← Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life
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- [00:04]
Podcast Host
You're listening to the Gospel in Life podcast. What does God's concern for cities tell us about his mission? Jonah was called to preach to the great city of Nineveh. But his own anger and prejudice blinded him to what God would accomplish there. Today, Tim Keller looks at why culture shaping cities matter to God and what that reveals about his heart for the entire world.
- [00:34]
Reader
The reading is from Jonah, chapter three, verse one, through chapter four, verse five. Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you. Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now, Nineveh was a very important city. A visit required three days. On the first day, Jonah started into the city, he proclaimed, 40 more days and Nineveh will be overturned. The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the King of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat down in the dust. Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, do not let any man or beast, herd or flock taste anything. Do not let them eat or drink, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened. But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord. O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love. A God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live. But the Lord replied, have you any right to be angry? Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade, and waited to see what would happen to the city.
- [02:39]
Dr. Tim Keller
Now, Book of Jonah, which we're looking at, is awfully, awfully relevant to our situation, especially today. In fact, maybe a little more relevant than it was this morning. Because, you see, Jonah has been asked to go to the capital of Assyria, the great rising, emerging imperial world power. And as you can see from chapter three, verse eight, this was a violent society history. And I don't have to go into the gory details, and they are gory details. History tells us that really the Assyrian Empire brought cruelty and massacre and those sorts of things to a sort of a new level. It was a violent place. It was a violent empire. It slaughtered helpless people. And Jonah's response to that is anger. Jonah's response to that. He wants them punished. He is angry at them for their violence. And some people here certainly are going to say, I know. I know how he feels. I know how he feels. And yet, in one of the great surprises in all of biblical narrative, in other words, of all the stories in the Bible, there's probably no more surprising turn than the one that you see right there, which we're going to get to in a second, because God refuses to accept either the violence of Nineveh or the poisonous anger of Jonah. And so let's take a look and see what this text tells us about violence. As the verse 8 says, let them give up their violence. The three things we learn is, first of all, we're going to learn about the surprising sources of violence. Secondly, the remarkable strategy we should take with violence. And then lastly, the ultimate solution for violence. Okay, the strategies. I mean, the sources of violence, the strategies with violence and the ultimate solution to violence. First of all, when I say surprising, it is surprising. Now, there's two things the Bible shows us. Here are sources for violent behavior and action. And the first one isn't a surprise, but we still have to talk about it kind of briefly here. And that is that the first source of violence is the pagan society of Assyria. Now, when I use the word pagan, I'm not being pejorative. You know, nowadays there's a lot of people that like to use the word pagan just to mean nasty or immoral or something like that. But paganism was a worldview, a worldview that you have to. It was polytheistic. One of the questions you have to ask is, why were all those old polytheistic ancient cultures so violent? Even the best ones, even Greece and Rome, they had the entertainment was gladiators and prisoners being eaten by lions. And the populace came out and cheered and girl babies were just thrown out. If you had a, what would you want? A girl, Right? So we have a girl baby and you just throw them out. Everybody accepted that. And there was no tradition in any of those ancient cultures. Of care for the poor at all. Why were they so violent? St. Augustine, in his book City of God, does a devastating critique on polytheism and paganism. In fact, his critique was so devastating intellectually in that book City of God, that really polytheism did not become intellectual, wasn't intellectually respectable for centuries after that. And here's what he said, here's his critique. He says, if there's one God, the way Judaism and Christianity say, if there's one God who's a supreme power and supreme lawgiver over everything in the world, then that means the world is essentially or inherently or originally an orderly, peaceful place. And God, God's project is to bring it back. It's been marred by sin and evil, but it's to bring it back into peace and justice. And our job is to do his will and become part of his project, part of his program to do that. But Augustine says, but think of polytheism. Polytheism says there's no one God, but there's many gods. There's no one supreme power, but there's many powers. And they all are at war with each other, right? The gods fight with each other. There's no one supreme lawgiver, one supreme judge, one supreme truth. Polytheism therefore believed that reality and the universe was essentially violent, that that was the nature of things, that the world was essentially chaotic and violent. And Augustine says, all right, now if polytheism is true, I just want you to realize that you cannot have a just society, he says, because if polytheism is true, number one, it means nature is. The world is by nature violent. And therefore justice and peace is totally unnatural. So you have no hope for justice. But on the other hand, you have no basis for justice because since there's no one truth and one lawgiver, who's to say what justice is? He says, therefore polytheism is by nature violent because it sees the world is by nature violent and