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Question of the Day: When you’re confronted with a multiple choice situation, and you truly don’t know which one to pick, what do you do?

Are you familiar with the Bible story of Jonah and the whale? I know, I know – not everyone has heard it. So rather than assume you know what I’m talking about, here’s a synopsis. (And before you cry out “Hey, it wasn’t a whale!” – you’re right; but if you’ll just bear with me a bit…)

A Clear Command

OK, to begin with, Jonah was something of an “unwilling” prophet. God had an assignment for him, and had stated it in no uncertain terms: go to the city of Nineveh (known far and wide as the Sin City of his day) and tell them to repent. If they didn’t – well, let’s just say they wouldn’t like what happens next, if you know what I mean…

However, Jonah decided he wanted no part of it. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t because he didn’t want to actually be a prophet. No, the sad truth was that he was so full of prejudice and anger toward the Ninevites that he didn’t want them to repent – he wanted them to be destroyed!

(Another question: Have you ever had the misfortune to run across someone like that? Someone so rabidly angry or prejudiced you could barely even have a conversation with them? I have, and it ain’t pretty, lemme tell ya!)

The Wrong Response

Anyway, instead of going to Nineveh, he jumped on the first ship headed in the exact opposite direction. Definitely a moment of insanity; perhaps even more than one – I mean, did he really think he could hide from God?

As luck would have it, while they were out to sea a huge storm blew up; one so bad the sailors began to fear for their very lives. Jonah, in a fit of remorse, confessed that it was all his fault, and that he was running from God. He went on to say that if they tossed him overboard – hey, it would solve everybody’s problems.

Naturally the sailors, being a generally superstitious lot, thought this was a great idea. And, as far as Jonah was concerned, he probably figured his own problems would be solved too (since he would be, you know, dead), so what the heck.

Now here’s where the most well-known and interesting part of the story happens. After being thrown overboard, a huge sea creature swallowed him up, and the sea immediately calmed down. The sailors, on seeing that, thought to themselves well, scratch one prophet, and sailed on their merry way.

(Note: by the way, the Bible calls it a “big fish”, but most people simply use the word “whale”. Truth be told, there’s no telling what it really was, other than it was, well, big enough to swallow him whole.)

A Second Chance

But see, God had given Jonah an assignment, and by golly, he was going to do it! (Ever been through something like this with your children? Yep, thought so.) So Jonah, who according to the Biblical account spent three days in the belly of this (well, let’s just use the convenient term for it) whale finally told God, OK, you win – I’ll do it.

On the third day, the whale spits ol’ Jonah up on the beach (yuk; being turned into whale vomit is bad enough – but on the other hand, at least it beats the alternative!), and he heads off (uh, Jonah, not the whale) to do what he should have been doing in the first place – going to Ninevah.

A Credible Messenger

Now, imagine the scene with me if you will. Here’s a Ninevite fisherman, standing up to his knees in the warm Mediterranean surf, happily fishing away and generally minding his own business. It’s nighttime (hey, everybody knows that’s the best time to surf fish), and he’s out there all alone. All… alone. Then, out of the darkness, he begins to hear the sound of someone slosh-slosh-sloshing noisily out of the water towards him.

Like an apparition out of his worst nightmare, Jonah suddenly appears before him, and in my mind, this guy had to be somethin’ to see! He’s bleached completely white from three days’ exposure to the stomach acids in the whale’s belly. His clothes are in tatters. There’s a piece of seaweed stuck in his hair right there. And then, to cap it off, he walks right up to the terrified fisherman, points his bony finger at him and says, “Repent!”

What would you do? Well, Bubba, I’m tellin’ ya – I’d repent!

In fact it should come as no surprise that within a short time of his arrival, the people of Nineveh - well, they repented.

Now let’s think about that for a minute. The Biblical account indicates that the people of Nineveh didn’t have to be told WHO God was, I mean, they pretty much already knew. All they really needed was a messenger with, well, credibility.

You may be thinking to yourself, but wait a minute, didn’t God have enough credibility of His own? Well, that’s the problem – they were ignoring Him. So, to solve that, He sent someone else to get their attention.

Now granted, someone who looked like how I described Jonah might have looked would probably not be taken too seriously today. I mean, I’ve certainly seen stranger folks in my own travels, and you probably have too. But back then, this was pretty unusual.

Hey, up until then, not that many people had been swallowed by a whale and lived to tell about it! I’m telling you, it certainly got their attention! What’s more, it gave his message weight – which translates into credibility.

How to Evaluate Advice

I bet you’ve been wondering where we’re going with this line of thought? So was I.

Every day, all day, we are called upon to pass judgment on all kinds of things; it’s a never ending stream of decisions based on information we’ve been supplied. So how do we make up our minds? Well, the answer is simple, really.

When you want to try a new restaurant, what do you do? You ask around to see if someone you know has been there, right? If you need to find a good lawyer, it’s pretty much the same thing: you check for references among the people you know. Interested in dating a certain person? Don’t you first go check out what your friends know (and are willing to tell you) about them?

See, we consider the source of the information. The more we know about (and believe and/or trust) the messenger – well, the more credible the message is.

Take politics, for instance (please!) Granted, what we hear is filtered through our own experiences, leanings, and let’s face it, prejudices. A political conservative, for instance, would probably hear things a certain way; likewise for liberals (and bear in mind, I use these terms in their broadest sense).

But the thing to remember is this: Sooner or later we’re going to be called upon to make a decision based on what someone has told us. Hey, it happens all the time; in business, in our personal lives – like I said, all the time. And there will be times when we simply can’t know with certainty the truth of everything we hear.

When that’s the case, sometimes we have no choice but to fall back on our final line of defense.

Consider the source.

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