"Prophetic Suicide" Jonah 4:1-4 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Well good morning.

I invite you to open your Bibles, if you would, to the book of Jonah.

Jonah chapter four.

We will finish Jonah in a couple weeks.

And uh after that, our plan, Lord willing, is to look at um Nahum for a couple weeks.

Nahum is the prophet that went to Nineveh after Jonah.

So we'll do that at the end of August.

Um and then uh who knows what the Lord has in store for us in September.

Um but uh we'll figure it out by then.

Um I want to thank you all for your kindness and patience through our construction project.

Um I know it's uh it's it's not fun to be meeting in two different places and not in the worship center.

When we have a worship center, you just can't I I know I miss it.

I just want to be across the hallway in the worship center.

But uh, you know, in the months we've done this, I haven't heard any complaints, not even any grumbling.

I've I've seen expectant people trying to look through the window, but that's that's it.

Um and thank you guys for just making this um really joyful and easy.

Uh your godliness is evident in that you care more about Christ than what room you are in when we learn about him.

So thank you for your your faithfulness.

Jonah chapter four, um, we're just gonna look at the first four verses of it this morning.

Uh it says this.

You really need to start reading in three, verse ten.

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

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry, and he prayed to Yahweh and said, O Yahweh, 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 were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.

Therefore now, O Yahweh, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

And Yahweh said, Do you do well to be angry?

Let's go to the Lord one more time in prayer before we begin.

Father, we do pray for your kindness to be on us this morning.

We know that you are a God of kindness, of grace, and compassion, and we pray that we would experience that this morning, that you would open our eyes to see things from your word.

We know that this is one of your chief kindnesses towards us, that you allow us to perceive truth in your word.

Apart from the intervention of your spirit, we'd be unable to do that.

And so I pray that there would be no one here this morning that takes that for granted.

That as Jonah just declared, you are compassionate and kind.

And I pray that we would experience that through our study in your word this morning.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Warren Weirsby, the famous pastor of Moody Bible Church, described a typical missionary interview.

When a missionary wants to go in the mission field, he goes to the church that he wants to have them sent out, and a group of elders from the church or their missions council meet with the prospective missionary and ask him a series of questions.

And Wirsby relays the questions that he always uses in those interviews.

First, he asks, Are you called by God to the mission field?

It's a pretty easy question if you want to be a missionary.

Second, describe your own personal evangelism.

Do you see fruit in your evangelism?

Third, has the Lord blessed your missions activity before?

Have you been used by the Lord in reaching the nations?

And he says, question we always ask is describe your prayer life.

What's your prayer life like?

How about Bible memorization?

Do you have a pattern of Bible memorization in your life?

And then he says, somebody in every missions council always wants to ask, do you know about the deeper Christian life?

Do you experience the deeper Christian life?

And says, there's one in every missions council.

You just have to deal with that person and ask the question.

Now, how would Jonah answer those questions?

Imagine Jonah interviewing to be a missionary.

Would you want Jonah to go out from your church as a missionary?

Imagine him fielding those questions.

Jonah, are you called by God as a missionary?

And Jonah would say, not once, but twice.

Quite clearly, in fact.

There was no mistaking it.

I knew exactly that God wanted me to be a missionary and he would not let me do anything else with my life.

Jonah, describe your personal evangelism.

Oh, I can't help it.

You know, sometimes when I'm flying, the whole row of people I'm sitting with, they all get saved.

It's incredible.

I can come across idol worshippers in my own travel, and by the end of our flight, they're throwing their idols overboard and they're saved.

Jonah, has God used you in the mission field before?

Oh, of course.

I mean, the largest revival the world's ever experienced happened under my preaching.

It was only a three-day crusade, and everybody got saved.

Their sheep got saved.

I mean, come on.

Jonah, describe your prayer life.

Oh.

I have prayed in the most unusual places.

Nobody compares to my prayer life.

I've even raised myself from the dead with my own prayers.

What's your Bible memorization like, Jonah?

Oh, I've got all the Psalms of Ascent memorized, all the Psalms of Sheol, I've got them all memorized.

I can recall them under any circumstance.

And then finally, Jonah, have you experienced a deeper Christian life?

Oh yeah.

Jonah would not make a good missionary, despite knowing the answers to all the questions.

And that's what we encounter at the beginning of chapter four this morning.

Jonah has just experienced a remarkable revival at the end of chapter three.

Chapter 4 begins and it begins in a disappointing way.

The glories of chapter 3 are replaced with the dust storm of chapter 4.

You follow Jonah so far through this book.

In chapter 1, you followed him through a great storm, in chapter 2 through a great fish, and chapter 3 into a great city.

