Here we are in chapter four of the book of Jonah, the end of the story, things haven’t turned out the way Jonah expected, have they? He has seen nothing but disappointment. He was told by God to go to a place he didn’t want to go to and deliver a message he didn’t want to deliver to a people who were trying to destroy his people; his plan to take a cruise to Spain was a disaster; God’s plan to save Jonah from drowning wasn’t, orthodox; God has the fish vomit him back on the beach and doesn’t tell him Hisw plan or what to say until he gets to the city of Nineveh – where things went just as he feared, the people repented. It looks like God is going to relent and not destroy the city.
You know, over and over I run into people who at one time in their life, used to go to church; they used to be excited about Jesus Christ… then they woke up one day and realized that they haven’t prayed for so long they can’t remember the last time they even prayed, they are not sure where their bible could be, is it in the living room, the bedroom, the garage?…the truth is they haven’t even thought about God in the last few months. Now it is not that they are against the church, or that they don’t care about God or that they have no faith – there is just no oomph to it. They are disappointment with God. Disappointment, for whatever reason, arrives, and our experience with God fades….
Disappointment with God. I think like Jonah, no one starts out thinking they will end up being disappointed with God. I mean, that’s an oxymoron isn’t it: Disappointment / God? Those two things logically cannot coexist. So one day we wake up and no matter how we look at it, we find that we cannot deny our disappointment with God, and it hits us twice as hard; What has happened is something that can’t happen, God / disappointment. We are bewildered. How did we get here? I’m sure that when Jonah started out as a prophet he thought a life of serving God would be turning people’s lives around, lifting people out of their sorrows, blessing people with the powerful word of God; He was on God’s side, it would be nothing but successful for if God is for us who can be against us?
When we look at Jonah in this chapter we see the great anger of Jonah don’t we? He is not just miffed, he is over the top, he is furious, he is so mad he claims that he could sit down and die. But I think Jonah’s anger is just an expression of what is happening deep within his soul – things have not worked out like he expected they would, Jonah has a in a time of a loss of hope. Things in my life should be this way – but they are this way, how can that be? The anger rises up from within. He is so angry that he doesn’t want to go on.
Now Jonah is not naive, he has been around, he knows his scriptures, he has experienced God first hand. He has been the go to man for God. He’s the one people would come to, to answer questions about God. “Go ask the prophet Jonah, I’m sure he can answer your question about God”. He knows God, he has taught others about God. How did Jonah arrive at such a state of disappointment?
Picking up at verse 5 we see Jonah leaves the city of Nineveh for obvious reasons. First, Jonah hates the Assyrians and detests the city of Nineveh so he is out of there – The best view of the city of Nineveh is in his rearview mirror. Second, Jonah has convinced himself that Nineveh is about to be destroyed, so as a practical matter he gets out of town before the destruction rains down, like Lot and his family fleeing Sodom. So there is verse 5 we see Jonah going a safe distance making a shelter out of whatever he could find, ready for the fireworks to start.
When there is an accident on the side of the road, you are crawling along in traffic, because everyone ahead of you had to take a look, it is very hard not to take a look yourself, isn’t it? Jonah is just like us, he is human, he wants to see shock and awe. But I think there is more to why he sets up outside of town, much more. Jonah could have just left and gone home, but he doesn’t, Jonah needs a sense of closure. He has to see what will happen next. He has seen disappointment after disappointment, maybe now things will go his way…
Years ago this worker would stroll into the department I was working in, make several observations about how we were doing our jobs and then proceed to tell us what we needed to do to be better at our jobs. Later she would visit and be taken back that none of her “suggestions” were implemented. Over the months she became more insistent and more demanding, growing more frustrated, growing more angry each time she came by. Why wouldn’t we listen to her?! The fact that she wasn’t our boss, the fact that she didn’t have any authority over us, the fact that she worked in the sock department and not housewares….never seemed to occurred to her. This woman could not manipulate us, she could not control us, she could not make her will happen, and this infuriated her.
Have you had people like this is your life? – They give you direction – “This is what you need to do”, they give you a task, “Here, do this and things will be better”, they make demands, “You must make this happen”, they may even disguise their manipulation with spiritual talk, “I prayed about it, and this is what you are to do”; and if you don’t carry out their demands they claim that, “You just won’t listen”! Somehow, someway, they think they know the answer to what is happening in your life, and things would work out so well, if you would just do what they say.
