Jonah’s Anger

I was moved to teach on the doxology and the benedictions, first of all, because of what they mean to me in my own devotional life. I turned to them in my own private meditations for refocus, for worship, for self-examination, for building up a faith. And then, as a result of that, I've been looking for opportunities to teach them to our church, because I believe they aid the people of God in looking up and seeing the greatness of God in these succinct statements of blessing and or doxology that are memorable and meaningful. We take them for granted, but they are there for our blessing and benefit. Wishing and praise by H.B.

Charles, Jr. Visit Ligonier.org slash teaching series to learn more. Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind… Jonah perhaps would have been pleased to go to Nineveh simply to be an agent of destruction. He would have liked to have been an avenger of his own people against this wicked city. Instead, he was asked to go and preach repentance to them, and then they repented, and Jonah is furious. You'd think Jonah would be happy an entire city had turned from their sin and avoided imminent destruction, but this prophet hated the Ninevites. Not even their repentance could change that. Today we'll see that God is going to teach Jonah and all of us a very important lesson about grace.

Here's Dr. R.C. Sproul. We've been looking at the little book of the minor prophets, the book of Jonah, and we've seen that Jonah heard the Word of God when God commanded him to go on a mission of outreach and of preaching to Nineveh, the capital city of the wicked Assyrian kingdom, the hated enemy of the Jewish people of the eighth century B.C. And Jonah disobeyed that command and fled by ship from Joppa, headed for Tarshish. And we know the story of how the great foment arose on the sea, and Jonah was thrown overboard and then rescued by the intervention of the fish that God had prepared to deliver him.

Chapter 3 of Jonah gives us the narrative as it picks up at that point where we read these words in verse 1. Now the Word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time. Now let me pause for a minute and say, fortunately for us, God is a God of the second chance. I've often heard people say we're all entitled to one mistake.

That's not true. God doesn't entitle us to any mistakes. But if it were true, we would have used up our one mistake a long time ago, and it would be very worthless to us. But in this case, Jonah does get a second chance. God comes to him and reissues the original command, saying, arise and go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I tell you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh. What a striking contrast that is from chapter 1 where Jonah, after being called to arise, we read there that Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish. Now he does what God tells him to do. He rises, but this time he arises and goes to Nineveh.

According to the Word of the Lord. And the Scriptures say this, now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent. That is, it would take you three days to walk through the city. And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day's walk. And then he cried out and said, yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Here is this obscure Jewish prophet that doesn't know anybody in the city of Nineveh. He comes out of nowhere like Elijah out of the desert or John the Baptist out of the wilderness, and he gives an oracle of doom that he announces to this vast, magnificent city, a city that houses one of the most powerful nation's capital in the ancient world. And he makes this prediction, forty days, and this city will be overthrown. And you would think no one in that pagan city would listen to him at all.

We remember when Paul appeared at the Areopagus in Athens, and as he was about to speak, some of those who were hecklers there said, what will this babbler say? And I'm sure that's the same kind of greeting that Jonah would have expected on this mission. But it's not what happened. The people of Nineveh, we read in verse 5, believed God.

Now, pay attention to that phrase there. It doesn't say that the people of Nineveh believed in God. It said they believed God, and there is a huge difference between those. There are lots of people who believe in God in the sense that they believe that God exists, but they don't believe Him when He speaks His Word.

And in a sense, that belies the first conviction. You say that you believe in God, but if you don't believe the God you believe in, you don't really believe in the God who is, because the God who is is eminently believable. He's omniscient. He's impeccable. He never speaks falsehood.

Why wouldn't you believe God if you believe in God? The people of Nineveh, to their credit, believed God and proclaimed the fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. Now, the proclaiming of the fast and the dawning of the sackcloth indicates a spirit of profound and deep repentance.

They believed the threatening message, and they responded accordingly in deep repentance. And then word came to the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne and laid aside his robe and covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published throughout Nineveh by the decree of his king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Do not let them eat or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hand.

Who can tell if God will turn and relent and turn away from his fierce anger so that we may not perish? Beloved, I don't know any record in all of history of such a mass action of repentance as what is recorded here about the city of Nineveh, a city that takes three days to walk through it, and the whole city from the great to the least, including the king who leaves his throne, which is significant. By getting off his throne, he is acknowledging the authority of the Lord God over him. He takes off his royal robes, all of those signs of power and authority, and dons for himself the clothing of humiliation. He adorns himself in sackcloth, and he sits in the ashes, signaling a posture of repentance. And together with his nobles issues a decree that his example is to be followed throughout the entire, not just the entire city but the entire land, including the animals and every person in the land, that there might be a corporate repentance, that the people might mourn of their sins with the hope that God, who has promised the destruction of their city, will relent and turn aside from his anger and be merciful to the people.

