“The Jonah Complex”

Jonah 4:1-11

Well I hope you’ve enjoyed our little socially distanced summers cruise with Jonah.  We’ve gone from the waters off the coast of Joppa to the bottom of the sea in the belly of a fish, and we took a 3 day tour of the ancient city of Nineveh, one of the wonders of the world of its day, and finally ended up on a hillside outside the city of Nineveh, modern day Northern Iraq.

Personally, I’m a little disappointed having to come back to dock again, but that’s where we are with this part of our story today.  Last week we left Jonah sitting on a hillside east of Nineveh…and he’s angry. He has now preached God’s message to the Assyrian people that Jonah hated because he was a Jew and they were not.  Basically, it was a prejudice deeply imbedded in Jonah, and really all Jewish people.  Like we still today talk about Nazi Germany as the epitome of evil.

Now before we leave this too quickly let’s think again where Jonah was.  He was angry…he was resentful that an entire city of pagan, idolatrous people had turned to God in repentance.  Lest we think that would never happen to us, let’s imagine a scenario.

For some of us, had something drastic happened last week during the DNC…speaker after speaker took the platform and began to repent and turn from their sins…revival happened!  For some of us, we might have a problem because it happened at the DNC!  Or what if something similar happened next week at during the RNC.

God forgave them upon their genuine repentance as they turned to God as their Creator and judge.  In 2 Chronicles 6:32-33 Solomon prayed “As for the foreigner who does not belong to Your people Israel…when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from Heaven, Your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of You, so that all the peoples of the earth may know Your Name and fear You.” Jonah would have known this promise.  And now he’s seeing it come to pass before his eyes!

With just 48 verses, this is an incredible and God-inspired account we are reading about.  While we’ve talked about Jonah a lot, this is really a story about God:  not a prophet, not a whale, and not a revival in a city.  The fish gets mentioned four times; Jonah 19 times but God is mentioned 38 times!   It is a portrayal of God as “gracious, and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”

But it’s also a lesson to Israel to show them Who He was and what He expected them to be.  They were rebellious and resistant to God’s call to be “a blessing to all the nations of the earth” and “a kingdom of priests and kings.”  They wanted to enjoy the privilege of God’s call without the pain of responsibility.  Just like us!  They didn’t want to have to love people they didn’t like!  Jonah’s story was a real-life object lesson for all of Israel and revealed their resistance to doing His will.

But the Book of Jonah also reveals characteristics of God that we sometimes struggle with and don’t understand.  Let me mention three.

God’s Mercy and Jonah’s Resentment. (Jonah 4:1-5)

Jonah experienced what many today experience.  He struggled with reconciling how God could be just, and righteous, and holy and, at the same time, forgive the unrighteous who, clearly in Jonah’s opinion, more than deserved God’s burning wrath.  He didn’t like the “change of plans” that God pulled off, because it crashed into Jonah’s neat and simplistic view of God that some of us entertain:  God loves good people and punishes bad ones.

This view is flawed on several levels, but the most obvious one is this:  Good people compared to who?  “Would God send an innocent person to hell?” Absolutely not!  The problem with that statement, though, is that there are no innocent people.  We usually compare ourselves with other people and then create a sliding scale of good vs bad.  “Well, I’m better than that person, but not as good as her.”  But God stands us up next to His perfect righteousness as the standard.  How’s that working for you now?  “All have sinned…”  There is no righteous person.  No innocent person.  Not even one.

It took the death of Jesus on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin.  Religion can’t do that.  Promising to try harder won’t do it.  Only trusting in what Jesus did for you at the cross can bring you the righteousness you need.

And only the cross can explain how God can reconcile His own holiness, and righteousness and justice and still forgive our sins.

