Jonah 4

This morning we’re finishing up our series through the book of Jonah. This all started with the word of the LORD, the word of Yahweh, coming to Jonah to go and speak against the wickedness of the Ninevites. But Jonah flees from the presence of God. God brings Jonah to the end of himself, sending him this instrument of death, the great fish, which actually becomes an instrument of new life for Jonah, where he becomes awake to God’s presence, responding to the steadfast love of God in songs of gratitude, at least, that’s how it goes for a while. So then Jonah begrudgingly obeys God and goes to Nineveh and preaches a five word sermon that conveniently leaves a lot of very important information out, and something that no one least of all Jonah, expects: the Ninevites hear this judgment of God, a judgment that springs from God’s love, and from the least to greatest turn to God, they repent of their evil ways, and believe God.

And how’s Jonah taking the news? Look back at the last verse of chapter 3:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.

Okay, so the wholehearted repentance of a nation as significant and as wicked as Nineveh is a pretty big deal. You would think that if you’re the prophet who helped bring this about, you’d be sitting pretty. The most wicked and powerful nation in the entire world has turned to your God, giving him honor and glory, they are changing the trajectory of their lives, and you only had to speak five words. This would be the pinnacle of any prophetic career!!

And yet, how’s Jonah taking it. Verse 1:

English Standard Version Chapter 4

4 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2

You’d expect the prophet of God to see all that has taken place and to say, “Mission accomplished! God is glorified and honored.” But Jonah is livid! He’s enraged at what’s happened. The translation says that he was exceedingly displeased, but literally in the Hebrew it says that Jonah considered what had happened to be evil! He’s ticked off, and he’s ticked off at God, and he lets him have it. Verse 2:

English Standard Version Chapter 4

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 are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. 3 Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

So we remember, that Jonah didn’t flee from God because he was afraid to go to Nineveh. He wasn’t afraid for his safety. He fled because he hates the Ninevites, they are irredeemable in his eyes, not because they can’t be saved, but because Jonah does not want them to be, and he knows that God is gracious and merciful and patient and loving, and he didn’t want the Ninevites to be rescued. You can just see the steam coming off Jonah here. He is so angry at God.

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English Standard Version Chapter 3

4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

So the ESV says “overthrown,” some other translations use words like, “overturned, demolished, destroyed, etc.” So the Hebrew word is the verb, hapaq. Now, just like in English, sometimes words in Hebrew have a basic meaning and then a more nuanced meaning. For example, to say my house was demolished, we’re mean that the physical structure of my house was destroyed, and probably that was a pretty bad thing. But we can also say, in the context of football, “we demolished them!” And that’s actually a good thing! Or next week, we’re all going to demolish turkey and dressing and all the other goodies we’ll eat during the Thanksgiving holiday. So the basic meaning and the nuanced meaning have different connotations.

The word hapq is the same way. The basic meaning is that something is to turn something over. So the prophet Hosea uses the metaphor to describe Israel that they are a piece of baked bread that isn’t hapaqed, isn’t turned over, so its ruined. So that’s using the basic meaning. Now, when you apply hapaq to a city, especially one that is wicked and evil, it typically means what our translations say here, the city is turned over, overthrown, destroyed. But hapaq can also mean to turn something from bad to good. So in we see:

English Standard Version Psalm 30

11  You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;

you have loosed my sackcloth

and clothed me with gladness,

So here it’s something that’s bad that is transformed, turned over, into something that is good.

Now…which meaning of hapaq do you think Jonah intended when we was preaching this sermon? But which meaning did God intend, and what actually happened? God’s played a trick against Jonah! Jonah was hoping and scheming that the Ninevites would be overturned to their death, but because of God’s incredible grace, they were overturned from death to life.

But theres a big irony in these word’s of Jonah. Look at how Jonah describes God in verse 2.

But the irony continues and it’s so rich. Look at how Jonah describes God here.

English Standard Version Chapter 4

for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster

If this sound familiar, it’s because it is an echo of one the most repeated ways of describing God in the Old Testament. It’s a description that God actually uses to describe himself. We find it in the book of Exodus during the time when God gives the people of Israel the Ten Commandments, the first two of which are that they’d have no other God’s but Yahweh, and that they would not make any idols, or physical representations of God out of wood, stone, whatever, lest they’re attention be drawn away from God. And what’s the first thing the people of Israel do after receiving these commandments? Forty days go by, their at the foot of Mount Sinai, Moses has been gone all this time, granted the presence of God is still hovering over the mountain in this great cloud, but what to the people do? They make a golden calf to represent God! So God is going to bring judgment against these people, he’s going to essentially dump them as his people, but Moses intercedes on their behalf, and the text says that God relented from the disaster that he planned to do. Relents from the disaster he planned to do. Hmmmm. Does that sound familiar? Sounds a lot like the end of Jonah chapter 3, doesn’t it?

