Jonah chapter 4: The vine-a place to grow
Intro: In our last lesson from Chapter 3 of Jonah, we saw Jonah obediently follow God’s call to go to Nineveh and to preach against all the evil that was going on there. Naturally, we remember that it took a storm and a great fish to get Jonah headed in the right direction, but 3 days in the belly of the fish was enough to convince Jonah that he had better quit running away from God.
Jonah arrived in Nineveh, one of the main cities of the Assyrian empire, and he preached the message God told him to preach against these evil people. “40 more days and Nineveh will be overturned!” This was a simple doom and gloom kind of message: No poem, no joke, no clever introduction, no invitation hymn, no possibility of a glimmer of hope. Just a warning about death and destruction.
But much to Jonah’s surprise, his message struck a chord with the people. They believed what he preached. Even the King of Nineveh believed and called for fasting and sack-cloth on everyone, even the animals. (can you imagine a cow walking around in a burlap sack?) Revival broke out as everyone repented and prayed for God to change his mind and spare their city. Jonah’s crusade in Nineveh was a whopping success! He had better results preaching here than in Jerusalem! This would have been a wonderful ending for the book of Jonah.
But wait, there’s another chapter! And look how chapter 4 begins! “But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry.” What?... Angry?... Why? His preaching had worked! The People were converted. Jonah had succeeded in what God had sent him to Nineveh to do.
Ahh, but the problem is that these Ninevites were the wrong kind of people. These heathens had made war against the Jews. They had tortured and killed thousands of Jews. They had taken Jews from their homes and sold them in slavery. The Jews hated these people and wanted their city to be destroyed. And as a loyal and patriotic Jew, Jonah wanted what all the other Jews wanted. “Death to the Ninevites!”
This is like what happened when the Japinese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th, 1941 and killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The Japinese did this when war had not yet been declared. This was a senseless massacre of peace time Americans on a lazy early Sunday Morning in December on Oahu, Hawaii. Our guns weren’t loaded. We weren’t looking for an enemy to attack us.
This happened again on September 11, 2001 in Washington DC and New York city, when radical Jihadi Muslims hijacked 4 airplanes and killed 3,000 people by slamming the planes, like missles, into the Pentagon, and the Twin Towers of the world Trade Center.
On both occasions, Americans became enraged. Pearl Harbor brought us with full resolve into the Second World War against Japan and Germany. 9/11 caused us to declare war on terrorism and radical Muslim extremism. Many Americans developed strong hatred of these foreign groups from what happened back then.
The other day, a soldier was in my office. He had been exposed to radiation poisoning while deployed in Afghanistan and was brought home to prepare for death. But he told me his story, and said he wasn’t prepared to die and meet God on Judgment day. This soldier said that his parents were both killed on 9/11 and that he enlisted in the army in order to seek revenge on those who had killed his parents. While in Afghanistan he said he killed hundreds of insurgents, not because of his duty as a soldier, but because of his bitterness over losing his parents. He admitted that his attitude was all wrong, but he couldn’t help himself because his hatred was so overwhelming. He was pretty sure, that when he died, God would send him to hell because of his desire for revenge on the death of his parents.
This same kind of attitude filled the heart of Jonah and for the same reason. He wanted revenge against these horrible Ninevites. Jonah wanted them to all be killed. And he explaned his bitterness in a prayer to God, “Oh, Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? This 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. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (Jonah 4:2-3, NIV)
There’s a lot of irony in what is happening here. Jonah had prayed for God to let him live, when he had been in the belly of the great fish. But now, that his work was done, (and I might add, quite successfully,) he begged for God to allow him to die. Some scholars think that part of this was that Jonah had prophesied the death and destruction of Nineveh, and because of God’s mercy, what Jonah had predicted had not come to pass. This means that Jonah’s prophecy had not come true. He failed the test of a prophet and was liable to be stoned as a false prophet. That’s what some think, but I don’t think that is the heart of Jonah’s anger. Jonah was all for mercy and pardon, but not for these people. For the Jews, yes, certainly! But these people deserved to burn and die. That’s the way Jonah saw it.
Jonah had a messed up heart. He knew it. God also knew it and was trying to reveal the dirty laundry in Jonah’s life. God answered Jonah’s prayer with a simple question, “Do you have a right to be angry?” And Jonah didn’t answer God’s question because he knew in his heart of hearts, that he did not have any right to the rotten attitude festering in his heart. His heart was full of decaying filth, but he didn’t want to lift a finger to fix it.
Jonah turned his back on God’s question and walked over to a place overlooking the city so he could watch and wait for God to destroy it all. He constructed a little temporary shelter (like a pup tent) and waited to see what would happen to the city. While he was sitting there, God took pity and provided a quick growing vine to give him shade and ease his discomfort. The text says, “And Jonah was very happy about the vine.” (vs. 6)
Notice here, Jonah was angry about God’s mercy on the Ninevites, but happy about the comfort of a leafy vine. It appears that Jonah’s comfort was more important than the survival of 120,000 Ninevites (not to mention animals). Noticing Jonah’s rotten attitude, God decided to provide a little disciplinary action to wake Jonah up to his own immaturity and infantile behavior.
Just like God had provided a vine for comfort, God also provided a worm to wither the vine, and a scorcher of a hot windy day to accentuate the change of climate. Jonah grew faint and a second time he said to God, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” (vs. 8)
But God answered Jonah’s death wish with another question, somewhat like the one he had asked the day before, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” (vs. 9)
This time Jonah answered the Lord’s question, “I do, I am angry enough to die.”
In answer to Jonah’s outburst, God gives a reply, which is not only an answer laced with advice for Jonah, but the moral of the story for the whole book of Jonah. God 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. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people who can’t tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
The book of Jonah ends with an unanswered question given by God. This question hangs in the air awaiting an answer which calls for us to speak up for the compassion of God. He loves, even the evil Ninevites. In 1941 that would have included the Japanese who killed innocent Americans. In 9/11, 2001 that would have included radical terrorists. We don’t care about such evil people. But it looks as though God does.
And while perhaps all we care about is our own personal comfort, that doesn’t equal the mercy of God’s blessing. Sadly, trouble happens. Unpleasant circumstances happen, but God promises never to leave us.
Jonah’s response even at the end of the story is to run, quit, complain, ask “why?”. But Jonah is an example of the fact that there is no easy-breezy way to Grow spiritually. Sometimes, there is pain involved in growing closer to God, and we tend to get tired of Jonah, but God remained patient with him all the way through the story. Even after the main event was over, God was still working to teach lessons to Jonah. Just like Jonah, we often forget how much God loves people. He loves them enough to send them a flawed servant with rotten values and behaviors: pride, arrogance, prejudice, unforgiveness…
And Jonah teaches us that life isn’t always safe, easy, comfortable. The people we are called to serve may not be the ones we would naturally chose for ourselves. Sometimes we may miss out on God’s plan because we aren’t in tune with God’s ways. We don’t see things like He does or care about what breaks His heart.
