A little boy who had shown a fit of temper was scolded by
his mother and sent to his room. He was told to pray that his
temper might be reformed. His mother followed him and
listened at the door to see if he would. This is what she
heard: "O, Lord, please take away my bad temper, and
while you are about it you might as well take mother's too."
A bad temper is a problem at any age. It is a dangerous
weapon because it injures both others and the one who has it.
A woman once said to Billy Sunday that she had a bad
temper, but it was over in a minute. He replied, "So is a
shotgun blast, but it blows everything to pieces." The speed
at which evil is done does not lessen the evil. Someone wrote
a poem that reveals the difficulty in finding any justification
for a bad temper.
"When I have lost my temper, I have lost my reason too.
I'm never proud of anything which angrily I do.
When I have talked in anger, and my cheeks are flaming red
I have always uttered something that I wish I hadn't said.
In anger I have never done a kindly deed, or wise,
But many things for which I know I should apologize.
In looking back across my life, and all I've lost or made
I can't recall a single time when fury ever paid."
The first line of that poem describes exactly what Jonah's
bad temper did to him. Jonah's anger had blinded him to the
true values of life, and he became childish. He was like a
baby having a temper tantrum because he is not allowed to
pull the lamp off the table, or poke your eye out with a
ballpoint pen. A bad temper reduces a person to an
irresponsible infant whose own selfish pleasure becomes the
measure of all things. I have known otherwise mature men
smash their arms through a cupboard and throw a wrench
through their windshield because of their loss of temper.
God had to show Jonah just how low his standard of
values had fallen in his awful attitude of anger. To make
sure he gets the message God prepares Jonah for a question.
God has a test for Jonah consisting of just one question, but
before he gives it to him he makes sure that Jonah will know
the answer. We want to consider the preparation for the
question, and then the question.
I. THE PREPARATION FOR THE QUESTION.
In verse 5 we see that Jonah had not given up hope. He
had come a long way to see Nineveh burn, and he wanted a
ringside seat. In contrast to Jesus who wept over Jerusalem
because of the coming destruction, and Abraham who
pleaded for Sodom, Jonah was looking for blood. His only
fear that was the whole thing might be cancelled. Jonah's
system of values had no place for the concept of mercy. It
was justice and justice alone that he looked for. Justice is of
the very essence of God's nature, but it is always combined
with mercy, and God expects the same to be true to His
servants. Justice without mercy gives you what you have in
the elder brother of the Prodigal. If he had come home and
heard his brother screaming as his father was beating him,
he would have felt good. But when he heard his father was
having a party for the returned sinner he threw a fit, and like
an immature child he refused to have any part in the
celebration. Justice without mercy always leads to anger at
the practice of forgiveness. Jonah had this spirit, and he was
hoping yet to see Nineveh destroyed.
In verse 6 we see that God takes advantage of the
situation to give Jonah an object lesson to challenge his
system of values. It appears that God performed another
miracle here. All of the miracles of this book are due to
Jonah's disobedience and God's efforts to straighten him out.
The plant was a fast growing plant of which there are several
in that part of the world. None grow in one night, however,
and so God's direct action was needed. We see how
conservative God is in His use of power. He could have made
a tree that takes 20 years to grow come up over night, but He
uses a plant that naturally grows very rapidly. God is not
extravagant and showy in His use of miracles. He stays as
close to the natural possess as possible. He feels no need to
be spectacular like the stories of magic genies. Jesus would
not gain popularity by jumping off the temple, or turning
stones into bread. God is conservative omnipotence. He does
only what is necessary to accomplish His goal. In this case it
was to give Jonah shade to protect him from the scorching
sun.
His goal is simply accomplished and Jonah is delighted.
He is so engrossed in self-pity that this pleasure is just what
he needed to bolster his ego. He is thinking that maybe
everything isn't so bad after all. God still favors me, and so
maybe destruction might still come. Every cloud has a silver
lining was the way he was thinking, but it didn't' last long.
The next day Jonah was back down in the dumps. In verse 7
God has a worm attack the plant and it withers. By the
natural means of hot wind and the sun God makes Jonah
miserable. His hopes collapse for everything seemed to be
against him. Even the worm and the wind are against him,
and so he was ready to die. God now had Jonah almost in
readiness for the test, but first He gave Jonah a practice
question.
In verse 9 God asked Jonah if he thought his anger was
justified. Jonah responded without hesitation that he had a
perfect right to be angry enough to die. When nothing goes
right and everything is against you, what is the sense of
living? The thing he could not see, of course, was that the
reason all looked dark was because of the blinders he was
wearing. His false values were being crushed, but he refused
to admit they were false, and so he was crushed.
