Last week Tim took us through chapter 3.
Here we see the Lord, once again, tell Jonah to go to Nineveh. This time, Jonah
agrees, and he shouts through the city, “40 more days and Nineveh will be
overthrown [or fall].” The Ninevites heed this message, perhaps because Jonah’s
adventure in the fish has preceded him, and perhaps because the Ninevites
worship the god Dagon, half man, half fish. In any case, the Ninevites fast and
wear sackcloth and ashes, traditional signs of mourning, and even the king does
this, making a proclamation for everyone to do this, even to the point of
putting sackcloth on the animals. And this brings us to the last verse of
Chapter 3:
When
God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, He relented and
did not bring on them the destruction He had threatened. – Jonah 3:10
It says here that they “turned.” The word
used for repentance in the Bible means turning. There was genuine repentance
here.
It is interesting to note that from
archaeological evidence from that time period in Assyria, the common practice
when a king was threatened by the “gods” was to appoint a substitute king,
dress him in the kings clothing, and have him sacrificed (killed) to appease
the gods. But this practice really reflected insincerity; it was more about
appeasing the gods than truly repenting. But here, the king himself repented –
no substitutes, no “smoke and mirrors,” no games – it really does appear that
their repentance was genuine. Of course, this is what it basically says in
Jonah 3:10; they truly turned from their evil ways.
A very relevant verse to this discussion is
Jeremiah 18:7-10. God is speaking:
If at
any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and
destroyed, and
if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict
on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another
time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in My sight and does not obey Me, then I will
reconsider the good I had intended to do for it. – Jer. 18:7-10
I think the end of chapter 3 could have
made a good ending for the book. It’s a story filled with surprises: a prophet
who doesn’t obey at first, a wild storm, the great fish, but then the prophet
doing what he is supposed to be doing and a people genuinely repenting of their
sins. Book closed.
But the book isn’t finished; there’s one more chapter. And it’s a doozy. Let’s
look at it:
But
to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord,
“Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried
to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and
compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from
sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it
is better for me to die than to live.” But the Lord replied, “Is it right for
you to be angry?” – Jonah 4:1-4
Wow! Again, we have perhaps read this so
many times that it doesn’t shock us, but to a first-time reader or listener, it
is a shock on a par with any of the greatest surprises in literature. Jonah
actually wasn’t afraid of going to Nineveh because of fearing for his life;
that is, he wasn’t afraid of failing. He was actually afraid of succeeding! He was afraid that the
people actually would repent, and then God would forgive them!
Jonah in his tirade even quotes scripture
back to God – the only other person I can think of offhand who did this was
Satan, to Jesus when He was in the desert. The “slow to anger and abounding in
love” appears in Numbers 14:18, and the whole phrase, including the “gracious
and compassionate” part is in Psalm 103:8 and in Psalm 145:8 (both psalms “of
David”).
Jonah’s reaction is extreme, even asking
God to kill him. Wait – I’m a little confused; in chapter 2, wasn’t Jonah
praising God for saving him, for preventing his death? The reality is that Jonah is having a
full-blown tantrum. It’s almost like one of those “reality” TV shows where you
see adults acting like children and you know it would be better to just turn it
off, but you can’t because you are so amazed at what you are seeing and
hearing. This too is reality that is painful to read.
But for a moment let’s try, just a little,
to get into Jonah’s head, to understand why he is so upset. The Ninevites, and
indeed, the entire Assyrians, were a brutal and evil people. We know from
archaeological evidence that when they took over a new area, they loved to
torture the leaders as well as members of the opposing army. I don’t want to be
too graphic, but they flayed people alive, decorated their temples and palaces
with the heads of the losing leaders, and much more. In some ways they were
almost the opposite of what the Babylonians later did when they conquered; the
Babylonians tried to assimilate the new people. In the account of Daniel, for
example, we see that they took people (including Daniel) into captivity but
gave some of them an education and trained them to be people with important
government jobs. They hoped that by treating people well, the old cultural
traditions and especially the cohesive
identity of each people group would weaken. The goal really was
assimilation, to become a, to use a modern term, “melting pot.” But the
Assyrians instead liked to destroy. They ruled by terror.
Here are some quotes from ancient writings
regarding their practices:
“I destroyed, I demolished, I burned. I took their warriors
prisoner and impaled them on stakes before their cities. …flayed the nobles, as
many as had rebelled, and spread their skins out on the piles [of dead
corpses]… many of the captives I burned in a fire. Many I took alive; from some
I cut off their hands to the write, from other I cut off their noses, ears and
fingers; I put out the eyes of many of the soldiers."
