Jonah: A Self-Righteous Heart Resents a Gracious God (4:1-11)

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning in to New Sun Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel centered church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

The first reading is from Jonah chapter 4, verses 1 through 11.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

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, excuse me, 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 sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there.

He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city.

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

So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant.

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

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 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

You, Lord, are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Lord Jesus, would you teach us what exactly to do with that?

And in your mercy, would you so captivate our hearts that we cannot help but share your grace and mercy to those who are least deserving of it, but who need it the most.

Just like us.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Yeah.

I want to begin by uh talking about uh Mrs.

Turpin.

Mrs.

Ruby Turpin is a character in Flannery O'Connor's short story called Revelation.

I may have told you about Ms.

Turpin before, but good stories are always worth repeating.

So strap yourselves in.

Mrs.

Turpin spends her days constantly classifying everyone she meets by their face value, by their race, by their class, by their cleanliness, by their decency.

I should mention, by the way, Flannery O'Connor always sets her stories in the deep south of the early 20th century, right?

So here's Miss Turpin going about her days, constantly classifying everyone into their social hierarchy, and she goes around thanking Jesus for making her a respectable, hardworking landowner like she is.

So we meet her sitting in a doctor's waiting room alongside, or across from, I should say, a young woman named Mary Grace.

Mary Grace is a college student whose presence Mrs.

Turpin finds unsettling and kind of disturbing.

And Mary Grace grows increasingly agitated by Mrs.

Turpin's self-satisfied pietistic chatter, which inspires Mrs.

Turpin, of course, to chatter along all the more while Mary Grace gets more and more agitated.

The cycle breaks when suddenly Mrs.

Turpin is struck on the head by a textbook flying across the room from the hand of Mary Grace, who tells Mrs.

Turpin to go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog.

Mrs.

Turpin leaves humiliated, shaken, and obsessed with the insult that she's been given.

All alone on her farm, she goes inspecting her pigs, and she angrily shakes her fist at God, insisting on her moral goodness and her pious character, which should disqualify her from insults like this.

And she demands an explanation as to why such an injustice was done to her.

She says, Why would you send me a message like that?

Why me?

I break my back every day working, and I do the same for the church.

Go on, she says.

Call me a hog again.

Then we read, a final surge of fury shook her.

And she roared, Who do you think you are?

Have you ever been there?

Shaking your fist at God.

Jonah has.

We met Jonah.

Well, when we meet Jonah, he is a, shall we say, reluctant prophet, rebellious prophet, blockhead of a prophet.

In chapter one, he's called to go and preach God's word to the Ninevites.

For him, the worst of the worst sorts of people.

And so he does his best to resist God's call to go preach the word.

But as he discovers, as we discover, we can resist God, but we can't outrun him.

And so God pursues Jonah.

And over the course of a stormy sea, he gets tossed overboard and the waves settle, and he's swallowed by this fish.

And from the very depths of death itself, Jonah calls out to God.

He realizes he has no other hope but the one who's called him, the one for whom Nineveh can only hope.

He calls out to God and he repents of his sin.

And he promises to follow through with what he's vowed to the Lord.

And so the fish spits him out on the beach and sends him his way towards Nineveh.

And last Sunday we saw Jonah make his way into the city, proclaiming the word of God's judgment against the evil and violence that Nineveh has been committing.

And we saw Nineveh repent.

We saw Nineveh turn to the Lord as best as they understood how, to put their evil and violent ways behind us.

And we saw that God's word proclaims death to sin, but life to sinners who turn to the Lord for forgiveness.

All of this, you would think, should delight Jonah's heart.

He has had one of the most successful ministries that any prophet could hope for.

And yet, that's not where we find Jonah this week, is it?

What we see in chapter 4 is this a self-righteous heart resents a gracious God.

A self-righteous heart resents a gracious God.

Just like in Jonah's day, God is generous and merciful.

And just like in our day, God is generous and merciful, even with those people, whoever those people might be for us.

A self-righteous heart resents God's grace.

And friends, this is worth our consideration, especially on a day like World Mission Sunday, where we once again are meant to consider the call to proclaim God's true and life-giving world, not just to those that we're most comfortable with, not just to those who we think have earned it, but to the least of these, to the undeserving, even, dare I say, to those people.

So let's open up the scriptures together to Jonah chapter 4.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

That's page 727 in the Bibles in the pews there.

You can also open up your order of service and follow along.

Just how does a self-righteous heart resent a gracious God?

I'm going to suggest at least two ways, and then we're going to look at the flip side of that coin.

Here's two ways that a self-righteous heart resents a gracious God.

A self-righteous heart calls God unjust in his grace.

And a self-righteous heart calls God uncaring in his mercy.

