To listen to the unabridged message click here: Even Them
God’s grace flows from God’s identity
We have come to the end of another book of the Bible together. We did John, and now here we are at the end of Jonah.
Jonah chapter 4 is fascinating to me because it is unresolved. You get to the end and you think to yourself, “Where is the rest? Did somebody lose a page?” Let me assure you: that really is the end. It is not a misprint. Nobody tore the page out of your Bible. It just ends abruptly and leaves you wanting more.
It reminds me of the end of The Sopranos, which ends the same way, and people have debated for twenty years about how it really ended.
And you come to the end of Jonah and you want to know what happened. Did Jonah keep following the Lord? We do not know, and I think that is the beauty of it. This is a feature, not a bug, of the book of Jonah. Because God’s love and grace are simply unresolved. They just keep going, and we are invited in, day after day. We never fully comprehend God’s love or God’s grace. It is beyond our comprehension.
And the reason is that God’s grace flows from God’s identity. It simply is who God is. God’s grace cannot be separated from who God is in his personhood. And Jonah chapter 4 puts that on display.
Remember where we left off. Jonah went a third of the way into Nineveh, said what he was going to say, and left. The people repented, and God relented. Now we get to see what happens as a result.
But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing 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, LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
But the LORD replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the LORD God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”
But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:1-11)
The gracious and compassionate God
Jonah is pouting. He sees God relent. No calamity comes to the Ninevites, who were not just enemies but the symbol of all that was wrong in the world to Israel and Judah. Jonah, more than anything, wanted to see fire and brimstone come falling from the sky and see those dirty, rotten Ninevites destroyed good and hard.
And instead, they heard his message, no matter how reluctantly preached, and they repented. And God relented.
And Jonah says this: “Isn’t this what I said when I was still at home? That is why I tried to forestall this by fleeing 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.”
This is who God is. Jonah knew it to the core of his being, and that is why he did not want to go. He knew that as soon as he preached, these people would repent, and God would be glad.
Now, notice where we are in the Scriptures. We are in what we call the Old Testament, and there is this misconception that the God of the Old Testament is angry, that he is about rules and smiting people and dropping fire and brimstone on people’s heads. But the prophets tell us over and over again the identity of the God they serve: slow to anger and abounding in love, the compassionate God who does not desire to send calamity.
This is the identity of God from Genesis to Revelation, and we see him on every page of the Scriptures.
And Jonah knew it. Is that not Jonah’s problem? He knew God so well, and believed him so deeply, that he knew God would grant his enemies, the people he despised and hated and wanted judged, grace and mercy and compassion, because this is indeed who God is.
We often read Jonah and think he just did not believe God enough. But that is not it. He had seen this God up close, not laying waste to Israel the way Jonah probably wanted. He was prophesying to Jeroboam II, one of the evil kings, and instead of Israel getting judged, it was expanding its borders and receiving blessing.
This is why we so deeply struggle when Jesus says, in the Sermon on the Mount, “Love your enemies.” Because he says, “Your Father in heaven causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
We really hate that. Sun and rain are blessings, the things you need to grow crops and food, the signs of God’s blessing on people. And Jesus says he sends them on the righteous and the unrighteous.
We believe this is who our God is, and because we believe it, enemy love is so hard. We know that if we show up, no matter how reluctantly, and communicate God’s love and grace, they might repent. And if they do, God is going to relent and welcome them into the family and into the party. And boy, do we not want to see that happen. We are just like Jonah, and it is because we know who God is.
The sovereign God
The other part of God’s identity is that he is the sovereign God, the God who grows a plant and then provides a worm to kill it.
And Jonah did nothing in that whole scenario. He is just sitting there, stewing mad, looking like he bit into a lemon, while God grows a plant to offer him shade. Jonah is delighted. In the middle of the night, here comes the worm, and it kills the plant. Jonah wakes up and throws a fit.