And you've seen that word great repeated over and over and over again.

From the great fish to the great storm and into the great city.

Now, finally, in the fourth chapter, you see him in a great rage, in a great anger.

And that's how the chapter begins.

It displeased Jonah exceedingly.

There's that word again.

Jonah was greatly distressed.

The same word used to describe the storm, the same word used to describe the fish, the same word used to describe the city.

Now it's the storm in Jonah's heart.

Jonah is very, very angry.

He's exceedingly angry, and his anger has one target.

The target is Yahweh, the target is the Lord.

In a book, a short book, these four chapters of one unforeseen twist after another, nothing is more surprising than what you encounter in chapter four.

In fact, this book really should have ended at chapter three.

That's where you feel like the plane should have landed.

What a happy ending this book would have been, huh?

Even though it had a renegade prophet who ran from the Lord, the Lord fished him back and reeled him in and got him onto the right city.

And then he goes to the city and preaches, and they get saved.

And what a happy ending.

Can we just move on now?

Let's get to the New Testament quick.

But instead, there's chapter four sitting here, staring you right in the eye.

And I'm sure most of you are familiar with chapter four because we've been in this book for a while and you've read it on your own.

But it is never ceases to amaze me that when I talk to people about Jonah, how many of them don't know what's in chapter four of this book?

You know, growing up as a kid in church, you're always exposed to Jonah chapter one.

Everybody's got that.

But chapter four, you forget about.

There's really not a whole lot else in the Bible like what you see in chapter four.

Here you have a prophet who is angry with God.

In fact, he calls God evil.

He says that God is acting in a sinful way, very angry with him.

And Jonah really goes to war against God.

And he goes to war in his heart, and the war is going to spill out into the battlefield of the world here at the end of the chapter.

We'll save that for our next time on Jonah 4.

This morning we'll just look at the first few verses.

But here Jonah speaks up against God.

It and the antecedent to it is the end of chapter 3, verse 10, that God relented of the disaster.

And so Jonah's anger here is directed towards God.

God's relenting at the end of chapter 3 is what has displeased Jonah so much, and Jonah is angry with him.

I talked to a book editor at Moody Press that I used to work with there, and uh one of the larger Christian publishers, and he said if he was assigned the book of Jonah as a book editor, there's no way he would have allowed chapter four to go to prince.

It's just not acceptable.

You have such a good narrative arc, and there's the conflict, and there's the resolution, and there's the conclusion, and that's where it ends.

You know, if you want to write chapter four, save it for a sequel, okay?

Don't bring in this new dynamic here, but this is not a novel, of course, this is real life, and it doesn't follow the narrative arc that you would design in your own head.

So why does God include Jonah's rage in Jonah chapter four?

What is the lesson that it's here for us?

And there's lots of little lessons we'll notice as we go through it, but I just want to begin with the big one here.

The very existence of Jonah chapter 4 in the Bible, its very existence in the world, is a very strong demonstration to you that God cares about the heart of his workers, in a sense, more than he cares about the work itself.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

That's a very pastoral lesson for me as a pastor, to be reminded that God cares, in a sense, as he's relating to me, more about what's going on in my heart, even than he does about the fruit of my ministry.

And that truth should apply to you as well.

It's sobering to realize that God cares more about what's going on in your heart than he cares how successful you are and what you're doing in the world.

And here's where Jonah 4 kind of becomes an Old Testament pastoral epistle.

Because the main place this book is going is not the conversion of Nineveh.

That's a little aside thing that's going on here.

From the perspective of history and from the perspective of biblical theology and biblical missions, Jonah 3 is where the action is.

But from the perspective of God caring for the hearts of his people, Jonah 4 lets you know that God cares more about what your own motivations are, what's going on in your own heart through trials and difficulties and success and failure than he does about the actual successes and failures of life.

That's what this chapter is doing here.

It confronts you with the reality that God will go to great lengths to expose deficiencies and idolatries in your heart.

Because God didn't need to do anything in chapter 4.

But he does everything you're going to see here both this week and the next time we're in Jonah 4.

He does all of this stuff to expose Jonah's sin.

Jonah goes to war against grace, and God does not give up.

Begin in verse 1 with really what's I'm going to call just a stunning response here from Jonah.

It displeased the it.

I remember the antecedent is God.

God here displeased Jonah exceedingly.

The Hebrew here is literally it's very evil.

It was very evil to Jonah.

It was a great evil to Jonah what God did.

It's translated in ESV, it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and that's true, but the actual words are this was very evil to Jonah.

So notice what you have here is God's prophet calling God not just evil, but very evil.

