Jonah – The Compassion of God

Introduction

Well, good morning. It is a real honor to be here. I really can’t express just how excited and really elated that I am and that my family is to be here. And frankly, humbled. This congregation is a special congregation. And you all have a really good reputation. And you’re doing a lot of really good work. And so to be not only invited by the elders, but for that to be agreeable to the rest of the congregation, to have us come, is uh quite quite an honor. And uh I I look forward to getting to know you and to uh to working with you and getting to know you all on a personal level as well. You know, I thought it would be a long shot when I when I heard about this opportunity at South Bumby.

I thought that sounds marvelous. But I I just thought, well, I’ll just try and we’ll see. And uh I just am amazed and uh and I rejoice that it has worked out and that I’m here. I really do view this as the opportunity of a lifetime, uh, and I hope that God can use me and my family uh to be effective and to help people. My my goal is to help you, uh that we labor together and to help help you to learn God’s word better better, but also to help to motivate you and even to help to hopefully inspire you to live joyfully and zealously for God. And that’s what we are about, and that’s what I need to be trying to do. If God can use me here, I think that he has a purpose for me being here.

If I’m here, I just don’t want to get in his way. And I want to plant and water, and I pray that we will plant and water together, and that God can cause the increase. And uh I do feel unworthy, and uh I I honestly struggle with that a little bit. I feel a bit unworthy to be standing here and to be among you in this capacity, but it is uh partly because of that sense of unworthiness that has motivated me, and I will assure you I’m going to work hard. Uh I’m going to work hard to help the kingdom, and I’m going to work hard to help to help you all. It was hard to leave where I where I was. We were at a congregation in Dade City that’s not quite an hour north of Tampa, and the name of the congregation is Trillicucci, uh about half the size of this group or so.

And uh I was there in a part-time capacity for a couple of years, uh, and that was a marvelous opportunity because I was able to work with one of my mentors, uh Bob Waldron, and he invited me to come there, and we we worked together, and uh I felt like I was a help to him, and he was a marvelous help to me. But it came a point where I need to preach full-time, and it was not a feasible option there uh currently for for me to do that, for my family to be supported, and so I I looked elsewhere and found this opportunity. So we we leave with heavy hearts from that congregation, but we are thrilled uh to be here in this congregation. I also want to tell you that I’m open to criticism, to uh uh any suggestions that you might have of anything that I say that it is not that that might not be spot on.

I certainly want everything to be spot on. And but if you ever have any concerns. Of course, my desire, as is uh any preacher up here, Mr. Harkwriter and Greg, our desire is to preach God’s word and to teach the truth of God’s word without apology, but we also don’t want to do it in a way that offends unnecessarily. And so if I ever have anything that I say that you’re concerned about, I would hate for you to feel like you can’t talk to me, because I will be more than happy to sit down with anybody here and to hear any of your concerns anytime. So I want to make that statement up front. I want to begin the lesson this morning by asking a question.

When you think of the book of Jonah, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Well, obviously, the fish. That’s the first thing that comes to everybody’s mind when they think of the book of Jonah. But that’s not actually the first thing that should come to our mind. Because that’s not really what the book’s about. That’s an important part of the book. But really, what the message and the thrust of the book is, it is the compassion of God. Whether it be God’s compassion with Jonah in saving him in the belly of that great sea creature, or whether it be especially God’s compassion toward the wicked city of Nineveh. It is the compassion of God that is driven home time and time again all through the book.

And that is the theme of the book.

1. Jonah Flees

And so what we want to do today is we just want to go through the book and we want to especially highlight the compassion of our God and see whatever other practical points that the book makes that we can apply to ourselves. Jonah was a prophet in the time of the divided kingdom. And he worked with the in the northern kingdom, and it was about year 790 BC or so that he was doing his prophetic work. The capital city of the nation of Assyria was Nineveh. And Assyria was a growing threat. And so let’s begin reading in chapter 1, where we see Jonah flees. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Emittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.

Now this sounds pretty straightforward. Hey, get up, go to Nineveh, tell them to repent. I mean, no problem, right? But this was something he did not want to do. Because Nineveh was an enemy, and it was also a very wicked city. I mean, just thoroughly wicked, and they were brutal, you know, cutting off the hands and feet of their captors and cutting off their heads. This was a terrible people. And so to extend a hand of grace to them, this is not what he wanted to do. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later. Now, the fact that God was reaching out to Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, shows us that God was not only interested in the Israelites. And this was not the only time God would reach out to the other nations.

