Feb. 25, 2018 PM Anger Over Mercy by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Well, this afternoon we will take a look at Jonah 4, a rather short chapter as was the content of last week's message.

Chapter 3 was a 10 -verse chapter. And now as this prophetic book comes to a close, we have an 11 -verse chapter.

Let me read these verses to you. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.

And he prayed to the Lord and said, O Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why

I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God, a merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.

Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

And the Lord said, Do you do well to be angry? Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there.

And he sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city.

Now the Lord had appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort.

So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came on the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered.

When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint.

And he asked that he might die and said, It is better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, Do you do well to be angry for the plant?

And he said, Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die. And the Lord said,

You pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night.

And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120 ,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?

And so ends this four chapter prophetic book, which we've been in for some time.

Lord willing, next week we will begin some new series in our afternoon worship.

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. It's a fairly amazing statement to read.

In a prophetic book about a prophet who I made the case, rehabilitating his image somewhat, is one of the great prophets, because of all the things that he did in his life, his living parable of the gospel of the

Lord Jesus Christ, in ways that no other prophet could really point to and match.

And yet we have this incredible statement, exceedingly, he was exceedingly angry. Over what?

Over the Lord's working? Well, yes, but more literally, over the

Lord's not working. Over the Lord's not doing something. Over the Lord's refraining from an action.

Angry over what God didn't do. But still, to look at a prophetic book, to read the words and the behavior and the actions of a great prophet, and find him angry.

It's an incredible statement. We must confess that we do, at times, do we not disagree with God?

We can say we did agree with him, because intellectually we know that God is sovereign, and he's to be worshiped in all things, and nothing he does is but right.

Will not the God of all the earth, excuse me, the judge of all the earth, do what is right? And the meaning there being more, do only what is right?

And of course the answer is yes, of course. And yet, we must admit that we do, at times, disagree with Jonah.

I prayed faithfully that my husband might keep that job, but you let that company close, and he lost that job.

Lord, I disagree with you. Why did you let that parent or that spouse or that child get sick, or even die?

Didn't I pray to you in Jesus' name? Lord, I'm angry, and I disagree with you.

My health, Lord, why did you have to attack my health as you did Job? What did

I do? Which is sort of the question that Job was asking. And we say, well,

I am angry about this. I disagree with you, Lord. Are we not often in that same position as we find

Jonah? Questioning God is one thing. Israel's poet,

King David, he did it often enough in the Psalms, and others did as well. How long, oh Lord, we read in one of the

Psalms. How long, oh Lord, will you be angry forever? But where do we end up?

Where must we end up? Oh, in one sense, with some trepidation and massive respect, in one sense, yes, we can question

God. We can give him our reasons against him. We can give him our complaints.

The psalmists do it. Where must we end up? With the complaining psalmist, we must end up.

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is none on earth that I desire besides you. Jonah is not really questioning

God, though. He's really just angry. He speaks to God with the language tells us a hot displeasure.

There's a compounding here that's a bit clumsy in the English, but he gets a point across what God didn't do to destroy

Nineveh displeased Jonah. And displeased has a root meaning.

It comes from a word whose root meaning is evil. It was to him a great evil, but it was an evil of great proportions to Jonah, and he was hot and enraged over it.

It'd be one way to paraphrase it. So what is it that's displeasing to the prophet?

What did he see? He hadn't yet seen the non -destruction of Nineveh.

He hadn't yet seen God not act upon Nineveh. It seems at this point that all

Jonah had seen was the spread of repentance. He saw revival begin in this pagan city.

He saw repentance starting. Now we can credit him with one great theological insight, and that is this, when men repent, it's

God who did it. Does he not imply that? When he's angry at God because of what he's seeing in the city, he's seeing people repent, he's seeing the sackcloth and ashes, he's seeing the king say, let no man or beast wear anything but sackcloth, and let him not eat or drink.

Man or beast, we're not gonna have commerce, we're not gonna make a living, we're not gonna do anything until we have found that God has heard us.

