Thursday 8 May 2014

May 8: Jonah 1:6-9

Key Verse: Jonah 1:9
So he said to them, “I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

Devotion:
I like the words that Jonah uses here because I can relate to them! Jonah states that he does fear God, in other words he knows there is a God, he knows it is our Lord God and he knows He is creator God… and yet he still gives it a go to see if he can get away with things! I know I have done that before as well, just pushed a bit further to see if God would let me do things my own way instead of following His direction!

When will we learn that God is in control and He has order of all things? He knows what is best for us and He knows when we need things; He still wants us to ask to remind ourselves that we do need Him in our lives. When He asks us to do something it is because it is the best thing for us to do and not just some idle chatter He is using to pass the time of day (as we might do). God asks us to do things when we need to do them and He expects us to listen to Him if we say that we do fear Him.

Jonah realised that he had messed up this time and he was willing to leave the punishment up to God. He knew that he should not inflict any more on the fellow sailors and now gets ready to ask them to throw him overboard to God’s mercy. When we do go against God it is His own choice as to what is going to happen and not our choice; we have broken our commitment to Him and He has every right to set us right once again. That is when the fear of the Lord kicks in again, when we realise that God is still in control and we have tried to take that control away from Him!

But God has incredible mercy and compassion toward us. He has demonstrated this through allowing Jesus to come and lay down is life for us. He has demonstrated this through stories like Jonah by showing us that Jonah did survive and was convinced that God was the one to be listened to. He has demonstrated it by making sure that all His promises so far have come true so we can know that the remaining promises will come true as well – even if we choose to have our own way for a while!

Points to Ponder:
Do you question God’s ways?

Or do you bow down to His ways?