God’s Plan and Jonah’s Resistance. (Jonah 4:6-7)

Let’s remember again a theme that runs throughout Jonah: The theme of obedience.  “To obey is better than sacrifice,” we read in 1 Samuel.  Every element of nature and every person introduced in the Book of Jonah obeyed God unquestionably.  But not Jonah.  The wind and sea obeyed as a storm came.  The pagan sailors on the boat obeyed and the last time we see them they are praying to Jonah’s God offering sacrifices of thanksgiving to Him.  The fish obeyed; worst assignment in the story:   The fish and the worm may have argued about who had the worst job:  The fish might say, “I had to have that ugly, bitter little prophet kicking and shouting inside of me for three days and three nights!”  It is debatable which was more relieved, and who wanted Jonah out of the fish more: Jonah or the fish!  But then a little worm had to eat a castor oil plant!  The people of Nineveh obeyed “even the cattle,” the plant obeyed and grew up over Jonah, the east wind obeyed and blew, and a little worm did what God told him and ate a castor oil plant.

We see this incredible portrait of God’s sovereign rule over all of His creation, people, and nature alike.  All of creation obeyed God.  But Jonah was still stubborn in his rebellion.  He resisted.  He chose to disobey God’s plan.

God’s Love and Jonah’s Reluctance (Jonah 4:8-11)

Jonah preached to Nineveh, but not because he loved Nineveh.  He was an angry, bigoted, Jewish prophet who wanted the God of Israel to obliterate these people.  Jonah obeyed God, but not because he loved God.  He feared God…he saw what God can do with a fish!  He didn’t want to end up in a worse condition.

But God’s “abounding love” even abounded toward the hated enemies of Israel.  Jonah couldn’t handle that.  It was too much, and far too much for him to get his arms around.

So, God gave Jonah an object lesson about His abounding, steadfast love.  He allowed a plant to grow up.  Now Jonah had already made a lean-to, probably tying some sticks together. (Guat: Cornstalks). But God sent Jonah the mercy of a shade plant. (ricisnus—castor oil)

God covers us with His mercy and love.  That’s how the love of God works…that’s how it worked for Jonah…that’s how it worked for Nineveh.  God “covers” us when we don’t deserve it.

And Jonah “set his heart” on this plant.  He was so grateful.  “Finally, something is going my way!” But then came the worm.  And the east wind.  And soon the plant was a casualty and withered and died.

Jonah got REALLY angry then.  And it was right there that God called him out: “Jonah…you set your heart on this plant…but you won’t set your heart on these people I have created.”

God taught Jonah an important lesson we all need to learn.  The Greek philosophers taught that there were two kinds of love:  Benevolence, which basically is a love based on the one loving, since the one being loved could do little or nothing for the one loving.

But they also believed there was a second kind of love:  the love of “attachment.”   This is a love that brings the one loving into the relationship because of attraction and loving desire. (Keller, Prodigal).

[The word used in verses 10 and 11 for “compassion” is a word that means to grieve over someone or something, to have your heart broken, to weep for it.  God says, “You had compassion for the plant” (verse 10). That is, God says, “You wept over it, Jonah. Your heart became attached to it. When it died, it grieved you.” Then God says, in essence, “You weep over plants, but my compassion is for people.” For God to apply this word to himself is radical. This is the language of attachment. God weeps over the evil and lostness of Nineveh. When you put your love on someone, you can be happy only if they are happy, and their distress becomes your distress.

The love of attachment makes you vulnerable to suffering, and yet that is what God says about himself—here and in other places (cf. Isaiah 63:9). In Genesis 6:6 it says that when God looked down on the evil of the earth, “his heart was filled with pain.”6 While this language cannot mean that the eternal, unchangeable God loses any of his omnipotence or sovereignty, it is a strong declaration at which we must marvel.7 Most of our deepest attachments as human beings are involuntary. Jonah did not look at the Ricinus plant and say, “I’m going to attach my heart to you in affection.” We need many things, and we get emotionally attached to things that meet those needs. God, however, needs nothing. He is utterly and perfectly happy in himself, and he does not need us. So how could he get attached to us? The only answer is that an infinite, omnipotent, self-sufficient divine being loves only voluntarily. The whole universe is no bigger to God than a piece of lint is to us, and we are smaller pieces of lint on the lint. How could God be attached to us? How could God say, “What happens to Nineveh affects me. It moves me. It grieves me”? It means he voluntarily attaches his heart. Elsewhere we see God looking at Israel, sinking into evil and sin, and God speaks about his heart literally turning over within him. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (Hosea 11:8, ESV).]

