What is the overarching message from the Book of Jonah that helps us today? What are the ways that we can get confused about or struggle with God's...

The
overarching message of Jonah is that we must obey God's commands, even if they go against our
wishes and desires. The second overarching message is that mercy is a great goodone which God
models in sparing Nineveh.

Jonah is instructed by God to tell the people of
the Assyrian city of Nineveh to repent of their sins or they will soon be destroyed by God.
Jonah doesn't want to do this, so he flees and gets passage on board a ship. However, God sends
a great storm that threatens to destroy the ship. When Jonah admits he is the cause of the
storm, the sailors throw him overboard. He is swallowed by a great fish, often said to be a
whale, but after he prays to God for deliverance and promises to do his will, he is vomited from
the whale.

At this point, he preaches to Nineveh that they have 40 days to
repent or be destroyed. They do and are spared. Jonah is angry about this and sulks. God grows a
gourd to shade Jonah and then kills it. Jonah is upset over this act. God says to him:

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 six score thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

We can get confused and struggle with God's purpose when we mistake
our own ideas of what God's purpose should be for God's purpose. When God's ideas don't align
with our own, it is easy to decide God is wrong and that we don't have to obey. Furthermore, we
tend to be angry when sin is forgiven rather than punished because our sense of justice kicks
in. But we have to remember, as Jonah is reminded, that mercy is a great gift and virtue, and
one that God has the right to dispense.