NOTES for Jon 3:10
Can God revoke His decision? And if He can, in what cases? What are fate, doom, predestination? Do they exist? Prophetic experience gives the best answer to this question. Prophets are often considered predictors of future events, to whom God Himself reveals His plans so that people may learn about them.
But is that so? The biblical language has no word that in other languages is conveyed by concepts such as doom, fate, or destiny. The Bible does not use them at all. In that case, naturally, there is no reason to speak of any predestination, since predestination is impossible if nothing is programmed in advance. Nineveh was supposed to perish; it seemed doomed. But its inhabitants repented of their sins and turned to God, and He, seeing their repentance, canceled what even Jonah himself thought was already the inevitable end.
The natural question arises: what about God's plans and purposes? How can one plan anything at all if one never knows exactly whether events will happen as planned? Meanwhile, when the matter concerns us ourselves, we, being in just such a position, are still able to plan our actions and often to carry out what we have intended, provided, of course, that nothing goes completely contrary to what we were counting on. The goal remains the same; only the ways of reaching it change. Why, then, should we be surprised that God too often acts in the same way?
He could act differently. He could simply carry out His plan without paying any attention to us or to our choices. He could forgive us nothing and give each of us only one chance. But He does not want merely to carry out what He has conceived; He wants to do it in such a way that we are drawn as deeply as possible into His works. Not because He cannot manage without us, but because being drawn into His works also means becoming participants in His plans and, in the end (if, of course, we do not leave on our own), inhabitants of His Kingdom. The Kingdom without which there can be no talk either of salvation or of life.