Throughout this story it is hard to admire Jonah. But not until the last chapter do we sense the depth of his problems. “Though Jonah hardly comes across as a hero anywhere in the book, he appears especially selfish, petty, temperamental, and even downright foolish” in the end.1 It is finally clear just how “malformed his non-missionary theology is.”2
By contrast, God shows himself to be a master teacher. The final chapter is organized around three divine questions. The first two are set-up questions. Both times God asks Jonah if he has any right to rage over God’s providence. The first time Jonah refuses to answer. When God repeats the question Jonah’s ridiculous answer spreads the backdrop for God’s main lesson. God doesn’t record Jonah’s response to his final question. The question is clearly more for us than for him.
God’s questions draw an angry, narrow-minded, misdirected believer into a painful but fruitful dialogue with the Almighty. It is Jonah’s time to hear what God said to Job: “I will question you, and you shall answer Me” (Job 38:3, New King James Version). Jonah does. His answer isn’t pretty. But the encounter is one of those painfully real moments that can change a life. Jonah is no longer running from God. He’s no longer trying to hide truth from God. He is no longer maintaining a façade. He now wrestles with God, an act of genuine piety. Jonah “made God his counsellor; honestly and unreservedly he unbosomed himself to God; his whole case and his whole heart he laid open . . . He had no secret from God.” In the early part of the book, “agitated and alarmed, he fled from the Lord. Agitated and alarmed now again, he flees to the Lord.”3
This closing chapter challenges us to be honest with the God who invites us to a life of joyful, satisfying service.
An Unanswered Question (vv. 1–4)
Here’s God’s first question: Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (4:4). Jonah’s refusal to answer is absurd. Of course it wasn’t right! Jonah was exceedingly displeased and angry because “God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon [the Ninevites], and He did not do it” (3:10). Jonah’s anger shows how dissonant his heart is from God’s; his silence shows that he isn’t yet ready to be honest. It is okay to ask, “What is wrong with Jonah?” as long as we understand that Scripture’s story is meant to reprove and correct us (2 Tim. 3:16). Here is a better question: “In what ways am I as mixed up as Jonah?”
One way we answer that question is to interrogate our anger as God interrogates Jonah’s. Anger is often a sign of an out-of-focus heart. James is right to caution us to be slow to anger “for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires” (Jas. 1:20, English Standard Version). Anger feels righteous because by it we defend our heart’s dearest treasures. Anger is a window into the treasure chest of the soul. And rash, selfish, dangerous anger is a sign that we are not treasuring what God treasures. Ironically, in his anger Jonah confesses God to be “slow to anger” (4:2, New King James Version). Explosive, impulsive, vindictive anger is not godlike. God wants Jonah to reevaluate what he loves. Are you right to be angry, Jonah? Is your anger defending what is good, noble, and true? The fact that Jonah eventually authored this book, filled as it is with his terrible failures, suggests that he finally came to realize his faulty frame of mind. He was not right to be angry. From our safe vantage point we can see what God’s question revealed.
Jonah’s anger over God’s grace shows how imperfectly he knew God. When he saved the Ninevites God proved “that he loved the glory of his mercy more than of his justice, or his own declared threatening, and his own prophet’s credit.”4 Here is a hard truth that we must keep learning about God: God loves mercy more than we do. God’s mercy is broader, less discriminating than ours is. For Jonah revival had come to the wrong people. God’s covenant people needed revival; until that happened Jonah didn’t care about outsiders. Jonah didn’t rejoice with the angels over a whole city coming to faith (Luke 15:10) because he undervalued the people God saved. Jonah “manifests the worst sort of provincialism,” a provincialism that kept him from rightly knowing God.5
To identify those more deserving of mercy is to misunderstand mercy. God loves to treat sinners contrary to what they deserve. Until we love that about him we will share Jonah’s misunderstanding about God.
