Deeper Commentary

Jonah 4:1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry- Jonah wanted to see Nineveh's destruction. The 'grace' side of God, His desire for human repentance and salvation, just wasn't reflected in Jonah. He focused on God's anger with sin and sinners, and overlooked the rest. The book of Jonah was written by Jonah to state his repentance of legalism, elitism, racism and lack of grace. It's a profound warning that conservatism is not right of itself, and can lead to serious moral failure. It's simply not the case that conservatism is likely, as a rule of thumb, to be closer to God than liberalism. That has been the deeply wrong assumption of so many people. The Lord warned that conservatism is part of our human nature, and His teaching is radically progressive and anti-conservative (see on Lk. 5:39). It was God's right to be angry with sin and Nineveh; it was not for Jonah to be angry just because they had repented. The Lord perceived this feature of human nature when He commented that His goodness leads some to have an evil eye, a bitter outlook because He has saved (see on Mt. 20:15). Jonah had invested so much of himself in the message of judgment that he preached; when he realized God was changing from that path, he felt the whole narrative of his own life had been upset. God can change; this is clearly taught throughout the Bible. His passion for human salvation makes Him open ended in many ways. But for some, that is too much. Divine history has to be foretold in advance according to their particular interpretation of it. And when things don't work out for them, because either their understanding was faulty or God worked differently because of factoring in human repentance or potential to repent, they lose their faith or drift away from God. Jonah speaks to them.

"Displeased" is the word typically used of God's displeasure with sin. But Jonah presents himself as totally out of step with God. He was "displeased" at repentance from sin. And he will go on in :2 to even justify himself, by saying that 'This is exactly what I said would happen!'. He makes himself the prophet. Probably one of the greatest tests of human spirituality is how we respond to others' blessing or repentance. Jonah presents himself as being so deeply unspiritual by being bitter when God shows mercy and men repent and receive His blessing. We note all the personal pronouns in :2,3: "wasn’t this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee away to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and You relent of doing harm.
 Therefore now Yahweh, take, I beg You, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live". He presents as an extreme narcissist.  

Nineveh repented; thousands repented, and there must have been a party of joy in Heaven! But on earth, God's preacher, Jonah- didn't share Heaven's joy. He was angry. He didn't walk in step with the spirit. He didn't reflect Heaven's joy on earth. The Lord said: "Is your eye evil [i.e. are you clouded by a mean spirited feeling], because I am good?". We are all prone to this; to respond to God's grace by being evil-eyed, by our worldview, our "eye", becoming narrower and clouded because of the extravagance of His grace. By these comments I do not in any way underestimate the sadness and urgency of resolving divisions in the body of Christ; but we must remember that all true Christians who are in the one body preach, by that token, the same true Gospel. Their baptisms are valid-  so, we can rejoice. For who, after all, is Paul or Apollos, or Steve Z or Steve A, or Andy A or Andy Z, or any of us, but ministers. The essence is Christ. 

We recall that God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but wishes all men to repent (Ez. 18:23). Clearly Jonah is totally out of step with God's essential will.

Jonah 4:2 He prayed to Yahweh and said, Please, Yahweh, wasn’t this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee away to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and You relent of doing harm- See on Joel 2:14. This remonstration with God isn't recorded from God's standpoint in the record of Jon. 1. But the book of Jonah is Jonah's confession of sin and repentance. So he now records what he said. And he does so in exactly the terms in which God revealed His character and Name to Moses in Ex. 32. Jonah knew God was like this but didn't want Him to be like it. Just as he also knew Ps. 139:6 says that you can't flee from Yahweh's presence- but still he did. Jonah is effectively saying that he can't stand who God really is. He wanted, like so many religious people, to focus on a few aspects of God [in this case, God's anger with sin and judgment of it] and build the narrative of his understanding of God upon them; without wanting to see the far wider picture of who God is. In Jonah's case, his willful ignoring of God's gracious side was tantamount to not knowing the God whom he knew only in theory; for the gracious side of God dominates. And Jonah's amazing salvation from death, even his experience of resurrection, ought to have been enough to help him see that side. But here we see how hard it is to understand grace and believe it. Even death and resurrection, salvation by utter grace, wasn't enough to persuade Jonah of it. Others are likewise dragged through hell and high water, as Jonah was literally, and still don't get it. Judgmentalism and elitism dies a hard death, and many never get there. For to accept God's grace means an admission that they were wrong.  