It's noteworthy when you read the book of Jonah.

This is the only description in the entire book of evil as great.

That's something exceedingly evil.

We've seen evil before.

The Ninevites were evil.

We've seen great before.

Their city was great, the fish was great, the storm was great.

This is the only place you see the two combine.

That God is very evil according to Jonah.

One commentator points out that, ironically, speaking tongue in cheek, it seems Jonah is more upset with Nineveh's deliverance than God was angry at their sin.

Jonah's angrier at God for forgiving Nineveh than God was angry at Nineveh for sinning in the first place.

And I hope you see that the rebellion Jonah has in chapter 4, verse 1 here is every bit as extreme as his rebellion in chapter 1.

What he does here in chapter 4 by yelling at God is just as sinful as what he did in chapter 1.

Remember, chapter 1, he rebelled against God with his feet, not his mouth.

God said, Go speak to Nineveh, go call out against them, and he shut his mouth and ran away with his feet.

Well, in chapter 4, he can't run anymore.

He's learned that lesson.

His feet are planted there.

So in chapter 4, the rebellion spills out of his mouth.

And of course, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

This lets you know the repentance that happened in the fish was not a permanent kind of repentance.

That doesn't mean it wasn't a genuine repentance.

I'm sure the repentance we saw in chapter 2 was genuine.

It just means that Jonah here is regressing.

He's going back into the sin that he repented of.

And before you judge that too severely, just jog in your own minds the kind of sins that you have fallen back into.

It's so easy to say, oh, Jonah's repentance in chapter two wasn't legit because he's rebelling in chapter four.

Well, meet yourself.

I think Jonah's repentance in chapter two was legitimate, but here in chapter four, he's regressed, he's fallen back into his same old sin, and he is angry at God, he's yelling at God, and he refuses to listen to him.

And you know he was angry because that's how the verse ends.

It was a great evil to Jonah, and he was angry at it.

And the it here, of course, is God's relenting.

The fact that God didn't destroy Nineveh.

Why is Jonah so angry?

There's a great book on Jonah.

It's not published in the United States, it's published in uh in India called What's Eating Jonah?

What a great title.

What's eating Jonah?

Why is he so angry with God?

And there's a couple obvious reasons.

The text doesn't give you the exact reason, but it gives you enough clues you can start to fill in what's going on in Jonah's heart here.

First, Jonah's angry at God because he doesn't want to be a false prophet.

He had just said 40 days, you guys are going down, and now he's pulled up a chair to watch, and they're not going down, they're not destroyed.

And the punishment for a false prophet is death.

And Jonah didn't have an asterisk at the end of his preaching.

He knew, we're going to see in the second, he knew that God was going to show mercy to them, but he didn't express it out loud.

That was the point we looked at last week in chapter 3.

Jonah didn't go actually say, unless you repent.

Jonah knew if they repented, they wouldn't be destroyed.

They figure that out.

They were grasping at straws, remember, back in chapter 3, verse 9, even their king said, Who knows?

Maybe God might be merciful, but we don't know.

Does anyone know?

And Jonah doesn't tell them.

So Jonah perhaps doesn't want to be known as a false prophet, which is his own fault.

He should have said, if you repent, God might spare you.

Jonah doesn't want evil to go unpunished.

Part of this is he feels like he's defending God in God's character.

After all, the Ninevites are so wicked, if God doesn't punish them, Jonah will feel like his own God is being defiled, being defamed.

I mean, if God is holy, and Jonah believes that God is holy, then doesn't God have to punish sin?

And if there's any places that need an example made out of them for how wickedly evil they are, it's certainly Nineveh.

Certainly Nineveh.

I mean, every week I spend time reading about the sins and the atrocities of Nineveh, and I shared some of them with you, and I just keep finding new ones.

I mean, the things that I'll spare you some of the details, but just the way I told you last week that they would take skins of people they conquered and spread them over the wall.

Just the horrible ways they went to to get the skins off of the people and stretch them off of the wall.

I mean, it's like an old form of crucifixion, except you were level on the ground.

They didn't lift you up, they laid you on the ground on poles, stakes through you, piercing you, and then took basically a fish hook and split you in half from your middle up, pulled that off and put that over the wall.

That's who we're dealing with here.

So don't they need to be punished by God?

That's the question.

And Jonah says absolutely they need to be punished by God, and here he is pulling up a chair to watch them be punished by God, and it's not happening.

So certainly some of it's he doesn't want to be a false prophet.

Certainly some of it is he doesn't want to see God defamed.

He wants to see God vindicated, he wants the evil punished.

But I think the real reason, the main heart reason here, and I'll show you why in a second, is that he knows that God is going to use the Assyrians to destroy Israel.

