The prophet who ran from God, and then got angry when God was kind.
Appears in Jonah 1–4, 2 Kings 14:25.
God told Jonah to go to the great city of Nineveh in Assyria, Israel's brutal enemy, and preach against it. Jonah went the opposite direction and boarded a ship from Joppa headed for Tarshish. God sent a violent storm. The sailors cried out to their gods while Jonah slept below deck. When they found out he was running from the LORD, Jonah told them to throw him into the sea.
God sent a huge fish to swallow him, and Jonah spent three days and three nights inside it, praying. The fish spat him onto dry land, and God called him a second time. This time Jonah went. His message was one sentence: "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown." The whole city repented, from the king down, and God spared them.
That's where most people stop. But chapter 4 is the real ending: Jonah was furious that God showed mercy.
Jonah doesn't come off well in his own book. He ran from God. He slept through a storm while sailors who didn't know God were praying. And when God spared Nineveh, Jonah admitted why he had run in the first place: "I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God" (4:2). He didn't want his enemies to receive mercy. He was more upset about losing the plant that shaded him than about a city of more than 120,000 people (4:9–11). The book ends with God's question, and we never hear Jonah's answer.
Jesus made this connection Himself: "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). The contrast is just as strong. Jonah ran away from his enemies. Jesus came to His.
Is there someone you'd secretly rather God didn't show mercy to?
Reading plan: Jonah (Jonah in 4 days)