Jonah 4:1-11

Anger reveals the truth about our own hearts.  When we become angry it shows us what we truly love and the picture may not always be very pretty.  Jonah becomes very angry in this last chapter.  We would expect for him to rejoice because of the effectiveness of His ministry, the grace of God and the salvation of souls.  The truth is that Jonah did not want any of that.  His anger reveals a lack of compassion for the souls of men.  Our anger is also very revealing.  We will often become angry when we suffer some kind of loss or even when our sports team suffers a loss.  How often do we become angry about the suffering of others or blasphemy against the Lord?

JONAH IS ANGRY OVER NINEVEH’S SALVATION: It becomes very clear that Jonah ran away from God’s command in the first place because He had no love in his heart for the people of Nineveh.  He wanted them to be destroyed and He did not want to warn them of the coming judgment because he knew that God would likely forgive them if they repented.  Jonah asks God to take his life if He would not judge the city of Nineveh.  His ultimatum is to kill the people of Nineveh or kill him.  God is loving, merciful and full of grace.  His patience and long-suffering is constantly on display.  Jonah has experienced God’s mercy but He has no desire that others experience that same mercy.  The fact that God did not grant Jonah’s request of death is once again a demonstration of God’s grace.  We must guard our hearts from this kind of hatred of any person or any nation.  If we have enemies, we are called to pray for God’s salvation and not their condemnation.  We must love the nations that support and promote terrorism today and cry out to the Lord to lead them to repentance and salvation trough Jesus.


JONAH IS ANGRY OVER HIS OWN SITUATION: Jonah goes up on a hill to pout about what has just happened and to watch the city just in case God decides to destroy it.  Jonah wants to see God deal with Nineveh in wrath.  Instead God chooses do deal with Jonah in grace.  God provides shelter and shade for Jonah and so he rejoices in his own comfort.  The following day God takes the shade away when a worm eats the plant.  This makes Jonah exceedingly angry and he refuses to back off from his anger even when God confronts him.  Jonah is more concerned about his own comfort than he is about the souls of thousands of men.  God reveals this to Jonah and confronts him with this reality.  We must not allow personal comfort or revenge to become controlling factors in our lives.  God calls us to be willing to sacrifice our own comfort so that others might come to Jesus.  These others may be our enemies.  We do not know if Jonah ever repents of His selfish, legalistic and hateful attitudes.  However the fact that Jonah recorded this story seems to argue for the point that he did repent and writes the book with his own failures as a warning to all who are angry about their own comfort level and have no compassion for the lost whom God loves and forgives.

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