Jonah and the Great Evil (An Exposition of Jonah 4:1-11) Introduction You might think that if you

saw a miracle, it would change your life. Did that work for Jonah? Not so much. If miracles lead too changed lives, then Jonah chapter four presents us with a problem, doesn't it? Jonah had been right in the middle of at least three (3) miracles through the first three chapters of the book the ceasing of the great storm, the great fish & the great revival in Nineveh of all places! Yet when we come to Jonah chapter four, not only do we not see a transformed Jonah, he seems to have regressed. His wonderful Psalm of praise for the salvation of the LORD from the belly of the great fish in chapter two is a distant memory. Jonah is not only not repentant, but he is angry enough to die! And he's not just exceedingly angry he is angry with God! Just like chapter one tells us three (3) times that Jonah was fleeing away from the presence of the LORD (v.3 [2X], 10), so here in chapter four no less than three (3) times we are told that Jonah so angry that he wanted to die! What was Jonah's problem? He just could not make sense out of what God was doing. He saw God's mercy on Nineveh as evil. God did not fit in the box that Jonah had created for Him in his mind. He did not know how to make heads or tails out of what he saw the LORD do in Nineveh. God's great mercy and compassion for the people of Nineveh seemed to Jonah to be contrary to His mercy and compassion toward Israel. First, Nineveh's repentance put Israel to shame. Israel in Jonah's day knew nothing like the repentance and revival of Nineveh. If anything, the spiritual conditions in Israel were the exact opposite. Why had God not visited his own people with such revival? But to do that in the wicked city of Nineveh?!? Not only that, but if Nineveh were destroyed, Israel would probably be safe; if Nineveh (the capital of Assyria) were spared, Israel would be in grave danger. And that is exactly what happened - in 722 BC, Assyria would conquer Israel and take its people into captivity. Jonah's Pity Party (v.1-4) Back in chapter one the LORD told Jonah that He was sending him to the great city of Nineveh to call out against it because their evil has come up before Me (v.2). Now in Jonah 4:1 we see that God's mercy on Nineveh was a great evil in the eyes of Jonah! Verse one says, But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. A more literal translation would actually be, And it was evil to Jonah a great evil, and he was angry. The same word for evil is used in both Jonah 1:2 & 4:1. Jonah saw God's mercy upon Nineveh as an absolute disaster he thought of it as not just evil, but a great evil! This verse just might be the most difficult verse to come to grips with in the entire book of Jonah. Jonah was angry with God. In fact, that is an understatement to say the least. The Hebrew word for anger here literally means to be kindled or to burn. And, as Jonah chapter four tells us at least three (3) times, he was angry enough to want to die!1 This same prophet who experienced the amazing grace and mercy of the LORD back in the belly of the great fish in chapter two, the same runaway, castaway prophet of the LORD whose life was spared despite his sin and disobedience, was now burning with anger at the very same LORD whom He had been praising in chapter two!
1 See v.3, 8 & 9.

