Jonah 4
1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2 And he prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. 3 Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 And the Lord said, “Do you do well to be angry?” 5 Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. 6 Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. 7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” 9 But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” 10 And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”
Introduction
Who do you hate? Not just merely dislike and then move on. Who do you really hate? Who has sinned against you? Who has hurt you? Who has betrayed you? What is is about them that you hate? Why is it hard for you to forgive them? How would you describe your attitude toward them? How about your mission? What is God’s message for them?
Our passage today, zooms in on the prophet of God as he wrestles with his own heart toward—his own attitudes and perspectives on—his enemies. It divides nicely into three sections: verses 1-3, a contrast between the characters of Jonah and God, verses 4-8, a kindergarten class for Jonah from God, and verses 9-11, a critical confrontation of Jonah by God.
1. A Contrast of Characters (Jonah 4:1-3)
Like a setting, the first three verses establish the context of our passage, focusing particularly on the starting points of our two characters. First, we have Jonah.
Verse 1: “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.” What a loaded verse. As we parachute in to our text, the first thing we know is that Jonah is displeased. What? About what is Jonah displeased? If we look just a few verses earlier up to 3:10, we will have seen that God has just relented from visiting disaster upon the very deserving Ninevites. This context is actually linguistically tied in Hebrew. The Ninevites turn from or repent from their evil or displeasing ways, and so God relents of the disaster or evil (the same word here—he relents of his displeasure) with the Ninevites. How does Jonah respond? He responds in 4:1 with exceeding frustration (our word again). The Ninevites turn from their displeasing ways, God relents from his displeasure, and so Jonah is displeased.
But he is not merely displeased. He is, in fact, angry. And this, friends, is his problem. There is something off inside of Jonah. He is in a bad state. The word here is, again, literally “hot.” Jonah’s blood is boiling. In a medical sense, anger produces an increased heart rate. It raises the blood pressure. Adrenaline and noradrenaline (the chemicals that get the body ready for action, like gasoline on a fire) kick into gear. Unmistakable and unavoidable facial expressions and body language. Jonah becomes increasingly aggressive. He’s ready for a fight. He’s longing for the satisfaction of battle. He’s an itch that begs to be scratched.
He’s in a bad state. To be clear, this is not righteous anger. More than 30 times in Psalms, this word is used to describe God’s response to sin and his enemies. But Jonah is not God. He has neither the constitution of character nor righteous perspective to be rightly godlike in his anger. His anger comes from somewhere else. Where? Why is he so angry?
Part of it, in Jonah’s mind, stems from God’s character. Notice how he describes God in verse 3:
“…you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.” Notice the repetition. Jonah is blowing up in anger. God is slow to anger. We have Jonah, on the one hand, flying off the handle and frankly losing his mind in blind rage, and it all stems from God’s compassion.
What a spectacular contrast! This is not the first time this kind of language is used of God. In fact, it has a rich biblical history that goes back to Exodus. In chapter 32, Moses is delayed up on the mountain, communing with God and receiving the Law. The people, however, make for themselves a golden calf and start worshipping. It’s a low point for Israel, to say the least. Moses, angry at the site of it, throws the tablets to the ground, breaking them. He then orders the sons of Levi to go and purge the camp of sinners, taking out 3,000 men. And in one of the more straightforward rebukes of the Old Testament, Moses tells them in 32:30: “You have sinned a great sin.” Then they get a plague as well. God declares his stance on those who have sinned against him: he will blot them out.
But this is not the end. God’s people are not done. Moses gathers those who repent in the tent of meeting. He prays and prays. And then God calls him back. This time, Moses, ‘cut for yourself two stone tablets like the first set.’ You’re making them this time. And then the Lord passes before Moses and proclaims in 34:6-7: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
God forgave Israel. God was right to blot them out and yet, part of his character is to be merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. I wish we had time to go to Numbers 14 and see the next instance. But suffice it say for now: Jonah is angry. But God is compassionate. But why? Why does God’s compassion anger Jonah so much? In the next few verses, 4-8, God tries to show Jonah through an object lesson.
2. A Kindergarten Class (Jonah 4:4-8:)
God takes Jonah back to kindergarten, to pre-school. It’s show and tell time. In Victorian England, it’s time for an object lesson complete with props. This section, like the next section, begins in verse 4 with a question from God. “Do you do well to be angry?” And then God orchestrates nature to make a point. Notice the repetition of the word “appoint.”
“5 Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. 6 Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. 7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
You see, Jonah betrays something about himself here. We learn in the next section that he pities the plant, he mourns the gourd that gave him relief from the heat of the dessert sun. Here in our text, he’s prepared to die because he can’t live without the shade. But it goes so much deeper. He throws a fit because he thinks he deserves better.
Where does this anger come from? It’s internal. In a psychological sense, anger is a response to sources of stress or anxiety, it inspires action without knowing or understanding real causes. Behind Jonah’s anger is a dark sense of self-righteousness, pride, arrogance that consumes him. He is fundamentally selfish, believing that he truly deserves God’s merciful provision of shade (from a plant that he himself has nothing to do with creating, growing, procuring, maintaining, or sustaining). He deceives himself into thinking that God owes him mercy.
And so, he gets angry.
Brothers and sisters, is this us? Do we trick ourselves into believing that we deserve better? Do we look at the challenges of our lives and say, I am righteous, I deserve a better life? Do we look at the sin—the materialism and hypocrisy and false religions—around us and think: they deserve worse? Do we divide up the world according to works, tallying scores? I am a Christian, he’s not, therefore my life should be better. God should take better care of me. I deserve a little more shade. Do we tell ourselves this lie?
