God's Far-Reaching Love

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If you don't want one, that's fine, you can just listen, or you can even borrow a Bible to follow along, and the passage will look at in Jonah, chapter 4 today.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

To get us started, though, I've asked my friends to come back one more time for a final recap of Jonah's story to this point.

The voyages of the prophet Jonah.

His one year mission from God is to leave Israel and go to the Assyrian city of Nineveh and preach against it.

At first, jonah decided he didn't want to go and warn the Ninevites of God's coming judgment.

So he ran away from God, getting on a boat going to Tarshish.

But after getting right with God by spending three days and three nights in the belly of a whale, jonah went to Nineveh and preached against it.

Jonah was shocked that the Ninevites repented, beginning with the king himself.

Jonah decided to wait outside the city, hoping that their repentance wasn't real and that God would still destroy them.

After all, they were Israel's sworn enemies.

But when God didn't destroy them, jonah got really mad at God for letting them off so easy.

But Jonah was extremely happy when God provided a nice tree to give him shade while he waited.

But then God sent a worm to destroy the tree and a scorching hot wind, and that made Jonah miserable.

That made Jonah even more angry at God for removing his comfort and he told God that he just wanted to die.

Well, here's what happens next.

The Lord is my salvation who is like the Lord, our God, strong to you, safe, faithful in love.

My debt is paid and the victory won.

The Lord is my salvation.

The Lord is my salvation.

My thanks to the public team for helping me out with this series.

They did a whale of a job, I think.

Thank you, guys.

So God gave us Jonah's testimony to help us understand God and our relationship with him.

And from the book of Jonah we've learned things like God is sovereign over all his creation plants and worms and whales and even the way he brings things in and out of our lives.

And we also learned that God's Word is very powerful.

It means what he says and it's a source of life for our lives and to be obeyed for our own good.

We also learned that God is ascending God to those whom he brings into himself.

He spins out to be a blessing to others, and then we can run from God's presence.

We don't want to do what he's asking us but can't run very far.

He always, always, will pursue us and catch up somehow.

Now we're going to look at the final lesson God teaches Jonah in chapter 4.

I'm going to begin reading it, if you want to follow along, at the end of chapter 3 of verse 10.

And we'll read it one more time.

When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which he declared he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.

But that greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry.

He prayed to the Lord and said please, lord, was this not when I said while I was still in my own country?

Therefore, in order to forestall this, I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, bounding and loving kindness in one who relents concerning calamity.

Therefore, now, o Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.

And the Lord said do you have a good reason to be angry?

Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it.

There he made a shelter for himself, sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city.

And so the Lord, god, appointed a plant and they grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort.

And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant.

And then God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered.

When the sun came up, god appointed a scorching east wind and the sun beat down on Jonah's head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying death is better to me than life.

Then God said to Jonah do you have a good reason to be angry about the plant?

And he said I have a good reason to be angry, even to death.

Then the Lord said you had compassion on the plant for which you did not work, which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight.

Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?

Last time we learned that because Jonah didn't understand important aspects of God's love, he got really upset that God forgave the Ninevites and in Jonah, chapter 4, it focuses on the lessons God is trying to teach Jonah and us about his love.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

Last time we learned that because God loves us, he is jealous to protect any threat to our relationship with him, and we call that God's refining love.

Like a surgeon, he will allow pain and suffering to do us good, to bring us back in right relationship with him.

Sometimes he gives us things for our comfort, like he gave Jonah for shade.

Sometimes he appoints things to take away our comfort, all for our good and for his glory.

He gives and takes away.

While we focused on God's refining love last time, today we're going to look at the second aspect of his love, which we'll call his far-reaching love.

The first thing Jonah didn't understand about God's love was the extent of its reach.

How far does God's love reach?

We see first that God's love extends to this believing, angry, sinning prophet, Jonah.

When Jonah became upset and mad when God forgave the Ninevites, god had the right to say to him I've had it with you, I'm done with your angry, rebellious pouting.

Instead, god says do you have a good reason to be angry?

God is giving to Jonah what Jonah did not want to give to the Ninevites grace, acceptance, forgiveness.

Jonah's behavior merits God's rejection of him.

Instead, he gets grace.

God loves the Ninevites in spite of their violence and wickedness, and God loves Jonah in spite of his irreverent, arrogant disobedience.

One very important lesson we're going to learn from Jonah, chapter 4, is that the extent and reasons God manifests his love are very hard for us to sometimes understand.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

One reason it's difficult is because our concept of love and love's reach is one-dimensional, whereas God's is not.

Our concept of love one-dimensional.

We see love in terms of conditions and the worthiness of the person who receives it.

We don't believe love should be given to people who don't deserve it.

A lot of people believe that God will love us only if we're good, and so many people today are out there trying to live the best lives they can.

