We're grateful to the Lord for this lovely
day, this lovely morning in which to meet
again in his sanctuary.
And we turn this morning to the concluding
study in the book of the prophet Jonah.
I don't know how eager you are to
get away from Jonah.
Some are loath to come to him.
But we have learned quite a number of
lessons as we have pondered over these three
chapters to date.
And I trust that as we come to
the last chapter, we shall again find that
the Lord has really something to say to
us here.
You might find it useful, therefore, if you
keep the book open in front of you,
because I'm going to be referring to the
text as we work our way through.
Angry with God, angry and angry with God.
That's our subject.
That the events recorded in this chapter should
ever have taken place points, I believe, to
the dark mystery of iniquity in the life
of this man who was a prophet of
God, and evidently a man who was a
good man, but a man who at this
point in his life is certainly sinking to
a new low of rebellion.
That God should nevertheless have seen fit to
pursue the prophet and to deal with him
even in the face of this most serious
spiritual lapse is a matter of great joy
and thanksgiving to all of us who ponder
these things seriously.
That God should go after this sulking, soured
man, this prophet gone wrong, and not let
him go.
Just as he brought him up from the
depths of the sea in chapter one, so
now he brings him up from the depths
of despair and out of the clutches of
a death wish in chapter four, and brings
him back and renews him again spiritually this,
I say, is a matter of great grace.
So that the mystery of iniquity is countered
in this chapter by the ministry of the
Almighty and the ministry of God to his
servant is effective in delivering him out of
the bondage of his iniquity.
Now let's look then first of all at
the mystery of iniquity and then we'll turn
to the ministry of the Almighty.
The mystery of Jonah's iniquity, beginning with verse
10 and going on to chapter four and
verse three.
Put in a nutshell, the chapter first unfolds
the imponderable mystery that a man believed what
Jonah believed, who had experienced what Jonah had
already experienced, who had been privileged to be
the mouthpiece of God in a movement of
his spirit that was going to turn a
whole city of the dimensions of Nineveh in
penitence to God, that a man of this
background and of this experience should find it
in his heart to be angry at his
God to the point that he wants to
bully the Almighty to dance to his tune
and even to blackmail the Almighty that if
he doesn't, it'll be a very bad day
for him.
This, I repeat, is a mystery before us,
the mystery, the sheer mystery of iniquity.
It is a mystery of a miraculously delivered
rebel, a graciously pardoned and subsequently honored man
of God now turned sour and sulking and
yet I'm very much aware as I say
that that it may well be that some
of us are in that condition this morning.
It is very rare to preach the word
of God and to expound it but that
there is someone in the house of the
Lord who's sulking and churlish and sour with
God.
And in your spirit there is a spleen.
I trust and pray most sincerely that if
there is anyone here this morning in that
spirit that you will find this word of
God through the prophet Jonah in chapter four
like a shaft from the throne casting light
across your way and that it will win
you back as certainly to a place in
the heart and in the mind and in
the purpose of God as it brought Jonah
there.
Now let's look first of all at the
cause of Jonah's anger.
Verse 10 in chapter three.
When God saw that what they did, that
is the Ninevites, how they turned from their
evil way, God repented of the evil which
he had said he would do to them
and he did not do it.
God had threatened imminent judgment, judgment in 40
days.
He never even said that he would not
judge them if they repented.
But the message via the prophet Jonah was
this, in 40 days Nineveh is to be
judged.
Now the prophet Jeremiah very clearly enunciates certain
principles that always underlie God's threats and God's
promises.
The context may not always refer to them
but the prophet tells us that there are
certain principles which are always operative when God
threatens or when God promises.
Let's read it.
Read this passage, it's found in Jeremiah chapter
18 verses seven to 10.
I'll read it from the RSV.
If at any time I declare, says God,
if I declare concerning a nation or a
kingdom that I will pluck up and break
down and destroy it, and if that nation
concerning which I have spoken turns from its
evil, I will repent of the evil that
I intended to do to it.
And then, and if at any time I
declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that
I will build up and plant it, and
if it does evil in my sight, not
listening to my voice, then I will repent
of the good which I have intended to
do it.
Put in our current terminology, all God's threats
and promises are morally conditioned.
