The God Who Will Be Gracious

Jonah Series | 4:1-4 | Pastor Duane Smets

This an exegetical sermon of Jonah 4:1-4 looks at what the nature of grace is, how God can be gracious without compromising his justice, how the world is better with grace and what God did in Jesus in order to secure grace for all time. This sermon was originally preached on May 8th, 2011 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.

Listen

.

The Resolved Church | www.theresolved.com
(619) 393-1990 | contact@theresolved.com
All Rights Reserved © The Resolved Church

Permissions: you are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material provided you not alter the wording in any way and you do not charge a fee. For web posting a link to this document is preferred.

The Resolved Church
Pastor Duane Smets
May 8th, 2011

The God Who Will Be Gracious (4:1-4)
I. Charge: God’s Grace Is Evil (v1-2)
II. Evidence: God Has Been Gracious (v2)
III. Verdict: God’s Grace Must Be Dismissed (v3)
IV. Answer: God Has More Grace (v4)

Introduction

Well, we’re back in Jonah again this Sunday and today we begin the final chapter of the book. In this final chapter we see this exciting and event filled climax in this showdown between God and Jonah. I wrestled a lot with whether to try and do the whole chapter today but there is just too much there to cover in one sermon, unless you all wanted to sit here for like an hour and half and I figured none of you would be down for that…especially in those metal chairs.

So what we’re doing is verses 1-4 of chapter four today and focusing on God’s nature and character of grace…then next week we’ll work with the whole chapter and especially focus on how God deals with Jonah’s heart and then three weeks from today we’ll finish the book by spending a whole week on Jesus and what he says about himself and this story. Let’s just jump right in, read these four verses and get to it. Cool? The title of my message is “The God Who Will Be Gracious” Jonah 4:1-4. Let’s read text and pray God will help us with it. Jonah 4:1-4, after Obadiah, before Micah.

I. Charge: God’s Grace Is Evil (v1-2)

Alright. My first point this morning is “Charge: God’s Grace Is Evil.” I called it that for two reasons. Reason number one, Jonah clearly has a beef with God here. Like a prosecutor in a courtroom Jonah here has really called God onto the stand and is charging him with a crime.

I mean, listen to him in verse two. It’s says he prayed this. I’m not sure how much of this is really a prayer as much it is as an accusation. But listen to him, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? This is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”

Sometimes it’s hard to pick up on tone in text. But not here. Jonah is not happy. It really actually sounds like he’s shouting. He’s upset, in the worst way and he has a charge against God. There’s a battle going on here between Jonah and God. Between God’s Word and Jonah’s Word and the question is, who is right? You ever had a problem with God’s Word and questioned whether it was right, or true? If so, you’re in good company here.

That’s the second part of my first point here, what Jonah’s charge is…his charge is that God’s grace is evil. I say that because of the first verse. Verse 1 says, “It displeased Jonah exceedingly.” Now, that is actually not a very good translation. Bad ESV. Bad ESV. Usually the ESV is good, you guys know, I love it, it’s the best English one out there, but it blows it here like almost all the other English translations do.

So some Hebrew. I know it won’t make sense to you but see if you can pick up on something you hear…some similar sounds. Here is the original text, in Hebrew up until the word and in the first verse, “yerah yonah gadowl rah.” I’ll say it again, “yerah yonah gadowl rah.”

Did you hear the word “ra”? It’s in there twice. The word “ra” in Hebrew means evil. So a literal translation here is, “It was evil to Jonah, a great evil.” Bible translators just tend to freak out at the word “evil” for some reason.

Jonah thinks “it” was an evil, a great evil. What’s the it? What just happened, what we studied last week. The end of chapter three, 3:10. “When God saw they did (the Ninevites), how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster he had said he would do to them and he did not do it.”

So see the connection. Jonah does not think God should have done that…relented. And more than that he thinks it’s evil that God did not wreak disaster down onto Nineveh. He thinks God is wrong and has massively erred.

But it goes even deeper than that still. Jonah isn’t just mad that God had grace on Nineveh, he’s mad that God is gracious at all, in his very character and being. He’s got a fundamental problem with this attribute of God.

Notice here at the beginning of verse two, in his “prayer” we finally find out the real reason Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh in the first place. We never really knew why. All we knew up until this point was Jonah was disobeying God and going his own way. But we didn’t know why? We speculated because of the background of Jonah from 2 Kings 14 that it was because the Ninevites had killed a bunch of his friends and therefore he probably was either scared of them or just plain didn’t like them. But here we see there was much more to it.

