Jonah 4:4-11
Amen. Turn in your Bibles to
the Book of Jonah. Tonight will be our final study
in the Book of Jonah. We’ll be reading verses 4 of
chapter 4 through verse 11. I think I told you all the last
couple of weeks I have no idea what’s ahead, but I think I may
have an idea. I’m usually not this far behind. The Heidelberg Catechism in some
Reformed denominations is Typically the Sunday night sermons, you
may have experienced that before, and I’m tempted, I’m thinking
about going through the 52 Lord’s Days. That’s something I’m thinking
about, but also I’m kind of partial to Old Testament books on our
Sunday night series. So if you have found your way
to Jonah chapter four, follow along with me, if you will, beginning
at verse four. It says this. And the Lord said
to Jonah, you do well to be angry. Jonah went out of the city and
sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there.
He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would
become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a
plant. and made it come up over Jonah that it might be a shade
over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was
exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came upon
the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that
it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed
a scorching east wind and the sun beat down on the head of
Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die
and said, it is better for me to die than to live. But God
said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And
he said, yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die. And the Lord said, you pity the
plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which
came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should
not I pity none of us? that great city in which there
are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand
from their left and also much cattle. Amen. The word of the
living God. You have to ask the question
as you come to the end of Jonah, uh, was all of this worth it? Was all of this worth it? Because
after all this book, This message, I think, ends up being all about
Jonah. Was all of this worth it? The
ship, the sea, the tempest, the loss of the boat’s tackle, the
loss of the ship’s cargo, the loss of, well, the loss of wits. Was all of this worth it to teach
Jonah a lesson? The fish, The trip to Nineveh
and all the rest. Was all of this worth it, you
ask? It was a fool’s errand to send a man to a foreign city,
a hated city, and to expect him to preach the gospel of God. Was all of this worth it? And
I think you have to answer yes. Well, you better answer yes.
because it’s in God’s word and this is the way it is. But I
want us to think as we wrap up our study of Jonah, I want us
to think of this. God will go to great lengths
to sanctify you. And you think of the great lengths
to which he went to sanctify Jonah. This story is not necessarily
about Nineveh. It’s not necessarily about the
sailors. It’s about a little man from
an obscure northern kingdom of an obscure little country in
an obscure part of the world with this with this God who loves a people
relentlessly. And you think about how God has
shaped your life. Think about how God has step
by step, day by day, put shaping influences in your life, problems,
issues, preaching, churches, ministry, podcast, table talk,
study Bibles, maybe cancer cells, maybe death and hardship. He’s
put all of these things in your path to sanctify you. Well, was all of this really
worth it? You ask. I think if you look at it from
that perspective, the answer is yes. Uh, no profit, no preacher
would have taken Jonah’s call. Uh, I’ve, I’ve in close to 20
years ministry, 20 years being out of seminary looked at Tons
of churches, tons of opportunities. Is this the right place to go?
Is this the right place for me and my family? You look at all
the circumstances and very few times do you come up with the
answer, yes. God Taylor makes calls for a man and that’s the
thing that Jonah missed. Jonah missed this call was not
about Nineveh, this call was not about 40 days and perhaps
God will relent if they would repent. This was really about
Jonah. Will you leave a small and comfortable
northern kingdom and go to Metro Nineveh, a hated people, and
preach the good news? This would be a little like leaving
Burlington for New York City. Size, geography. But this would
really be like going to our sworn enemies. I mean, think about
it. It’s March Madness, basketball,
craze. You think Durham and Chapel Hill.
Couldn’t be two more opposing enemies there. What does Duke
Blue have to do in Chapel Hill and vice versa? It would be that
much hatred, that much vile hatred of one another. And 150 years,
very interesting to think, 150 years, not from now, but from
the time of Jonah, Assyria is going to come and exile this
Northern kingdom and they’re going to do it viciously. They’re
going to do it criminally. They’re going to, they’re going
to make, they’re going to make war crimes. when they come into
the land of promise and take them away. But it is God who
gives assignments, it is God who is a God of love and mercy,
and it is God who chooses the objects of his affection and
his grace. And it is our task, it was Jonah’s
task, it is our task today to freely offer the gospel with
compassion and love of God to those who are sinners, even to
our sworn enemies. Think of Israel. Their job was
to be a light to the nations, not a scourge to the nations,
not a hate to the nations, not a scoffing to the nations, but
it is their job to pray and preach and proclaim the good news of
God, even to sworn enemies. So was all this worth it? Yes,
it was for Jonah. But was all this worth it? In
just 100 plus years, Nahum is going to write the epitaph of
Assyria. Well, at least a generation,
maybe two generations came to know the Lord. Well, a couple
things to think about before we dig into this. Jonah hates
sinners in the hands of a merciful God. That’s clear to us. He says,
in fact, I’d rather die I’d rather die, die at sea, or die in the
hands of enemies than to preach to these people. Now think about
Israel for a moment. There’s a little parallel here.
