Obadiah is the shortest book in the Old Testament. Twenty-one verses. One nation under judgment — Edom, Israel’s eastern neighbor, descended from Esau, who had stood by and rejoiced when Jerusalem fell. Jonah is barely longer. Forty-eight verses. One reluctant prophet, one Gentile city, and one God who saved both. Together, these two short books form one of the most uncomfortable arguments in Scripture: God’s grace and his judgment have the same author, and neither belongs to Israel alone.
Walter Kaiser Jr. observes that the theology of Jonah revolves around the extension of the grace of God to the Gentiles — an amplification of the original promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed through his offspring. Obadiah and Jonah arrive at this from opposite directions. Obadiah judges a nation that mocked God’s people. Jonah saves a nation that hated God’s people. Both prove the same thing: there is one God of all the earth, and his standard does not bend for the people closest to him or the people farthest from him. The day of the LORD is for everyone.
“The Day of the LORD”
The theology of the book of Jonah revolves around the extension of the grace of God to Gentiles. It is another amplification of Genesis 12:3.
Jonah’s confession in chapter 4 is one of the most quietly devastating sentences in the Old Testament. He runs from God’s call to Nineveh because he knows what will happen if he obeys. The Ninevites will repent. God will relent. And God will be exposed, in front of his prophet, as exactly the kind of God Jonah did not want to serve — gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in ḥesed. This was not a complaint about God’s character. This was a complaint that God’s character extended to people Jonah had decided were beneath it.
That is the test. The God of Israel is also the God of Nineveh. The God of the covenant is also the God of Edom — even when Edom is being judged for what Edom has done. The same standard that condemns the worst of the Gentile nations also makes mercy available to them when they turn. Obadiah and Jonah are not contradictions. They are the same gospel told from two angles, and they are designed to dismantle the assumption that God belongs to your tribe in a way he does not belong to the tribe across the border.
Most of us have a Nineveh. A person, a group, a category of people we would secretly prefer God not save. We do not say it that way out loud — we have learned to be polite about it — but Jonah says the part out loud, and the discomfort of his honesty is the whole point of the book. The mercy of God is staggering. It is also, sometimes, the thing we resent in him.
The question is not whether God’s mercy bothers you in theory. The question is whose face appears in your mind when you ask whether God’s mercy is fair. That face is your Nineveh. And the truth is, you cannot be the recipient of God’s mercy without also being the agent of it. The same hand that holds you also holds them. To resent that is to misunderstand the gospel you have been receiving.⁸⁴
Whose face appears in your mind when you wonder whether God’s mercy is fair — and what would it mean to ask God to do for them what he has already done for you?
Someone in your life is convinced they are too far gone for God’s mercy. They have decided they are their own Nineveh. They have done the math on themselves, and the math says no. What they need is a friend who has read Jonah and understood it — who can tell them, without flinching, that the grace of God is not a budget that runs out at the city limits.
Tell them about Nineveh. The most violent empire of its day. The ones who skinned their enemies and built towers of skulls. And one prophet, sent reluctantly, with one sentence — and a city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand was spared. If God did that for Nineveh, the answer for your friend is settled before they ask it.
Who in your life has decided they are too far gone — and how could you tell them what God did for Nineveh as if it were the most relevant news they have heard this year?
The household of disciple-makers raises people whose mercy is bigger than their tribe. That is rare and that is hard, and it is exactly what the gospel requires. The opposite of Jonah is not someone who has eliminated all of his prejudices — it is someone who, when God sends them to their Nineveh, goes. Not because they have purified their heart in advance, but because they trust the God who is sending them more than the heart that is resisting.
Teach your household that the mercy of God is not a club they belong to. It is a river they have stepped into, and the river is still running, and the banks are wider than they have been told. That kind of household stops sorting people into deserving and undeserving and starts noticing that all of us are downstream of mercy we did nothing to earn.
Who is the person you have written off as undeserving of God’s mercy — and what does it reveal about your heart that you would prefer they not receive it?
Write down the names of three people or groups you have quietly assumed are beyond God’s mercy. Then write a one-sentence prayer for each one — asking God to extend to them what he has already extended to you.
⁸³ Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Promise-Plan of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), Chapter 9: The Prophetic Era.
⁸⁴ “Loneliness Is Dangerous,” vimeo.com/kathykoch.
⁸⁵ “The Fruit of the Spirit: Gentleness (Controlled Strength),” vimeo.com/kathykoch.