Jonah 4

To Thine Own Self be True

Intro:

Read Verses: 3:10-4:11

Main Point God Always Acts According to His Character

I. God Keeps His Word (3:10-4:4)

The end for chapter three seems to go with chapter four or at least the first few verses of chapter 4 go with the end of the 3. The end of chapter 3 has the Ninevites giving up their evil ways, they get rid of their troubles, and so God gets rid of his troubles with them. To put it another way, the problem between God and the Ninevites disappears because the Ninevites repented.

So all should be right in the world. But in Jonah’s world it is not right. We start the chapter by hearing that Jonah was greatly displeased or troubled. The same Hebrew word is used to describe the Ninevites and God in chapter 3:9-10. Not only was he troubled or displeased, Jonah was angry, furious or in the original phrasing, he was Hot. When you get angry,you temperature goes up, you turn red, your adrenaline starts flowing, your heart rate increases. Which increases your blood flow to your head huh is why your face turns red Apparently you can see red by seeing the blood in your capillaries in your eyes.

Why was Jonah so angry, from the human standpoint he was the Jewish Billy Graham who had just converted an entire city and hundreds of thousands of people are saved. One article I read described Jonah as the most successful Old Testament Prophet.

Verse 2 tells us that Jonah saw this coming. And he says, that is he I fled toward Tarshish. I knew you were:

A gracious and compassionate God

Slow to anger, the Hebrew phrase for this is one with a long nose, because if your whole face turns red, then if you have a long nose, you never really get completely angry.

Abounding in faithful Love—This phrase has the word hesed. Remember we have been hitting that word or concept of god being covenantly faithful and loving toward his people. The word demonstrates that it connotes long-term, reliable loyalty of one member of a covenant relationship to another.

You relent in Sending disaster

So what is Jonah really saying? I’m angry because “God is gonna God.” He is always going to act exactly according to His nature and character.

He was acting like God when he promised to destroy Ninieveh if they did not repent, but when they repented and re relented or upheld his word. Even sending Jonah and offering the terms as a form of grace. And the irony is that God showed Jonah so much more grace because Jonah flat out disobeyed God and went in the opposite direction, but God did not destroy him.

God’s list of character traits shows up in the form that we see it here in Jonah in . And it is repeated throughout the Bible in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Nehemiah, several Psalms, Joel, and in Romans.

This list is one of the key factors that Makes Yahweh, the Hebrew God, our God, unique. He is not fickle, he cannot be bribed or bought. He acts according to His nature of compassion, faithfulness and upholding justice. God acts according to his character

Application 1: We should not be angry when God keeps His Word

Jonah is angry because God did exactly what He said. He may be angry because somebody else that wasn’t like him. Jonah acted more like the prodigal son’s older brother who was angry that the father welcomed back the son who left.

God will follow through or fulfill what he has decreed. But Jonah was so distraught he actually pulls a card from Elijah’s play book and says oh I Just want to die. But he's being dramatic but he had no problem being saved when he was the one facing God’s anger.

God Proved his grace by sending us his son Jesus, who is God and possess all of the attributes, as does God the Holy Spirit.

God promised a Messiah that would come and restore the world.

(ESV): Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts

(ESV): For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.”

TS: Like Jonah experienced, if we run away from or disobey God, we will face some kind of correction, or punishment or consequence. Why? Because God has said it must be. He is holy and he requires obedience but he has offered us grace while we learn to obey and we are being sanctified.

II. God Provides His Grace (4:5-8)

Jonah leaves the city and builds a booth or a tent. He is hot and he is waiting to See what is going to happen to the city. So it seems that he saw the city repent but maybe he didn’t think it would stick and the people would go back to their old ways. Jonah setup camp and was waiting until the 40 days were over. Maybe his anger or his heat will be be cooled down by the shade and by the waiting. God wanted to teach Jonah a lesson though.

Gd makes a plant grow overJonah to provide shade and rescue him from his trouble. It grew up very quickly but large enough to provide Jonah shade.

Jonah was finally happy that he was getting shade and able to rest.

Then God makes a worm to eat the plant, which took away the shade and then sends a scorching wind to make it even hotter. I have lived in the south, and even the two weeks when it gets hot here, i say its too hot to live. But there is more to it than that when Jonah says It's better for me to die than live. Jonah had the one thing that made him happy taken away from him, but he did not work for it.

Like the fish, God commanded them plant to grow, and he commanded the small worm to eat it. And then God commands the scorching east wind. God is in control of everything in the story.

Application 2: Grace is God’s gift to provide to whoever he wants

God exercises his sovereign grace over his kingdom as he sees fit.

The Puritan preacher and author John Bunyan taught that sovereign grace is “God’s free, sovereign, good pleasure, whereby he acteth in Christ towards his people.”

He goes onto say, election is eternal, absolute, and unconditional. It is based on neither foreseen faith nor merit.

