Save the City, (Part Four) . . . God cares about the Youth.
Jonah 4:11 (NIV) “. . . Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
Adam Clarke, Methodist Bible commentator, (and a Renaissance man if ever there was one), says in his remarks on this passage that God has young people in mind when He speaks of those too innocent to know their right hand from their left.
Strange God. He cares for cities, and cattle, and young people? More for these than for vindicating His reputation by destroying a city that has heretofore been wholly unresponsive to His reign and law? A God who is more interested in showing mercy on the undeserving than in punishing those who live without any reference to Him or His righteous design for life?
How does this jibe with the picture of the God of the Old Testament so often bandied about by fuzzy-headed theologians and pseudo-intellectuals who spout mangled paraphrastic religous jargon — full of sound but empty of meaning?
These do their best to portray the God of Scripture as a vengeful, touchy, petty tyrant with no regard for the pains and experiences of His creatures, much less that He should actually care for them in a tender, compassionate way.
But there it is. In the proverbial “black & white”. . . God loves the young, the beasts, and the wicked city. Loves them quite in advance of their “straightening up” or “getting their act together”. Loves them enough that He longs to redeem them for the purpose of relating with them in love.
But, we knew that already, didn’t we?
Paul said as much in Romans 5:8:
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this:
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Tell that to the city . . . and her youth!
