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by GLENN PEASE
03/13/18
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Based on Jonah 4:6-11

      A little boy who had shown a fit of temper was scolded by his mother and sent to his room. He was told to pray that his temper might be reformed. His mother followed him and listened at the door to see if he would. This is what she heard: "O, Lord, please take away my bad temper, and while you are about it you might as well take mother's too." A bad temper is a problem at any age. It is a dangerous weapon because it injures both others and the one who has it. A woman once said to Billy Sunday that she had a bad temper, but it was over in a minute. He replied, "So is a shotgun blast, but it blows everything to pieces." The speed at which evil is done does not lessen the evil. Someone wrote a poem that reveals the difficulty in finding any justification for a bad temper.

"When I have lost my temper, I have lost my reason too.
I'm never proud of anything which angrily I do.
When I have talked in anger, and my cheeks are flaming red
I have always uttered something that I wish I hadn't said.

In anger I have never done a kindly deed, or wise,
But many things for which I know I should apologize.
In looking back across my life, and all I've lost or made
I can't recall a single time when fury ever paid."

      The first line of that poem describes exactly what Jonah's bad temper did to him. Jonah's anger had blinded him to the true values of life, and he became childish. He was like a baby having a temper tantrum because he is not allowed to pull the lamp off the table, or poke your eye out with a ballpoint pen. A bad temper reduces a person to an irresponsible infant whose own selfish pleasure becomes the measure of all things. I have known otherwise mature men smash their arms through a cupboard and throw a wrench through their windshield because of their loss of temper.

       God had to show Jonah just how low his standard of values had fallen in his awful attitude of anger. To make sure he gets the message God prepares Jonah for a question. God has a test for Jonah consisting of just one question, but before he gives it to him he makes sure that Jonah will know the answer. We want to consider the preparation for the question, and then the question.

I. THE PREPARATION FOR THE QUESTION.

      In verse 5 we see that Jonah had not given up hope. He had come a long way to see Nineveh burn, and he wanted a ringside seat. In contrast to Jesus who wept over Jerusalem because of the coming destruction, and Abraham who pleaded for Sodom, Jonah was looking for blood. His only fear that was the whole thing might be cancelled. Jonah's system of values had no place for the concept of mercy. It was justice and justice alone that he looked for. Justice is of the very essence of God's nature, but it is always combined with mercy, and God expects the same to be true to His servants. Justice without mercy gives you what you have in the elder brother of the Prodigal. If he had come home and heard his brother screaming as his father was beating him, he would have felt good. But when he heard his father was having a party for the returned sinner he threw a fit, and like an immature child he refused to have any part in the celebration. Justice without mercy always leads to anger at the practice of forgiveness. Jonah had this spirit, and he was hoping yet to see Nineveh destroyed.

        In verse 6 we see that God takes advantage of the situation to give Jonah an object lesson to challenge his system of values. It appears that God performed another miracle here. All of the miracles of this book are due to Jonah's disobedience and God's efforts to straighten him out. The plant was a fast growing plant of which there are several in that part of the world. None grow in one night, however, and so God's direct action was needed. We see how conservative God is in His use of power. He could have made a tree that takes 20 years to grow come up over night, but He
uses a plant that naturally grows very rapidly. God is not extravagant and showy in His use of miracles. He stays as close to the natural possess as possible. He feels no need to be spectacular like the stories of magic genies. Jesus would not gain popularity by jumping off the temple, or turning stones into bread. God is conservative omnipotence. He does only what is necessary to accomplish His goal. In this case it was to give Jonah shade to protect him from the scorching sun.

       His goal is simply accomplished and Jonah is delighted. He is so engrossed in self-pity that this pleasure is just what he needed to bolster his ego. He is thinking that maybe everything isn't so bad after all. God still favors me, and so maybe destruction might still come. Every cloud has a silver lining was the way he was thinking, but it didn't' last long. The next day Jonah was back down in the dumps. In verse 7 God has a worm attack the plant and it withers. By the natural means of hot wind and the sun God makes Jonah miserable. His hopes collapse for everything seemed to be against him. Even the worm and the wind are against him, and so he was ready to die. God now had Jonah almost in readiness for the test, but first He gave Jonah a practice question.

