JONAH 4:1-11 - The Angry Prophet and the Merciful God

Introduction

We certainly live in an angry day and age, don’t we? You can’t turn on the TV or go online without encountering someone in the middle of an angry tirade about one thing or another. And I suppose there is a lot to be angry about in the world we live in. Anger, after all, is a God-given emotion that is aroused in us when we encounter some kind of injustice or unfairness—and there is a lot of that to go around these, days, is there not?

The problem with our anger in its natural state is that because we are a fallen race our understanding of what justice actually is. We get angry about a lot of things we shouldn’t—and we fail to get as angry as we should about other things—because our minds and hearts (and the rest of us) have been utterly corrupted by sin.

And so this is why there is a lot of sinful anger in our world—and in our lives. I have a friend who always used to say that “the last unclaimed realm of the Holy Spirit is the driver’s seat of a car”—you are personally offended that your plan to get to work on time has been ruined by that numbskull ahead of you who can’t go more than twenty miles an hour on a winding road. We get angry when our will is thwarted by what we perceive to be injustice or unfairness—whether its the traffic that keeps us from getting where we intend to be, or a boss that assigns us work we don’t think we should have to do, or a spouse that doesn’t agree with us on spending money or disciplining children, or an elected official who breaks the promises he made in order to get your vote.

In all of these things there are different degrees of healthy and unhealthy anger—we might really have a biblical reason to be angry—the murder of unborn children in the womb, for instance, should make us angry (and perhaps should make us more angry than we are at times...) And there may be times when our own selfishness or pride or slothfulness causes us to be angry for sinful reasons.

But here in Jonah 4 we find an instance of anger that is always evil; anger that can never be justified and will inevitably destroy the one who indulges in it: Anger at God. There may be times when our anger toward another creature in this fallen world may be a righteous anger—but there is never an instance where our fallen anger against the Perfectly Righteous, Infinitely Holy, Wise and Good Creator, Sustainer and Judge of all Creation can ever be righteous:

Job 36:22–23 LSB

“Behold, God is exalted in His power; Who is a teacher like Him? “Who has appointed Him His way, And who has said, ‘You have worked out unrighteousness’?

But in this fallen world, and as we continue to wage our daily war with the world, the flesh and the Devil we must be constantly on guard against the temptation to be angry with God, to believe that He has been unjust to us or unfair, to harbor a grudge against Him because He has not acted in the way we want Him to. God has not answered your prayers for healing the way you want Him to; He has not opened up the career path that you wanted; He has not rescued you from your loneliness; He has not vindicated you as you have suffered from slander or ridicule because of your faith.

At one time or another, every one of us in this room has been angry with God. And the day will come when we will get angry with Him again. Even now you may be harboring resentment against God; you may be holding on to some grudge you claim to have on Him for what He has done (or not done) for you.

And this isn’t just a temptation for those who are young believers or those who are weak in their faith. Even a man of God like Jonah—our prodigal prophet—felt himself dragged down by his anger and resentment toward YHWH here in our text:

Jonah 4:1 LSB

But this was a great evil to Jonah, and he became angry.

(at God...)

For every one of us who have been (or will be) in Jonah’s shoes, angry at God for some evil we believe He has done to us, this is the invitation the Scriptures extend to us through this account from Jonah’s life:

Escape UNRIGHTEOUS ANGER at God as you fly to the UNRESTRAINED MERCY of God

We find here in this account four warning signs that unrighteous anger at God is beginning to take hold in your heart. As we examine Jonah’s words and his behavior in this account, I pray that you will examine your own words and behavior, that you may root out that ungodly anger toward God before it consumes you.

The first thing that this inspired account sets before you to consider this morning is

I. Your deadly PERIL in your ANGER at God

As we open the fourth chapter of Jonah, the people of Nineveh have just repented in sackcloth and ashes and fasting, crying out for the mercy of God toward them, saying

Jonah 3:9–10 LSB

“Who knows, God may turn and relent and turn away from His burning anger so that we will not perish.” Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, so God relented concerning the evil which He had spoken He would bring upon them. And He did not bring it upon them.

And as Chapter 4 opens we see Jonah’s response to their repentance:

Jonah 4:1 LSB

But this was a great evil to Jonah, and he became angry.

