The Reluctant, Rebellious, Pouting Prophet: Jonah Chapter 4
Today's message is the final in a four part series on the book of Jonah.
Turn to page 1325 in your pew Bibles to Jonah chapter 4. If you have your own Bible, it is after Obadiah and before Micah in the Old Testament.
So far, we've learned that Jonah was told, in Chapter 1, to go to Nineveh, he said no and ran the other way to Tarshish, the wind began to blow at the hand of God and when the sailors did throw him overboard the sea calmed and Jonah was swallowed by the great fish.
In Jonah Chapter 2, we saw how Jonah cried out in dispair to God, he rededicated himself toward God and God delivered him by having the great fish throw him up on the beach. We also learned that "Salvation is of the Lord"; this is what we are taught in the New Testament by Paul, James Peter, John, the writer of Hebrews and yes, even Jesus Himself.
Some people think that salvation is by works, that is that to be saved and/or to stay saved you must do things that are pleasing to God. But what does this scripture say? Salvation is of the LORD. We can't do any of the work, because then salvation would be of ourselves. What does the word of God say about this?
1) We are spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins
Eph 2:1-7
1 And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,
2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,
3 among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
6 and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
7 that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
(NKJ)
Col 2:13-14
13 And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses,
14 having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
(NKJ)
2) Because we are dead in our trespasses and sins when we are unsaved, we do not seek God. Some churches have "seeker" classes, and I think that that is wrong. Either God calls you and you are saved by Him (Salvation is of the Lord) or you are blind to Him and do not seek Him.
Rom 3:10-11
10 As it is written: "There is none righteous, no, not one;
11 There is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God.
(NKJ)
3) If we could be saved by our works, our good deeds, then we'd be able to brag about it.
Eph 2:8-9
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
(NKJ)
4) If we could be saved by our works, then we God would owe us. He doesn't owe us anything at all; he created us and it is us that are separated by Him. We don't have the ability to come to Him.
Rom 4:1-4
1 What then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh?
2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.
3 For what does the Scripture say? "Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness."
4 Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. (NKJ)
In Jonah chapter three, we see that God is a God of second chances. How many of you are glad that God is a God of second chances? Has God ever given you a second chance? Sure He has. God deals with us when we sin, but he shows us his love in that he treats us as children; if we misbehave, then God takes us to the woodshed.
God used Jonah, who did not want to see the Ninevites saved, to bring them to faith. They knew from the message and the appearance of Jonah that this was something unique, this message. Also, it was a movement of the Holy Spirit in the message that was conveyed by Jonah. One thing that the Bible is clear on is that the word must be heard for salvation to occur:
Rom 10:17
17 So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (NKJ)
So, let's pick up today's message in Jonah 3:10:
Jonah 3:10-4:11
10 Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it.
If you remember from last week, God saw that the Ninevites meant business; they knew that God was serious about wiping them from the face of the earth. They looked as their sin, saw it, were ashamed and hated what their sin had made them, rose above it and turned to God. They were saved. God did not do what He had said he would because God is a God of superabundant mercy.
Sometimes we think that God is just waiting for us to mess up so that he can squash us like a bug. God does discipline us, but God is also long suffering. He puts up with a great deal from us. To us, we seem pretty good but to God we're pretty rotten. It's all in your viewpoint and whether it's distorted or not. But when we were saved, our sins were laid on the cross with Jesus and our sin debt was nailed to the cross--it was taken away.
Here's the question that I asked last week: Did God change His mind? From our viewpoint, it would seem that He did, but God already knew the outcome of what was going to happen. He knew that the Ninevites would come to faith, and being that God is a long suffering God, a God of mercy, he pushed the right buttons on these folks so that they would come to faith and he wouldn't have to wipe them out.
So God did not destroy them. Let's look at chapter 4 and see what old Jonah did at this point.
There are two words that describe today's scripture from Jonah chapter 4; lamenting and learning.
CHAPTER 4
1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry.
