As we begin looking toward our mission conference next month, I want to share some thoughts with you from the book of Jonah – a prophet who tried to escape from warning a savage nation to repent, because he actually wanted God to judge them!
So he boarded a ship heading the other way, but God sent a storm to intercept him. The mariners threw him overboard, the storm miraculously ceased, and these Gentile sailors became Jonah’s first converts as they worshipped the God Who had spared their lives.
Meanwhile, God sent a great fish to swallow Jonah, and miraculously kept him alive for three days and nights until the fish spat him out. Centuries later, Jesus used this to picture His own burial for three days and nights in the tomb.
Jonah finally began moving in the right direction. He entered the city and began delivering his warning.
We left off last week in chapter three where a revival was sweeping the city as the entire population turned in repentance to the God of Israel. All in response to a one-line sermon, Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And if that sermon seemed a little sparse, we’ll see in a moment why that probably was!
But there’s something really humorous about that message that gets lost in translation. The last word of it says Nineveh will be overthrown, by which Jonah means a catastrophic “Sodom and Gomorrah” type destruction. But that word overthrown can just as easily mean, turned over in the sense of completely converted – totally transformed – abruptly changed. Jonah’s prophecy came true after all – just not in the way he had expected!
You know, it’s a pity the story couldn’t have just ended right there!
But if it had, we’d have missed Jonah’s reaction. And ugly as it is, the Bible is very honest about the flaws of its heroes – which really sets it apart from other religious writings. And it’s honest about them because we are men of like passions.
You see, I couldn’t really picture myself walking into the heart of a hostile metropolis and boldly proclaiming, Yet 40 days and San Francisco will be overthrown!
But getting frustrated at my circumstances? Or impatient with God? Or feeling sorry for myself? Oh, yeah – I could see that! I admire what Jonah did in chapter 3, but I regret to admit that I relate far more to what he does in chapter 4. So, as exciting as Jonah’s great victory is to read, I really need the lessons from his great failure even more!
And the most amazing thing about Jonah is that in his greatest victory he felt his greatest defeat! He very literally couldn’t win for losing. And it was all because of his hateful attitude!
1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.
2 And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.
3 Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.
4 Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry?
5 So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.
Heavenly Father, I must admit, I can understand Jonah’s rage against the enemies of God’s people. We have plenty of them in our own nation today. And yet, if You had not loved Your enemies, You would have no friends at all!
May we strive to destroy our enemies by making them our friends. May we be earnest in our prayers and our witness to stall Your judgment for another generation. May you burden our hearts for the lost souls throughout our land. May Your Spirit temper our wrath in righteous measure – and may any among us estranged from You flee to Christ from the wrath to come – in Jesus’ name, Amen!
In this passage, all Nineveh repents in the greatest revival the world has ever seen – any other missionary’s “Dream Crusade”! But how does Jonah react?
1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.
Can you believe this guy? He’s just swept some half a million souls into the kingdom of God in a single day! All of this after experiencing one of the most fantastic miracles found anywhere in the Bible – a man whom Jesus will someday use as an example of His own resurrection.
And his response to the unprecedented privileges God has showered on him is to be exceedingly displeased and very angry! A prophet whose very job is to preach repentance to the lost and bring them to salvation is upset when he succeeds amazingly in his own calling!
The word displeased literally means it “was evil to” Jonah. In his mind, God had done him wrong – which is a typical reaction when people don’t get their way!
He was like the little boy who kept standing up in his highchair until his father sternly threatened him. He grudgingly got down into his chair, but he muttered as he did, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m still standing on the inside!”
That’s Jonah – right here! Just because God could force Jonah to obey him on the outside, it didn’t mean that Jonah agreed on the inside – as he nows begins to show. His “repentance” appears to have been nothing more than “skin deep”!
Some have suggested it was because he can now foresee that the doom he had foretold won’t happen, and that would be an embarrassment to his reputation as a prophet. Prophets don’t like seeing their predictions fall flat – makes them look bad!
But I don’t buy that. I mean, if you tell people, “You’re doomed because of your sin in 40 days” – and they all repent, and then the doom doesn’t fall, I don’t think that makes you look like a false prophet – I think it makes you look like an effective prophet! I mean, hey – I’d book the guy for a revival! I’d just figure that their repentance was the whole point of the warning in the first place – to give them a chance to do that very thing.
