Retributive Vs Restorative Justice | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

So we're in a series called Perfect Anger, and what we're doing is looking at what the Bible has to say about the anger of God and trying to compare it to our own anger and figure out how we can get better at being angry.

That's going to be inevitable.

You're going to feel anger, and so we've been really trying to look at that and learn from it the best we can.

Without re-preaching all the sermons, I need to give you a few things that we need to revisit that we've already talked about because we're going to build on those things today.

First week we talked about passion versus pathos.

Passion would be our anger.

Our anger is provoked, and so it creates an emotion, a fever of the mind.

And our anger is often provoked by very human things like our egos get bruised, or we feel threatened.

When you're afraid or you feel threatened, we can well up with anger.

When you lose control of something that's important to you, you can feel anger or insecurities that we have.

We all have them.

And when those insecurities are rubbed up against, often it provokes anger.

We think about God's anger.

God never gets angry because his ego is bruised or because he's afraid.

God is perfect.

And even though the Bible uses human emotion and human anatomy to describe God's anger, we have to make sure we keep it straight that God's anger, God's not a hothead.

He doesn't go from zero to angry real quick.

God's anger is pathos, which is uh it's connected to his character.

It's logical, it makes sense, and it's uh it's it's appropriate, it's predictable, and so we we looked at those things.

The second, we talked about what makes God angry.

And so we talked about idolatry and injustice.

Essentially, that our theology affects our sociology.

So one of the reasons God is angry about idolatry is not because he's jealous of Baal in the sense that he needs all the credit or all the attention, it's that the theological distortions of idolatry lead to injustices perpetuated towards people.

And so when those two things are off, okay, it's a disruption of what the Bible calls shalom.

In other words, right relationship with God, a right relationship with yourself, and right relationship with the world around you.

And then we looked at God's punishment.

So we talked about two different kinds of missing the mark or sin.

Uh, and one would be struggle.

The apostle Paul talks about this in Romans 7.

He says, you know, the thing I don't want to do, I end up doing, and the thing I want to do, I don't do.

And we talked about uh people who are trying to hit the mark, but in their humanity, in their flesh, they keep missing it, and how God is patient with struggle.

But then also we talked about stubborn is the next word, which is, you know, people who go, I see the mark, and I don't even care.

Uh they harden their heart, they stiffen their neck, and this is a whole other thing.

You see this all throughout the Bible that God will send warnings, okay?

If you don't do this, then this is gonna happen.

And even in the stubbornness, God offers patience.

But the idea of punishment or retribution does happen, which is what I want to introduce this week are two new words, which would be retributive justice.

When we talk about God's justice, I want to give you two words, retributive and restorative.

All right, so let's define these real quick.

Retributive justice, go ahead and bring that definition up.

Retributive justice is justice that gives people what their deeds deserve.

In other words, the punishment fits the crime.

Okay, the scales of justice.

You do this, we do that.

Uh most of the law is described, describes retributive justice.

Uh, if something gets broken, you gotta pay for it.

So, you know, we we essentially uh have a deed in the future that that that offsets what happened in the past.

The second is restorative justice, which is justice aimed at repairing what sin has broken.

Things like relationships, community, uh, righteousness, and shalom.

Okay, so we'll think about our own judicial system.

We would say when it functions perfectly, um, rehabilitation would be the would be the goal.

We want to rehabilitate, but there's obviously retribution.

You do this, it can't be undone, you have to have to have that.

When it comes to God's justice, okay, the way God punishes when he withholds punishment or when he punishes, okay, we would look and go, it's a combination of with the spirit of restoration.

Sometimes there's uh retributive justice, sometimes there's not.

We put these in God's hands.

How do we make sense of all this and how should we feel about it and think about it?

Okay, I'm gonna do something challenging today, but let's lock in and see if we can do this thing together.

I'm gonna preach through a whole book of the Bible, four chapters.

Thankfully it's a short book, but it's the book of Jonah.

Okay, if you've heard of Jonah, if you know anything about Jonah, you're probably now thinking about a whale and a big fish, right?

The story of Jonah, the whale.