Jonah didn't share Heaven's joy. He was angry. He didn't walk in step with the spirit. It is apparent from the lesson of the gourd, and God’s final approval of Nineveh’s repentance, that His motive in asking Jonah to preach judgment to come upon Nineveh was because God wanted their repentance. Jonah’s initial response had been to refuse to preach, because He feared God’s grace might incorporate them too. We need to probe the motives for our reticence in not preaching as we might. It’s too easy to excuse it as our personal shyness. Can there not be a sense in us too that we actually don’t want our potential audiences to share in God’s grace, even though we may not express this to ourselves directly? And another lesson arises for our preaching. It was God’s intention, surely, that an upfront confrontation of Nineveh with their sins and the reality of God’s coming judgment if proclaimed with love in the heart and a sense of our own unworthiness would bring about their conversion. We must ask whether we have perceived this in our approach to preaching.  

Many struggle with the question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people. But it appears Jonah's struggle was with why God allows good things to happen to bad people. The result of not accepting God's ways leads to the anger, depression and effective loss of faith which we see in Jonah. It's perhaps more common to see this arising from struggling with why evil happens to the good. But both struggles arise from a lack of humility. These "Why?" questions are inbuilt, purposefully, into the structure of our lives. The very fact we don't have answers is to humble us- and if we refuse to be humbled, we will lose our faith as so many have.

 

Jonah 4:3 Therefore now Yahweh, take, I beg You, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live- This is a quotation of Elijah's words in 1 Kings 19:4. As noted on Jon. 3:1, there are similarities between Jonah and Elijah; who likewise struggled with spiritual elitism and judgmentalism. His whole life was centered around his sense that he was right and others wrong; and that judgment would come upon the 'others'. To have the whole narrative of his life and psychology wrecked by God's grace... was too much for him. He saw no point in being alive, despite the fact that he of all people had been preserved alive and resurrected. We too were raised with the Lord Jesus in baptism; our lives are worth it, they are for the Lord's sake and the sake of His grace, rather than to prove ourselves always right and others wrong. Jonah would rather die than have his view of God proved wrong by God Himself. For him, it was only important that he was right. He didn't want to see any other dimension; and so many get involved in small time Protestant religion, with all the arguments about what is the true interpretation of this or that, because they simply want to be right. And they see no other dimension. He was devoted to his understanding of God, rather than to God as He actually is. And so many have had to make this hard journey. Jonah's conversion is the pattern for so many who considered themselves orthodox Christians- orthodox to whatever set of understandings of God they had received and liked to believe. God turned from His anger with Nineveh in the same way as He had turned from the fierceness of His anger and "repented of the evil" planned with Israel at the time of the golden calf incident (Ex. 32:12,14). Jonah knew this. But he didn't want God to be as kind to Gentiles as He had been to himself and Israel. Those who so object to the salvation of others will accept God has been gracious to them personally- but they don't want to see that that amazing grace can be applied to others in other ways, ways different to which it was shown to themselves. Yet the same amazing grace in its essence is part of God's saving character, it is what 'Jesus', Yah's salvation, is all about. The parallels with the golden calf incident continue, in that Moses was willing to give his life for Israel's salvation, whereas Jonah wanted to give his life in suicide because his own narrative about God had run out of highway. Jonah's words "Isn't this what I told You?" echo those of Israel in Ex. 14:12: "Isn’t this the word that we spoke to you in Egypt, saying, ‘Leave us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians?’". Jonah's double attempt at suicide contrasts with the sailors and the king of Nineveh, who earnestly sought not to die.

Jonah had earlier experienced his prophecy of Israel's restoration coming true even though they did not repent. But he failed to see that his, and Israel's, experience of grace could be shared by others.  For "Jeroboam did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh: he didn’t depart from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, with which he made Israel to sin. He restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath to the sea of the Arabah, according to the word of Yahweh, the God of Israel, which He spoke by His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet who was of Gath Hepher. For Yahweh saw the affliction of Israel, that it was very bitter; for there was none shut up nor left at large, neither was there any helper for Israel.
 Yahweh didn’t say that He would blot out the name of Israel from under the sky; but He saved them by the hand of Jeroboam the son of Joash" (2 Kings 14:24-27).