Certainly you would expect Jonah to be overjoyed that his preaching was used by God to bring the wicked city of Nineveh to repentance—but he considered it evil. That, by the way, is the same Hebrew word that God uses to describe the works of the Ninevites in Chapter 1— “Their evil”—their destructive, violent hurtfulness— “has come up before Me”. Here in Chapter 4, Jonah is using that word to describe God’s work among the Ninevites! Jonah is looking at God’s great compassion and mercy and pity as evil!

This is the first way that your unrighteous anger at God will put you into deadly peril, when

God’s PROMISES become a FRUSTRATION to you (v. 2)

Jonah says in Verse 2:

Jonah 4:2 LSB

And he prayed to Yahweh and said, “Ah! O Yahweh, was not this my word to myself while I was still in my own land? Therefore I went ahead to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning evil.

This is a direct quotation from the great statement of YHWH’s covenant faithfulness—the foundational statement of His covenant with the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land in Exodus 34:6-7

Exodus 34:6–7 LSB

...“Yahweh, Yahweh God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”

And this was a frustration to Jonah! “I didn’t want you to forgive them—I WANTED YOU TO HURT THEM! I wanted to see them perish in fire and brimstone like Sodom and Gomorrah, I wanted to see Your justice done! But I knew You were a pushover, I knew you’d go back on your threat, just like You always do!”

When you find yourself frustrated by God’s character; when His glorious nature stands in the way of what you want to see happen, mark it well that unrighteous anger is beginning to take root in your life.

A couple of verses down in Verse 5 we see in Jonah’s behavior another warning sign of that ungodly, destructive anger against God:

God’s PEOPLE become an ANNOYANCE to you (v. 5)

I take this from what Jonah did in Verse 5:

Jonah 4:5 LSB

Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of the city. And there he made a booth for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city.

Matthew Henry points out in his commentary on this passage

We may suppose that the Ninevites, giving credit to the message he brought, were ready to give entertainment to the messenger that brought it, and to show him respect, that they would have made him welcome to the best of their houses and tables. But Jonah was out of humour, would not accept their kindness, nor behave towards them with common civility… Henry, M. (1994). Matthew Henry’s commentary on the whole Bible: complete and unabridged in one volume (p. 1530). Hendrickson.

The prospect of being in the company of people who were rejoicing in their right relationship with God and glorifying Him with their thankfulness was too much for Jonah—God had disappointed him by forgiving the people Jonah wanted to see suffer. And so he left the city, and went out to sit by himself in hopes that God might still turn around and do what Jonah thought should be done.

When you find the company of other believers annoying; when you are surrounded by people who are rejoicing in the pardon they have received for their sin and glorifying God for His grace and mercy toward them, and it is loathsome to you—take heed, because this is the deadly peril of holding on to anger against God.

Look carefully at the telltale signs that you are succumbing to unrighteous anger against God—God’s promises become a frustration to you, God’s people become an annoyance to you, and

God’s PEACE becomes FOREIGN to you

This chapter is a portrayal of a man who is utterly without peace—Jonah is despondent, he is depressed, he is utterly without light in his anger. Three different times in this account you hear him saying that he wants to die:

Jonah 4:3 LSB

“So now, O Yahweh, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.”

Jonah 4:8 LSB

Then… Jonah… asked with all his soul to die and said, “Death is better to me than life.”

Jonah 4:9 LSB

[Jonah says to God] “I have good reason to be angry, even to death.”

When you hold on to anger at God and call His work evil and reject His presence mediated in His children; when you hold a grudge against Him because He has not done in your life what you insist He should have done, or He has done things that you did not want Him to do and you resent Him for it, it will rob you of any peace you have in your life. The heart that holds onto its anger at God, that insists on impugning His character and blames Him for all of the evil that has befallen it in this life is a heart that will succumb to depression, hopelessness and despair. Jonah’s anger at God drove him to wish that he was dead. That is one of the deadly perils of unrighteous anger against God.

Jonah had left the city, isolating himself from the very people his preaching had brought repentance to, and now he sits in self-imposed isolation and despair, hoping that God might destroy them after all. And as He sits there, we read in Verse 6:

Jonah 4:6 LSB

...Yahweh God appointed a plant, and it came up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his miserable evil. And Jonah was extremely glad about the plant.

