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Book: The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God's Mercy
Quotes of Book: The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah
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  1. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    Jesus did not merely weep for us; he died for us. Jonah went outside the city, hoping to witness its condemnation, but Jesus Christ went outside the city to die on a cross to accomplish its salvation.
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  2. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    When you indulge yourself in bitter thought, it feels so satisfying to fantasize about payback. But slowly and surely it will enlarge your capacity for self-pity, erode your ability to trust and enjoy relationships, and generally drain the happiness out of your daily life. Sin always the conscience, locks you in the prison of your own defensiveness and rationalizations, and eats you up slowly from the inside.
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  3. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    Why was God sending a deluge of disappointments? "Tis in this way," the Lord replied, in essence: "I am ANSWERING your prayers for grace and faith. I am only trying to liberate you from the things that enslave you, drive you, and control you. Do you not see that if you loved me supremely, more than anything else, you'd be truly free? Find your all in me."
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  4. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    When Christian believers care more for their own interests and security than for the good and salvation of other races and ethnicities, they are sinning like Jonah. If they value the economic and military flourishing of their country over the good of the human race and the furtherance of God's work in the world, they are sinning like Jonah.
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  5. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    Everyone gets an identity from something. Everyone must say to himself or herself, "I'm significant because of This" and "I'm acceptable because I'm welcomed by Them." But then whatever This is and whoever They are, these things become virtual gods to us, and the deepest truths about who we are. They become things we must have under any circumstances. I recently spoke to a man who had been in meetings in which a financial institution decided to invest in a new technology. Privately, the individuals in the room admitted to him that they had real reservations about the effect of the technology on society. They thought it would eliminate many jobs for every one new job it produced, and that it might be bad for the youth who would primarily use it. But to walk away from the deal would have meant leaving billions of dollars on the table. And no one could imagine doing that. When financial success commands allegiance that is unconditional and that cannot be questioned, it functions as a religious object, a god, even a "salvation."2
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  6. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    Jonah wants a God of his own making, a God who simply smites the bad people, for instance, the wicked Ninevites and blesses the good people, for instance, Jonah and his countrymen. When the real God-not Jonah's counterfeit-keeps showing up, Jonah is thrown into fury or despair.
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  7. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    In literature, plays, and cinema, substitutionary sacrifice is always the most riveting and moving plot point. In the movie The Last of the Mohicans, British major Duncan Heyward asks his Indian captors if he might die in the flames so that Cora, whom he loves, and Nathaniel can go free. When, as he is being dragged away, Duncan cries, "My compliments, sir! Take her and get out!" we are electrified by his unflinching willingness to die to save others, one of whom has been his rival. He dies with his arms bound and stretched out, as if he were on a cross. In Ernest Gordon's memoir of being a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, he recounts how at the end of a day of forced labor the guards counted the shovels, and one was apparently missing. A furious guard threatened the British POWs that unless the guilty person confessed, he would kill them all. He cocked his gun to start shooting them one by one. At that moment, one prisoner stepped forward calmly and said, "I did it." He stood quietly at attention, and "he did not open his mouth" {Isaiah 53: 7} as he was beaten to death. When they all got back to the camp and counted the shovels again, it turned out that they were all there. The man had sacrificed himself to save them all. In the first Harry Potter novel, the evil Lord Voldemort can't touch Harry without being burned. Later Dumbledore explains it to him. "Your mother died to save you. . . . Love as powerful {as that} . . . leaves its own mark. . . . {T} o have been loved so deeply . . . will give us some protection forever." Why do these stories move us? It's because we know from the mundane corners of life to the most dramatic that all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice. We know that anybody who has ever done anything that really made a difference in our lives made a sacrifice, stepped in and gave something or paid something or bore something so we would not have to.
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  8. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    Jonah undertook what we could call an urban mission. He went to a city that was one of the largest in the world at that time. When God is arguing about why he should be deeply concerned for Nineveh, he cites its population figure as a reason for the city's significance to him and uses the term adam-the word for humankind: "120,000 of humanity." It is as if God was saying, "I care about human beings, and so how much more should I be concerned to reach a place where so much humanity is amassed?" This simple logic is powerful. Many people simply do not like cities, but if we care about people, and if we believe that the deepest human need is to be reconciled to God, then all Christians must be concerned for and supportive of urban Christian ministry in one way or another. If anything, God's appeal to sheer size as an indicator of spiritual need comes home to us today with greater force.
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  9. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been. Yet, of course, he is infinitely more than that. Jesus did not merely weep for us; he died for us. Jonah went outside the city, hoping to witness its condemnation, but Jesus Christ went outside the city to die on a cross to accomplish its salvation.
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  10. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    Even if we accept responsibility for wrongdoing, we believe "we can fix this." The most common way we try to do that is to apply the technology of morality. We believe that with hard work and/or fastidious religious observance, we can repair our relationship with God and even put him in a position where he "can't say 'no' to us."7
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  11. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    The classic Old Testament example of these two ways to run from God is right here in the book of Jonah. Jonah takes turns acting as both the "younger brother" and the "older brother." In the first two chapters of the book, Jonah disobeys and runs away from the Lord and yet ultimately repents and asks for God's grace, just as the younger brother leaves home but returns repentant. In the last two chapters, however, Jonah obeys God's command to go and preach to Nineveh. In both cases, however, he's trying to get control of the agenda.11 When God accepts the repentance of the Ninevites, just like the older brother in Luke 15, Jonah bristles with self-righteous anger at God's graciousness and mercy to sinners.12 And that is the problem facing Jonah, namely, the mystery of God's mercy. It is a theological problem, but it is at the same time a heart problem. Unless Jonah can see his own sin, and see himself as living wholly by the mercy of God, he will never understand how God can be merciful to evil people and still be just and faithful. The story of Jonah, with all its twists and turns, is about how God takes Jonah, sometimes by the hand, other times by the scruff of the neck, to show him these things.
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  12. Timothy J. Keller _ The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah

    God varies his strategies too, and continually extends mercy to us in new ways, even though we neither understand nor deserve it.
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