Hopefully someday God will welcome them to heaven.

They've been good and merit his love.

So that's the exact opposite of the gospel.

You know that Jonah, chapter 4, blows that idea out of the water.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

And even though we know better by the authority of the Scripture, we still struggle with how far God's love should extend and to whom, just like Jonah did.

We may believe, like Jonah did, that some people are just not worthy.

They're not worthy, but the truth is none of us are worthy.

Until we get that, we'll always be judging and condemning other people.

None of us are worthy of God's love.

Paul writes to Titus in chapter 3 of that book in the New Testament, and here's what he says chapter 3, 3-7.

He says, titus, we also were once foolish, foolish ourselves.

We were disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful hating one another.

But circle it.

But when the kindness of God, our Savior, and his love for mankind appeared, he saved us, not on the basis of deeds we weren't worthy, not on the basis of deeds, which we've done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration, renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior, so that, by being justified by His grace, we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

That's a huge, huge truth we need to remember.

God extends His love to the angry, believing prophet and he extends His love to corrupt, wicked pagan nations.

No matter what we think, the hard truth to grasp is God doesn't give anybody what they deserve.

If he did, there would be none of us left.

Why is that?

Why give people what they don't deserve?

Well, the answer is in Jonah, chapter 4.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

And Jonah knew this, and you know this.

It's because God is love.

He can't do anything else but love.

Everything he does is motivated from a heart of love, even his judgments, all of it.

That's his very nature.

Jonah got it.

Jonah 4-2, he understood exactly what was going on.

He just couldn't accept it.

He didn't get it.

I knew you were gracious and compassionate of God, slow to anger, abundant in loving-kindness, one who relents concerning calamity.

I knew that I just couldn't.

He couldn't see.

Well, that doesn't make sense.

They're not worthy of that.

Exactly One-dimensional love.

God doesn't operate that way.

We constantly listen to me get in the Scriptures means we are constantly needing to readjust our theology.

What's the truth?

What's he saying?

The love we receive from God sometimes is hard to extend to others that we deem unworthy because we have also a faulty view of ourselves.

We believe we deserve God's love.

They don't.

That's another issue.

Check yourself Are there people in your life who you feel morally more unworthy than you and even maybe have a nicer life than you?

That's what Jonah is seeing in the Ninevites.

That made him mad.

He thought they didn't deserve God's love, but he certainly did.

How would God's own?

Well, god wants Jonah to stop that.

Stop that thinking.

That may be how he operates.

That's not how God operates.

Stop looking at other people's worthiness.

He loves them all in spite of their sin.

That's really hard to get our head around that because we always come back to our default Love is only given on the condition that we deserve it.

That's not the gospel.

One reason a lot of people have a hard time accepting the truth of the gospel of Jesus.

A lot of people I talk to said well, yeah, I'd like to know, I'm going to heaven, I'd like to come to church, I'm just not good enough.

It's a huge hurdle to get over.

That leads us to the second point we learned from Jonah, chapter 4.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

I believe that that is God's free to love.

This concept of God's freedom also can be very difficult for us to understand.

He's free to do whatever he wants.

He's the Creator.

He can do whatever he wants Whenever he wants.

In large your concept of who God is, he's not like us in that rich yard.

He's free, completely free.

He's outside of all of his creation and he only came in and the person of Jesus to save us.

But he's outside and he's making choices.

He's making choices and he's free to love.

And the freedom of God's love now asks who does God's love reach?

The answer is, as Jonah discovered, everybody and anybody to whom God wants to give it.

Of course we know intellectually.

See, god is tall, he loves the whole world.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

We know that.

Do we connect it to even those who are unworthy and don't deserve it?

Scripture tells us God is free to love who he wants.

Classic biblical illustration of that is what he says about Jacob and Esau in Romans 9.13.

Just as it is written.

God says Jacob, I loved, esau I hated.

It doesn't mean he literally hated it.

It means I'm choosing Jacob over Esau.

Does God play favorites?

No, he does not.

That's something we do.

God is free.

God remember this.

He has good reasons for all the choices he makes and because God is eternally good, holy, righteous and pure, every single decision God makes will be good, holy, righteous and pure, every single one.

He can't do anything that's not coming from his very nature, who he is.

James 1.17 even says every good thing given, every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there's no variation or shifting shadow.

Everything that he gives and chooses to give is good.

Of course, this is not true of the choices we make, and sometimes we project what God should be doing from our mindset.

The choices we usually make are selfish and come with impure motives.

We got an agenda that we're not really up front about.

In Jonah, chapter 4, god tells Jonah that he cares about.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

This is really good to know.

Profound.

He cares about all his creatures.

You need to remember that Even animals, dogs, cats, fish, birds, all of them and he reserves the right to be merciful to whomever he wants.