Who knows? Maybe he will turn, said the king. And Jonah sees all this, and we'll talk about his displeasure and what he's being displeased about, but do keep in mind, at least this to his credit, that in this particular context, that he knows that if men repented, that it's

God who did it. It is God who did it. When Peter preached at Pentecost, and the men said, men and brothers, what shall we do?

And he said, repent, to be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was God, the Holy Spirit, as Acts chapter two makes so clear, and in so many other places.

Jonah's attitude seems to be more, more and more surely God would never accept such a thing from such a people as this.

But Nineveh, the reader of the Ninevites, convinced that they had heard what? The word of God, it says they believed

God, not Jonah. Nineveh was convinced that that's what they heard, that's what they obeyed, and this was met with the prophet, with the herald's hot displeasure.

And we know by what the scripture tells us, and you who've had the humbling honor of preaching, and the even more humbling blessing of somebody coming and saying, you know, that spoke to me, and sometimes they say, you spoke to me, and that's okay because what the person means is,

God, by your exposition of his word, spoke to me. And so God gets all the credit.

God gets all the glory. All a man can do, a man can do, a man like myself, a man like yourselves, a man like Jonah, is to tell you, thus saith the

Lord. And God does with that what he will. The preparation of the heart is your responsibility.

But how that word enters your heart is God's reign, and that alone.

But this in Jonah is fairly amazing. If the eight -word message of chapter three, verse four, yet 40 days, and then it shall be overturned, if that spoke only of their impending doom, then this whole sequence tells us that, possibly,

Jonah didn't even offer forgiveness. And I told you before that there's two main schools of thought on the content of Jonah's message.

Some men think it was, yet 40 days, and then it shall be overturned. Other men think, like myself, that that's sort of the summary of the message, the title, if you will.

It doesn't change very much in how we understand the book, so it's not something that's even worth thumb -wrestling over.

But it would appear from his hot displeasure at the Lord. And if all he saw up to that point was the repentance of that people, then this is what made him angry, seeing this people turn from their wicked ways to God.

It seems that that's all he told them. It didn't sound like there was any grace, any forgiveness in his message.

Didn't even offer that. Brother, what shall we do? Could they have cried out with the men at Pentecost?

And then what would his response have been? Maybe something like, nothing you can do. God's about to smite you all dead.

Get your affairs in order, prepare to meet thy maker. And then he complains even further.

He prayed to the Lord. And the scripture tells us this is a prayer, which again is fairly amazing.

Is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish.

For I knew that your gracious God and merciful, and merciful, slow to anger, and so forth. Angry to have to serve a

God of that nature. Angry that he would go and preach for a merciful

God and be angry that the merciful God showed mercy. Anger is a terrible cancer.

We're warned against it all through the Proverbs. We're warned against it by the prophets.

We're warned against it by Cain in Genesis four. We're warned about it by the prophet in Ephesians and in Romans where we've been all over the scripture.

Anger is this terrible, terrible disease. It's a cancer. It flows unbidden from our fallen nature.

It comes from the flesh whose yearnings that we just don't quite tamp down. Anger is cousin to pride.

The one justifying the other, and then the one justified feeds the other for more self -justification, and the pride swells to the bursting point, and it almost guarantees what?

Another burst of anger, because pride says I didn't get my way. God asked

Cain, he asked Jonah, he asks us, do you do well to be angry? I mean, is not anger a repudiation of God?

Is it not a denial of his goodness and his wisdom? So Jonah here receives another object lesson.

Three days, and this fish gave him his wish to be free from God, or so he thought.

That taste of what it would be like if his wish had been granted. So now, outside of Nineveh, as he gazes upon the city from the shelter that he built for himself, he experiences in himself and for himself a taste of what it would have been like had

God done what he wanted him to do to Nineveh. He built himself a shelter.

He built himself a shelter, and it seems that it had no roof. And in that desert, it would be a very hot, a very dry place, a very uncomfortable place.