There’s Jonah, his hatred of foreign nations. He’d rather
die than them get saved. But there’s Israel, the nation.
They continually reject Yahweh. And they don’t want their grace
to extend beyond the boundaries of Israel. My dad served a church
one time and he said of this church, the kingdom does not
go past the front door of this congregation. They believe that
everything that happened in the world of Christendom took place
in their little building, on their little city block. And
you would bring up things like, well, let’s give to missions.
Let’s give some of our surplus to this place or that. Oh no,
we need to fix the front doors. Oh no, we need to change out
the carpet. And you know, you got to keep your building up
and all the rest. But his comment was very interesting. This church
believes nothing goes beyond these front doors as the kingdom
of almighty God. And so we’ve got to be careful
not to be like Jonah hating centers in the hands of a merciful God,
or to be a church like Israel who thought it all happens here.
It all takes place within our our boundaries. Well, I want
us to, I want us to think about the end of Jonah here in a couple
ways. The first way is God loves the Ninevites. Uh, that’s plain
to us, isn’t it? God loves the Ninevites as he
should remember God’s mandate, his creation mandate to Adam.
It was to be fruitful and it was to multiply and it was to
fill the earth, not only with babies, but to fill the earth
with generations who would love and fear God. Now that was the
same admonition, the same challenge he gave to Noah. God destroyed
the whole earth with a flood, even all the people except Noah’s
family. They’re in the ark for a year, they’re floating around,
they’re landing one day after a whole year and a month or so,
and they get out of the boat. And what does God say? Be fruitful,
multiply, fill the earth, the same command, have babies, and
spread the righteousness of God across the face of the earth.
Well, remember after Adam and Eve, what happened? Well, sin
and Cain and Abel and all that craziness that brought us to
the flood. Well, what happens after the
time of Noah? Well, very shortly after there’s
the tower of Babel. Let’s build a city. Let’s not
spread across the earth. Let’s make a city and make a
name for ourselves. And the culmination of our city
will be a tower rising to the heavens. We’ll make a way for
ourselves to get to God. Well, God loves the Ninevites
as he should. It’s in his heart. It’s in his mission. This mission
is nothing new. See it in Adam. We see it in
Noah, see it in Jesus at the great commission. And so he sends
a prophet with a word. Now, if you are sitting in your
lifetime, yes now, but if you’re sitting in your lifetime within
the sound of the ministry of the word of God, how privileged
you are. We read in history of generations,
we read in history of regions, we read in history of eras where
there was a famine of the word of God. In fact, we misuse this
passage But this is what that proverb means, without a vision,
the people perish. There is no ministry of the word,
there’s death. There’s death, there’s everlasting
death. So God sends a prophet with a
word and it’s their task to listen up. It’s their task to seek the
Lord while he may be found and to call upon him while he is
near. I wonder what America will do
in generations to come when there’ll be few churches. And there’ll
be few preachers. And when life begins to fall
apart, we think inflation is bad. We think wartime is bad. We think being a near socialist
country is terrible. Wait till we’re more godless
than we are. And what I mean by that is more
godless than we are is there will be a day in America where
there will be church buildings standing, but no one preaching.
No one gathering will be like the cathedrals of Europe that
are turned into nightclubs and mosque and all other manner of
uses. But God gave a prophet and a
message and a warning to Nineveh. He gave them eyes and ears. He
gave them repentance. He gave them faith. He gave them
salvation. He saved a city. He saved a culture. He saved a region. And it’s one
less Sodom and Gomorrah. and the history books of God’s
work of redemptive history. And why did he do this? Why did
he love the Ninevites? Did he want to save them? Of
course he did. He did it. But he did it to show
Jonah what God is like. He did it as an object lesson
to show to Jonah, to show to us that what God loves, what
God values and who God will save. We sang earlier that hymn, How
Sweet and Awful is the Place. How sweet and awesome is the
place? And I love that phrase in there. It’s a very humbling
phrase. Lord, why was I a guest? We have to think of God’s love
for us and ask, why did he save me? Why did he save us? So God loves the Ninevites. God also loves Jonah. We find
Jonah sitting in the scorching heat. We see him searing in the
sun. We see him catch this. He is
watching and waiting. He is counting down 35, 36, 37,
38, 39 and 40. And on day 40, what does
he want to see? He wants to see the hellfire
and the brimstone come from heaven as it did at Sodom and Gomorrah.