Um, we're barely even gonna talk about the big fish because the big fish really isn't the point of the story.

The more you study this book, you realize it was written, designed to make us uncomfortable.

And although we we like good feelings, there are sometimes that there are certain tough questions or tough topics that are important for us to think about and and to wrestle with, and that's what Jonah is gonna do.

So I'm gonna move fast.

If you kind of buckle up, uh we'll we'll move through this pretty quickly together.

Um, Jonah chapter 1, verse 1 says, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amateh.

Jonah 1:1

Jonah, we know him from the book of Jonah, but it's probably noteworthy that Jonah shows up elsewhere in the Bible.

Uh he was a bona fide prophet.

He was someone who God used as a mouthpiece to give often difficult lessons, and he always gave those lessons until the book of Jonah.

He gave them to his own people, he gave them to the nation of Israel, particularly the northern kingdom.

This is the first time in the Bible that God uses a prophet to go outside of their own nation and to give a message to another nation.

And so it says in verse 2 that God said to him, Go to the great city.

When it says great city, it means large city, not like good city, but large city of Nineveh and preached against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.

Okay, when we we talk about the wickedness of Nineveh, we can just set the Bible aside for a quick second and open up a history book.

And what you would find is that Nineveh is the capital of the Assyrian Empire.

And the Assyrians were famous throughout the ancient Near East for their cruelty.

And the reason that we have this so well documented is because the Assyrians themselves documented it.

Uh archae, the archaeological records show um uh things that are called reliefs, which are essentially carvings into the palaces in Assyria, where they described themselves filleting their enemies alive.

So essentially cutting their skin off their body uh while they were alive.

Um they were famous for poking out the eyes of their enemies, the people who they they captured.

Um they were famous for relocating entire populations of people in order to break their national identity.

The point was if we can crush their culture, we can crush their identity, then they'll be so demoralized and feel so hopeless, they'll be easier to rule.

And so they utilize psychological warfare to literally terrorize the nations around them into submission.

So when you talk about their wickedness coming up before God, uh it's true.

They were a wicked group of people.

Um the word that's used here for wickedness is a really important word.

In fact, it's going to run, this word's gonna run as like a spine through all four chapters of the story.

And it's the word ra is the root word, and it's it's used seven different times throughout the four chapters.

Um, the word ra.

Now, ra is what's called a polysemic word, which essentially means it has more than one meaning.

So it'd be like the word cold.

So think of the word cold.

Cold means first like temperature, something is warm or cold, then cold might refer to someone's personality.

Yeah, that person's really cold.

Or maybe it was a mood someone was in.

Or you describe, hey, that room was cold, that room was icy, or to some, cold means something's really great, like, man, that dude is cold.

Okay, so the idea that it's one word, and depending on how you use it, it could mean a variety of things.

So ra, which is the word here for wickedness, it means two things.

It means, first of all, moral wickedness.

In other words, someone committed a crime, someone committed a sin, they did something bad.

But it also describes calamity, okay, which it might be a natural disaster, it might be a disease, uh, it might be a really unpleasant situation.

And so the word Ra is used like a drumbeat through the four chapters of Jonah of talking about human wickedness and divine punishment.

And so uh so there it's brought up for the first time.

Verse 3 it says that Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed to Tarshish, and he went down to Joppa.

Okay, now what you're gonna see for the next couple chapters is is a very intentional literary device of showing Jonah going down, down, down, down, down, down, down.

So he first goes down to Joppa, and then he goes uh down in the boat.

In fact, if you look at verse 5, it says Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell asleep into a deep sleep.

Okay, so it's a deliberate downward movement that mirrors Jonah's spiritual descent away from God.

So he goes down to Joppa, he goes down in the boat, he goes down into sleep.

Eventually uh the storm kicks up.

So it says in verse 7, by the way, you're gonna see the word Ra again.

It says in verse 7, it says the sailors said to each other, when the storm comes up, let's cast lots to find out who's responsible for this Ra, for this calamity.

Okay, so you have the Ra, the wickedness of the Ninevites.