And if it was a shelter, as I'm envisioning, perhaps three -sided and he's sitting in there, then he's only protected from wind, and he's only protected from those directions, and not from the heat.

So the Lord appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, which just made me, every time

I read this, I have to kind of stop for a second and look at this. And then also, later, when he appoints the worm that destroys the plant, it's like you telling me that the

God of the universe, who right now, under his sovereign power, is directing every molecule that exists, that God, who knows, by name, each soul, in all history, that he placed in the

Lord Jesus Christ. A God who raises up kings and crushes nations, and raises up others in their place, and when they don't do his will, or when he decides it's time, he casts them aside.

Are you telling me that a God, with all these things on his mind, is going to appoint a plant?

He's going to say to a blade of grass, grow. He's gonna look at a single gourd and say, you're gonna grow up overnight in this place.

I want you to bend over at this angle, and cover this much of this shelter, and cover this prophet's head while he looks in this direction.

Yes, that is what the scripture teaches us about our God appointing a plant.

And of course, the same for the worm. Do we have a God who could speak to a worm? We have nothing in the Bible that tells us, quote,

God said to the worm, or anything like that, and yet, did not God appoint the worm?

Did not God, from heaven, with every molecule in the universe, working under his immediate, direct, providential control, say to a worm, go to this place, and at this moment, destroy this plant that is covering that prophet's head?

Yes, that's the God we worship. That's the God the apostle says in Ephesians chapter one, three through 14, the whole section of that.

You're chosen in him, chosen to be in him, in Christ, before the foundation of the world. That's the

God who Jesus Christ says, not a sparrow falls from the ground, except that your father in heaven says.

Which means that a sparrow, I don't know how many times a second they flap their wings, but I think it's pretty quick.

That means that every flap of the wing, every time, God said, that wing shall flap that moment.

That's the God we worship. Well, God appoints the plant to come up over Jonah. God appoints the word to take the plant away from Jonah.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Jonah, excuse me,

Nineveh was a great city. The Hebrew phrase actually says it was great to the Lord. It was a great city to God.

Men built the city, but who decreed that that city should exist? The Lord.

And who made it great? I know what the Ninevites thought, but the answer is the same as before.

The Lord, the Lord God. It was to him a great city because as are all other cities, it was his city.

He made it. He decreed when it would exist, what it would do, who would be in it, how high the walls would be.

It's God's city. And it was a great city to him. As he appointed

Nineveh to exist and give shelter to its citizens, so here he has appointed the plant to exist and to give shade to Jonah.

Shelter to him. Why was it taken away? Because it was God's to give and it came without a contracted lifespan by which the prophet could cry foul.

So he says, you didn't labor for this plant. It's not yours. It's mine.

I set it over you. You should be happy you had it for a moment. So removed from no more cause than that just to show

God's sovereign power. Jonah's being shown what it is he's wishing for against his hated enemy.

His city is the shelter he built and the shelter he has in that city is the gourd that grew overnight.

So all that was to him, what? It was the walls of Nineveh to the citizens of that city.

It was their shelter. It would now see, says the Lord, how it would be for 120 ,000 people to be cast into the wilderness and have nothing to protect them from the sun or from the scorching wind.

You know, God might need to take our comforts from us. These things that while we give thanks for them, we do, if we admit it, sort of take for granted.

And here perhaps the lesson is very simple and very basic. Let us be charitable. Let us be a merciful people.

Let us be generous as Jesus tells us in Matthew 6, one through four in the Sermon on the Mount. Many times in the law, where God's people are commanded to be what?

Open -handed and generous. The beginning of the reading this morning in Leviticus, what

Conley read to you had to do with not gleaning all your fields. Why? Because that would humiliate the poor who come to the field to find something for their food, something for the table, and you're to leave the corners for just that reason.

Accented by, accentuated with this, I am the Lord your God. But those words sink down into our ears.

There are times where the lesson learned is to find out what it would be like to be without these things.