Control, impatience, personal comfort, conflict with our sinful nature – this is what is happening in the life of Jonah and this is what this chapter in Jonah is about. Jonah is committed to his own concept of God and how God works. Jonah in his logic, in his intelligence, in his experience, sees that life will go well if things happen as he envisions them to be and anything outside of that, leads to disappointment. This is what I believe about God; This is what I believe is fair; This is what I believe is spiritual, logical and makes perfect sense, and if I do not see it happen, disappointment sets in. God sees this in Jonah and so he sets out to turn him from his sin with a plant, a worm, and a hot wind.
The shelter that Jonah would have build probably was some sort of lean to made out of scrub brush, so it wasn’t much of a shelter, this isn’t a lush area of the world. Now this part of Iraq is very, very, hot. Understand that Jonah is ready to wait for forty days. So Jonah is exposed day after day baking in the sun and when the vine appears and spreads out over his booth he is more than thrilled at the relief he has been given. Verse 6. What kind of vine that grows over his booth is irrelevant, the type of plant is not the point – the grace and mercy from God is the point. God didn’t ask Jonah to stay. Jonah stayed out of his own free will. God didn’t ask Jonah to build a shelter and suffer in the intense heat, no, Jonah is the one who has placed himself in this miserable situation. Now understand that from Jonah’s point of view, he is very willing to endure this suffering which he brings upon himself, so that he can see the conclusion he so much desires to see. Because he sees the potential destruction of his enemies as a righteous act by God, he fools himself into thinking that his suffering in the sun is an act of righteousness that he must endure to see his own wish of destruction happen. But his suffering, his time of misery has nothing to do with holiness – it is just the result of a bad choice for a camp site.
So the vine grows and provides Jonah with one day’s relief from the heat. Jonah is happy with the vine & shelter because of personal comfort. You can’t help but notice that he has no concern about the 600,000 to one million people in the city; See, he is personally very uncomfortable, he is so personally miserable, concern for others doesn’t even enter his mind - Self comes first with Jonah. In verse 6 the word shade in Hebrew has a double meaning: to shade, and to save. In the same way the word for discomfort also carries a double meaning: discomfort and evil, wickedness, trouble. Double meaning here is not only to shade and ease Jonah’s discomfort, but to also to save Jonah from his wickedness. Perhaps Jonah will wake up and see, what he has in mind, however logical, however righteous – is not the will of God.
The plant is a symbol of God’s mercy on Nineveh. Death of plant: God’s removal of mercy from Jonah. So God gives Jonah a taste of grace, mercy and then he takes it away to wake Jonah up spiritually. He kills the plant with a worm at night and then piles it on with a sirocco the next morning, a hot wind that can be up to 120 degrees. We see in verse 8 that Jonah has now had enough, his disappointment is too great, so he lashes out at God in anger. Jonah’s anger – he cannot manipulate God, he cannot make God do what he envisions as fair in his life. He is frustrated by not being able to control events in his life. The only thing left for him to control is whether he lives or dies, so he cries out- “It would be better for me to die than to live.”. God ignores his death wish.
When Robert G. Ingersoll was delivering his lectures against Christ and the Bible, his oratorical ability usually assured him of a large crowd. One night after an inflammatory speech in which he severely attacked man’s faith in God, he dramatically took out his watch and said, "I’ll give God a chance to prove that He exists and is almighty. I challenge Him to strike me dead within 5 minutes!" First there was silence, then people became uneasy. Some left the hall, unable to take the nervous strain of the occasion, and one woman fainted. At the end of the allotted time, the atheist exclaimed derisively, "See! There is no God. I am still very much alive!" After the lecture a young fellow said to a Christian lady, "Well, Ingersoll certainly proved something tonight!" "Yes he did," she said. "He proved God isn’t taking orders from atheists tonight."
Jonah is furious about the vine - It wasn’t his in the first place. But being furious about the vine is just a symptom of being furious about not being able to control events in his life. Think about it, many times when you are angry about an issue, an event, a thing that has happened, or not happened, your anger is more about not being able to control things around you rather than the issue itself. The root of that anger is disappointment and the root of our disappointment is pride. I know what is fair, I know what is right, I know what should happen in my life!