Listen to this again In Jonah 4.9-11,.

God said to Jonah do you have a good reason to be angry about the plant which you had nothing to do with?

Absolutely nothing.

See, you had compassion on the plant yeah, you didn't work for it which you did not cause to grow.

Guess who caused it to grow?

I did.

Came up overnight, perished overnight.

Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great sit?

These are people I created in my own image.

Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between the right and left hand, as well as many animals?

And when God says to Jonah, should I not have compassion?

He's saying I am free to love whoever I want, even though you think they don't deserve it.

God loves both Jonah and the Ninevites.

Both received grace.

They did not deserve the vine, you see, or the plant in Jonah 4, is what God uses to put things in perspective.

Jonah was concerned about the plant and upset that the plant stopped being useful to him.

That says volumes about a person's heart.

But God was concerned about the Ninevites and Jonah wants him to nuke them.

120,000 people nuke them.

God is rebuking him in this passage and he's rebuking us and using the plant, god is asking Jonah and us what is it that we're deeply concerned about in our life?

Look at what you love, god says.

Look at what I love.

Do they line up at all?

Do they even come close?

Jonah is more concerned about his garden than people.

Unfortunately, we can be more concerned about our comforts and losing those comforts than those who will lose God's grace forever.

It's a message God is sending to Jonah and to us.

Through him, god refers to Jonah's plant.

It can be translated vine.

He refers to Jonah's vine and shade to remind him that we can become very attached to our comforts and really get comfortable and familiar with great expectations that they should remain.

Have you ever given God permission to do whatever he wants to do with whatever you have?

That's a hard one, but God taught me early on dedicate, commit, surrender everything in my life to him.

You know why.

He's very capable of taking care of stuff that's his.

You're not mine.

I turned over a deed.

It's all yours Now.

The funny part is like a living sacrifice Romans 12, 1,.

Living sacrifices keep crawling off the altar Every cell office.

Wait a second.

That car belongs to you, lord.

Whatever you want to do with it.

You want to smash it, you want to give it away, it's yours.

I believe you could take care of it just fine, whatever you want with it.

I told this story but it still strikes me as tied into this.

Early years ago we had a Dodge minivan and it was time to sell it, get rid of it.

So I advertised it in the paper.

A guy came by to look at it and he wanted to take it for a test drive.

So we took it for a test drive and I'm sitting in one seat.

He's in the driver's seat.

We're driving 10 blocks or so and he stops the van, gets out of the car with the van running, opens the hood and I'm like that's odd.

But I turn off the van and get out and I said everything okay, yes, and he gets back in, starts the van.

He said okay, put down the hood, puts down the hood and then takes off.

He stole my van.

But the funny part is I'm watching my van drive down the road and I'm thinking, oh, that guy has no idea, he just stole God's van.

Honestly, that's how I thought.

That was my first thought.

I feel sorry for him because that van was right back in my driveway 24 hours later.

But you know what?

I didn't dedicate to him?

Things inside the van.

My golf clubs were dark.

After that incident, god taught me what else do you need to give over to me?

Then let me do whatever I want with it.

It's free, very free.

Even if somebody steals that you can watch.

I wonder what God's going to do about that.

John Wesley came home once and saw his house burning to the ground.

He and a friend are staying there and John says wow, I wonder what God's going to do with his house.

It's all burned down.

He says he can do whatever he wants when we cling to stuff.

Jonah figured this out in chapter 2.

Watch it when our comforts begin to crawl into the place of an idol we don't want to.

Oh no, that has to stay.

Be careful, jonah 2.8,.

Those who cling to worthless idols, jonah says, forfeit the grace that could be theirs.

But he's still learning that lesson in chapter 4, isn't he?

Because that plant, that plant, even though he didn't realize it had just grown to idol proportion.

He didn't want it to go, he didn't want God to take it, it was his, it was useful to him.

Finally, the book ends with God's triumph of love.

First with Jonah, then the new advice.

Everybody agrees this is a really strange book.

In the Bible, at the end of the book God is asking Jonah, whose life has been so wrapped up in himself, to repent.

And then the book abruptly ends with God's question Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city, which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between the right and left hand, as Rosamundian will stop?

Will Jonah come through?

What will happen?

We're not told.

We're intentionally not told, but I believe the fact that we have the book of Jonah, which is his own personal testimony nobody else could have told this but him and he tells us his testimony, warts and all to help us learn what he learned.

It ends abruptly unanswered.

Perhaps also to speak to other Jonah's reading this who are running from God, complaining about the comforts God's taken away and the undeserved grace God's giving to other people that don't deserve it perhaps.

But in the end, one thing that stands out is the triumph of God's love to those who don't know the difference, god's love to those who don't deserve it.