And God gives us an object lesson as well as we see His love crucified on a hillside outside of the city of Jerusalem.

Last week I mentioned in our little sidebar on anger that anger happens as a result of a threat to something important or precious to us.

Sin happens when we are inflamed with anger, or “quick to anger” and when we “seethe with anger.” Getting angry is not sinful.  Getting angry all the time becoming inflamed and for no good reason is a problem.  Hanging on to anger and letting it turn into resentment and bitterness is sin.

But if anger is a result of something being threatened in us, and it is, how could anything threaten God?

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Could God possibly be VULNERABLE?  What’s more vulnerable than a newborn baby?  What display of love is more genuine than laying down your life for what you love?

It was this amazing fact of God’s “hesed” love; His steadfast love that even extends to lost, and violent, idolatrous, and pagan people that threw Jonah.  He didn’t know how to think about a God Who loves even people who don’t deserve to be loved.

We don’t really understand the profound message of Jonah without the cross.  From a hillside of judgement and condemnation, where Jonah sat, to a hillside of mercy and reconciliation at Calvary.

“Should I not love…?” is the question that God leaves Jonah with…and us as the book ends.  It really doesn’t end.  The reader must put your own ending on the book!

Two things remain to do.  First, let me answer the question asked me by a young lady early in this study.  “Is Jonah in heaven today?” I think “yes,” not because of any evidence we see in Chapter 4 of Jonah’s changing.

But the logical question is, “if Jonah didn’t tell the story in The Book of Jonah, who did?”  Biblical books don’t just “fall from the sky,” bound in black leather and gold-embossed pages.

They are real.  They happen to people.  People relay what happened to them, as in the four Gospel presentations of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Biblical inspiration can be, ultimately, traced back to a real person experiencing something with God in a valid historical context.

Jonah told the story of Jonah.  He told it as a cautionary tale, because I believe that one of the important purposes of this book was to warn Israel how they were missing the point of their existence by refusing to proclaim their God to the pagan and unbelieving nations of the world.

Second, “what are you going to do about the ending of the book?”

It ends with a question.  Let me prompt your thinking with four. Each are taken from one of the four chapters of Jonah.

1. What thing that God is calling you to do are you running from?  Maybe God is offering you a second chance to do the right thing.  (Chapter 1)
2. What storms has your disobedience brought into your own life…and those around you? (Chapter
3. Who are the most difficult people or maybe just the most difficult person in your life to love? (Chapter 3)
4. What are you angry about?  Where is that anger coming from?  Why are you “angry enough to die?”  Is it right?  Your anger usually reveals an idol in your life… (Chapter 4).

If you are running from God in your life, remember Jonah.  When his running was finished, he ran right into the God he was running from!  I pray you’ll do the same.

“An Angry Prophet in the Hands of a Merciful God”

(Jonah 4:1-4)

• Chapter 1:  Jonah Rebelling and Running from God
• Chapter 2:  Jonah Repenting and Running Back to God
• Chapter 3:  Jonah Restarting and Running with God
• Chapter 4:  Jonah Regretting and Resenting God

Jonah 4:1-10   

“This change of plans greatly upset Jonah, and he became very angry. So, he complained to the Lord about it: “Didn’t I say before I left home that you would do this, Lord? That is why I ran away to Tarshish! I knew that you are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. You are eager to turn back from destroying people. Just kill me now, Lord! I’d rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen.” The Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry about this?””

(Jonah 4:1-4 NLT)

Oliver Cromwell was sitting for his official portrait that would portray his image to future generations.  In a time when royal people having their portraits done told the artist, “don’t paint the mole. Paint me with a smaller nose, or a taller or thinner profile.”  But Cromwell told the artist to “paint him as he is, warts and all.”  And so that phrase entered our vocabulary.  It means, “this is how it really is.”.  (OR Use high school portrait)

In Chapter 4 of Jonah, we see him portrayed “warts and all.” If we were writing this story, Chapter 3 would have been a great ending.  In fact, if it ended there Jonah would be considered the greatest prophet in Israel!  “From Running to Revival.”  I can see the book title now!

