Jonah 4: Bringing Our Worst to God
This sermon was preached on June 2nd, 2024.
The past month we’ve been in the book of Jonah. For me, at least, it’s been such a challenging and encouraging sermon series. It’s a short books: just 48 verses. It packs a punch. As we read the story, and we see Jonah over and over questioned, we ourselves are questioned. Jonah is a story about prejudices and sin. About what it means to live as God’s people in a broken world. About what it means to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us.
Today we’re looking at the last chapter of the book—when Jonah finally says out loud what has been going on within him this whole time. Here he allows himself to verbalize his anger to God. And he finds that God does not condemn his feelings, that he’s not too much for God. But he also finds that while God does not stop his children from saying their piece, he also does not hold back from saying his.
3.10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
4.1 But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. 2 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. 3 Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
4 But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
5 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. 6 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. 7 But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. 8 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.”
9 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.”
10 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. 11 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?”
Bring Your Worst
God allows us to bring to him our worst—and when we do God will take that and use it to transform our hearts. That we can bring our worst to God and find that he brings his best.
We’re at the end of the story, and some incredible things have happened so far. Just to recap: God had called Jonah to go to the people he would hated more than any other. Jonah had fled from this, and found that God would not be dissuaded from bringing his grace to those people—through Jonah. And though Jonah seems to have a death wish and is tossed into the sea, on the verge of drowning, God rescues him dramatically. Then God calls him again.
That time Jonah goes but his heart is not in it. He delivers a five word sermon that only tells them that destruction is coming. But God uses that to bring his grace to the people of Nineveh, and from the least to the greatest, they turn to God. Chapter 4 finds us in the aftermath of this and how Jonah responds to it.
Does he rejoice that God’s glory has shined in him showing mercy? No, not at all. We see it here in v1: “to Jonah, this seemed very wrong and he became angry.” In v2, Jonah seems to finally drop his pretending and his religious costume and pray to God. I’ll paraphrase
I knew this would happen. This is why I ran, because I know who you are, God. You show grace and it’s the last thing I wanted to see happen. And now that it has happened I’m furious. Just take my life. I’d rather die than live in a world where those people have been forgiven.
I don’t think any of us would call this a prayer, but our passage does. But it is. Jonah is speaking to God. In chapter 1 he had fled. In chapter 2 he had said what he thought were the right words. In chapter 3 he had spoken to others. But here is able to come to God with his absolute worst. And this is a key moment for him. He’s furious, he’s accusing God, but he’s finally dropped both his resistance and his act.
This prayer is the growth of Jonah. If you heard me pray this kind of prayer this morning, you’d probably be concerned? But no—this is the step of authenticity/openness before God. Jonah is not fleeing. At the beginning of this story, he had taken his worst—his hatred and prejudice—and fled from God with it. Here he’s bringing it to God.
We can bring our worst to God. Our absolute worst. That anger when things seem so wrong to us. That lament when the sadness feels overwhelming. Those desires that we’re terrified of. Those sins that fill us with feelings of guilt and shame. Those fears about an unknown future.
Bring your worst to him. We do it every week when we confess our sins. And I often say it—we often think of religion as bringing our best. And yes, God gives us gifts and a profound act of worship is when we take those gifts and use them for his glory. When we pursue loving him and others well through our talents.
The profound truth of the gospel is we can bring our worst, no matter how big or how bad it may seem to us. And when we do, we find that he is a God that does not leave us in our worst. A God that brings us his best.
When I say “bring your worst,” I don’t mean it just in a therapeutic way—like bring your worst to God and you’ll feel better after you say it out loud. That’s true enough. But we don’t just bring our worst to God because he’s a good listener. And that leads us to our next section:
When God Answers
Jonah prays and he has an experience that only a handful of people in Scripture have ever had—God speaks back to him audibly. “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Maybe Jonah didn’t expect God to respond. He does—“Is it right for you to be angry?” It cuts to the heart of the entire book of Jonah. And what we see is what I said a few moments ago—God does not leave us in our worst. But for Jonah these words are not enough. He doesn’t even respond to God. He seems to be so profoundly angry that he turns away and leaves, getting a far enough distance away to watch.
I suppose he thinks they’ll immediately turn from God and back to their wickedness. He’s turned toward them, but not for good. He’s watching them—to judge and condemn. He’s watching it like we watch reality TV, waiting for the drama so he can scoff and feel better than them.
