The Wisdom of God - Jonah 3:10-4:4

The Wisdom of God

Jonah 3:10-4:4

Introduction: Have you ever started watching a movie with someone, who within the first five minutes, starts asking questions about how it ends? It happened just recently. The movie started, and then the questions started! “What happens to this person? What happens to that person?” I had to ask, “Do you really want to know? It will kind of ruin the movie for you!” In most cases the writers, if they are doing their job well, are telling the story in an intentional way, it builds the drama, the tension mounts, and the resolution comes near the end. Do you turn to the end of a book before starting to read it? (Ok, I have done that!). …Jonah may be a story that shocks us by ending in a most unexpected way… Actually, many children’s lessons leave out chapter 4, but to a certain degree I think it is the point of the whole story.

      We’ve called our Jonah series “Jonah: The Prodigal Prophet,” borrowing the title of Tim Keller’s little commentary. Keller used that title to draw a parallel between Jonah, and the parable of the prodigal son. And though the story of Jonah begins with the prophet looking like the younger son who takes his inheritance and then abandons his father, the point of the parable, and the point of Jonah, is really the story of the elder son, who is jealous and angry at the father receiving his brother back so graciously. When I taught this chapter to the Olympian kids the “big idea” was, “God cares about you, and God cares about me, God cares about other people, and so should we!” That’s pretty much the point of chapter 4, class dismissed! Well, maybe the point is a bit deeper, the application even wider. Do we trust the mind and wisdom of God? Will we seek His will, above ours? That brings us to…

The Maine* Idea: God is good, and He does all things well. We can trust Him, even when we don’t understand. First, remember…

The Context: The people repent, and God relents (3:10)!

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

       Jonah finally relented and brought God’s message to the Ninevites in Chapter 3, announcing God’s impending judgement: Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown! The boldness of a Jewish prophet going into the Assyrian capital and preaching such a message had to be shocking!  I don’t think that alone could evoke such a response from such a violent and wicked people. There may have been more of a back story that we’ll never know, providences of God that He used to soften the hearts of the Ninevites. One commentator mentioned a couple of plagues, an earthquake, and a solar eclipse that happened around that time. It is hard to know since it is hard to date the book precisely. The point is that by whatever means, God broke through, and broke the prideful and sinful hearts of the Ninevites, leading them to faith and repentance. They believed the word of the Lord, and they turned from their wicked ways. And in response, God turned from the disaster that he was going to bring on the city. God’s judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, His sending of the flood on the earth in the days of Noah, were harbingers of God’s future judgement of unrepentant humanity. He will be no means leave the guilty unpunished! But, at least for this generation, Nineveh repented and escaped the judgment of God.

       Ok then, God’s prophet brought God’s word, and the people believed and repented, and everyone lived happily ever after, right? That may be where some children’s lessons stop in telling Jonah’s story, but God gave us chapter 4. And this is really the point. God was indeed interested in the Ninevites, just as he was interested in the Phoenecian sailors caught in the storm with Jonah. But he was also working on Jonah’s heart… and on ours. Like Jonah needed to learn, we need to be convinced that God is good, and He does all things well… And that we can trust Him, even when we don’t understand. We need to remember that…

I. When we get angry: …and question the wisdom of God (4:1).

“But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.”

       The language in v.1 is an intentional play on words. We can miss it in the English translation. The ESV gets at the sense of the phrase, “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly…” What we miss in English, is the Hebrew phrase uses the word “ra-ah”, which is used to describe the “evil” from which the Ninevites had turned, and the disaster from which God had relented. The wording is, “It was ra-ah to Jonah, a big ra-ah.” Let’s look a bit into the use of that word in the Old Testament. But first let’s set it against the backdrop of God’s evaluation of the original creation. In Genesis 1:10,12,18,21, 25, and 31, at each step in the creation process, God saw that it was good [tov]. This was life before the Fall, the “good life,” the way life should be! God gave humans one simple law, a tree in the midst of the Garden, the tree of the knowledge of “good” [tov] and “evil” [ra]. And you know the rest of that story! Humans sin, the creation is cursed, and the “good life” is disrupted.