But that’s not how it ends. It moves from Jonah preaching to Nineveh in Chapter 3 to pouting over Nineveh’s response to his message in Chapter 4.  Now, beloved, I will tell you I have spent some time pouting in ministry, but usually it’s because people DIDN’T respond to what I thought was a really great message!  My warts were showing in times like that.    “The heart of the problem is always a problem of the heart.” (Wiersbe). Jonah had a heart problem!  The Bible does not create plastic, perfect people as it’s heroes.  It’s the flawed, the folks with warts.

God does not airbrush or photoshop the characters of Scripture.

Jonah, however, is pouting because they DID respond to the message!  That’s like a concert violinist getting angry because she got a standing ovation or a Christian singer winning a Dove Award and flying into a rage!  Jonah’s name in Hebrew is “dove.” An “angry dove” is an oxymoron.  Even the anger of Yahweh against Nineveh’s evil (3:9) is not described as “very angry.”

Jonah wanted to be able to return to Israel and report, “Well God said He was going to blast the Ninevites.  I told them so.  And I’m happy to report today that He wiped out the whole mess of them!”

But that’s not what happened.  Instead, the whole city repented, and God showed them grace!  Inside of Jonah, however, that was viewed as a failure…not a success.  It was a failure to how he viewed himself.  It was a failure to the ideal of his national interest.  It was a blow to his false idol of Jewish superiority.  Jonah feared this chain of events would result in his being seen as a false prophet.  So, it was also a blow to his self-esteem, his self-identity.

In the things that make us angry, we meet our “bottom line,” which is the thing we worship.  In other words, it is our idol, our counterfeit god.

Nineveh’s Repentance and Jonah’s Collapse

Jonah prays his best prayer in the worst place, and his worst prayer in the best place.

In 4:2, Jonah gives us a classic description of what God is like: (Taken from Exodus 34:6-7)

1). Gracious (merciful)

2). Compassionate (soft like a womb)

3). Slow to wrath (be patient, postpone anger)

4). Abounding in steadfast love (unrelenting, covenant love). “hesed”

One of the strange ironies of Jonah’s message as he promises, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overturned” is that, while the same words CAN apply to being overturned and destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah, it can ALSO mean “turning something over—turning it around—or turning it into something new…” like the Lord turning Moses staff into a serpent or the River Nile into blood.  It is a word that means, in English, “conversion.”

Jonah thought he was prophesying the destruction of Nineveh when actually he was proclaiming the Gospel to Nineveh!  “Forty days…and you will become something other than what you are…”

So, in reality here, Jonah accomplished what he was sent to do; to proclaim the possibility of forgiveness and conversion to Nineveh even though he thought, and he had hoped he was proclaiming their destruction.  He thought what he had said did not come to pass, and therefore he would be seen as a false prophet.  God actually made every word that Jonah spoke come to pass!

Jonah’s Response and God’s Question

“To Jonah this was a disaster…a great disaster…and he became angry!”

Jonah was angry.  Angry enough to die!  “Very angry,” a term that was not even used when we hear God to describe His anger over Nineveh’s evil!   Jonah was madder than God at Nineveh, and now he was angry AT God for not blowing them off the map.

These people he had so despised now became part of the same participants in the grace Israel had known.  But Jonah did not rejoice in that.  He was angry that God was “compassionate, and slow to anger.”

He was angry at God’s focused compassion for Nineveh.

So, the section before us ends with a diagnostic question which God asked of Jonah.  I want to turn the question to us today:

• “Do you do well to be angry?” (ESV)
•  “Do you have good reason to be angry?” (NASB)
•  “Is it right for you to be angry?” (CSB) and (NIV)
•  “Doest thou well to be angry?” (KJV)
•  “Is it right for you to be angry about this?

What makes you angry?  Your answer reveals a lot about your true self.  We become angry over the things that are most meaningful to us.

IS ANGER BIBLICAL?

Many push back on this question of anger, and will quickly assert, “Oh, I never get angry.”  But to say that is very quickly to resign from the human race.  People get angry. Good people and bad people.  Men and women.  Infants and senior adults.