This is what God did. He would reach out and try to get people to repent. Even Nineveh, the wicked city. And in verse 3, but Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare, and went down into it with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. Now notice that, from the presence of the Lord. And so he is, he is trying to get away from God’s presence. Really, isn’t that a silly thought? That, well, the Lord’s in this area over here. And so he wants me to do something, and I don’t want to do it. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go way over there and get out of his presence, and then I won’t have to worry about what he has to say.

I mean, really, that’s just not logical. As if God is in one area. God is everywhere. And, brethren, it doesn’t matter if we go to New York or if we go to South Africa or China or where we go, God is there. And God’s word is God’s word. Anywhere we go, you can’t get away from that. You can’t hide from God. And so he went from, I assume, his hometown, which 2 Kings 14 tells us was in the area of the Sea of Galilee, Gath Hephra, and went down from there to Joppa, which is about a 50-mile hike, and gets on a boat, pays the fare, and begins to travel west. Now, if you notice on this map, Nineveh was very much not west. It was very much east, several hundred miles east.

But he is traveling the complete opposite direction from what God told him to do. Now, brethren, when God tells us to go east, we need to go east.

When God tells us to go east. In that case, we would need to repent and go the opposite direction from where we were headed. Now this map backs up, and we see just how far his ultimate destination was. Tarshius is in Spain. This was about 2,000 miles away. He is literally trying to flee from the presence of the Lord. And he doesn’t make it to Tarshius, as we’re going to go on and see. Now you might ask, well, why? Why did he so want to get away from Nineveh? Well, I explained a little bit earlier. Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria. And Assyria was a threat. This was the threat. And if he went and preached to Nineveh, and if they repented, then what might that do to the nation?

Weaken it or strengthen it? He was afraid. If we do, if I do that, and they listen, then the nation will be strengthened. Did he want to see a strengthening of his archenemy? Not at all. Not at all. And in 2 Kings 14 and verse 25, Jeroboam II, who was the king of the northern tribe, restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath as far as the sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, which the God of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke through his servant Jonah, the son of Amitai, the prophet, who was of Gath Hefer. And so there was a strengthening of the border in the days of Jonah. And this was part of Jonah’s work.

As he was prophesying about this, and it and it came to pass that there was the strengthening of this border, so that means that there must have been some weakening of the Assyrian Empire. And so he did not want to see that change. So we can see where he would want to flee. It doesn’t make it right. In verse 4, the Lord hurled a great wind on the sea, and there was a great storm on the sea, so that the ship was about to break up. So just imagine he’s in this, he’s in this ship, he thinks everything’s going okay, he’s going to get away from the Lord, and here comes this great storm, and it’s just being the ship is being tossed everywhere. Then the sailors became afraid.

And every man cried to his God, and they threw the cargo which was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, laying down, and fallen asleep. How could he be asleep? He’s being tossed everywhere. There’s a great storm happening. People are afraid of their for their lives. And Jonah’s down there sleeping. Well, he must have been tired. He must have been very tired. So the captain approached him and said, How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your God. Perhaps your God will be concerned about us so that we will not perish. Each man said to his mate, Come, let us cast lots so that we may learn on whose account this calamity has struck us.

So they cast lots, and the light fell on Jonah. Casting of lots was sort of the equivalent of rolling dice. And so this was divinely guided. The lot fell on Jonah. And they said to him, Tell us now, on whose account has this calamity struck us? What is your occupation and where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you? Now keep in mind this is a very stressful situation because they think they could die at any moment. It’s continuing to rain and storm on them while they’re having this conversation. And he said to them, I am a Hebrew, and I serve the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. Well, just pause there for a minute. Now that that is a really good confession that Jonah made.

And I don’t want to disrespect Jonah because he was a prophet of the Lord. But Jonah, you’re making this confession, but you’re going west when the Lord said go east. So your confession doesn’t mean a whole lot in this situation. You see, if God tells us to go east, and we’re going west, then our confession of Him is empty. And so the thing we need to do is not just give the Lord lip service, but when the Lord says go east, go east. Then the men became extremely frightened. And they said to him, How could you do this? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. So they said to him, What should we do?