You break the rules, you transgress the moral
principles involved, and if God has made promise
to you as parents bringing their children to
baptism, you transgress the law, you break your
oaths and your promises, then says the Lord,
I am free.
There is no good in it.
Or on the other hand, if I have
promised judgment to you and you repent and
you cease to be rebellious, then I will
forget about my threat of judgment and I
will come to you in mercy.
That's what the prophet Jeremiah says.
It's a principle written into the word of
God, whether you find it in different places
or not, it is there, says the prophet.
Now, in the case of the arrogant and
grossly perverse Ninevites, God had threatened to meet
their uncheckered sin with imminent judgment, judgment in
40 days.
But you remember what happened.
Jonah went not simply as the herald of
the message, but he went, as Jesus tells
us in Luke 11, 30, as a sign.
This implies that Nineveh knew something of what
had happened to Jonah.
He was a sign to them.
A sign of what?
A sign of the power of God, saving
him from the belly of the fish, saving
him from the depths of the Mediterranean, and
a sign not only of the power of
God, but of the grace of God.
And this man goes himself a message, his
very existence a sign.
He goes and he declares to Nineveh, 40
days and Nineveh will be destroyed.
You can imagine the Ninevites listening, knowing evidently
what they knew about Jonah.
Jonah's God is the living God.
He was first angry with his prophet, and
he would not let him run away and
get away with it, run away from duty.
He pursued him, but he was in charge
of the deeps.
He was the Lord who could provide the
great fish.
He was the Lord who delivered him again,
and he was the Lord who had mercy
upon him.
This God is a God, the kind of
which we've never heard before.
Our gods of idols and idols don't come
up to this.
And in the marvel of God's grace, the
people of the utterly rampantly pagan city of
Nineveh repented.
Everybody was pleased, except Jonah.
We read in verse one, but it displeased
Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.
Now look at the complaint which Jonah expressed
in what is supposed to be his prayer
to God.
Some prayers, you know, are only prayers in
name.
They're not prayers in content, and they're never
prayers in spirit.
Only in name, we call them prayers, but
they're nothing of the kind.
Here is a prayer that was never a
prayer.
And he prayed to the Lord and said,
I pray thee, Lord, but listen what he
does.
Is not this, it's an argument.
He's throwing things back into the teeth of
God.
Is not this what I said when I
was yet in my country?
That is why I made haste to flee
the Tarshish, for I knew that thou art
a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger
and abounding in steadfast love, and repentant of
evil.
The angered prophet now explains the reasons for
his initial rebellion and refusal to be the
herald of God's judgment upon the pagan city
of Nineveh.
It was not that he disagreed with God's
anger against Nineveh.
No, no, no, far from it.
He thought that Nineveh should have been judged
a long time ago.
And he would have been perfectly happy to
announce judgment upon Nineveh if we rightly judge
from his spirit and attitude.
But what grieved Jonah and inspired his attempted
flight to Tarshish was the fear, no, the
deep conviction that God is slow to anger.
And if the people of Nineveh will show
any signs of a change of heart, that
God would repent and not judge them.
And Jonah felt that that would not be
playing true to him.
He was angry.
Now, why should he be angry?
Let's try and enlarge upon this for a
moment because I think it is important to
the whole picture.
Why should Jonah be angry that God would
not carry out his threat upon Nineveh?
Why should he be angry that God should
show mercy toward Nineveh?
Many reasons have been suggested.
I want to choose two of which I
believe two of the most important and the
most worthy perhaps.
The first possible explanation is related to what
we may call Jonah's exclusive nationalism.
Now, Jonah was rightly, rightly aware of the
greatness, of the uniqueness of his Jewish heritage.
He knew the history of the nation.
He knew that God had called Abraham.
He knew that God had made promises through
Abraham.
And he was aware of the privilege that
was his as a member of that nation.
But he became very nationalistic.
And he saw, or at least he thought
he saw, that in the light of God's
calling to Abraham and to the nation through
Abraham and to successive generations of Abram's children,
he thought that he could see that God's
purposes were exclusively for this community.
And he excluded everybody else from the mercy
of the God of Abraham.
And he shut everybody else out.
And what made the thing, what made the
spirit more tragic, of course, was this that
Jonah owed so much to the mercy of
God.
Jonah was not only a creature being sustained
by God, but he's been miraculously saved from
death by God.