You have Jonah, who does the exact stubborn opposite of what God asked him to do.

Jonah's going down, down, down.

A storm, a Ra, a calamity comes upon them, and of course, you know, they end up throwing him off the boat.

It's really interesting.

I think these sailors are pretty good guys because they're like, who is this?

The lot falls to Jonah.

Of course, in the ancient mind, every natural disaster was connected to divine wrath.

So they think, you know, gods are upset, and Jonah's like, it's me.

And he's like, throw me off the boat, and they don't even want to do it.

They actually, you know, if it if I was in that situation, I'd be like, all right, you know, uh, but but they actually uh they throw their cargo, it says they threw their cargo over.

They want to do anything but throw them over, but they end up throwing them over, and of course, this is at the end of chapter one where the big fish swallows Jonah.

So we get to chapter two, and Jonah is in the depths.

Okay, he's in the the the belly of the fish, and it says in Jonah 2, 1, from the inside of the fish, Jonah prayed, prayed out to the Lord his God.

So he's gone down, down, down, and he's now, we see he's at rock bottom.

It says in verse 2, he said, In my distress, I called to the Lord and he answered me.

From deep in the realm of the dead.

In other words, I am at the very, very bottom.

I am on death's doorstep.

From the realm of the dead, I called for help.

Some of you know what death's doorstep feels like.

It said, and you, when I was there, he says, you listened to my cry.

Jonah 2, 6 says, To the roots of the mountains I sank down.

That's beautiful, poetic language.

You imagine the mountains having roots.

He's like, I'm I'm I'm as low as I can possibly go.

He said, the earth beneath me barred me forever.

I'm behind the bars of the earth.

It says, but you, Lord my God, brought me up from the pit.

Jonah 2, 9 says, I with shouts of grateful praise will sacrifice to you.

Jonah's fighting for his life.

He's begging for a second chance.

He says, If you'll, if you'll just get me out of the depths, if you'll pull me up from the roots of the mountain, what I have vowed I will make good, I will say, I will say, salvation.

Don't miss this.

Salvation, he says, comes from the Lord.

So Jonah 3, 1, you flip to Jonah 3, it says, then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.

Is anybody in the house thankful to God for second chances?

All right, so even when we're stubborn, right?

God gives us a second chance.

So he gets the same call.

This time he's obedient.

He shows up to Nineveh.

Verse 4 of chapter 3 says, here's what he says to them 40 more days, and you all are about to be overthrown.

Verse 5, the Nineveh believed God.

A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

In other words, they they felt remorse for what they did and they repented before God.

So when Jonah's warning reached the king of Nineveh all the way to the very top, he stood up from his throne, he took off his royal robes, he covered himself with sackcloth, he humbles himself, and he sat down in the dust.

And then, this is how he led the people in this moment, verse 8.

He says to the people, let everyone call urgently on God.

Let them give up all the evil ways and all their evil ways and their violence.

Okay?

Let this new view of God, okay.

We've been following an idol, we've had a distorted view of God.

When they saw the light, they said, now we need to treat everyone better.

And so put away your evil, put away your violence, and and uh cover uh and cover uh sorry, where am I at?

Verse 9.

Verse 8.

Verse 9.

He says, Who knows?

God may yet relent and with compassion turn his fierce anger and we will not perish.

Verse 10.

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil, their Ra.

How they turned from their Ra.

He relented and did not bring the Ra that he had threatened.

Now you go to chapter 4.

You would think for a prophet who's called by God to go give his word that an entire collective repentance would be the ultimate victory.

But in Jonah 4, 1 it says, But Joan, but to Jonah, this seemed very wrong, and he became angry.

In the literary element, right, the literary element in verse 1 here is it used what's called a cognate accusative, which is essentially using the same word twice to intensify it.

So it'd be like saying, you dream to dream, or cry to cry.

Here it says that to Jonah God eviled an evil.

And he was angry, angry.

Essentially it's saying that in Jonah's mind, the people of Nineveh, the Assyrians, deserved retribution.

They should get what's coming to them.

It's written on the walls of their palace.

The eyeballs have been taken out, they speak for themselves.