has no. There's really no basis for even talking about truth and justice. And he says, if you want the proof, look at the history of Rome and in the City of God. He points out that the history of Rome was not a history of seeking truth and justice, but was one of power and subjugation. Now you say, well, that's interesting. He was dealing with a very old worldview. Oh, no, he wasn't. Because I want you to ask, what do your professors believe in? Almost 90% of the Liberal arts departments of American universities, First of all, they believe really the same thing. They believe, first of all that the world is by nature violent. Evolution. What is evolution? What's the engine of evolution? The strong eat the weak. If there is no God and there is no truth, then reality is by nature violent, just like the old polytheists say. And there is no way not only to hope for justice, because why would there be justice and peace? That's totally unnatural. But secondly, there's no basis for talking about it, because if there is no truth, who's to say what is just? Who's to say what is right? And therefore, Augustine, what he said back then is still true today. If you don't believe in God, if you believe this world is all there is, that leads inherently to using power for your own ends. And if you say, well, that's really. Wait a minute. In other words, Augustine's critique of polytheism was it tends to violence and it doesn't tend to justice. In fact, is there no basis for a just society in it? And if you think, well, that's kind of weird, that seems to be overstating it. You know, a lot of people say, well, I'm a relativist. I don't believe in truth, and therefore I believe in tolerance. Why Aldous Huxley in his. It's interesting, he just pulled that right out of the air. What do you mean, therefore? There is no therefore. Aldous Huxley in his little autobiography, Ways and Means, said something really remarkable. He said, the philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerning himself exclusively with an intellectual problem. He's talking about himself. He says, the philosophy of meaninglessness is essentially an instrument. That means that there is no valid reason why the philosopher should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way they find most advantageous to themselves. Now, what is August Huxley saying? He says, if this world is all there is and it happened by accident, therefore it's meaningless. That means if reality is basically violent and chaotic and there is no way to even define truth and justice, give me one good reason why I shouldn't do what I want and take power and use it to my advantage against yours. Give me one good reason. Well, we should be tolerant, because who's this? Where does that come from? So Augustine says, polytheism, a denial of God, or I should put it this way, pluralistic relativism, is a source of oppression and abuse of power and violence. But that's not the only thing. The Bible says here is a source of violence, because violence is not just flowing out of Nineveh. The great surprise in this narrative is that there's another source of violence. You see, here's Jonah, and he comes in and he comes to the biggest city, the New York of its day, in a way, and he comes into Nineveh and he says, I want to get rid of the crime. I want to get rid of the social injustice. The word violence, by the way, does not just mean physical cruelty. It also has an aspect of social injustice, of the strong hurting the weak and the rich oppressing the poor and so on. So Jonah comes in and he preaches right in the streets, and he says, I want you to give up your social injustice. I want to give up your evil ways. I want you to give up your violence. And they do it now. Every social worker, every counselor, every minister, every priest, every rabbi, every mayor, every government official. I mean, if they're worth their salt, that's what they want in their cities. They want to see this sort of thing. Jonah comes in, everybody. You know what they say? They listen to the preacher and they say, you're right, we're proud, we're wicked, we're violent. We're going to change. And so you expect this is the apex of his career, of course, you know, and you expect that the book would end with chapter three, verse 11. You see, in chapter three, verse 10, they change and they relent, and they put on sackcloth and so on. And you'd expect that the book would have ended with chapter 3, verse 11, and it would have gone something like this. And Jonah returned to his own land, rejoicing. But there is no chapter three, verse 11. And what Jonah does in chapter four, verse one, is one of the most astounding things anywhere in the Bible. First of all, literally in the Hebrew, it says he became evil with the evil he saw. Now, that's actually a very hard thing to translate, but it basically means this. When he saw God refusing to be violent with the violent, he became violently angry. And look carefully. What does he want? What does he want? What, is he mad because it didn't happen? What is he setting up over in chapter four, verse five? He's setting up outside the city, still hoping for it. What does he want? Now, this is a frightening thing, but let me just suggest this to you. He's sitting outside the city because he wants to see firebolts come down out of the blue and start smashing their buildings. He wants Sodom and Gomorrah, you know, he wants violence. He's mad because there wasn't any violence. And therefore what the Bible is saying is something really amazing. It is true that the pluralistic relativism, the idea there's no truth and everything is chaotic, certainly leads to oppression, certainly can lead to violence. But the Bible here is unbelievably nuanced and even handed. And he says, it's saying here that religion is also a source of violence. Now let me say this carefully, but let's think about this. Jonah is violent. If he had something, he'd do it. You know, Jonah is violent. Not in spite of the fact he's religious, not in spite of the fact that he's a prophet, not in spite of the fact he's so moral. We know that he's being violently angry because he's moral and religious, because these are the sinners, these are the heretics, these are the pagans, these are