Jonah 4:4 Yahweh said, Is it right for you to be angry?- Perhaps the emphasis is on the word "you". Jonah was a sinner. God alone had the right to be angry with the sins of Nineveh, and by being angry that others could be saved, Jonah was playing God. And not even playing God very well, for he was ignoring the gracious side of God which is so fundamental to Him. All who struggle with anger issues need to read Jonah this way; are you right to be angry? Even if anger is justified, it is not always for you to express that anger. Anger, Divine wrath, is in the end His and not ours. For He is the judge; we are the sinners, saved by grace like Jonah and responding to that grace by showing it to others.

Jonah 4:5 Then Jonah went out of the city- Jonah was hoping the city would be destroyed, and so rather than remain there begging them to repent for 40 days, he simply uttered the doom and left. Perhaps he was aware of prophecies that the Assyrians would destroy Judah and God's people go into captivity there. And perhaps that was why he wanted to see Nineveh destroyed. But by thinking that way, he was accepting that God's prophetic word could change according to human action, in this case, his not persuading Nineveh to repent. And yet again, in a beautiful way, he was brought to realize that if God's intentions can indeed change, then he should allow Nineveh the chance of repentance to change the otherwise inevitable prophetic outcome.

I suggest Jonah left the city because he hoped against hope it would still be judged and destroyed. And like Lot leaving Sodom to the east, he wanted to be away from the destruction and saved by his isolation. 

And sat on the east side of the city, and there made himself a shelter- This is the same word used of the booths made by Israel at the time of the feast of tabernacles. Perhaps it was that time of year, and Jonah legalistically tried to keep the feast. But he was keeping it in Gentile territory. And so his legalism was used by God to teach him that relationship with Him was perfectly possible outside eretz Israel. But the word for "shelter" is also used in Isaiah as a double symbol- of Israel in their condemnation (Is. 1:8) and of God's final giving of shelter to all nations upon Zion (Is. 4:6). And by being condemnatory of Gentiles, Jonah was living out the symbolism of a condemned Judah. For if we condemn, we shall be condemned (Mt. 7:1). So God seeks to convert Jonah to see the better symbolism, and live that out. He creates for Jonah a better shelter, to give him shade from the heat, and this is described in the very language of Is. 4:6: "There will be a pavilion for a shade in the daytime from the heat, and for a refuge and for a shelter from storm and from rain". God is ever seeking to convert legalists and hyper conservatives like Jonah, when their judgmentalism and total lack of love would make many of us just give up with them. We note the Lord's similar efforts towards the scribes and Pharisees, which actually paid off in that after His ascension, many of them were baptized.

 

And sat under it in the shade- As noted above, the shade of the booth was clearly alluding to Is. 4:6, the salvation given by Yahweh in Zion. Jonah experienced it not in Zion but in a Gentile land. But that didn't make him recalculate his position. He himself enjoyed the shade of God's grace, but was unwilling to see Gentiles share it. His story would have been a powerful message to the early Jewish Christians who initially struggled with accepting Gentiles into the hope of Israel.

 

Until he might see what would become of the city- Jonah left the city because he believed and hoped that it would be destroyed. He is presented as being diametrically opposed to the will of God. Indeed, seeing Jonah wrote the book of Jonah, he presents himself this way, because the book is his confession. Let us note that in this case it was religious conservatism which led to his being so totally out of step with God, just as it was the libertinism of the Corinthian believers which led them to the same final position.

Jonah 4:6 Yahweh God prepared- "Prepared" is a major theme in Jonah. God prepared a huge fish (Jon. 1:17), the vine, a tiny worm (:7) and an east wind (:8). The impression is clearly given that God was at work in things and ways great and small in order to bring about the repentance of both Jonah and the Ninevites. I suggest "the vine" was a special creation by God, just as the big fish was. But if it were the castor-bean vine, then we can reflect that this was a tree of brittle wood that had a short lifespan and was disregarded by man for any useful purpose. That was how Jonah viewed Nineveh- but God saw something in Nineveh that was not useless and He would not disregard them. We reflect that a burnt, brittle vine, useless for any human use, is used by God to represent Ithe city of Jerusalem in Ez. 15:1-8. And the point there is that what was useless to man, namely Jerusalem judged and destroyed, God would still use and show interest in. And He was being as gracious to the city of Nineveh.  

