When God is Wrong (Jonah 4:1-11)

So Melissa and I have been married for 21 years, and it was about 20 years ago, very early in our marriage, that I received a phone call.

I can't believe I did this.

A telemarketer asked me if I wanted to go to a timeshare meeting in Orlando for in exchange for a free place to stay so that we could go to Disney World.

And I was a full-time grad student, we didn't have any vacation money, and I said, yes, this sounds great.

Let's go to a high pressure sales meeting, a couple of them, in exchange for free uh boarding for Disney World.

And so we go there and you know we do Disney and we have fun, but then we have to come back for these very high pressure meetings.

And I don't know if you've been in a high-pressure sort of sales pitch for a timeshare before, but it is heavily orchestrated, very manipulative, and we had communicated, me and Melissa beforehand, we're gonna stay as the minimum that we have to stay, we're gonna wait for them to say what's your answer, we're gonna say no, and then we're gonna bolt.

We don't want to spend any more time there than we have to.

And so we're we're in the pitch, you know, and he's sort of showing the model of what this place is gonna look like and going through all the perks, including like a 17% interest rate.

And I was like, gosh, this is the easiest decision of my life.

But halfway through his pitch, I realized that there were two people pitching me, and one of them was Melissa, that at some point she had turned on me.

And now I had a dual front.

I was like, what's happening here?

And so now the one who's working on commission says, Don't you want your wife to have nice vacations?

And she's nodding in agreement.

I was like, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, what is happening?

We got out of there, thankfully.

We had to go to another pitch.

I was like, that can't happen again.

It happened again.

So, okay, Melissa has no business being in high-pressure sales pitches, okay?

I realized in that moment, have you ever had this moment?

Whose side are you on?

Whose side are you on?

And in our passage this morning, we're closing out Jonah.

Next week we're going to return to Mark, and Jonah is angry at God, and his anger really stems from God, whose side are you on?

We saw last week that Jonah, this hesitant prophet, finally goes and he preaches to Nineveh and they repent, and this incenses Jonah.

He wants judgment for his enemies, but the real question isn't, God, whose side are you on?

Jonah, whose side are you on?

You have forgotten whose side you're on.

And the good news this morning is that there is a God who pursues those of us who often forget which side we're on.

So let me read Jonah chapter four and ask God to help us.

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry, and he prayed to the Lord and said, O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country?

That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.

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

And the Lord said, Do you do well to be angry?

Jonah went out of the city, and he sat to the east of the city, and made a booth for himself there, and he sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city.

Now the Lord God appointed a plant, and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort.

So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant.

And when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered.

And 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.

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.

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.

And should not I pity 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 much cattle.

The word of the Lord.

Father in heaven, we ask that you would show us yourselves in these words that you preserved for so long, that we might see ourselves in Jonah, that we might see ourselves as the recipients of great grace that you offer to us in Christ.

Would you dig out for us ears to hear, and would you give us eyes to see this risen Christ?

And we pray this in his name.

Amen.

Well, we've just read Jonah chapter four, and it's funny, Jonah is such a familiar passage, and yet chapter four is almost the forgetting, forgotten part of Jonah.

We sort of think that the climax is that this hesitant prophet goes to Nineveh and preaches and they repent, you know, end of scene, the end.

And we think that's how it ends sometimes, and yet the climax is actually here.

And the climax is that the prophet who goes and has a very successful reaction to his sermon, this prophet is angry that his enemies have repented.

This prophet is angry that his enemies have received grace and mercy from God.

And so now he has a dialogue with God.

And I want to look at this passage in this dialogue under two headings, and I want to look at Jonah's anger, and then I want to look at Jonah's pity party.

His anger and his pity party.

Now, what's interesting about Jonah is how much chapters one and three mirror each other, and how much chapters two and four mirror each other.

One and three are very obvious.

They both start with almost the same language.

Arise, go to Nineveh, go to Nineveh and cry out against it.

That's how both chapters start.

And then you find at the end of chapters one and three that Gentiles, those far from God, seemingly respond more favorably to God than God's own prophet.

Then you've got chapters two and four, in which God appoints something in creation, a fish or a plant, a worm, to interact with Jonah.