So it seems unreasonable that his reputation as a prophet would have suffered.
If anything, it should have been enhanced!
No, based on what Jonah himself says in the next verse, he just didn’t want the people of Nineveh to repent and be forgiven. He didn’t want them to live. He wanted God to punish them. And that puts Jonah at odds with his own God!
Because in Ezekiel 33:11, God says, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.
God never enjoys punishing sinners. The joy in heaven is over them repenting, not dying, not being cast into hell. Only the devils delight in destroying more sinners – well, the devils... and Jonah! What a strange prophet!
2 And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.
He prayed unto the Lord with complaining, and he used God’s mercy as an excuse for his sin in running from God in the first place. He says, Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish. “This was exactly why I got on that ship going the other way – I knew this would happen!” He’s throwing a tantrum over God’s mercy!
If somebody one day told you they were sorry for what they had done, and then turned around later and blamed you for provoking them to do it, how would that make you feel about the repentance they had supposedly shown before?
Jonah says, I knew that thou art a gracious God. “This was just so predictable of You, God – I said you’d do this. I knew if they repented You’d just forgive them for everything!” Jonah knew very well what God was like, and Jonah was nothing like Him!
Boy – talk about being eager to cast the first stone! Jonah was okay with God’s mercy and forgiveness back when it was him in the fish.
And he was okay with God showing mercy and forgiveness to Israel in II Kings 14:25 and following when they recovered their lost territory from the Syrians.
But for God to show mercy and forgiveness to the heathen – to Israel’s arch-enemy, the ancient superpower that was his people’s greatest threat... well, as far as Jonah was concerned, that was just taking this “mercy and forgiveness” business about two steps too far!
And the reason Jonah felt that way was because his own heart was not on board with the heart of God. When a child of God, even a greatly used servant as Jonah was, fails to think and feel toward others the way God does, he will develop a complaining spirit, bitterness will set in, and he will begin to alienate himself from those around him. And that’s exactly what begins happening to Jonah now in the verses that follow.
He accused God of being a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Jonah knew all that about God because back in Exodus 34:6-7 the Lord described Himself to Moses as merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.
And now Jonah’s blaming God, for... well, being so good! He’s accusing God of being too merciful and gracious! He’s whining like a brat because of God’s great kindness! He’s having a temper tantrum because God is slow to anger!
Well, all I can say is, it’s a good thing for Jonah that God is slow to anger, because I’m thinking that anyone less than God would have probably fried Jonah like a moth in a bug zapper right about then!
He says that God repented of the evil He would’ve brought upon the Ninevites, and that’s true. The last verse in chapter 3 that we looked at last week says He did.
But we also said last week, don’t let that language confuse you. “Evil” is a very generic word. It can mean moral evil; it can mean evil like a natural disaster; it can even mean evil in the sense of general hardship as when Jacob says few and evil have the days of my life been – meaning the years have been hard on him.
So when the Bible says God would’ve brought evil upon the people of Nineveh, it’s not saying He was going to do anything immoral or wicked to them. God is holy – He’s incapable of doing anything morally wrong – it’s contrary to His very nature. He was going to bring a devastating judgment on them for their immorality and wickedness – which would’ve actually been a righteous punishment as all the victims of Nineveh’s violence would quickly and enthusiastically agree!
Besides, for God to take the lives of sinners isn’t immoral because He’s the Author of life in the first place – it’s His to give or take away as He sees fit!
So when Jonah says that God repents of doing evil to Nineveh, it just means that the Ninevites’ changed attitude has changed God’s intention to judge their sins. That’s what repent actually means – a change of heart or action. If they continued with the sinning, He’d continue with the judgment. If they changed their sinful ways, He’d change His judgment. Simple as that!
3 Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better
for me to die than to live.
What? It is better for me to die than to live? It’s like he’s saying, “Just go ahead and kill me now, God! You’ve let these Ninevites repent, so we both know you’re not going to destroy them now! So just go ahead and get it over with – kill me now!” What on earth does he mean? What kind of bipolar nonsense is this? What’s behind Jonah’s little “pity party”?
