by Pastor Glenn Layne

September 29, 2002
This Week's Message:

Fourth Message in the Series
You're Drafted! Jonah and You

Under Cover

Jonah 4

Who belongs in heaven?

I mean really belongs. I was at a wedding recently and I overheard some people talking about a family member who had recently died. "She went straight up to heaven," they said. "No if ands, no maybes. She deserved it."

Who belongs in heaven? Another way of putting it-a little more theologically-is, how is a person made right with God?

We cling to the folk belief that a person is right with God because they are good people. It only seems fair.

If that's the case, the Bible is full of unfairness. Take these Assyrians that God sent Jonah to preach to. Cruel and vicious people. Warlike-7th century BC Klingons. Jonah arrives and tells them that they're gonna be wiped out in 40 days.

But then they repent. They believe the message and change their ways. And God lets them off the hook.

That's unfair. But that's the way God does things.

When you're dealing with the holy ways of God, you don't want what's fair-you don't want justice. Believe me, you want mercy.

And that's what God gave the Ninevites. Mercy.

And Jonah didn't like it one little bit. He was afraid that God would pull a trick like this! His attitude about who belonged in heaven is like that satirically stated by Jonathan Swift (the author of Gullivar's Travels):

"We are God's chosen few,
All others will be damned.
There is no place in heaven for you,
We can't have heaven crammed!"

• A quick start review of Jonah

Let's remind ourselves how this book has gone thus far:

Chapter one: Jonah goes AWOL and God grabs him back through a storm.
Chapter two: He saved by a whale and has a change of heart.
Chapter three: He has a successful preaching campaign in Ninevah. The Ninevites repent and God spares them.
Chapter four: Jonah's last lesson.

• Jonah, Abraham and the mission of Israel

About 1000 years before Jonah's time, God took his ancestor Abraham and gave him a call, a blessing saying that through his offspring, all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

That was the standing orders, the marching papers of the people of Israel.

But so many of them got the message "Jonahfied." They put all the emphasis on being blessed that they forget that they were only being blessed so that they could bless the nations. Israel thought they were the Big Deal. They were not. The Big Deal is worldwide. The Big Deal was never the size of Israel (an area the size of New Jersey!) The Big Deal was never for one little group of people.

• It represents some wrong thinking about the homefront. In American today, a new term has come along that reinforces that mentality: "Homeland Security." We have that impulse that says the "charity begins at home." (I have found that people who say that almost always mean that charity ends at home, too!)
• In my first church, the first time we got a missionary speaker, I called up everybody in the church (it was a little church-it took maybe an hour). One lady almost made me loose my lunch: "Oh pastor, I don't believe in missions. We have to take care of our own people." Our own people? What's that?
• But what does God say?

1. Jesus' word is that the good news has to go out to all the nations
2. "Our people?" The world is a small place these days. Lotsa people, but a small place-the very fact that we have Chinese and Kachin congregations on this campus so clearly demonstrates this.
3. The reality is this: every corner of the globe, the most isolated peoples left in New Guinea or Africa will be reached by one of the 4 Ms: merchants, Marxists, Muslims or missionaries. Who do you want to get there first?

Jonah: one angry prophet (4:1-4)

But now, let's get back to Jonah.

41But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. 2He prayed to the LORD, "O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee 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. 3Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live."

4But the LORD replied, "Have you any right to be angry?"

• Jonah-you've just won the Ninevah bowl-what are you going to do now? "I'm going to sulk like a moody teenage girl."
• Now we get why he fled-not just because he hates Gentiles, but that he always suspected that God might do something nice to them-to the greatest enemy that Israel had ever faced.
• He is so angry over God's grace that he says, "I wanna die!" (v. 3). (And in verse 9 he again says that he wants to die. If I were God, I might have accommodated him!)
• His "problem" here is the character of God:
• "I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. (v. 2b). Oh! Why do you have to be so nice to people I hate!
• You see, Jonah, as a prophet of God, knew the Torah, the law of God. In verse 2, he is quoting almost verbatim God's self-description in Exodus 34:6-7: "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin."
• God is a God of justice, but at the same time, God is almost bursting at the seams with a desire to show compassion, love, forgiveness, in a word, to show His grace.
• D.L. Moody in one of his sermons imagines the disciples after the resurrection in kind of a Jonah-mode. "You say go to everyone? How about the Pharisees?" "Yes, go to the Pharisees." "The priests?" Yes. "How about the centurion-the one who nailed your hands and feet to the cross-the one who plunged a spear into your side right into your heart to make sure that you're dead?" Jesus smiles and says, "Go to the centurion and tell him that there is a nearer way to my heart."
• This grace way is God's way. Jonah knew it and that's why he didn't want to do it. He'd really rather have the Ninevites ground up like hamburger by their enemies.
• "I'd rather die now!"
• And God says: "Are you right to be angry?" The NIV translates, "Do you have any right to be angry?" but the Hebrew is probably better translated, "Are you right to be angry?" Is your anger right Jonah? He just leaves that question hanging.

