The Epilogue Is the Point

Some of y’all know I was out of town for a few days this week. I flew to Las Vegas on Wednesday for a concert on Thursday, and then I flew back home on Friday.

It was a good trip. The concert was fantastic. It was good to catch up with friends. And the travel … well, ask me about it sometime, but be prepared for a long story that I’m not sure I can tell without getting all lathered up.

Suffice to say that I made it home in one piece, despite airline delays, changes to my routings and a sprint through the Atlanta airport.

But while I was gone, I rekindled an old romance — with reading for pleasure!

Reading for pleasure used to be one of my favorite things to do. I’d have multiple books going at one time, and I could spend hours devoting my attention to them.

But then, I became a newspaper editor, and I read many thousands of words a day for work, and I didn’t often feel like reading when I wasn’t at work.

Even after I left the newspaper business, though, my reading has been either for school, for sermon prep, for teaching prep, or for personal devotional times.

But I wanted to do something while I was traveling that would feel disconnected from my ordinary life, so I downloaded a new thriller to my iPad and read it on the plane on Wednesday and Friday.

And as I finished the book Friday, I was reminded of one of the neat things about fiction: the epilogue. Now, the epilogue is normally where everything’s finally tied up in a neat bow. It’s not essential to the action, but it brings some closure for the characters and the story.

“And they all lived happily ever after” would be the epilogue for a lot of fairy tales.

Sometimes, the epilogue will actually introduce an event or incident that foreshadows a sequel, which seemed to be the point of the epilogue in the book I read this week.

But epilogues are NEVER the main point of the book.

Except for the Book of Jonah.

Today, as we continue our study of Jonah, we’re going to see God’s response to the Ninevites’ response to Jonah’s prophetic message of God’s impending judgment upon them.

Then, we’ll start to look at chapter 4, which is often seen as a sort of epilogue to the Book of Jonah. And what we’ll discover is that THIS epilogue is the exception of that rule I just gave you. THIS epilogue IS the point of the whole biblical account of Jonah.

And finally, we’ll see how all of this points us to the ninth of the 12 spiritual growth indicators we can find in this text for followers of Jesus.

So, let’s begin with a look at our text. We’re going to be studying verse 10 of chapter 3 and verse 1 of chapter 4 today.

Jonah 3:10–4:1 NASB95

10 When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it. 1 But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry.

Now, just to remind you how we got here: God had called Jonah, a prophet from the Northern Kingdom of Israel, to go to Nineveh, capital of the hated and brutal Assyrian Empire, in order to warn the Ninevites of God’s impending judgment on them for their idolatry and violence.

But Jonah didn’t want to go, and he tried to run away from the presence of God. And that didn’t really work out so well for Jonah.

God sent a storm that nearly sank the boat he’d boarded to head in the opposite direction from Nineveh. The sailors aboard that boat were only saved by throwing Jonah into the sea, at which point God caused the storm to be still.

And Jonah nearly drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. But God sent some kind of great fish or sea creature to rescue him, and the prophet spent three days in the belly of this great fish composing a hymn of thanksgiving and praise to God for rescuing him.

And when the fish vomited Jonah onto the dry land, Jonah did what he’d been called to do in the first place. He went to Nineveh to proclaim a warning of God’s imminent judgment. Sadly, though, his obedient action was tempered by a heart that still wasn’t aligned with God’s.

But God is sovereign over every part of Jonah’s story, just as He still is in our lives today. And in His sovereignty, He caused Jonah’s pitiful message — just five words in the Hebrew language — to be a powerful catalyst for repentance among the Ninevites.

Indeed, as we saw last week, the text suggests Nineveh’s repentance was genuine and widespread.

And so, we’ve seen pagan hearts turned to God both aboard the ship nearly sunk by God’s storm and within the city His prophet had half-heartedly warned of the coming judgment.

But maybe Jonah’s heart has been changed, too. After all, what missionary or evangelist wouldn’t consider his or her ministry to have been a (literally) miraculous success if a whole city turned to God after just one evangelistic message?