the bad people and we're the good people. And why haven't you done, you know, bombed them? Now therefore listen carefully. The danger of morality if it's not put into a context of grace and the gospel. In other words, the danger of morality is this. Moral people have a strong tendency to say, the reason that God loves me, the reason why I can look myself in the mirror, the reason why I'm an alright person, is because I'm moral and I obey the truth and I know the truth and I believe the truth. And that's what makes me better than other people. And when you are not just moral, but moralistic and the tendency of the human heart is to take morality and turn it into moralism, you have got the seeds again for oppression, for abuse of power and for violence. It is really astounding. You know, when Jonah says, look at this prayer, look at this prayer in chapter two and three. Let me just. It just in chapter four, I mean verse two and three. Let me just tell you what he's actually saying. He says, I knew it. I knew you were compassionate. I knew that at the drop of a sackcloth you would relent. I knew that you were characterized, O Lord, by hair trigger, compassion. I mean, these people haven't really converted. Notice something? Do you notice something, oh Lord? They never called you Yahweh. They never used the covenant name. They're not really converted. They haven't converted. They're scared, probably heartfelt, but superficial. They haven't even converted, for crying out loud. And look at their violent people and you relent and you give them another chance. And the last line of this prayer is simply kill me because I don't want to live in a Universe run by a loving God like you. It's hard to find a place where the Bible has more, you might say, unmasked, the kind of wickedness that can be nurtured in the heart of a moral religious life. Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zarathustra, points out, where does the violence come from that kills Jesus? Who is violent to Jesus, huh? The criminals, the bad people, the poor? You know, we middle class, respectable people, we go to the poor areas of town, we look around because, wow, these are dangerous. You know, these are the kinds of people who are dangerous. And we hope that they'll get religion, you know, that somebody will, you know, when they're in prison, convert them, because if they get religion, then, then they'll be safer. And yet Nietzsche points out the violence against Jesus Christ comes from the good people, the middle class people, the religious people, the scribes, the teachers of the law. The Bible is unbelievably nuanced and says that pluralistic relativism and moralistic absolutism are the seeds for violence. And that means that almost every kind of person and every kind of society and every kind of group has got tremendous potential for oppression and for cruelty and violence. And let me just quick, we got to move on here. But one of the things that's so weird about this is that almost all the commentators today are so simplistic compared to the Bible because the conservative commentary containers are always saying the problem with America, you know, this shows us that we have lost our values and we have to get back to our moral values, overlooking the fact that religiosity and morality or moralism is one of the great reasons why there is violence. But on the other hand, the secular commentators in Stalin were hardly religious people. They were atheists and they were very violent. And as we said last week, the Amish, who are very, very conservative and don't even wear normal modern clothes and are very patriarchal and of course have to be. They're fundamentalists by every single definition of the word. But we're not afraid of Amish terrorists. And the reason we're not afraid of Amish terrorists is because their fundamental is Jesus. It's not fundamentalism that makes you hostile. It depends on what your fundamental is. And if your fundamental is moralism, you will. Or even atheism can be. You may be. But if the fundamental is Jesus, then the God who comes and serves the God who the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. And if that's your fundamental. All that does is suck violence out of you and suck hatred out of you, as we're about to see. So the sources of violence are very many and the Bible is vastly less simplistic than any of its detractors. Now, the second thing we learn is not just the surprising sources of violence, but secondly, we learned the remarkable strategy we're supposed to take in the face of violence. What does God do with Nineveh? On the one hand, he sends Jonah in with a very hard message. 40 days and Nineveh will be destroyed, which means non negotiable demand from God. Evil must stop, violence must stop. So there's no compromise, there's no, you see, accepting of it at all. So on the one hand, it's very hard. On the other hand, God sends Jonah, makes him vulnerable, of course, going into the very heart of this violent city and offers them a chance, offers them hope, offers them and you know, actually Jonah's right in at least the little soliloquy, not soliloquy that I just created for him a second ago. God is incredibly hair trigger with his compassion. Many over the years, I've read commentators who say, this is just ridiculous, this is impossible. There's no record of Nineveh converting to the God of Israel. And of course that's not what. Yeah, you're right, it's true, but that's not what it says. We actually have other instances where the king of Nineveh sent out a decree trying to get everybody to repent of their violence in sackcloth. It was such a violent society that when kings had an opportunity, like if there was a total eclipse or an earthquake or anything that scared the populace, very often the king would actually say, let us repent of our violence and let's get into sackcloth and ashes. It's not as weird as you might think. It was an effort at social reform. And evidently Jonah's preaching was popular enough, was incisive enough, was powerful enough that it began a wave of repenting and the king jumped on it. And that's not the same thing as a conversion. It's sincere, it's, it just, it's just a, it's a baby step in the right direction and God relents.