God has already said that.

The Assyrians are going to be the nation that will destroy Israel.

And now he's been sent to prophesy to them.

He went very reluctantly.

And now they've repented, and now God is not destroying them.

What's God going to do to your heart?

I mean, these are the people that are going to destroy your own nation.

And you might be quick to say, yeah, but if they repented, that means God won't use them to destroy your own nation.

That is what Jonah was thinking.

But it doesn't hold up.

Because you know who has not repented?

The Israelites.

They haven't repented.

And it starts to dawn on Jonah, I think, that God is most definitely still going to use the Ninevehites, still going to use the Assyrians to destroy Israel.

Even though the Ninevites repented.

And it's always a stretch to compare the United States to Israel, since I don't want to make that kind of comparison, except just to get this going in your heart just a little bit here.

Imagine if God said clearly and, you know, some kind of prophetic declaration that in 40 years the Taliban was going to attack the United States with a series of terrorist attacks and conquer our country.

Would you believe it?

And you'd say, no, you know, we can take them.

But it is a prophecy, and so you eventually get to the point where you're like, okay, that will happen.

And then God sends you as a missionary to them.

And so then you go to the terrorists and you preach their destruction, and then God saves them.

They repent of their wicked ways, and God saves them.

And then it occurs to you that God is still going to use them to destroy your own country.

Still, after all that.

Now, what is your heart attitude supposed to be towards them?

And to Jonah's point, what's your attitude going to be towards God?

After all, they're the wicked ones, not us.

They're the wicked ones.

We're the people who are called by your name, not them.

And you're going to use them to destroy us?

And so you go there and you, you know, preach their own destruction, and then they repent in a way that has never been experienced in your own country.

Ever.

Do you see how all of that would make you angry at the terrace?

All of that would make you angry at your own country for not repenting.

And all of that, when you're honest about it, would make you angry at God.

If you really experience that emotional turmoil in your heart, you're starting to have sympathetic resonance with Jonah here.

Why is he upset?

Because he knows that Israel's going down.

And it's going to go down by Nineveh.

That's the story of Jonah.

Jonah makes the mistake here of thinking that his own political enemies are also God's enemies, which in some cases they might be, but they're always the mission fields, even in the Old Testament here.

And I'm sure you can come with lots of applications for your own little heart in that, huh?

How quick we are to see our political enemies as, oh, they must be God's enemies too.

And that just that thinking, that kind of thinking of viewing your opponents from a political or national perspective as enemies, what that thinking does to you is it destroys the concept of a mission field.

Or if you do go into the mission field of your quote unquote enemies, you're not going there as a compassionate ambassador of a gracious and saving God.

You're going there as a reluctant prophet doing your duty, and boy, you're gonna be hacked if they end up repenting.

After all, they're your enemies.

I remember I had a Korean roommate when I was in seminary, and he'd come to the United States for.

School, and I told him, Why don't you go as a missionary to North Korea when you're done with seminary?

You think there's many master seminary graduates in North Korea?

What a great place to go.

And he looked at me like that was just the craziest thing he'd ever heard.

And this is, you know, a long time ago, almost 20 years ago now.

He looked at me like, are you out of your mind?

He's like, and this is what he told me.

North Koreans are evil, evil, wicked, wicked people.

And there's no way an American could understand how evil that place is.

You'd never go there.

I mean, what if they actually did listen to a missionary?

You think you're gonna start a church there?

Forget about it.

You can't be a missionary in North Korea.

Ha! And it just was so jarring to me.

That kind of language.

And I don't mean that in a self-righteous way at all.

Like obviously, I'm here in Northern Virginia and not North Korea.

You know, Anyaseo is not the language of my choice right now.

This is a little bit of what's going on in Jonah's minds.

I can't go there.

They're so wicked.

And then they repent.

And Jonah's angry.

And this is he finally lashes out at God in verse 2.

And he prayed.

And again, Jonah's not doing everything wrong here.

He's taking his anger at God to God.

So he's going to the right place.

You have to appreciate about Jonah one thing.

He's angry with the right person.

I mean, he's not angry at the Ninevehites.

He's angry at God.

He knows that God is the one doing this, as I've mentioned many times through a study in Jonah.

God is always the actor.

It's always God who's doing things.

It's God who's appointing, God who's moving, God who's who's at work here.

And so Jonah goes with his anger to God.

And when you go to God and you're speaking to him, that's called prayer, even when you're angry at him.

And so verse 2 is right when it says that Jonah prayed to Yahweh and said, Oh Yahweh.

I love it.

Oh Yahweh.