These people who have been crushed, how do you quantify that damage?

You can quantify the damage of a building or an inanimate object.

How do you quantify the damage that's done to a human heart?

So to Jonah, God's restorative justice in this case, he now aims the ra at God.

He's saying, You have done a wrong thing.

It seemed, again, wrong, wrong to him, and he became angry, angry.

And so now what we're gonna have is an uncomfortable, a very interesting but uncomfortable lesson that Jonah is about to learn.

And we get to watch.

So verse 2, it says as he prays to the Lord.

Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home?

This is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish.

Okay, so this is interesting because you would have thought Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh because these people fillet people.

So what are they gonna do to me when I show up as this foreigner and I show up and say, hey, bad things are gonna happen to you, bad things are gonna happen to me.

But what what we see that Jonah wasn't actually, that wasn't his fear at all.

In fact, he says, Here's why I didn't want to be faithful to what you asked me to do, God.

Uh I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God who's long of nose, in other words, you're a slow breather, you're patient and abounding in Hesed, unfailing love, a God who relents from sending Ra.

Now, Lord, take away my life.

If this is how you're going to run the universe, I don't want any part of it.

For it's better for me to die than to live.

Verse 4, but the Lord replied, Is it right for you to be angry?

Uh have you ever been in a foul mood and somebody asks you a question like, hey, is it right for you to be angry?

And it just like in your like intense passion, like like you know what I'm saying, you just like send you through the roof.

I was I was talking to a friend recently, and uh he was going through a difficult season in his life and pretty much mad at everybody, and kind of in the valley of despair, and his wife came to him, and and he was telling me this later.

He said, His wife came to him and she said, Hey, I've for the last two weeks I've been wanting to ask you this question.

And and and I've been holding off because it just didn't feel like the right time.

It felt like you were too low, and I don't want to crush you, and and I'm worried I'm not gonna have the right words to say it.

Um, but she's like, I just can't wait anymore.

I need to ask you this.

And so she asks him this question, and he said, the question made him so angry.

He felt so defensive, and he said, I was so angry, we didn't like talk for about two days.

Uh we just, I was just so mad I couldn't say anything.

He goes, but the question, she planted it in my mind, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

And the more that I thought about it and prayed about it, I realized she had asked me the exact question that I needed to be asked, and and I I wanted to reject it, but it was the right thing.

And I think what wisdom teaches us over time is often the really difficult question that might even feel like an insult, it might feel ridiculous, and it might take our passion from here to here.

I think wisdom teaches us that those questions provoke us for a reason, and instead of being defensive, we probably ought to develop a spirit of curiosity and not just conclude that the first answer that pops into our mind is the real answer, and that maybe we need to wrestle with it.

And so you have Jonah, by the way, who refuses to wrestle with this question when God says, Is it right for you to be angry?

In fact, Jonah doesn't even answer the question.

We're gonna see what he does in a second, but I want to look at the question a little bit closer.

God says, Jonah, is it right for you to be angry?

Uh two important things to note as we kind of fly up to 10,000 feet and look at everything that just happened.

First of all, some of you when when Jonah says, I knew you were gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, you're like, I recognize that from somewhere, okay?

Well, if you've been here through the series, you do recognize it because it's from the book of Exodus.

It's from the story when the nation of Israel has been given a covenant by God and the ink isn't even dry on the covenant and they violate it.

And so now the retributive justice would be for God to destroy them.

And so the text shows that God's saying, Well, this is what they deserve, this is what I'm gonna do.

And Moses stands in the gap.

He intercedes and he says, God, bring your twin character quality of mercy with your quality of justice.

Justice and mercy, your anger and your unfailing love.

Demonstrate that.

Lord, please show mercy to your people.

And so God, you know, in the when they, you know, the nation builds the golden calf, this whole thing, this is now where this thing is born.

This language is born of God's unfailing love and mercy.

And so you have Jonah taking what's a salvation text and now weaponizing it back at God.

Because as long as it was for us in the book of Exodus, we're cool with it, until it goes across the border to the Ninevehes.

