But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (Jonah 4:1-4)
Wait a minute! We stood on the beach with Jonah and watched him catch his breath after his big adventure! We watched him strive mightily into the very gates of hell (as Nineveh might as well have been) and announce God’s impending judgment unless the people repent! Sure as shooting, the people and the king repent, donning sackcloth and ashes and seeking God’s mercy.
We look for Jonah after such a mighty revival! Where is he?
There he goes, making his way out of the city, head bowed and his mind filling every second with…joy? No.
Relief? No.
Praise to God? No.
Anger? Yes.
What?
Your mission is accomplished, Big Boy! You were delivered from death; you sang a song of salvation without reservation; you then did as God commanded you. It is a brilliant success beyond your wildest dreams. Instead of now requesting time with the king to elaborate on the details of living for God, you are walking out of town, quickly heading for the “Nineveh City Limits” sign as fast as your sandaled feet can carry you.
In the first chapter of Jonah, we really did not hear his reasons for running away from God’s call. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to get the story started.
But here Jonah now elaborates his reasons in great detail, and we respect his honesty. Funny, even though he can now speak with a great conviction about God’s mercy, he is still angry and afraid. He personally experienced God’s grace and compassion. He saw how God’s anger at his disobedience transformed into love and deliverance. The Lord provided a fish and he stayed there until he saw the error of his ways. He realizes the mightiness of God in saving his life.
But now the thought that Israel’s mighty and merciless neighbor, Assyria, might actually come into the fold of God’s favor, shuts Jonah down.[1] He overcame his fear by walking into Nineveh, but was he still secretly hoping that the people and their leader would reject his message? Did he want to sit on the sidelines and watch Nineveh go POOF! under God’s avenging hand?
Jonah’s fear is still clouding and distorting his judgment. If God is powerful, mighty, loving, and compassionate (as Jonah admits), could anything, including an enemy nation coming into the fold, actually deter God away from His precious Israel?
Let’s look at how Heaven sees repentance. We lose the joy we might otherwise have, when, instead of rejoicing over sinners coming into God’s kingdom, we somehow think that God’s love can be diminished towards us if He is paying attention to others. God’s goal is to bring His wandering children, whoever they are, into His embrace.
Jesus often taught in parables about repentance and how Heaven responds. He talks of a shepherd who leaves his ninety-nine sheep to seek out the one sheep that wandered off, and then calls his friends in to rejoice with him. How does Heaven respond?
"I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” (Luke 15:4-7)
Jesus talks of a woman who turns her house upside down to find a lost coin and then calls her friends in to rejoice with her. Heaven’s response?
“In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” (Luke 15:8-10)
While Jesus is teaching the people with these parables, they are largely aimed at the Pharisees who are muttering about Jesus associating with what they call “sinners.” These leaders resent that Jesus reaches out to the lowly, the dirty, the uneducated, and the outcasts—the very ones that the leaders look down on with such disdain. The behavior of the unwashed masses disgusts them.
It is not just the people’s behavior that Jesus is seeking to change. He wants changed hearts for all of His listeners, including the religious leaders. With changed hearts, people will seek to please God. But the Pharisees lost sight of the heart-change element. The sinful behavior in others led to an ever-growing self-righteousness in them. Consequently, an ever-growing distance between themselves and the masses developed.
Jesus then goes on in this passage from Luke 15 about a prodigal son. He tells how, after squandering everything by his wild ways, this younger son comes back to his father, sincerely repenting and willing to face his father’s chastisement. The father instead throws him a party.
The interesting part is the reaction of the older son. Although obedient to his father, the older son is disgusted by how much attention the father has lavished on this despicable son. He seems to believe that the father’s love couldn’t be expansive enough to love both sons. The father reminds the older son that all the father has is his and that everyone needs to rejoice over the lost son.
The older son, who has grown cold over time towards his father and hasn’t availed himself to his father’s grace, now feels jealous and angry towards his younger brother. He wouldn’t and couldn’t rejoice in his younger sibling’s change.
If we do not feel God’s grace in our lives, we are far less willing to be gracious with others. We grow jealous of God’s expansive love towards others because we are growing cold in our heart towards God.
The Pharisees, because of their cold hearts, shut out God’s grace. Consequently, they are not willing to extend it to others. They may have wondered why God is paying attention to sinners when He should be watching them as they diligently follow His law.
The mission of the Old Testament prophets was to call the people to repentance and restoration. God calls His own first, the children of Israel, but He also calls out to the nations who don’t know Him.
Why has Jonah lost sight of God’s grace so quickly? Even Jonah admits that God’s love is boundless. What’s going on here?
Jesus tells a parable about a king who wants to settle accounts with his servants. He calls forward a servant who owes him a huge debt. The servant begs the king for mercy. The king cancels the debt, and lets the servant go. The servant promptly goes and finds one of his fellow servants who owes him a measly amount. The man is angry and starts to choke his fellow servant. He then has him thrown into prison, ignoring the other’s pleas for mercy and patience. The king finds out and is furious.
He says to the first servant:
Then the master called the servant in. "You wicked servant," he said, "I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?" (Matt. 18:32-33)
Where’s Jonah in all this? He was disobedient to God by ignoring His call. He is swallowed up by the whale and then is mercifully delivered. He is like the servant whose huge debt is forgiven. Why? Because the servant met personally with the king, and likewise, Jonah has a personal relationship with God. He is one of the Chosen People, a man of the nation of Israel. The other servant in the parable did not meet personally with the king; similarly, the people of Nineveh have not yet received the full revelation of the one true God. So, this intimate contact with God makes Jonah, like the servant who is punished severely at the end of the parable, more accountable, and thus in deeper trouble for his disobedience.
The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel says that God does not take delight in the death of wicked people. He would much rather have them repent and live:
Even people who have felt God’s mighty hand of deliverance can slip into such sinful thinking. Why? Because, like the prodigal son’s older brother, they think they are entitled to some kind of special treatment because of how good they have been, compared to others. They see God as having let them down in some way. They then decide to go their own way.
Jonah’s fears are understandable. Your fears are understandable. Don’t allow those fears to pave the way toward sinful reactions. In an odd way, the belly of the whale was a kind of safe place for Jonah. He had no one else to lean on but the Lord Himself. Sometimes in the depths of our suffering, we feel the Lord’s presence in such an intimate way that we are astonished.
Once we find ourselves on shore again, delivered by God’s mighty hand, we forget God’s mercy towards us. We may start remembering the sins of others, the sins against us, and our fear may drive us back into thinking sinful things. Or worse, doing sinful things. We can quickly forget the power of God:
Alienation from God, even if we have been wronged, can lead us to shrivel up, and a root of bitterness will grow around our hearts, leaving us vulnerable to sin. How often do we lose sight of God because we are not seeking to live for Him and then, over time, we have a harder and harder time seeing Him?
When we lose sight of God and His grace, we feel estranged from Him. Then if we see someone else basking in the light of His goodness, we grow angry and murmur about how God has blessed that person and He has left us out. Psalm 43:3-5 shows us the right direction of where to put our energy:
let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy mountain,
to the place where you dwell.
Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God, my joy and my delight.
I will praise you with the lyre,
O God, my God.
Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
God encounters us with the same question that He posed to Jonah: “Have you any right to be angry?”
When He extends His hand graciously, and tells you, “Everything I have is yours,” and your heart responds coldly as you walk away from Him, ask yourself this question: If you feel distant from God, guess who moved?
[1] NIV Study Bible, note on Jonah 4:3
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