Anger is a God-designed defense mechanism.  It was given to us for our protection, and to make us aware when something is threatening to us.  It is actually more dangerous NOT to be aware when you’re angry than to admit and recognize when you are!

We will sometimes play games with our emotions and rename them.  If we say, “I don’t get angry, I get irritated” or “that frustrates me” or some other euphemism for being angry, we have not solved the problem.  You won’t fix an anger issue by refusing to acknowledge the problem.  And it is a problem, maybe in some ways more for Christians or those who were raised to think anger is sinful.

The Anatomy of Anger

The anger response is built into our created nature.  The fact that Jesus felt anger is evidence that, even a man created with no sin could respond with anger.  Anger is no more sinful than the physiological response of hunger or the need for sex.  But like those, anger can become sinful if we express it wrongly.

But we throw out the baby with the bath water.   We have been taught to believe that, if you feel anger, you are doing something wrong.  More, you are “sinning” by feeling the emotion of anger.  That belief has done a world of damage to otherwise normal people.

A Response to a Threat

When I first started doing work in counseling and even started doing post-graduate work in pastoral care at Southern Seminary, I was still not convinced that anger was normal. I had been well conditioned to “swallow” or “suppress” feelings of anger through my childhood home and even by watching my parents, in addition to being raised as a Southern Baptist in the 50’s and 60’s.  It came from my home and from the pulpit of my church and through the lips of Sunday School teachers and church leaders.

“Anger is wrong,” I was taught.  I was not to feel it or acknowledge it if I did.  I learned my lessons well, and it was not until I started breaking down my body that I finally started revisiting my thinking on this subject.

It was there for the first time that someone in authority told me, “You’re normal if you feel anger.”  This was both freeing and terrifying to me.

I had been taught that anger was almost like a monster inside me that I had to keep locked away in a dark room lest it escape and wreak havoc on those around me.  But as we all know, the things we keep locked away in closets grow in the darkness.  Anger is one such “monster.” Opening the closet door doesn’t “unleash” the monster:  It actually reduces it!

God Gets Angry

One of the more commonly quoted verses regarding God’s anger is

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.  (Romans 1:18)

However, there are literally dozens of verses in the Old and New Testaments that reference God’s wrath and anger.  Clearly this dimension of God’s character and nature is not hidden.

Jesus Got Angry

In several places through Jesus’ life, we see the reality of His anger.

The difference is Jesus’ anger was never about Him defending Himself.  It was never self-protective anger.  It was “righteous” because His anger was never used to defend Him.

The Angry Christian

Christians get angry.  All the time.  While the Bible never strictly condemns anger per se, there are some cautions that we need to heed:

BIBLICAL CAUTIONS

• One who is quick tempered acts foolishly.  (Proverbs 14:17)
• Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but one who has a hasty temper exalts folly.  (Prov 14:20)
• One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty… (Prov 16:32)
• Those with good sense are slow to anger, and it is their glory to overlook an offense. (Prov 19:11)
• Do not be quick to anger, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools. (Ecc 7:9)
• A bishop should not be arrogant or quick-tempered… (Titus 1:7)
• …let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.  (James 1:19-20)
• In your anger do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your wrath… (Eph 4:15)

We can draw some conclusions about anger from this:

1. It is not wrong to experience anger.  Everyone does it.  Some are just unaware that it’s happening.
2. Anger that flares up (“quick tempered”) is condemned in Scripture.  It is always something we should have control over and not let it become the “beast” that devours us (see Genesis 4 with God and Cain).
3. Anger that we won’t release is wrong.  This anger becomes resentment and embitters us toward others.  We are “not to allow the sun to set on our anger,” Ephesians 4 tells us.  When Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that “to call someone a fool out of anger” is tantamount to murder, He uses the word that meant “to cling to anger” or “to seethe with anger.”. In other words, holding on to anger is sinful.  We must resolve if possible, the issue that brought us anger.  If we cannot we need to trust God to take this from us as we release it.
4. The experience of anger is tied to our autonomic nervous system, as are our hearts and lungs.  It happens instinctively and automatically.  You cannot “will” your heart to stop beating.  But you can determine what you are going to do with your anger when it happens.  We are not held responsible for being angry.  We are very much held responsible for how we express it.

