Devotions: Pride Or Compassion

He prayed to the Lord and said, “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.”

Jonah 4:2-3 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

Jonah had been sent by God warn the people of Ninevah of impending doom because of their sin. They responded to his prophesy with genuine repentance and God withheld His wrath. These verses are Jonah’s reaction to their deliverance. At first glance, he seems pretty selfish and unjust, but we have to understand the context. The people of Ninevah were horrible. Not only had they persecuted the people of Israel repeatedly but they were brutal as well. (They actually perfected the “art” of skinning people alive.) These were the sins that God was going to punish them for, but He relented because they repented of them. To be honest, I can sympathize with Jonah. Those people were awful, they didn’t deserve to be saved, they deserved to be punished. The thing is, we don’t deserve to be saved either. We deserve to be punished for our sin. Nothing we go through on this earth is as bad as we deserve. God’s grace makes us forget who and what we truly are. When we start to compare ourselves to others and say we deserve it but they don’t we are putting ourselves in the place of God. That pride might actually be worse sin than the rest. The Bible says that no one is righteous, not one, not me, not you. God has compassion when we repent. We should rejoice as much when this happens for others as when it happens for us. We cannot have both pride and compassion. Which will you choose?

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