You know, if you think about it, there’s only one explanation that really makes any sense out of Jonah’s anger. As things would eventually turn out, these Assyrians that Nineveh was the capital of, would one day conquer the northern kingdom of Israel to which Jonah, a prophet from Galilee, belonged. The Assyrians would destroy their cities and carry the people of Israel’s ten northern tribes away into captivity from which very few of them would ever return.
Jonah was a prophet. He could see what was coming. He saw the sins of his nation. He knew of God’s warnings to Moses. The closing verses of Deuteronomy 29 described how God would destroy Israel if they sinned against Him – and boy, had they ever sinned against Him!
Beginning in verse 22, God said, your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land, when they see the plagues of that land (Israel), and the sicknesses which the Lord hath laid upon it; And that the whole land thereof is brimstone and salt and burning, that it is not sown nor beareth nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah... which the Lord overthrew in his anger and in his wrath... Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers...For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them...And the anger of the LORD was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book: And the LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.
Jonah saw clearly where all this was heading. He knew what Assyria had done to other cities and nations as it conquered its way westward toward Palestine. Isaiah 37:12-13 listed them – cities like Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which were in Telassar... the king of Hamath, and the king of Arphad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah.
Assyria was doing to all of them exactly what God said would come upon the disobedient Jews. In fact, it was so obvious, it didn’t really take a prophet to read the handwriting on that wall. The judgment was coming, and Assyria was the weapon God would use against His own disobedient people.
And Jonah’s preaching had just effectively rescued the very nation that God would use to destroy his own people! He felt like he had just sabotaged his own nation. He foresees the slaughter, he foresees the burning, the pillaging, the horror of it all, and so he says, “God, just go ahead and kill me now!”
But what Jonah doesn’t see is that his very preaching has, temporarily at least, changed Nineveh for a generation. The destruction won’t come in Jonah’s lifetime now. He’s bought his people an extra half a century to repent. How tragic though, that his own nation would not respond to God as humbly as their enemies had!
You know that prophecy we mentioned where Jonah said Israel would retake the lands stolen by Syria? Well, they did. But because of the nation’s stubborn sins, Amos 6:13-14 reversed the victory and said the Syrians would take them back!
And here in America, we can see that God’s judgment upon our nation’s sins is rapidly approaching as well. But may God’s people all across this land labor constantly in prayer, in preaching, in warning the lost – and may we stall the judgment long enough for one more generation to repent!
But when that judgment finally does fall, will you be ready? Have you turned from your sins? Have you trusted in the death of Christ on Calvary’s cross to pay for your sins, in His resurrection to raise you from the grave? Have you called upon the Lord for salvation?
4 Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry?
To say that Jonah had an anger management problem might be an understatement! And, like anyone who lets anger get the better of him, he thought he had a right to be mad. He thought he did well to be angry.
After all, these were wicked and violent heathens who deserved to be wiped out!
Say – between Jonah and God, who do you think probably had a greater right to be angry at the Ninevites? If God chooses to forgive them, then who does Jonah think he is to be angry at God for it? Deuteronomy 32:35 says, To me belongeth vengeance and recompence. Zapping people is for God to decide – not Jonah!
And aren’t you glad! If God gave Jonah the power to zap people, do you think he might misuse it? I think Jonah’s being very clear about what he’d do with it!
What if He gave you that kind of power? Would you trust yourself with it? Would you trust me with it? Would you trust any of us?
You know, we actually show every day what we’d do if we had the power to zap others with lightning from heaven. We show it by how we zap them with our harsh words, our vindictive attitudes, our retaliatory actions, our vengeful desires. Isn’t it a good thing that vengeance belongeth to the Lord?
You know, we’ve all heard of righteous indignation or righteous wrath, but often when people try to pass off an outburst as righteous anger, it’s really nothing more than trying to justify letting their flesh, their adrenaline, get out of control.
So is there such a thing as righteous indignation, or is all anger wrong? Well, of course, God got angry at sinners in the Bible, and Jesus got angry at the money changers in the temple. The Apostle Paul seemed pretty angry at the Apostle Peter in Galatians 2:11 and following when he had to put him in his place. Throughout .
the Psalms, David is repeatedly angry at the enemies of God, and Moses was angry at the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart.
Ephesians 4:26 says, be ye angry and sin not, let not the sun go down upon your wrath. So clearly there is a kind of anger that’s commanded. But then verse 31 says to let... anger... be put away from you. So clearly there is a kind of anger that is condemned. How then can we tell the difference?