- [20:58]
Podcast Host
Jonah is one of the most widely known stories in the Bible, but it's so much more than a simple account of a prophet who runs from God and gets swallowed by a great fish. In his book Rediscovering Jonah, Tim Keller uncovers the deeper message of this familiar story, revealing how Jonah's resistance to God exposes our own reluctance to trust and obey him and how Jonah's experience ultimately points us to Jesus and his saving work on the cross. During the month of May. We'll send you a copy of Rediscovering Jonah as our thanks for your gift to help gospel and life share the transforming love of Christ with more people. So request your copy today@gospelandlife.com give. That's gospelandlife.com give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the the rest of today's teaching.
- [21:48]
Dr. Tim Keller
So on the one hand, you have this incredible hardness and this incredible softness, and here's what's going on. The strategies. Let me tell you the two strategies we're not supposed to take with wrongdoing. When someone wrongs you, let's be real. Let's stop thinking about American foreign policy for a second, okay? When someone wrongs you, when someone does evil to you, when someone hurts you, abuses you, you know, really, really does wrong to you. The one thing God does not allow, vengeance. But the other thing that God does not allow is resignation. Vengeance is I pummel the wrongdoer. And my goal is not upholding justice and truth. And my goal is not to do the right thing for the world. My goal is to hurt him more than he hurt me. I'm dealing with my hurt. I'm not thinking about justice. I'm not thinking about truth. I'm not thinking about what does the world need? None of that. I'm trying to deal with my hurt by hurting you more. That's vengeance. On the other hand, there's resignation. And resignation goes like this. Just let it go. Don't bring it up. Just forget it. Get past it. Because no matter what you do, it's not going to be able to undo the hurt. It's not going to be able to undo what was done. So just get away. Just get past it. Just avoid it. Just stop it. Just, you know, leave it. Now, here's what's interesting about that. Resignation does not confront the wrongdoer or pummel the wrongdoer. Resignation just wants to have nothing to do with the wrongdoer. What's really weird about this is that resignation always looks on the surface, by the way, Christians use it all the time, you know, thinking they're being more Christian than the vengeful person and the pummeler. All right? But the fact is that in resignation, you're also not thinking of truth. You're not thinking of justice. You're not thinking, what does the world need? And Surely one thing the world does not need is this person completely able to continue going on doing what he or she has done to you. You're not thinking of the world. You're not thinking of peace, you're not thinking of justice, you're not thinking of the common good. What you're thinking about again is your own hurt. And what's ironic, as different as the vengeful person and as different as vengeance and resignation appear on the surface. You know, the pummeler and the avoider, they're both dealing with their own hurt in a selfish way. They're doing it by excluding the wrongdoer permanently excluding, saying, I do not want a relationship with you, I never want a relationship with you. I put you outside the circle of my community, permanently and forever. The avoider looks usually more controlled and, you know, less vengeful and more Christian. But it's not much different because in both cases, you're not thinking of justice, you're not thinking about the wrongdoer, you're not thinking of the world and the people that wrongdoer is going to be living with over the years. You are, in a very selfish way, simply dealing with your hurt by excluding the wrongdoer one way or the other. Now what does God say you're supposed to do if you're not to do vengeance and you're not supposed to do resignation? He calls for forgiveness. Ah, well, now right away, people immediately say, oh, okay, forgiveness, not vengeance. Well, right, forgiveness is not vengeance, but it's also not resignation. Forgiveness is not. Most people think forgiveness means letting it go. No, no, no, no. That's not what God does here in Nineveh, is it? He's hair trigger compassionate, but he does not let it go. The Bible does not say pay evil for evil, but it doesn't say avoid evil. It says overcome evil with good. And here's what forgiveness is. Definition. Forgiveness is dealing, getting rid of, dealing and getting rid of your hate and anger before you deal with the wrongdoer. It's dealing with your hate and anger before you deal with the wrongdoer. And let me tell you why that's different than both vengeance and resignation. In vengeance, you're dealing with your anger and hate as you deal with the wrongdoer. You're dealing with your anger and hate by dealing with the wrongdoer in the most caustic and abrasive and mean and hurtful way possible. While the resigned person, the avoider, is