Have you ever been angry with God? Have you ever lashed out at the Lord in prayer? Maybe when something didn't work out the way you hoped it would or thought it should. Expectations can be a dangerous thing. Unspoken and unfulfilled expectations can be the source of many an argument in a marriage, family or other relationships. Sometimes those are unjustified or unrealistic expectations. That was the case for Jonah here. In the same way we sometimes have expectations of God that He does not comply with for us, don't we? This happens when we impose our expectations or ideas upon our relationship with God apart from His Word. Sometimes we have false expectations that come from a twisted view of what our heavenly Father promises us in Scripture. Certainly that is what was happening with Jonah here. He could not square what he was seeing in Nineveh (or maybe what he was NOT seeing its destruction!) with what He thought God should do. He was an unwilling evangelist who had the strangest reaction to success ever in all the history of preaching or prophesying! God used him in a mighty way, but Jonah was angry about it! Why was Jonah angry that the LORD who showed mercy on him also showed mercy upon Nineveh? First (as God Himself even stated!), they were an evil people. They were not Jews, but worshiped false pagan deities and idols. Not only that, but they were exceedingly wicked and violent. And they were the capital city of Assyria, the #1 threat to Israel at the time. Jonah almost certainly knew that God sparing Nineveh meant destruction for Israel down the road. That took place in 722 BC. To Jonah, the destruction of Nineveh would have not only been to see an enemy of the LORD's people judged and destroyed, but also would have represented the deliverance of Israel from judgment at their hands. In a very real sense, mercy for Nineveh meant judgment for Israel. You can probably see why this would be a big problem for Jonah! So the LORD asks his angry prophet a question. He says, Do you do well to be angry? Another way of saying it would be, Do you have a right to be angry? or Are you right to be angry? It is a rhetorical question, isn't it? To ask the question is to imply the answer an emphatic No! Jonah is not right to be angry, certainly not angry with the LORD! And Jonah is angry enough to die! Jonah's Pity for the Plant (v.5-8) The next thing we see is Jonah leaving the city of Nineveh. He has had about all he can take of that place. He wants nothing more to do with these people, even though they are repenting and turning from their pagan ways to the one true and living God Jonah's God! Three times in this verse Nineveh is just described as the city - it is as if Jonah could not even stand the sound of its name! He left the city, sat down to the east of the city, and made a booth to sit under so that he might observe what happened in the city (v.5). What exactly was he hoping to see? It seems pretty obvious from the text here in chapter four that Jonah was hoping against hope that just as God relented from sending disaster upon the city of Nineveh before, so now Jonah hoped that He might relent again and go ahead and destroy the city! He was hoping for a sequel to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:23-29). The same Hebrew word was used of both the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (overthrow - hapak in Genesis 19:29) and the threatened destruction or overthrow of Nineveh back in Jonah 3:4. Both were threatened with hapak (destruction), but the LORD relented and showed mercy upon Nineveh.

So what happens next? 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 (v.6). All of a sudden things are coming up roses (or gourds or palm trees) whatever this plant was, it was large enough to give Jonah shade from the heat of the day. It is as if God were saying, Are you comfy now? It certainly seemed to make this grumpy prophet perk up, didn't it? The play on words in the Hebrew is hard to bring across in English. The word for discomfort here is the same word translated as evil elsewhere in the book. So it literally could be translated that God 'delivered him from his evil.' What was Jonah's reaction? Huge mood swing, right? He went from telling his God that he wanted to die to 'rejoicing with a great rejoicing!' He was practically throwing a party! God finally seemed to be seeing things his way, right? Jonah seemed to take the plant as a sign that God was finally going to meet his expectations & destroy the city after all, He was making sure that Jonah had a comfortable seat to view what was going to happen in the city, right? Not so much. Just as God appointed the plant, now He also appointed a worm to destroy the plant (v.7)! (Ironic, since that is not the first worm that the LORD appointed in this book, is it?) Notice the wording here the worm attacked the plant! It is nothing less than a miniature horticultural picture of judgment, isn't it? God was doing to that plant what Jonah wished He would do to Nineveh! But wait, there's more! God didn't stop there at the crack of dawn He not only sent the worm, but He also sent a wind! Notice again that He appointed it! This was no accident or coincidence God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint (v.8). The word used for the sun 'beating down' on Jonah's head is the same word used of the worm's actions against the plant the sun attacked or smote Jonah! What was Jonah's reaction? It was so bad that he wanted to die . . .again! It seemed like all of nature itself was being turned against Jonah (again)! Not only was God showing mercy upon Nineveh, but now He seemed to be turning against Jonah! Jonah burned with anger back in v.1. Now he's burning up in the heat of the desert wind (v.8)! And once again he's ready to die. He says that it would be better for him to die than to live (v.8)! How many of us are just like Jonah? When things are going well, then we're sure that God loves us. More than that, we are sure that we must be doing something right! In other words, it looks like God must approve of whatever it is that we are doing, right? But is that true? Is that the right way to look at things? Does that mean that when we don't think things are going our way, that they must not be going the right way? Does that mean that God is doing something wrong? Does that mean that God is against us? That is clearly how Jonah felt and (if we are honest), that is how we feel sometimes too, isn't it? God's Pity for the Lost (v.9-11) Once again God asks Jonah a question - Do you do well to be angry for the plant? (v.9). And this time Jonah actually tries to assert that he was right (and God was wrong)! He says, Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die (v.9). He is actually arguing with the LORD! How merciful is God, that He bears with Jonah!