That's what Job learned. That's what Jonah is learning. Many of us in our lives have learned that very lesson.

As loved ones have been lost, homes, jobs, all sorts of things. And it's a good lesson.

It is for us a good lesson if when we end up saying, whom have I in heaven but you, we're looking at the

Lord Jesus Christ. We're looking at his cross and say, what do I have worth having other than the faith you've given me to believe in the salvation that you won at that cross?

Jonah wants to die. It's better for me to die than live. And in that discussion between them, do you do well to be angry over the plant?

Yes, of course, I'm angry enough to die over the plant. You pitied the plant for which you didn't labor. You had nothing to do with it.

You didn't make it grow. And it comes up in the night and it perishes in the night. How dare you complain about something you had nothing at all to do with?

And then, you're angry over the plant. But nothing for a city of 120 ,000.

I don't want to deal very much with Jonah's death wish. And I'll be very honest with you why

I don't. I don't understand it. I can't really figure out what it is he's saying.

And every time I come up with an idea, I find a respected commentator who has a different idea that seems better than mine.

But when I look at his idea, it falls apart, and I look at another man, and they have a good idea. But that one, I can't find anything that really explains this to me.

And so, I'm not going to try and pretend like I've come up with some paradigm understanding of Jonah's death wish.

But I will tell you what I guardedly think is the most sensible, is that it's hyperbole.

It's a bit of a tantrum. It's a bit of a child stomping their feet and saying, well,

I just wish I was dead because I didn't get my way. That sort of overstates it, and I admit there's holes in that.

But honestly, that's the best I can do. And I just want to tell you, you who've read your Bibles, you who are serious about God's word with the rest of us and are wondering about that, and I'm paid to figure all these things out,

I can't figure this one out. I really don't know how to explain his death wish other than hyperbole seems to fit the best.

There's the prophet's lack of appreciation for the intrinsic value, though, of every image bearer.

Every human being is born with the imprint of God in a way that no other living thing in all the universe is.

This is why murder is so horrific a crime. In almost all societies, all cultures, murder rises to the top of capital crimes.

Of course, the difference for us is we would agree with a statement like that, as would most of the country, but we would attribute that crime to the wanton killing of unborn image bearers.

But murder, death, is at the top of the list, or bringing death to another.

There's also that Jonah, while confessing to know that God is, in fact, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, he wanted those qualities to work in his favor, and not for those who he, in his wisdom, thought should be allowed only the opposite, judgment, condemnation.

But Jonah was sent on a mission of mercy, declaring judgment is an act of mercy if disaster is impending.

Mercy for me, yes, that's very good. In fact, I'll have a double helping, and I'll eat that while I'm getting back in line for more of that, but that vile sinner over there, that one who's eyeing the line that's passing by the tables filled with God's bounty, no, not for him.

I judge him unworthy. I call on God to condemn him. And right now, actually, would be a good time.

Before the line moves forward, and he gets to reach out onto that buffet table and grab something like the bread of life.

God's pity for the animals is simply his concern for the people. How can they live without the means of production?

The Egyptians learned that lesson the hard way in the fifth plague, with their leader, Pharaoh, never repenting, though he saw the mighty works of God as he bared his arm against them.

But of course, the Egyptians, unlike the Ninevites, never repented. What do we learn from all this as we prepare our hearts to take the table?

Lord willing, I'll finish in enough time that we're gonna take a quiet five or six, maybe seven minutes this afternoon, quietly considering ourselves before we take the table.

What do we learn from all this? One of the great lessons, I think, we have here is that repentance is never ignored by God.

Were the Ninevites actually saved, or were they only the recipients of a stay of execution with eternal condemnation still ahead of them?

We have little to go on here. We can say positively, though, that when God sees repentance, when men call on his name as his name, when they believe that God will do as he has warned that he is going to do, and that he can just as easily dissuade himself that this merciful

God does, and when he hears repentance like that, we know is never for naught, because God, as Jonah says, as Moses learned in Exodus 33, as the prophets repeat so many times, he is merciful and patient and abounding in love, and he condemns the sinner and he punishes iniquity and yet he forgives in a more abounding way.