refusing to deal with the wrongdoer at all. The avoider is dealing with the hurt and hate and anger by avoiding the wrongdoer. Forgiveness is you deal with the hurt and anger before you deal with the wrongdoer. And then you go and you confront, then you go and you seek justice. You seek to get them to see the truth, you get them to see what's right. You get them as much as possible to do what's right. They may not do it, but at least what are you doing? You're not operating out of this selfish, self obsessed need to deal with your hurt and anger, by the way in which you treat or refuse to treat the wrongdoer. You're dealing with it, you're forgiving, you're putting it away. We'll get to that in a second. You're dealing with it and then you're going and dealing with the wrongdoer. And this is the reason why Miroslav Volfus, the Croatian theologian who speaks a lot about this, says forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. Forgiving someone does not mean you demand no change in the perpetrator and no righting of wrongs. In fact, forgiveness provides a framework in which the quest for properly understood justice can fruitfully be pursued. I want to tell you something. If I haven't utterly forgiven, radically forgiven, the person who has wronged me, when I go to confront them, I'm not going for their sake or for God's sake sake, or for truth's sake, or for justice sake, or for the sake of the people that person has to live with. I'm doing it for my sake. And I'm always. I always overreach. I confront, but I don't. I'm trying to hurt, I'm trying to humiliate, I'm trying to punish. I don't really want them to see the light. And even if I say I do, or even if I delude myself into thinking I do, I'm not going to. Because the anger in me, you see, is trying to work it. I'm trying to deal with my anger and hate by pummeling him. And ironically, what that means is I can't do justice unless I forgive. It's not like, do I do justice or do I forgive? You're never going to do justice unless you forgive. And if you refuse to do justice, it's because you haven't forgiven. You're trying to deal with your anger and your hatred by avoiding the person, excluding the person. See? And that's the reason why Miroslav Volh says, if you want justice and nothing but justice, you will inevitably get injustice. You know what he means by that, if there's no love in your heart, if you say, I want justice, justice, almost for sure. What you really mean is vengeance. Vengeance. They killed 5,000 of our civilians. I'm going to get 50,000 of theirs. And inevitably you go beyond justice into vengeance. And what you're going to do is evil wins. Evil wins because you are just as self absorbed and you've been pulled right into the cycle and it wins. If you want justice without injustice, you have to also want love. Now, somebody says, fascinating, captain, you know what this means? Think about this. Because most of you aren't pummelers. I'll tell you what you are. Most of you. This is how you deal with people who wrong you. You hate them on the inside, say nothing on the outside. That's exactly what Jonah wanted to do. He wanted to hate Nineveh and have nothing to do with it. And God, what God demands of us is the opposite. He demands that you forgive and love your enemy and then be willing to open your mouth and confront. It's the opposite. The Bible does not say pay evil for evil. No, but it doesn't say avoid evil. It says, overcome evil with good. Even if it means having to actually really be pretty strong with somebody. Even if it means actually punishing them. You may punish them in a way that actually brings good about. If you've gotten rid of the hatred in your heart so that you're not doing it just to handle your own hurt, but you're doing it for the world's sake and for the sake of peace and order and for justice sake and the sake of the other people who have to live with those folks. You see. So that's the remarkable strategy, and that's the incredible sources. So the real question comes up is, wait a minute, somebody says, you keep saying you deal with it without pummeling them or without avoiding them and excluding them, you deal with it. How? How do you do that? And that brings us to the final point. And that is to be able to be a forgiver, not an avoider, not a revengeful person. To be a forgiver, it's not as much. So I tell you what, at the end, you're the only one of the three sermons today that I'm going to say something. At the very end, I'm going to try to give you two practical steps because people have been asking me all day, congratulations. Okay? But the secret of forgiving is not so much what you do, but who you are. The secret of forgiving is having an identity that's been changed. An identity that makes it possible to do the forgiving. And look at God showing Jonah that he's forgotten who he is. In this question, in chapter four, verse four, he says this. Do you have a right to be angry? Now look at the two things that that question tells us. On the one hand, it tells us that if you are sustained in