       By Noah’s time, we read in Genesis 6:5, “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil [ra-ah] continually.” God brought judgment on the earth, but Noah found grace in the eyes of God. At the other end of Genesis, Joseph’s brothers fear for their lives before him, knowing the evil they had done, and he says “…you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive…” (Gen 50:20).

       So “evil,” on the part of man, is disruption in God’s good creation, something contrary to the “good” he originally created. Now back to Jonah, and let’s think about what has happened in the story. The Ninevites turned from their evil way (3:10). And now Jonah judges God’s relenting from destroying them as “an exceeding great evil” [it was ra-ah to Jonah, a great ra-ah] from his perspective (4:1). Yes, as the English Bibles translate, it displeased him exceedingly. Anger is essentially saying forcefully, “I disagree with that! That is not right!” Jonah is angry, “hot,” and he is angry with God. He is calling good evil (Isa 5:20)! The words of Paul come to mind, “Who are you O man to talk back to God?!” I just heard a news report that the fastest growing church in the world is in a country you might not expect: Iran! It is persecuted, it is underground, it is mostly led by women, but it is growing. God is doing that. Do we pray for Iran’s destruction, or will be pray for revival and souls?

       Like Jonah needed to learn, we need to be convinced that God is good, and He does all things well… And that we can trust Him, even when we don’t understand. We need to remember that…

II. When we judge others: …and fail to see our own desperate need of grace (2).

 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.

     Finally, only for the second time in the book, do we see Jonah praying (the last time was from the fish’s belly!).  The sailors on the boat had cried out to the God of Jonah. The captain had asked Jonah to pray, but as far as we know he didn’t. The king of Nineveh calls on everyone in the city to cry out to God. Finally, in chapter 4, for a second time, we see Jonah praying. This will be good, right? Not so much, but at least Jonah is praying now, talking to God instead of running from Him. As he begins, we see a hint as to the debate that happened when God first called Jonah to go to Nineveh, and some insight into why Jonah fled toward Tarshish in the first place…

       Is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? When God called Jonah to go to Nineveh and announce their impending destruction, he knew what that meant. Why warn the Ninevites? Why cry out against them? Why not just drop fire from heaven and be done with them? Implied in the announcement of impending judgment is a call to repentance! And Jonah knew that God’s character was such that he would respond with mercy if they repented. Think about Jonah’s experience. Why did Jonah run? He tells us…

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.

He had experienced God’s mercy firsthand, and he was grateful for it. Jonah in fact quotes from Scripture God’s own words to Moses when He had revealed himself on the mountain in Exodus 34:6…

The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…

So, Jonah had some good theology, but it broke down in terms of application. He did not yet understand that God was interested in people from every race and nation. When God called Jonah to go to that great city, Nineveh, he tried to run from God. God hurled a great wind toward the boat on the sea. He wasn’t going to let Jonah get away. When Jonah was thrown into the sea, just about to drown, he remembered the LORD, and God sent along a great fish to bring him back to dry ground. And God calls him to go a second time.

       Jonah knew about the mercy of God, he had experienced His grace. He wanted it in his life, and in the life of his nation, but not for these pagan Assyrians! So, the first time he was called, he ran. The second time, in chapter 3, he went, and he proclaimed God’s message, but not with the heart God had for those people. It seems Jonah is like the stubborn child, who refuses to sit down at the dinner table. Finally he gives in, but crosses his arms and says, “I am sitting down, but I am still standing on the inside!” Jonah did not agree with what God was doing – he hated the Assyrians so much, he didn’t want God to show them mercy! He seemed to forget his own rebellion, and how much he needed God’s mercy and grace in his own life. He didn’t understand, it seems, how evil his own rebellion was. He didn’t realize there was a log in his own eye.

       Like Jonah needed to learn, we need to be convinced that God is good, and He does all things well… And that we can trust Him, even when we don’t understand. We need to remember that when we get angry with God, when we are tempted to judge others, and…

III. When we are self-righteous: …and put ourselves in the place of God (3).

³ Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live." 