H. L. Willmington, in Willmington's Guide to the Bible, made an interesting note at this point in the study; the book of Jonah is proof not just that the book of Jonah itself is authentic but that the Bible as a whole is authentic. We saw the "dirty laundry" of the affair with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11, and the judgment that came upon David because of it, and we also see in other books a similar story. These people were just that--people. They had certain likes, dislikes and loves and hates. God always responds well to loves that are blessed by Him, and he will always respond in correction to those that are in a mindset of hate.
Here's the point--if the story of Jonah were not true, why would Jonah, who wrote the book, have written about himself in such a negative way? If it were untrue, wouldn't he have built himself up to look like the great prophet? Same thing with David. Wouldn't he have just omitted the whole story of his affair and subsequent cover-up and covert murder and activites to keep himself from looking bad? God had David, Jonah and others tell us these stories so that we could learn from them.
In verse 1, the word angry in Hebrew is the word Charah; (khaw-raw') this root means to burn, be kindled, glow with anger, be incensed, grow indignant; to be zealous, act zealously. Unlike some of its synonyms, Charah points to the fire or heat of the anger just after it has been ignited. It can refer to the anger of either men or God. It has the sense of fretting in Ps. 37:1; 7:8; Prov. 24:19.
Jonah wasn't just a little miffed that God had saved the Ninevites, he was burning with anger toward God.
2 So he prayed to the LORD, and said, "Ah, LORD, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish; for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm.
3 "Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live!"
Jonah looks to God and shakes his fist at Him. From the text here, we can see that not only did God know that Jonah didn't like the mission that God had assigned to him to go to Nineveh, but that Jonah even told God that He didn't want to go.
There have been times that we've all said the same thing to someone. Maybe it was your boss. Maybe it was your parents, or maybe to your spouse when you knew it was right but you were too knotheaded to see it the right way.
Look at verse three again. Jonah has a hatred so intense for the Ninevites that he'd rather be dead than to see them saved.
How many times have you said "I'll die before I forgive so and so!"? How many times have you felt so badly because someone that you did not like was blessed and you weren't? How many times have you cut a hissy fit and pouted because you didn't get your way, and your enemy did?
Hey, I have. And you know, I don't like it one bit.
Why would he have said this? We know that it was because of his hatred for the Ninevites, but think about these other things. Perhaps he didn't like the idea about the Ninevites swimming in the river of life in heaven with him. He thought that it should be "Jews only", just like the days prior to the civil rights movement in the south. There were, and still are, people that would never witness to a black person because of the color of their skin. They would not witness to someone in their neighborhood because they third generation welfare. The would rather die than witness to someone that beat them up in school, betrayed them in an area of trust, or because they were mean to begin with.
God is a God of all mercy. God doesn't save the righteous, but the unrighteous. For those that think that they are just fine, that they are so spiritual that their works can get them into heaven and that all others are doomed because they weren't born with the right name or with the right amount of money in the bank or whatever, the Word of God will not reach them. Do you know why? Because it's our sin that will condemn the unsaved, and these folks can't see their sin. They are lost in their trespasses and sins and unless they see their sin and their emptiness in who and what they are, they cannot be saved.
Here's another reason why Jonah may have been reluctant to see them saved: He did not want to be seen as a prophet that prophesied wrongly.
In the days of the Old Testament, if you were a prophet you always prophesied accurately. The first time that you prophesied wrong, you were a false prophet. Guess what the Jews did to false prophets? They took them out to the edge of town and stoned them, that's what.
Maybe Jonah would rather die than to face his hometown crowd. I doubt that this was the case, but it is possible. But more than likely, it was a case where he just plain hated the Ninevites.
4 Then the LORD said, "Is it right for you to be angry?"
Here's a good question for you. Is it right to be angry? Is there a time for you to be angry? In the short term, maybe. In the long term, definitely not. Absolutely not.