your bitterness towards someone, it's because you think you're better than they are. You cannot stay sustained in your hatred unless you feel like you have the right. And you only have the right if you feel like I would never do what they did. Now would you just think with me? Use a little common sense. Not even great theologists common sense. Do you really want to look at anybody and say, if I had their upbringing, if I had their family, if I had all the influences that they had on themselves, if I had all the pressures, if I had everything, if I had their life, I would never have done anything like that? You want us. Are you willing to make that claim? You must be very young. You're not speaking for me. The first thing God does is he confronts him and he says, jonah, don't you remember what the first whole part of the book was about? Don't you remember what the fish was about? Don't you remember? It was all about the fact that you're a sinner saved by grace. You're a sinner saved by grace. So the first thing is, if you are angry, it's because you think you have the right to, but you don't. So it's a confrontation. He's showing Jonah he's a sinner. He doesn't have the right to be the judge. But on the other hand, notice it's a question. Isn't this amazing? After all the stuff that God has done, do you know what Jonah is saying to him? He says, kill me. I don't want to live in a universe with somebody like you. And instead, what. What does God say? I can't believe the patience of God. I cannot believe the gentleness of God. How much is this guy going to put up, this guy going to put up with Jonah, but he's doing it. Why? You ask a question to get the person to wake up, to see it for himself, right? Which means that in spite of how sinful he is, in spite of what a racist he is, in spite of all the stuff that God has done, done for Jonah, in spite of the fact that Jonah just continues to go on, in a sense, you know, accusing God, angry at God, what is God doing? He's still totally committed to Jonah. He's still working with Jonah. He hasn't given up on Jonah. And what we have right in this little question, both the content and the form, ridiculously, comically, inveterately, deeply flawed, and yet completely and absolutely unconditionally, love, loved. That's the gospel identity. The reason Jonah has lapsed into violence is he's forgotten his gospel identity. He had it at the end of the psalm and the fish, but he slipped out of it. And that's all of our problem. I mean, people are always saying, help me forgive, Help me forgive. And I mean, all right, I'll tell you something. I'll tell you something right away. But the fact is, a person who is a moralist, who says, I'm a good person, I'm better than others, that's the reason why God loves me, is incapable of forgiving, because you've got to feel better than other people. But on the other, you see, unless you feel so humbled by God's grace that you don't ever have the right to be angry, and yet so affirm by God's grace that you don't have the need. Because the reason we get taken from us, reputation, you know, we've lost face. You know, we had. Something was taken from us. But if you say, God loves me, he's got me, I'm a complete beauty. If you have enough emotional wealth that you don't need to be furiously violently angry, and if you have enough emotional humility so that you really don't have the right to be violently angry, then you've got an identity that sucks away and reduces the anger, so it becomes something that's proportionate. But if somebody says, how do you really do it? Okay, I already told you two quickies. Number one, look at Jesus, look at what he's done for you, until it sort of melts the anger down, doesn't completely get rid of it. But when I look at Jesus, it melts the anger down. I see what he's done for me. How can I be so angry at other people who have wronged me when he's done all this for me and I've wronged him. You know, one of the most amazing things about chapter four, verse five, is when Jonah goes outside of the city that could have killed him and didn't, and he's just angry with it. What a contrast with Jesus Christ in Luke 22, who goes to see a city who's going to kill him, and only he weeps over it, and he Says Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that pertain to your peace. But now they're hidden from my eyes, you know, he says, I wish I could have taken you under my wings like a mother. Oh, my word. He's weeping over the city, who's going to kill him? Because Jesus Christ is the ultimate solution for violence on the cross. Because there he took violence without paying back. He absorbed it. He paid the cost, the penalty for all of our violence. So that when I know what he's done for me, that melts my heart out of the natural thing, which I would have either as a relativist or a moralist, that would make me violent. Jesus Christ overcame violence by paying it himself. And what that means is, when I think about that, that melts my anger down. But there's still something left. And I'll just read this to you and