And he's been honored again by God in
being called the second time to be his
prophet.
But this exclusivism has got into his bones.
And he can't possibly imagine God having mercy
on the Ninevites when the Assyrians, of which
Nineveh was the capital city, when the Assyrians
at that very moment were such a menace
to Israel.
Now, before you judge him too harshly, let's
be very careful because, you know, this iniquitous
weed can too easily grow in your heart
and mine.
I'm not so sure, but that all of
us at some time or another have resented
God showing mercy to people that we didn't
like.
Sometimes it's been people of a different color
skin.
Sometimes it's been people from another segment of
society.
Sometimes it's been people who are culturally not
our cup of tea.
And sometimes in particular, and I think these
folk feel more or less justified, but God
should have mercy upon people who have made
war or are meaning to make war against
our nation.
Touches a raw spot.
Oh, let him have mercy upon other people,
but such and such a nation is a
menace to us.
Our very existence is at stake.
How can God have mercy upon these people?
As the Ninevites were a threat to Israel
at that time.
You have it in the New Testament, of
course.
You have this spirit.
It was a sheer mystery that shook the
very foundation of the early church that God
should have mercy upon a Saul of Tarsus.
Now Saul was the arch persecutor of the
Christian church.
And he had massive intellectual powers as well
as means of morally persuading people.
He was a gigantic mind and had a
big heart and was willing to spend and
be spent for his cause.
Even as a Jew, he was a Pharisee
before he became a Christian.
That God should have mercy upon the arch
persecutor of the Christian church was a staggering
moment in the experience of the early church.
How can it be?
You remember, there was no one in Jerusalem
willing to have fellowship with Saul when he
came there first.
I'm wrong, there was one.
It's one of the saddest chapters in the
whole history of the Christian church.
Saul comes to Jerusalem and all the saints
are giving him a cold shoulder and they're
keeping away from him.
He's the persecutor, you see.
Well, what's he doing here?
Is he going to pray in the name
of Jesus?
Is it genuine?
Can we trust him?
There was one man, Barnabas, who put his
arms around him and called him brother Saul.
No, no, this spirit didn't die with Jonah
and it hasn't expressed itself only in Jonah.
There can be an exclusivism in your heart
and mine this morning as rabid and as
awkward and as wrong in the sight of
God as ever appeared in Jonah here.
But it was wrong in Jonah and it
is wrong in me and wrong in you,
wherever it appears.
There's a second reason.
The second probable reason, and there may be
two, of course.
These two may have to go together.
There was the fear of his own reputation
as a prophet.
Now, this was not without some basis to
it.
You see, in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter
18 and verse 22, we read these words.
When a prophet speaks in the name of
the Lord, if the word does not come
to pass or come true, that is a
word which the Lord has not spoken.
The prophet has spoken it presumptuously.
You need not be afraid of him.
And that's Deuteronomy 18 and verse 22.
So evidently, you see, Jonah thought like this.
If I'm going to announce judgment to Nineveh
and to say that it's coming in 40
days and it doesn't come in 40 days,
well, then the people are going to brand
me as a false prophet and so here
I am.
My good name is gone.
My character is lost in the day.
You say that's very reasonable.
Well, now hang on for a moment, will
you?
Hang on for a moment.
Who is Jonah?
What has God done for Jonah?
What does Jonah know about the power of
God?
Anything?
Of course he does.
Rarely did a man, a human being, know
the power and the grace of God to
take care of him as Jonah did.
Jonah was thrown into the depths of the
Mediterranean and he describes himself swimming down the
bottom of the seas with a seaweed around
his neck, God cared for him.
God sent a fish to bring him up
and he kept him in the belly of
the big fish for three days and three
nights and then delivered him safely on land
and then God called him back into his
service again and God made him his mouthpiece
in Nineveh and he saw a movement of
the Spirit of God, the kind of which
few people ever see in a lifetime.
Can't I trust a God like that with
my reputation?
See, that's the point.
Now again, don't let's be too hasty in
judging Jonah though we have to do it
here but you see the point is, can
you trust your reputation in the hand of
God to do something that is rather difficult?
I find that when it comes to a
matter of sheer consecration, there are many people
who are prepared to put their bodies, even
their businesses, even their homes and their children
in the hand of God who keep their
reputation in their own hands.