Believe it or not, this is the first time in the whole book that we see Jonah being happy about something! We don’t read that he was “extremely glad” to be rescued from drowning, and we certainly don’t read that he was “extremely glad” that tens of thousands of people repented and turned in saving faith to God. This shows us another one of the perilous dangers that threaten us when we harbor anger against God:

God’s PURPOSES become INVISIBLE to you

Consider how self-absorbed Jonah has become—all he cares about is his own personal comfort and security. The movements of God’s Spirit as He brought salvation to the people of Nineveh through Jonah’s preaching; the marvelous transformation of a violently evil people into worshippers of YHWH—none of that moved Jonah’s needle at all. All he cared about was that he could be comfortable now!

When you are harboring that unrighteous anger toward God, it will blind you to His purposes and priorities for this world. Acts 17:26-27 tells us that God has “determined the appointed times and boundaries” of the world’s habitations

Acts 17:27 LSB

that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;

God is working and moving and arranging all events and occurences of this world in order that men and women might come to seek Him and find Him—everything from the Russia Ukraine war to the balance of power in Washington to the wildfires in California to the collapse of Hamas in the Middle East to the price of eggs at the supermarket. All of these things are under His providential control so that He might be glorified and men might come to repentance and faith in Him through Christ.

But when you are harboring that unrighteous anger at God, all you can see is how much more you have to pay for your groceries, or how much more expensive its going to be to get your car repaired because of the tariffs or how much your taxes will be affected by cutting government spending. God is at work in this world through all of His providential acts to bring in a mighty harvest of souls—the fields are white, but you can’t lift up your eyes to see it because you are stewing in your unrighteous resentment toward Him because He hasn’t done what you wanted Him to.

We find in this chapter the warning signs of a heart that is in deadly peril because of the unrighteous anger it harbors toward God. God’s promises become a frustration to you, His people an annoyance, His peace becomes foreign to you, and His purposes for this world become invisible to you.

Beloved, if you see those signs of anger towards God taking root in your life; if God’s Word has exposed your sin of resentment and bitterness toward Him because He has done in your life something you did not want Him to do or has not done what you insisted He do—if you see that kind of sinful anger stirring in you, then your duty is plain: Fly to the unrestrained mercy of God!

Repent of the sin that your anger has nurtured in you—His promises that you have been tempted to scorn are in fact your only hope—that He is

Jonah 4:2 LSB

...a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning evil.

Jonah resented God’s grace toward Nineveh, and that resentment drew him into an absolute swamp of sin and anger and bitterness against God. But see here that God’s grace is the only hope that a miserable resentful sinner has!

And just as this passage sets forward the warning signs of unrighteous anger and your deadly peril in your anger at God, so these verses also shine with

II. Your glorious PRESERVATION in God’s MERCY toward you

Jonah is revealed in this chapter as a pitiful, bitter little man—self-centered, petty and vindictive as he sits pouting in his makeshift lean-to outside Nineveh and stewing in his resentment against God for being a God of compassion. But see in these verses how God responds with mercy to Jonah’s unrighteous anger at Him.

See your glorious preservation in God’s mercy toward you—first of all, this passage shows us that

He is PROTECTING you with PATIENCE (vv. 4, 9)

In verses 1-3 we see Jonah’s initial outburst against God for His compassion and love, ending with Jonah’s declaration that he doesn’t even want to live anymore:

Jonah 4:3 LSB

“So now, O Yahweh, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.”

And how does God respond? Mind you, this is the same God Who hurled a great storm on the Mediterranean Sea just a few weeks earlier—a God of such power and authority and mighty righteousness that He could have blown Jonah right off of that hillside, lean-to and all. He is the God Who responded to Pharaoh’s arrogance by leveling Egypt with plagues; He wiped out three thousand of His own people at the base of Mount Sinai for their turning away from Him to worship the golden calf, He laid the bodies of tens of thousands of His people into unmarked graves in the wilderness for forty years because they refused to believe His promise to give them the land of Canaan, giants and all.

This is the same God who answers Jonah now—and He answers him with gentle patience!

Jonah 4:4 LSB

And Yahweh said, “Do you have good reason to be angry?”

The literal Hebrew rendering of that question is “are you walking uprightly with this anger?” It is the same phrase that God uses when He speaks to Cain about his anger in Genesis 4—

Genesis 4:6–7 LSB

Then Yahweh said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? “If you do well, [there’s our word] will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is lying at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”

Behold the patience of God to His child struggling with unrighteous anger—patiently reasoning with Him, gently drawing him out to see the sin that threatens to consume him! The mercy of God preserves you as He patiently protects you from the consequences of your sinful anger against Him—and see in verses 6-8 how in His mercy

He is PURSUING you with His PROVIDENCE (vv. 6-8)

Look with me at verses 6-8 of our text:

Jonah 4:6–8 LSB

So Yahweh God appointed a plant, and it came up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his miserable evil. And Jonah was extremely glad about the plant. But God appointed a worm at the breaking of dawn the next day, and it struck the plant, and it dried up. Then it happened that as the sun rose up, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun struck down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and asked with all his soul to die and said, “Death is better to me than life.”

