A Fish Story about Expectiations

The book of Jonah is one of my favorites.  Not because of the fish story.  God tells Jonah that God is going to destroy Nineveh and Jonah needs to tell the people of Nineveh that God is going to destroy the city.  The story is set around 750 B.C.

Jonah hangs out to watch the city be destroyed and the book of Jonah ends before Nineveh is destroyed about 610 B.C.  Jonah becomes impatient with God not keeping his promises in Jonah's time frame.

People become obsessed with their own expectations, their own understanding of "truth" and "how things should be".

God did not tell the people of Nineveh that God would destroy the city UNLESS they got their act together.  God did not give the people of Nineveh (or Jonah) a time frame for destruction.  God just told people that God was going to destroy Nineveh and God did.  God handed Nineveh into the hands of the Assyrians I believe, not that it matters.

We deal with a lot of falsehoods, many because of our own expectations of how "things should be".  It took God about 150 years to destroy Nineveh.  Did God let Jonah hang around until Nineveh was destroyed?  The book doesn't tell us, the book doesn't even tell us Nineveh was destroyed.  The book of Jonah ends with God rebuking Jonah because Jonah was upset with the way God did things.

Here we are, 2600 years later, Nineveh is gone and people are still expecting God to behave the way they think God should behave OR they don't believe in God because God does not behave the way they expect God to behave.