The Lord: one gracious, persistent God (4:5-9)

• Chapters 1-3 are about Jonah and a storm, Jonah and a fish, and Jonah and a city.
• But Chapter 4 is about Jonah and God. Not mano a mano, but mano a Dios. The lesson learned inside the fish only took him to the point of external obedience-not to the point of real heart transformation. He still wasn't seeing things the way God saw them.
• Instead he goes out and makes his silly little shelter. What a missed opportunity! What if he had remained and taught the Ninevites the whole word of God? The law? The hope of the Messiah?

5Jonah went 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. 6Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. 7But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. 8When 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."

9But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?" "I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die."

Why did he go out to the east side of the city and make this pathetic little shelter? "Maybe if I hide out here, they'll forget their repentance and God will wipe them out, and here I am on the 50 yard line." Maybe. Maybe he didn't know what to do. It's a long, long way back to Israel (about 500 miles-on foot).

The summer temp can be 110F in central Iraq. So he builds a shelter-a kind of lean-to. But it must not have been much. Then God does something interesting and extraordinary. God provided a vibe ("provided"-the same word used of the great fish in chapter one) that grew over his shelter. Oh, now it's like air conditioning! Thank you! I always knew that you cared for me! Yes sir! This is suburban living. It's like I'm living in Rancho Cucamonga!

But do you see how Jonah's values have gotten completely cross-wired? Look at his compassion versus God's compassion (see your message notes):

JONAH'S COMPASSION GOD'S COMPASSION
For a plant For a people
Unconscious life Conscious life
Unsought Sought
Temporary Permanent
Love has no effect on it People transformed by love

• That's our confusion as well: people vs. stuff.
• Do you know what God's heart is? They say that every generation develops a subconscious image of God based on what's going on in society at the time. For example, in an ear of kings, we think of God as a great king. If you live under a tyrant, you tend to think of God as a kind of heavenly tyrant.
• The dominant mode of thinking in the western word is based on technology. And we face a temptation to think of God as a kind of supercomputer at His core, a super-brain processing the management of the universe, receiving prayers, processing sins, sending answers at billions of actions per second.
• But the Bible reveals a very different kind of God. At his core is not a mainframe, but a heart of compassion. Francis Schaeffer used the wonderful term "the Infinite-Personal" God to describe Him. Infinite. Yes. But also and ever personal. The first and original person, who has compassion. Love. Who mourns your sin and rejoices when you repent. A God who weeps and laughs. A God who looks at you with care-who never sees a crowd-but who sees each one in the crowd.
• If our God is a God of love, then what?
• 1 John 4:19-21 says:

19We love because he first loved us. 20If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. 21And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

• One day, there's a vine. But then God provided (same word as "provided" a great fish, "provided" a vine-showing God's sovereignty) a worm to eat the vine. Then to make sure Jonah got the full effect, God sends a scorching east wind, a scirroco (in California we call them the Santa Anna winds).
• I mentioned that the summer temp could be 110F. with a nasty scirroco, that could jump up an additional 20F. This was an extremely dry wind that sucks it all out of you-sort of like our ash-filled week we've had, but much, much worse. Man, that's' hot! That's Palm Springs in August with no pool.
• No wonder Jonah says, "It would be better for me to die than to live."
  
• God asks again-are you right to be so angry? Exactly the same patient question. And Jonah spits out the same immature answer. Personally, I would have thrown him back in the ocean at this point.

The last lesson: the concern of God (10-11)

But God puts up with him. And now the story ends with these words. Just as Jonah opens with the word of the Lord, now it ends with the word of the Lord.

10But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?"

And that's how the book ends.

The abrupt ending…the story is still being written…

It's kind of puzzling.

Stories-like a TV drama for example-always have three parts: tension, reversal and resolution. Tension: a crime's been committed. The CSI team arrives. They dust for prints. They take pictures. They test the walls, the carpet, and the drapes in the room. It's puzzling. There's a body. How did they die? How did the body get here? Did the crime happen here or was the body moved? And what's that mark on the back of their hand?

They investigate. They find a clue that enables them to identify the body. The mark on the hand is a kind of ink that's only used by a certain Las Vegas casino. They get not one but two suspects. The evidence points toward his old business partner.

But then there's a surprise. A reversal. Now we know. A hidden motive is revealed. It was his wife, not the business partner.

And at the end, Gil Grissom walks out of the lab alone after talking about how sad it all was another member of the CSI crew. Gil always ends up alone. That's resolution.

Tension-reversal-resolution.

Only with Jonah, we don't get a resolution.

At the end, Jonah doesn't go back to Israel, have a root beer with the other prophets, and talks about the lessons he's learned.

Don't get me wrong. He must have learned some lessons, or we won't have his book.

But the way the book is written kind of drops the end of the story in our lap.

What's important to you? Shade vines of eternal souls? A house in the suburbs or lost people?

• What we have here is the consistency of God's concern: He will not give up.
• We have the coverage of God's concern: it is worldwide and covers all peoples and nations.
• And only hinted at is the cost of God's concern. That cost is the cross of Jesus.

And now, what will you do with the story?

Will you write the end with a life of obedience-or narrow selfish preoccupation?

How will the story end?

The ball's in your court.

What will you do?

© Copyright 2002, Pastor Glenn Layne, www.templecitybaptist.org