That the sea may become calm for us. For the sea was becoming increasingly stormy. He said to them, Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you. For I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you. Now you might look at that and say, Now, see, that’s that’s very noble of you, Jonah. Yeah, but why didn’t he just repent? Instead of repenting, he says, just throw me into the sea. Apparently he was, he was more willing to die than he was to repent. And so let that be a lesson to us, not to be stubborn in our ways. And some people would rather die than to repent of their great wickedness. However, the men rode desperately to return to land, but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them.

So now the storm is increasing, and it’s getting it’s getting more treacherous every moment. Then they called on the Lord and said, We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life, and do not put innocent blood on us, for you, O Lord, have done as you have pleased. So these are good men. They don’t want to be guilty of murder, throwing this man into the sea and for him dying on their behalf. But uh they they figured they had no choice. So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. And what do you think that did to the men? Then the men feared the Lord greatly. And they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

Not a strategy for evangelism that I would suggest, but it worked in this situation, didn’t it? A couple of nights ago, uh my boys were begging to watch a movie, a family night. And uh sometimes we do that, time to time. And I said, Well, tonight’s not family night. If we do that too often, I mean it’s not movie night. If we do a movie too often, you know, you’re just sitting and watching a movie, you’re not actually interacting. Let’s do something interactive. I said, video games. I said, no, no. Let’s do something interact. Well, what do we do? I said, let’s act out a Bible story. And it’s fun. Little kids love it. So I said, let’s do the story of Jonah. And so I just read through and narrated, read through the whole book.

And when I got to the different speaking parts, I would have the boys playing the different parts, and and uh later June even played the worm. And so we were all playing the different parts and uh using different things in the house for props, and we got to this part where it was, you know, Jonah being thrown from the boat. And Ty, my older son, was acting the sailor’s part, and he was up in the boat, which was two chairs put together in the middle facing there. And Stone was Jonah. And before I could even get to the part that they actually threw him into the sea, Ty had already thrown Stone off the side, and he hits his back, and it’s all beat up, and then there’s tears and drama.

And we were able to finish the story. Now I’m not just, I’m not just saying that, you know, as just a side note that leads nowhere. But I want to encourage us parents and grandparents. Take your children and have them act out Bible stories. Try that sometime. You don’t have to know the Bible story even all that well. Just read through it and read the part that they’re supposed to read. Children love that. They really love it, and it was the fun thing that we did on our family night instead of watching a movie. So Jonah is thrown into the sea. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. Well, what’s going on here?

He’s thrown into the sea, he was going to die. So was the fish punishment? This was his salvation. The fish was his salvation. Now, what kind of fish was it? What kind of sea creature was it? You might say, well, I know it was a well. Remember the kid’s song? Who did who did who did who did? Who did swallow Jojo Jonah? Well did swallow Jonah. Well did swallow Jonah. Well did swallow Jonah up. Anyone remember that song? So I know what swallowed Jonah was a well. Well, the word that’s used here in the Hebrew is a word that just is a general word for a sea creature. So it could have been a well, could have been some other type of creature. We just don’t know what type of creature that it was.

But at this point, liberal skeptics will step in and say, ah, now, see, this couldn’t be a true account because there’s no animal large enough, you know, no sea creature large enough that could swallow somebody whole, and there’s no way you could live inside of a sea creature for three days and everything. Well, my response to that, first of all, is yes, there are. There are blue whales and sperm wells, if it indeed was a well that swallowed Jonah, that are large enough to swallow a man whole. But the other thing we have to remember about this is this is miraculous. And if God could deliver Daniel from the mouth of the lions, and if God could deliver Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace, then God could preserve Jonah three days inside of some kind of sea creature.

2. Jonah Prays

That would be no problem for our God who created everything. So it does require faith, doesn’t it? Now, chapter 2, Jonah prays. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord as God from the stomach of the fish. So Jonah’s inside of a fish. Okay. Now put yourself in Jonah’s shoes for a minute. Be inside of a fish in your mind. This is terrifying. It is utterly terrifying. It’s dark, it’s yucky, it’s probably hot, I would guess, and you don’t know when you’re going to get out, but you know that you’re not dead. Would you have the presence of mind to pray? Because Jonah did.

If you did pray, what would you pray? Because I’ll tell you what I would pray if I was inside of a great sea creature. Get me out of here. But that’s not what Jonah prayed. And he said, I called out of my distress to the Lord. And he answered me. I cried for help from the depth of Sheol. You heard my voice. Now notice he’s thinking in the past tense here. For you had cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the current engulfed me. All your breakers and billows passed over me. So I said, I have been expelled from your sight. Nevertheless, I will look again toward your holy temple. Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me.

