What Do You Do When Someone Already Knows the Answer? – Jonah, Nineveh, and Answering the Real Objection
What Do You Do When Someone Already Knows the Answer? – Jonah, Nineveh, and Answering the Real Objection – Introduction
Anyone who has spent time answering objections to the Christian faith learns that the question a person asks is not always the question he is disputing. Good apologetics listens long enough to find the real disagreement before it tries to settle it.
The book of Jonah offers an unusual case study in that problem. Jonah is not an unbeliever weighing the evidence. He is God’s own prophet, under God’s correction. But the way God deals with him shows what it looks like to answer the objection a person actually holds rather than the one we assume.
“Anyone who has spent time answering objections to the Christian faith learns that the question a person asks is not always the question he is disputing.”
Most of us met Jonah early: a command, a ship, a storm, a fish, and a reluctant prophet who finally does what he was told. Told that way, the story becomes a lesson in obedience. But Jonah eventually tells us why he ran, and fear has nothing to do with it.
After Nineveh repents and God spares the city, Jonah prays, and he prays angrily: “I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil” (Jonah 4:2).
Read that again. Jonah did not run because he doubted God. He did not run because he feared the message would fail. He ran because he suspected it would succeed.
What Jonah Already Knew
Jonah’s complaint is built from a confession of faith. He is echoing the words God spoke when He proclaimed His own name to Moses: “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Ex. 34:6). Jonah knows his Bible.
“Jonah did not run because he doubted God. He did not run because he feared the message would fail. He ran because he suspected it would succeed.”
Notice how his version ends. God, he says, “repentest thee of the evil.” Jonah does not merely know that God is kind in some general way.
He knows that when the LORD announces judgment and people turn, the LORD is willing to turn as well. That is precisely what Jonah could not bear to watch happen in Nineveh.
So the question is not what Jonah failed to understand. The question is why a man who understood God so well found His mercy so objectionable.
Jonah Was Not Wrong About Nineveh
It would be easy to turn this into a story about a narrow-minded prophet who needed to learn tolerance. The text will not let us.
“So the question is not what Jonah failed to understand. The question is why a man who understood God so well found His mercy so objectionable.”
Jonah shows no hostility toward outsiders in general. The sailors on his ship were pagans, and he told them, “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you” (Jonah 1:12).
Before the chapter ends, those sailors “feared the LORD exceedingly” (Jonah 1:16), and the text records no complaint from Jonah. His quarrel was never with outsiders. It was with Nineveh.
God Himself sends Jonah with the words “their wickedness is come up before me” (Jonah 1:2).
Nineveh was a great city of Assyria. At no point does God discover that the Ninevites were better than their reputation, and the message He gives is not ambiguous: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4).
God is righteous. Nineveh is wicked. Wickedness deserves judgment. The trouble begins when Jonah treats deserved judgment as the only outcome a righteous God is permitted to choose.
“God is righteous. Nineveh is wicked. Wickedness deserves judgment. The trouble begins when Jonah treats deserved judgment as the only outcome a righteous God is permitted to choose.”
Then Nineveh repents. “So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth” (Jonah 3:5).
Even the king rises from his throne, sits in ashes, and commands the whole city to turn “from the violence that is in their hands” (Jonah 3:8). Then he asks, “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?” (Jonah 3:9).
Set the king’s words beside Jonah’s. The pagan king hopes for a mercy he cannot be sure of. The prophet dreads a mercy he is sure of.
“And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (Jonah 3:10).
The book does not tell us everything that moved the Ninevites to take a foreign prophet seriously, and nothing here requires us to know. It tells us what matters: Jonah proclaimed, the people believed God, they turned from their violence, and God saw that they turned.
“But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry” (Jonah 4:1).
The Mercy Jonah Had Already Received
Jonah had received a direct command and deliberately gone the other way. He “rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD” (Jonah 1:3).
If the rule is simply guilt followed by judgment, his story ends beneath the waves. Instead, “the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah” (Jonah 1:17).
“Read Jonah’s prayer from inside the fish carefully, and something is missing. What he never quite says is, ‘I have sinned.'”
Read Jonah’s prayer from inside the fish carefully, and something is missing. What he never quite says is, “I have sinned.” Yet God hears him. And that prayer contains two lines that come back to haunt him.
“They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy” (Jonah 2:8) is a swipe at idol worshipers, spoken by a man about to watch idol worshipers receive mercy. And then: “Salvation is of the LORD” (Jonah 2:9). Jonah was entirely right. But if salvation belongs to the LORD, then the LORD, not Jonah, decides to whom He will show it.
God did not discard His runaway prophet. “The word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time” (Jonah 3:1). And after Nineveh was spared, God kept teaching him.
Jonah’s Real Objection
So what was Jonah actually disputing? Not whether God is merciful; he had just quoted that back to God. Not whether God relents when people turn; he had built his complaint on it. His objection was narrower and harder: whether God should show that mercy to Nineveh.
Another demonstration of divine mercy would have told Jonah nothing he did not already believe, so God does not spend chapter 4 establishing what Jonah already confesses. He presses on the point in dispute: “Doest thou well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4).
