I

Regardless of how angry God had been with the Ninevites, as soon as they declared a fast and donned sackcloth and ashes, His heart began to gradually soften and He began to change His mind. The moment before He proclaimed to them that He would destroy their city—the moment prior to their confession and repentance for their sins—God was still angry with them. Once they had carried out a series of repentant acts, God’s anger for the people of Nineveh gradually transformed into mercy and tolerance for them.

II

There is nothing contradictory about the coinciding revelation of these two aspects of God’s disposition in the same event. God expressed and revealed each of these two polar-opposite essences before and after the people of Nineveh repented, allowing people to see the realness and the unoffendableness of God’s essence. God used His attitude to tell people the following: It’s not that God does not tolerate people, or that He does not want to show mercy to them; rather, it is that they rarely truly repent to God, and it’s rare that people truly turn away from their evil ways and abandon the violence in their hands.

III

When God is angry with man, He hopes that man will be able to truly repent, and He hopes to see man’s true repentance, in which case He’ll then liberally continue to bestow His mercy and tolerance upon man. That is, man’s evil deeds incur God’s wrath, whereas God’s mercy and tolerance are given to those who listen to God and truly repent before Him, to those who can turn away from their evil ways and abandon the violence in their hands. God’s attitude was very clearly revealed in His treatment of the Ninevites: It’s not hard to gain God’s mercy and tolerance, and what He requires is one’s true repentance. As long as people turn away from their evil ways and abandon their violence, God will change His heart and His attitude toward them.

from The Word, Vol. 2. On Knowing God. God Himself, the Unique II