God Loves, Those You Hate!

We do not have to look too far today to see the evidence of hatred in our country. The media glories in stories of hatred and violence and it seems as if everyone, even Christians, hate each other. We are a country divided by ideology, race, gender, political parties and religious doctrines. Our society is a ticking timebomb that can go off at any moment erupting in violence towards each other. Over the summer we have seen this played out in the news and on social media as angry people displayed their hatred in violence and riots throughout our country. So how did we get here? It is easy to blame the other political party, or another race, or another country or someone else for the problem of hatred in this world. But the truth is that the problem of hatred in this world is because of you and me. The problem of hatred is because of our sin and our fallen nature.

When Adam and Eve sinned, it was not just a simple disobedience towards God. The result of their disobedience completely changed the DNA of humanity. We gained a knowledge that we were never supposed to know, and we became our own gods. We now have the power to judge in our own righteousness what is right and wrong with ourselves and with other people. This thinking leads to our own pridefulness and self-righteousness. We want to be right. We want other people to agree that we are right and when others disagree with us or commit offences against us, it breeds anger which can result in hatred. When we have been hurt our sinful nature gives us the right to hurt back, or at least harbor hatred and unforgiveness because our own righteousness demands it. Today in our Scripture lesson we are looking at the fourth chapter of Jonah the truth of hatred and the consequences it brings, but before we begin to look at those truths it is important that we look at the context of the other three chapters.

CONTEXT

God called Jonah in to service as his prophet and minister to go to Nineveh and tell them that they were going to be destroyed. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire and they were the enemies of Israel. However, instead of being faithful to God and doing what He asked him to do, Jonah went in the complete opposite direction to Tarshish. While on the way to Tarshish God sent a terrible storm to stop Jonah. The sailors on board were terrified by this storm and each one of them were praying to their gods for help. They began to cast lots to see who was responsible for this storm and the lots fell on Jonah, who was sleeping in the bottom of the ship. They woke him up and asked him what he had done that his God would send such a terrifying storm. Jonah told them that he was a Hebrew and a prophet for the God that created everything. These seasoned sailors were dumbfounded and could not believe that Jonah would disobey a God who was capable of sending a storm of that magnitude. Jonah tells them to throw him overboard and the storm would stop but they do not want his blood on their heads. The more they tried to fight against the storm the worse it became. Finally, they conceded and they threw Jonah over board. God, being merciful, had compassion on these heathen sailors, immediately calmed the sea and in response they turned to the Lord, worshipped Him and began to fear Him.

God also showed mercy and compassion to Jonah and He sent a large sea creature to swallow Jonah and save him. In the belly of the beast Jonah, comes to his senses, realizes that it is completely pointless to try and run from God because He is going to accomplish His will no matter what. Jonah prays to God, repents and asks forgiveness and thanks God saving him despite that fact that he ran from Him. Jonah allows himself to be used by God and that he would go to Nineveh to deliver God’s message. The Sea creature then vomits Jonah onto the land and he goes to Nineveh.

In Nineveh, Jonah delivers the Lord’s message, which is actually only five words in Hebrew, “40 days Nineveh shall be overthrown”. This short message is enough to spark one of the largest revivals ever documented. In Jonah 3 it says that all the people in Nineveh recognized their sin, they mourned because of it and they turned from it. The king decreed that no one in the city was to eat or drink and they were all to wear sackcloth, which is a sign of sorrow and mourning. The king even had the animals wear sackcloth which is a sign that the entire country was sorry for their evil they had committed. The king then issued a decree that everyone was to turn from their violence, turn to God, ask for forgiveness and maybe He would spare them. God, being gracious, merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, relented and spared the people of Nineveh. God poured out His Grace on an entire nation of people who did nothing to deserve it. These first three chapters of Jonah exemplify the beauty of God’s Grace and that He pours out His mercy on the undeserving. Then we come to Chapter 4 and our text for today. In chapter 4 we see the one who was in the most desperate need of God’s grace, the prophet Jonah himself. In this chapter we see the truth of the consequences of hatred in our life. Hatred reveals our true nature, hatred leads to hopelessness and despair and that hatred robs us from our compassion for others. Ultimately what we see is that the hope of our healing our own hatred towards others comes from experiencing God’s grace for ourselves. God is the one who gives us the power to love, forgive and have compassion even those who we hate.

