what truly is.

Jonah is one of several in the Bible who struggled with running away.  Jacob spent much of his life running.   Moses fled before he led.  One of God’s chief desires for us is that we learn how to not run from what unfolds within our lives.

Our self-reliance and self-dependence is not a demonstration of our faithfulness.  On the contrary, excelling in those qualities often signals we are in reality missing the point and the power of the gospel, and that we are living unto ourselves, and not in and with the guidance of God.

The gospel is a storm, and grace should cause some disturbance in our lives.  If it doesn’t, there is a good chance we haven’t let it penetrate far enough into our hearts to really do within us what He intended it to.