Is not this what I said when I was in my country?

So he's doing the I told you so card to God.

Now, did Jonah say this out loud?

No, but he said it in his heart.

And here's just one of the many, many Bible verses that lets you know that God can hear your heart.

God knows what's going on inside of you.

Even when you don't express it out loud, God knows.

And Jonah knows that.

And so Jonah just puts quotes around it.

This is exactly what I told you.

Just imagine saying that to God.

I knew this would happen, God.

And you, I mean, the implication is you should have listened to me.

You know this in marriage.

There is no, no good way in a marriage to tell your wife, I told you so.

Like even when you did tell her so.

Like even when you said, hey, we shouldn't go this way, that's the wrong way, and you go that way, and it's is the wrong way, there are zero ways for you to, you can't even like tactfully drop the clue.

Like, did someone mention in this car this would be the wrong way?

Someone?

Would you like me to get the directions this time?

Oh no.

No.

No.

My wife will be in the gym and she'll won't be seeing the video of this.

Unless one of you rats me out.

There's no way to say that.

And Jonah here says it directly to God.

I told you so.

So the implication with that kind of language is very clear.

When you're telling someone I told you so, what you're implying is that you are wrong.

What happened is what I said would happen, and it is the wrong thing to have happened, right?

You wouldn't say, I told you so, if the other person turns out, lo and behold, to be correct.

If you say, go this way, and your spouse says, no, let's go this way, and you go the way your spouse wants to go, and it turns out to be the right way, you're not then going to do your little victory dance and be like, I told you so.

No, you were the wrong one.

So Jonah is really unveiling his heart here.

God, I told you.

If I went, you would end up not destroying them.

I knew this would happen.

I knew it.

Now, why did Jonah think that?

What gave the game away to Jonah?

Why did Jonah think that God would not in fact destroy them?

And this is what you get in verse 2.

This is why I met haste to flee to Tarshish.

For I knew, and here it is, that you're a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.

That's what it is.

I mean, what a great verse that is, huh?

You could underline that in Bach.

If it didn't have context around it, that could be like a life verse right there.

In fact, this where you see this verse, this verse is quoted many, many times in the Bible.

One of the places this is quoted is the book of Nahum, and it's one of the in-and-out verses.

You know what I mean by the in-out verses, like in-and-out hamburgers and sodas have Bible verses written on them.

This is one of those verses that's literally written on an in-and-out soda cup.

That's what kind of verse this is.

You could probably buy a plaque of it in the bookstore, I bet, and put it on your wall.

I mean, it's an adorable verse.

Oh, God is so gracious and compassionate and slow to anger.

He's just such a merciful God.

Amen.

But now you have to zoom out, which is one inch above the page here and realize no, Jonah is angry at God for this reason.

If Jonah saw that plaque on your wall, he would rip it down and throw it in the river.

What do you mean?

God being so gracious.

Man, it bugs Jonah.

And it is worth just pausing here and contrasting the last word in verse 1.

Jonah was angry.

And then in the middle of verse 2, God is slow to anger.

Do you see that connection there?

I don't think Jonah realized the irony of this right now.

But Jonah is filled with anger, and one of the things he's filled with anger about is that God is slow to anger.

What are you going to do with a God who's slow to anger?

It means that God's not going to be angry at the things you're angry about.

You get angry about something, and God's not angry about that, then you get angry at God.

And that's what Jonah's experiencing.

Now, this verse, this description of God, that he's a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, relenting from disaster.

This is not something Jonah is making whole cloth here.

Jonah is importing this.

This is a quote from Exodus 34.

And you really do need to know the context is a very significant, probably, other than the parting of the Red Sea and the plagues, this is where the action is in the book of Exodus, the end of chapter 32 through 34 there.

32, Moses comes down the mountain with the law on the stone tablets.

Remember what he finds when he comes down the mountain?

All of the idol worshiping, the Israelites dancing around the fire, worshipping cows.

And Moses is angry and breaks the law and tells God, You brought these people out of captivity, you can take them back, God.

Chapter 33, God says, Okay, I'll destroy them and make new people.

This puts Moses in an awkward situation.

God's going to destroy the Israelites.

What's Moses supposed to do?

What should Moses' response be to God saying, Fine, I'll wipe out the Israelites and start over?

Moses begins interceding for the Israelites.

He begins praying for them and asking God.

He appeals to God and says, You can't destroy them because and this is where he goes, what would the other nations say if they hear that you led us out of slavery only to destroy us in the wilderness?

What would they say?

So Moses appeals to God's character.

What would they say if they heard that you destroyed us?

And God has a very fascinating response to Moses before you get to what he quotes here.