And now that God is showing that same unfailing love, okay, Jonah has, although he's a highly educated prophet, he's missed the point, even of the Abrahamic covenant, where God said, I want I don't just want to do something in you, I want to do it through you to bless the entire world, including the Ninevehes.

I want them to find shalom as well.

This is for the whole world.

So he's going, hey, Jonah, you just used a verse against the Ninevehites that showed my grace to your people.

People, how come it's okay when grace comes your way, but not when it comes their way?

And then the second thing is he says, Jonah, is it right for you to be angry?

In other words, my man, were you there in chapter one when I called you to go this way and you literally went the other way?

Don't forget I was showing you grace when you went down, down, down, down, down, down, down.

Don't forget chapter two.

You remember the roots of the mountain?

Remember when you were in the valley of despair?

Remember you were on death's doorstep?

Remember all that beautiful poetry that you just busted out in chapter two that said when I was at the lowest of the low of the low, I cried out to God and he heard me and he brought me up.

So it's cool when I bring you up.

It's cool when I give you mercy, when I give you grace or your people grace, but when I give these people grace, now it's a now you're mad mad?

You're angry, angry.

It's an evil, evil.

And so Jonah is so ticked off about this, he doesn't even answer God.

And let's keep going here.

Let's see what happens.

Verse 5 says, Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city, and there he made himself a shelter and sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.

So he's still holding out hope that the Ninevites are gonna get cooked.

So he goes out, you know, and he sets up his lawn chair and he sets up his like primitive little inadequate shelter, and he's looking at the city, just hoping, just scowling, he's just hoping that they get what's coming to them.

And uh and it says, and then the Lord provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head.

So he made a shelter, but apparently his head was still out in the Middle Eastern sun being scorched.

And so God does something merciful.

He makes this plant to cover him and to give him shade for his head to ease, look at it, look, look what it says, to ease his discomfort.

And Jonah was happy, happy about the plant.

It uses the same uh cognate accusative.

It says he was happy, happy.

So this story is about getting interesting because you have Jonah, whose inadequate structure couldn't give him what he needed.

God puts this plant over him to give him a moment of restorative justice, a moment of comfort.

God is doing something so powerful here, and this is so interesting because Jonah knows the word.

Jonah is a righteous insider.

Okay?

He's been used by God throughout his life.

In fact, he's just quoted perfectly from the Torah.

And sometimes when people are sophisticated in their thinking, it takes something simple to get through to them.

Notice God doesn't go bar for bar, verse for verse, with Jonah, because that probably would have gone absolutely nowhere.

Sometimes when somebody sees themselves in a certain light and is sophisticated in their thinking, to get through to them, you need to take them into the sandbox and almost bring it so simple you can't miss it.

And so he's sitting there and the plant grows over his head, and he's in, he catches some shade, and he's like, oh, and now for the first time in the whole book of Jonah, he gets happy, happy.

My man's been in a foul mood the whole book.

Chapter one, God calls him, he goes the opposite direction.

He goes down, down, down, down, down.

Chapter two, he's drowning, he's in the valley of despair, as low as I can possibly be.

Chapter three, he goes into the city, okay, and and he's preaching.

And then chapter four, what should be the ultimate victory?

He now is calling God Ra, evil, evil, wicked, wicked, and I'm angry, angry.

So you've been angry the whole time until this plant grows over your head, gives you a little bit of reprieve, a little bit of comfort, and now you're happy, happy.

And so God is about to do something very simple but very powerful.

It says in verse 7, but at dawn the next day, God provided a worm which chewed the plant so that it withered.

Um if you have the King James, it says that the worm smote the plant.

If you have the ESV, it says it attacked the plant.

If you read it in the Hebrew, the word that's used to describe what the worm did to the plant is used 500 times in the Bible, and almost always it's used as a military strike or a physical assault.

So it's not just that it chewed it up, it's like it chewed it up, spit it out, put a beat down on it, launched a physical military attack.

It's almost like sort of dark humor.

It's like Jonah's just starting to, oh, I'm I'm under this beautiful, you know, grace.

