Jonah 4:9-11

All right, let’s turn to the book of Jonah chapter four for our study and verses 9 through 11 as we come to the last section of the book. Jonah chapter 4 verses 9 through 11. And God said that Jonah doest thou well to be angry for the gourd. He said, I do well to be angry even under death. and said the Lord thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored, neither madeest it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. And should not I spare Nineveh that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discerned between their right hand and their left, and also much cattle. May God blessed to us his sacred word this morning. The book of Exodus in explaining one of the plagues talks about a darkness which may be felt in Exodus chapter 10 verse 21. There was a Christian man he said he didn’t understand that verse until he went on vacation. and they were visiting, he and his family, a cave in Kentucky, and they were led by a guide through its many winding passageways in subterranean areas. And at one point the guide turned off all the lights. And he said, I’m the only one who knows how to get back to the entrance. If I left you here, you’d probably never find your way out. Anyone lost in this cave would become insane within a week from oppressive loneliness. Be quiet for a moment and feel the darkness. After about 30 seconds, someone in the audience, the group said this, turn on the lights. I’m going crazy now. But the guy had made his point. And the Christian said he understood something about a darkness that may be felt. Jonah is a very unhappy man. twice he has asked the Lord to take his life. He has some type of death wish syndrome at this point. He’s very upset because God has not destroyed the city of Nineveh as he had prophesied. He doesn’t care that they’ve repented. So Jonah needs a little lesson here about compassion. Like the Christian in the cavern, Jonah needs to feel compassion firsthand to understand it. And so God provides a gourd here that grows up. It must have been leafy, or like a caster oil plant leaf, and it shaded Jonah. And then God sends a worm. And the worm destroys it. And he no longer has the shade the shade. because it has withered. He’s made to feel compassion and pity for this plant. And now God is ready to explain his compassion to Nineveh to Jonah. Let me begin by asking this question. What was Jonah’s main focus on with regard to the gourd? What was his main focus with regard to the gourd? Yes, really? His own. Comfort and happiness is what he was concerned about with the regard of the gourd. And it shows the immaturity of his thinking here, and it’s rooted in selfishness. Apparently, Jonah wasn’t very happy throughout the whole story. We think about it. He didn’t like God’s commission sending him to preach to Ninevehnava, so he flees. He didn’t like God. the storm either. They didn’t like the great fish, even though it actually saved his life. He wasn’t thrilled about the second commission to send him to Ninevehnava. He wasn’t happy that they repented and God spared them. Nothing seems to make him happy. But verse 6 says, Jonah was exceedingly glad of the gourd. So the thing that did make him happy, was the gourd out of the whole story. That’s the only thing it seemed to give him some happiness. The answer, why that is the case, is, of course, that Jonah was pleased because God was finally doing something special for him. It was his happiness that was at stake. And then God sent the worm which destroyed his new found joy. Think about Jonah’s thinking in this matter. His thinking is, who cares about some heathen city? My gourd is ruined. I’ve lost my shade. That sun’s pretty hot. He’s profoundly disappointed that God didn’t wipe out hundreds of thousands of Ninevites. And he’s equally disappointed that God, the creator of all plants and animals, allowed this worm to eat his gourd. But there’s a difference. The death of the gourd, was something that was a personal inconvenience to him, whereas the demise of the multitudes in Nineveh was of no big concern since they were the bitter enemies of Israel. What lesson do you think we can learn from this particular circumstance? Yes, Russ. Let me think of the, I don’t know, the Matthew 18, the Encyclos came, who’s the greatest in heaven And that ends with his parable about the one servant who owed, you know, an unpayable amount to the king. And that was forgiven him. And then some, the fellow servant. The servant. You know, a pittance in comparison. You know, and that’s kind of the way we are. You know, we don’t, if we think of how much grace and mercy of God has shown to us, we should be, you know, then do and ensure that same for the reason versus for a fellow man. And certainly, you know, but it’s not doing that. Yeah. Sometimes we are obsessed with our own personal happiness. And the slightest irritation causes us to be enraged with bitterness. He’s more concerned about temporal happiness than he is about eternal souls, which is what I think you were, you were driving. in that, Russell. There are times we put things before people, and we can become very selfish in this. Now, where does this selfishness land you? Well, first, he’s angry with God, as verse four indicates to us. We don’t like the way God is running his world because he’s not making us happy. And then you become angry with circumstances, even trivial things like the gourd. We get in a huff about small, things. Thousands of people going to hell may not bother you as much as the small den on your beautiful new cars fender. John Kelvin wrote this concerning Jonah, and I quote, Who could have thought that the Holy Prophet could have been brought into this state of mind? But let us be reminded by this remarkable example, how furious and unreasonable example, how furious and unreasonable are the passions of our flush. that is therefore nothing better there is therefore nothing better than to restrain them before they gather more strength than they ought for when anyone feeds his vices this obstinacy and hardness must follow unquote I think he’s he’s right in what in his thinking when we get find ourselves getting furious over the smallest things in life we should ask why maybe God should say, you know, to us, do you have a right to be angry about the gourd? Yes. You know, in our simple nature, we tend towards acting like animals. Where animals