Listen my friend, if you want to be
a servant of the most high God in
very truth, there comes a point when you
have to put your reputation, your supposedly good
name into his keeping and let him look
after it and if he can bring you
up from the depths of the sea and
send his large fish, he can look after
your good name, he will vindicate you in
good time, never mind what men think.
I would never be in the ministry if
I didn't believe this but it was taught
me in my very early Christian days.
My father in God was charged with an
immoral wrong and everybody talked about him and
he wouldn't open his mouth until the day
came when God stepped in.
God stepped in and when God steps in,
the man is cleared, the man is clean
and if God knows he's clean, then that's
the only thing that matters but it's a
very humbling thing for those who dishonor and
disrespect the servant of God and have a
share in castigating his name and they don't
understand what's going on.
The point is you see that Jonah has
gone through all these experiences without learning to
trust his God.
You and I can do exactly the same
thing.
We can go through all the experiences of
life not seeing God, not recognizing what he's
doing for us and though there are miracles
that have happened in our lives, we're forgetful
of them and the climax of Jonah's prayer
is terribly sad at this point.
We read in verse three, therefore now, O
Lord, take my life from me.
I beseech thee for it is better for
me to die than to live.
In his prayer in the waters of the
Mediterranean and in the belly of the great
fish, Jonah's concern had been to live.
Now he prays to die.
In the former prayer, he spoke of offering
a sacrifice to God with a song and
of unfailingly honoring the vow that he had
made when he was in the deep but
here he's forgotten all about his vows.
Here he's sulking, he's rebellious, he's gone totally
wrong.
Frankly, brothers and sisters, if you were God,
I know I shouldn't talk like this really,
forgive me, will you?
If you were God, if you stood, if
you sat on the throne of the universe
and your people were more godly and more
honoring of you when they're in trouble than
when they are honored, what would you do?
Wouldn't you keep the kettle boiling?
Wouldn't you keep them on the edge of
a volcano?
Wouldn't you keep them awake, worrying about this
and about that if worry brings them more
into your arms and more to your feet?
Let me tell you, one of the things
that is breaking in upon my soul these
days is this, it's the mystery of the
fact that we have so many days and
nights and weeks and months and years that
are free of trouble because when we are
free of trouble, the tragedy is we all
too easily forget our God but when trouble
comes, when the storm comes, when we're in
the depths of the ocean, all we cry
to God but not afterwards.
See, it all shows the marvel of God's
mercy.
We've sung it, we've sung these words, the
love of God is broader than the measures
of man's mind and the heart of the
eternal is most wonderfully kind that he has
grace toward us even when we forget his
most gracious dealings toward us but here we
have the mystery of iniquity.
Now let's turn to the other side, the
ministry of the Almighty from verses four to
the end of the chapter.
The rest of the chapter then deals with
a gracious ministry of God in order to
deal with the problem of his sulking servant.
Do not miss the point that the grace
of God is such.
He will not let Jonah go yet.
He will no more leave Jonah in the
bonds of iniquity than he would leave him
in the belly of the fish.
Now don't miss that.
You can get so involved with the fish
that you miss the other things in this
great book.
God would not leave him in his sulks
any more than God would leave him in
the sea.
God personally ministers to his sullen servant in
order to bring him out of this dark
and dismal spirit of his and renew him
again.
Oh, our God is a wonderful God.
Since there ought to be worship ascending from
our every heart this morning just because of
this portrait of God, our God is a
wonderful God.
Now there are five movements in the drama
of this ministry of the Almighty to the
weary, wobbly prophet Jonah.
I shan't have time to enlarge upon them,
but I want you to see them.
First of all, there's a probing question in
verse four.
The Lord said to Jonah, do you do
well to be angry?
Isn't the Lord merciful?
Oh, I'm repeating, but I mean to repeat.
Why not slap the man across the mouth
and tell him to shut up?
It's the Lord of all creation talking to
this sulky, soured man.
And God comes reasonably to him and says,
Jonah, come and let us reason together.
You do well to be angry.
Is it a good thing?
The Hebrew can be translated in two different
ways.
Are you very angry or are you right
to be angry?
And I believe that it's the second that
takes the emphasis.
Is this anger of yours rational and moral
and proper?
