5 Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. 6 Now 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. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. 7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” 9 But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” 10 And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 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?”
One of God’s attributes is His omniscience - His knowledge of all things. His omniscience is a fundamental aspect of His divine nature. God possesses perfect and complete knowledge of all things, past, present, and future. But He has not only perfect knowledge of events. He also perfectly knows and understands the deepest thoughts and intentions of every person.
Yet, when we read the Bible, we find that God asks many questions. This is not because He needs information, but rather He intends for us to examine ourselves and our motives. They are meant to teach us something, or to expose our sin, our guilt or our disobedience.
The very first question asked by God in the Bible is in Genesis 3:9, when He asked Adam, “Where are you?” The Lord knew exactly which bush Adam was hiding behind, so this question is significant because it began a dialogue between God and humanity about our sin and our relationship with Him. God’s purpose here was to make it clear to Adam the enormity of his sin.
In Chapter 4, when He asked Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” (Genesis 4:9), God was demanding an explanation from Cain for his actions.
As I mentioned last week, the book of Jonah has a strange and confusing ending, but it teaches us much about Jonah, ourselves and God. He asks Jonah three questions in the closing chapter which expose not only Jonah’s remarkably selfish nature, but also the compassionate and merciful nature of God.
In verse 4, after God had spared the Ninevites from judgment that Jonah believed they deserved, He asked Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry?”
Jonah thought that he did, so he built himself a shelter outside the city, and waited for the destruction he believed should and would come, once their repentance proved to be false.
God responded by appointing a plant to grow over Jonah and provide him with shade, which made Jonah very happy, but the next morning God appointed a worm to attack and kill the plant. Again, Jonah was so upset that he said in verse 8, “It is better for me to die than to live.” So God asked him a second question. “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” Jonah’s bitter reply was, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.”
God’s purpose in these questions was first of all to expose Jonah’s appalling self-centred attitude. We see this first in what makes Jonah happy. Amid all the complaints from Jonah throughout the 4 chapters, there is only one time when he is glad. Jonah was not happy when God blessed his preaching with the mass repentance of Nineveh.
Instead, he was miserable, because he felt the people of Nineveh were beneath him. They didn’t measure up to his ethnic and moral requirements for salvation. In his arrogance and pride, he refused to associate with the newly saved Ninevites. They were new converts who needed to learn so much about the God who saved them. This was Jonah’s task, but instead of guiding them in their new-found faith, he refused to share in their worship or to minister to them.
God accepted Nineveh’s repentance, but Jonah didn’t. Instead, he set up camp outside Nineveh, and waited for the signs of their failure and destruction, which to Jonah, was inevitable.
So if Nineveh’s salvation didn’t please Jonah, then what did? The answer is in verse 6: “Now 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. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant.”
Here, God was exposing Jonah’s self-centred attitude toward God’s grace, and the miserable spirit which inevitably followed, especially when the plant was destroyed, which meant that Jonah lost his protection from the harsh sun.
The New Bible Commentary says of Jonah’s temper tantrum, “Jonah (and the reader) must learn about the relative value of human life. Jonah was furious at the death of his plant. Not stupid, Jonah surely had realised that God was behind these events. But he still protested in his anger that he wanted to die. The prophet who had recently eloquently thanked God for rescuing him from death now wanted to die, and it was over nothing more than a plant that had lived only briefly.”
Jonah cared so deeply about a plant, so God’s lesson to Jonah was that because he wanted a plant to be spared, but not people, his values were completely wrong.
The challenge to us is, in which ways are we like Jonah? Are our values also wrong? Do we hate our enemies and wish or even pray that they would be punished, while at the same time we are quite happy to receive God’s grace for ourselves? Jesus taught in Matthew 5:43-47, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”
Jonah was quite happy to be a recipient of God’s grace, but what this meant for others was of little concern for him. He had his own personal reasons for not wanting grace for the Ninevites, so there he sat in misery, seething outside the city, while the wind and the sun added to his misery.
He should have been thrilled that so many people came to faith, and he should have willingly helped the Ninevites to grow in grace, especially in the early days of their new faith. God calls and expects His people to do exactly that. It is part of what we are to do as the church. Hebrews 10:24-25 says, “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”
Jonah should have been ministering to the Ninevites, encouraging their newborn faith. James Boice wrote, “Jonah was not called to be a spectator, any more than Christians are called to be spectators of the world’s ills and misfortunes today. He was called to identify with those people and help them as best he could by the grace of God.”
Like the other questions in the Bible, God’s questions to Jonah are asked of us too. Do we regard the Gospel as a consumer product for our personal benefit? Have we set up our little booths outside the culture, happy to enjoy God’s mercy for us while enjoying the misfortune of those who do not know salvation in Christ?
Or to put it in Jonah’s terms, what makes us glad? Are we grateful for God’s grace to us and delighted about His grace for others, or are we happy when we are right, and others are wrong?