That's really the main message, one of the main messages we need to take from this book.

God extends his love and grace to people who don't deserve it, and that includes me, and that really is the precursor for the whole gospel message.

When we come to the New Testament, god's ultimate answer to the sin and evil in the world and rebellion and sin in our lives was to send his love and grace in the person of Jesus Christ.

The scripture declares that sending Jesus was the living witness, the ultimate proof that God loves us Because of what Jesus has done when he died on the cross for our sins.

God's love triumphs over sin and judgment for all who believe in him.

Romans 5, 5-8,.

Paul says Hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us, for while we were still sinners, still helpless, at the right time, christ died for the ungodly.

You know what One will hardly die for a righteous man.

You know why?

Because we're one dimensional love.

One will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man someone would dare even to die.

But God demonstrates his love toward us and that, while we were yet sinners, christ died for us.

And as Paul says, how do we know God loves us?

Not only has Jesus died for our sins, but he sent the Holy Spirit into our hearts, testifying to us inside us, that God loves us.

That's what Paul just said.

And God's love for those who don't deserve it is the ultimate triumph.

And when you have God's love in your heart, in the person of the Holy Spirit I believe that Paul is suggesting, if that's true, you can get through anything.

In Romans 8, 35-39, paul says Exactly who will separate us from the love of Christ.

When we go through tribulations, that means God doesn't love us.

No.

When we're in distress or persecutions, that means God doesn't love us no.

Famine, nakedness, peril, sword Does that mean God doesn't love me?

No, it does not mean that.

Just as he's written For you to be saved, lord, we're being put to death All day long.

We were considered as sheep to this Lord, but in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us.

I'm convinced neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things that come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

It's just a fantastic statement of truth we need to remind ourselves of and hang on to that.

There's nothing we're going to go through.

Paul says, or we can even somehow remotely conceive or conclude that God doesn't love us.

All this bad thing that's happened to me must be God doesn't love me.

No, but I guarantee you there's a reason.

The distress comes.

The plant is attacked by a worm.

There's a reason.

Listen for it, as Jonah had to.

The book of Jonah must be real.

It has to be real, real history why?

Because Jesus told us that the things that happened to Jonah were actually a sign of what would happen to Jesus himself.

In Matthew 12, jesus said A wicked and adulterous generation asked for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah, for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish.

If that's not true, then what Jesus is saying is absolutely meaningless.

You get that right Three days, three nights in the belly of a huge fish.

So the Son of man will be three days, three nights in the heart of the earth.

The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah.

And now something greater than Jonah is here.

Jesus Christ died, was buried, rose again.

Now anyone who believes in Him as their Savior is saved from God's wrath for their sin.

Have you received Jesus as your Savior?

It's life-changing.

Many of you may be familiar with Blaise Pascal, the great mathematician philosopher of the 17th century.

When he died, they found a little piece of paper in his pocket.

It was a page ripped out of his journal that described an overwhelming, life-transforming experience he had.

Here's what he wrote this day of grace, 1659, from about half past ten to midnight.

And right after that he just writes one word, all caps Fire, f-i-r-e.

Then he writes the God of Abraham, isaac and Jacob is not a God of the philosophers and the wise.

He can only be found in believing what was taught in the Gospels.

Oh, righteous Father, the world has not known thee, but I have known thee joy, joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

He writes Wow, what's happening?

First fire, then joy, unspeakable.

What's happening to Pascal?

One day he came to know the true God, the real God.

Up to that point, you see, in Pascal God was just an abstraction of philosophy, a religion.

Somehow, the truth of the Gospel broke through to him and he experienced God's love as fire within that broke his arrogant pride as a philosopher.

Suddenly, god became a reality through his faith in Jesus.

The same can happen to you or anybody who is willing to humble himself and acknowledge Jesus, the Savior sent to love us into heaven forever.

If you've never done so, I encourage you to.

I invite you to open your heart to Jesus and pray something like this Dear God, I am like the Ninevites in Pascal, who didn't know you.

I want to know you.

I believe in Jesus, whom you sent to save me from my sins.

Please help me to know you and your love in Jesus.

That's simple.

Now, if you have believed in Jesus, perhaps you need to pray.

Father, I'm a Jonah who knows you through faith in Jesus, but I've been running away from you.

I repent and ask you to receive me back so that I might know you're far reaching love.

Maybe that's your prayer today.

Let's close in prayer.

Father, thank you that you've spared Jonah.

You spared the Ninevites in order to teach us some wonderful truths about your love and the struggles we sometimes have when we disagree your word and go our own way.

We thank you, lord, for your love that is everlasting.

Your love never gives up on us when we fail.

Help us, lord, to trust you when troubles come, and honor you for the gifts you give.

I pray in Jesus' name, amen.