Now you may be saying that the Bible tells us
Eph 4:26-27
26 "Be angry, and do not sin": do not let the sun go down on your wrath,
27 nor give place to the devil. (NKJ)
Now the key here is "and do not sin." There will be times when you will be angry, but you do not have to let anger rule you. In the near future I will be doing a series, more than likely on Sunday evenings, on anger. I've been listening to a series of messages on anger done by Pastor Harding that I think that we could all benefit from, and I'll be setting up the framework for my series soon.
God teaches us by the trials that we go through. Here we have Jonah, lamenting to himself--Oh why God? I knew that I shouldn't come, because you'd save them. Hey, I told you I didn't want to go! But you saved them because that's how you are."
Now watch the trial that God put Jonah through to get His point across.
5 So Jonah went out of the city and sat on the east side of the city. There he made himself a shelter and sat under it in the shade, till he might see what would become of the city.
Why didn't Jonah just go home? I'll tell you my idea--he had cut his little fit just like a child and he was holding his breath to see if God would pay attention and wipe out the city after all.
6 And the LORD God prepared a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be shade for his head to deliver him from his misery. So Jonah was very grateful for the plant.
Now picture this. Here's Jonah, on the east side of the city, just watching to see what becomes of Nineveh. The sun is beating down upon him in the desert, so he builds himself a little shelter out of sticks and branches. The next thing that you know God prepared a plant (here's another miracle) to provide shade so that it would protect him from the sun beating down on him. Jonah was very grateful for the plant is what the text says, but I'd like to thing that he really liked this plant.
Could a plant have come up that quickly in the desert, so that it could have provided shade? The answer is yes! The castor oil plant grows very rapidly, and could have provided him shade that quickly from some study that I've done. Remember that this is still a miracle, because this was the desert, and that of all of the places to come up it just happened (!) To come up right where Jonah was.
This became his pet plant.
7 But as morning dawned the next day God prepared a worm, and it so damaged the plant that it withered.
So what do we see here? We see that God did another miracle--he sent a worm to destroy the plant.
8 And it happened, when the sun arose, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat on Jonah's head, so that he grew faint. Then he wished death for himself, and said, "It is better for me to die than to live."
Here goes Jonah again, wanting to be dead because things did not go his way. The vehement wind from the east is know in that region as a sirocco, a wind that is hot and dries out everything.
God teaches us through the trials and tribulations in our lives a new way. His way. His perfect way. Now here it comes.
9 Then God said to Jonah, "Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?" And he said, "It is right for me to be angry, even to death!"
God had Jonah do a head check, so that Jonah would have a chance, after he had committed himself to his line of thought and line of words, to examine himself.
10 But the LORD said, "You have had pity on the plant for which you have not labored, nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night.
God, in essence said to Jonah, Look I gave you that plant, and now it's time for school. You had pity on that plant. You weep for the plant, because it provided shade for you. Hey, it's just a plant! You think that you've got trouble here? You think that the world stops at your feet? You think that you are the center of the universe?
11 "And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left-- and much livestock?" (NKJ)
God's thought to Jonah was this--how could you have more pity on a plant than on people? How dare you?
Now, look further at what God says here. The phrase "in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left" what do you suppose that means? Of all of the people on the earth, who would not know their right from their left?
Kids. One hundred and twenty thousand children. One little plant meant more that 120,000 kids. Little kids that didn't know any better than to sin. Little kids that didn't know right from wrong. Little children that could be taught right from wrong.
See, we sometimes forget to look at the big picture when we get angry with someone. Remember the word for angry in Hebrew?
Charah; (khaw-raw') this root means to burn, be kindled, glow with anger, be incensed, grow indignant; to be zealous, act zealously. Unlike some of its synonyms, Charah points to the fire or heat of the anger just after it has been ignited.
More often than not, we are so consumed by the fire of our anger that we lose sight of those that are in the way of the anger. It could be our wives or husbands, our kids, our friends. We sometimes get so filled up with our "overdeveloped sense of justice" that it doesn't matter who or what gets in the way.
Some people have been known to kick the dog or kick the cat because they are angry. Folks, it's time to grow up in the Lord and not be so thin skinned. If you have an issue with someone, it needs to be settled, but make sure that the big picture is what you are focusing on.
