Unrighteous Anger

Introduction:

Well, good morning - if you are visiting with us today my name is Trey - I am an elder candidate here at Cross & Crown. This morning our text comes from Jonah 4:1–5, if you have your bibles open them up there, and if you don’t have a bible there are two or three blue bibles there under your seats, you can take that with you this morning as well. The text will also be on the screen behind me, and if you would join me in standing for the reading of God’s Word.

Subj: Txt.

Jonah 4:1–5 ESV

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 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 are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Do you do well to be angry?” Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city.

We have now reached the penultimate sermon in our series through the book of Jonah. Our text this morning is the climax of the book - where all of the oddity of Jonah’s initial reaction to God’s word in chapter 1 comes into crystal clear focus. If you remember back to Jonah 1, God speaks to Jonah and tells him to, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” And Jonah, gets up and does the exact opposite. In fact, if we were to take Jonah’s case before a court what we see is that under the law Jonah acts with intent and forethought. He had intent, he had determined in his mind to violate God’s word and do the opposite, and as we see in verses 3-4 he put thought into the disobedience, “But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.”

The thing about this whole incident, is that we really don’t know why if we are just reading the story for the first time. God’s command is to go and call out against Nineveh because their works are so evil that it has come up before the Lord. This is the precursor to judgement - so we can maybe infer at the beginning that Jonah is afraid of the Ninevites, or maybe (much less likely) he has some of the modern scruples about God’s wrath and doesn’t want to be part of it. However, until we keep reading we just don’t know why Jonah runs from the presence and command of the Lord.

Yet, when we get her to chapter 4, everything comes into sharp focus. We see in verse 2 what was really behind Jonah’s flight “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 are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”

RtN.:

Jonah ran, not because he was afraid of Nineveh - and how they might treat him. He didn’t run because he had issues with God destroying pagan peoples like some deconstructed YouTuber. He ran because he knew, and took issue with, the nature and character of God. He ran because, as one commentator puts it, thought, “he would, like many of us, govern God’s world better than God Himself.”

And now, as he sees the reality of all that has taken place upon his preaching Nineveh’s destruction, and their subsequent national repentance - is angry. He’s angry and directs all his anger up to the God of heaven, and you can almost see him pointing his finger with a scowl on his face saying, “I knew it! I knew it the whole time! I knew that…” God was a moral monster? No. That Nineveh would string him up in the city center to torture and mock him? Nothing of the sort. That forty days would pass, God would have been bluffing, and the status quo would continue and Jonah would be outed as a fraud? Not at all.

Jonah says, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.” Pause with me for a moment, and consider the words that flow from Jonah’s complaint to the Lord; “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful… slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love… and relenting from disaster.” In short - Jonah is angry that God is consistent in His character.

It would be easy here to take this and run down the road of - Jonah is a selfish (which all evidences points to the fact that his is) Israel Nationalist (which, again he is) petty child, which given verse 5 - homeboy kind of is. And because those are in one regard very much true - we could build our entire time this morning around how the gospel calls us out of our selfish pride (which it does), myopic western centric Christian worldview (which, the gospel is to be proclaimed to all peoples everywhere, so it does), immaturity, which I am sure we have much to grow out of.

However, if that was all we drew out of this climactic moment of Jonah’s story, we would miss the forrest for the trees. Understanding Jonah - the man - and the book means we have to understand the world that formed Jonah. It means we have to understand how the book was meant to be received by God’s people - and how they didn’t. Because understanding those things helps us understanding the magnitude of God’s grace toward Nineveh, Israel, Jonah, and us today.

T/S.: So, to begin this morning, we need to understand whats happening in Jonah’s world that has formed him.

Understanding Jonah’s Worldview Formation

Jonah knows something about Nineveh that we likely never connect when we read this book. You see Jonah’s contemporaries were the prophets Amos and Hosea - they were called to prophesy to the Northern Kingdom just as Jonah was. Amos was sent first, and prophesied about a nation that would come and carry off the people of Israel “beyond Damascus.” Later, as Israel continued in their rebellion God sent Hosea who prophecies explicitly about Assyria ruling over them because they refuse to repent. What God places in both men’s mouths to prophecy to his people, is that repentance will bring restoration to the nation.

Amos 5:14–15 ESV

Seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said. Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

Hosea 14:1–2 ESV

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the Lord; say to him, “Take away all iniquity; accept what is good, and we will pay with bulls the vows of our lips.

Israel’s story has been one of repeated, and ever increasing apostasy. Time and again they turn from the Lord, face judgement, call out to the Lord, rinse and repeat with each successive generation’s apostasy being greater than the one before. God has sent prophet, after prophet to call Israel out of their doom spiral often to no avail. Jonah had prophesied earlier in his career and it had caused a brief moment of reformation and revival, but it proved to be short lived.

He now finds himself preaching an eerily similar message to his enemies - to the ones God has chosen to use as an instrument of his own people’s judgement and destruction - and he knew all along what God was up to. So let’s go back to Jonah 4:1–2 “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 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 are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”

Again, we come to this passage and we realize that Jonah’s anger comes from knowing the character of God, and he sins - not because he brings his complaint before God - but because his discontent turns into anger with God. One commentator said it this way,

What he desired was not unjust in itself, that the Ninevites should be punished for their past sins, and that the sentence of God pronounced against them should not be recalled, although they repented. For so the judge hangs the robber for theft, however he repent.” He sinned, in that he disputed with God.

He sins in forgetting his own reception of God’s gift of grace, and in presuming to know how to govern God’s world better than God himself. Yet the same commentator goes on to bring this home by saying, “let him cast the first stone, who never rejoiced at the overthrow of the enemies of his [own] country,” in other words - in my flesh I understand why Jonah is in his feels here.

You see, Jonah’s anger and sin was driven from despair at the the realization that Nineveh had acted in such a way as to receive God’s mercy and his own people - God’s chosen people - would be far less likely to respond in kind to God’s message. He has lost hope for Israel’s reformation - because he thought that Nineveh’s destruction would be their wake up call. Yet, their being spared becomes a tool that God uses to condemn Israel all the more.

[Add Application]

Understanding Jonah’s Intended Audience

A few weeks ago, when we walked through Jonah 2 together, I pointed out that Jonah is a warning to God’s people. Brad will walk us through the close of the book last week, which leaves us on a big cliff hanger, but I think the fact that we have the story written down shows us that Jonah eventually understood what God was up to. The narrative is meant to come alongside the prophecies of Amos and Hosea and show the people of God what would happen if they repented. The rest of Israel’s story in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles shows us the unfortunate reality they suffered because they did not.

As we read Jonah 4, The words of Jesus echo in the scene, where he says in Matthew 11:21 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.” But the comparison is even more explicit, because later in Matthew 12:41, when the Pharisees asked for a sign, Jesus quotes from the story of Jonah, saying that the only sign that they will be given is the sign of Jonah - just as he was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so Jesus would be in the belly of the earth and, “The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.”

God’s Mercy and Justice