And you also see Jonah praying to God in both chapters two and four.

And two, he's praising God for his mercy.

I know that I deserve death, and yet you have saved me.

Praise God for your mercy.

But in four, he goes to God and he says, How dare you extend that same mercy to my enemies?

That's what that's the similarities there.

So let's look at Jonah's angry.

Jonah's anger.

Why is he angry?

Because he was sent with a message, yet 40 days and God will overthrow Nineveh.

And he didn't want to say that.

He didn't want to go and proclaim it, and yet when he proclaimed it, he was like, I kind of hope that that happens in 20 days, 10 days, four days, right?

He's angry.

And the plot twist that we've gotten used to is that Nineveh responds.

They repent.

We read that right before verse 1, the last verse of chapter 3 reads this way.

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

And Jonah is angry.

I mean, it's almost comical.

It's hard to almost see ourselves in this because it's so on the nose.

We know grace is good.

We know repentance is good.

We would never be angry.

You know, let's lean into this a little bit.

Commentators note that the NIV actually, in verse 1 and 4, gets something right that the ESV kind of misses.

But to Jonah, this seemed very wrong.

And he became angry.

That the word used there is to Jonah, God's relenting of showing judgment, God showing mercy and grace seemed wrong, immoral, wicked.

It's wrong.

It's not fair.

He became angry.

He's angry because he thinks that what God has done, the mercy he has shown, is wrong.

How could you do this?

Why would you do this?

Why would you show mercy to Nineveh?

Why would you accept their repentance?

Jonah actually thinks that the maker of heaven and earth, the one who can command plants and worms and whales and all of creation for that matter, is wrong.

Simply put, Jonah has forgotten whose team he is on.

He wants mercy and grace for himself and his own people, and he wants judgment for his enemies.

He wants mercy and grace for himself and his own people, but he wants justice for his enemies.

Now there's an obvious and heavy application that we can't ignore.

I'm not going to camp out here, but when God calls us to love others as ourselves, an obvious implication, and it gets pretty close to explicit here, is that racism is utterly incompatible with the love and the mercy and the grace of God.

Utterly incompatible.

I mean, built into any sort of racist ideology is a self-confidence in something other than the work of God.

And our nationality or our skin color or any, we're boasting in something that somebody else has that's different, that has no bearing on what we should boast in, that is the grace and the mercy of God.

And clearly, this is part of Jonah's problem.

And consistently, this is an issue that the gospel continues to push against, not just with Jonah.

I mean, in Luke chapter 4, Jesus' sort of coming out party when he unrolls the scroll in Isaiah in the synagogue.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

Do you remember this?

He says, I have come to proclaim good news to the poor and proclaim liberty to the captives.

And everyone marvels as if to say, We're listening.

We're listening.

And then he says, There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and yet none of them were cleansed, but only that Gentile, Naaman the Syrian, and when they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath, and they tried to throw Jesus off a cliff.

We want grace and mercy for us, but not for our enemies.

They're filled with wrath.

The chief apostle Peter wrestles with this on at least two occasions.

Famously in Acts 10, he's praying, and God says, I want you to go to Cornelius.

I want you to go to that Gentile, and I want you to enter his house and eat with him and preach good news to him.

And he says, By no means.

And God says, Do not call people unclean.

Go and proclaim the good news.

Later on, after having already had this experience, the church, early church, is mixed, Jewish and Gentile, and Peter starts hanging out with his Jewish friends.

And Paul goes up to him and he says, How dare you ignore these Gentiles?

How dare you ignore the other races?

Because there's something that's different about them.

It's not worse or better.

Jonah, like so many in the Bible, has forgotten whose side he is on.

He's not to be on the side of public opinion and half-truths.

He's not to be on the side of whataboutisms?

After all, what about Nineveh?

They're awful.

They're brutish.

They have done terrible, barbaric things to my people.

This is true.

Absolutely true.

You're not allowed to say, what about them?

If God is showing them the mercy of God, who are you to get in the way of that?

God is saying, no one can forfeit their humanness.

Jonah's been called to go where God is going and to love those whom God loves.

And in verse 2, in his anger, Jonah prays out to God, and he says two things.