Well, Jonah, for one.

Jonah had hoped the people of Nineveh would NOT repent. And then, when they did repent, despite what he knew about God — despite the very reasons he’d praised God from the belly of the great fish — Jonah still hoped God would bring down fire and brimstone on the Ninevites.

But God is sovereign over every part of Jonah’s story, including over His own plans and actions. And as we saw in the Book of Jeremiah last week, in His sovereignty, God has declared that He will withhold His judgment from those who repent.

That’s just what He did in Nineveh. The Ninevites repented — they turned from their wicked ways. So, God relented — He turned from the judgment He’d promised.

But Pastor Res, you said God is sovereign over every part of Jonah’s story. Doesn’t the fact that He didn’t destroy the repentant Ninevites put His sovereignty in service to THEIR actions?

One commentator had a particularly good answer to this question:

“That God should choose to make his own actions contingent—at least in part—upon human actions is no limitation of his sovereignty. Having first decided to place the option of obedience and disobedience before nations, his holding them responsible for their actions automatically involves a sort of contingency. He promises blessing if they repent, punishment if not. But this hardly makes God dependent on the nations; it rather makes them dependent on him … . God holds all the right, all the power, and all the authority.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Jon 3:10, quoting Stuart.]

Think of it this way. A thermometer reacts differently to cold than it does to heat. It looks different when it measures freezing temperatures and when it measures boiling temperatures.

But it’s still the same thermometer. It’s still unchanged. It’s still operating under the same physical laws, whether it’s hot or cold.

Similarly, God operates according to His perfect holiness. His justice is perfect, and His love is perfect, and His mercy is perfect.

One isn’t tempered by the other; instead, they are expressions of the other. For those who turn to Him through faith in Jesus Christ, His mercy is an expression of His justice. We sinners who’ve followed Jesus in faith are forgiven and redeemed through the blood Jesus shed at the cross.

And for those who reject Him by rejecting Jesus, His justice is an expression of His love. He loves them so much that He won’t force them to love Him back. Since they’ve chosen to reject God in this lifetime, He won’t force them to spend eternity with Him.

And verse 10 here is great evidence of the fact that what God desires from mankind is not the destruction of sinners but that ALL would come to faith in Him and be reconciled to Him.

So, when Nineveh repented, God relented. Judgment against this great city was suspended. And Jonah — who’d been the beneficiary of God’s grace and mercy not long earlier — threw a rod. Had a conniption fit. Blew a gasket.

This wasn’t what he’d signed up for, was it? Watching his enemies be spared God’s judgment?!

In this regard, Jonah is a lot like many of US. He’s a big fan of God’s mercy and grace when it’s been extended to HIM. But he’s much more interested in God’s justice when it comes to those Jonah considers to be his enemies.

So, when God “relents” from the calamity He said He’d bring upon the Ninevites, Jonah reacts like every 7-year-old ever who didn’t get his way. He throws a temper tantrum.

We’ll get into the specifics of this tantrum in the next couple of weeks. For today, let’s just say what today’s verses say: “He became angry.”

In fact the literal translation of this verse is, “It was evil to Jonah, a great evil, and it burned to him.”

Listen, if you ever find yourself thinking the work that God’s doing around you is evil, then you’d better start examining your heart, because it’s clearly not in the right place.

Maybe Jonah had heard Hosea’s prophecy that the Assyrians would conquer Israel. Their prophetic ministries overlapped, so that’s entirely possible.

Maybe he was concerned that his unfulfilled prophecy of Nineveh’s doom would cost him his standing as a prophet. That was certainly a possibility under the Mosaic Law.

Maybe he’d even hoped the expected Assyrian invasion would bring Israel to repentance. The repentance and faith of Israel and Judah were always the prophets’ main themes.

Or maybe he simply hated the Ninevites.

Whatever the case, what we see here is a prophet of the Most High God completely out of step with the God he serves.