Kierkegaard said, "Man clutches his torment because it gives
him a right to be resentful." This was the picture of Jonah,
and now he is ready for the question.
II. THE QUESTION.
Note that the book of Jonah ends with a question mark.
God teaches His greatest lesson to Jonah with a question.
Jesus used the question often in His teaching, and He
answered difficult questions by asking another question.
This was a pedagogical method of the Jews. A frustrated
Gentile once said to a Jew in debate, "Why do you always
answer a question with another question?" The Jew said,
"Why shouldn't I." And there was silence. There is silence
after God's question also, for Jonah has no answer. With all
of his arrogance and readiness to argue with God, this
question stops him. Many assume that Jonah learned his
lesson and submitted to God's will.
God simply pointed out how he pitted the plant which
gave him personal comfort, but for which he did not labor,
and then he asks if it is wrong for God to pity a whole city of
eternal souls, many of whom are innocent children? Jonah
must have seen immediately how low his system of values
had fallen. He was giving priority to a plant over persons,
and this is the basic cause for all the inhumanity to man in
the world. While a prisoner in Russia after the second World
War, Helmut Gollwitzer, a famous German chaplain,
saw a bumper crop of sugar beets destroyed while he and
fellow prisoners were near starvation. It was all due to a
minor official who misjudged the projected yield, and a
higher official who, like Jonah, had a perverted system of
values. He felt that accurate predictions were more
important than people, and so to keep the prediction
accurate he ordered the crops destroyed.
The evils of every form of government arise because the
priority of persons is not practiced. The evils in religious
institutions are also due to putting other values above
persons. Jesus said the Pharisees would allow a man to pull
an animal out of the pit on the Sabbath, but they were angry
because they healed persons on the Sabbath. Jesus put
people first, and because of it he clashed with value systems
of His day. God gives priority to persons above all else. In
Mark 2:27 we read, "The Sabbath was made for man, and
not man for the Sabbath." The Sabbath was a God ordained
institution, and it was so important that it was a matter of
life and death to obey it. But Jesus made it clear that it was
for man's blessing, and not to be a burden. Persons had
priority even over this sacred day.
E. Stanley Jones said that all religious institutions are
made for man, and not man for them. When persons are
sacrificed to the machinery of an institution, that institution
no longer represents the values of God. Like Jonah it must
learn God's value system or it will be opposed to God's will.
We can apply this to anything, for any person or organization
that puts anything above persons is guilty of folly.
All forms of government, which say that man exists for
the state, and not the state for man, have fallen from grace,
and are opposed to God's system of values.
The lesson that Jonah needed to learn to bring him to his
senses, and the lesson all of us must be conscious of is that
persons are ends in them selves and not means. The state
and the church exist for the welfare of persons. Whenever
the state or the church uses persons for its welfare, and to the
harm of the persons, true values are perverted, and people
are being exploited for an end that is less valuable. The
whole ministry of Jesus was person centered. And even here
in the Old Testament we see that in God's system of values
the priority goes to persons. The Pharisees put precepts over
persons, and Satan tempted Jesus to do the same, and this is
the temptation all of us must overcome.
Ted Hatlen gave a speech in high school many years ago
at a Lincoln's birthday celebration. Afterward an old man
came up to him and said, "I like the way you gave that
speech, but you made a common mistake. I heard Lincoln at
Gettysburg so I know what I talking about. Everyone says of
the people, by the people, and for the people. But Lincoln
said of the people, by the people, and for the people." He
gave the priority to persons. This is what Jonah failed to do.
Jonah is famous for having been fish food that survived,
or more grossly put, he is histories most famous fish vomit.
He is not famous for being a man of God-like compassion.
He illustrates that one can be a child of God for eternity, but
still have choices to make that determine what they will be
remembered for. Alice Freeman Palmer, the second
President of Wellesley College for girls, was urged to write
books to become more famous. She had no interest in
becoming famous through books. She decided to put her life
into the girls she served. She said, "It is people that count.
You want to put yourself into people; they touch other
people; these, others still, and so you go on working forever."
She saw what Jonah was blind to, and she chose the
wiser way. Jesus did not want us to remember Him as one
who built a great empire; who lead armies to great victories,
or who built a monument to his own glory. He wanted us to
remember him as the one who gave his life for people that
they might be forgiven, redeemed, and restored through
fellowship with God. He made it clear that a God-like value
system always gives the priority to persons.
