What does First B Jackson teach about forgiving enemies?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on forgiving enemies starts with an honest admission that the command is genuinely hard. When Van Jones preached through the book of Jonah, he did not soften the difficulty. Nineveh was Israel's brutal enemy, the kind of place that paraded severed heads on sticks, and God's call to go there and preach was not a small ask. Jonah's reluctance made a certain kind of sense. What the book refuses to let stand, though, is the idea that our feelings about an enemy get to override God's call to go to them. Van traced his own history with this, noting that he once wanted enemies destroyed, and that years of overseas ministry and his wife's influence had slowly pressed him toward what the Bible actually teaches: that apart from Christ, every person is an enemy of God, and that the grace we depend on is the same grace God wanted to extend to Nineveh.
The Jonah story also surfaces something harder than outright hatred. Jonah does eventually go to Nineveh and preach, but he goes without love for the people he is speaking to. When the entire city repents and God relents, Jonah is furious. He admits to God that this mercy is exactly what he was afraid of. Van pointed out that Jonah even quotes God's own character accurately, from Exodus 34, but uses it as an accusation rather than a comfort. The issue underneath Jonah's anger is an idol: his love for his own people, his nationalism, had quietly displaced his obedience to God. He could not rejoice in mercy extended to people he had written off as enemies, because he had never fully received that mercy himself.
The cross is where the teaching finally lands. Van drew the parallel between Jonah being thrown into the sea so that others could be spared and Jesus absorbing the wrath that was due to others. Jonah 4 ends with God pressing Jonah on whether his anger is justified, and the book closes without a tidy resolution, which Van took as a deliberate invitation. The reader is left sitting where Jonah is sitting, being asked the same question. The grace God showed Nineveh, and the grace that meets both God's mercy and His justice at the cross, is the only ground from which forgiving an enemy becomes possible at all.
Taught from Jonah 4:2 · Exodus 34:6-7 · Jonah 3:10 · Jonah 1:1-3 · Jonah 4:6-11
The passage taught · Exodus 34:6-7
6 Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth,
7 keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation.”
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- August 17, 2025 The Book of Jonah - Guest Speaker Van Jones Jonah ran from God's call to love his enemies. A sermon from First Baptist Jackson on obedience, repentance, and the mercy we resist giving others.
- August 17, 2025 God Calls Jonah to Do Hard Things Van Jones walks through the entire book of Jonah, showing how God pursues stubborn people through hard things and calls us to obey, repent, and love our enemies.
- August 17, 2025 No and Lord Van Jones walks through the entire book of Jonah, showing how God patiently pursues a reluctant, angry prophet and calls us to love even the people we most want to see judged.
Mentioned along the way
- October 23, 2016 Owe Nothing to Nobody But Love Romans 13:8 shows love is a debt that never gets paid off. Pastor Ray McDaniel explains why loving others fulfills the whole law.