“I slew two hundred and sixty fighting men; I cut off their heads and made
pyramids thereof. I slew one of every two. I built a wall before the great
gates of the city; I flayed the chief men of the rebels, and I covered the wall
with their skins. Some of them were enclosed alive in the bricks of the wall,
some of them were crucified on stakes along the wall; I caused a great
multitude of them to be flayed in my presence, and I covered the wall with
their skins. I gathered together the heads in the form of crowns, and their
pierced bodies in the form of garlands." – Assyrian War Bulletin (around 1000
B.C.)
Earlier in the series I gave the analogy of
a Jew being asked in the 1930s or 1940s to go into Nazi Germany and ask the
leaders to repent, and I think this is a decent analogy. Jonah saw them as the
evil empire, and seeing them being given God’s grace seemed unfair, because
they weren’t receiving any punishment for their many crimes and sins. But God’s
grace is in some sense “unfair” by its very nature, because to be treated as
our sins deserve would mean that we all would be condemned, without hope –
including Jonah, a point that he utterly fails to understand. Let’s continue
with the account:
Jonah had gone out
and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat
in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided
a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease
his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant
so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a
scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint.
He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” –
Jonah 4:5-9a
Again, this is actually painful for me to read. Jonah is
sitting outside of town, waiting for fire and brimstone, or a giant earthquake,
or something. He is waiting for the people to get what he felt they deserved.
While waiting, God caused this plant to grow up and shade Jonah from the heat –
this is desert in Iraq – but the next morning, the plant had withered, and
Jonah no longer had that shade, at least not from his present vantage point. God
was behind this – it says He provided a worm to cut down that plant, and He
also provided a hot wind. Once again, Jonah has a temper tantrum, again saying
he would rather die. Just as with the previous verses, God again asks Jonah a
question, and it is almost the same question. His previous question was “Is it
right for you to be angry?” – referring to Jonah’s anger that the city wasn’t destroyed. Now He again asks, “Is
it right for you to be angry?” – this time referring to Jonah’s anger that a
plant had been destroyed.
I think it is worth pointing out at this point that God,
who knows what is in people’s hearts, who knows what people are capable (and
incapable) of , chose to use Jonah as His prophet on this mission. Could God
have found someone who behaved better, who obeyed the first time around? I have
to think so. But God chose to use Jonah, in part because, even with flawed
Jonah, the people did repent and turn to God, and while doing all this, God was
able to speak to the flaws and sins in Jonah’s life as well as in the lives of
all the people that would go on to read this account.
So, although on one hand it is painful for me to read
Jonah’s tantrums, so much so that I would almost rather read something else, on
the other hand I am encouraged because I know that even with all my flaws, even
with all the ways I fall short of God’s standards for behavior and character,
God can use me too, all the while working on me as He does. This is not meant
to excuse sin – far from it – but I am encouraged by God’s patience, by His
desire to put flawed people “in the game” of reaching out to a lost world, and
by the knowledge that He can use even our flaws to draw people to Him and
advance His kingdom. Let’s read the final verses:
“It is,” he said. “And
I’m so angry I wish I were dead.” But the Lord said, “You have been concerned
about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up
overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city
of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people
who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” –
Jonah 4:9b-11
I’ve lost count of how many times Jonah
wants to die. It’s ironic if you compare Jonah to Elijah; Elijah too once asked
God for death, but Elijah did this because he felt like a failure. Jonah,
however, is asking to die basically because he has succeeded! A whole city has
repented! But Jonah is fixated in his anger, in his pain, in his belief that it
is wrong to allow these people to live, to see them forsake their evil ways and
begin to worship the true God.
God rebukes Jonah with yet another
question. He uses Jonah’s love of the silly plant against him. If you have such
love for a plant, which is just – a plant, how do you think I feel, Jonah, when
I see these multitudes whose sin has been so great that I felt the need to
destroy them, people I love and made in My image? It is a stinging rebuke.
By the way, the phrase “who cannot tell
their right hand from their left” may be a figurative reference to the people
as a whole in the sense that they haven’t really been exposed to the true God;
they don’t know His laws, they haven’t seen His miracles, etc. Some
commentators think it is actually a literal reference to young children, in
which case the total size of the population would have been much larger than
120,000.
