Jonah 4:2: “So he prayed to the LORD, and said, ‘Ah, LORD, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish; for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm.'”

November 23rd, 2021 by Pastor Ed in devotional

Jonah’s brutal honesty here, as he gives us more information than we had in the first chapter about the attitude of his heart, is both a little shocking and a little refreshing. This prophet of God confessed that he knew the character of God so well, he knew that if the people of Nineveh repented, God would forgive them. And that was the real cause for Jonah’s running in the opposite direction of Assyria. He had his own ideas of how God should run the world, and he was being willfully disobedient in his actions to try and stop God from forgiving Assyria.

There is an old story about the devil selling his tools of spiritual warfare against believers at a garage sale. On a table, labeled and marked with prices, were greed, hatred, lust, envy, gossip, jealousy, and deceit. There was also a wedge shaped tool that was worn and much more expensive than any of the others. It was labeled self. A potential buyer picked up the wedge and asked why it had been used so much more than the others and why it cost so much. The devil replied, “Because it is more useful to me than any of the others. I can pry open and get inside a man’s consciousness with that tool when I couldn’t get near him with any of the others. I use it on nearly everybody. It’s the most valuable tool because very few people know that it actually belongs to me.” The old story goes on to say that the wedge of self was the one tool that didn’t sell and so the devil still owns it and uses it. Satan never attacks us in his own name but instead uses the disguise of “self” in each of us. We have all heard the voice of self: “You deserve . . . you’re unappreciated . . . they take you for granted . . . you are unacknowledged, unnoticed, unrewarded, etc.” That’s where the devil wants us to live, because when we start living for self, we stop living for the Lord.

“LORD, give us eyes to see the disguises of the enemy today so we can reject his temptations and chose life in You.”