God tells Moses, Exodus 33, verse 19, Moses, I will have compassion on whomever I want to have compassion.

Exodus 33:19

I will show mercy to whoever I want to show mercy.

That's God's response to Moses.

I want to show compassion to people, I'll show compassion to them.

I want to show mercy to them, I'll show mercy to them, and there's nothing you can do about it, Moses.

Notice that it seems like God's arguing the other side of this.

I thought God was on the side of destroy them, and Moses is on the side of spare them.

But God's response to Moses is, look, I can show compassion to whomever I want to, Moses.

Now, initially it sounds like God is arguing for why he's going to withhold compassion.

And then you keep going in the narrative, and Moses keeps praying to God in light of this.

And then finally, God says, I will relent, I won't destroy them.

You can go back to he makes Moses hand carve the stones again.

It's Moses' punishment.

Write it on the board a hundred times.

And then Yahweh says, This when you go back down the mountain, this is what you will tell the Israelites.

This is Exodus 34, verse 6.

Exodus 34:6

Yahweh passed before Moses and proclaimed, Yahweh, Yahweh is a God merciful and gracious.

This is God's self-declaration.

He's the one saying this quote.

Yahweh, Yahweh is a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

That's God's own declaration.

That's what Moses is supposed to go down the mountain and proclaim: that God is indeed these things.

And Moses does.

So notice the tension here.

Should God have destroyed the Israelites for their sin?

Moses thought, yes, initially, until he realized it was going to happen.

And then Moses' compassion was towards the Israelites.

He interceded for them.

He put his arms in front of them and said, God, if you're going to kill them, you've got to go through me first.

And God says, Okay, I'll show them all mercy.

Go back to them and lead them.

That's how that played out.

This is the verse Jonah is using in Jonah 4.

Unironically, Jonah doesn't mean this ironically.

He's using this verse as if it were on his side.

He's reminding God of what happened in the wilderness with Israel.

It's very hard if you're not Jewish to understand the significance of what Jonah is doing here, because in our mind, the war is between compassion and wrath.

Should God judge the Ninevites or should God show them mercy?

That's the battle here.

But in Jonah's mind, the war isn't between God's compassion and God's wrath.

In Jonah's mind, the war is between Israel and the Assyrians.

And Jonah is the one appealing for the Israelites in this.

And God is the one who's saying, I'm going to show mercy to the Assyrians.

And Jonah is quoting the verse back to Yahweh that God himself declared for why he was going to show mercy to the Israelites.

Jonah feels like God is coming down the wrong side of this war.

God is coming down on the Assyrian side.

How does he forget all that happened in the wilderness?

Now, between the Assyrians and the Israelites, why would God, in Jonah's mind, why should God be on the Israelite side?

Well, the answer is similar, I think, simple, and it's tucked in this verse here.

God has a covenant with Israel.

He does not have a covenant with Assyria.

God has under no covenant obligations with the Assyrians.

He never told them he would save them.

He never made a promise to them.

They didn't get the Ten Commandments.

They didn't get the law.

They don't have priests.

They don't have the temple.

If you look in the middle of verse 4, God is gracious and merciful.

That means, you know, gracious is a disposition of giving things.

Merciful is a disposition of holding back things.

So gracious is that he gives good things.

Merciful, he does not give his wrath.

He's slow to anger.

In other words, it takes a while to provoke him to anger.

The Israelites are a living testimony of this.

And this is the phrase, he's abounding in steadfast love.

That word, steadfast love, of course, it's the word Hassed.

It means there's no one English word for it.

It would take 12 English words to even begin to describe Hassed, but it's a covenant love.

It's an unchanging, never breakable covenant love.

As long as the covenant is in effect, God will show love and faithfulness and kindness to the members of that covenant.

And it kind of the American analogy would be a marriage vow.

You know, it's a have and to hold kind of vow.

There's no way to translate that.

If so, say I do.

There's no way to translate those words.

You need the whole social structure around marriage to get what those vows mean.

It's a whole deal.

There's not one word that means it.

It's this whole covenant that takes place, and that when you get married, all of the packages of that covenant come along with you.

That's this word here.

So Jonah is reminding God, you have a covenant, and it is not with the Assyrians, it is with the Israelites, and so you cannot show them mercy, the Assyrians.

There's no covenant with Nineveh.

But do you remember what Exodus 33 says?

That God will show compassion to whomever he wants to show compassion.

His compassion is not confined by his covenant.

And the truth is that God's grace is not confined to Israel.

It's not.

Jonah is interceding on behalf of Israel, and God's grace is secondary in Jonah's mind.