are driven by their immediate desires and their immediate central experience. It would be the glory of a human to, you know, deny yourself and to live in love for God and love for neighbor, but we have a tendency towards just doing like the animals. And not rising above those things. Yeah. So we can either sit around and constantly be moaning and groaning about our gourd that we’ve lost, or we can think beyond that and think higher thoughts. And a problem is that many times we’re selfish in our thinking. We’re only thinking about what gives us comfort and pleasure. So you should be aware of the dangerous self-centeredness. I think that comes out here. The second thought, I’ll focus on verse 10 here. We read here, then said the Lord, thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madeest it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. What must Jonah learn here about God’s gifts? Lord take it away? Yeah. Yet, the God has a right to bestow gifts as he sees fit. How does the granting and removing of divine gifts test your thinking about God’s sovereignty? How does God’s giving and removing of gifts test your thinking about God’s sovereignty? And by that, I mean, it’s easy for us to talk about God’s sovereignty and, you know, give a theolog, theological or theoretical statement about it. But when you get down to your own personal life and God gives you something and he takes you something and he takes it away, are we still saying that God is sovereign? Do we still accept that God is sovereign in that? Are we happy with God’s sovereignty in that situation? Or not? That’s sort of the question of how do we respond? when his sovereignty actually touches our life in such a way, as it did here in Jonah’s case. This is the situation we run into. You see the wisdom of God in dealing with Jonah here. He’s vent his spleen, so to speak, over this withered gourd. He’s ticked off because his comfort is taken away. He thinks he is right to be angry about the gourd. Now, God here wants to teach Jonah a very simple lesson about his gifts, a profound one. He says, Jonah, you see this gourd. It was in no sense your gourd. You didn’t plant it. You didn’t cause it to grow up. I did. You didn’t care for it. You didn’t water it. You didn’t prune it. I gave you the plant. And you rejoiced in it for a while, for a day. And then I took it away. That was my choice. The gourd was my gift. You certainly didn’t deserve it. Why are you angry with me? You know, you stormed out in Nineve it. You didn’t finish your ministry there. And when I took away the vine, I simply was demonstrating to you that gifts that are given are mine, I can do what I want to do. Johnny’s been acting as if God owed him the money. gourd and he’s not looking at the gourd as a good gift that God has granted. It was unmerited, it was undeserved, and it was unexpected. So the gourd here preaches the truth about God’s sovereignty. Jonah was pleased to receive God’s gift. But he wasn’t pleased that God would give a gift, in this case grace, to the Ninevehivites. Can’t I do the same with the Nineveites? Can I give them a good gift? He should learn from this then, that God does as he pleases. If grace is the gift of highest quality and totally undeserved, then God has a sovereign right to bestow salvation on whomever he pleases. You know, Jonah has confessed when he was in the belly of the whale that salvation is of the Lord. and he gets delivered. But he doesn’t want to confess salvation as the Lord, evidently, when it comes to the Ninevites. That can’t be right. So he has a real problem here. But God is teaching us here about his sovereignty in this matter. So here’s a simple test that will tell you how much you really recognize the sovereignty of God for what it is. How do you react when his gifts and benefits are taken away from you? Sometimes we have our gourds and we love them. And they’re the most precious things to us. And gourds can come in different shapes and sizes. Maybe a budding career with financial success on the horizon. It could be a charming friendship with prospects of marriage. It could be a little golden-haired child that God grants your family, which thrills your heart. It could be a fancy car. It could be a close. collection of guns or dishes or books or whatever the case may be. Could be a beautiful home. But whatever gifts or benefits you possess from God are your gourds? We’re exceedingly glad when God provides these things for us, and we should be thankful to him. But that we quarrel with God when he takes them away from them. Sometimes our gourds wither. Sometimes God sends a worm to eat them. And our hopes may be dashed. With regard to marriage or the little child may break your heart when he or she gets their rebellious youth or maybe a teenager or a young adult. The house may come tumbling down on tornado. The valuable collection of yours, of your hobby may be lost, burned up in a fire. The car of yours may be wrecked and destroyed. This is why we always have to look beyond the gifts to the sovereign giver of those gifts. I’m reminded of Habakkuk chapter 3, verses 17 and 18. The book ends. And it’s a book that talks about the wickedness of Israel, and the prophet is concerned that people aren’t following the law of God. And we praise the Lord and doing something about it. He says, I am doing something. I’m going to send the Babylonians, and they’re all going to go into captivity. That really wasn’t what the prophet. that wanted. But God also promised to restore. And so he ends the book with this statement. Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines. The labor of the olives shall fail. And the field shall yield no meat. The flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls. Yet, I will rejoice in the Lord. I will joy in the God of my salvation. Here’s the man that learned that he had looked beyond the gourds to the salvation that he had from the Lord and how precious that was. And so we see this. You should ponder the truth of God’s sovereignty in giving of the gifts that he gives us. Verse 11. Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand and also much cattle. What does this verse teach you about showing compassion? I think it teaches that we should have a compassion for those who are perishing in this passage of Scripture. The word spare here is in the Hebrew pity, spare, have compassion or regard for according to strong. It’s root word, primary root, means to cover. I think in the sense of shield, should I not shield them from my wrath? Should I not spare Nineveh? How does self-centeredness undermine your compassion for others? Yes. If we’re only focused on herself, then we’re not concerned about anyone else. That’s right. Should the Lord have pity on a city roughly to size, let’s say, of New York City? Notice here, God doesn’t even talk about the adult population. Undoubtedly, they deserved God’s judgment that Jonah had pronounced. Instead, he talks about the cattle, which are innocent, and the smallest children who probably are unaware of all that’s going on. They have really no clue here. as he says here, they can’t discern their right hand from their left, so they don’t really have any true understanding of what the circumstances are here. Was not God right to show mercy for their sake at least, if not for the adult population, at least for their sake? And so God is saying, Jonah, doesn’t your compassion for a mere vine vindicate my decision to save the least offensive inhabitants and the cattle? Does God care about the destruction of infants? Does he care about cattle? It’s interesting, if you read the law of God on the Sabbath Day commandment, the Fourth Commandment, you’ll notice he talks about rest, not just for people, but for servants and animals. And so God has, in a sense, compassion in that he’s going to care for them. So God challenges Jonah here. Can you be so hard-hearted that you only can think about a gourd and you can’t even think about forget the adult population. What about the infants? What about the cat? Now, you can see what what self-centeredness does to you here because you begin to think about yourself. And Jonah has to learn to think about someone else and have compassion for those who are perishing. we shouldn’t be so hard to think, well, they’re just a bunch of reprobates anyhow, so if God dams them, he does. It’s true that we don’t know God’s will. We don’t know what he’s going to do. We can’t say that God desires the salvation of all men. It’s interesting. There are people who perhaps would go to this passage of scripture and say, see, God wants everybody to be saved. Well, the difficulty you have here is that God’s compassion here is sovereignly granted. For example, look with me at the book of Ezekiel, if you would. Chapter 9, and I could go to about six passages here in Ezekiel, but I’ll just pick this one as an example. Chapter 9, verses 5 and 6, here God is going to send out his angels to bring judgment on the Israelites for their wickedness. He first is going to mark those men that he’s going to spare. And then we read here in verses 5 and 6. And to the others, he said in mine hearing, go after him through the city and smite. Let not your eyes spare, neither have you pity. Slay utterly Olin. and young both maids and little children. Verse 10. And as for me also, mine I shall not spare, neither will I have pity, but I will recompense their way upon their head. So we see from this passage, and there’s plenty more that we could look at in Ezekiel, that God shows mercy to whom he will have mercy, and have compassion upon whom he will have compassion. What I’m trying to trying to get out here is this. God expects us to be compassionate. It’s easy to become cold and detached about the righteous damnation of the wicked. But God is indicating to us that he has some elect among the heathen. He has some that he’s going to show compassion on it that he’s going to say. Therefore, when we think about those that are lost, not knowing who they are, we do all things, adduer all things for the elects sake, that they may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. 2.10. So we should have a concern for the lost. We should love the people where we live. You know, the great city that is around us has many in it that are lost. That we pray for our unsaved neighbors and friends. We plead that God, may show mercy upon them. Do we take the opportunity to give them the gospel of Jesus Christ? Are we too busy fussing about our withered gourd instead? Now the real problem with Jonah was not that he may not have compassion. If these had been Israelites, maybe he would have shown a lot of compassion, but these were his enemies. And so that put things in a different category, didn’t it? These Assyrians, I think Jonah maybe have clung to the philosophy of the Jews of the day that Jesus refuted in the sermon of the Mount, thou shall love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. Jesus knows all too well the tendency of our heart to follow that principle. But he taught us, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good under them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you. One of the things you ought to be praying about, that God changed their heart, that God would save them. This is, I think, an important aspect of our witnessing that we don’t get to actually choose those people that we ought to reach out and touch with the gospel. We should try to reach out and touch everyone we can. Now, there are those who will act as dogs and swine, and we may have to withdraw our witness from them, but that doesn’t mean we don’t initially try. to witness to people. When it comes to being compassion toward mere lost people, you can have some pity perhaps. But what about that person who has cheated you out of some money? What about that person who’s a neighbor who has mistreated you in some fashion? What about the drunk who has killed your child? Or that impossible guy at work? Now it’s not so easy, is it? We have to admit that sometimes we prefer to call fire down from heaven and destroy them. And I realize there are times when we should pray for God’s judgments on the enemies of the Lord, but they should be the enemies of the Lord, not just our personal enemies, per se. But Jonah here doesn’t care, and God has to teach him. He needs to learn to care. So as we look at this text of Scripture, I think it indicates to us a need for us to be committed to the practical gospel evangelism. We need to try to think about people who are perishing and not just get wrapped up in our own little world and what our needs are. Any other thoughts or ideas from this passage? Perhaps I have overlooked something that you have thought of. Why don’t we… them with the word of prayer.