I don’t really have the “post-Christmas blues,” but I probably should. The latest (January/February) issue of HM Magazine is late. Normally this issue is given to the printer before Thanksgiving and then delivered by early to mid-December. This time, however, I kept the issue late, where I skipped the Thanksgiving week to take a holiday with my family. I was able to turn the last files in while hanging out with my friends Nate and Tessa Allen (from Destroy Nate Allen), who stayed up all night with me on the morning of December 11th. It felt good to get those 64 pages of files to the printer (and have them all approved for printing) by 5:30 am that morning.
Come to find out later, however, that a check we mailed to the printer did not arrive. In fact, that sucker (a Priority Mail envelope with tracking abilities) took 11 days to get from Austin, TX to Oak Creek, WI. Why it was “processed” on 12/20 in Oak Creek WI is a mystery to me, as the package was addressed for Chicago, IL. My printer, God bless them, put a “press hold” on this issue, since the previous one hadn’t been paid for yet. Fair enough, right? I think so. What sucks, though, is that I didn’t get notified that they hadn’t rec’d the payment. Our beloved Heaven’s Metal Fanzine was on this press hold along with HM #141, but it got printed and shipped out around the time that the check should have arrived (on Dec 11th, to be exact), so we assumed that the payment must’ve been rec’d and we could get our concentration back on HM Magazine business. When I called to check in on the progress of our Living Sacrifice issue, however, I discovered that there was a “press hold” on the thing. This didn’t make sense at first, because I thought it’d been lifted (and I didn’t do anything to qualify for an additional press hold), but after a few phone calls and a trace on the check/package, that’s when I discovered that said package had never arrived.
Oh boy! This triggered one of those, “gotta get on this immediately” things on a day that was packed with “To Do” lists. After slapping that whopper of a print bill on a credit card, I figured this problem would get resolved and at least one day of work would have taken place (on the 23rd) before the printer took a holiday. Come to find out today that the payment was only processed today and, to make things even better, the job would start today, as if my files had arrived today instead of December 11th. So, this means that the Jan/Feb issue will be mailed out from the printer on January 7th.
This will hopefully be a magical day, by the way, as it’s the day that the University of Texas Longhorns (my alma-mater) gets to play for the National Championship in football.
After traveling to Houston twice for the holidays (once on Christmas Eve and then again the day after), we arrived home late on Saturday night and decided to sleep in and skip church the following morning. I recommend doing this at least once every two years, just to remind yourself that you belong to the body of Christ and that your community/family benefits from your consistent attendance but that it’s not a legalistic thing but a joy, a choice and a loving thing.
That night I had a great sleep, and I woke up with a prompting to hit my knees and open the Word. I felt like God wanted me to read Jonah, so I did. I forgot how short that book was, though I was prepared to read a longer one. The brevity of it allowed me to re-read it and portions of it a few times to glean understanding.
The first thing that jumped out at me while reading this New International Version translation was God asked Jonah to “preach against” the city of Nineveh. I have been on a kick of sorts the past couple years, focusing on how I want to be known more for what I am for, rather than what I am against. I’m not real big on boycotts and protests and rebuking/confronting things. It makes more sense to be about doing the “Do’s” of the Bible rather than focusing on the “Do Not’s,” which (by God’s grace) are pretty easy to avoid, actually. So, with that attitude firmly entrenched in my heart, a command for one of God’s servants to “preach against” something/someone/someplace really jumps out at me.
God said, “…its wickedness has come up before Me.” I find that interesting and I take it serious. Makes me wonder how God treats the nations of the world at the present time. I kind of take the attitude that, knowing there is a large and thriving remnant in various locations around the world, perhaps that somehow “earns” God’s favor and pleasure. I know that when I find something in my children worth delighting in, that’s what I do – I delight in it. I take joy. I thank God. I smile. I imagine when God’s people seek His face, worship Him and love one another that He takes delight in them/us. And, just like I am wont to do as a parent, He probably goes out of His way to protect and bless those children.
I believe there is a balance, which gives wide room for theologians to disagree over how things are done on earth. I think that God sits on His throne and allows us to live apart from His intervention, like a Deist would believe. One example of this would be rainfall – both the positive, crop-growing/life-giving kind and the disasterous flood-causing/destructive kind.
“The rain falls on the just and the unjust.”
Good things happen to “bad” people and bad things happen to “good” people. I think this shows that God allows us a certain amount of autonomy. I differ from a strict Deist worldview, however, because I believe that God is a Father and is very active in our lives. I view my relationship with God as being real and alive. I believe in divine healing. I believe in miracles. I think God is very active in our world, working through you and I as well as supernaturally. I think He has set up an order or system where He chooses to chiefly limit Himself to working through and as a result of prayer.
