When God Loves Your Enemies

Well, here we are. In the last week of our study of the book of Jonah! So far we’ve talked about religious hypocrisy, spiritual apathy, God using pain and suffering and severe mercy to wake us up. We’ve even seen divine repentance!

It’s been an interesting adventure so far, and I bet you’ve all learned something about this story, about one of God’s prophets that you didn’t know before.

Well, this week is no different! We are going to work through Jonah chapter 4 this morning!

In Jonah chapters 1-3 we read about this prophet Jonah. He’s a religious man of God, who ends up hating God and his Will and runs from him. This leads him to the very bottom, and it brings ruin on him and all of these other people around him. But, God makes this brush with death the worst thing that’s ever happened to Jonah, and then he makes it the very best thing that’s ever happened to him.

It wakes him up, for a moment at least. He physically obeys and goes to Nineveh, but he preaches this 5 words Hebrew sermon and the entire city repents! Now, you’d think that if you were a prophet that this would be a wonderful thing to add to your prophetic resume. Right, you’ve confronted sin city and they listened! They have this radical transformation, God relents and doesn’t destroy the city! If you were the prophet that delivered this message you’d be jumping for joy, right! Well, maybe not. And, Jonah responds much like how many of us probably would.

Let’s see what Jonah does in Chapter 4

Jonah 4 NRSV

1 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3 And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” 5 Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. 6 The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. 7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” 9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” 10 Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Well, I think it’s safe to say, especially after reading this, that Jonah was NOT thrilled about Nineveh repenting!

In fact, we see right in v.1-2 that Jonah is angry and displeased. He is livid and furious. So, what does he do? He prays! He prays through clenched teeth and tightened fists...

“O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning.”

Now, right here we learn something that counters what many people think. Many think, and I did for a while, that Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh because he was afraid. But he’s not petrified of Nineveh! He says,

“That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”

Jonah admits right here that he didn’t run from Nineveh because he was afraid of what they might do to him, he was afraid that God was going to be merciful! He hates the Ninevites, he doesn’t want God to be merciful and slow to anger, relenting from punishment. He wants God to smite the city like Sodom!

But, he continues and says “Take my life, kill me. It would be better for me to die.” At this point it seems like Jonah has just about lost his mind. God saves an entire city, and Jonah’s response is an angry, child-like temper tantrum in which he says, “Oh just kill me already!”

Now, as he was explaining to God the characteristics of God, he was listing these attributes:

Gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love… does this sound familiar to anyone?

This is like the John 3:16 of the OT. This line of attributes given to God is not only repeated over a dozen times throughout the Old Testament, but it comes from God’s own mouth in Exodus 34:6.

God’s about to bring judgment on the people of Israel for disobeying the covenant, right after the golden calf incident. Moses intercedes, God relents, and Moses says, “why are you doing this? Who are you?” The Lord says, “Yahweh. Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slot to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

Jonah is trying to throw this back in God’s face like “I knew you were like this, you’ve always been like this!” Jonah is so irrational and heated that he’s throwing God’s own words back at him, thinking he’d win some argument. Jonah is angry because God is too gracious, too nice, too forgiving of people who don’t deserve it.

Jonah 4 exposes the scandal behind God’s grace. Right, we love that Christ forgave us and continues to forgive us. When we slip up and sin we are thankful that God forgives us. I’m happy when I realize how screwed up I am and turn to Jesus and he shows me his grace. But, then we realize that while Jesus is like that to me, he’s like that to the person I despise, and hate. Then I’m like “woah, they don’t deserve that. Do you know what they did to me?”

The very motivation behind Jonah’s criticism is something that we can understand. If were in his exact situation, it’s likely we would say the same thing.

Sure, Jonah is depicted as ridiculous, but it’s not, it’s understandable.

God is trying to help Jonah realize his ridiculousness, and he does so 3 times in Jonah 4.

In v.4 we see the first attempt. God says, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Do you know what Jonah’s response is to this question?

Look at v.5. “Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there.”

God asks him this question and he ignores him! He doesn’t answer, leaves the city, and decides to build a booth or tabernacle.

I imagine Jonah setting up this tabernacle, this tent, and sitting there, stewing in his anger, watching the city, waiting and hoping that God will relent from his relenting and in fact destroy the city. He wants fire to rain down from heaven! And, the fact that he build a tabernacle goes to show that he was willing to sit there a long time to wait.

But, what’s incredibly funny in this whole story comes from Jonah’s sermon. Right, remember last week we talked about his 5 word sermon. Well, Jonah’s anger with God not only comes from God being too gracious and forgiving, but because God sort of plays a trick on Jonah.

Go back to chapter 3:4

Now, some translations say overthrown and others say overturned.

Jonah says “40 days and Nineveh will be overturned.” Or, 40 days and Nineveh will be הָפַךְ. (Ha-pach).