So he has mercy on the Israelites, and he renews the covenant with them, and then he explains who he is to Moses, and he says in chapter 34, I’m Yahweh, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

So the only reason that Israel exists as the people of God is because God is this way, because he’s been gracious to them, as undeserving as they are. And the irony here is that Jonah is taking these words of God and he’s throwing them back at God, saying, “I knew you were like this! You’ve always been like this! ” He’s angry at God for being too kind, too loving. But he would not exist as an Israelite if God weren’t like this! He sounds ridiculous, and most likely we’re not sympathizing with Jonah at this point.

And that’s exactly what God is exposing here in Jonah. Jonah is angry at the wideness of God’s grace. The scandalous nature of God’s grace and mercy.

But the motivations of his anger are not foreign to us. It’s one thing for me to admit my wrongdoing, to turn to Jesus, and he shows me his grace. That’s awesome, and we’re all for it. But then there’s the other side of God’s grace and mercy, it’s something that happens as Christians when we realize that Jesus is like that to me, but he’s also like that to people that I despise and can’t stand. And then we’re like, “woah now, they don’t deserve to be shown grace and mercy, Jesus; don’t you know what they’ve done?” And this is exactly what God is exposing in us in this story.

We love the grace of God. The Israelites loved the grace of God. The only reason we exist is because of the grace of God. And so we sing songs about grace, highlight scriptures about grace. We love it. But there’s a scandalous side of God’s grace, when it’s wideness begins to include people that we hate, people that have wronged us, people that we believe don’t deserve it. And then God’s grace becomes unsettling, disturbing, and outrageous. Jonah looks ridiculous in this chapter, but he’s not as crazy as we might first think.

So what happens in the rest of this chapter is God tries to help Jonah understand his grace in a new way.

Verse 4:

English Standard Version Chapter 4

4 And the LORD said, “Do you do well to be angry?”

5 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

English Standard Version Chapter 4

4 And the LORD said, “Do you do well to be angry?”

So God asks if it’s right for Jonah to be angry that he’s shown grace to the Ninevites. Is Jonah’s anger legitimate? And Jonah just gives him the hand. He doesn’t respond at all. He goes out on the city and build himself a shelter, so he’s obviously planning to hang around for a while, forty days even, to see what’s going to happen to the city. Jonah’s hanging around to see if the Ninevites get fire and brimstone, meteors from heaven, he wants to see the fire works of God’s judgment.

Now, Jonah is angry for a number of reasons, but one of them is that God has played a trick on Jonah; and this is perhaps the best part of the entire book in Jonah. Look back at chapter 3, verse 4, at the five word sermon that Jonah preached.

English Standard Version Chapter 3

4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

So the ESV says “overthrown,” some other translations use words like, “overturned, demolished, destroyed, etc.” So the Hebrew word is the verb, hapaq. Now, just like in English, sometimes words in Hebrew have a basic meaning and then a more nuanced meaning. For example, to say my house was demolished, we’re mean that the physical structure of my house was destroyed, and probably that was a pretty bad thing. But we can also say, in the context of football, “we demolished them!” And that’s actually a good thing! Or next week, we’re all going to demolish turkey and dressing and all the other goodies we’ll eat during the Thanksgiving holiday. So the basic meaning and the nuanced meaning have different connotations.

The word hapq is the same way. The basic meaning is that something is to turn something over. So the prophet Hosea uses the metaphor to describe Israel that they are a piece of baked bread that isn’t hapaqed, isn’t turned over, so its ruined. So that’s using the basic meaning. Now, when you apply hapaq to a city, especially one that is wicked and evil, it typically means what our translations say here, the city is turned over, overthrown, destroyed. But hapaq can also mean to turn something from bad to good. So in we see:

English Standard Version Psalm 30

11  You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;

you have loosed my sackcloth

and clothed me with gladness,

So here it’s something that’s bad that is transformed, turned over, into something that is good.

Now…which meaning of hapaq do you think Jonah intended when we was preaching this sermon? But which meaning did God intend, and what actually happened? God’s played a trick on Jonah! Jonah was hoping and scheming that the Ninevites would be overturned to their death, but because of God’s incredible grace, they were overturned from death to life. This is the wideness of God’s grace and mercy, and it as enveloped even Jonah’s greatest enemy, and he’s ticked off about it.

So God tried to engage with him by asking the question up front, “Is it right for you to be angry?” But Jonah doesn’t engage. He ignores God. So moves to the next tactic. Verse 6.