Well, what happens? In verse 10 of chapter 3, we read this record. And then God saw their works that they turned from their evil way, and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it. Now, sometimes the Bible speaks of God's repentance when it means, perhaps more accurately in our language, a relenting rather than a repenting, because for us the word repent suggests turning away from some evil deed. God is incapable of turning away from an evil deed because He was never in the way of an evil deed in the first place. God does not have to change His mind from considering sinning. And so He doesn't repent in that sense. That's why the Scripture says that God is not a man that He should repent. And even the idea of relenting, meaning that He backs off something that He fully intended to do, is somewhat misleading.

Even though the Bible uses this language, it uses the language of appearance, it uses what we call phenomenological language, and it uses what we call anthropomorphic language, that is, by which we describe God in human form. And we are not to draw the inference from this narrative that God had set about a particular purpose and had decided in His own mind that He was going to do plan A. But when He saw the reaction of the people that He didn't know in advance would happen, He came up with a better plan, plan B, and was persuaded by all of this fasting and repenting to change His mind. That's a manner of speaking, and we need to understand that God knew all along that these people would in fact repent. And even though Jonah was directed to give the statement, this city is going to be overthrown in forty days, and he doesn't say, unless you repent, that unless you repent is elliptical, that is to say it is clearly implied that God always has the right when He exercises a threat of judgment, He always has the right to rescind that threat by executing mercy. It's the same thing we saw when David wrestled for seven days in prayer when God had said that his child would die, and David pled with God for seven days begging God to change his mind, and God didn't. The baby died. And when the servants asked David why he did this, he said, as long as there was still life in this baby, I had the hope that perhaps God would choose to exercise His grace.

But he didn't. But in this case, God does exercise mercy over the wicked city of Nineveh in light of the people's repentance. Now, can you imagine how the angels in heaven, we are told, rejoice at the repentance of one sinner? And I would say the heavenly hosts threw a party that afternoon when they saw this mass movement of repentance from the city of Nineveh. And so you would expect that Jonah being so successful in this mission would have thrown his hat in the air and said, gee, Lord, I never would have believed that my preaching would have such a marvelous result through Your accompanying that Word with Your power. But that's not the response of Jonah.

Remember, these are Israel's most bitter enemies. Jonah perhaps would have been pleased to go to Nineveh simply to be an agent of destruction. He would have liked to have been an avenger of his own people against this wicked city. Instead, he was asked to go and preach repentance to them, and then they repented. And Jonah is furious.

Look at chapter 4. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry. So, he prayed to the Lord and said, Ah, Lord, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore, I fled previously to Tarshish, for I know You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant lovingkindness, one who relents from doing harm. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die and to live. I knew it, God.

I'd just like You to do this. Somebody didn't want to go in the first place. I had a feeling that this is what was going to happen, that at the last minute, at the eleventh hour, You were going to exercise mercy instead of justice, grace instead of judgment. And now, You're going to let these wicked people go, as evil as they are, simply because they repented in sackcloth and ashes.

It's not good enough for me. This really makes me mad, and I'd just as soon die and have to live through this. Now, this is the same man who has himself, after he has been disobedient and after he has repented, had been rescued sure and certainly by the grace of God. God was under no obligation to rescue Jonah from the midst of the sea. He could have let Jonah just sink to the bottom of the sea, and that would have been the end of it. The sea would have been quiet. The sailors on the ship bound for Tarshish would have been rescued. The great fish would not have despaired and had his appetite ruined by having to swallow this human being.

Everything would have been happy, and justice would have been done, and God could have sent another prophet to Nineveh. Instead, God had saved Jonah out of his sin and out of his hopeless condition. And five minutes later, he's angry because God saved somebody else. Does that speak to you?

We have a little slogan in our culture there, but for the grace of God go I. Do we really believe that? There is no room in the Christian heart to enjoy the prospect of the destruction even of the wicked. Because we live moment to moment by God's grace, and if we have been recipients of grace, why should we despise someone else's receiving the grace of God? But it's hard when we see God be gracious to those who have been hostile to us. We don't want God to forgive those who trespass against us. We want God to forgive us, but not to forgive those who sin against us. And at that point, Jonah is every inch the man.

He is so common, so typical of all of us in a situation such as this. And then in verse 4 we read this, chapter 4 verse 4, then the Lord said, is it right for you to be angry? If ever was a rhetorical question, here it is. Jonah had absolutely no right whatsoever to be angry, and God puts the question to him, is this right Jonah? Do you have any right whatsoever to be angry when I bestow My grace on somebody else? What would you say to that? How would you answer that question? Do you ever have any right to be angry if God is merciful to your enemies?