There are three things in the Bible that distinguish righteous indignation from the unrighteous kind.
First of all, righteous wrath is upset over something that is actually unrighteous. It’s not upset over personal inconveniences, but over sin against God. All of those displays of anger that God and Jesus and David and the rest of them showed in the Bible were directed at people who were committing sin.
Paul didn’t chew Peter out because he’d forgotten his birthday, or kept him waiting, or burned his toast, or anything like that. He was mad because Peter was sinning against his Gentile Christian brethren. He was hurting the body of Christ.
If I’m getting mad because someone forgot to pick something up at the store, because they cut in front of me in traffic, because they accidentally broke something I treasured, because they somehow created work or expense or inconvenience for me, that’s not righteous indignation.
Truly righteous anger is stirred when righteousness is violated. Otherwise, it’s just carnal impatience.
And God says to Jonah here, Doest thou well to be angry? Jonah is sulking because his preaching has just rescued a nation that God will use to punish the disobedient Israelites! He’s mad about the hardship that God will bring on his own sinful nation! So no, this is not righteous anger – he does not well to be angry at all!
A second characteristic of righteous anger is that it gives a righteous response. Unrighteous anger tends to overreact. When the flesh is driving our anger, we want to dish out to another more pain than he caused us.
But James 1:20 says, The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. When we’re just venting our own emotions, we’re seeking our satisfaction, not God’s – and it shows that our focus is wrong.
If a punishment is called for, let whoever is responsible dispense a punishment that’s meet for the wrong done. Don’t let another’s sin against you work you up into reacting sinfully yourself. If you do, then they have wronged you twice, but the second one you allowed yourself to be provoked into.
Is Jonah’s response an overreaction? Well, he’s wanting God to indiscriminately nuke an entire city of genuinely repentant people. I’d call that the very definition of an overreaction! Is he doing well to be angry? Not even close!
Righteous anger is upset about unrighteousness, it responds in a righteous way, and it does not hold a grudge – it is willing to forgive. Ephesians 4:26 says, Be ye angry and sin not – let not the sun go down upon your wrath. If you carry your anger with you to bed, then you have been angry and sinned. Jonah is going to hold onto his anger for 40 days, sitting outside the city waiting to confirm whether God will indeed let it survive. He lets the sun go down upon his wrath 40 times. He definitely does not well to be angry over and over again!
Jonah’s lack of an answer implies a certain sense of conviction and guilt at this question. Rather than judging Jonah for his presumptuous tirade against God’s mercy, grace and kindness, that very mercy, grace and kindness allows Jonah a chance to judge himself – for if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.
5 So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.
The word So at the beginning of this verse suggests that what happens next is a response to the question in verse 4. That is, when God says, Doest thou well to be angry? Jonah, reluctant to accept the city’s deliverance, reads into it a hint that perhaps God may not spare them after all. Even David repented of his sin with Bathsheba, but the child she bore still died. So he went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city.
He’s apparently hoping for some devastation as thorough as the fire that consumed Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain. Since Nineveh was on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and Jonah is backing away still further east, it appears that he is ascending higher – trying to maximize his distance from the hoped for catastrophe while still keeping a front row seat. He wants to relish the view, but not be included in the blast himself.
He there made him a booth, and sat under the shadow of it. This booth is the same that was used by the Israelites during the weeklong Feast of Tabernacles. It was hastily constructed of palm boughs and not meant to last long against the elements. It would have been open to the wind, and as the palm fronds withered in the sun, its rays would eventually have shone through the roof. Jonah is merely rigging something for some temporary shade against the Assyrian sun.
That last phrase, till he might see what would become of the city, tells us that Jonah still holds out hope that God will zap them yet. He’s won’t leave the stadium with time on the clock – he’ll see this thing through to the end!
So, is there someone you’re wanting God to zap? Or are you endeavoring to love your enemies? To bless them that curse you? To do good to them that hate you. To pray for them that despitefully use you? It’s not the nice people who draw our Christlikeness out – it’s the porcupine personalities. There’s nothing supernatural in loving your friends – it’s loving all the rest that sets apart the children of God.
So is your anger like God’s or like Jonah’s?
And there is either a judgment coming or a revival – are you ready?