A self-righteous heart says, God, you are unjust, and God, you are uncaring.

And we're going to see how Jonah lives that out in his dialogue with God.

And I hope we consider where that leaves our hearts today as well.

So, Jonah chapter 4, let's start at verses 1 and 2 here.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

But it, that is Nineveh's repentance, God's relenting from the disaster that he's promised, all of this repentance 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, you know, back in my hometown?

That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, you know, the opposite direction from Nineveh, for I knew that you were a gracious God, and merciful, and 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.

Wow.

It displeased Jonah exceedingly to look at Nineveh's repentance, to consider the sheer fathomlessness of God's forgiveness for sinners.

It displeased Jonah exceedingly.

Some translations might put it like this it was an exceeding evil to Jonah.

He looks at God's graciousness and he goes, That's not right.

Because they're not getting what they deserve.

And here's the thing, Jonah says, I knew this would happen.

I knew you were like this.

You don't think I had a purpose for going to Tarshish?

I had a purpose, and the purpose was this.

I knew what the scriptures say about you.

I went to Sunday school.

I know my Bible.

I know that you're a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.

And when people turn to you in repentance, you relent from disaster.

You're so like this, is what Jonah says.

And so I didn't want to give Nineveh the chance, lest they don't get what's coming to them.

Do you see what's happening here?

So desolate is Jonah that he says, it is better for me to die than to live.

What's he saying?

I would rather die than live in a world where undeserving sinners don't get what's coming to them.

I'd rather die than live than live with this injustice.

That's what Jonah's saying.

Have you ever felt that way?

They were the Ninevites for Jonah, the undeserving, right?

The ones who've disqualified themselves from God's grace.

Surely, abundantly evil, surely abundantly violent.

If anyone deserves to get smited, if anyone deserves the fires of hell, it's them.

That's what Jonah's saying.

They were the Ninevites for Jonah.

Who are they for us?

Who are the undeserving?

Who are the ones that we secretly harbor a hope will just finally get what's coming to them?

Serves them right, says our hearts.

I have to confess, over the course of about 10 years in ministry now, one thing that I've had in common with every parish that I've served at is I've harbored that heart, that thought in my heart.

When I meet someone in the community, when I meet someone, whatever, I have this thought sometimes that goes, good luck seeing them in church.

Right?

Good luck getting her to repent.

Yeah, right.

And there's something that there's something askew, deep in the recesses of my heart that just assumes I'm just better than they are.

Do you ever feel like that?

Or is it just me?

And time and time again, in every place that I've served, you know, poor Perry certainly not being an exception, I've seen God do remarkable things in the lives of many of those people.

Suddenly they show up on invitation.

Suddenly they hear through someone else in the community that this is going on at the church, and I want to check this out.

Suddenly they have questions about Jesus, and they might say something like, Are you do you ever do an introduction to Christianity, like something I could explore?

You know, something like that.

And it is amazing how God has that way.

We talked about that thread that God pulls last week.

He has that way of just pulling the thread on the people that I think are furthest away and most disqualified from his grace.

And I am confronted with the callousness of my own self-righteousness.

That part of me that thinks is superior, I see crumble in the reality of God's grace.

Yes, sin is real.

I don't mean to undermine the reality of repentance and making amendment of life and obedience to God's word.

And yes, those who turn to the Lord have to reckon with uh evil and violence just like the Ninevehes have, all in their own way.

Yes, all of that is true, and yet God is still calling them to repentance because he loves them, and because he has died for them, and because he calls people like you and me, who have experienced God's grace so abundantly and so undeservedly, to go and proclaim that good news, that true and life-giving word to them, just like Jonah.

Jonah harbors that callous heart of self-righteousness towards the Ninevehites.

He would rather them burn than see God's grace flood the city.

That's who they were for Jonah.

Who are they for us?

See, the gospel has to challenge that part of our heart that harbors self-righteousness, that thinks in some way I am qualified for God's grace in a way that they, whoever they are, are disqualified from God's grace.

It has to challenge that self-righteousness.

It has to confront it and it has to kill it.

And that's exactly what God is saying to Jonah in verse 4.

The Lord said, Do you do well to be angry?

In other words, Jonah, what right have you?

What right have you to be angry at my generosity, at my compassionate heart, for the most, for the least deserving, but for those who need my grace the most?

What right do you have?

Is your anger justified?

See, Jonah knows his scriptures.

Jonah knows God's character.

He knows what the prophet Ezekiel affirms when the prophet Ezekiel writes, As I live, declares the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live.

That's the heart of the God of our God towards sinners.

But that's not Jonah's heart.

See, there can be that disconnect, can't there, in our self-righteousness from God's heart of generosity.

