Faith & formation

You Can Obey Exactly and Still Not Be With Him

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  5 min read

The thing most often missed about Jonah is that the mission worked.

Not partially. Comprehensively — a whole city, top to bottom, in a way no comparable mission in the record ever manages. By every metric anybody would put on a report, it is the most successful assignment in the book.

And the story does not end there, because the story was never mainly about the city.

A person can carry out God’s instructions exactly and still be in the wrong relationship with the One who gave them.

Compliance and communion are different things

We tend to treat obedience as the summit — do the thing, and the internal state will sort itself out on the way.

Jonah is the counterexample sitting in the middle of scripture. He goes. He preaches. It lands. And then he sits down outside the city and is furious, and the anger is not confusion — it is coherent, and he explains it. He objects to the mercy. He would rather the outcome had been worse.

So here is a man who has done exactly what was asked and wants the opposite of what his own obedience produced. The task and the heart came apart entirely, and the task never noticed.

Why this is the most uncomfortable chapter for competent people

Because competent people can complete things. That is the ability, and it is real, and it is genuinely valuable.

But a person who can complete things can complete an assignment on top of an unresolved objection, indefinitely. The completion covers the objection. Nobody — including the person — can see the gap while the work keeps landing.

You can serve for years alongside somebody, or as somebody, whose fruitfulness is real and whose consent to the God behind it was withdrawn some time ago and never mentioned.

What the ending is for

The book closes on a question, not a resolution, and it is addressed to Jonah rather than to Nineveh. The city has already been dealt with. What remains outstanding is the man who did the work.

Which tells you what the whole account was actually tracking. Not the assignment — that was completed in a sentence. The tracking was on whether the one carrying it wanted what God wanted, and at the last line, he still does not, and God is still talking to him.

That last part is not a small mercy. The conversation is ongoing at the point the record stops.