Introduction
Dear Brothers and Sisters at Dalkeith Baptist,
I pray that God is blessing you and that you have been able to make the most productive time of our enforced distancing. What a great time it is for phoning, writing or emailing friends and acquaintances, for encouraging others, and for spending time in prayer and the Word!
Below is the latest instalment of my sermon series on Jonah, and the Bulletin. I hope you find both challenging and edifying.
Our passage in Jonah makes it clear that we will all profit from consideration of this topic; if only we will listen. I pray that God will enrich all of us from His Word, as we grow in wisdom and godliness, and seek to conform our whole lives to His will and love those around us. I hope you may be blessed as you read through today’s sermon along with the Bulletin with words of encouragement, and listen to a much loved hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ (YouTube link below). Enjoy!
May God bless Dalkeith Baptist over the coming week, and uphold His people in all faithfulness.
Your brother heartily in Christ Jesus,
Pastor Mark
Bulletin
Bible Passage: Jonah 4: 1-11
Today we are reading though the final chapter of Jonah, such an important book of the Bible which teaches us so much about our own human nature, and such a great contrast to the character of our God.
1 But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. 3 Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life. 4 The LORD said, Do you have good reason to be angry? 5 Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city. 6 So the LORD God appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant. 7 But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered. 8 When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, Death is better to me than life. 9 Then God said to Jonah, Do you have good reason to be angry about the plant? And he said, I have good reason to be angry, even to death. 10 Then the LORD said, You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. 11 Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?
Jonah 4: 1-11
Sermon: Jonah’s Anger and God’s Kindness
Jonah 4 is such an interesting passage in that it gives away the thoughts of a Jonah who was wiser than he acted, even during the events recorded. The chapter also gives away that Jonah as probable writer of the book was affected by God showing him, and us, what he (and we) needed to learn about credit, grace, difference and commonality. This brings me to three major points which we can draw out from the passage:
1. The Glory of God’s Character
It is interesting that from the very beginning of Jonah’s sulk before the Lord, he very accurately places credit for the salvation of the Ninevites properly in the right quarter. You see it in the very first 2 verses where Jonah complains of the very thing that is the theme of the first third of the chapter; that God in His characteristic way, has (as always) had mercy on sinners.
“Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.”
This is the glory of the book of Jonah, that coheres with the New Testament gospel principle of Ephesians 2:8-9:
‘For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no man may boast.’
Here is the glory of Jonah’s account: that the persons who receive mercy do not primarily do so because of anything in them, but by first cause because of the character of the Salvation-God who saves them. Jonah states it as blame in Jonah 4:2, but it is really a backhanded compliment. He is absolutely right, for if salvation is by faith alone (and it appears from chapter 3 that salvation is by faith alone, as the Ninevites repent their life direction, from sin and towards throwing themselves on the mercy of God, in dependent belief or faith in Him) then that salvation can only be as a gift, and the only one to receive credit for the giving of the gift is the Divine Giver.
And so, it is only by the overwhelming compassion of God that the Ninevites are saved: by His grace, His loving-kindness, His slowness to anger, His goodness to Sinners who only deserve a just destruction.
As it is written in Psalm 103:8-11:
The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
Slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness,
He will not always strive with us,
Nor will He keep His anger forever.
He has not dealt with us according to our sins,
Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities,
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
So great is His lovingkindness toward those who fear Him.’
The Ninevites’ quickness to repent is an instrument for their salvation, but Jonah does not focus on that as a basis of merit for their salvation. He knows (as every Jew of the covenant knew) that even faith and repentance though real, are brought about by the gift of God. For this reason he focuses on the much bigger element in salvation, the character and activity of God rather than the secondary action of man.
It is a message repeated again and again throughout Scripture. This phrase, “gracious and compassionate God”, along with “abundant in loving-kindness”, is the essence of God’s character presented to Moses. It is the stock in trade of the praise of the Psalms. It is the theological bedrock beneath the gospel, for it is God’s character that guarantee His promises, and it is His promise to Abraham that undergirds salvation in Christ (Abraham’s seed), by Grace (unilateral covenant blessings) through Faith (the faith of Abraham, elaborated), in the New Testament.
Now this was not what Jonah wanted. He is quite happy for grace and loving kindness and compassion to be extended to himself, as epitomised by his salvation from an unspeakably frightening story, and then the waters of the Mediterranean, and finally the belly of a great fish. We would have to say from history that he was the recipient of grace unto life, in a way analogous to the proverbial Lazarus with a triple bypass. But it is of the nature of his whole problem that Jonah seemed to slip easily into thinking that salvation is not by grace but by works, as we all slip easily into. Why else would one love one’s own people as supposedly the chosen, the supposedly righteous, those afflicted by foreigners, while hating one’s historic opponents as the reprobate, the pagan, the wicked and the torturers of one’s own people? It would be reasonable to wish the Ninevites to change and be saved, to be otherwise than Israel’s pagan oppressors. It was not reasonable (or at least godly) to instead wish them unconverted, and dead, for that is at least half of the essence of even the Old Testament Law, to love one’s neighbour as oneself.