As he said through the prophet Ezekiel, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked.

Turn, turning is always efficacious with God. God sees repentance and God relents when he sees that.

Whether the Ninevites have waited with other saints of old for the Savior's blood to be shed to accomplish their final salvation, or whether they were not determined for eternal communion with God through Christ, but to something different, that's the

Lord's domain. But let it never be said that our heavenly Father's ear is ever closed to true repentance.

Jonah's idea is that the wages of sin is death, that every transgression or disobedience receives and should receive and must receive a just retribution.

And you know, I've combined there some things like James who says that if you would keep the law, you must keep it all, and the author of Hebrews saying that every iniquity, every disobedience received its just retribution.

Well, this is exactly where Jonah is. You sinned, you die. You sinned,

I saw it, I told you, you're done. That's what the law says.

That's what the apostle says, for the wages of sin is death. We know this. Jesus turns it all upside down, though, doesn't he?

This is what he puts in place of our sins. He says something like, I have fulfilled the law's demands. I, Jesus, I by my perfect obedience to the

Father, I've quenched the flames of Sinai, where any living thing that presumed to even touch the mountain had to die.

And I have obeyed all this. I have fulfilled the law's demands. I have satisfied his righteousness.

And at the cross, which we this afternoon remember, suffered all its penalties, all its penalties by everyone who violated it in the slightest, which includes every human other than himself.

God in the flesh, when God became man, only he did not need someone to die for him.

If Jonah says the wages of sin is death, we say, amen. The death of our

Savior paid our death. Jesus' testimony of this is a lengthy testimony, developed over centuries, from Abel's murder to Calvary's cross.

And we see here Jonah, he's once more this flame showing forth the light of the gospel. There were revivals, there was national mourning for sin led by kings and governors in Israel like Josiah or Nineveh.

So where's the gospel in Jonah? It's in God's grace showered down upon penitent sinners who went from total self -reliance to total self -despair, from self -aggrandizing pride to humble begging before God that he might give them one more breath with which to confess their sin.

And that's the gospel, because God hears. The sailors said, perhaps God will give a thought to us that we may not perish.

The king said, who knows, God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish.

And Jonah said, is this not what I said? You see, for him, for Jonah, there was no perhaps, there was no who knows.

He knew God so well, he was so intimate with Yahweh, so fully did he trust in God's nature that he had no doubt that the divine message would be attended with power, and that God, the

God he knew so well, would act from his mercy and spare those who heard. I think it's a bit like the parable of the workers hired at different times, hired throughout the day, and the first hired who saw the last hired get the same pay, and they presumed to tell the master what's fair, that he wasn't being fair to them, yet what?

He said, no, I gave you what I agreed. You've got your reward, your wages, in full. Go your way, it's mine to do with what

I want, speaking of his own resources. The Ninevites are like that.

Non -Israelites, non -first in line, receiving the grace of God, as all of us can affirm, all of us will take the elements in a few moments, that yes,

I am a recipient of grace, and only of grace, and all of grace, and nothing but grace of God, undeserving.

I, a Ninevite, I, the chief of all sinners, and yet God, in his mercy, saved me by the washing and regeneration of the

Holy Spirit. All of us can learn to look to God with pure eyes, and to know how boundless is his mercy.

I mean, what sinner can be too far gone for God to recover? That's sort of the message here. Ninevites, there's been worse sinners than Ninevites in the world, and we're gonna meet a whole lot of them,

I think, when we get to see Jesus in all his glory. Jesus, the good shepherd, the one who leaves 99 to bring back one.

Whoever comes to mind for you is the worst, most depraved, most maniacally, criminally insane transgressor you can imagine.

If that one is so bad that God cannot save them, I say cannot, will not is up to him, cannot, then he can save no one.