The God of the Second Chance

Jonah 3:1-5

Well we left Jonah last week drying out on some beach probably near God’s destination for him:  Nineveh.  After three days and three nights in the digestive tract of a fish, Jonah would have been something to see.  Skin bleached white by the gastric juices, clothes mostly dissolved, and smelling to high heaven, Jonah stumbled out of the water blinded by the bright sunlight.  We aren’t told whether or not there were witnesses, but it was a pretty humbling arrival!

We also aren’t told how much time lapsed between Jonah’s arrival and God’s call.  The text simply says, “Then the Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time…” (3:1), as if to say, “Jonah, now do I have your attention?”  But I want us to notice that there’s a lot of grace evident in that second calling.

JONAH’S FAILURE AND GOD’S GRACE

Some have drawn a comparison between Jonah’s story and the parable of the prodigal son.  In Jesus’ parable in Luke 15, a man has two sons.  The younger came to his father, asked to cash out his inheritance, and he left home.  He squandered “all of his money” in reckless behavior until all of it was gone, along with his new “friends.”

Starving and alone, on rock bottom, the young man took a job feeding pigs and eating the food they were eating.  Dear ones, there aren’t many things that smell more nauseating than a pig pen…unless maybe it’s how you smell after three days inside of a fish!

The younger son and Jonah had both “bottomed out.” They had fallen down as far as someone could fall.  Both had nothing left to their name but ragged, smelly clothes.  The younger son decided to “come home” and throw himself on the mercy of  his father. He confessed his folly and his ignorance and his sin, and the father “placed a robe and a family crest on his finger” and threw a great party for him, saying “this my son who was dead is now alive.”  It was resurrection language.  Jesus compared Jonah’s coming out of the fish alive as a resurrection!

The prodigal son got a second chance that he didn’t deserve.  The prodigal prophet did too.  Chapter 1 and 2 of Jonah, Jonah is like the younger son.  Running, disobedient, away from the presence of his Father, and then going down, down and down to the lowest point on earth.  We remember Jonah’s downward journey: Down to Joppa, down to the belly of the ship, down into the water, and finally down inside a fish.  When we run from God, down is the only direction we can go!

It doesn’t matter how far we fall.  God is ready to receive back any person who will come truly repentant and truly yielded to Him.  We all need grace, we need a second chance.  And some of us today know exactly where Jonah was, and exactly where the prodigal son was.  Broken, alone, messed up, and maybe reeking like the garbage of the world.  You need a second chance…or a third, or fourth…

JONAH’S ASSIGNMENT AND GOD’S MESSAGE

So now we see a second time, Jonah is given an assignment from God.  I am certain hearing the voice of God again was reassuring to Jonah.  After all, when he left for his trip to Tarshish he effectively quit his job!  We are given no indication that God spoke anything to him while he was inside the fish.

But now, as the Word of the Lord came to him a second time, Jonah went to Nineveh instantly.  Nothing in God’s plan had been altered.  God still wanted a message brought to Nineveh.

It is an act of compassion and grace that, before God ever brings judgment to a people or a nation, He always sent a messenger first.  God warns, and then He acts.  “The Lord is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” The “win” for God, if you would, is not that He acts in destructive force against sinful people, though He can and He has, but that people are given every chance to change course if they choose.

Let me say it this way.  God could have just blown the Ninevites into oblivion if He wanted.  They certainly deserved it. Our nation deserves it.  We are guilty of systemic sin.  It is everywhere, in every institution, and in every heart.  He owed Nineveh no warning, but He gave it just the same because God is compassionate and merciful and gracious.

“So pastor you’re saying then that God wouldn’t send me to Hell without warning me first?”  Did you know that one of the most common Google searches during these months as we have gone through the pandemic is, “Am I going to go to hell?”  640 million Google searches on that.  SO what I’m saying is this.  If your life is not where it needs to be before God, and if you do not repent and trust Jesus as your Savior and Lord, as your only hope, you will die in your sins and you will go to Hell.  Forever.  No chance of escape.  Now, you’ve been warned.