What Jonah says here is his real reason for disobeying was he knew that if he went there and told them about God that they would probably repent and God would have grace on them. And he didn’t want that! Look at verse 2, “This is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God…relenting from disaster.” Jonah has a problem with God being gracious. He’s got a fundamental problem with who God is and whether God really deserves to be God and is acting as God should act.

You’ve got to feel the tension here. Jonah says, “Is this not what I said?” Jonah’s word versus God’s Word. One commentator paraphrases Jonah here and says he’s basically saying, “See I was right all along. I knew it. I knew this would happen because that’s who you are. I was right all along. I knew if I went and preached to Nineveh that they would repent and you would have grace on them. I knew.”

Jonah wants God to only exercise justice, not grace. Now, that’s one of the things about grace. Maybe you’ve been sitting here and wondering what “grace” is. It can easily become one of those words that Christian people throw around all the time and you never really know what it is.

We say, “grace” at our meals. We name our kids “grace.” No offense if you’re name’s grace. It’s a good name. So some of you are Mumford and Sons fans, yeah? Me too. Some of you have no idea who they are and that’s okay. They’re just a popular band right now. They’ve got a line in one of their songs where they ask the question of what this “grace thing is.”

Grace is confusing. To truly understand what grace is you’ve got to understand what justice is. Justice is rightly getting what you deserve. Grace is not getting what you deserve. It’s undeserved blessing and favor. Mumford and Sons actually almost get it right. Let me read to you their lyric where they mention it.

“Darkness is a harsh term don’t you think? And yet it dominates the things I see. It seems that all my bridges have been burned, But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works. It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, But the welcome I receive with the restart.”

Grace is the restart that comes when you have burned all your bridges and you deserve darkness and the wrath of God. So here’s Jonah’s contention with God….if God is just, then he shouldn’t be gracious. If he’s gracious, then his justice is compromised.

Jonah wants the Ninevites to burn, no second chances. And they deserved it. If you were here last week you heard about how sick and cruel they were. Skinning humans alive and draping their flesh over Nineveh’s walls. They were an evil and wicked people. They made Gaddaffi, Saddam and Osama bin Laden look like panzies. Jonah’s contention is, “No. God you cannot grant them grace or you’re corrupt, you’re evil.”

And as we said before, it’s bigger than just how God has treated the Ninevites. It’s how God is always treating his enemies. Jonah’s charge against God isn’t just a charge against how he acted once but a charge against the fundamental character and nature of God being a gracious God. It’s how God is always acting.

Let’s just stop here for a second. Let me ask you. What’s your God like? Really. Let’s just be honest. Most people’s God falls into one of three camps.

Camp number one, God is the one true God who is just and right and one day he’s going to prove it to everyone and wipe everyone out…and you can’t wait for it to happen.

Camp number two, God is just a big teddy bear full of love who doesn’t really get riled up about much of anything. Don’t worry about it man…it’s cool, God loves you and he just let’s everything slide.

Then maybe there’s camp number three, where you’re not sure if there even is a God but if there is, he’s just sort of out there and detached and doesn’t really care or isn’t involved at all and we can never really find out one way or another.

What camp are you in? What God do you have or what God do you long for? One who will bring swift justice? One who will let all the bad go and bring everyone into his love? Or one that is just detached from either love or justice?

Jonah is in camp number one but sees God as being in camp number two. And really, his view of God apparently goes back a long way. He’s been feeling this way about God for some time, long before this whole Nineveh bit came about. This is our second point for today, “Evidence: God Has Been Gracious.”

II. Evidence: God Has Been Gracious (v2)

This comes from the second part of verse 2, where Jonah says, “For I knew (I KNEW) you are gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”

Okay. Here’s the thing. This is a well, well known phrase if you’re a Jew living during 8th century. It’s words God said about himself back in Exodus when he revealed himself to Moses and after that these words get incorporated into a bunch of Psalms, worship services and prophecies that come after it (Ex 34:6; 2 Chron 30:9; Neh 9:17,31; Ps 86:15;103:8;111:4;112:4;145:8; Joel 2:13.

When they would get together for church like we’re doing now, they would sing, “God, you are a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster!”

Jonah knows this. He had read of it, sung it, and heard stories after stories. Which ought to be a wake up call for us. You can grow up hearing it and singing it and still, deep inside, have a fundamental problem with who God is and not really be a Christian.

Jonah here says, “I knew.” Way back in Joppa when he fled to Tarshish, when he thought about who God is and what God would do…he knew God would be gracious. How did he know?

I think here it would be helpful for us to learn what Jonah knew. To go back to the original story of when this well known phrase first came on the scene and look at the evidence for God’s graciousness that was imprinted into Jonah’s memory.

