What if someone you thought you knew very well started behaving strangely? What would you do? Now suppose the person acting strange was — God?
Jonah thought he knew God. In fact, as a prophet, he was accustomed to hearing God’s voice and believed he could count on God no matter what difficulties life presented. But then, God started saying things he couldn’t possibly mean.
In Jonah: When God Changes, Rev. Bruce G. Epperly presents the biblical Book of Jonah not merely as a “whale of a story” but as a radical text that confronts our deepest theological and ethical assumptions. This powerful volume, part of the “Topical Line Drives” series designed for direct, clear, and quick insights into theological and biblical topics, invites you into a profound spiritual adventure.
Prepare to have your understanding of the divine challenged, as Jonah was:
- Imagine God asking you to challenge everything you thought was true, or even to disregard what you previously believed were God’s own words.
- What if God urged you to go into “the heart of darkness, the enemy camp,” preaching a message that might lead to salvation for your oppressors?
- Worse yet, what if God changed God’s mind to expand the circle of grace to include “our nation’s worst enemies, let’s say, al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban”?
This book explores the theological cognitive dissonance Jonah experiences when God appears to overturn prior mandates and expand Jonah’s prophetic vocation to include his nation’s enemies. Jonah’s flight is portrayed not as simple disobedience, but as a flight from a “new, more universal and loving, vision of God”. Like Jonah, committed Christians today grapple with radical shifts in understanding marriage equality, equal rights, war, peace, and other religions.
If God is still speaking, then God can surprise us with new insights for changing times. “Jonah: When God Changes” presents the provocative possibility: What if God loves our enemies as much as God loves our friends? The book portrays God as an “iconoclast,” a “lover of our enemies,” and one who “cares for non-humans with the same devotion as God cares for humankind”.
Through Jonah’s story, you will discover that God’s providence and mercy are “greater than we can imagine”, constantly doing a new thing and calling us to embrace new understandings of God’s vision for the world. The book is a guide to help you discern the right path when God’s ways are different than imagined, asking what it means to follow God’s way in a world filled with terrorism, xenophobia, and fear-based politics.
This book is suitable as a guide for individual study or for challenging small group discussions or sermon series. It’s a quick read selected to inspire you to study further and embrace unexpected companions on God’s journey of Shalom.