The LORD answered Jonah's claim. He 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 Nineveh, 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? (v.10-11). Was Jonah the first environmentalist? After all, he cared far more about the plant than he did the people of Nineveh (or even the cattle)! He was so upset about the plant's fate that he wanted to die! Look at God's description of the Ninevites in v.11. He says, And should I not pity Nineveh, 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? Is there a more descriptive picture of the lost than that? They are so clueless spiritually that they don't seem to know which hand is which! How do we often look at the lost, especially the really down and out or even the really well-todo who don't know the Lord? Do we look at their sinful lifestyles, how they are living in darkness and pat ourselves on the back for not being like them? Do we despise them or look down on them? I think we sometimes do. And we do that to our shame. It shows that we are very much like Jonah and not enough like our Lord. But how does God look upon them? With pity. With compassion. And we should too. It is to our shame if we do not. Racism, nationalistic prejudice, cultural or societal or even moral snobbery has no place in the life of a believer. After all, if we have our acts together and know the Lord, why is that? Is that because we are smarter, better or more deserving than those who do not? Absolutely not! If you are here this morning and are a believer in Jesus Christ, it is for one reason and one reason alone the sovereign mercy and grace of God in Jesus Christ! Conclusion Jonah clearly wanted those 120,000 people and their cattle to be destroyed. He was angry enough to want to die himself when he saw that they were spared. But he became extremely upset when the plant died, didn't he? How could Jonah care more about a plant than he did about all of the people in Nineveh? What did the plant represent to Jonah? What did it provide for him? Comfort. So we must ask ourselves a question: Are we more concerned with having God's blessings to ourselves than we are for others to share in those blessings? Another way of saying that is to ask, do we care more about our material comforts than we do about the lost and perishing around us? The answer to that question can be found in our prayers, our schedules and our checkbooks. What do we pray about more? What do we spend our time doing? What do we spend our money on? If we are honest, many of us must answer that at some level we are a lot like Jonah we are far more concerned with our own comfort than we are the fate of the lost. Another way of saying that is to say that I care more about myself than I do about others. Maybe God removes our comforts at times (just like He did with Jonah), in order to reveal this to us. And when He does this it is really a mercy of sorts, isn't it? He does it to show us that we may not care much for the condition of the lost, but He does! God takes pity on the lost far more than we realize! Just look at the lengths He went to save us in His Son, Jesus Christ!

And we can be thankful that He still has mercy on us when we stray. Just look at God's steadfast love and mercy toward Jonah. Jonah thought that the only thing that Nineveh deserved was God's wrath. And in the sense of what they deserved, he was right. We read the story and think that Jonah himself deserves nothing but God's wrath. And we'd be right in thinking that. But that is not what Nineveh or Jonah receive from God is it? We all deserve God's wrath for our sins, don't we? Aren't you glad that in Jesus Christ, God continues to show mercy and steadfast love to His people. As Psalm 103 tells us, the LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He does not always chide, nor will He keep His anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities (v.8-10). Why not? Because as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His love toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us (v.11-12). What does that mean? It means quite literally that in Jesus Christ you can't even begin to imagine how much God loves you. It means that in Jesus Christ you can't even begin to imagine how far He has removed your transgressions from you! You can't even imagine how forgiven you really are through faith in Jesus Christ! Do you believe that? Do you live as if you really believe that? That is what will cause you to worship, witness and serve the way you know you should. He who is forgiven much loves much (Luke 7:47)! And in Jesus Christ, by faith in Him, we have been forgiven much! And we have been forgiven more completely than we can even begin to comprehend! The angels in heaven rejoice over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:10). May we learn to rejoice at God's mercy and compassion to the lost as well. May we have mercy and compassion on the lost all around us more than we care for our own comfort. And may we do all of this to the glory of the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.