Taking that as our key, we may well
need to stress something else here.
God is asking, I believe, with the emphasis
on the personal pronoun you.
Do you, Jonah, do well to be angry?
No one has the right to be angry
with God.
And it is a sin for us so
to be anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances, but
for Jonah especially.
Jonah, with his experience, Jonah, where he's been
and where God has brought him out from,
Jonah, the servant of the Lord, honored despite
his sin, that Jonah should be angry.
I say, it's almost unbelievable.
Whilst Nineveh is rejoicing in the mercy of
God, and the angels of God are rejoicing
over every one sinner that repents, here is
this prophet of the Lord, sulking and sour.
I say, that's sin, isn't it?
The question struck home with Jonah.
And the response was this, silence.
Has God ever made you silent?
Has he ever got you before his throne
and you've really been stunned to silence?
But now, wait a moment.
I want you to see that beyond Jonah's
silence, there was action that spoke louder than
words, which means that he hasn't changed his
attitude.
I read in verse five, then Jonah went
out of the city and sat to the
east of the city and made a booth
for himself there.
What for, Jonah?
Listen, he sat under it in the shade
till he should see what had become or
became of the city.
Now notice what we've got here.
It makes a sad picture.
This tragic man moving outside the city and
going to a lookout post, as it were,
to see if God really would hear his
objection.
And rather than have mercy upon Nineveh, if
God would still change his mind because Jonah
wasn't willing, and send his judgments of fire
upon the Ninevites.
The next thing I want you to notice
in the way God deals with him is
God's gracious provision.
Now, he takes him in hand and deals
very gently with him at first.
Verse six, the Lord God appointed a plant
and he made it come up over Jonah
that it might be a shade over his
head to save him from his discomfort.
So Jonah was exceeding glad.
Jonah's changing his mood for a moment.
He was glad because of the plant or
the gourd.
Now, get the point.
Following his probing question comes God's gracious provision.
God would assure the soured, angry man that
he, that is God, still cared for him.
Cared for him despite his continued sin as
he cares for you and for me this
morning.
And he first meets Jonah's anger by more
kindness to Jonah.
We are told in the book of Romans
to overcome evil with good and to overcome
hatred with love.
God is one who acts like that and
the more awkward Jonah gets, God will do
him another favor and he causes this plant
to grow.
Look at it.
Over and above the booth that Jonah had
made for himself, God caused this plant to
grow.
Now, I call it a plant.
The KJV, I think, calls it the gourd.
The NIV speaks of it as a vine.
Well now, it was probably the racinus plant
as it is called or the castor oil
plant.
A rapid growing plant with huge broad leaves
springing up in a couple of hours with
huge leaves that could shelter you even from
a storm of rain as well as from
the sunny blast.
The same God who prepared a fish to
save Jonah when he was in the water
now prepared a gourd to save him under
the sun.
And Jonah's spirit for a moment brightened.
Now moved to the next phase of the
drama, an unwelcome action.
Jonah didn't like this.
Verses 7 and 8.
But when dawn came next day, God appointed
a worm.
See, our God is sovereign.
The God who appointed the whale appoints a
worm.
Doesn't always need a whale, a big fish
to deal with us.
Sometimes a little worm will do.
And God is the Lord of the worms.
God appointed a worm which attacked the plant
so that it withered.
When the sun rose, God appointed a sultry
east wind and the sun beat upon 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.
Poor, poor Jonah.
Now though the rapidly developed plant or gourd
had assured Jonah of God's continued care and
of his infinite capacity to provide, there in
the blazing sun outside of Nineveh as back
in the waters of the Mediterranean, God now
had a further lesson to teach him.
And God goes on.
He moves.
So the Lord who prepared the plant prepared
the worm.
And the worm began to do its work
for God.
And the plant began to wilt and to
wither.
And Jonah saw it.
And it was becoming hotter and hotter.
And as the plant withered, Jonah began to
wither.
And physically he's becoming exhausted, almost at the
point of death.
And angry.
And so we come to the fourth movement
here.
God repeats his question.
I found that one of the marvelous things
about God is the way, the timing of
his questions as much as the way he
asks them.
And you have that right here too.
I have no time to enlarge upon it
this morning, but the timing as well as
the content.
God said to Jonah, Do you do well
to be angry for the plant?