Then God shows Jonah something else entirely. God causes a plant to grow over Jonah to give him shade, something Jonah enjoys—who doesn’t love some good shade on a hot day? Then God causes the shade to go away the next day, and in the aftermath Jonah grew faint (why didn’t he bring water and food with him?) And as it says in v8, “he wanted to die” (which seems like an over-reaction) and even says to God “It would be better for me to be dead.”
So God asks him another question? “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?!” It’s a question meant to shock Jonah to his senses—this is a plant. Jonah, you had no hand in it being planted or growing. You seem to have irresponsibly gone out to the barren land beyond the city without food or water. But you are so furious that you’re ready to die—over a plant?!
We see how disordered Jonah’s priorities are with what God says next. “You’re concerned about this plant…but think it wrong that I am concerned with the 120k people in Nineveh?!
When God speaks back to Jonah, God does a couple of things 1) reveals clearly who He is and 2) challenges Jonah to throw off the shackles that surround his heart. God shows Jonah that God is a God of compassion and mercy. A God who overflows with grace toward the wicked, and provides a way for them to be freed from sin and wickedness. And a God that will not allow Jonah to remain in his sin, but is calling him out to himself.
When we are confronted by God, it is never just a condemnation of our sin. He’d be justified in that, of course. He is righteous and holy, and we are not. And justice would be him showing us our sin, demanding we answer for it. Or him simply leaving us to our darkness, allowing the foolishness of our sin to play itself out.
But that’s not what God does. When he confronts us about our sin, it is always also an open door to forgiveness, transformation, and hope. God invites us to bring our worst so he can bring to us His best. God shows us our sin so we can know that it can be forgiven. He shows us the darkness of our hearts so that we can know they can be transformed. And he tells us the destruction that sin will lead to so that we can find a different way ahead founded on hope in the power of his love for us.
Valuing What God Values
God is asking these questions of Jonah to pull him out of himself. To get to the heart of the matter and put a mirror up to Jonah for him to see what’s going on in his heart. But we aren’t told how Jonah responds. Notice, the book ends with this question. And it can feel like a TV show that got cancelled before it could resolve the cliffhanger.
But this book ends with the question because this book isn’t just a story about a man named Jonah and his experience with God. This book is about us. The books ends with this question because it is an open ended question to us, meant to hold up to us what God values and call us to value what He values.
This is the heart of what the Christian life is. When we are called to follow Jesus, it is a calling to walk the path of becoming like him. To become who Jesus would be if he were us.
But it’s not just that we get the model of who God is and then work in our own power to make it happen. The good news is we get the revelation of who He is not just as a goal, but as a source of our joy. We see who He is and adore him. Our hearts are captured by the beauty of his goodness, right alongside our minds being engaged by the truth.
We are called to value what God values, but how do we find that transformation? We keep coming back over and over again to the never ending fountain of God’s love for us. We draw on his power, not on our own. We rest on his sufficiency, knowing that the same grace that sought us out in the first place continues to be ours as we abide in Jesus.
We sink our roots deeply into God and our restless hearts find rest in Him. We, like a child safe in his father’s arms, throw ourselves back into the surety of his hold on us. We realize that apart from him, we are simply silly and senseless—but because of him we are held in his faithfulness and so as secure as we can possibly be, even when we can’t see it.
That doesn’t mean the challenge in front of us is not real. It doesn’t mean that being confronted with what God values isn’t a sometimes difficult thing. It doesn’t mean that the road ahead will not take turns we don’t anticipate. But it does mean that we never do it alone. That as we are being changed to be those who value what God values.
What’s in a Name?
We named this sermon series: Silly and Senseless, but Held in God’s Faithfulness. We named it that, because that’s what Jonah’s name means, and it’s the essence of the story. The point.
As I’ve said in this series—the story of Jonah is the story of God’s people discovering who they truly are. Kept in God’s Faithfulness. And we can come to him with our silliness and senselessness and not find silence, but a God who speaks to us a clearer and more beautiful word than even if he spoke to each of us individually.
God speaks to us his eternal Word, which is what the gospel of John calls Jesus. The Word. The communication of who God is. The Word that became flesh, the eternal Son of God who took on a human nature to become one of us, to answer definitively each of us. Humanity, from the beginning, has brought God our worst and God has answered with his best—himself.