But if you will turn away from your rebellion and sin and return to the Father, you will be forgiven.  You will be given a second chance!  That is what the Father really desires.  “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” God said.

That message of grace is what Jonah went to Nineveh with.  He went to warn them of judgment that would fall if they did not turn away and turn to Him: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.”

Jonah obeyed.

JONAH’S HEART AND GOD’S PATIENCE

Jonah obeyed.  But we find later that Jonah’s heart was not in it.  In the first chapter his disobedience was clearly open rebellion.  In the third chapter, his sin was half-hearted obedience. Jonah had not truly repented.  Maybe he went because he made a vow to God that he would while he was inside the fish. (“What I have vowed I will pay…” 2:9)

Jonah was a racist prophet.  He was a man who put his nationality as a Jew above every other race on earth.  It was entrenched in him.  He blamed the Ninevites for what they had done, not to him personally, but to his forefathers and to his country.  It’s a tragic thing when a Christian loses his heart for the lost of the world.  When we get complacent in our spiritual life the first symptom is we lose our desire to see lost people come to the Lord.

Jonah despised the Assyrian people so much he was more eager for God to wipe them off the map.  People he’d likely never met, never sat with for tea; people with whom he’d never shared a meal.  But he hated them.  How much?  Enough to rejoice if God wiped them out and to take it personally and sulk when God didn’t.

None of that changed in Jonah’s attitude, even after his time in the belly of the great fish.  He was still racist and prejudiced and filled with hatred.  He wanted God to fry these people while he sat on a hillside and watched the show.  It is true that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but Jonah certainly was ready to!

The parable of the prodigal son does not end with the son’s return.  There was an older brother in the story too, who had stayed behind with his father and continued doing his duty.  This is actually the main point of the parable.

And when his younger prodigal brother returned home, this older brother didn’t rejoice.  He was resentful.  He was angry that everyone was celebrating his prodigal and sinful brother’s return.  And he wasn’t about to go to his party!  He believed the Father owed HIM a party because of his obedience.

You know folks, there are two ways we can run from God.  One is, like the prodigal, by running into the world and into a sinful lifestyle.  The other is, like Jonah and the older brother, to run into religious practice and performance that makes us believe God owes us.  There’s a lot of “older brothers” in the church today.

Longing to leave her poor Brazilian neighborhood, Christina wanted to see the world. Discontent with a home having only a pallet on the floor, a washbasin, and a wood-burning stove, she dreamed of a better life in the city. One morning she slipped away, breaking her mother’s heart. Knowing what life on the streets would be like for her young, attractive daughter, Maria hurriedly packed to go find her. On her way to the bus stop she entered a drugstore to get one last thing. Pictures. She sat in the photograph booth, closed the curtain, and spent all she could on pictures of herself. With her purse full of small black-and-white photos, she boarded the next bus to Rio de Janeiro. Maria knew Christina had no way of earning money. She also knew that her daughter was too stubborn to give up. When pride meets hunger, a human will do things that were before unthinkable. Knowing this, Maria began her search. Bars, hotels, nightclubs, any place with the reputation for street walkers or prostitutes. She went to them all. And at each place she left her picture—taped on a bathroom mirror, tacked to a hotel bulletin board, fastened to a corner phone booth. And on the back of each photo she wrote a note. It wasn’t too long before both the money and the pictures ran out, and Maria had to go home. The weary mother wept as the bus began its long journey back to her small village. It was a few weeks later that young Christina descended the hotel stairs. Her young face was tired. Her brown eyes no longer danced with youth but spoke of pain and fear. Her laughter was broken. Her dream had become a nightmare. A thousand times over she had longed to trade these countless beds for her secure pallet. Yet the little village was, in too many ways, too far away. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes noticed a familiar face. She looked again, and there on the lobby mirror was a small picture of her mother. Christina’s eyes burned and her throat tightened as she walked across the room and removed the small photo. Written on the back was this compelling invitation. “Whatever you have done, whatever you have become, it doesn’t matter. Please come home.” She did.

God is a God of second chances.  Almost everyone greatly used in the Bible was a recipient of that honor!  God gives second chances, and maybe you need one today.

If so, His arms are open wide for you to come home too.