God was gracious in providing Jonah with his plant, but His true purpose behind this seemingly strange story is seen in how God revealed His sovereignty in dealing with him. Verses 7-9 again: “When dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’ But God said to Jonah, ‘Do you do well to be angry for the plant?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.’”
This whole episode shows God’s sovereignty in dealing with His people. The expression “God appointed” appears four times in the book of Jonah. He appointed the great fish, the plant, the worm and the scorching wind. These might seem like odd details, but the bigger lesson to us, using Jonah’s experiences as an illustration, is that it is God who appoints the great fish that delivers us, the shade that gives us comfort, and the worm and harsh winds that try us. God sovereignly appoints even the little details of our lives. Once we grasp just some understanding of the sovereignty of God, we soon learn that there are no such things as random events in our lives.
God was patient with Jonah, and He is patient with us, which is just as well, because we need His long-suffering patience as we grow in the grace and knowledge of God. The truth is that we are more like Jonah than we’d care to admit. Think about how many times God could have given up on us, but He doesn’t. God bears with our weakness and sin and He never gives up on our salvation. He sees the end from the beginning and He knows the glory He will bring Himself through His patient and persevering grace.
In Matthew 17 Jesus cast a demon out of a young boy, but there was a lot more going on in this episode. “A man came up to Him and, kneeling before Him, said, ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly. For often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.’ And Jesus answered, ‘O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.’ And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was healed instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘Because of your little faith.’” (Matthew 17:14-20)
The disciples’ weak faith is often recorded in the four Gospel accounts, but Jesus was patient with them. How patient was He? All the way to the cross, where He died for their and our sins.
The way that God dealt with Jonah teaches us about the wisdom of how He deals with His people. In providing and then destroying Jonah’s precious plant, God had at least two important life lessons for Jonah.
First, he had to recognise how self-centred and selfish he was. He was consumed with his own petty affairs, and his worldview was dictated to by his narrow opinions and his personal comfort.
Jonah teaches us that self-centred people do not improve. They will only become more selfish over time. At the beginning of chapter 4 Jonah wanted to die because God did not conform to his narrow view of salvation, but by now, he was angry enough to die because his precious plant had withered. If we are consumed by our own problems and situations, our spiritual life shrivels. Jonah was now consumed by nothing more than a plant and how it impacted his life.
Many Christians can be like this, becoming so obsessed with little details in the church which are of little or no importance, that they lose sight of the really important things, like praising the God who saved us, and the importance of sharing the Gospel message.
Self-centred people can be among the most unhappy of people, constantly complaining, and taking little or no joy out of life. When we allow ourselves to be consumed with self, we waste the gifts and calling that God has given us, and metaphorically speaking, we sit miserably under the beating sun of the world’s struggles, wishing we could die.
Jonah’s great weakness was his bitterness for the Ninevites. His attitude was, “How can I live when the Ninevites are saved?” This was what consumed him - God’s grace for his enemies. The Bible commentator Leslie Allen wrote, “A Jonah lurks in every Christian heart, whimpering his insidious message of smug prejudice, empty traditionalism, and exclusive solidarity.”
The question is, how, with God’s help, do we guard against allowing ourselves to be like Jonah?
This is the point of God’s third question, and the second life lesson God taught him. “You pity the plant, for which you did not labour, 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?” (Jonah 4:10–11).
The way out of self-consuming misery is to lift up our hearts in praise to glorify the God who saves. The most joyful and most useful Christians are those who have a passion for the Gospel. They are the ones who grow in grace, as they are excited to see God’s grace reaching others.
Notice how God taught Jonah at the end of his story. Jonah loved his little plant, for which did not labour. In the greater scheme of things, Jonah’s plant was completely insignificant, yet he failed to see the significance of the eternal souls of more than 120,000 people. Even their cattle were more important than Jonah’s plant.
God describes the Ninevites as people who “do not know their right hand from their left.” To put this in modern terms, these are baby Christians, people who inevitably bring a lot of spiritual baggage and wrong ideas of the Gospel into their new lives of faith. These are people who need to be cared for by those who should know better - people like Jonah. What can we or should we be doing to help those who are young in the faith to grow in grace?
Instead of doing what God had called and equipped Jonah to do, he resented the grace they had been shown.
God has mercy on sinful mankind, trapped in our ignorance and corruption. Our spiritual bondage outside of salvation in Christ is our own fault, but God still has compassion on us. What more reason do we need to glorify Him than that? To God be the glory, great things He has done, should be our cry.
But Jonah thought it best to feel sorry for himself over something as trivial as a little plant, just as we are so easily consumed by our petty affairs. When we do that we will fail to see the glory of God’s grace for a world lost in sin.
The sinful human race, just like the ancient city of Nineveh, is desperately wicked and evil, and stands guilty before a perfectly holy God, yet this same God chooses to treat the world with grace and mercy. When we realise that as the church, we are meant to partner with God in the work of the Gospel, our hearts should break for the lost, not be filled with the resentment of Jonah.