As one commentator puts it: “One of Jonah’s quintessential problems is that he has forgotten God’s mercy toward him. Jonah is suffering from a memory problem. He too has experienced God’s mercy, but now he is ill-equipped to appreciate God’s mercy when he observes it exercised on someone else’s behalf.” [Bryan D. Estelle, Salvation through Judgment and Mercy: The Gospel according to Jonah, ed. Tremper Longman III and J. Alan Groves, The Gospel according to the Old Testament (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2005), 126.]

And I want you to remember that Jonah’s account was first given to the Jews in Israel as an object lesson calling them to repent for their own sins against God.

The people of Israel had been hearing warnings from the prophets, all the way back to Moses, that God would send judgment upon them if they turned from Him to the false gods that had been worshiped in the Promised Land before their arrival.

They’d been warned that if they committed the sins of the Canaanites, they’d be vomited out of the land, just as the Canaanites had been.

Yet, they’d done just what God had warned them not to do. And so, Jonah’s story would be to them a cautionary tale that showed how God would be merciful if they’d only repent and turn back to Him.

It’s as if God is saying, “See what the Ninevites did? That’s what YOU need to do.”

Just like the pagan sailors, just like violent and brutal Nineveh — just like disobedient Jonah — faithless Israel had benefitted from God’s mercy and grace. But Jonah — and Israel, too — seemed content to sit on the gift of God’s grace, like an egg they were incubating.

But that’s not how grace bears fruit. The fruit of God’s grace is MORE grace, which yields LIFE. But it doesn’t grow buried between the cushions of your couch, warmed by your body heat as you sit upon it.

And God’s grace doesn’t have to be protected. It’s not our job to “keep it safe” from those who don’t deserve it. That’s the main point of Jesus’s Parable of the Talents in Matthew, chapter 25.

We don’t have time to look verse-by-verse at this parable today. But let me remind you of the high points.

A man about to go on a long journey calls three of his servants together and entrusts them with his possessions. He gives one servant five talents; the second, two talents; and the third, one talent.

It’s significant to note that a talent was a unit of currency worth about 15 years of wages for a laborer. So, they’d all received more than they could ever pay back.

In the parable, the man represents God, and the talents represent the life-giving, grace-fueled message of the gospel.

The servants represent the people of Israel in the most direct context of the parable, but also (in a broader sense as Jesus anticipated the church) those who’ve heard and responded in faith to the message of the gospel.

The servants who’d received five and two talents, respectively, traded their talents and doubled their investment. But the servant who’d received just one talent buried it.

In the parable, the master congratulates the two who invested his money and condemns the one who simply buried it. He’d been expecting what he’d given them to grow, not to be kept safe in a hole in the backyard or trapped between the sofa cushions.

It’s a paradox, but it’s one that perfectly aligns with God’s character. God’s grace — and the new life that it enables — grows when we give it away, when we share it. That’s why He gave it to us, anyway.

Disobedient Jonah had benefitted from the grace of God when he was swallowed by the great fish and rescued from drowning.

The right response would’ve been for him to have gone to Nineveh with a new appreciation for that grace and a desire for others to experience what HE’D experienced.

The right response would’ve been for him to freely trade the message of grace and mercy. And then, to watch with great anticipation for the miracle of new life through faith in God.

But, instead, he became angry at God for showing the Ninevites exactly the same mercy and grace God had shown him.

In the Parable of the Talents, what we’re intended to see is that the two good servants valued the gospel’s ability to reproduce new life.

And almost paradoxically, because they valued it, they gave it away, and the investment grew — it brought new life.

Conversely, the servant who is ultimately condemned doesn’t place the same value on the fruits of new life that the gospel brings, so he simply buries it.

He’s not interested in seeing this fruit, so he doesn’t share the life-giving message of the gospel. He keeps it to himself. And this illustrates that this servant doesn’t share the values of his master.