And then all of a sudden this worm shows up with like a military hat and a tank and launches an assault on the plant, right?

And then and then it uses the term again in verse 8.

It says, then the sun rose and God provided a scorching east wind.

So now it's really hot wind, and then it said, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head.

It uses that same word for assault or military attack.

So now Jonah has gone from being happy, happy underneath this plant, and now it that the military assault of the worm and the military assault of the sun on his head, and it said that Jonah uh became faint, he grew faint, and he wanted to die, and he said it would be better for me to die than to live.

Okay, so get this.

He gets an experience of both God's restorative justice and retributive justice in about a day.

So so this plant grows over him.

He did nothing for that plant.

God gave him some shade, and then and that's restorative.

Then he then he has just a little bit of retributive justice.

The sun, the shade's gone, the wind, and all of a sudden he's ready to crumble.

He couldn't take one day in God's retributive justice.

And so God gives him a taste of both of these things, and now he goes back to the valley of despair.

So now what you have is this glaring, glaring truth that's just sitting in front of him.

It's like God holds a mirror up to his face and is essentially saying, When I gave a plant some shade, when I gave grace to your enemy, it was an evil.

But when I gave grace to you, you were happy, happy.

And then God goes on to say in verse 9, it says, God says to Jonah, is it right for you to be angry about the plant?

So he asks the same question with just a little bit of a difference, and Jonah says, It is, he said, I am so angry, I wish I were dead.

But the Lord said, You've been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow.

You you have no creator rights.

You did nothing to earn it, nothing to deserve it, you didn't make it, you didn't cultivate it, you didn't barely look at it.

All you did was sit there in its wonderful shade that you didn't earn.

And should I not?

Oh, I'm sorry, he says, uh, but the Lord said, You've been concerned about this plant, though.

You did not tend it or make it grow.

It sprang up overnight and died overnight.

In other words, it's but what didn't even live 24 hours?

And should I not have concern about the large city of Nineveh in which there are more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals.

What God is saying here, by the way, when he says they don't know their right hand from their left, he's not saying that they're stupid or they're dumb people.

What he's saying is that they're living in spiritual ignorance.

They were struggling and they were naive and they were ignorant, and when actually they saw the light, they saw God's word, they repented.

So he's saying you see yourself as a righteous insider because you have the law and you have a relationship with the one true God, and yet when I spoke to you, you rejected it.

And he said, But you want me to just lump 120,000 people into one category, and what would have been, you know, the ultimate righteous move would have been for me to destroy them?

You have an appetite for destruction like that?

It's like that's why I didn't put it in your hands, Jonah.

You see, you think about what we talked about a few weeks ago.

As human beings, we have to categorize.

That's what we do.

We categorize colors, we categorize uh uh, you know, chairs versus the floor versus, you know, a stage versus different kinds of cars, we we categorize inanimate objects so that we can organize, and then we categorize humans, and of course that's not inappropriate.

We categorize so that we can understand and make sense of it, but if you're not careful, the categorizing can lead to depersonalizing, leading to dehumanizing.

And this is what we see right here from Jonah.

Jonah had now lumped all of Assyria, all of the Ninevites into this category of people that deserved retribution.

And God essentially says, Jonah, I know the 120,000 by name.

I know the hairs on their head, I know their strengths and weaknesses, I know the skeletons in their closet, I know the purpose I created them for.

My love extends to them too.

And so Jonah now, the whole book ends with should I not care about them?

And it leaves you with the question mark.

Should I not?

We have no clue what Jonah does.

We don't know if he, you know, spirals out or if he repents and turns.

We don't know.

But that's really not the point of the book, isn't it?

Really not about Jonah, because it's it's like at the after that question mark, it turns the mirror to us and asks us, like, what are we gonna do?

And if we take this whole series and kind of look at it and button it up, it's you know, we started talking about the anger of God and the fear of the anger of God, but Jonah really does a good job teaching us that the anger we should be most concerned about is our own.

If you understood God's character, you understood his pathos, you understood his nature, you would never run from his anger.

You would run to it.

Because you would understand that God's anger isn't God being hot-headed.