It’s important to understand that words in English have basic meanings, but those meanings can change based on context and nuances and what not. You could say “I destroyed my car” and it could be the physical destroying of your car. But you could say “I destroyed the world record for most gummy bears eaten in one sitting.” Destroyed, used in the second instance, is a good thing!

Now, the basic meaning for הָפַךְ. (Ha-pach) is to turn something over. So, it’s like if you are cooking a piece of meat on the grill, if you don’t ha-pach the meat, what happens to it? Right, it burns.

But, if you take a city, and ha-pach it, it’s really not a good thing. In fact, Sodom was a city that was ha-pached.

However, there is another meaning for ha-pach. It also means to turn something or someone over from bad to good.

Now, which meaning do you think Jonah intended? Right, the really bad meaning.

Which meaning does God intend? And, which meaning actually happened?! Despite Jonah’s prophetic sabotage Nineveh ha-pachs and turns over from bad to good.

Right, God did exactly what Jonah said. It’s funny!

Well, to me it is, but not so much to Jonah. He’s livid at God for this!

But, God tries again to help Jonah see. In v.6 we see his second attempt. God provides a leafy plant to grow up over Jonah to provide him with shade and to ease his discomfort. Jonah was extremely happy about this plant. And, this is the first time that we see Jonah happy. Jonah goes from “ahhh I want to die” to extremely happy.

In vv.7-8 God provides this little worm. He goes from providing a huge storm, a huge fish, a large leafy plant, to a little worm. And, this worm chews the plant and it withers.

The sun comes out and God provides this scorching east wind and the sun starts beating down on Jonah’s head. He grows faint, and what does he do? Again, he says “it would be better for me to die.” Jonah goes from angry to happy to angry!

So, in vv.9-11 we see God once again ask Jonah “is it right for you to be angry about the plant?

It should be enough to shake Jonah from his lack of reason, but instead Jonah says, “Yes, angry enough to die!”

I mean, he’s lost it. He can’t come back. He’s a goner.

But, the good news for Jonah is that God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger. He’s committed to Jonah.

So, God address him a 3rd time.

“You’re concerned about this plant/bush. Listen Jonah. You didn’t plant this, water it, help it grow. You can’t claim to have this emotional attachment to it when you did nothing to help it grow. It hasn’t been in your life for very long. You’re so emotional and passionate about this mere plant.

In v.11 God says, “shouldn’t I be able to have that same emotional response and concern for something a little more significant, like a huge city full of people? A city of more than 120,000 who can’t tell their right hand from their left? And, also many animals!”

God is trying to help him understand his anger through a plant, and it didn’t work.

God recognizes that Jonah, for the first time in the story, actually cares for something other than himself. He’s concerned for this plant which provides him with comfort and he cared about that.

God takes that little part of Jonah’s heart that cared for something other than himself and he uses that. He is saying to Jonah, “If your concern for that plant is legitimate, shouldn’t my concern for this great city be legitimate as well?

Now, God calls this a city filled with people who don’t know their right from their left. It’s an idiom saying that they are misguided. We have some intuition as to how we should live, but we tend to go the opposite direction. Lost and misguided morally and spiritually. God isn’t excusing them and their atrocities, but reminding Jonah that they too need help.

At his point we turn the page in our Bibles searching for how it ends. How does Jonah respond? Does he listen to God? Does he calm down? Well, it doesn’t matter. This story, the whole of Jonah, is not about Jonah’s response. It’s about you. You should be asking yourselves, “How am I living the response to God’s questions.”

Jonah is this ridiculous caricature of people who grasp the scandal of God’s grace, and that God loves your enemy as much as he loves you.

God is trying to softened the hardened heart of Jonah, to help him see more clearly. He’s trying to make him see that he’s just as lost and broken as the Ninevites.

Jonah 4 is about God forgiving us and our enemies. Some of us hear that and say, “Okay, I think I can swallow that. I think I can deal with that. But, I don’t know what to think about the fact that he wants me to forgive my enemies as well.”

Sure, God can love and forgive my enemies, but I’m not going to!

Folks, this is one of the core fundamental issues of the Gospel! Forgiveness of one’s enemies. That’s what God does for us at the cross, and Jesus talks about it all the time.

Jesus put it this way in Matthew 5

“But I tell you who hear me, love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

Even as Christians we respond to these teachings in some of the most bizarre ways. Sometimes we go, “What?! There’s no way Jesus actually meant that!” or we go “Well, that’s very noble, but I’m just not going to do that. I can’t.”

The entire Gospel is about the announcement of the Kingdom fo God being here. In Jesus there is a whole new way of living. Through Him people are reconciled to God, where people who have made themselves enemies of God are reconciled.