And so often we call it piety, don't we?

A self-righteous heart sees God's grace towards undeserving sinners, shakes its fist, and calls it injustice.

We miss God's generosity, first and foremost to us, because surely God has been generous with us.

A self-righteous heart sees God as unjust.

But we also see in Jonah a self-righteous heart considers God uncaring.

So, verse five.

Jonah still has hope.

He still has hope that God will think better of this whole repentance business.

That God is enlightened enough that he'll come around and see Jonah's point of view.

You know, God will give it some sober second thought.

So Jonah goes out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there, a little nice little uh spot to go see what's happening.

He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city.

So, you know, Jonah's thinking to himself, the fireworks surely are gonna start any time now.

And I'm gonna have, you know, prime seats, front row seats, to see God in all of his wrath and all of his judgment just pour on the Ninevites exactly what it is that they deserve.

Because Jonah holds out hope that yes, God will come around to see my point of view here.

He'll know just how disqualified these people are, and he'll do what it takes.

But Jonah, even while he shakes his fist as God, even while he holds out hope that God's anger will prevail, Jonah gets a sign of God's generosity towards him.

Verse 6.

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

So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant.

Notice the parallel, by the way.

Exceedingly glad because of the plant giving him shade, exceedingly angry with God's generosity, forgiveness towards sinners.

You see the parallel there?

A plant grows, and it represents for Jonah a source of comfort.

We love our comfort, don't we?

We're very comfortable people.

And I have a lot of comfort for which to be thankful.

I'm, you know, we've been having furnace trouble lately, and the furnace has been going just fine in the last couple of days, and I surely can be thankful for that sort of comfort.

We have a lot of comfort.

And we can be grateful for it.

But Jonah feels, I wonder, entitled to it.

And not just entitled to a sense of comfort, but I wonder if this plant represents for Jonah a sense of vindication.

He's made his way out of the city because he knows, well, he thinks he knows what this what's coming upon this city, and he's gonna have prime seats for it.

He's made his way out of the city and he's looking out over it, and God has made this plant to miraculously spring up and give him some shade.

Maybe for Jonah this represents not just comfort, but vindication.

God has come around and he sees my point of view.

Maybe that's what it means for Jonah.

But notice what happens next.

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

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.

Boy, Jonah has a tune, doesn't he?

This plant dies, and Jonah wishes for the same for himself.

It's better for me to die, Jonah is saying, than to live in a world where I don't get the comfort and vindication that I deserve.

The Ninevites aren't getting what's coming to them.

I'm not getting what's coming to me.

Just take me out right now, God.

Boy, Jonah sounds like a ticked-off teenager, doesn't he?

He's shaking his fist.

Screw you, God.

Who needs your justice?

Who needs your mercy?

See, a self righteous heart sees God's mercy at work towards the least deserving, towards the others, and says, You don't care about me.

Jonah starts sounding a lot like the older brother, doesn't he?

Remember the parable of the prodigal son?

The younger brother goes off, squanders the family's inheritance, comes back sheepishly, but the father embraces him as a son.

What a picture of our salvation.

But it's the older brother who's been out working the field the whole time.

And that's where the parable ends.

When the father comes out to explain why all this partying is happening indoors, this new son, or this son who's come back who was dead and is now alive, this older brother shakes his fist at his father.

You never threw a party for me and my friends, and I stayed here slaving away for you this whole time.

Screw you.

And the father says, All that is mine is yours.

But we have to celebrate your brother because he was dead and now is alive.

See, the older brother is thinking your generosity towards him means you really don't care about me, but his premise is flawed from the start, isn't it?

The older brother's comfort and vindication don't come from his good behavior, they come from a father's heart for a son, and he is loved unconditionally, completely, and the father withholds nothing from him.

The older brother has a flawed perception of his father's generosity towards him, and so too does Jonah.

I've had good behavior, God.

I deserve better than this.

And they certainly deserve worse.

The gospel has to challenge this idea that God's favoritism, or pardon me, let me change my word, God's generosity towards the undeserving means God is withdrawing his care from us.

That is the gospel challenge here, because once again God challenges Jonah.

Do you do well to be angry for the plant?

And he says, Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.

Slam the door, so to speak.

And the Lord says, 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 the night.

And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who you do not know, who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?

Kind of a funny way to end the book, isn't it?

But remember, remember that the whole city has been involved in this act of repentance, turning away from evil and violence, right from the king to the peasant, and including the animals as well.

Let's get the sackcloth and ashes on them.

God is saying, I care about this whole city and all of its goings-on.

There's nothing outside of my purview here.

Jonah, your heart is completely disordered.

You care about your comfort, you care about your vindication, you care more about this plant than you do for the 120,000 plus souls of this city.