It's actually designed for restoration.

It's actually designed because something is off, something is wrong.

Shalom has been broken between you and God, you and yourself and people around you, and God wants to bring restoration.

If you really knew and trusted his character, you would actually run to his anger.

I want us to think about as we wrap up, I'm gonna put three questions in front of you for you to start to wrestle with and think about and pray about.

But I want us to think real quick on action.

As it relates to God's anger, I want to encourage you to run to his anger, to trust his character, and to allow that work to happen in you and to trust him with that.

But the second is the areas in our lives when it comes to our anger and our authority, how should we handle our anger?

And what I would say is, I think it's really important that we as human beings do the best we can to move from passion to pathos.

In other words, what when I feel anger, when you feel anger, what has contaminated my anger?

And I need to get good, and you need to get good at purifying your anger, because the reality is in this room and watching online, there's a lot of people who have the power to make decisions that affect other people's lives.

To whether it's restorative or retributive or whatever.

Okay?

You have power in certain places, and that has a ripple effect in society, in the community.

And so wherever you have that authority, you need to take it very seriously.

And I would say be a little suspicious and skeptical and curious around your own anger.

Even like Jonah, when it feels so righteous, and you have the verses to back it up, to really go search me, oh God, get to the essence of my passion.

Yeah, I've got the right answer, but is the right answer the real answer?

Is that really what I'm angry about, or is it an ego thing?

Is it a fear thing?

Is it an insecurity thing?

Is it a loss of control thing?

And could that cause me to be so blinded to the lesson that's right in front of me that now I take what I think is righteous anger and it spills out onto someone else, creating more and more injustice.

So in this process of maturity, we go, Lord, show us where our passion has overtaken our anger and has contaminated it and moving towards pathos and with a heart for restoration, okay, case by case, decision by decision, situation by situation, we make the decision as God would.

Here's the three questions I want to put before you and really encourage you not only to ask yourself, but to pray about and ask God.

First one is this Are there any lessons that your self-righteous anger has blinded you from seeing?

Is there anywhere that the feeling of self-righteousness, and it feels pretty good, has kept you from seeing something that's right in front of you.

Number two, is there anywhere that your focus on outward evil has blinded you from inward evil?

The truth about the Assyrians was that they were full of wickedness and ra, but Jonah was so fixated on theirs that their wickedness became a distraction to his own.

So I wonder how much time and energy we spend pointing out everybody else's anger.

I'm not saying there's never a time for that.

I'm not saying there's never a place for that.

It's sometimes it's very appropriate.

I guess my question is just to have an honest soul search and go, is that where I spend all my time?

How often am I turning the mirror inward?

And then the third is have you considered that God may be using raw hardship to save you from your raw evil?

Maybe if you're going through a hard time right now, unpleasant, some version of calamity, a situation you just really would like to get out of.

Is it possible, could it be, that God wants to use that hardship to do a work inside of your heart in your life?

So let's turn to God now.

Lord, we come to you in the name of Jesus.

We ask you to search our hearts.

Over the next few moments, we're gonna we're gonna pray together.

But at any point, if you'd like someone to pray with you, you can just get up out of your seat now and come down and receive as I'm closing in prayer.

Whether it's something we talked about today or it may be something completely unrelated, but uh our prayer team's here to serve you, Lord.

We ask you to shine a light on our hearts and bring things to our understanding, even if it's unpleasant.

Some difficult questions, difficult conversations are really important.

So just because they feel bad doesn't mean they are bad.

Often, Lord, it's an interception.

You are keeping us from going down a certain path.

The irony of Jonah 4 is that you were using Ra, you were using the hot sun and the unpleasant situation, Lord, to save him from his distorted view of you and the bitterness that was building up in his life.

And so, uh Lord, we recognize we're we can be similar to that.

I pray, Lord, that you would speak to each one of us.

Lord, help us to become a community worthy to be called the body of Christ, to be able to not allow our human passions to become contaminated to the point that they blind us to our own motives.

Take us to a place of pathos and help us, Lord, in a spirit of restoration to bring justice to the world.

We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.