This is why in Jonah's mind, God's grace is his enemy.

Do you get understand that?

If the Assyrians are Jonah's enemy, and God is sparing the Assyrians because of grace, then God's grace becomes Jonah's enemy.

If you are angry enough at God for showing mercy to people, then his mercy is who you're really opposed to.

That's why this is not in Jonah's mind, it's the Assyrians versus the Israelites, but in real life, it's Jonah against God.

Because God can show compassion and mercy to whomever he wants to.

And there's some sympathy for that because there is there is truth in that.

In a sense, God's mercy is opposed to his wrath, because God's wrath demands that he showed show punishment, and God's mercy is he withholds punishment.

Who wins when those two conflict?

When Emmanuel built this atrium, we had to go through a county permit process, and there were two different people involved in the county permit process that refused to sign off on this.

One was the county bike lane people.

There's the county bike lane person.

And they wanted us to move our sidewalk back and give away some of our parking spots so they could make a bike lane up Backlick there.

And they wouldn't sign off on us doing this until we agreed to make a bike lane on Backlick.

The other person that was opposed to us was the county tree person who would not sign off on this until we agreed not to move the sidewalk back because that would interfere with the trees.

And so it was a tree versus bicycle war at the county level.

Two Prius' hitting head-on.

That's how I visualize it.

I have no idea if they drive Priuses, maybe ranger pickups, I don't know, but Priuses is my guess.

And who wins when the county bike lane person fights the county tree lane person?

Who wins?

It turns out the tree lane person wins, that the tree person wins, and there is no bike lane out there.

The trees won the day, and we can sit in their shade.

I'm grateful for those trees and their squirrels.

When the tree guy and the bike guy fight, the tree guy wins.

We learned that.

When God's mercy and God's wrath conflict, his mercy wins out here.

Because God is merciful by nature.

Now he is a judge by nature too, but what happens is he's going to pour his judgment out somewhere else.

We'll get to that in a second.

Verse 3, this is one surprise after another here.

Verse 3.

Now therefore, O Yahweh, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

This is prophetic suicide.

Jonah asks for divine euthanasia here.

God, kill me.

I would rather die than live with a God who's showing mercy to my enemies.

That's the bottom line here.

He's so upset.

Jonah wants God to kill him.

He's lazy here, he won't do it himself.

He wants God to do it for him.

Take my life.

And he's going to repeat that later on.

We'll see that next week.

He's going to tell God again, why aren't you killing me?

Jonah would rather die than live in a world where God shows mercy to people like the Ninevites.

And again, it's so easy to roll your eyes at Jonah, but you have to make, you have to nationalize this a little bit and recognize that in Jonah's mind, what God is doing here is breaking his covenant with Israel to side with Israel's enemies.

The truth is, the Israelites never repented.

And Jonah knew this.

He was a prophet to Israel.

They never repented like the Nineveh did.

Never.

And so this whole thing is condemning to Israel.

But Jonah can't tolerate this God.

He would rather die than live in a world where God's mercy triumphs over his justice.

What I do appreciate about Jonah here, what I do appreciate about Jonah, this is one of those places in the Bible where it's, I want to be careful I say this, it's a good reason to be angry at God.

You know, we live in a world where so many people are angry at God for made up in fake reasons.

They design a picture of God in their own mind that is nothing at all like the real God, and then they get angry at that fictional God they just made up.

That's the normal way people get angry at Christianity in our own culture today, is they describe a Christian God who is not at all like the God of the Bible and say, I can't be a Christian because I don't like this God that I just made up in my mind.

Or they say things like, I wish God was more like the X, Y, or Z, and they're making God in their own image.

Jonah doesn't do that.

Jonah's not inventing a God in his own image.

Jonah is going face to face with the real God of the universe, the real God in the Bible.

He's not designing, he's not making up a God in his own image.

It's not that kind of idolatry.

Jonah's angry because God doesn't match the idol that Jonah wishes he was like.

Jonah's angry because the real God of the universe is not like the God that Jonah wishes he was.

Which is incredibly arrogant.

It's also a little bit refreshing to see somebody angry at the right God.

But it's so arrogant.

God, I wish you were more like me, is what Jonah says.

Can't you be more like me?

Can't you see things from my perspective?

Just imagine saying to God, God, my righteousness exceeds that of the scribes, it exceeds that of the Pharisees, and it exceeds that of you.

I got a better handle on things than you do up there.

Well, Jonah asks for death.

How would you respond if you were God?

After all of this?

The fish, the storm, the revival, after all of that, and then the guy says, kill me.

If you were God, what would you do?

Consult the end of the book of Job.

I know where the lightning bolts are.