A vine, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. So Jonah was very glad because of the vine- We would likely have turned away in disgust from someone as self-righteous and unloving as Jonah. But God saw the man's discomfort and showed him grace. The vine or gourd was a special creation, although perhaps an exaggerated form of a quick growing shrub known in the area, as the big fish likewise was a special creation but an exaggerated form of a whale or shark. The impression given is that God magnifies the natural in such a way as to demonstrate His power and preference to use the natural and well known.

Jonah 4:7 But God prepared a worm at dawn the next day, and it chewed on the vine so that it withered- Jonah was being taught that God can give grace and take it away in a moment if we don't appreciate it. From mighty fish to tiny worms, God is at work. For "prepared" see on :6.

This incident was to make Jonah understand how God valued Nineveh. God had made each of the Ninevites to “grow” (4:10,11), just as He had made the gourd grow (4:6). Jonah was so grateful for the gourd; he valued it. And this was to show him God’s value of Nineveh. Yet Jonah was angry with the worm, who had made the gourd perish. The perishing of Nineveh (Jon. 3:9) and the perishing of the gourd (4:10) are clearly parallel. He was being led to realize who he really was- a worm, who unthinkingly had sought to fell and cause to perish a wonderful and beautiful part of God’s creation. Jonah’s anger that Nineveh had been preserved is set against his anger that the gourd had perished. He was being shown that he was not in step with God’s thinking / Spirit here. If Nineveh had perished, God would have been angry and sad and depressed, just as Jonah felt on the perishing of the gourd. This was the whole purpose of the gourd incident, and it is the purpose of many incidents in our lives- to show us how God feels. Jonah was angry that Nineveh had been preserved, when instead he should have been angry if it had perished. His anger, his feelings, were not in step with God’s. And the gourd incident beautifully brought this out to him.  

 

Jonah 4:8 It happened that when the sun arose, God prepared- For "prepared" see on :6.

A hot east wind- A sign of Divine judgment, as this was what was sent upon the Egyptians. Jonah was sitting on the east of the city and so it came directly upon him.

 

And the sun beat on Jonah’s head- Being smitten by the sun was to be understood as Divine judgment, and preservation from this is a sign of being God's people (the same Hebrew phrase is used in Ps. 121:6; Is. 49:10 "They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun strike them: for He who has mercy on them will lead them"). Jonah had set himself up in his booth to observe the hoped for judgment upon Nineveh. But in fact they were to be spared judgment, and instead, judgment was aimed at Jonah, even though God in His grace had been willing to spare Jonah from it through creating the vine. The whole narrative of Jonah's thinking and self-understanding was being overturned. Sinful Gentiles had repented and were being saved; and instead Divine judgment was headed for him for his self-righteous elitism.

 

So that he fainted- Jonah “fainted” as a result of the gourd perishing, just as he “fainted” [s.w.] when he refused to preach to Nineveh initially (Jon. 2:7). Circumstances so often repeat in the lives of God’s people, and this is in order to seek to teach us something. It seems that Jonah only preached on the outskirts of Nineveh and then gave up; for it was only word of his message that reached the King (Jon. 3:3,4). Jonah couldn’t maintain the intensity; he wilted as the gourd did. He couldn’t maintain a sense of God’s grace, of His tremendous desire to save, and his motivation waned. And so, circumstances repeated. His half hearted preaching was tantamount to his refusal to preach; and he fainted as a result of each of these things.  

 

And requested for himself that he might die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live- See on Jon. 1:4. These are the very words of the self-righteous Elijah, who wished to die because he considered himself to be the only faithful believer in Israel, ignoring the at least 7000 whom God stated were faithful. Elijah said this after the contest on Carmel, after which Ahab apparently repented. Perhaps it was Ahab's repentance which made Elijah wish to die; he wished judgment upon Ahab. And Jonah didn't learn the lesson. I argued on Jon. 2 that Jonah had already died and been resurrected by grace. He really ought to have learnt grace; but instead he just wants to die again. He considered the new life he had been given to be worthless, unless he could in that life see judgment upon sinners. We too can be saved from so great a death, preserved by grace, and yet still not let that grace become the narrative of our lives, but instead return to legalism, anger and self-righteous condemnation of others. The story of Jonah is indeed an incisive challenge to us in our age, where anger and condemnation of others is so much part of daily experience.