HATRED REVEALS OUR TRUE NATURE (V 1-2).

“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 area gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.” The first thing that we need to ask ourselves is what was Jonah so angry about? This is where context is important. The only other time that Jonah is mentioned in the Bible is in 2 Kings 14:25, and it says that Jonah is the son of Amittai, that he is a prophet, and he was from Gath-hepher which is in the region of the tribe of Zebulun in northern of the Israel. This is an important to know because ever since the times of the Judges, which is just after Israel came into the promised land, this region had been exposed, to corruption and subjugation from the neighboring countries. They suffered from constant attacks from the Syrians, and the Assyrians. The Assyrians were known for their brutality and their ability to terrorize any nation that opposed them. They would often attack just after harvest and steal food, they would torture and murder all the men in the city, they would rape the women and carry them and the children off into slavery. This is the world that Jonah would have grown up in and it is likely that Jonah would have personally been affected by brutality of the Assyrians.

Nineveh was the capital of Assyrian Empire. These are the people that God told Jonah to preach to and as we know Jonah defied God and boarded a ship to Tarshish. He did this not because he was afraid of the Assyrians, but because he wanted them wiped off the face of the earth. Jonah hated the Ninevites and in his judgement he determined that they had no redeeming qualities.

Jonah was angry at God because He showed mercy to them. He says in verse 2 that that he knew that if he went and delivered this message that God would spare them. He even quotes Exodus 24:6 of the character and goodness of God. He says that God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and that He relents from disaster. Jonah did not want the people of Nineveh to be saved. It was as if Jonah was saying. “This is not fair! Have you not seen how horrible these people are? Have you not seen their brutality? Have you not seen what that have done to your people, year after year? Have you to seen what they have done to me? Your prophet? And what they have done to the people I love? Why don’t you to hate them as much as I do? Why won’t you let them to suffer? Why would you be merciful to these people who do not deserve mercy?

Have you ever felt the way that Jonah felt? Have you hated some so much that you wanted them to die or suffer in some way? Have you judged people because of their ideology, political or religious belief felt that they did not deserve any grace or mercy? The truth is that all of us have experienced hatred in one form or another, because it is our nature. We are quick to expect others to forgive us when we have wronged them, but we are slow in offering forgiveness in return because we may feel that they are not deserving. The truth is that when we harbor unforgiveness, anger and resentment does not ever lead us to a place of joy and peace, it only leads us to hopelessness and despair.

HATRED LEADS TO HOPELESSNESS AND DESPAIR (V 3-9)

In verses 3 we can see the level of despair that Jonah reached. Jonah was so distraught that he would rather die than live in a world where God would spare the lives of his mortal enemies. 3Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” Jonah’s conclusion to the goodness of God’s grace is that he would rather be dead then live in a world with the Ninevites. In a way Jonah giving God an ultimatum. Through his actions we can see that Jonah is saying to God, chose me or chose them. Then God full of grace and mercy asks him a question, “what do you have to be angry about?” or “how is your anger working for you?” We can see in from Jonah’s previous response that his hatred and anger was doing nothing for him accept causing him misery. Jonah does not answer God, instead he sulks off to a hill outside of town to see if God change His mind and destroy the Ninevites, giving Jonah the vindication that he felt he deserved.

So, while Jonah is pouting and feeling sorry for himself that he did not get his way, God continues to show him mercy. He gave him a large plant, essentially a large weed, that grows quickly and shades Jonah to give him relief from the hot sun. And we can see in our text that Jonah is exceedingly happy about this plant because of the comfort it offered. But then God appointed a worm to eat this plant and it died which then sends Jonah into another angry tirade. In verse 8, again He says to God that “it is better for him to die that to live”. Jonah is miserable in his anger and self-righteous indignation because He does not think that God is right. He is judging God and feels that God should not be merciful. Jonah is miserable and angry at God because of who he is. That He is gracious, merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. It is in his miserable state that God shows him the true depth of his hatred and that it had robbed him of compassion for others.