It comes from Exodus 34:8 and here’s what brought it about. The book of Exodus in the Bible is titled that way because of the great “exit” God’s people made out of Egypt. They had been slaves their for over 430 years and through a string of great miracles God delivered them and had them follow him out into the desert.

At first they are overjoyed. So happy at being free and not being slaves anymore. But God doesn’t tell him his whole plan ahead of time and so after they end up in this desert and things get hard, they start to question God and his goodness and whether they should have ever really left.

They come to this mountain, Mt. Sinai, and Moses, their human leader under God’s direction, goes up on top of the mountain to get some instructions from God. The people wait at the base of the mountain and just camp out and wait.

It turns out Moses ends up being their a long time, forty days. There’s a bunch of thunder and lightening up on the mountain while he’s there. The people don’t know what’s happened to him. They actually say “we do not know what has become of him (Ex 32:1).” All this way he has been the representative of God to them.

So this dude, who actually is Moses’ right hand man, gets this dumb idea. The people are complaining and he does what every weak leader ends up doing and that’s just trying to make the people happy instead of lovingly confronting, challenging and leading them. This God, YHWH, which gets translated at LORD in all capitals, apparently he’s supposed to be the one who did all these miracles to get them out of Egypt…but he is different than any other God they have ever heard of in the land.

You see, the culture at the time was much like our culture. There’s lots of different beliefs. Different gods. It didn’t really matter which one you believed in or worshipped as long as you were being spiritual. But what made this God, YHWH, the LORD, different is that no one had ever seen him. No one knew what he looked like. This God only revealed himself through words, not images. He required people to think and believe and not just act. But that’s hard, that’s not easy.

So the people come up with this idea and demand. They say, okay YHWH the LORD is the one who brought us out of the Egypt, but we need something tangible to worship. So Moses’ right hand man, Aaron goes along with it and says, okay, everyone take off your jewelry…the rings off your fingers, ears and noses, your bracelets…anything gold you have…put it in this fire and we’ll melt it all and make an image of YHWH for you. So they do. They make this golden calf, call it YHWH, start worshipping it and saying it was what brought them out of Egypt.

I know it sounds stupid. But these people are not stupid primitive apes. We want and do the same thing. Think about it. So often we pray…Oh God, give me this or that or do this and then I’ll believe. We want something tangible in order for us to believe in and follow god. It seems easier that way.

Meanwhile, Moses is up on the mountain. He hasn’t died or anything. In fact God is doing something phenomenal. He is writing, himself, with his finger, the Bible. He’s giving Moses the ten commandments written on stone. Guess what the first two commandments are?

Commandment number one: I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt, you shall have no other gods beside me. Commandment number two: You shall not make for yourself any image and say it’s me. God’s going to be the God of his word revealed in a book.

The irony is thick. Moses comes down from the mountain. Sees the dumb golden calf. Gets pissed, throws down the ten commandments breaking them. Then he leaves and goes back to meet with God and tells God he quits and doesn’t want to lead the people anymore. Then this phenomenal thing happens.

God tells Moses that even though the people are what he calls “stiff-necked” he has decided to have favor on them and to commit his presence to be with them. It’s crazy. You don’t expect it all. What do you expect? Justice. Instead grace. And God even says it. He tells Moses Exodus 33:19 “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious.”

Moses wants some assurance so in not so many words he asks God to prove it to him. And guess what God does? He lifts Moses up, puts him in this ledge on the side of the mountain and then passes by him in a great wind and bright light and in a booming voice says, I am… “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin (Ex 34:6-7).”

Jonah knew it. He knew it. He knew it because God had said it. God had committed himself to being a God of grace. He had promised it. Jonah knew God would be gracious because he had been gracious. The evidence was clear.

You see sometimes you hear that the God of the Old Testament is the mean God and that the God of the New Testament is a God of love. Far from it. The God of the New Testament and the God of the Old are one and the same. The evidence is clear. God is a God who will be gracious, because he has determined it to be…as he has said, it’s who he is.

Every single one of us in this room could look back on our own life and if we were careful and insightful enough we could uncover time and time again where God has been gracious to us…times when he has not treated us according to what we deserved but rather has treated us with much kindness and grace. Where and when has God been gracious to you?

God’s grace is real and is ever present. That we are sitting here, right now, breathing air is his grace. That we have made it this far in all the dangers of this world and this life is grace. That we were even born into this world is grace. Everything is grace. There’s no doubt about God is a God of grace.