As the previous quotation suggests, Bunyan believes election to be an act of sovereign grace in which all three Persons of the Trinity are involved. He specifically attributes the choice of some men for salvation to the Father. He writes, “The Father by his grace hath bound up them that shall go to heaven in an eternal decree of election; and here, indeed, is the beginning of our salvation.” But he is quick to point out that the Father saves no man without the work of the Son or the Spirit. He writes, “The Father designs us for heaven, the Son redeems from sin and death, and the Spirit makes us meet for heaven.” Election, for Bunyan, is thus an act of sovereign grace in which the Father is the chief actor, but the Son and the Spirit are not excluded.

This election though, is unconditional. There is nothing you need to do to earn it. God could have destroyed the Ninevites without warning but he exercised grace and warned them to repent. The way we read the story and understand the Jewish law, He should have smited Jonah because Jonah directly and openly disobeyed God, But God relented.

God’s grace is unbuyable. No one person can earn it over another person. No one can out work someone else to earn his or her salvation. The salvation is oven freely for reason’s only God knows. In the case of Jonah,he had a job to do to extend God’s earthly kingdom to the Ninevites.

Bringing it you or me, God extends that same grace to people today. We can be equally secure in God’s election because like the plant that God grew to protect Jonah, He was the one that commanded it to grow. Jonah was not even thinking about the shade.

TS: Most of us don’t think about salvation, and God knows who belongs to him and so he can wait for us to realize that we are His.

III. God Demonstrates Patience (4:9-11)

God asks Jonah again if he has any right to be angry over the loss of the plant. God explains the object lessons.

He explains to Jonah tat Jonah cares an awful lot for something that he did not create or grow in any way.

Really what the question is asking “is central to the whole book. “What right do we have to demand that God should favor us and not others? By reducing the question to the particular issue of the gourd, God focused it in a way that would cause Jonah to condemn himself by his own words. Jonah did just that.”

Jonah is confronted with his own inconsistency and he is standing at a point to realize it and admit he is wrong and then change his thinking and be aware that God’s grace for the many and not the few.

(Amos, Obadiah, Jonah (NAC)): Stuart is right in saying that this question is central to the whole book. “What right do we have to demand that God should favor us and not others? By reducing the question to the particular issue of the gourd, God focused it in a way that would cause Jonah to condemn himself by his own words. Jonah did just that.”

Jonah is essentially saying as long as the rules apply to me and my kind, then everything is good. But if the “others” are afforded the same kind of privilege, then I do not approve.

We see this being played out in our country today and in the world’s history. One group oppresses another. You can have free speech as long as say what I want to hear. You can make cakes as long as you make me my cake. You can have free religion as long as you worship what I worship. It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you are on, it matter’s what side of the Bible you are on.

But you see Instead of destroying Jonah God takes the time to teach Jonah where he has gone off the rails in his thinking.

Application 3: God is a patient teacher

The Puritan, Stephen Charnock elaborates: “[Patience] signifies a willingness to defer, and an unwillingness to pour forth wrath upon sinful creatures; [God] moderates his provoked justice, and forbears to revenge the injuries he daily meets with in the world.” Charnock deftly brings God’s attributes together harmoniously as the logical outcome of his essential simplicity: “Goodness sets God upon the exercise of patience, and patience sets many a sinner on running into the arms of mercy.”

James warns us to be slow to anger.

Take your time. Count to 10 before you do or say something. It takes discipline to act in the spirit versus acting in the flesh. Act like God toward Jonah, slow down, wait, guide the person or yourself back to where you want them go and then teach them the lesson you end them to hear.

There is power in patience that is unseen at first, but it gathers the more you use exercise patience. It is the patience to wait to eat a donut, or the power to not scream at you kids or employees or wife that demonstrates they control you have over yourself.

You won't be that person who just flies off the handle at every little instance. You will become the person who is steady and thoughtful and makes decisions based on facts and not raw emotions.

Conclusion

Jonah knew God’s attributes or character and he also knew that God would act in accordance with those attributes toward the Ninevites. He seems to miss the boat that God had already acted in the same manner toward the Israelites as a whole and also had just shown Jonah that he would hold to his word, he had shown him grace and patience and taught him a lesson on how to be a prophet.

We are made in God’s image and we possess a small amount of the same communicable attributes. We can be true to our word, we can offer grace to people,even though they wrong us or frustrate us and we can be patient with one another while we all work out our salvation and sanctification.

The question for this week is is your character consistent with God? Is it consistent with your new self? Because God is the one that is consistent with himself and we, through His Grace and the work of the Holy Spirit are being changed into the new self. One that is no longer like the old.

Do people know what to expect when you say I am a christian? Do you want others to be reborn in their newness of life?

Charles Spurgeon said this: By the love and wounds and death of Christ, by your own salvation, by your own indebtedness to Jesus, by the terrible condition of the heathen, and by that awful hell whose yawning mouth is before them, ought you not to say, Here am I; send me?

Closing Prayer

The Lord is slow to anger and great in power,

and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.

His way is in whirlwind and storm,

and the clouds are the dust of his feet. ()