God's Pity
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- Category: Perspectives
- Published on Saturday, 14 January 2012 18:58
- Written by Aurelius Raines
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God’s Pity
And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle? (Jonah 4:9-11)
The above words come to mind as I contemplate the debate over the vast amount of money spent by the previous presidential administration to bail out the financial institutions. There seems to be a segment of our country and those that represent them in the congress that believe the government did the wrong thing in bailing out institutions that foolishly gambled with the financial security of this country. When I think about the facts, as I understand them, I am left wondering would God have had to reason with a modern day Jonah along the same lines as he did with the actual Jonah. My personal opinion is informed by the following facts as I understand them.
Prior to the near collapse of the financial structure of the world, there were those who warned the government of the United States that a disaster was in the making in the way derivatives were being packaged and sold. The government stood fast on its beliefs about the free market and did nothing. Once it became clear to the extent of the pending disaster if free market was allowed to run its course, the government, to its credit, forsook doctrine and did the practical thing. I likened the government’s move and reasoning to a couple in which one of the spouses contacted the early stages of cancer. The couple does not have the money to pay the tremendous cost to arrest the cancer before it becomes life threatening. Because the couple does not have the money needed to treat the cancer, it does not resolve to allow the afflicted spouse to die. Instead, arrangements are made to secure the funds needed to treat the cancer, and as part of the treatment plan, the couple makes a plan to pay back any money borrowed. The couple may not agree with the methods to secure funding for the cancer treatment, but time is not wasted over whether funds should be secured to save the life of the afflicted spouse. Because of the urgency of the occasion, the couple will come to an agreement and move forward with the cancer treatment.
In the scenario I mentioned above, the couple will do the sensible thing to deal with a very bad situation. Unfortunately, our government is so divided instead of debating how to avoid the disaster it helped to create by doing nothing as the disaster unfolded, it was a debate over whether the government should become involved in avoiding a situation that had the potential to negatively affect the lives of billions of people around the globe not to mention the millions of people in this country. If the God of Jonah was concerned about the lives of 120,000 people, shouldn’t his people be concerned about the millions of lives that lost their livelihood and well-being because of the unmoral actions of others?