In our last post, we went halfway through the recorded story of Jonah, where he finally cries out to God from within the fish’s belly, and declares, “I will sacrifice unto the thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord.”(2:9) Jonah is now willing to go to Nineveh, so God commands the fish to “vomit out Jonah upon the dry land,” and it obeys. Then God gives the command again to Jonah to go to Nineveh, and preach the message that He will give him once he arrives. Jonah finally heeds the will of God, and travels to Nineveh. Upon arriving, God gives one message for Jonah to declare: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Pretty simple, relatively speaking. Now, Nineveh was such a large city that it took 3 days just to walk across it. Jonah travels into the midst of the city (a day’s journey) and cried out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Jonah didn’t have to walk all over the city and declare in on every street corner. As far as I can tell, he said it one time. Then the wicked people of Nineveh believed God, started to repent, fast and turned away from the evil that they did. When God saw this, He chose to withhold His judgement on them. Amazing right?! God saw their repentant hearts and forgave them instantly.
Now here’s the part in the story that I never noticed before, and it actually made me gasp. Here’s where we see Jonah’s true heart issue, and why he ran from obeying God’s command in the first place.
In response to God sparing Nineveh, Jonah 4:1-2 states, “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And prayed unto the Lord, and said, ‘I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of evil.”
Did you hear what he just said? Jonah says that he ran from God because he knew that God was merciful, slow to anger, and kind, and would potentially withhold harm.
Now he wanted all of those things for himself when he disobeyed God and found himself in the belly of a fish, but he did not want God to be merciful to the people of Nineveh.
He wanted them to be wiped out. He had heard, and possibly seen the harm and terror that this great city had brought on so many surrounding countries, and he had no compassion for them.
Up until this point in the story, I thought that Jonah was running from God’s will out of fear for his life when facing the people of Nineveh, and perhaps Jonah had some fear, but he never mentions it. Instead, he admits that he ran, because he didn’t want God to be merciful...to the people of Nineveh. Take into consideration that this was before the storm on the ship, being swallowed by a fish, and God mercifully sparing his life. Surely he should be more compassionate and understanding after experiencing God’s mercy toward himself in so many ways. But was he? No. He becomes angry, and asked God to kill him, because it would be better for him to die than live if the people of Nineveh are spared. It seems as if Jonah is throwing a fit in an attempt to get God to change His mind and still destroy the people of Nineveh. Why do I think that this is the reason? Because Jonah leaves the presence of God, storms out of the city….and goes home? No, he goes outside the city limits at a safe distance, and makes himself a booth of sorts to sit under and look over the city of Nineveh to see what will happen to it. He’s hoping that God will still destroy the city, and built himself a seat to watch it happen.
Now we are going to see God do a miracle. In one night, God “prepared” a gourd plant to sprout and grow up over Jonah’s head which provided him shade. Jonah was overjoyed because of this gourd that brought him relief from the sun for 1 day. Then that night, God “prepared’ a worm to eat the plant, and he also “prepared” a strong east wind the next morning, which caused the sun to beat down on Jonah’s head, and he grieved because of his discomfort. Then God scolds Jonah and the selfishness of his heart. Jonah mourned over a plant that was there for one day and gone the next, but he didn’t want God to grieve over the 120, 000 lost souls in the city of Nineveh, and give them a chance to repent. The End.
That is where the story of Jonah ends. Did Jonah repent himself? Did he continue in his selfishness? Did God ever call upon Jonah again to carry out His will? We don’t know, and clearly that is not what God wanted us to learn from this story. So, what does God want us to learn from what we know?
God seeks after the heart of His people, no matter the cost. All throughout this story, we see how God “prepared” events and situations in Jonah’s life to give him opportunities to see and evaluate his own heart.
Sometimes God will give us simple blessings in life, and then allows them to be taken away so that we can see what we truly treasure in this life. Do we treasure conveniences and comforts, and then complain the moment they are gone, but then we have a serious apathy toward the lost souls that God has placed in our lives to share the truth of the gospel with?
God wants us to see lost nations and individual people with the same compassion that He sees them with.
As once wayward people ourselves, who were forgiven by the grace of God, we should have the most compassion on those who are still lost in their sin and have not yet experience the grace of God in their lives. May we hold the things of this world loosely, and gain an eternal vision for what God says has true value.
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