Remember one of our foundational Bible study principles—look for words or ideas that are repeated. If you look at these verses you see the word “appointed” repeated three times—God appointed a plant, a worm and a wind. (You’ll also remember back in Chapter 1 that the fish that swallowed Jonah was also “appointed” by YHWH.) The Hebrew word translated “appointed” carries the idea of “arranged” or “set apart” or “assigned”.

It’s important to note that in this whole account we never read of God “appointing” or “assigning” anything for the sailors or the Ninevites, do we? God sets His particular providential care on Jonah alone. God is the Creator and Sustainer and Orchestrator of all creation—from the collision of massive galaxies in the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the cell division in the embryo of a field mouse—and everything in between—God rules over all of it.

But in all of the uncountable ways that God governs His creation, it is only to His children that He has promised to work all of it together for their good and His glory. Consider that, of the four things “appointed” to Jonah in this book, half of them were seen as good things (the whale that rescued him from drowning and the plant that rescued him from the sun), and two of them were evil in his sight (the worm that killed the plant and the wind that scorched him afterward). In his petulance, Jonah could see no good in those things, but the text specifically says that God appointed them “to deliver him from his miserable evil” (v. 6). Jonah thought that the most miserable evil he needed to be delivered from was the heat of the sun; but God in His kind providence was working to deliver Jonah from the miserable evil of his unrighteous anger against Him.

See the kind providence of God that pursues you when you are being dragged away by your sin, Christian? Is there any greater mercy that for God to bend all of the workings of His providence in this world for the sake of your deliverance from besetting sin? How could you not want to fly to Him for mercy? How could you remain sullen and embittered toward a God who loves you so, Who will literally move Heaven and Earth to deliver you from your miserable evil? Oh that God may open our eyes to see the great mercy on display to us in our wretched condition!

Flee the deadly peril of your anger against God, Christian, and trust in the glorious preservation of God’s mercy toward you—He will protect you with His patience, He will pursue you with His providence, and

He will PARDON you in His PITY (vv. 10-11)

We come to the last verse of this chapter—and of the book itself—with God still tenderly reasoning with Jonah over his unrighteous anger and self-centered disregard of the fate of tens of thousands of repentant sinners:

Jonah 4:10–11 LSB

Then Yahweh said, “You had pity on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came to be overnight and perished overnight. “So should I not have pity on Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”

Jonah felt pity for a plant that withered—a vine that he did not plant or water or cultivate. And God graciously, patiently reasons with him again: “You care more for the death of a plant that you never raised than I do for a city that I have been tending and raising and caring for since it was founded! Jonah cannot see that the pity that God has shown to Nineveh is the same pity that He is showing to Jonah! God even pitied that poor thirsty, sackcloth-draped livestock more than Jonah did—and the pity that Jonah refused to show to the people of Nineveh was the same pity God showed him.

And this is how the book ends—with God confronting Jonah for his pitiless disregard for a repentant city:

Jonah 4:11 LSB

“So should I not have pity on Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”

The entire city—even down to the livestock—had mourned and cried out for rescue from their plight. And God heard their cry and pardoned them out of His great pity. But what about Jonah? We are left with this question hanging in the air, waiting for an answer that Jonah never gives. Do we have any assurance that Jonah repented of his unrighteous anger and flew to the unrestrained mercy of God?

I think there are two very good reasons to think so—one that comes from the text itself, and the other that comes from the historical context of the book. (We call these internal and external evidences.) The internal evidence that Jonah repented and received the mercy of God for forgiveness and restoration comes from the likelihood that Jonah himself authored this book. And a man so angry with God and would never sit down and write such a brutally honest account of his own sin! The entire book—and especially our text this morning in Chapter 4—is written to put Jonah in the most brutally honest light, and also puts YHWH in the most glorious, merciful, gracious and faithful light. When you have sought escape from unrighteous anger at God by running to the unlimited mercy of God, you have no interest in making yourself look good, but only magnifying the great mercy of the God Who saved you!