If Jonah
had truly had the heart of God, he would have been overjoyed at this mass
repentance, unprecedented in scale. He wouldn’t be waiting outside the town
hoping for fireworks, but he would have stayed in the town, teaching people
more about God. He might have spent the rest of his life in Nineveh; the task
was big enough for 100 Jonah’s, for 1000 Jonah’s, not just one.
How did
Jonah respond to God’s question? This is another shock of the book of Jonah.
There were multiple places earlier in the book where it seemed like a good
stopping point; after Jonah’s being saved and his prayer in Chapter 2, and
after the city repented in Chapter 3, for example. But instead, the book ends
here, on God’s question. This kind of thing just wasn’t done!
As a
result, we don’t know how Jonah responded, but we are invited to think about
our own response. On one hand, I don’t think anyone here is quite as messed up
as Jonah, wishing for their enemies, real or imagined, to die and spend
eternity in hell. But we can be indifferent to what is going on all around us.
Do we really have God’s heart for the lost? Do we understand God’s pain in
seeing those He loves, those He created, not turn to Him for salvation? Or do
we care more about our “broken plants,” whatever they are? We may not get angry
with God or go into tantrums like Jonah,
but do we reject God’s still small voice calling us to be salt and light
and reveal God’s love to the lost around us?
Do we
really understand our salvation? On
multiple occasions in this series I mentioned that there are gigantic ironies
in this story of Jonah. Really in this story there are three groups of people:
the sailors, the Ninevites, and Jonah. By the end of the story, the sailors are
happy and filled with awe and godly fear at the true God. They are entering
into relationships with Him, as best as they can with their limited knowledge,
making vows and offerings to Him. And the same is true of the Ninevites – they
have truly repented of their sins and are eager to worship this God of grace.
But the one man who has had all of the education, all of the exposure, who has
repeatedly heard God’s voice, is miserable, angry at God, wanting to die. How
can this be?
Jonah
doesn’t get that he is a miserable sinner just like the sailors, just like the
Ninevites. He doesn’t get what it says in Romans 3:
As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become
worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” – Rom. 3:10-12
Even as
believers, we can fall into a bit of Jonah’s thinking. When we see families out
in public whose kids are horribly behaved. When we hear of or meet people
addicted to drugs, or unable to hold a job, or who have previously served time
in jail or prison, or whose every other sentence includes swearing, or who live
immorally with regards to the opposite sex (or the same sex), or, or, or… These
people are sinners, yes, absolutely. But God still loves them and desperately
wants them to turn to Him. Just like He loves us and desperately wanted us to
turn to Him, and still wants us to do so.
Let us not
be like the good son in the story of the prodigal son. Let us not be like the
man who prays boastfully, thankful that he is not like the wicked sinners. Let
us not be like the leaders who refused to help the robbed and beaten-up man
that was finally helped by a Samaritan. Let us not be like the Pharisees who
thought all their law-keeping made them righteous. Let us not be even the
tiniest hint like this!
Finally, let me return to the comparisons I made in the first
message between Jonah and Jesus. Jesus referred to His own death and
resurrection in veiled terms as the “sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matt. 12:39)
and said He is a greater-than-Jonah (Matt. 12:41). “Greater-than” doesn’t even
begin to do justice to the comparison. Jonah was ultra-picky about who he
shared his message to; Jesus actually sought out the riff-raff, the prostitutes
and tax-collectors, the Samaritans, the demon-possessed, and so on. Jonah
wanted God to punish the evil sinners; Jesus offered salvation through His
voluntary sacrifice of Himself on the cross. Jonah was petulant and angry when
the Ninevites repented; Jesus – and indeed all of heaven – rejoices when even
one sinner comes in faith to salvation. And in a great irony, sin-ridden,
disobedient, immature Jonah had near-universal success in that just about
everyone he came in contact with repented and turned to God; Jesus, who was
without sin, who was God Himself, only had a handful of true converts, and most
of the people He spoke to not only refused to repent, but at the end wanted to
see Him crucified!
But we don’t come
here today to worship Jonah – perish the thought – we come to worship Jesus,
the author and perfecter of our faith. For the joy set before Him He endured
the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of
God. We now remember Him as He instructed us, with the
bread and the cup, remembering that His body was broken for us, that His blood was spilled for us. We are like the Ninevites, recipients of God’s grace. We do
not deserve salvation; but by faith we receive it, worshiping our Savior,
Jesus. Let us remember Him and worship Him now.
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