Jonah 4
ONE of the tokens that the Bible is the Word of God, is its accurate and searching exposure of the heart of man; and not only is the light of His truth turned therein upon the sinner in his sins, but His saints, on occasion, are also seen in it in ways unworthy and shameful, and even worse. It is thus that the failures, as well as the faith, of God’s elect are set forth for our admonition upon whom the ends of the ages are come.
Here therefore we see Jonah on a low plane indeed. Did we not know something, by God’s great mercy, of our own selves, that in us, apart from Him, good does not dwell, we might well be surprised at such a change in the man who, but a little season before, humbly prayed in the belly of the great fish. He was angry now; much grieved because, as it seems, he felt that his name as a prophet would suffer since the people of Nineveh were to be spared after being marked for soon-to-be-executed judgment.
How unlike his Master, and how unworthy of Him this was! Jonah knew, he says, that that One at whose bidding he had gone to the Gentiles, is a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger and of great loving kindness; and he would rather, thinking of the people of Nineveh, that He had not been so. Better was it, in Jonah’s opinion, that the hundreds of thousands in the city should perish, then that the luster of his own name as a prophet should be dimmed; therefore he wishes to die.
Observe now the answer of God after the manner of a patient parent with a petulant child, “Doest thou well to be angry?”—an inquiry enough, surely, to bring Jonah back to Himself; but he was not yet ready to listen, to pause and consider his way. He went out of the city and sat on the east side of it, perhaps on the rocky high ground not far from the eastern wall, from which he could view the place.
Observe again the tender compassion of the heart of God, not hindered from flowing out by the narrow and hard selfishness of the natural heart of man. Though Jonah’s inward state is still rebellious, God prepares a gourd to shade the prophet from the heat, “to deliver him from his grief” (or trouble); and it had that effect.
But God also prepared a worm, and a sultry east wind, and Jonah again wished to die; he pitied the gourd, because of the good it had done him; poor, impatient child of God! What was the gourd in comparison with the great city of the Gentiles on which God had pity? The Book does not tell us the result of these dealings of God with His servant, but we may well conclude that they taught him the lesson he so much needed, of sharing His thoughts and desires concerning the unworthy.
ML 03/21/1937