English Standard Version Chapter 4

6 Now the LORD God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant.

This is the only time in the entire story that Jonah is happy. In chapter 4, Jonah is portrayed as being completely irrational. First, he wants to die rather than watch as his enemies are rescued. Now, he’s got some shade, he’s extremely happy. And then what happens? Verse 7:

English Standard Version Chapter 4

7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

And now he wants to die again. Do you see how ridiculous Jonah is being portrayed here? We’re supposed to look at him and say, “Dude, you’re acting like a toddler. Pull yourself together.” But what’s God getting at? How is this tactic of the plant and the worm supposed to draw Jonah into a deeper understanding of God’s grace? Look at verse 9:

English Standard Version Chapter 4

9 But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” 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?”

What’s God doing here? Well, think about this. This is the first time in the entire story that Jonah has cared about something besides himself. This is the first time where Jonah is actually showing compassion on something other than himself. He’s having a strong emotional attachment to this plant; and God uses that small, itty bitty compassion that Jonah is feeling, to expose the ridiculous nature of his anger. God is in effect saying, “Jonah, you’ve got this passionate concern from something outside of yourself, which is great, that’s a good thing; but can’t I also have a passionate concern for something outside of myself, something of much greater significance, like, say, a city full with more than a hundred thousand people made in my image?

And look at how God describes the people of the city, “they do not know their right hand from their left.” I always think of Ben Stiller, Zoolander, “I cant turn left.” Now, God is not saying that they don’t know any better, because he obviously expects them to know better. He brought a word of judgment against them, calling for them to turn, because he obviously expects that they should know better. This isn’t God letting them off the hook or sweeping their rampant violence under the rug. This is an idiom in the Old Testament to refer to people who are misguided and lost - it typically is in reference to sheep who go astray, following after the wrong shepherds.

And so God is highlighting the grandness of his grace here, Jonah is all worked up about his plant, he’s so concerned about it that he wants to die, and God says, if you claim that it is right for you to have such a connection with this plant, that you didn’t do anything to make grow, you just stumbled upon it, is it not right for me to have a passionate connection to these hundreds of thousands of human beings that I formed in my own image and who have been led astray?

is a comical, ridiculous look at the people of God coming to terms with the wideness of God’s grace and mercy. He’s trying to get Jonah outside of himself. Jonah obviously thinks the Ninevites are the worst people in the world, the absolute worst. But in the story of Jonah, it’s Jonah who is the most hard hearted and rebellious and faithless character. And God is gently opening Jonah to the fact that he is just as lost and misguided as he believes the Ninevites to be, and so Jonah is just as reliant on the wideness of God’s grace and mercy as the Ninevites. Jonah needs God’s grace to be scandalously wide, to include even the enemy, because that’s his only hope.

At the center of the proclamation of the good news of Jesus, what we call the gospel, is the idea that God loves the enemy, which is incredibly good news because each one of us as made ourselves out to be enemies of God, making choices that hurt ourselves and others and God’s beautiful creation. But because God is gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, he sent his Son to die for us while we were still his enemies, so that we could receive his grace and become his family.

But it’s one thing to believe in a God who loves my enemy, it’s another thing when he asks us to join him in that task.

And we never get Jonah’s answer, because the book abruptly ends. And we’re like, “What did he say? How did he respond? Did Jonah see the light at last?” But here at the end of the story, with this question left unanswered, we recognize that this was never a story about Jonah or a story about Nineveh, this was a story about you and me. It’s a story about God’s people and their struggle with a God who loves their enemy as much as he loves they themselves. And so Jonah never responds to God, because the question is posed to us. The real question is how am I living my response to God’s question?

There are undoubtedly people in our lives that we despise, that we can’t stand, that in our darker moments we’d say we even hate. And listen, there are significant wounds that we’ve received from people, and I’m not belittling that in any way. But if there is one place where the cycle of hatred and violence and wounding ends, it ends at the cross. And the community that gathers around the cross of Christ are called to live in a different way, not because we’re better than the rest, but because we ourselves have been met with the scandalous grace of Jesus.

God brings Jonah into contact with his greatest enemy in order to draw Jonah into a deeper understanding of his grace. I’ll end with this question. Could it be that these people are in your life for the exact same reason? Could it be that God has brought you into contact with your enemies so as to draw you into a deeper understanding of his grace, not just to recognize his grace for you, but to actually participate with him in showing grace to them? Could it be that he wants to grow you, shape you, mold you by struggling with the wideness of his grace and mercy?

How will you live your response to God’s message to you in this story of Jonah?

Let’s pray.

God exposes that Jonah needs grace just as much as the Ninevites.

Jonah wants mercy for himself and wrath for his enemy.

God challenges us to live out the response to his question.

The gospel is all about God loving the enemy.

God teaches Jonah to think about someone other than himself.

God uses our enemies to bring us into a deeper understanding of his grace.