Jonah’s anger over God’s grace shows how imperfectly he knew himself. Jonah could not celebrate the salvation of the city because he could not say, “I am Nineveh.” He could not swallow this truth: The Ninevites “share in God’s grace with me” (Phil. 1:7, New International Version). Jonah knew God’s grace from his study of Scripture (Ps. 103:7–8) 6 and recent firsthand experience. “But there was the long journey across the desert, and man’s memory is short.”7 Jonah did not see himself as a debtor to mercy alone. I wonder if he had stopped singing about God’s amazing grace. Was he no longer reminding himself that “grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home”? In his parable of the lost son (Luke 15:11–32) Jesus warns that self-righteous anger is a sign that the beauty of grace is threatened by the appeal of merit. Unlike these prodigal Ninevites Jonah had always served God. He saw himself in a different, more worthy class than them. How could he rejoice in their salvation?
As Jonah fumed in unrighteous anger, God simply asked him a question: “Have you any right to be angry?” Jonah clenched his teeth, refusing to answer. Instead he left the city angrier than ever.
A Mis-answered Question (vv. 5–9)
Jonah retained hope that God would destroy the city. For a second time Jonah quit his call. He refused to rejoice with the city over God’s deliverance. He declined to disciple the repentant Ninevites. As James Boice notes, Jonah became a spectator of a world that made him uncomfortable.8
But God had not quit on Jonah. He was bringing him to a life-changing crisis point. God tested Jonah by providing a plant for shade. Then, just as quickly, he removed it from him. The plant withered under the blazing sun and vehement east wind. Jonah, exposed to the brutal desert elements, “became faint, and he begged with all his soul to die” (4:8, New American Standard Bible). Jonah experienced a nightmarish taste of hell. Compare Jonah’s experience with that of the rich man in Jesus’ parable in Luke 16. Jonah felt tormented as if surrounded by flames. He hated what had become of his life. The only thing he could think of was leaving that place. Here’s what Jonah couldn’t see: the torment that made his life not worth living was exactly what he hoped would happen to Nineveh! He had a front-row seat to what he wished would be a repeat of God’s judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah. Would Jonah’s descent into a temporary personal hell move his sympathies for the lost?
As Jonah declared his death wish God came to him with a second question: “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” (4:9, New King James Version). This time Jonah blurted out an answer: “It is right for me to be angry, even to death!” God touched a nerve. He provoked Jonah to admit something: he was angry over the plant’s destruction because he valued it. God is adjusting Jonah’s value system. The fact that 120,000 Ninevite people might have perished was a meaningless data point for Jonah. By contrast the plant mattered to Jonah because it served his interests. But God has a different value system. On a far greater scale than that plant “Nineveh had great intrinsic worth in spite of its many objectionable characteristics.”9 Here is God’s question to everyone who overvalues things that serve us: what are people worth? How do divine image bearers rate on your value scale? A person “can become greatly concerned and disturbed when that which directly affects him is touched by the finger of providence; but he can be utterly indifferent, even hard to that which may be of infinitely greater value when this does not affect him.”10
If the lives of community members are perceived to be less valuable than the lives of church members the church will prioritize covenant nurture to the exclusion of community outreach. John Calvin, responding to this problem, wrote, “How difficult it is to perform the duty of seeking the good of our neighbor! Unless you leave of all thought of yourself, and in a manner cease to be yourself, you will never accomplish it. How can you exhibit . . . charity . . . unless you renounce yourself, and become wholly devoted to others?”11 Jonah wasn’t ready for this.
God addressed Jonah’s foolish outburst with one last question.
A Lingering Question (vv. 10–11)
“Is it not right to have compassion on the lost?” The obvious answer is yes. But God communicates much more than a single answer to a single question. He teaches powerful principles about our care for the lost and about our understanding of God himself.
Unbelievers Are Lost
Those who live in God’s world without the guiding of his word and Spirit “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand” (4:11). It is not that they are unintelligent or incompetent, only that they are “wandering through life aimlessly, not knowing the right perspective on the simplest things of life.”12 God wants us to see behind the façade of confident unbelief and feel the sense of despair provoked by the reality of being lost. Paul, likewise, describes non-Christians in terms of homelessness. They are aliens, strangers. They have “no hope” and are “without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).