We all know the story of Jonah and the whale, but most people that take Christianity seriously soon discover that the Bible did not say “whale,” but “fish.” Whales apparently have smaller openings in their mouths than some fish, which would present some challenges to explain. Another misquoted myth is that Noah brought the animals on two-by-two. A simple reading of the account in Genesis tell us that God instructed Noah to “Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.” Anyway, back to the point I was going to make: we’re all pretty familiar with the story of Jonah – how he runs from God and His instructions to preach against Nineveh, boards a ship and sets sail to Tarshish. A storm erupts and the sailors on the ship start freaking out, wondering why the storm has come upon them.
It’s interesting that they cried out to their own gods and the Captain rebuked Jonah, “Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us, and we will not perish.” The sailors cast lots to determine who was responsible for this calamity. They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. That’s an interesting way of doing things, isn’t it?
Jonah fessed up that it was all his fault. “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.” This terrified them, it says, and they asked him what he had done, because he had already told them that he was “running away from the Lord.”
That’s so dramatic. That reminds me of a time that I picked up a hitchhiker, who told me he was headed back to Florida to kill his dad. It seems those running or traveling with a dramatic reason and motivation are so focused and determined that they will share their motivation and the slightest prompting.
After Jonah told them to toss him overboard they did their best to not do this. They tried to make it back to dry land, but the storm got worse. They actually prayed to Jonah’s God: “O Lord, please do not let us die for taking this man’s life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, O Lord, have done as you pleased.”
It’s amazing that Jonah survived for three days and three nights inside the fish. I presume that he was in a pocket of air that gave him enough oxygen to survive that long. It’s possible that God could have suspended the laws that Jonah’s lungs operated under during that time, but I bet it was miraculous in the sense that God provided the oxygen.
I was impressed with Jonah’s prayer. It’s so eloquent and partly made me ashamed that not many of my prayers of late have been nearly as eloquent. I don’t think that God necessarily listens with more favor if our words rhyme or are composed in a more intelligent way than most… I think honesty and vulnerability are key points here.
“In my distress I called to the Lord,
and he answered me.
From the depths of the grave I called for help,
and you listened to my cry.
You hurled me into the deep,
into the very heart of the seas,
and the currents swirled about me:
all your waves and breakers swept over me.
I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight:
yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’
The engulfing waters threatened me,
the deep surrounded me:
seaweed was wrapped around my head.
To the roots of the mountains I sank down:
the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you brought my life up from the pit,
O Lord my God.“When my life was ebbing away,
I remembered you, Lord,
and my prayer rose to you,
to your holy temple.“Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
But I, with a song of thanksgiving,
will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
Salvation comes from the Lord.”
What a prayer! It is definitely truthful. Jonah declares where he is and what trouble he is in. I like his line about being wrapped in seaweed. That’s descriptive. It probably bothered him and made him panic. I think I would if I was sinking and tangled up. He was out of control. I wonder what kind of fish it was. When the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time to “go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you,” Jonah went. The description of the city being “important” stood out to me. It required three days to get there. Just like the reference of “…just as Jonah was in the fish for three days” that Jesus made to His own death and resurrection, anytime the number of three days is mentioned in the Bible, I pay attention. But the part that stands out here to me is that the city was important, strategic, populated.
Jonah told the people there, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” The Ninevites believed God, declared a fast and all of them put on sackcloth. Wow. They took this repentence thing seriously. Good for them. The king of Nineveh even rose from his throne, took of his royal robes and put on sackcloth and sat in dust. He made a public statement, too: “…Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”
God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways and had compassion on them. It’s funny (and really very sad, actually) that Jonah got mad about this. He said, “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee 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. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
God chastised him, “Have you any right to be angry?” God lets Jonah have his little pity party, but He interrupts it with a vine, shade and a worm to eat the vine. He teaches him an object lesson about His sovereignty, I guess. God underscores His purpose and His motivation in His reply: “Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
Here is a great Gospel and Missions lesson: God went out of His way to reach a people group that were not His. Perhaps Jonah was mad because he was a racist or he hated people from Nineveh (or thought he was better than them). Or maybe it was just a petty self-importance that boiled down to “us” (the Jews) vs. “them” (non-Hebrew countries). This book, however, underscores God’s love for all peoples. He has called all men to Himself and goes out of His way (and involves us in the process) of drawing all men to Himself.
This is probably one of the reasons why I can’t seem to stay in a state of blues surrounding the dumb luck of this issue of HM Magazine. There are bigger things to focus on. May God be glorified and may He redeem mankind to Himself.
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