For Jonah, God shouldn’t be and Jonah offers a solution, so let’s move on to our third point and look at it, “Verdict: God’s Grace Must Be Dismissed.”

III. Verdict: God’s Grace Must Be Dismissed (v3)

Jonah’s solution is in verse 3, he says, “Therefore now (since you are in fact a God of grace and you shouldn’t be…therefore) O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

Now, it’s hard to know exactly what Jonah is getting at here. I think there’s a couple things going on. One, Jonah at least says here he doesn’t want grace, he would rather die. I don’t think that means necessarily he thinks he needs grace. In fact, we never get any confession of wrong doing or thinking from Jonah in the entire book. But the simple thing is life itself is a gift of grace and Jonah would rather not live if he has to see God exercise grace on the Ninevites and let them live.

Two, the other thing I think may be going on here is Jonah is trying to manipulate God. “It’s them or me! Who do you love more? Either kill them or kill me God!” Jonah here seems to be trying to put God in a box, trying to force his hand so that either way he acts God’s grace will be eclipsed.

But really, he’s wrong and just confused. If God was really going to get rid of his grace then he’d wipe out the Ninevites and Jonah. But Jonah doesn’t see that. Jonah thinks a world full of perfect justice rather than grace would be better.

How deceiving that is. Not only because we’d all be thrown in prison and executed if real perfect justice over all our thoughts, affections and actions were judged. But also because when we do get justice it never really fixes things.

Maybe some of you have heard of the story of Corrie Ten Boom. Corrie was the daughter of a watch-maker in Holland, born in 1892. Corrie’s family were Christians and when Hitler invaded Holland in the early 1940′s the Boom’s harbored and hid Jews in their home to protect them from the Holocaust. Eventually they were caught and taken to a prison camp called Ravensbruck and Corrie lost her dad and sister to the hands of the Nazis.

Years later, Corrie was in at a church service in Germany and afterward a man came up to Corrie to introduce himself. At the sight of his face, she became horrified as she recognized him as one of the men from the prison camp who had forced her to walk naked and degraded throughout the camp as she and many others awaited their death.

For many years she had thought thoughts of hatred and longed for justice to be served thinking that would heal the wounds she felt deeply. As she recounts the story she says she remembered seeing the face of the man and in that moment having a thousands reasons of hate rushing in toward him. But in that same moment she remembered how much God had forgiven her in Christ, so she extended her hand toward the man and spoke the words, “I forgive you.” And then her and the man began to weep together and God healed her heart.

You see, the funny thing about thinking the world we be better with justice instead of grace is that almost all the time what happens is that when you want justice, particularly when something really wrong has personally been done to you…you begin to fantasize about it and what’s going on underneath is you think you’ll be much happier if the other person experiences just a fraction of the pain and misery that they have caused you. But what happens, slowly and subtly is it begins to change you and turn your heart cold hard black and bitter.

We’ll talk more about that next week. But for now, where we’re at is Jonah’s simply conclusion, he’s reached his verdict: God is gracious and his needs to not be, grace needs to be dismissed. Jonah’s done with his rant, he has gone off on God and now God answers. So let’s look at our last point for today, “Answer: God Has More Grace.”

IV. Answer: God Has More Grace (v4)

Jonah has charged God, cited him and called out his character and then rendered his verdict. In reality, it’s been pretty borderline blasphemous. John Calvin calls the way Jonah talks to God here “monstrous.”

It’s crazy. If I were God and Jonah talked to me like that I think I just would have reacted and been like that’s it you tool. Bing! You’re done. That’s probably pretty telling of my own heart and what camp I fall into like we were talking about earlier. I guess I’m where I can’t wait for God just to smite people who defy him and I’m just as blind and stupid as Jonah.

But God is truly gracious. Truly slow to anger. Check out how he responds to Jonah. Verse 4, The LORD says, “Do you do well to be angry?” He asks him a question.

Now this isn’t the first time one of God’s men has questioned God like this. Job in the book of Job actually used courtroom language and called God to court questioning him about all the bad stuff that had happened to him. Toward the end of the book God finally shows up to Job’s court and when he does God starts hammering him with questions like, where you there when I created the world..when I placed the stars and created the animals? And then God says who are you oh man to question me (Job 38 paraphrase)?

In the book of Habakkuk, he likewise is upset that those who are evil seem to get away with it and go unpunished and Habakkuk challenges God demanding to know how long this is going to go on. Then Habakkuk climbs up into this tower and says he’s going to stay there and wait until God answers him.

In all these cases with these men, Jonah, Job, Hakakkuk God always responds and it’s always with grace. Here in our case with Jonah rather than smite him for being rude and disrespectful and downright wrong, God turns around and asks Jonah a question and probes him.