Which is exactly where we find Jonah in verse 1 of chapter 4. His values are in conflict with God’s values. What God considered to be good, Jonah considered to be evil.

And it’s interesting to note that this is exactly what Adam and Eve were seeking when they ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

They wanted to be able to decide for themselves what was good and what was evil. They wanted to have the authority that rests only with God.

And now, here, with Jonah, we see the fruit of that sinful choice. We see a prophet of God calling what is good, evil.

The Ninevites had been saved by God’s grace. And that was good news. But it was only good news if you cared about the lives or the eternal souls of the Ninevites.

For whatever reason, Jonah couldn’t find compassion in his heart for them, even after they’d repented, even when God had shown him that HE valued compassion and repentance.

And so, as we’ll see in the next couple of weeks, what should have been the epilogue to this story becomes the main point: the hardness of heart of both Jonah and the nation of Israel.

This hardness of heart had contributed to rampant sin within the nation of Israel. And it was exemplified by Jonah’s anger over God’s mercy shed upon the people of Nineveh.

And that brings us to this week’s spiritual growth indicator in the life of a believer: “A life that’s growing spiritually loves the unlovely and pursues them.” [Mark Yarbrough, Jonah: Beyond the Tale of a Whale, (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), 131.]

Jonah certainly considered the Ninevites to be unlovely. Perhaps even unlovable. But God loved them, and therefore so should Jonah have loved them. He should have pursued their salvation as hard as he could.

That’s what God was doing with Israel.

They thought they were lovely. As God’s chosen people, they thought they were in a right relationship with Him. But they and their kings and their whole nation were living outside of His will.

They were sinners no more worthy of God’s grace and mercy than the Ninevites were. And yet, God was pursuing them, just as He was pursuing the Ninevites.

And here’s the lesson for us: If only those who DESERVED God’s grace received it, none of us could be saved. Grace is God stooping down to help those who could never help themselves, to bless those who deserve to be cursed.

And when we recognize that that describes each one of us — when we remember that “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” — then we should see that gatekeeping the gospel message — even, or maybe especially, keeping it from our enemies and persecutors — is actually a sin.

What better way to dispense of an enemy than to introduce him to Jesus? After all, every one of us who’s been saved by grace through faith in Jesus was once an enemy of God. But now, He calls us His sons and daughters.

Not that this would ever happen, but I wonder how much less we’d spend on defense in this nation if the church committed even a fraction of our current defense spending to sending more missionaries to Russia, China, the Middle East, and other places where our perceived enemies live?

Places where the people hate us and mean us harm as a nation. Places where our lives might be in danger by being there. Places like Nineveh for Jonah.

Wouldn’t this be a perfect expression of obedience to the command to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you?

How might the crime rate be affected if the church took sharing the gospel of grace and mercy with prisoners as seriously as we take justice for their crimes?

Wouldn’t this be a perfect expression of loving the unlovely and pursuing them?

What if every Christian police officer — every Christian teacher, every Christian business leader, every Christian laborer, every Christian health care worker, every Christian salesman or student or retiree or politician or pastor — saw every difficult client or colleague or student or neighbor as their mission field?

What if we shared God’s compassion for them? What if we loved them? Do we value the gospel of God’s grace and mercy, demonstrated in Jesus Christ, enough to give it away? Do we love it enough to share it and watch for it to bear fruit?

Jonah has proved throughout this account just how unlovely he is. But God never stopped pursuing him. God never stopped reminding him that His grace and mercy are available to all — and desperately needed by every unlovely person among us.

But Jonah became angry, because of the hardness of his heart, because of his selfishness and arrogance, because he’d decided he knew better than God, and because he didn’t share God’s values.

And so, Jonah’s epilogue will become the whole point of his story.

Friends, don’t let the hardness of your heart keep you from loving the unlovely. Don’t let it make you into a gatekeeper for the gospel. Don’t let it cause you to bury the gospel in your couch cushions or in your backyard for safekeeping.

Don’t be like Jonah.