Jonah: A Story of Relentless Grace
The View from the Shade
March 24, 2024 • Dave Romoser
For many of us, when we think about the book of Jonah we have the thought... "that's the book about a guy who gets swallowed by a big fish". But if what if the author has something much more subversive and profound he wants us to explore from our "view in the shade"?
Unusual Justice
March 17, 2024 • Dave Romoser
You don't have to look far to recognize that the world is broken, that evil and injustice abound. And when you're the victim of that brokenness in some way, whether you've been cheated, stolen from, lied to, abused in some manner that left you full of pain and rage, or in some other of the myriad ways it could come, the cry is often for justice - for things to be set right... and it should be. And justice can often feel like "they should get what's coming to them"... and that's a natural reaction. But Jonah discovers that how we think justice should come and how God chooses to execute it aren't always the same.
An Unusual Repentance
March 10, 2024 • Dave Romoser
Jonah's prophetic warning to the people of Nineveh is one of the strangest calls to repentance in the Scriptures. You could say that it seems a bit comedic, even... which by now, shouldn't surprise us. Which also raises the question... what is it that the writer is wanting us to see?
The Thing About Storms and Fish
March 3, 2024 • Dave Romoser
For anyone who's ever experienced great loss or suffering, the natural tendency is to want to be rescued from it, to escape it and put it behind us perhaps even hoping we can put it out of our minds and move on. But what if it's those very things, those experiences of pain and hardship are less the things we need rescuing from and can actually be the very things that rescue us?
There's A Bit of Jonah In All of Us
February 25, 2024 • Dave Romoser
The story of Jonah reminds us that the world doesn't always work like we think it's supposed to and the human struggle often leads us to do or say things that seem to go against the current of what we know we should. We might say it like this: "we all have a bit of Jonah in us".
God In Unexpected Places
February 18, 2024 • Dave Romoser • Jonah 1:1–3
The book of Jonah may be one of the strangest and most underestimated books in the Bible but it has so much to say just beneath the surface about human nature and our tendency to want to avoid the dark places in our lives... which just might be exactly where we need to go to find him and the deep joy that lies just on the other side.