We note the clear similarities with Elijah, who sat under a juniper tree and asked to die in the same terms (1 Kings 19:4). He was another man who ran out of highway in his narrative about God, considering himself the only faithful one and despising others. And he too wanted to die rather than hear that Ahab had even apparently repented, and that Israel had slain the prophets of Baal. Again Jonah presents himself negatively- as acting like self righteous Elijah in weakness. For what Elijah said then, he was rejected from his prophetic ministry. And Jonah seems to be making the point thereby, that he was also utterly unworthy of being a prophet / preacher. Even though he had brought about the conversion of up to 1 million people. Jonah had been dramatically saved from death in the fish, so his desire to die is all the more ungrateful.

Jonah 4:9 God said to Jonah, Is it right for you to be angry about the vine? He said, I am right to be angry, even to death- As noted on :8, Jonah ought to have learnt from his own salvation by grace that all bitterness and wrath was to have no part in his life from then on. But he didn't. Again we must put the emphasis upon "you"- is it right for you to be angry, when wrath and judgment belongs to God alone? Jonah was angry that God had taken away the vine, just as he was angry that Nineveh wasn't being judged. Yet the gift of the vine to shelter him in his anger was purely by God's grace. He was angry that grace had been withdrawn from him, just as he was angry that judgment had been withdrawn from Nineveh. He assumed that he had a right to God's grace, whereas Nineveh didn't. He was being powerfully tested in these things, just as we are. "Is it right...?" translates a Hebrew word which really carries the idea of 'Are you doing / creating good?'. Anger of Jonah's kind is uncreative. No good will come of it. Whilst anger is part of our human makeup, it needs to be controlled. The expression of God's anger is always ultimately creative, His judgments bring others to know Him, His Name is glorified... whereas the anger displayed by Jonah was not going to do or create anything good or right. It was purely selfish, and he admits that he is angry unto death- so angry, that he wanted to die, and throw away the gift of saved life which He had earlier been given when resurrected out of the fish.

The plant saved Jonah's life. Even though he had said he wanted to die rather than live. So why was he so upset that the plant, which preserved his life, had died? God is proving whether his suicidal wish was what he really wanted. Any sense that "My life is not worth living" is likewise probed by God.

Jonah 4:10 Yahweh said, You have been concerned for the vine, for which you have not laboured, neither made it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night- If Jonah didn't want God's grace withdrawn from him nor the vine, then he had to understand that God also didn't want to withdraw His grace from Nineveh. And God had far more invested in Nineveh than Jonah had in the vine. He had laboured for Nineveh and its people; proof enough that this world isn't just wound up by God and left ticking on a clockwork mechanism. Everything, especially human life, is a result of His outgoing giving out of His power and energy. God had made the people of Nineveh grow... this is how close God is to Gentiles. And let us not think that people are unimportant to God, or not noticed by Him if they don't know the Gospel. He expends conscious effort for all growth, especially human growth. People matter to Him, even if we cannot fathom why many die without never hearing the Gospel; perhaps He foreknew they would not accept it, and so not calling them to hear it was an act of grace. For those who hear it and reject it shall be raised to condemnation. Whatever the reason, we must accept that God is love, and reveals Himself here as having made each animal and human to grow; to destroy them with mass destruction was clearly not what He wanted to do. Instead, He had "pity" (AV), or "was concerned" for Nineveh even more than Jonah was for the vine (:11). And so we should be for all people; John Thomas was quite wrong to claim that we should "not care a rush" for those who differ from us in their religious understandings. 

God saved Nineveh because He pitied them, as Jonah pitied the shade tree. God wishes to show that He didn't just save Nineveh because they repented. If left at that, we would go away thinking God only saves the totally penitent. But from Adam and Eve onwards, through Jonah, we see this isn't the full story. He wishes to show that He also saved Nineveh because He pitied the kids and cattle. Pity was the reason He saved Israel from destruction in Egypt send in the wilderness: "In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old" (Is. 63:10). His eye pitied them that He didn't destroy them in the desert (Ez. 20:17). Jer. 15:5 seems to imply God pitied Jerusalem because nobody else would: "For who shall have pity upon thee, O Jerusalem?". "No eye pitied you... you were cast out bleeding into the open field" (Ez. 16:5). Just for that reason. He restored Zion not because Judah in exile repented, but because He pitied them. The Lord's teaching "Be merciful as your Father is merciful" could as well be translated "Be pitiful, as your Father is pitiful to you". God saved Judah from exile because of pity: "But I had pity for mine holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the heathen, whither they went" (Ez. 36:21).