I knew that you were going to do this because I know what you're like.

I knew you were going to do this.

Because I know what you're like.

Oh Lord, isn't this what I said when I was yet in my country?

This is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, which is in Spain, by the way.

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

I knew you were going to do this.

I don't know.

I'm going to date myself here.

This is an old movie reference.

In 1996, A Time to Kill, which is back when John Grisham books were being turned into movies like Every Other Day, it felt like.

And Samuel L.

Jackson, this is actually one of the movies that kind of put him on the scene.

Clearly a black man in racially torn Mississippi in the 1980s.

And what happens in that movie at the very beginning is that his 10-year-old daughter is abducted, violently assaulted, and then they try to murder her.

And it's two white guys that do this.

And they leave her for dead.

And Samuel L.

Jackson's character is so bothered that he's not going to see a fair trial that he takes justice into his own hands and he murders these two men.

And so now it's not them on trial, it's him on trial.

And there's this tense moment when the prosecutor is trying to make him look as negatively as he can in front of the jury.

And he says, Do you think that these men deserve to die?

Do you think they deserve to die?

And he finally yells, he says, Yes, I think they deserve to die.

And I hope they burn in hell.

It's this visceral sort of response.

This is the heart space that Jonah is in.

This is where he is.

My enemies do not deserve the grace and the mercy of God.

They don't deserve it.

I knew this was going to happen.

I knew you were going to show grace to them.

And all I wanted to do was to proclaim mercy and grace to my own people in my own country.

Verse 3, he basically says, I don't want to live in a world where they get grace.

You can kill me now.

And then God asked in verse 4, and again I'm going to lean on the ESV, is it right for you to be angry?

Because it's interesting.

In verse 1, Jonah thinks that what God did was wrong.

And now God is asking Jonah, are you right to be angry?

Are you?

Are you right?

It's a good question for us to ask ourselves in general when we're angry.

Do you do right to be angry?

Well, there's no answer, and that leads us to Jonah's pity party.

Jonah thinks that maybe God will change his mind, and he goes just to the east of the city and he sets up camp, maybe a little homeless shelter, and he wants to see the fireworks.

Maybe Nineveh will get the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment after all, and that's what he's waiting for.

He's wanting to see the fireworks.

They're going to come down because they deserve it.

I've not lost all hope that God will do the right thing after all.

He builds himself this shelter, apparently is unable to get a roof.

Lots of interesting theories and commentators about that.

But apparently there's no roof.

And so a plant, this weed, cudzu like a fast-growing plant, comes over and shades Jonah.

And he's delighted.

And notice the language there.

God appoints this plant in his sovereignty to save him.

That language is there on purpose, though.

Then it goes on to say, from his discomfort.

How much more?

That's where we're going.

So this plant saves him from his discomfort, and Jonah is thrilled, and then a worm eats through the leaves.

If this happens to your garden sometimes, all the leaves got eaten through overnight, and you're upset, but now the heat can come down and God appoints a hot wind.

And so Jonah is just miserable.

And keep in mind, why is he there?

He doesn't have to be there.

He's there to catch the fireworks.

That's why he's there.

Jonah says, just kill me.

And so God asks him again, is it right for you to be angry about the plant?

Is it right?

Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.

And God says, You didn't make the plant?

And you didn't care for the plant?

The people that you're so angry about are people.

Shouldn't you have more concern for people than you do a plant?

And if I have more concern for people than a plant, shouldn't you come with me on that?

And if not for the people, for the animals that are there?

Because even animals are worth more than this plant.

God is correcting, He's pursuing Jonah in this.

You have forgotten whose side you are on.

Will you come back to me?

Jonah, you were so thankful not too long ago, the last time you prayed to me, you were so thankful for the mercy that I had extended to you.

You know what it is to be in need of mercy, and you would deprive that of these people.

You are not the dispenser of mercy.

You were not in my chair.

This is not your decision.

I am not on your team.

You have been called to be on my team.

And those are two different ideas.

And sometimes I think we can say, well, of course we're on God's team.

What we mean is I want him to baptize everything I want for myself.

That there's a part of us that thinks if we follow Jesus in just the right way, that life will be smoother than if we don't.