       In verse 9 God asked Jonah if he thought his anger was justified. Jonah responded without hesitation that he had a perfect right to be angry enough to die. When nothing goes right and everything is against you, what is the sense of living? The thing he could not see, of course, was that the reason all looked dark was because of the blinders he was wearing. His false values were being crushed, but he refused to admit they were false, and so he was crushed. Kierkegaard said, "Man clutches his torment because it gives him a right to be resentful." This was the picture of Jonah, and now he is ready for the question.

II. THE QUESTION.

       Note that the book of Jonah ends with a question mark. God teaches His greatest lesson to Jonah with a question. Jesus used the question often in His teaching, and He answered difficult questions by asking another question. This was a pedagogical method of the Jews. A frustrated Gentile once said to a Jew in debate, "Why do you always answer a question with another question?" The Jew said, "Why shouldn't I." And there was silence. There is silence after God's question also, for Jonah has no answer. With all of his arrogance and readiness to argue with God, this question stops him. Many assume that Jonah learned his lesson and submitted to God's will.

       God simply pointed out how he pitted the plant which gave him personal comfort, but for which he did not labor, and then he asks if it is wrong for God to pity a whole city of eternal souls, many of whom are innocent children? Jonah must have seen immediately how low his system of values had fallen. He was giving priority to a plant over persons, and this is the basic cause for all the inhumanity to man in the world. While a prisoner in Russia after the second World War, Helmut Gollwitzer, a famous German chaplain, saw a bumper crop of sugar beets destroyed while he and fellow prisoners were near starvation. It was all due to a minor official who misjudged the projected yield, and a higher official who, like Jonah, had a perverted system of values. He felt that accurate predictions were more important than people, and so to keep the prediction accurate he ordered the crops destroyed.

       The evils of every form of government arise because the priority of persons is not practiced. The evils in religious institutions are also due to putting other values above persons. Jesus said the Pharisees would allow a man to pull an animal out of the pit on the Sabbath, but they were angry because they healed persons on the Sabbath. Jesus put people first, and because of it he clashed with value systems of His day. God gives priority to persons above all else. In Mark 2:27 we read, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." The Sabbath was a God ordained institution, and it was so important that it was a matter of life and death to obey it. But Jesus made it clear that it was for man's blessing, and not to be a burden. Persons had priority even over this sacred day.

       E. Stanley Jones said that all religious institutions are made for man, and not man for them. When persons are sacrificed to the machinery of an institution, that institution no longer represents the values of God. Like Jonah it must learn God's value system or it will be opposed to God's will. We can apply this to anything, for any person or organization that puts anything above persons is guilty of folly. All forms of government, which say that man exists for the state, and not the state for man, have fallen from grace, and are opposed to God's system of values.

       The lesson that Jonah needed to learn to bring him to his senses, and the lesson all of us must be conscious of is that persons are ends in them selves and not means. The state and the church exist for the welfare of persons. Whenever the state or the church uses persons for its welfare, and to the harm of the persons, true values are perverted, and people are being exploited for an end that is less valuable. The whole ministry of Jesus was person centered. And even here in the Old Testament we see that in God's system of values the priority goes to persons. The Pharisees put precepts over persons, and Satan tempted Jesus to do the same, and this is the temptation all of us must overcome.

       Ted Hatlen gave a speech in high school many years ago at a Lincoln's birthday celebration. Afterward an old man came up to him and said, "I like the way you gave that speech, but you made a common mistake. I heard Lincoln at Gettysburg so I know what I talking about. Everyone says of the people, by the people, and for the people. But Lincoln said of the people, by the people, and for the people." He gave the priority to persons. This is what Jonah failed to do.

       Jonah is famous for having been fish food that survived, or more grossly put, he is histories most famous fish vomit. He is not famous for being a man of God-like compassion. He illustrates that one can be a child of God for eternity, but still have choices to make that determine what they will be remembered for. Alice Freeman Palmer, the second President of Wellesley College for girls, was urged to write books to become more famous. She had no interest in becoming famous through books. She decided to put her life into the girls she served. She said, "It is people that count. You want to put yourself into people; they touch other people; these, others still, and so you go on working forever."

       She saw what Jonah was blind to, and she chose the wiser way. Jesus did not want us to remember Him as one who built a great empire; who lead armies to great victories, or who built a monument to his own glory. He wanted us to remember him as the one who gave his life for people that they might be forgiven, redeemed, and restored through fellowship with God. He made it clear that a God-like value system always gives the priority to persons.

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