The Pardon That Made a Prosecutor Quit

In 1947, Corrie ten Boom stood in a church basement in Munich and watched a man walk toward her with his hand extended. She recognized him instantly — the former S.S. guard from Ravensbrück, the camp where her sister Betsie had starved and died. He was beaming. He had become a Christian, he said, and he knew God had forgiven him. Would she forgive him too?

Corrie's blood went cold. She had just finished speaking about forgiveness. Now forgiveness had a face — and it was the face of a man who had mocked her sister's emaciated body. Every cell in her screamed to turn away. She understood in that moment exactly what Jonah felt sitting outside Nineveh, furious that the God he served would dare extend mercy to the very people who had brutalized his nation.

Jonah's complaint in chapter four is breathtaking in its honesty: "I knew it. I knew You were gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love." He says it like an accusation. He fled to Tarshish not because he doubted God's power, but because he knew God's character too well. He could not stomach a pardoned Nineveh.

We rarely admit that the hardest part of following a merciful God is watching Him be merciful to people we believe deserve destruction. Yet this is precisely who Yahweh reveals Himself to be — a God whose compassion outruns even His prophet's longest grudge.