The cross saves everyone fully for whom it was fully intended. If God chose to bring under Christ's blood the 120 ,000

Ninevites, then we're gonna meet them one day in heaven. Paul writes in Ephesians 1 .3, our

God and father of the Lord Jesus Christ, he chose us in him before the foundation of the world and has given us, with maybe some of them, this free gift of salvation without money, without price.

And so we progress from the end of this prophecy to the

Lord's Supper. It's the end of our day. I hope that this table, that this remembrance of the

Lord Jesus Christ in his sacrifice is not just the end of the day, but the highlight, the climax of the day as we come here to remember our savior, to be strengthened as we obey him by coming to this table, by taking rightly in a worthy manner, and by his spirit being strengthened in our faith and prepared for the week that lies ahead of us, whatever that week holds in store for us.

Jonah, I think, would be awestruck by what we do here. Sinners awash in the forgiveness of God by the work of his son at Calvary.

Sinners as bad as the Ninevites that he was angry at seeing their non -destruction, reveling in the grace and goodness and kindness of a forgiving

God. What might he have said to God if he saw God's only son paying the sin price for a

Ninevite? I won't speculate. But this is the savior whose sacrifice for us,

Ninevites to the last, is remembered. You know, last

Sunday school, when I was teaching about the Lord's Table, I misspoke just a little bit.

I said we had a memorialist view of the Lord's Table, and I used a technical term in a non -technical way, and that was a bit of an error, and I'm afraid

I sowed some confusion with that. Memorialist is a formal term, and it means that this is remembrance and nothing more.

We do this because Jesus said, and for really no other reason, but true memorialism denies any special presence of Christ at the table.

And that's not what I meant, that's not what I believe. It was a misuse of the term, and I apologize for it. I meant to reinforce that the elements do not become anything other than what they are, as Roman Catholicism states, or the

Lutheran doctrine that Christ is somehow specially present in and through and behind and around the element.

I was trying to reinforce the idea that the bread and the wine remain bread and wine.

Our position is the Reformed view. In the confession of faith, which is our statement of faith, worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly, excuse me, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive and feed upon Christ crucified and all the benefits of his death, the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally, meaning physically, or carnally, meaning by flesh, but spiritually present to the faith of believers in that ordinance as the elements themselves are to their outward senses.

1 Corinthians 10 .6 would confirm this in fewer words than all that. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?

The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? Of course, the answer to both those questions is yes.

It is a participation. It is a spiritual exercise.

It is a means of grace by which we are spiritually strengthened and reminded of our faith and our

Savior. So we're going to serve in a few minutes.

And until we do, what I would call for now is for all of us to sit quietly before the

Lord. To sit quietly and prayerfully, within your own mind and spirit, to discern his body and blood.

His body in the broken bread, his blood through the vine, representing his tortures for us in the body, his broken body, representing of life poured out for us, his blood actually spilled on our behalf.

Discern his body and blood. Discern his body, the church, with whom we live together in this place in spirit of unity and love.

Think upon these things. If the scripture would guide you, then

Ephesians chapter, excuse me, 1 Corinthians chapter 11 would be a good place to set your mind and spirit and your eyes upon those words that are going to be repeated again and again and again when we take the table.

We prepare ourselves for a real participation in Christ because as the word of God says in Romans chapter six and one through 11,

Ephesians chapter one and verse three, in God the Father's eyes, we were in Christ when he suffered.

We did participate in that sense in his suffering, all his, none ours. So that his suffering, the righteousness he earned, the obedience to the

Lord, the obedience to the law, the fealty to God's holiness of his whole life and work could be imputed to us.

So let's pray individually, quietly for a few minutes. As I said, if the scripture's open, 1

Corinthians 11's not the only place to go, but it'd be a good place to go to prepare for the table.

I wouldn't object if someone feels led to tap a brother or sister on the shoulder and pray with them for a moment or two, that's fine as well.

But let's take somewhere around five to seven minutes for prayer and with this prayer, individually or in small, quiet groups, prepare ourselves for the table, amen?