The book ends with the comment that there were many animals there, who could not repent- to simply show that God feels pity for any suffering, and not just human suffering. The message is of the immense dimension of His pity. Jonah's pity for the plant is therefore God's attempt to lead him to share His kind of pity. We are to infer that Jonah got it, and returned to Nineveh and pastored the converts succesfully, seeing they will be in the resurrection, the Lord says.  God labours hard for the growth of every plant in a Gentile land, even if it flourishes only for a day. Jonah was willfully blind to the extent of God's operations because there was too much grace in it. He had earlier tried to think that God worked only in Israel and he could somehow dodge God. And man cannot dodge God. Jonah presents as totally self centered rather than rejoicing in amazing grace. God had laboured for Nineveh in preparing her potentially for conversion, perhaps through the experience of Nineveh's "40 lean years" noted by historians. He works for the conversion of so many; to not preach to them, or despise them as not our type, is as it were to seek to nullify all that labour. Every person we witness to has had that Divine labour in their lives preparing them for our witness. By working so hard to avoid making the witness, Jonah was working against the God who had worked so hard to bring Nineveh to repentance. We are to be "workers together with God" in witness, not workers against Him. Like God with Nineveh and the 120,000 children, we are to perceive the potential in people, and witness to them seeking to appeal to that latent potential within them.  

The vine 'perished' as Nineveh were going to perish and as the Gentile sailors had almost perished (see on Jon. 3:9). The point was that God made to perish that which He had long laboured for, and that perishing was for Jonah's sake. And He did not want to make Nineveh perish because of Jonah's nationalism and elitism.

Can one person on a speck of a planet in a speck of a solar system in a mediocre clump of a galaxy really make a difference to the creator of that universe? Just one of the billions who have lived on this planet since Adam? As David looked to the heavens, he felt what surely we all have: “What is man, that You are mindful of him…?”. Almighty God created a bush to give Jonah shade from the sun; and created a tiny worm to take it away, to teach Jonah something. We matter to God. Our lives and experiences and the things in our lives are important to Him, down to the micro level [a worm, in Jonah’s case]. And we should reflect this in the way we treat others- all men. God reminded Jonah that He had laboured and ‘made to grow’ the people of Nineveh, just as He had consciously  expended energy on the growth of the gourd. People should matter to us; their lives, their feelings, their eternal destiny. I am not preaching some kind of humanism. Rather, appealing for us to reflect the same senseless, illogical, caring and saving spirit of our Lord and our Creator.

Jonah 4:11 Shouldn’t I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city- The greatness of the city was the basis for His feeling of compassion, His desire that they would not perish [although they were worthy of it] and come to repentance. This enables us to read Jon. 1:2 in a somewhat different light: “Go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against”. When God described Nineveh as a “great city”, the very fact of its size elicited a desire to spare it. And of course we meet the same phrase in Revelation (Rev. 18:21), where a condemned Babylon is described as a “great city”. This was not God gleefully preparing to destroy a huge city. He surely had Nineveh in mind when He inspired those words. This was, and will be, a God whose very heart is touched by the tragedy of sinners having to be punished, and who is open to a change of purpose if they will repent. Thus the latter day appeal to “Come out of her!”, whether we understand ‘Babylon’ as false religion, the Moslem world, the world of sinners or whoever, is rooted in God’s spirit of passionate love towards Nineveh. As Jonah “cried” against Nineveh, so God ‘cries’ against Babylon (Rev. 18:2). We who make that appeal in these last days should be reflecting here on earth the mind of God in Heaven; not merely pronouncing doom and gloom against ‘Babylon’, but warning them of God’s stated intentions towards them with a heart that bleeds for them and seeks their repentance. The heart of God Almighty responded in harmony to the hearts of the Ninevites- brought out by the repeated word play in Jonah 3:8-10, whereby the ‘turning’ of Nineveh in repentance is reflected in how God ‘turns’ and repents of what He had said He would do to them. 