we'll close with this. And I get this out every five years or so because with all you single people, it kind of rings a bell when you see Jesus Christ paying the cost for what you have done rather than making you pay for it. Now you have a secret to what it means to forgive somebody else and deal with your hatred. This guy put it this way. Once upon a time I was engaged to a young lady who changed her mind. I forgave her, but it took me a whole year and I had to forgive her in small sums over that whole 12 months. I paid them. I paid these sums. Listen, I paid the price whenever I spoke to her and kept myself from rehashing the past. I paid them whenever I saw her with another man and refused self pity and rehearsal inside for what she'd done to me. And I paid them whenever I praised her to others, when I really wanted to slice away at her reputation. Those were the payments. But she never knew them. However, I never knew her payments. But I know she made them. I could tell. Forgiveness is not only refusal to hate someone, it's choosing to love and will the good of the offender. It is painful. But wood, nails and pain are the currency of forgiveness. But it is as the ultimate wooden nails where it leads to healing and more to resurrection. Now, you see what he says there. If somebody knocks over your lamp, smashes its $50 lamp, and you say, I forgive you, what does that mean? It means you pay for it. When you forgive, you absorb the cost. If you can't absorb the cost, you have to shrink it down by looking at what Jesus has done for you. And there's always still a debt. There's always you always say, but that person wronged me. How do you, how do you, what do you do with the debt? You pay it yourself in little sums by refraining from thinking about it all the time and putting little pins in the person in your mind. From refraining to sort of confronting the person in a mean way when you see him or her. Refraining from knocking the person to other folks that is eating the debt yourself. You say, oh my, this is going to be hard. Sure, look at Jonah. Look how many times God had to deal with Jonah. Look how many times he slipped out of his gospel identity into the other one. God's still working with him. He'll work with you. He'll use you in a city like this. One of the things that always amazed me, years ago somebody said, have you ever noticed how terrible Jonah's gospel presentation is? You notice Jonah could not quite bring himself to do what really God wanted him to say. What is his message? Take a look at it. What does he say? 40 days in Nineveh will be destroyed. Period. Oh, I just sort of left out that part about repentance and forgiveness. You know, I didn't, you know, I was. Time was running out and I didn't quite get to it. You know, that's the worst gospel presentation in history. And God used it. And see if God can use that, he can use you. He can use you with your imperfect, very imperfect efforts at forgiving people. You're constantly slipping out of your gospel situ, your gospel identity and getting too angry. God can use you as a healer. God can use you as a servant in the city. God can use you as an agent of reconciliation instead of violence and hostility. Absolutely. Use Jonah. He can use you. Don't worry about it. Give yourself some time. But, you know, stick with it. Let us pray. We ask you, Father, to show us how we can too, put away our violence. There's a, there's obviously in our hearts an anger, there's a, there's a pride. There's a non gospel identity that moves us in a way toward all the things that we see happening out in the world. We know that it's in us as well. We ask that you would keep us from really having, oh, I don't know, as a superiority complex toward people who do violence. But we do ask also that you would help us be agents of reconciliation in the world. We ask that you would show us how to really defeat evil through a forgiving but bold justice seeking demeanor and heart and temperament and life. My. To have the bravery of Jesus and yet at the same time the willingness to pay so many debts against us ourselves and forgive. That's the real way we're going to bring about the ultimate solution to violence in this world. So we ask that you would make us part of the solution, not part of the problem, and help us to help us to be people who can put that anger away and follow in the footsteps of your son who came not to be served, but to serve and give his life a ransom for many. In his name we pray. Amen.
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Podcast Host
Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helps you apply the Gospel to your life and share it with others. For more helpful resources from Tim Keller, visit gospelandlife.com There you can subscribe to the Life in the Gospel Quarterly Journal. When you do, you will also receive free articles, sermons, devotionals and other great gospel centered resources. Again, it's all at Gospel. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 2001. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.