But sometimes God calls us to go places that are difficult.

Sometimes God sovereignly orchestrates situations that are difficult for us because He has His own plan for this world.

You know, it's easy for us in the comfort of an air-conditioned sanctuary to look down on Jonah's racist tendencies.

It's easy for us to look down on his weird version of Israel first.

It's easy for us to do that when we're in a lot of comfort right now.

We have comfortable lives.

It's easy for us to think, you know, the point of this passage is to say, well, what is Jonah doing?

And just do the opposite.

Whatever Jonah's doing, I'll just do the opposite.

And there's don't be like Jonah, but that's not the point of the passage.

The point of the passage runs deeper than that.

If the takeaway is just don't be like Jonah, then we'll become just as self-righteous as Jonah in the opposite way.

Then we'll be able to look down on others who don't see things like we do.

The issue is not simply do you agree with where God is going.

The issue is will you obey him when you disagree?

You know, I heard Tim Keller once talk about raising his eight-year-old son, and if you've got children, if you've been around children, if you remember being a child, you know this is true, that you get to a season where there's like, oh, why?

Why?

Why?

I want you to do this.

Why?

Why?

And especially if it's something they don't want to do.

And sometimes you'll even hear if I just understood why, then I would do it.

And when that happens, we're actually not seeking to obey, we're seeking to agree.

If I just understood the rationale, if I could wrap my head around it, then I'd be on board.

But that's not the point.

The point is, has God actually said, thou shall or thou shalt not?

Sometimes we get a why, but the why isn't the point.

He's not seeking for us to agree with him every step of the way.

He's asking for us to trust him to obey even when we don't.

Even when we don't.

The question is, what is the real authority in our lives?

Do you think about it in this way?

What's the real authority?

Because it's easy to sometimes say, you know, I like this part of Scripture, I don't like this part of Scripture.

Okay.

So you're just looking for Scripture to agree with you.

And I'm talking to myself.

I mean, there are aspects of Scripture, there are doctrines, there are books that give me real heartburn at times.

But if I'm just going to say, look, the parts of Scripture I agree with, those are the parts that are right, and I can kind of ignore these other aspects, that doesn't make any sense.

How can I take the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead and sort of jettison, I don't have to forgive my enemies?

We can't pick and choose.

It's one whole word that God speaks.

And he speaks a word that says, Will you obey me?

Will you trust me?

And will you follow me even when you have heartburn in that?

You see, Jonah showing us what it looks like when we think that we're wiser than God.

What does it look like?

It doesn't look like we're enlightened.

It looks like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

And we might be more put together on the outside, but that is what God sees in our heart posture when we say, no, no.

Why would you?

My God would never do that.

Jonah's learning that yes, your God will do things that you don't like.

Now, maybe you don't struggle when the Bible calls out racism.

But what are the other doctrines that we struggle with?

You know, the funny thing is, the gospel is so countercultural because God's word punches left and right.

And some of us want a gospel that only punches left, and some of us want a gospel that only punches right.

The gospel is an altogether different way, and it's listening to God's voice.

And toward that end, Jonah ends masterfully.

I mean, it's a cliffhanger.

Jonah, are you going to listen?

I mean, that's what God is doing.

He's saying, shouldn't I care for these people who don't know their way?

Shouldn't I care for those who need instruction?

Jonah, do you do right to be angry about these people about this plant?

Do you know what you're doing?

It's not right for you to be angry.

And in God's grace, his word always confronts our sin.

And we said in the confession that if God is your enemy, then his law can only condemn you.

But when God is your friend in Christ, there is no condemnation.

God's word can confront you, but it cannot condemn you.

But if God's word cannot condemn you, then his spirit is at work in you, enabling you to go the way of his word.

Do you know God's word and spirit are never opposed to one another?

Never, ever, ever.

And so if you want to know where the Spirit is leading you, we learn the Bible and we go where the Bible calls by the Spirit.

The question is, will we receive it?

We see in Nineveh, he says, yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown.

God's word showed them a holy standard, and they received it.

God's word reminded them, God is in charge, and now Jonah needs to learn the same thing.

You know, Paul says it this way in Romans 7.

