What about the cows, man?

What the heck, Jonah. Like seriously.

I find it interesting that this is a book of the Bible because obviously Jonah isn’t someone we should strive to imitate. I think that in a lot of ways it’s meant to be a comfort to us – look at this guy, look at everything he did, and yet the Lord still used him and cared for him.

In reading this book this time, the first thing I noticed was the way in which we were introduced to Jonah. I find it interesting that there is no sort of introduction to this book or to Jonah, we are given no context to anything. The very first thing we find out is that God told Jonah to do something and he responded by turning and running in the absolute opposite direction. I feel as though usually characters in the Bible are introduced with a statement to the effect of, “they loved and served the Lord,” or “they were faithful in all they did”. But no – right off the bat, Jonah ran.

It doesn’t get better after that, either. I didn’t see a single kind thing stated about Jonah in the entire book. It simply talks about him being angry or frustrated or cowardly. Not only that but he is completely cold-hearted toward the hundreds of people in the city of Neveah and apparently also completely unashamed of that fact. I feel as though in a lot of ways this guy is simply lacking basic humanity. I really just don’t understand why God picked Jonah for this job.

A couple years ago I participated in a Bible study on this book and our leader pointed out the fact that God says, “and also many animals” (or, in the translation we were using, “and many cattle as well”) when trying to convince Jonah to accept the fact that He was not, in fact, going to rain fire and brimstone on the city. Our leader talked about how ridiculous that is, that God had to literally say, “well if you don’t care about all those people, can’t you at least care about the animals? What about all those cows, man?” But no. Jonah didn’t even care about the cows.

If God used Jonah, I think it’s fair to say that He could use absolutely anyone.