Weeds were wrapped around my head. Just picture Jonah here as he’s sinking, and the weeds are wrapping around his head, and he’s going lower and lower. I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever. But you have brought up my life from the pit, oh Lord, my God. Now pause there in this prayer. Do you see that this is not a prayer for deliverance out of the belly of the fish? Which is what you might expect, logically. This is a prayer of thanksgiving for the fish. Because he’s tremendous. You know, you might say, Well, my life is really hard. Well, life is hard. But are you in the belly of a fish? Well, my situation’s not fair. Well, are you in the belly of a fish?

Because Jonah was in the belly of a fish, and he gave thanks that God saved him by this fish. So let us be thankful, not only in our bad situations, but also for our bad situations. And the prayer continues.

Oh, this is beautiful. So here he is sinking deeper in the sea, and as he is descending lower and lower, he is praying to God, and though he’s in the depth of the sea, God who is in the heights of heaven hears him from his holy temple. Those who regard vain idols forsake their faithfulness, but I will sacrifice to you with the voice of thanksgiving that which I have vowed I will pay. Salvation is from the Lord. So I’m going to serve you, God. In essence, this is also a prayer of repentance. It is a prayer of repentance. And it’s a beautiful thing. I’m glad that he was committing himself to really serve the Lord, although we’re going to see that that commitment really fell short.

Right? And if I could be a little critical of Jonah here, I would say, well, Jonah, you sure did wait till the last minute to do all that repenting. Jonah, you should have repented while you were still on the boat. You should have repented while things were okay. And so you and I need to repent while we’re still on the boat. We don’t need to wait until things get desperate and we’re sinking in the depths of the sea and we’re at the brink of death, perhaps, to say, all right, now I’m going to repent. No, we need to repent while things are okay. But we’re glad that he does repent. And so, verse 10, then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land.

3. Jonah Preaches

That would be bizarre. Picture that. I mean, can you just see that and just maybe see that is if you were standing on the beach and you see this great big sea creature and just expels this human that is just there on the dry land. Imagine being Jonah. You have been inside of this fish for three days. And now you’re alive and you have a new lease on life. Chapter 3, we see Jonah preaches. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and proclaim to it the proclamation which I’m going to tell you. That’s the same thing God said the first time. He didn’t change what he said. It’s just Jonah was now in a different situation.

So he viewed what God said differently. And this time when God said it, Jonah said, Okay, I’ll go. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three days’ walk. Then Jonah began to go through the city one day’s walk, and he cried out and said, Yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown. That was his message. Just he he is out of duty doing what God wanted him to do. Yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown. Well, you know, I’m really glad that Jonah went on this second time. I used to teach martial arts. Uh, ever since I was 15 years old. I taught martial arts. And one of the things I’ve always taught my students is to do what you’re told the first time every time.

And don’t talk back. And don’t have an attitude. And do that at home and do that in the dojo. And so that was always emphasized. And we say that at home to our kids. They may not always do it, but we tell them, do what you’re told the first time, every time. And brethren, we are children of God. And what our attitude needs to be toward his word is we’re going to do what God tells us to do the first time. Every time. And of course, we fail in that. But you may, you may think to yourself, I’ll have another chance later. Well, you may not have another chance later. Jonah is lucky that he had a second chance. But he should have gone the first time God told him to go east instead of waiting until he just happened to get a second chance.

Alright, now, verse 5. Then the people of Nineveh believed in God, and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. Do you realize that this is the absolute last thing that you would expect the Ninevehes to do? These wicked people, they repented. Sometimes it’s easy to look at people and say, that person over there, that person’s not ever going to turn to the Lord. He drives a Harley. And he has long hair. He has tattoos. Whatever things we might think that would exclude him from being a good prospect. But I know a good preacher up in Indiana who was all of those things and wound up learning the gospel and becoming a preacher. And he said, the next time you see a long-haired hippie riding on a Harley, think to yourself, that man right there could one day be a great gospel preacher.

Instead of ruling it out. These were the Ninevehes. You would never expect the Ninevites to repent. But the Ninevites, these wicked people, they repent. When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat on the ashes. He issued a proclamation and sent this proclamation out through the land, commanding the people to fast and to repent. And in verse 9, he said, Who knows? God may turn and relent and withdraw his burning anger so that we will not perish. Our God is a consuming fire. But he is also a God of mercy. And he will turn and relent when people repent.