And he wants to see the earth eat up and swallow Nineveh. He hates these people. He’s crossing
off the days from his calendar until he should see them die. But a miracle plant comes along
and he changes his tune, old happy day, little shade, some
kind of canker plant, some kind of oil plant, tea leaf plant.
It grows quickly and it has these great big leaves. We have a tree
beside our house. a persimmon tree or something
like that and has these huge leaves. And when you get under
it in the summer, sun does not get through. So that probably
drops things by 10, 10 degrees. And so this miracle plant pops
up and it grows and God loves this unrepentant prophet. Now,
why do I say unrepentant? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?
His lesson in the fish, his lesson in the sea, his lesson in his
journey, his walk to Nineveh has not changed his heart. He’s
doing what he’s doing because he must. He’s like the child
who scuffs his feet along the way, doing what mama says, not
right away, not all the way, not in a happy way, but he’s
doing it because there’s no other choice. And Jonah here has turned
watching Nineveh’s downfall into a spectator sport. Now, that’s
a pretty sick position to be in. Now, I’ll admit, my family
was all gathered in a hotel room in Virginia a couple years ago.
And we caught wind that Wofford, Wofford, was beating Carolina. So we turned it on and we watched.
Oh, we loved it. They’re getting beat by Wofford.
Yesterday, we heard Baylor’s coming back on them. I mean,
y’all, y’all get it. We hate Carolina in our house.
Um, we were, we were, we were Baylor bears fans yesterday.
It didn’t, didn’t work out, but that’s basketball. That’s basketball. We cannot hate people. We cannot hate Vladimir Putin
or Saddam Hussein. We cannot hate the Stalins. We
cannot hate the wicked evil things. And we’re zeroed in on one place. There’s wickedness all over the
world, even in our own nation today taking place. We’re zeroed
in on one place, but we cannot turn the doom of others into
a spectator sport. Because we have to remember,
but for the grace of God, there would we be also. And so God
loves Jonah, the spectator of doom and gloom. He loves Jonah,
this nationalist pro-Israel idolater. He loves this self-pitying narcissist. That’s what he is. We’re seeing
him at the end of this book, wallowing in self-pity. Wouldn’t
you expect after a call to ministry, a guy to go and be happy to save
sinners? And wouldn’t you expect after
this failed call, he gets rescued by a fish from the bottom of
the sea where he saw the roots of the mountains. Wouldn’t you
expect this guy to turn it around and go preach with a little gusto? No, still not. Wouldn’t you expect
this guy to make the several hundred mile trek to Nineveh
and to walk across that ancient and great and wicked city preaching
a simple message and seeing people turn to Jesus? Wouldn’t you expect
him to be a changed man? No, he’s sitting under a weed. He’s sitting under a weed, counting
down the days until they meet their doom. He is a self-pitying,
self-loathing narcissist, and yet God loves him. Does that
not comfort you? In your weakest moments, in your
darkest days, God is still at work in your life. And you’re
wallowing, you’re navel-gazing, we say. God is still at work
in your life. Jonah, Jonah gives a strong and
conscious effort to his disobedience. I mean, he had to buy a ship’s
fare. He had to pack a bag. He had to make plans to go to
the Strait of Gibraltar to this Tarshish place. He has a strong
conscience disobedience, and he has a small, petty, and very
naive, if you even want to call it repentance at all. And God
is still at work in him. He is still using him here in
a mighty way. He saw God relent from disaster. And somehow, some way, he sees
no reason to fear this great God. Jonah’s in a bad spot. He’s in a terrible spot. Do you
do well to be angry? That’s the beginning of our study
here. And God’s gonna ask it again at the end. Do you do well
to be angry? Well, yes, I do. and I would rather die. But God
nevertheless loves Jonah. A third way to look at this passage,
third thing to see, God loves Nineveh, God loves Jonah. God
so loves the world. We think sometimes in our good
old Armenian-American culture that it means God loves everybody. We’re all of a sudden universalists
somehow. That’s not what that passage means. God loves people
who hate him. God loves people who are against
him. God loves people who have set themselves up like the Ninevites,
who have set themselves up like the Babylites. He so loves people
who have set up their altars, set up their egos, set up their
world systems. And those systems are against
God. And nevertheless, God comes in and says, I love you with
an everlasting love. And I preach my son, Jesus, to
you. I send preachers. I send mercy.