I think we might. I think we, like Jonah, might be so wrapped up in our own righteousness sometimes that we let it blind us the possibility of repentance and expression of mercy to others. We get caught up in being so right in our theology and so righteous in our behavior that our hearts turn cold. We lose site of the sinner for whom the mercy of the gospel is all the difference.
But why? Where does this come from? As James 4:1 says: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” Are we like Saul in 1 Samuel, compelled to anger by envy? Are we like David? Fueled by shame over our own sins? Are we like Solomon claims in Ecclesiastes 7:9 or Proverbs 14:29, brought to anger by our own foolishness? Are we like Jonah? So, convinced of our own right to comfort that the comfort of others burns in our hearts? Do we do well to be angry?
3. A Critical Confrontation (Jonah 4:9-11)
God finishes the passage on the climax with his central point of the book. Our passage has something of a strange structure. It’s only half a plot arc. That is, the dramatic tension which builds through the text only reaches its climax in the last verse, leaving us with an open question. What’s the point? God’s point is that he shows mercy.
He. Shows. Mercy.
He reveals his heart in that last question.
“Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’”
God determines to show his mercy to the furthest reaches of his creation. Just as God chose to show mercy to Jonah with the shade from heat, so he chose to show mercy to Nineveh. Jonah is confronted with this reality.
Jonah, the reluctant prophet, appears to have done very little to help. Is it possible that he preached a lengthy, well reasoned message that makes the case for repentance and turning from evil and which shares about the character of God who on the hand, visits judgment on those who deserve, and yet is a compassionate God who saves people, even gentiles like Rahab and Ruth? It is possible that what we have in Jonah 3 is merely a summary of this message? Is it possible that Jonah went to every possible person in Nineveh, like Paul in the Roman world, urgently trying to reach every last man, woman, and child with the good news?
Maybe. But that isn’t really the way Jonah 3 presents it. Rather, there is a comedic tone. You get the impression from the way it is described that Jonah has preached the world’s shortest hellfire and brimstone sermon. Verse 4 in chapter 3: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Clearly Jonah wasn’t very descriptive in his explanation of repentance. We see that in the Assyrian response. Once the message gets to the king, we have everybody putting on sackcloth. We have them putting sackcloth on the animals. Everybody’s fasting, even the cows and sheep. For well schooled Jews, it’s a picture of bumbling idiots.
But despite the terseness of the sermon and the silliness of the expression of repentance, God determines to show compassion to a repentant people. Yes, it’s portrayed as deficient preaching. But, God sometimes works through deficient preaching. John Stott—uncle John as he was called—was converted through preaching that he would later reject. “Behold I stand at the door and knock…” misused in the sermon that brought this giant of the faith to his faith. Why?
Because God shows mercy. And God’s character is one that determines to show mercy to the furthest reaches of creation. And this is his challenge to Jonah: ‘I will spare the Assyrians – and even take care of the cattle, you selfish idiot – and yet you are throwing a temper tantrum over your gourd…’
And so, we turn back to ourselves. I’ve always been fascinated that Jonah, in its entirety, is read out loud on Yom Kippur in synagogues all around the world. This is an early tradition, having been instituted by the rabbis in the Mishnah (Babylonian Talmud), probably in the third century. Why? Why the Day of Atonement? The holiest day of the year… Why this text on the day in which the Jews ask God for forgiveness of their sins against him?
Two reasons: First, it is a reminder for us that God is one who saves. God is one who gives second chances. We must be willing to see the sinners around us, the sinners we see in the mirror, and know that salvation belongs to the Lord our God. His nature is to show mercy. This may be us. We may be realizing for the first time, for the five hundredth time, that we deserve destruction like the Assyrians and our only hope is the gracious provision of God our Father. Second, it is a challenge to our sense of mission. For Jews, it is a reminder to go to the gentiles. For us, it must be a reminder that the mercy we have received—because it is not deserved—should not, in our own hearts, be withheld from others. We cannot be the Pharisees in Luke 15:1 or the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal later in that chapter, who would withhold the presence of Jesus from sinners because we have somehow convinced ourselves that we’re less sinful. Let go of your hatred and prejudice. Yes. But more so, let go of your self-righteousness. For Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners—and like Paul—we do well to consider that we might just be the chief-most of sinners. Does Jonah get it? I don’t know. The book doesn’t tell. What a chilling end. This book, the correction of a wayward prophet, ends without us knowing whether Jonah learned his lesson.
Conclusion
Let me conclude with this: Why? Why let go of our anger and turn to the God who shows mercy those who don’t deserve it? Why be willing to share that compassion? Because of the Lord’s greatest act of compassion. You see, greater than saving his people from the Egyptian captivity, greater than forgiving them after the golden calf, greater than forgiving the hypocritical king David, greater than even sparing the Ninevites, our God demonstrates his compassion in the cross of Jesus Christ. You see, just because God relents from total disaster, from horrific judgment that is so richly deserved by the the biggest city in the worst, most violent, and evil country in the world—it doesn’t mean that there is no judgment. It doesn’t mean that God’s burning anger against sin just disappears. It doesn’t mean that justice is not served.
No, it was applied to his Son.
The only reason that Jonah needed to have compassion on Nineveh, the only reason we need, is that God’s nature is to take the punishment that we all deserve and visit it upon his Son, in our place.
Let us pray. Heavenly father, we recognize that you are a God who saves sinners. And we are grateful that you, through your Son, saved us. Help us in our hearts, Lord, to know and love your compassion for sinners, and by your Spirit be free from self-righteous anger. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.