HATRED ROBS US FROM OUR COMPASSION FOR OTHERS (V 10-11)

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?” Jonah had become so blinded by his lifelong hatred of the Ninevites that he could no longer see them as people. They had become the embodiment of everything that he had come to hate. The Lord shows him that he had more compassion and love for a weed, then he did for the precious souls and God’s image bearers that lived in the city of Nineveh. He was blinded to the fact that inside those city walls were a truly repentant people, who had seen the error in their ways and turned form them. Jonah wanted the people of Nineveh to pay for their crimes because in his eyes that was justice. It was not fair that their past mistakes should be overlooked just because God showed them mercy. The people of Nineveh were deceived and ignorant to the ways of God. They were living in a way that they thought and felt was right. They were leaning on their own understanding and following the desires of their heart which lead them to evil atrocities. The Ninevites were important to God because He loved them and created them. In verse 11 God wanted Jonah to see that that their lives mattered more the worthless weed that Jonah had come to love more than them.

This text offers so much insight into the problem with hatred in our world. In our own selfish desire for our own agenda, our own needs, our own views and our own rights, we often do not see a person, we only see what we think that person represents. Sin causes us to pick apart and to judge everyone else for what we think in right and it hardens our hearts against people that may see the world differently that we do or think differently that we do. The truth of the matter is that none of us are any better than anyone else. The ground is level at the foot of the cross, we are all sinners and we need a Savior.

There are a lot of people in our community and in in our families who have rejected Christ and are walking in open rebellion and sin. There are proudly sinning and flaunting their hedonistic lifestyle. We see it on television and the internet and it is easy for us in the Church to judge their sin and to condemn. We get angry at the things they say about the church, we get angry about what they demand as their rights, we get angry about the message that they are sending to our children, we get angry. When our anger turns to hatred we loose compassion and empathy for people.

If we are honest, in our sinful nature, we have a tendency to be like Jonah. I think there are times we see people in light of the things that they have done. We see them as see them as the enemy, but they are not the enemy. They are precious souls created by God in his image, they are deceived, and often they are ignorant of God. The need to know the truth. They need to know that they are lost and condemned sinners and if they continue in their rejection of Christ they will separated from God forever. In the same way that Jonah spoke the truth of a pending destruction in the lives of the people of Nineveh. We need to not be afraid to speak up against sin and the truth that it also leads to destruction. However, when we call out sin it needs to be done with truth and with love and it needs to come from a place that we recognized the joy of our salvation and the hope that we have in Christ. This is the hope that the world needs and if we in the church are unable to display that hope, then where will those who do not know Christ find it. We need to continue to call sin, sin but we need to display love and compassion to others when we do it. As Christians we need to be humble and honest give the message of the truth of God’s word and that we are not their judge, but one day they will be judged by God. It is not our job to change people that is the work of the Holy Spirit, we need to show them same grace and mercy that we have already received through faith in Christ. They need to know that just because we are Christians does not mean that we are perfect and that we have it all together. They need to know that God loved us so much that He was willing to die for all our sins. 1 John 4:9-12 says, 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation (our sacrifice) for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

CONCLUSION:

The book of Jonah ends abruptly, with this conversation between God and Jonah. We don’t know what happened to Jonah after this book. However, because this book is so full of Grace and mercy it is my belief that Jonah listened to God and that he turned from His ways, repented and loved the people of Nineveh. I think that this is a possible outcome in two ways. First, Jonah is the author of this book and he wrote it in a way that he was not the hero, but that God’s character would be revealed. God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. God is the hero of the book of Jonah. The second reason I think Jonah repented was that the ancient city of Nineveh is in the modern city of Mosul, Iraq and in 2014 ISIS militants blew up a sacred site know as the tomb of Jonah. It is likely that Jonah remained with the Ninevites and ministered to them the rest of his life. What happened to Jonah is not what is important. What is important is that when we read this book that we realize the truth that God is merciful, gracious and loves us despite our sin and that there is nothing that we need to do to come to Him. His grace is available to everyone who recognize and turn from their sin and put their faith in Jesus Christ as their savior. The second truth that we can learn for the book of Jonah is that God loves those we hate and are we ok with that? This book is meant to humble us, so that we don’t see ourselves as better than others; but we see others as we see ourselves, as sinners saved by grace through the precious blood of Jesus Christ. I want to encourage you here today that if this message convicted you. If you are harboring hatred and unforgiveness towards someone do not leave here today the same way you came in. The Hope that we can draw from the book of Jonah is that God is compassionate and He will bring justice to every injustice we have incurred. He wants you to be at peace and you can trust Him to make all things right.

If there is anyone that needs prayer I will be here after the service to pray with you.