God’s final question to Jonah shows that He treats even the most wretched and wicked with grace.
Many have asked why the book of Jonah ends so abruptly. It stops in the middle of a conversation, and leaves us sort of hanging in mid-air. It ends with God’s final question, and in His sovereignty, He has chosen to not tell us how Jonah responded to Him, and there is a good reason for that. More important than Jonah’s answer to God’s final question is our answer.
Vernon McGee in his summary of the story of Jonah wrote, “God is saying to a great many people today, ‘I want you to go and take the Word of God to those who are lost.’ And they say, ‘But I don’t love them.’ God says, ‘I never asked you to love them; I asked you to go.’ I cannot find anywhere that God ever asked Jonah to go because he loved the Ninevites. He said, ‘Jonah, I want you to go because I love them. I love the Ninevites. I want to save the Ninevites. And I want you to take the message to them.’”
When we began our journey through Jonah some 3 months ago, I said that the main reason for us studying this book was not to establish whether the story of Jonah and the fish is fact or fiction. That is almost always the hot discussion point on the book of Jonah, but this misses the point entirely.
The reason for studying this book in such detail was for us to gain a deeper understanding of the amazing grace of God, while at the same time our spiritual pride, something we all battle with, needs to be exposed and confessed.
The main character in the book of Jonah is not Jonah, and nor is it the great fish. It is God Himself, so it is appropriate that we end our study by focussing on Him.
These 4 short chapters display the Lord in all His sovereign majesty. God’s commands were sovereignly given to Jonah. Jonah could refuse God’s call to preach in Nineveh, but he could not avoid God’s ordained purpose through him. Jonah could flee to Tarshish but he could not avoid the storm sent by the Lord. But just when God’s sovereignty might have seemed bad news to Jonah, he learned that it is exactly what he needed, as God sovereignly sent the great fish to swallow and deliver him.
Even in the small details of Jonah’s life, it was God who sovereignly helped him and disciplined him to grow in grace. And it was by God’s sovereign grace that an entire wicked city repented at the preaching of His word.
He says in Isaiah 46:9-11, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.’ I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.”
In the book of Jonah, we see the absolute sovereignty of God.
The book of Jonah also reveals the holiness of God. It was His holy wrath at Nineveh’s sins that started Jonah’s journey. “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” (Jonah 1:2)
It was because of that same perfect holiness that God did not accept Jonah’s rebellion. The great storm that God hurled at Jonah’s ship is just the tiniest glimpse of the greater judgment which will come to all those who reject salvation through Jesus Christ.
Because God is a holy God, evil will not continue forever. Sin has a date with fearful and final judgment, and without faith in the substitutionary atoning death of Christ, all those who reject Him will face the eternal consequences of that awful choice. God’s holiness demands judgment of our sin. We must choose whether we will bear that judgment ourselves, or believe that Christ has already done it for us on the cross.
Thirdly, Jonah reveals the Lord as a mighty God. Not only did Jonah fail to escape God’s reach, but he also could not escape God’s power. “I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land,” Jonah said to the pagan sailors in 1:9.
God has the power to change the hearts of rebellious sinners. He caused His word to be preached to the most wicked of people, the king of Nineveh, who himself repented and called the entire city to repentance.
If God is mighty enough to do this, and is mighty enough to save us, how can we live in fear of the world? Psalm 118:5-6 says, “Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free. The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me?”
Above all, the book of Jonah teaches us that the sovereign, holy, and mighty God is a God who is merciful and gracious.
The greatest thing that God has done for us is to send His only Son into the world to bear the Father’s righteous wrath at our sins.
Come to Christ. Come to the Saviour on His cross, plead for the mercy of God, and you will find that His grace is sufficient to save you from the wrath which is to come.
We close with a quote from John MacArthur. “God is the Creator of us all. We have sinned against our Creator. Wrath and judgment has been pronounced upon us. But we have been given the Gospel, which offers us forgiveness through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. You really see the Gospel in the heart of God in the story of Jonah. The Creator God, sinned against, warns about judgment, and fully forgives those who repent and embrace Him.”
Homegroup Study Notes
In preparation for your meeting, read the entire book of Jonah beforehand.
Read Jonah 4:5-11
Notice the 3 questions the Lord asks Jonah in verses 4, 9 and 11.
What was God teaching Jonah here, and what are we to learn from these 3 questions?
Why does the book of Jonah end so abruptly, and why do you think Jonah’s reply to God’s question in verse 11 is not recorded?
Most people, when asked about the story of Jonah, will talk about the possibility of a fish or whale swallowing a man whole, which usually leads to discussions about whether the story is fact or fiction.
Why is this a mistake?
What are the main points of the book of Jonah?
What important lessons have you learned about a) yourself, and b) God on our journey through Jonah?
Today’s Hymns:
Praise, My Soul, The King Of Heaven
The Church’s One Foundation
Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus
The Ancient Of Days