2. The end of Enmity
That, to bring me to my second point, is what the gospel does for us. Once it is revealed to us that salvation is by the gracious merciful lovingkindness and compassion of our God alone, rather than our merit, we can no longer be surprised that anyone we might frown upon as undeserving, also can receive that salvation by faith. Suddenly our whole opposition to them is undermined, for we and they are both alike saved by unmerited grace together. Even untrustworthy Jacob is greatly blessed as a father of Israel. Rahab the Canaanite is welcome to join Israel. Naaman the Syrian commander becomes our brother. Jews and Greeks eat together as brothers in Christ.
Suddenly we have a commonality with them that we never had before. It is for this reason that Paul can say in the New Testament, that the divisions of Jews and Greeks are broken down by the gospel. They are still distinct, but the wall of enmity must disappear.
It is the thing that makes the gospel to be the acid that alone can eat through the strongest metal of the walls that people set up between US and THEM. Those enmities may naturally run very deep. Jonah would rather die than see his Ninevite hearers saved. God illustrates to him in verses 5 to 8 that he has more concern for a plant of the field than he does for people made in God’s image. God illustrates to Jonah in verses 9 to 11 that he has no right to anger over God’s compassion to others, whereas the God who did work to create them and who providentially watched over their growth as His potential children, had every right to exercise His free compassion towards them.
It is as the illustration of grace that Jesus once told. The labourers who come last receive a generous wage though they did not work for it, just as the labourers who came first receive a generous wage though they worked hard to deserve it a little more. The wage is the same in generosity because the key factor is not the level of deserving in the recipient, but rather the level of generosity in the wage-giver to the undeserving. And so, having received grace from the Christ, we can extend humble grace to others, as it says in Philippians 2, considering them not less important but more important than ourselves.
Jonah indeed is the ultimate reluctant missionary. And yet, we know the end of the story, though it is not written directly. If we take Jonah to be the writer of his own account, though it does not say in the book of Jonah that he eventually got the point, yet having written it afterwards, showing himself as the unreasonable villain, he must have done. The lesson of grace and compassion was not lost on him. And so it should not be to us. We cannot any longer consider any group beyond God’s potential grace, if they will only repent and believe as the Ninevites did, as we did too. And once they have done so, we are one body in Christ with them.
3. Cultural consequences
That by the way, is I think the secret of why liberal democracies have only arisen and typically only endured, amongst the Western nations most permeated by Christianity, and those other nations most secondarily influenced by Western (Judeo-Christian Heritage) culture. Only Judeo-Christianity recognises the innate value of everyone as being made in the image of God, for “In the image of God, He created them”. And then, only Christianity elevates the importance of all as being valued by God according to the measure of His Son’s substitutionary sacrifice. Only Christianity can clearly ground the rule of law and instinctive righteousness in the bedrock of God’s nature, law, revealed morality and creation order, for as Romans 1 and 2 say of humans since the fall:
‘For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.’
And
‘For when Gentiles who do not have the Law (Torah) do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them..’
Thus only Christianity has proven historically successful at recognising profound differences between groups and peoples, and yet recognizing the precious value and dignity of all in an equality before God. Only Christianity limits the reach of the law to what is appropriate according to the external code of God’s revelation. Only Christianity has placed a high value on promoting lovingkindness towards people who are different to ourselves (far better than mere ‘tolerance’, a term not even found in Scripture), generosity, grace and peace and the commonalities that can be found, between diverse groups.
Would you spend your time and effort for political reform? That may be helpful, but a much more direct and lasting reform will be accomplished best by a spreading of the gospel.
Conclusions
We have seen that the glory of the book of Jonah is it’s illustration of the profound power, providence, grace, mercy, compassion and lovingkindness of the Only Creator God, who would save all who would place their faith/trust/belief in Him in repentance, throwing themselves on His mercy and grace. He is quick to respond to such appeals. He makes no distinction in salvation, seeking all who will come to Him so, to be saved.
For these reasons, we are to reflect the gracious attitude of the LORD. We who have received grace must be stirred to pass it on. We can be heartened that He uses even reluctant missionaries like us just as He will, though we have no competence to the task, if only we will obey Him and seek to serve to our best ability. No longer can we consider any group beyond the pale as potential recipients of His saving grace, if only they will repent and believe. Indeed, the book of Jonah could even serve for us as both gospel handbook, and gospel tract!
Let us take heart from Jonah and seek to share God’s good news at any, all and every opportunity. Let us heartily rejoice in the salvation of others who are not like us, and seek even to extend gospel bridges to people who are not yet like us or believers either. When they do turn to be saved, though we may be still distinct, they will become spiritually one body with us, to God’s glory alone.
Amen.