Brothers and sisters, we made ourselves enemies of God. Through our selfishness, self-absorption, thinking we are the stars of the show and that God is just this supporting and small character.

We all are participants in this broken world. We hear this instruction from Jesus and think that Jesus isn’t saying the right thing. Clearly, Jesus isn’t thinking straight because the world doesn’t work like that. But, Jesus is like, “No, you are the ones who have it all wrong.” God made us to live fully reconciled to God and to one another.

Now I don’t want you to think that I’m ignorant to your stories. Trust me, I have many of my own. I know there are real pains, real tragedies, real awful things that people have said and done to you and your friends and families.

But, if there is one place in the world where the train and the spiral of humans wronging each other ends, it stops at the cross and the community of people that form around the the cross are called to live differently. Not because we think we are better, but because we have been shown grace and compassion.

What Jonah 4 does is deconstructs the entire idea of who and what the enemy is. In Jonah’s mind the Ninevites are the bad guys. They are the evil ones who deserve punishment. Yet they are the ones who have soft hearts and turn to God immediately. Jonah is the bad guy and he can’t even see it.

This is what happens to us with our enemies. An enemy is someone or a group of people who have wronged you. Somebody has wronged someone you care about. And, you just can’t deal with them.

It’s okay to struggle to be around the people who hurt you or others. But the question is what do you do with those emotions?

What most of us tend to do is we tend to fixate on the thing that they did to me or to someone else. We take this complex human person who has a family of origin, and crazy stories, who’s wronged other people and been wronged by other people. Not to excuse what they’ve done, but they have a story. People don’t act in screwed up ways just for no reason. All of us have stories behind the ways that we act. But this person came into my life and this happened.

What we tend to do is reduce their complex humanity down to the thing that they did to you.

We begin to reduce their humanity down to that trait that annoys us or the thing that they did to us. And then, of course, we paint ourselves as the opposite of them, since we were the victim, and we end up with Jonah 4.

Jonah is so blind to the fact that the line of what is good and evil goes directly through hm. He thinks everyone else is the problem.

But, like Jonah, we are all contributors to this world being messed up. Some are worse than others, but that line of good and evil goes right through each of us. We have all made ourselves enemies of God.

But, every human being is leveled at the cross. I, nor you, get to stand at the foot of the cross, thank Jesus for his forgiveness, and then say, “Well, not them Jesus.”

It’s all, or none. That’s it. The death of Jesus was not just for a select few, but for the whole who would choose to accept and believe.

As we conclude Jonah it must be asked, what is this story about? Is it really about God and Nineveh and Jonah? No, it’s really about God and His own people. He’s trying to bring them around to seeing how messed up they are. How much they need his grace.

God has intentionally brought Jonah into contact with his enemy, to teach him something.

How many of you have a difficult person, an enemy, a toxic person, in your life and you think “I would be able to follow Jesus so much better if that person hadn’t crossed my path!”

Jonah flips that over and it says, “Could it be that that person is in your life precisely as a divine invitation for you to grow and mature in your experience of God’s grace. Not just knowing and receiving it, but beginning to show it to someone else.”

Could it be that this is the next step of growth for you?

Theologian, Walter Wank calls this the Gift of the Enemy. He says, “This is the gift that our enemy may be able to bring us. To see aspects of ourselves that we cannot discover any other way than through our enemies. Our friends seldom show us our flaws, they’re our friends precisely because they’re able to overlook or ignore those parts of us. The enemy is therefore not just a hurdle to be leaped over on the way to God, our enemy might actually be the way to God. We cannot come to terms with our own inner shadows except through our enemies. We have almost no other access to those unacceptable parts that need redeeming, except through the mirror that our enemies hold up to us.”

I want you all to try this exercise that Wank suggests. Sit down this week with a sheet of paper and Jonah 4 in front of you. Get your enemy in mind. The person who has wronged you, the person who annoys you, the person who you can’t stand to be around. Get them in your mind and write down every character trait about them that you hate. Get it all out there.

Now, some of you are thinking, “Yes good, I like this!”

But, there’s more.

Finish your list, stop, and pray. Recognize that as you pray you are in God’s presence.

Then, line by line, go through each thing that you listed and ask yourself “have I ever displayed this same kind of behavior, ever?”

Could it be that this person is in your life precisely because God is inviting you into a deeper experience of his grace?

Here, in this moment, you decided whether or not you are going to be like Jonah or not. The first step toward enemy love is recognizing the common humanity, the common brokenness that we all share.

That’s where God is leading Jonah through Jonah 4, and that’s where God is leading us through Jonah and the Gospel. We are each called to not just point others to Christ, but to offer forgiveness to even the worst offenders in our lives.

So let us allow God to have compassion even on the worst of us, and rejoice in that compassion and forgiveness.

Amen.