What did Jonah do to grow the plant? Nothing. He did not plant the seed on his way into Nineveh so he could sit up on that hill and watch God send fire and brimstone. He did none of that. He built himself a cruddy shelter that was not doing any good, and God, in his grace, grew the plant. Jonah still was not happy. He was still pouting. So God said, “Well, let us see how you like this,” and killed the plant.
“Should you be upset about the plant, Jonah?” “Yes, I should be upset about it. It is better for me to die than to live.”
Does Jonah not sound like a three-year-old? “It is better that I die than I live, because you gave grace to the Ninevites. It is better that I die than I live, because this plant that I did nothing to plant or grow, it died and now I am miserable.” He makes Eeyore look like an optimist.
But here is the thing. Jonah’s issue is that he has no control over this. He knew that as soon as he proclaimed God’s message, it was done. The control was gone. God was going to do what God was going to do, because God is the sovereign God, and Jonah did not like that.
Because we all love to be in control, to have the reins of our lives, to know exactly how things are going to work themselves out. So we try to control everything. But when it comes to God, when it comes to God’s love, we do not have any say in the matter.
Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, used to tell new staff, over and over again, that we are to go and preach the gospel and leave the results to God. All we can do is show up, be present, and preach the message. We cannot control whether somebody responds to the gospel or not. It is all up to God and his sovereign goodness.
And the beautiful thing is that we know who our God is: slow to anger, abounding in love, compassionate, not wanting to send calamity. That is all well and good for people we like and love. It is a real problem when it is about our enemies.
And this is where Jonah found himself, pouting, angry, frustrated, under the sovereignty of God. Because we can control the love of God about as much as Jonah could control the plant.
When God’s love begins to shine and show itself in the world, it just goes. It is like a flood that has burst the banks of a river, and you are not going to control it. That scares us, because we like to be in control. But our good and loving God is sovereign. We cannot control him. We cannot control his love, his grace, his mercy, or his compassion. We can control those things about as much as we could control the plant.
The God who loves even them
And then we come to the end, and we see the God who loves even them.
The Lord says, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
You see God’s heart. It is for these Ninevites, and it does not stop there. It includes the animals, all of creation. God’s love and concern go beyond our friends, out to the very fringes of our society, to those we call enemies. To those who embody everything we hate and despise, who make our stomachs turn and that vein in our neck begin to pop.
We know who those people are. And God’s concern for them is as great as his concern is for us.
Jonah illustrates enemy love, Matthew 5:43-48 in story form. It points us again and again to this truth: God’s love is sovereign, it is good, it is beyond anything we can possibly imagine, and it is out of our control. Because God’s love goes even to them.
That is a reminder that there is no such thing, for the person who follows after Jesus, as us and them. There is no “they.” There is simply “we.” We are together in the story, all of us created in the image of God, all of us desperately in need of God’s love, compassion, grace, and mercy. Because if we are honest, we all know we are somebody’s enemy, somebody’s “they.” And when we find ourselves in that position, what we want to say is, “I am not your enemy. I need God’s grace as much as you do.”
So there is no us and them. There is simply this “we” that we are all a part of. Every person you see out in the world, and every person you see on the news, is somebody who desperately needs God’s love, compassion, and grace.
And we create these dichotomies. We create this us versus them. We create this concept of enemies. We invent that.
As we read Jonah, we hear Jesus again in Matthew 5:43-48: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous… Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Because there is no us versus them. There is simply we, all of us, who desperately need God’s grace.
So my challenge, as we leave Jonah and, two weeks from today, begin our Advent journey together, looking for the tearing open of the heavens and the coming of Christ, is to remember that all of us are in desperate need of this love and grace, and so is every person we meet.
And those of us who bear the name Christian are his ambassadors, the ones who represent his love, compassion, and grace to everyone who needs it, friend, neighbor, or enemy. Because this is indeed who God is. And if this is who God is, then this is who we are to be.