Some questions to take note of in our lives: Was our conversion to Christ a radical transformation from self centered willfulness to obedience to Jesus Christ, or was it an effort to recruit God to help with our goals, and get more out of life? Are we the same people we always were, or has God changed our focus from our self individualistic way of life, to a life of obedience to his will. Finally, do I use the work of God in my life as an excuse to manipulate people?
Disappointment – impatience with God’s timetable, displeasure with God’s system of justice. This is usually the reason we arrive at disappointment with God. This is what we see in Jonah’s heart, and I dare say, we see it in our hearts also. We may be the best of people, but we are still sinful. Gal. 5:17 “For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.”
Jonah knows God, but he is unpracticed in God. He saw everything through his eyes, he saw nothing through the eyes of others, he is unable to see things through the eyes of God. Jonah is right, God is wrong. If that is not pride, I don’t know what is. He is unable to be in control, and to now see that his suffering is for nothing is more than he can take and like us, Jonah reveals his spiritual poverty through his anger at God.
Many times people are convinced that God is not interested in their lives – because He doesn’t answer their prayers, He doesn’t give into their demands, “You know Lord I need your help here, time is running out”. How many times have I seen people walk away from God because of an event that they see as unfair, because God did not intervene as they had hoped, in the specified time they have set before God, especially when it involves an innocent person. Hey build their booth, wait in the hot sun and when God doesn’t act as expected, they walk off into the desert. We find ourselves disappointed repeatedly because the result is something quite different than what we thought would happen. Angry when our will is not done.
Now I’m not in anyway saying that these requests we give to the Lord are not legitimate. We can have a very good, righteous and legitimate need, that we ask out of a pure, Godly and sincere heart. What we ask for can be something that is selfless and only for the good of others…still God is not required to act as we imagine He should act.
Contrast the prophet Jonah and the pagan king. A couple of weeks ago we saw that the pagan king turn from his evil ways toward God. He stops, turns around and humbles himself before God saying, “who knows, perhaps God will relent” – No demands, no anger, no self righteous statements, no thought that he knows what is best…No wonder God relents; amazing, we learn more from the pagan king than from the man of God – why is that? The pagan king doesn’t think he knows better.
In verse 11 we see God saying, 11 “But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well.
Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
The one hundred and twenty thousand doesn’t refer to the entire population of the city, but to the children in the city, who are so innocent. The rather odd reference to the cattle, contrasts the economy of the city to the one vine. It represents the entire net worth of a people as opposed to a wild gourd vine. It doesn’t matter what Jonah has stuck in his head about how things are, certainly God is concerned with the city and Jonah is disappointed.
The book of Jonah just stops, there really is no ending, is there? It is like a French movie, the plot just stops with no resolution. There is something missing. What is missing? You are. The book ends with God having the last word, which of course he is always going to have – I mean he is God after all; The book ends without Jonah understanding, without Jonah turning his life around. It is funny isn’t it? Jonah the good prophet, comes to tell a sinful hoard to get their lives together, and it turns out Jonah is the one who has his priorities all out of whack. Here we see the story asking us the same: Have you set yourself up for disappointment with God, or do you see there is more to life than meets the eye?
Let me end with this:
In 1945, Cliff Barrows and his girlfriend Billie scraped together enough funds for a simple wedding and two tickets to a city with a resort hotel. However, when they arrived, they found the hotel shut down. They were stranded in an unfamiliar city with little money. A sympathetic driver took them to a grocery store owned by a woman he knew. There the newlyweds spent their first night in a small lightly furnished room above the store. What a disappointing start to their marriage that night must have been! Certainly they had greater expectations than sleeping in a musty bed above a grocery store.
Though they were forced to spend the first night of their marriage sleeping in a small room above a grocery store they made the best of it. The next day the owner of the store overheard Cliff playing Christian songs on his trombone. She arranged for them to spend the rest of their honeymoon at a friend’s house. Several days later the host invited them to attend a youth rally where a young evangelist was speaking. The song leader that night was sick, and Cliff was asked to take charge of the music for the service. The young evangelist, of course, was Billy Graham. The two have been partners ever since.