You weep over your lost comfort.

You weep over your lost vindication.

I weep over the lost.

God looks down at people in that kind of spiritual fog, that spiritual stupidity, and he doesn't say, you idiots.

When we look at people who have brought trouble into their lives by their own foolishness, we say things like, serves them right.

Or we mock them on social media.

What kind of imbecile says something like this?

When we see people of other political party defeated, we just gloat.

This is all a way of detaching ourselves from them.

We distance ourselves from them, partly out of pride and partly because we don't want their unhappiness to be ours.

God doesn't do that.

Real compassion, the voluntary attachment of our hearts to others, means the sadness of their condition makes us sad.

It affects us.

That is deeply uncomfortable, but it is the character of compassion.

Do you see the heart of God?

Do you see the heart of compassion for the lost?

Jonah misses it.

But the book ends abruptly and as if to ask us, do you see it?

And what will you do with that?

Will we, in our self-righteousness, in our sense of what we've earned for ourselves, do we shake our fist at God and accuse him of injustice?

Do we accuse him of being uncaring?

Or do we delight in his generosity?

Do we delight to see the lost found and the dead made alive?

Because that is the invitation that Jonah has refused again and again and again to pick up.

But we're invited into it.

We God's people.

A self-righteous heart resents a gracious God, but the opposite is also true.

And here's where I want us to land.

Let's go back to this statement of God's essential character that Jonah makes in verse 2.

You are gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster.

This comes from Exodus chapter 34, and it represents the central affirmation of who God is towards his people.

Exodus 34 · chapter mention

This is Jonah's very hope in the depths, wasn't it?

Chapter 2, he calls out to God.

You raised my life up from the pit.

He's calling out to the God of all mercy.

And yet somehow he thinks he's entitled to that mercy in a way that others are disqualified.

And that is the tragedy of Jonah.

But it doesn't have to be our tragedy.

We can have the heart of Jonah towards sinners, or we can have the heart of Jesus.

Jesus, in Matthew chapter 9, we read this morning, looks at the crowds with compassion because they're harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, and his heart goes out to them.

Matthew 9 · chapter mention

It doesn't recoil from sinners, it goes out to sinners.

That's good news for sinners.

And Jesus looks out over Jerusalem, the city that represents all of God's people.

And he weeps over it because they didn't recognize the time of their visitation.

God has shown up in his grace and they haven't recognized him.

They've missed it.

Do we weep for the lost, friends?

Jesus doesn't just weep, does he?

He dies for his very enemies.

While we were yet enemies, Christ died for us, so says Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

There is nothing God in Christ withholds.

Nothing he withholds from us.

Nothing he withholds from the least deserving, because his delight is to be gracious and merciful.

And if we are humble of heart to recognize that, his grace and mercy won't be the source of our resentment.

His grace and mercy will be the source of our greatest delight because we will recognize I don't deserve the generosity that God has shown me, and yet he has been delighted to show me it again and again and again and again.

And how can I not share that with others?

Because God is so good, and he's been so good with me.

Should we not weep?

Weep with delight, weep with burden for the grace and mercy of God?

Should we not weep on World Mission Sunday?

And as we celebrate next Sunday the discharge of our mortgage and the raising up of new leaders, and we think about the mission of God that He is sending us on ahead in this new chapter, in this new season as a parish family, as we look forward, what is the point, if not to proclaim the true and life-giving word of Jesus, his very grace and goodness towards sinners.

See, friends, a self-righteous heart resents a gracious God, and yet the opposite is also true, isn't it?

A humble heart delights in a gracious God.

A heart that is humble to consider itself undeserving of his grace, a humble heart that desires to see God's generosity reach those who are lost, a humble heart on an ongoing, dependent basis, delight in our good and gracious God.

That is what it means to have the heart of Jesus.

So we left Miss Turpin on her farm, looking at these pigs, shaking her fist at the sky.

But the story ends with a vision, a vision that changes Miss Turpin.

A vision that might change us as well, just like perhaps it did Jonah.

Miss Turpin saw a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.

Upon it, a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.

There were whole companies of freaks and lunatics, kind of like Mary Grace, who we met earlier.

These freaks and lunatics were shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs, and bringing up the end of this heavenly procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those like herself.

They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they'd always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.

Yet Miss Turpin could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues, their self-righteous virtues, were being burned away.

And they were shouting, Hallelujah! Because a humble heart delights in a gracious and merciful God.

You, God, are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

New song, may we proclaim the goodness of this God always.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

Newsong's ministry is entirely funded by the generous giving of those who worship and journey with us.

If you feel called to support our ministry with a financial gift, please go to newsongportperry.ca slash giving to make your contribution.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.