He was a cousin of mine.

And he was talking to me on the phone one day. And what he was trying to do was convince me to be an atheist, too, or to challenge my faith. And he said, I tell you one reason I can’t believe in the God of the Bible. It’s because he changes his mind. He’s just like a human. Well, it’s true, our God does sometimes change his mind. He changes his mind from intending to do harm to intending to do good. Well, I just can’t obey and believe in a God like that. I tell you, I can believe in a God like that. Because that is a God of compassion. And that’s the God that we serve. And that’s the point that is made so often through this book.

Verse 10 says, When God saw their deeds that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which he had declared he would bring upon them, and he did not do it. Now let’s just picture, let’s just imagine that I decide I’m going to go into Orlando. Orlando has about a hundred and forty thousand people, two hundred and forty thousand people in the city proper. Nineveh, according to chapter 4, verse 11, had 120,000 people. So quite a difference there. But let’s say I go into Orlando and I just go and start preaching. Yet 40 days in Orlando will be overthrown. And people listen to me. And they actually accept what I say and they’re concerned. And then the governor says, hey, everybody, we need to listen to this man.

4. Jonah Became Angry at God’s Compassion

We need to repent. And there’s this wholesale conversion of the city. I mean, that would just be absolutely unbelievable. When you read through this and you read about Nineveh repenting, it is absolutely shocking that you would have this wholesale repentance of the city. So we get to chapter 4. Jonah sucks. But it greatly displeased Jonah, and he became angry. Now, what displeased him? The fact that God was showing compassion upon this wicked city of Nineveh. That’s what made him angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, Please, Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country. Therefore, in order to forestall this, I fled to Tarshish. For I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.

Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life. I mean, he is just acting like a child. And he’s complaining. What is he complaining about? The grace of God. Well, he sure wasn’t complaining about that grace when it saved him from the depths of the sea. But now that that grace is being offered to somebody he doesn’t want it to be offered to, he begrudges that. We must never begrudge God’s grace upon others because we rely upon it desperately. And he explains, this is why I fled. I knew you were going to have mercy on them. And so I didn’t want to go and preach, because I didn’t want them to repent. I wanted them to be destroyed.

He didn’t love the Ninevites.

And this statement that he makes at the end of verse 2 you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, is one of the most significant statements in all of the Old Testament. One way I know that is surely by the number of times that that statement is made. The first time we find that statement is in Exodus chapter 34. And this is after the Israelites had sinned with the golden calf, and God was ready to wipe them off the map. And Moses prayed that God might not do that. And God told him, I will put you in the cleft of the rock and pass before you and proclaim my name before you. Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth.

And God relented.

Well, after this incident, when the Israelites went out from Sinai and up to the land of, well, to Kadesh Barnea to the edge of the promised land, they sent in the twelve spies. They came back, ten of the twelve had a fearful report of the land, and all the people said, Oh, let’s go back to Egypt. God was again furious, and he was ready to wipe them off the face of the planet. But Moses begged that God not do that. And he said, But now I pray, let the power of the Lord be great. Just as you have declared the Lord is slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression. That’s what Jonah quotes. That was initially stated in Exodus 34. Jonah was familiar with that.

Jonah knew that God had shown mercy to the Israelites when they deserved to be wiped off the face of the planet. And he knew that if God would do that, then God will show compassion upon these Ninevehs. Now, isn’t that a wonderful thing that the character of God is such that we can rest assured and know that he is a God of compassion? He is slow to anger. He gives us time to repent. You know, sometimes we get this picture of God that he’s just this cosmic cop who is looking for somebody to catch. And he just delights in condemning people. No, that isn’t the God that we serve. Our God is long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

2 Peter 3 9. Our God wants all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 1 Timothy 2 and verse 4. And the thing that Jonah messed up so greatly about was that he did not imitate the compassion of his God. What we must do, brethren, is we must strive to be like our God. And our God is compassionate. And therefore we must be compassionate to those who are lost. In verse 4, the Lord said, Do you have good reason to be angry? Just a logical question. And Jonah doesn’t even answer the question. Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city.

So the Lord God appointed a plant. And it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant. Now he wasn’t happy when God told him to go to Nineveh. He wasn’t happy when the Ninevehes repented, and he wasn’t happy when God spared the Nineveh of destruction. But he was happy about his plant.

