I’ve been collecting the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series for some time. I’ve found it to be an excellent resource for theological reading of Scripture. I started working my way through the commentary on Jonah by Philip Carey.
Jonah is a fascinating text, both for historical reasons and on its own terms. I love Carey’s introduction to the text, which he acknowledges is indebted to Karl Barth’s theology of the word and of election.
Jonah 1:1 says “And the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai….” As Carey notes “the whole story [of Jonah] is initiated and moved along and shaped by the word of the Lord, without which there would be no story, no movement, no tension, no flight, and no rescue.” “The problem of the book,” Carey says, is
not how we are to know God but how God is to deal with us and our more or less persistent efforts not to know him. Only a fool is capable of not knowing God — of hearing the word of the Lord and not believing it — and the Lord must deal with such fools somehow. From this book [Jonah] we can be learn how graciously the Lord deals with fool such as us.
Excellent.