We have good internal evidence from the Scriptures that Jonah repented of his unrighteous anger at God, because he is the one who wrote this account for us (guided by the infallible inspiration of the Holy Spirit.) And there is one piece of external evidence that we have—evidence that doesn’t come to us from the Scripture itself, but comes to us from the historical context of Nineveh.

After the kingdom of Assyria was conquered by the Babylonian Empire in 612 B.C., the city of Nineveh was destroyed and largely abandoned. In fact, eventually even the location of the city was lost in the mists of antiquity, with many ancient historians and explorers of the classical period speculating on its whereabouts. It wasn’t until the year 1847 that a young archaeologist named Austen Henry Layard—who had done excavations in the ruins of Babylon—began to search for the location of Nineveh. When his investigations took him to northern Iraq, some of the locals pointed him to the great mounds of earth that sat opposite the city of Mosul, telling him that there is where he would find what they called the [[HUB-ruh Yu-NAN-ah]] - The Tomb of Jonah. Layard began excavating those hills and found the city of Nineveh. (Discoveries At Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard, Esq., D.C.L. (http://aina.org/books/dan.pdf, p. 5)

Think about this—at the end of Jonah 4, the prophet Jonah disappears from the pages of Scripture. God’s Word does not tell us anything else about where he went or what he did after YHWH posed His question to him in Verse 11. And we must not presume to speak with full confidence where the Scriptures are silent.

But at the same time, is it not possible to think that there was a great repentance in Jonah’s life at the end? That he did finally escape his unrighteous anger at God and was rescued and transformed by His unrestrained mercy? That at some point Jonah got up and walked away from his lean-to and its withered vine and his bitterness and anger and went back into Nineveh, spending the rest of his life there ministering to the people of the city, becoming so beloved to them and having such a profound impact upon them that when he died they erected a tomb for him that would endure for millennia in the minds and hearts of the people of that region.

Beloved, this is the mark of a heart that has repented of its unrighteous anger and has run for refuge in the unrestrained mercy of God. Your anger is replaced with love, your bitterness with compassion, your stubbornness with obedience, your selfishness with sacrifice. Why would you want to keep fostering that anger at God in light of such glorious promises of His mercy? Repent of seeing His promises as a frustration to you, His people an annoyance, his peace foreign to you. That anger will infect every relationship you have, it will kill your prayer life, it will ruin your witness, it will pull you into yourself until you are a small, bitter, self-absorbed knot of grudges and accusations. And if you refuse to repent; if you insist on hanging on to that anger against Him, your faith will be proven to have been a lie and you will die in your sins apart from any hope whatsoever in the mercy of God.

And so here is the glorious Good News for you this morning—God has poured out His mercy for you through Jesus Christ!

Ephesians 2:4–5 LSB

But God, being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—

Jesus Christ was crucified by the unrighteous anger of men who hated Him because He did not overthrow Rome the way they wanted Him to; He was nailed to that Cross because His own people hated Him with pitiless hatred; people who stood outside the gates of the city to watch what they thought was God’s judgment falling on Him. Jesus Christ suffered a pitiless death at the hands of pitiless, self-absorbed, hateful men in order to pay for the pitiless, self-absorbed, hateful unrighteous anger and judgment and pride you are guilty of. He died alone, cut off from His people in order to pay for your rejection of His covenant people. He died under the wrath of God so that you could flee from your sin of unrighteous anger to the mercy of God.

Let go of your unrighteous anger toward God. Walk away from the pitiful lean-to of your self-righteousness and the withered vine of your self-pity. His patience has protected you from His wrath while He pursues you with His providential hand to drive you to Himself. When you repent He will pardon you in His pity when you fly for mercy to the One Who has died and risen again to rescue you out of your spiritual death and make you alive together with Him—your Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION:

1 Peter 5:10–11 LSB

May the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, ...Himself restore, strengthen, confirm, and ground you. To Him be might forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

What are some things over which you have been extremely angry only later to find out you were wrong about injustice being committed toward you? What was driving your original perspective on the situation? What later information helped you to think differently?

When have you been angry with the Lord about unfulfilled dreams or missed expectations? What was your original hope that went unfulfilled? Why was that expectation so significant to you at that period of your life?

Consider the following verses in Jonah: 1:17; 4:6, 7, 8. These verses reveal the Lord “appointed” an event four times. What attributes of God do such events reveal? In what realms of the created order does God reveal these attributes in Jonah?