       Think about what Jonah is saying to God: Your actions, God, are so repulsive, so unacceptable, I don’t want even to be alive to see it! Jonah is essentially saying “Your actions are not good, this is not the way life should be. I would rather be dead!” Let’s think first about what this is not. It is not the laments of the psalmist that we see so frequently…

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? (Psalm 13:1).

       We see times when the psalmist expresses his pain and confusion to God. Something doesn’t seem right in the world, it might be enemies, or famine or sickness. Life the way it should be seems to be disrupted and the psalmist cries out for help and deliverance. Feeling abandoned or lost is not the same as questioning the goodness of God. It is not calling good evil, or evil good. And that is essentially what Jonah is doing in our text here in Jonah 4:3. He is saying that God’s actions are not good, not righteous, not acceptable! He is saying, “I know better than you what should happen here, and if you are not going to do it, just kill me now!” He is that self-righteous.

       Before we get too hard on Jonah, lets be honest about something. Even though we might not say this to God like Jonah did, if we choose to sin, if we made a decision and take an action that we know to be contrary to God’s will, we are doing the same thing. We are saying to God, “I know you don’t want me to have this, you don’t want me to do this, you don’t want me to see this, but I know this will make me happy, this will fulfill something in my life better than you can Lord. So I am going to do it. Don’t I have a right to be happy?” The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it? Recall God’s warning to Cain in Genesis 4:7, before the first murder, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” Now is the time to flee Jonah, flee from the evil welling up in your own heart, and run back to God!

       Like Jonah needed to learn, we need to be convinced that God is good, and He does all things well… And that we can trust Him, even when we don’t understand. We need to remember that…

IV. When God holds up His Word as a mirror: …and we are exposed (4)!

⁴ And the LORD said, "Do you do well to be angry?"

       The gentle, patient, dealing of God with the prodigal prophet! (OK, a storm and a great fish maybe weren’t so gentle, but it was merciful, and it was what Jonah needed at the time!).  Here, Jonah has had a self-righteous, judgmental, temper-tantrum, and God responds with a simple question, which He’ll need to repeat in a few verses, “Do you do well to be angry?” A simple question, an invitation to think, to meditate, to consider what Jonah is saying and feeling, to bring those thoughts captive to Christ.

What is God saying to me in this passage? Are you convinced that God is good, and that He does all things well? We can trust Him, even when we don’t understand. He is good, all the time. His way is always best.

What would God have me to do in response to this passage? Some applications…

       1. I am all for patriotism, but when it becomes a religion we can get in trouble. Jonah wanted God’s grace and mercy for Israel, but not for the Assyrians. Listen: The whole world is God’s world, and world evangelization is God’s work. A remnant from every tribe and nation will gather around his throne one day – and that is something to celebrate and be a part of, now! You might think, wait a minute, we support missions. But even today I hear it argued, why should we send missionaries overseas if we have needs right here in America? Well, we’ll always have needs in America. Why go? Because He said, “Go, make disciples of every nation…” Because He said, “…you will be my witnesses, even to the ends of the earth.” That’s God’s plan, and it should be good enough for us!

       2. I think we can avoid falling into Jonah’s error, by keeping the Gospel at the forefront of our life. If we remember that we were sinners, spiritually dead, separated from God, destined for wrath, and unable to do anything to save ourselves, yet God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, made us alive, by grace we have been saved (c.f. Eph 2:1-5). By His doing we are in Christ. What mercy! What grace! How can we not pray for God’s mercy to be extended to others? Why would we not be available to be used of God to be agents of the message of grace, His ambassadors?

       3. The key to knowing the mind of Christ is to allow His word to dwell richly within us. To receive it, as the Ninevites received Jonah’s message, as the Word of God. Pray as you read, that the Spirit of God would open your heart and mind to the will of God. Let’s trust Him, obey, and delight in the will of God.    AMEN.