Worse, they are headed for eternal condemnation if they do not repent. God subtly compares unbelievers with the plant that “perished in a night” (4:10). Like the plant, there is a worm that will eternally plague those who die without the covering of Christ’s righteousness (Mark 9:44, 46, 48). Unbelievers have a never-dying soul which at the Day of Judgment will be reunited to never-dying bodies. Did Jonah not care that there is an eternal hell reserved for those who die in their sins? Have we forgotten about hell?
Hell is a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, totally devoid of joy and hope. Hell is a country in which no good thing ever happens to its citizens. If you have ever felt utter despair and acute depression then you understand something of what hell is like. If you have ever been consumed by unquenchable anger, if you have ever been betrayed, if you have ever felt alone, if you have ever lacked a sense of purpose, then you understand something of what unrepentant unbelievers will experience forever.
Jonah would have responded, “That’s their problem.” But God says, “No, it’s your problem.” Should we not have compassion for the lost and condemned? Should not their problem be ours? To answer those questions we look to God.
The Lord Is Compassionate and Gracious
Compassion is the “feeling which goes out toward one who is in trouble.”13 God’s compassion is more than feeling. It is sacrificial action that rescues sinners from self-destruction. God gave Jonah a bitter taste of hell under the scorching Middle Eastern sun. Because God loved the world his beloved Son fully descended into hell. Our problem became his. His righteousness became ours. He became the way for the lost, truth for the confused, and life for the dead. We greatly offend God every day. But he remains compassionate and gracious. This is the message of Jonah.14
Good stories build up momentum toward the end. Some, like this one, ramp up tension and then suddenly break off. You might read the last words wondering if some pages were left out of your copy. But you think hard about how the book’s tension could resolve. By ending this book with a question God makes it echo through our minds as we ponder our response. God’s last question lingers to this day. “The audience is left with a choice: to copy Jonah’s ‘embarrassing and ridiculous’ . . . hatred of his enemies, or to see the world as God sees it, a world greatly in need of mercy.”15
What do you choose?
Questions
1. Jonah ends with a dialogue between God and his prophet. What impressions of God and Jonah does this dialogue leave you with? 2. What should we think of Jonah’s anger? How is God’s focus on his anger helpful for our self-examination? 3. Why is unrighteous anger so deceitful and so dangerous? 4. How can we tell whether we value what God values? 5. Why should we think of unbelievers as lost? 6. How does God show his compassion to us? 7. Describe the choice the ending of Jonah presents to us.1. Douglas Stuart, Hosea—Jonah, Word Biblical Commentary 31, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glen W. Barker (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 502.
2. Daniel Timmer, “Jonah and Mission: Missiological Dichotomy, Biblical Theology, and the Via Tertia,” Westminster Theological Journal 70 (2008): 166.
3. Hugh Martin, The Prophet Jonah: His Character and Mission to Nineveh (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1958), 349, 350.
4. Thomas Goodwin, The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2006), 23.
5. O. Palmer Robertson, Jonah: A Study in Compassion (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1990), 55.
6. Cf. Neh. 9:17; Ps. 145:8; Prov. 16:32; Joel 2:13.
7. James Montgomery Boice, Can You Run Away from God? (Wheaton, IL: SP Publications, 1977), 89.
8. Boice, Can You Run, 93.
9. Stuart, Hosea—Jonah, 509.
10. Homer Hailey, A Commentary on the Minor Prophets (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1972), 80.
11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 3.7.5.
12. Robertson, Jonah, 63.
13. Laird Harris, ed., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, vol. 2 (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 1980), 626.
14. Matt Papa, “His Mercy Is More,” https:// www.mattpapa.com/lyrics-to-his-mercy-is more-by-matt-papa.
15. Stuart, Hosea—Jonah, 501.
William Boekestein is the pastor of Immanuel Fellowship Reformed Church in Kalamazoo, MI.