And he said, I do well to be
angry.
Angry enough to die.
I am angry and I'm rightly angry.
And you can't find fault with me for
being angry.
I am angry enough to die.
But now don't miss this.
However vehemently Jonah would try to justify himself
before God, Jonah's anger was unwholesome and his
whole attitude irrational.
It was not wholly due either to an
altruistic love of Israel, nor to a justifiable
fear of his own reputation.
His anger was widespread and deep and sinful.
Now let me bring that up.
When God asked Jonah in verse 4, Do
you do well to be angry?
It was in connection with God having mercy
on Nineveh.
When God asks the same question with a
little addition in verse 9, you notice it
is with reference to something quite different.
He asks him now in verse 9, Do
you do well to be angry on account
of the gourd or the plant?
Aha!
So God sees that the occasion of Jonah's
anger now is not simply that God is
having mercy on Nineveh, but God has taken
away one of the most important things in
his comfort.
God had given him this gourd and he
was a little comfortable in his lookout post
when he was waiting to see if God
would change his mind and bow to his
prejudice.
Now God takes the gourd away and Jonah
is unhappy and angry with God because God
has taken his comfort away.
Brothers and sisters, I'm afraid I tremble when
I talk about this.
I don't know what's coming our way economically.
I don't know what's going to happen in
our society.
I don't know how well you and I
are going to have it over the next
10 years if we live.
I wonder how many of us will get
angry with God if we lose the standard
of living that we now have.
The way I find people dancing and shouting
and getting angry and cross to maintain their
standard of living, it makes me wonder what
some of the supposed saints of God will
say to him if they can't have three,
four cars and a few other things.
Do your comforts mean so much to you
that when they're taken away, you had nothing
to do in the provision of them, not
in the maintenance of them, but if God
takes them away, you get angry with the
Almighty?
And God have mercy on us.
We're in a bad way.
We need grace and we need repentance.
God is aware of a man's dishonesty.
You see, look at the illogicality of this.
I'm sorry I have no time to go
into it, but look at this.
He's wanting to die, he says.
It's better for me to die than to
live.
But he's grumbling because of a little discomfort.
Poor old John, how illogical you can be.
He's grumbling because he hasn't got shelter.
And yet he says, I want to die.
No, you don't want to die.
You want to bully the Almighty and blackmail
him by threats.
But do what you want him to do.
Now God comes and the fifth movement, the
fifth part in this whole drama is God
applies the whole lesson to himself.
He's been in charge of everything that has
taken place.
Now he's going to wrap it up and
he's going to apply the lesson with one
massive, masterly stroke of ministry.
Look at verses 10 and 11.
And the Lord said to Jonah, You pity
the plant for which you did not labor,
nor did you make it grow, which came
into being in the night and perished in
the night.
And should not I pity Nineveh, that great
city in which there are more than 120
,000 persons who have not known, sorry, who
do not know their right hand from their
left and also much cattle.
Answering Jonah's attempt to justify his anger and
his death wish, God comes to him and
says, Jonah, I want you to recognize that
your sense of values are topsy-turvy.
You think more of your own comfort than
of the salvation of 120,000 in Nineveh.
Could that be said of some of us?
Now let me repeat it like this.
God turns to this attitude that he's showing,
that Jonah is showing.
God turns to address it and he turns
the whole attitude of Jonah to good account.
He says something like this, Are you angry,
Jonah, that the good should have been destroyed?
Why should you show such concern about this
insignificant plant?
It grows in the day and it withers
in the night.
And you didn't do anything to cause it
to grow and you didn't do anything to
maintain it.
Why, why are you so angry?
Oh, says Jonah, but it comforted me.
It kept me from the heat and it
made me comfortable.
That's exactly what God wanted to hear because
he is really condemning himself with his words
that his comforts should be taken away.
And he was a sinner and a rebel
at that.
Now says God, okay, you're a sinner, you're
a rebel and you grumble when your comforts
are taken away.
Nineveh is a sinful place.
Cannot I and have I not the right
to be angry that you want me to
deny them the comforts of my mercy?
Have I not the right to do what
I please with my creatures?
The good sprang up in the night and
is gone in the night.
Here are men and women and boys and
girls made after my image.
A whole city of them.
Pagans, it is true.