We’ll talk next week about how God uses this to get at Jonah’s heart and the other things God says and does to reach Jonah. But this week, just notice his very response in entertaining the conversation is yet even more grace from God. He’s already had a ton of grace on him…giving him life, calling him to be a prophet, not killing him with the storm when he disobeyed, saving him with a fish and now when Jonah angrily accuses him…rather than lashing out, God responds carefully, lovingly with yet even more grace. God’s answer to Jonah’s charge, evidence and verdict is…more grace.

“Do you do well to be angry?” Should you really be angry with me? That’s gracious. Extremely gracious. Beyond gracious. In fact this whole chapter is one pile of grace upon grace. We’ll dig deep into it next week. But for now I want to conclude on this note…so let’s try and pull it together.

Conclusion

Jonah has a fundamental problem with God being gracious. He doesn’t think God should be gracious. Now granted, he’s wrong. We don’t want to ever call God on justice saying, “that’s not fair, that’s not fair” because what’s fair is he never created us and what’s fair is he wipes us all out because we’re a terrible failure in glorifying our maker.

Regardless, there is something to Job’s fundamental problem with God, wherein I kind of think…and I may be going out on a limb here…but I kind of think he’s right. There is a real problem with how God can be good or right or true or just at all if he just let’s this stuff go by exercising grace all the time. Sure it’s his prerogative and he can do what he wants, but how does that make sense? If a judge just let’s a murderer off the hook with no punishment, even if he’s sorry and just says it’s grace…isn’t there something wrong with that? God’s grace can be confusing really.

Now in Jonah’s case, God just goes after the duplicity of his heart which we’ll see next week. In Job’s case we learn there was something bigger going on between God and Satan. But in Habakkuk’s case when God responds he says something interesting. The heart of his response is “the just shall live by faith” which basically means, just wait, have faith and I’ll you’ll see later what I do and that’s why you can live…why I can exercise grace to you now.

God’s response really, all throughout the Old Testament was a promise, a covenant that looked forward in time through history to a point when God was going to do something great and put all these things together.

So I want to do something you’re never supposed to do and that’ s bring in new, potentially confusing information here in the end. So aspiring preachers, don’t do this. At least normally.

Here it is, Romans 3:23-26. Read it with me. Now don’t worry we’re not going to start over with text and sermon number two here. But notice one thing in this passage with me…look where it says in verse 25 that God “in his divine forebearance passed over former sins.” See that?

Romans here takes up the fundamental problem Jonah has with God with how God can be gracious. Romans here says yes, salvation, justification, redemption it’s a gift of grace, verse 24. But the way he could do that in the past, like in Jonah’s time with the Ninevites and in Habakkuk’s time with the Babylonians is that he passed over it, stored up the just judgment and wrath and then all at once poured it out on Jesus on the cross. That’s what that word propitiation means there…the satisfaction of wrath.

The result is verse 26. God’s just, he’s right and good and NOT evil because he did punish the wickedness and sin of men in Jesus instead of us AND he can justify, he can therefore grant grace and save people and he isn’t corrupt.

This my friends is the gospel, the good news of who Jesus is and what he has done. Jesus answers the problem of Jonah. You see back in Jonah there was something much bigger going on than Jonah and even the Ninevites. There was an extending and receiving of grace that God would provide for in future time in Jesus. The story of Jonah and the Ninevites and the whole Old Testament is a story of a people in need of the grace of God and God granting that grace on the basis of what he would one day do in Jesus.

So today this is where we conclude. We need grace and it’s provided for in Jesus. God is a God of grace and he has determined throughout all time that he will be a God of grace.

We’re all in one of two places today. We either live life thinking we deserve something good and it is owed to us and we have done enough to get it OR we live life realizing we don’t deserve anything except judgment, could never do enough and simply need massive grace and change.

Jonah’s view of God needed to change. Does yours? Where do you need God’s grace today? My guess is if God is not an active thing in your life…I mean like a daily, ongoing, relational, dependent, spirit filled deal…then there’s probably some issues between you and God you have yet to work out. Maybe for some of you you’ve never really had a straight up honest talk with God like Jonah does here.

Maybe some of you need to do that today. The message this morning is God is gracious. He has determined to be so. He sent his son and died on a cross for you so could know and experience grace. We all deserve judgment and wrath but God poured it out on Jesus instead of us so we might be saved and changed.

So let’s respond to the message of the gospel today and have God dig out our disbelief and bring us deliverance through his divine son.

Let’s pray.