Of course not. So Jonah went out of the city and sat on the east side of the city, and there he made himself a shelter and sat under it in the shade until he might see what would become of the city. And the Lord God prepared a plant and made it come up over Jonah that it might be shade for his head to deliver him from his misery. Here's Jonah sitting out here in the ancient Near East in the middle of the heat of the day with no refuge from the blistering heat that is assaulting him as he's sitting there contemplating the future of Nineveh. And God now does another act of mercy in Jonah's behalf.

He prepared a plant. Again, it makes me wonder whether the fish that delivered Jonah was a special creation because the same language is used here, that God specially prepared a fish to rescue Jonah in the first place, and now as he's exposed not to the water but to the heat, God makes another special preparation to rescue Jonah. He prepared a plant and made it come up over Jonah to be shade for his head, to deliver him from his misery. And we read, so Jonah was very grateful for the plant. But as the morning dawned the next day, God prepared a worm, and it so damaged the plant that it withered. And it happened that when the sun arose that God prepared a vehement east wind, and the sun beat on Jonah's head so that he grew faint.

Every Jewish person who reads this text, every person who lives in Palestine would understand it immediately. It's not just talking about a hot summer day in Florida. He's talking about the effects of the Scirocco, that dreaded wind that comes out of the Mediterranean, picks up heat and dryness from the desert, and it causes the skin to become like sandpaper.

And the Scirocco is known to kill many, many people because it just sucks the moisture out of a person's body and out of their face. It's like being caught in the middle of a sandstorm almost, although with exceedingly great heat that accompanies it. And this is what happens. God prepared, do you see what God prepared? He prepared a plant, He prepared a worm, and now He prepares a vehement east wind. And the sun beat on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. And he wished death for himself and said, it is better for me to die than to live. And so God asked Jonah another question, is it right for you to be angry about the plant? And Jonah said, it is right for me to be angry, even to death.

I am going to be mad at you until I die because that's not fair. My only comfort was that plant. Thank you very much for giving me the plant, but what kind of game are you playing, God? No sooner do you give me the shade and the benefits and the relief from misery of the plant. The next thing that happens, you send this worm to eat the plant. And so I lose my shade, and as soon as I lose my shade, you prepare a vehement east wind, the sirocco, to come in and scorch my very life. Yes, I'm angry about the plant, and this time I'm going to stay angry with you.

Oh God. But the Lord said, Jonah, you've had pity on a plant for which you have not labored nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than 120,000 persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left, and much livestock.

And the story ends abruptly. It's the lesson, Jonah. You care more about that plant than you care about these people. Centuries later, Saul, as he contemplated the state of the souls of his own countrymen who had rejected Christ, swore a vow before God saying that he would, that he himself were cursed if it could mean the salvation of his people. Paul cared so much about people that he was willing to surrender his own redemption for their sake. And what God is showing Jonah and showing us is that it is not right to care more about things than about people, to care more about our own comfort than about the redemption of one lost soul. Jonah's story isn't just theological. It's also very personal. It provides us with a crucial lesson in sanctification and humility. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday.

I'm Lee Webb. Thank you for being with us. Dr. Sproul will return with a final word in just a moment. What we just heard was one of five lessons from Dr. Sproul's teaching series on the Old Testament prophet Jonah. For your donation of any amount, you can request the complete series on MP3 CD when you visit our website. That's renewingyourmind.org. Today is the last day for this offer. You can also make your request when you call us at 800-435-4343. And in advance, let me thank you for your generous gift.

Now, here's R.C. again to tell us why Jonah's story is timeless and one that we dare not ignore. The story of Jonah is a lesson not in ancient living, but in contemporary living. Because though I believe Jonah was a real historical person, and there are a host of reasons why I believe that, the New Testament certainly regards him as a real person of history. Our Lord Himself regarded Jonah as a real person from history.

Beyond his uniqueness as a real live individual in a significant way, Jonah is every man. He is all of us who failed to keep the great commandment, to love the Lord his God with all of his might and all of his mind and all of his soul and his neighbor as much as himself. He was not prepared to love his enemies, which commandment is at the very heart of the teaching of Jesus. He could not delight in the salvation of those whom he hated.

He wasn't able to rejoice in the repentance of others and became more concerned for his own comfort than for the eternal rest of human beings. Beloved, that's a powerful message, and it's one I need to hear, and I'm sure it's one we all need to hear. That's our program for today, but we do hope you'll join us again tomorrow. R.C. is going to begin profiling some of those who met our Lord face to face, and through it we're going to learn more about Jesus' character, His authority, and His love for the lost. That's beginning Friday here on Renewing Your Mind. R.C.