We note that God says nothing about Nineveh's repentance. He doesn't say "They repented, so I did". That's what we expect Him to say, but He doesn't. He leaves Jonah with a picture of His absolute and sovereign grace towards Nineveh- because that was the quality of grace which He had shown to Jonah. God seems to give Jonah the reason for His change of mind as 'I'm concerned about the cattle and the kids, 120,000 of them. So, I re-thought'. Sovereign grace was the reason God gave Jonah for the re-thinking over Nineveh's destruction. And Jonah gets it- that he too had been saved by sovereign grace, not by repentance. For there is never a word of repentance from Jonah in the whole book. But God still worked to save him. Only when we appreciate this argument do we understand the otherwise strange ending to the book- "and much cattle". The point is that pity is a strong component of God's character. He simply pities people, despite their lack of  or low quality of repentance, as He did Jonah, Adam and Eve, humanity... As Jonah shows, it's not that repentance is not a factor. It is, big time. But God wants to demonstrate that His basic, essential deep pity is a major issue too, quite apart from repentance. For as a parent pities their children, so God pities us.

In which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who can’t discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?- As noted on :10, all life on this earth is a result of God's conscious, active involvement and labour. And this includes animal life; and so the tragedy of destroying the city would involve the loss of the animal life too. What was in God's mind therefore was a cataclysm the size of that which hit Sodom; it would have been on a huge scale, if 120,000  children and all the animals would have been destroyed. Keil and Delitsczh quote ancient sources which claim that a child was considered to only be able to certainly differentiate between right and left at seven years old. 120,000 under seven would mean a population of over half a million, with high population density. The total desolation of the Nineveh area was clearly in His mind; and therefore His sensitivity to human repentance is the more evident, in that He changed that plan.

"Who cannot discern..." may be God telling Jonah: 'You didn't get it, did you. Time and again, you didn't discern. But I saved you. So why should I not save these people who also don't discern?'. He also is perhaps saying that He saw the potential in those 120,000 young children who didn't currently know right from wrong. And the fact Jonah returned to Nineveh and spent the rest of his life pastoring them... means that he 'got it' in the end. And so again we understand how this book is his memoirs, explaining how he had come to spend his life pastoring the people of Nineveh.

 

In all true spiritual endeavour and genuine spiritual progress, there seems almost inevitably to be a process of two steps backward and three forward. Consider the pattern of Jonah’s life: 

-   Encounters the presence of God

-   Flees from his preaching responsibility; faints

-   Saved by God’s grace

-   Repents and obeys the call to preach

-   Loses his intensity

-   God shows Jonah how He feels about Nineveh

-   Jonah faints

-   Repents and obeys the call to preach by writing up his poem and writing the book of Jonah. 

Within the course of a few hours, we can go through the essence of this process, learning again the lesson of Jonah and the gourd. We are encountering the presence and call of God to minister every hour; for the need of the world around us is the call.

Jonah and Nahum

Nahum also prophesied against Nineveh. When we read his words, it would appear that there was no chance for Nineveh. And yet presumably there was always a chance for them, just as there was at Jonah’s time some years previously. But it seems to me that the essential message of Nahum was that of Jonah. They could have repented, even then. Not surprisingly, we find many allusions by Nahum back to Jonah: 

It becomes apparent that the Ninevites of Nahum’s day are being directed back to the repentance of their city at the time of Jonah; but clearly they are also being invited to share in Jonah’s personal repentance.  

From this it becomes apparent that Jonah is seen by God as in essentially the same position as the Ninevites. This was why his appeal to them was so strong. For he had been in just their position, in essence, yet had repented. The fact Nahum makes all these allusions to Jonah’s personal repentance indicates that they well knew the story of Jonah; and his repentance had inspired that of the audience he preached to. In these we see a very real pattern for ourselves; it is our identity with our audience, as repentant sinners ourselves, which will elicit their response.  

Nahum’s message was not only a warning of judgment to come upon Nineveh. It was an appeal to Israel, that unless they repented, they would likewise perish. The appeal to Judah to “perform thy vows” (Nah. 1:15) is couched in the very same words as Jonah used in Jonah 2:9: “I will pay [s.w. perform] that which I have vowed”. Judah were being asked to be like Jonah, and not despise Nineveh, but rather appeal to her to repent.