Then He prepares a gourd to shade Jonah’s head, a worm to destroy it, and an east wind. Faint in the heat, Jonah insists, “I do well to be angry, even unto death” (Jonah 4:9). And God makes His case: “Thou hast had pity on the gourd . . . And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:10–11).
“If Jonah can pity a plant he never planted, should not God spare a city full of people He made?…God knew exactly what Jonah was contesting, and that is what He addressed.”
That is an argument, and a searching one. God reasons from Jonah’s own grief. If Jonah can pity a plant he never planted, should not God spare a city full of people He made?
The question measures Jonah’s compassion for what mattered to him against his contempt for what mattered to God, and it leaves him standing in the contradiction. God knew exactly what Jonah was contesting, and that is what He addressed.
God was working through Jonah and on Jonah at the same time. The city Jonah was sent to confront became the mirror that exposed him. And the book ends with God’s question, which Jonah never answers. It is left for whoever is reading.
Mercy Without Pretending
Jonah’s objection should not be waved away, because the question beneath it is hard, and later history makes it harder. Jonah prophesied during the reign of Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14:25). Within a few decades of that reign, Assyria took Samaria and carried the northern kingdom into exile (2 Kings 17:6).
Scripture says that exile came because Israel had sinned against the LORD (2 Kings 17:7), but that does not make it any less terrible. The nation God spared in Jonah’s day became the rod that fell on Jonah’s own people.
“What does it mean for God to spare a people who will later do terrible evil?”
The book never says Jonah foresaw that. His stated reason for fleeing is God’s character, not Assyria’s future, and we should not read later history back into his motives. But a reader who knows what came next feels the weight of the question: what does it mean for God to spare a people who will later do terrible evil?
That weight is what makes God’s closing question so striking. The LORD asks, “Should not I spare Nineveh?” knowing far more about Nineveh’s future than Jonah ever could.
Nahum does not make that tension disappear, but it keeps us from misreading the mercy. God declared Himself to Moses as One “that will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex. 34:7). Jonah’s quotation stops before that line.
Nahum, speaking of Nineveh generations later, picks up the other half of the same confession: “The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked” (Nahum 1:3). By then Nineveh was again “the bloody city” (Nahum 3:1), and it fell.
“Jonah shows that God relents when sinners turn. Nahum shows that His forbearance never turns wickedness into righteousness. One generation’s repentance did not purchase immunity for the next.”
Jonah shows that God relents when sinners turn. Nahum shows that His forbearance never turns wickedness into righteousness. One generation’s repentance did not purchase immunity for the next.
Romans 3 does not answer every question about God’s providence toward Assyria. It answers a deeper one: how can God be righteous and still show forbearance to the guilty?
Paul says God set forth Christ “to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Rom. 3:25).
That is Nineveh’s situation, and Jonah’s as well. The cross is where God shows that His forbearance was never indifference to sin. He did it “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).
A Greater Than Jonah
Jesus pointed to this very story: “The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here” (Matt. 12:41).
Notice whom Jesus calls as witnesses. Not the prophet, but the city. He points to what it did: it repented at Jonah’s preaching. And He sets that response against a generation standing before One greater than Jonah. Greater light is never a greater excuse.
And the One greater than Jonah reverses Jonah at every point. Jonah went reluctantly to his enemies. Christ came willingly for His. Jonah was angry when his enemies received mercy. Christ died to make mercy possible for His, reconciling us to God “when we were enemies” (Rom. 5:10).
Conclusion – Answering the Real Objection
None of this makes apologetics less necessary. Peter still commands believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Pet. 3:15). But an answer has to answer something.
Sometimes the person across the table already agrees with the very premise we are laboring to prove. Proving it to him again will not help, because that was never his objection. The work is to find out what he actually rejects, and why.
“What he [Jonah] could not yet see was how far God would go to remain righteous while showing mercy to people who deserved judgment. The fullest answer would not come outside Nineveh. It would come centuries later, outside Jerusalem, at a cross.”
That means listening before answering. An evidential objection deserves evidence, not a quick verdict about the objector’s heart. A moral objection will not be met by one more historical fact. We pray throughout, but prayer is never a substitute for taking seriously the objection in front of us.
And Jonah warns the one giving the answers as well. Most of us do not struggle to believe God is merciful. We struggle when His mercy reaches people we would rather see judged, and we forget, as Jonah did, that we were once pulled from the water ourselves.
Jonah knew Nineveh deserved judgment, and he was right. What he could not yet see was how far God would go to remain righteous while showing mercy to people who deserved judgment. The fullest answer would not come outside Nineveh. It would come centuries later, outside Jerusalem, at a cross.
Phillip James, MDiv serves as pastor of Seven Springs Baptist Church in Seven Springs, North Carolina, where he and his wife, Brandy, share a heart for serving others and encouraging people in their walk with Christ. Drawing from a background in entrepreneurship, he is currently pursuing a PhD in Applied Apologetics at Liberty University. Phillip is dedicated to expository teaching, helping people understand Scripture, and applying biblical truth to everyday life. You can follow him on YouTube @PastorPhillipJames.
Image Credit: On the Beach, Dieppe by Eugène Boudin (French, 1864). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 2003.20.1.
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