The Jonah Project

Well, the cat’s out of the commentary bag: Rich Lusk and I are working on another commentary. Observers may have noticed my tweets or random notes on Jonah. I have been preaching through it and also writing and editing some of our joint efforts. As always, I like to say Rich Lusk is the exegetical genius and I am the fortunate guy who has the joy of working with him in these endeavors. The added benefit is that he and I share a lot of presuppositions about hermeneutics and general biblical exegesis which afford us an awful lot of common ground when we do these projects. In fact, if this is published it will be the third work I’ve done with Rich.

I will be posting occasional quotes from our future commentary. Here is a fairly descriptive summary of the Assyrians to whom Jonah was called to minister:

The ancient Assyrian emperor–just to give you one example of the wickedness that characterized the empire and the city — after a military victory would put giant fishhooks in the mouths of the vanquished and march them down Main Street in a kind of victory parade. And then he would impale them, he’d lift their skin off, and after skinning them alive, he’d cut off their limbs and throw them to the wild animals to be devoured. Now that’s wickedness. That’s what paganism looks like in the raw; paganism when it hasn’t been tamed in any way by the subduing grace of God. Nations that have been influenced by the gospel, even if they aren’t any longer officially Christian, even if they aren’t all that faithful, usually know better than to fight their ways in that way.

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