Ungodly, it is true, just like you, Noah.
Jonah, haven't I got the right to be
angry that you, my prophet, should object to
the mercy that I'm showing towards my own
creatures made after my image, however sinful they
may be?
Glaring at Jonah throughout all this is the
fact that whatever has happened to him to
date, however deep the plow has gone in
dealing with him, it's not gone deep enough.
Oh, I'm not suggesting that the repentance of
chapter 2, going into the end of chapter
1 and chapter 2, I'm not suggesting that
Jonah was not genuine.
He was genuine as far as he went.
I'm not suggesting that his consecration was not
genuine.
It was genuine as far as he went.
But what I want to say is this.
He didn't go far enough.
In fact, there are more deaths to die
than Jonah had realized.
It is no wonder that Paul said, I
die daily.
There are some Christians who believe that they
can escape with one death, one crisis of
death to self, and it's all over and
done with, and it's just joy and whistle
from there on.
Brothers and sisters, that's not biblical religion.
I die daily, says the apostle.
And what God is showing Jonah is this,
that the death of two chapters back has
to be repeated right here.
He's got to die to his own self
-will.
He's got to die to a concern about
his comfort and his reputation, and he's got
to put himself into the hand of God
and just trust the Almighty and obey.
It's a difficult lesson to learn, but it's
important.
But God won, and I've got to close
with this.
The ministry of the Almighty more than matched
the mystery of iniquity in the prophet's foul
heart.
You say to me now, now, preacher, hang
on.
How do you know that?
Where does it say that?
Where does it say that Jonah's spirit changed?
Where does it say that he was renewed?
I can't read it, can't you?
Hands up, those of you who can't see
it.
As one man over here is holding on
another there.
Well, I'm surprised at you.
Put your spectacles on.
Do you think that Jonah would have written
this book if he had not repented of
his sulks and been renewed in his spirit?
Let me put it to you in the
form of a question.
If you had rebelled like Jonah, and if
you had spoken to God like this, and
if you had been angry with God not
once but twice, and if God had pricked
your bubble and disclosed your heart to yourself
and humbled you, would you then, short of
the grace of God, write all the details
down for future generations to read it and
to be warned?
Would you?
No, you wouldn't, my friend.
You would not.
The very fact that we have this book
of Jonah written in all its details means
this.
Jonah found grace.
God overcame.
The man was revived and renewed again.
The ministry of God was greater than the
mastery of sin.
Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound,
and Jonah comes out of the doldrums.
We're not told more about him, but I
suggest to you that the very fact that
he was prepared to write down these gruesome
details about all his sin for subsequent generations
to read means that he's more concerned now
to glorify the grace of God than to
look after his own reputation.
And if you don't believe me, you try
it.
Write out your sins of this last week
and give it to me, and I will
read it from the pulpit of Knox next
Lord's Day, and I'll see if there's anybody
here who's got enough grace for that.
I don't think so.
If there is, it is somebody whom God
so wrought upon that he's a new creature,
he's out of the doldrums, and he's being
honest with God, and he's concerned only with
the glory of God and the good of
people.
No, I don't invite you to do that
writing.
I'm not serious.
But we close with this.
My friends, it's all so easy for us
to sit in judgment upon this dear man.
I feel very guilty when I call attention
to the sins of saints.
But you see, God has put this on
record because he wants us to learn from
these things.
How's your spirit today?
What are you angry about?
Don't be dishonest with God.
Be open.
Confess your sins.
Acknowledge your wrongs.
Tell him that you're all twisted up inside
if you are.
And bosom your cares at his feet.
He's more merciful than you ever dreamt.
And let him pardon your transgressions and renew
your spirit.
And the God of Jonah will prove himself
faithful again in a 20th century setting.
Let us pray.
Oh, Lord our God, we thank you for
this new day.
Not just because the sun is shining.
This is pleasant to us in the flesh.
But because you are the God of today.
And you are the unchanging God of Jonah.
You're alive today.
And your power is not shorn nor lost.
And your grace has not vanished or evaporated.
But you're a God of grace today.
So that we can be open with you
and honest with you and confess our sins
before you and find that our sins are
never too great for you to deal with.
Oh, Lord have mercy upon us.
And teach us your ways.
For Jesus' sake.
Amen.