Can you see that that’s about the most backwards priority a person could possibly have? And I think that that’s the problem that so often happens in the world in general, but in America. We are more concerned about our personal comfort than we are about God’s word and about these lost souls that are all around us. And we pour more effort into ourselves and into our comfort than we do into saving the lost who are around us. I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day, and it attacked the plant, and it withered. When the sun came up, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, Death is better to me than life.

So God was teaching him sort of an object lesson so that he might learn about compassion and priority. And Jonah is being melodramatic. Again, I don’t want to be disrespectful. I know that he was a prophet of the Lord, and I’ve been melodramatic. But I also have children. And I know what drama looks like. Do you? I’m going to staff. You know? I need to go to the hospital. I’m going to lose an eye. I’m going to die. You expect that out of children. But you don’t expect that out of adults. And God doesn’t expect that out of us.

Death is better to me than life, Jonah says. Then God said to Jonah, do you have good reason to be angry about the plant? And he said, I have good reason to be angry, even to death. Then the Lord said, and here’s the thrust. This sums up the book for us. You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand as well as many animals? He cared more about a plant than he cared about these people.

Compassion, even. Oh, I’m sad that the plant died. Think of the things that we have compassion for. And you can just think of your own and fill in the blank. Things that we care about, that we don’t want to see perish, that we want to take care of, that we go to great trouble to provide for and to help and to keep alive and healthy. And oh, we worry about it and we check on it. Are we more worried about those physical things of this earth than we are about the souls around us that are dying? I heard a great sermon recently on evangelism. And at the end of the lesson, he was talking about reasons we don’t evangelize more. And he made a lot of really good points, but after the lesson was over, the man that I was sitting next to said, you know, he made he made some good points there, but he forgot to mention this that the reason we don’t evangelize is because we don’t believe people are lost.

Now you might say, well, that’s not true. I believe that people are lost. So if you believe that people are lost, but you continue to do nothing to help them, what does that say about our heart? My heart, if I do that, it says that we don’t have enough compassion. Because that is the motivator behind evangelism. It’s not about us, it’s about helping others so that they might come to the Lord and be saved. And Jonah didn’t have that compassion because he didn’t want them to be saved. But do you see that when we ignore the opportunities around us to reach out to the lost?

Conclusion

We don’t see it that way. But we’re not showing compassion. And may it never be said on the judgment day, you never mention him to me, as Greg talked about earlier. So that’s the book of Jonah. When you think of the book of Jonah, don’t think of the fish. Let the first thought that comes to our mind when we think of the book of Jonah be the compassion of God. Would you bow with me in a word of prayer, please? Our Lord, our God who is in heaven. We are so thankful for your compassion and for your grace towards us. If it weren’t for that compassion, we could never be saved. Father, may we learn from the book of Jonah to look out at the Nineveh around us and to see that they are lost.

And instead of thinking there’s no way they’ll repent, help us to reach out to them and to urge them to obey the gospel. Give us strength, and most of all, Lord, give us compassion that we may imitate you, who are perfect, who is perfect. And your son is perfect. And it is through your son that we pray. Amen.

Well, there was a man in the New Testament who also fell asleep in a ship while there was a storm. And that man was woken up, and he didn’t have to be thrown into the sea to calm the sea. He simply went out to the sea and he said, Be quiet. And the wind and the waves obeyed him. And the disciples said, What kind of man is this? That even the wind and the waves obey him. It’s a man who is greater than Jonah. In Matthew chapter 12. The Pharisee said, Teacher, we want to see a sign from you. He said, An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign. Yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah, the prophet. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

And that is the ultimate sign is the resurrection of our Lord. The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment and will condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah. And behold, something greater than Jonah is here. So if you hear the gospel and refuse to repent and heed the gospel, then you are, you are unwilling to do something that even Nineveh did, which is repent. So I want to urge you to do what the Lord said. Because he said, I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish. So come to the Lord, believing in him, confessing his name, repenting of your sin, and being baptized in order to obtain your salvation. And then continue to go east when the Lord says, Go east.

If you would like to become a Christian, you can do it now, or you can wait till everybody leaves if you don’t want to do it in front of everybody. Or if you need our prayers, we’d be happy to do that. If you please come as we stand and sing the song of invitation.