He said, I would not have known what it was to covet if the law hadn't told me, thou shalt not covet.

I wouldn't have known that that impulse in me was against God unless God had said, That's dangerous.

Turn from that.

This is why God's word has to become our standard of right and wrong, and not just our impulses.

Because our impulses are not always holy.

And so God's word shows us our sin, but it also shows us our need for grace.

And Paul goes on to say, Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?

And do you want to know if you're hearing God's word rightly?

It doesn't lead you to trust yourself more.

It leads you to despair of your own ability so that you cry out for deliverance.

And the point isn't low self-esteem.

And sometimes you hear this.

Christians are just taught to have low self-esteem.

No, no, we're not.

Not rightly.

We're just taught not to trust in ourselves so that we might esteem highly the grace of God.

And if you can trust highly the grace of God to meet you in whatever brokenness and sinfulness you find yourself, then you have all the hope in the world that you need.

And so despairing of yourself isn't the goal.

Trusting in God is.

This was Jonah's problem.

I don't have to love them because I'm more immoral than they are.

No.

I don't have to love them because I come from a better country.

No.

I don't have to love them because I, when we say because I, that's the problem.

No, I am invited to love them because God loves them.

And they need the same mercy that I need.

We're on equal footing, and that's what Jonah has forgotten.

If you want to love your enemies, you have to first be gripped by the grace and the love of your first enemy.

While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son.

While we were enemies, he loved us.

So then, as John tells us, we love because we were loved first.

He loved us first.

God's word does not aim to convict us so that we hate ourselves.

It aims to convict that we might praise and love the majesty and the grace of Jesus.

Jonah ends without resolution.

Does he see the error of his ways?

Does he listen?

We're not told.

And the point is so that we're left in the same point that Jonah is, but my hunch is that he did.

My hunch is that where else would we have gotten this story?

Who else could tell it?

But Jonah or somebody that Jonah told it to.

And what else would free him to paint himself in such a negative light except that he learned to rest in the grace of God?

I was a fool, like all of us were.

And God sought me and pursued me, and it took me preaching to my enemies to find that I was acting like an enemy myself.

He's received grace not just for himself, but he shows us how we extend grace to others.

We have to experience it first.

I say this all the time, but it's true.

The mark of someone who has received great grace is that they become gracious themselves.

And if you would become gracious, it starts in the fertile soil of conviction of sin and crying out for deliverance.

And if you find that deliverance, what it does is it undercuts any part of you that wants to say, I'm better than this other person because of my race or my morality or my bank account or fill in the blank.

As we think about the kind of church that we want to be, as we think about our plans for the fall, as we think about where we're going, we don't want to be a people that thinks we've got something figured out that other people don't.

That's a boast in and of ourselves.

We don't want to think we offer something that nobody else offers.

I hope not.

But as we seek to lean into the opportunities that God has given us, as we seek his kingdom in this slice of the kingdom that he's given us, what we're reminded of in this book from Jonah is that other people, maybe that we don't despise, but other people are worth our efforts because God's heart moves in that way.

And that frees us to plan and pray, to ask for humility and opportunity to have conversations about the grace of God, even from a posture of someone who has received it.

Maybe the conversation is, I have been a jerk at home this week.

And I have been, I've found forgiveness, I've found mercy.

Maybe it is, I have been reminded again how much I need community.

I would love for you to join us.

What we find in Jonah is not just a command to chase down other people.

That's there.

But what we find is that God chases down a heart of anyone that would reach out and invites us again and again to be reminded of how much mercy and grace we have been shown, which shows us how much others are worth it.

Where the gospel is cherished, people are cherished.

And so we get to pray that God would help us to cherish the gospel that we might also cherish those made in his image.

Let's pray.

Father, we we do praise you.

We praise you because we are fearfully and wonderfully made along with every other human that has ever existed.

We praise you that when we rebelled against you in our sin, you didn't throw up your hands and say, Well, they get what they get, but you pursued us and you chased us down.

And the way that you have pursued us and chased us down is through other people.

And what we ask is that you would continue to humble us, that you would continue to help us to relish your grace, that we might be a proactive people that pursues others in your name.

And we pray these things in Christ's name.

Amen.