Target acquired.

It's amazing how God responds to Job, isn't it?

He responds with a question.

Yahweh said, Do you do well to be angry?

What an astonishing question.

How's that whole anger thing working out for you, Jonah?

Look at your life, man.

Sitting up on the hill, sitting in your dust storm, melting under, he's been up there for, you know, over a month.

What's he eating up there?

He's baking up there.

Is this the middle of Iraq, is where this is.

How's this working out for you, Jonah?

Are you re-evaluating your life choices that have led you to this point?

Is anger getting you where you want to go, Jonah?

How's it working out for you?

What a gracious response.

Notice that God's grace is not confined to Israel, but it's also not confined to Nineveh.

The great irony of this whole story here is the Ninevites have demonstrated more repentance than Jonah has, even though God is giving them both grace.

Both grace.

You see here that God is more compassionate than his prophet.

Do you do well to be angry?

Jonah doesn't answer the question.

Jonah ignores the question.

Just goes on with life.

You're gonna see, we're gonna see when we keep on this chapter.

Jonah gets just gets a better seat.

He's still hoping fire will come down.

Why is God the object of Jonah's anger?

Well, he's a savior by nature.

He delights to save.

If God is compassionate, just play this out in your own mind.

If God is compassionate, that means you need to be compassionate also.

And Jonah doesn't want to be compassionate to his enemies.

If God is compassionate, that means that you need to be an evangelist.

Let me say it this way.

If God is gracious, or if he's a savior by nature, if God has the desire to save people, that means that if you have a heart after God's, you would want to save people also.

So if you believe in Jonah's God, then you should be an evangelist.

If you believe in Jonah's God, you should be using your money for missions work.

You should be advancing missions work around the world, if not going yourself.

If God is a gracious, saving God.

If God is a gracious and saving God, then you should be going out of your way to show his grace and his salvation to people that don't know about it, if he is a gracious and saving God.

I fear that many of us do not go out of our way to make him known, that many of us are not active in supporting missions work, that many of us are not active in evangelism, but we're frankly too lazy to even be angry with God for being those things.

We just use our own apathy to detach ourselves.

God, you're compassionate, so do your thing.

I'll be over here doing my thing.

I mean, do you not get that there's a disconnect there?

That God is a compassionate God.

He delights in saving people.

So if you have a heart after him, if you love him, that should be evident in your own life as well.

Even towards your enemies.

That's the point here.

Your enemies are your mission field.

Which brings us full circle here.

Remember the missionary interview?

What kind of questions do you ask?

Are you called to the mission field?

Have you had success?

Personal evangelism, prayer life, scripture memorization, Jonah has all those.

What questions missing?

Like, how would you weed out the Jonah's in this?

One question.

Do you love your mission field?

Do you love the people that are there?

That's the question that would have weeded out Jonah.

Do you love your mission field?

And that becomes a question for you.

Do you love your mission field?

Do you actually love the people you're sent to bring the gospel to?

I'll tell you, you poison that field, you sow salt in that field, if you view the mission field as your enemies in any regard.

But especially politically, and I hope this hits on to you.

I know many of you work in DC.

This is Jonah's life right here.

From one capital city to another.

Those people are his enemies.

And so he loses compassion for them, and he's angry at God that God didn't lose compassion as well.

I mentioned that God's wrath and his grace are not really enemies.

They're not really opponents.

They do have the same agenda.

And they come together, of course, in Jesus Christ.

God's wrath for sin is poured out on Christ.

God is too holy to withhold his wrath from sin.

He's too holy to just overlook the Ninevite sin.

Of course, he punishes their sin, even when they repent, and he pours out their punishment on Jesus Christ.

And that lets you know so much about the heart of the Father.

The heart of the Father is not a heart of punishment and a heart of wrath, because in pouring out judgment on Jesus Christ, it leads to salvation for the world.

He is a savior by nature.

He is the Father in Luke 15 who runs to the renegade Son.

The Son comes back, the Father runs and receives them.

And Jonah and the Israelites are the older brother that stays home and would like to murder the father, frankly.

But God's heart is revealed as a saving God.

I pray that yours would reflect that heart as you go into the world this week.

Lord, we're thankful that you are a saving God.

You're compassionate, you're gracious, that you did not wipe out the Israelites when Moses pled for their life, that you did not wipe out the Ninevehites when they pled for salvation.

And she didn't wipe out Jonah when he asked you to.

You spared Jonah's life, you spared the Nineveh, you spared the Israelites, and that encourages us because in that we see that you'll spare us.

We trust you, Lord.

We're thankful for your saving grace and work in our life.

We'll give you thanks for it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.