I send grace. I send my church. I send missionaries. That’s how much God loves the
world. He sends his own son and he sent
us into the world. He’s given us the great commission.
This Jesus who’s loved us is the same Jesus who sends us into
the world. And so we’re to preach the sovereign
God. Remember, Jonah’s not always
wrong. He’s mostly wrong, but he’s not
always wrong. Remember what he said at the end of the chapter,
salvation is of the Lord. And our sovereign God, our sovereign
creator, our sovereign redeemer, so loves the world that he keeps
his church alive. You think of this church, 57
years, 57 years. I know what this church means
to many of you. Are we thankful? Are we thankful for this place,
these people, this ministry? Are we thankful for our denomination?
Are we thankful for the gospel? This sovereign God who sovereignly
oversees our little place, He sent the storm, the wind, the
tempest, the fish. He arranged for the dry land.
He brought up this plant. He put the worm in it that ate
it. And he is the God who blesses us. He’s the savior of sinner. He grants faith and he turns
lives around. God so loves Nineveh. He so loves
Jonah. He so loves the world. But the
final thing I want us to think about, God so loves you. Maybe
you’re seeing a little Jonah in you. You’ve got neighbors
that annoy you. And so you say, well, they’re
just Catholics. Or you’ve got neighbors that
really annoy you. Well, they’re Hindus, or they’re
Muslims, or they’re just pagans. And so we, like Jonah, we write
them off. Well, God doesn’t love them. They don’t wanna hear my
gospel. I’ll go to my people, I’ll go
to my tribe and we can be self-centered naval gazers if we’re not careful. We can think the world revolves
around us. God’s worm has eaten your canker
tree and your shade is gone and you’re angry, you’re mad at the
world. Why is it that other people prosper and I don’t? Why is it
that age has stricken me differently than others? Why is it somebody
who’s 10 years older than me is stronger than me? Why do they
get to have a baby and I don’t? Why have their teenagers rebelled
and not rebelled and mine have? Those sorts of things. We can
become uncomfortable not just with our neighbors, but with
our children, our church members, our family, our loved ones. But God so loves you and he is
at work in you. He’s battling perhaps maybe in
your mind and your heart like he was here with Jonah. You’ve
lost your senses. You’ve lost your love. You’ve
lost your mind in a sense to the things of almighty God. You’ve
lost your tree. You’ve lost your shade. You spend
your days grumbling and counting down to the days till everybody
else gets theirs. And that’s who God can love.
He can love you. You know, God could have left
us in our sin. He could have left us in our trespasses. He
could have said, son, stay in heaven. These people are not
worth a mission. Stay in heaven. Enjoy the riches
of glory. And in due time, we’ll open up
the pit of hell and they’ll all just fall in. But that’s not
what he did. And so we must think we must
consider the compassion of almighty God. And does our heart beat
the same way to the lost? Does our heart beat the same
way at church with fellow church members? Is it, is this a me
first sort of scenario? Is this me under my canker tree? Me under my, me under my little
piece of shade. God is a gracious God and he
is at work. Is it, is it all worth it? Some
of you are older than others of us and you see how God has
worked in your life and you see the hardships maybe like Jonah
has been through and you say, oh, it’s indeed worth it. It’s
the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Painful at the time, but
I look back and wouldn’t have it any other way. But we thank
the Lord that God is sovereign. And I say this very seriously
when I’ve mentioned it in our prayers. And when I say it now,
God has tailor made your way. He’s tailor-made your provision,
your needs, your setting in life, your spouse, your children, your
money. He’s tailor-made your skills, your abilities, your
weaknesses, your strengths. He’s tailor-made every aspect
of your life. Don’t go kicking at him like
Jonah, but be thankful and happy and blessed that Almighty God
has been pleased to come into your life. Make it easy for him
to be your father, in a sense. Let’s look to him in prayer.
Our God, we thank you that Jonah teaches us a lesson about submitting
wholly to you. It’s not up to us who gets saved,
but it is up to us to do your calling, your bidding in this
world. So help us to have a right, cheerful, and happy attitude
about the things you’ve put before us to do. We ask your help and
blessing and pray it in Jesus’ name, amen.