The Angry Shade-Lover and the Cattle-Saving God

Even so, Jonah should know from the experiences with the call to go and the storm that he cannot control God even by his disobedience because God will always be God: He always will be in absolute control of all things, working all things after the counsel of His own will, and that for our good! Yet God’s own children have a problem with God’s sovereign freedom. When things do not turn out as we desire them to, we then find ourselves, in truth, angry with the will of God for our lives. It is then that we, like Jonah, run the gamut of feelings from a simple pity party, “Woe is me,” to depression, where we don’t even feel like getting up most days; from there we slide to despondency, where we check out mentally and emotionally from a relationship; and then to despair, where we can’t see anything good at all. Finally, if we do not recognize the downward emotional cycle, we can land at Jonah’s death wish because we can see no way to make life fair: “God, it would be better if I were dead.”

The truth is that Jonah, and we, really do not want God to be anything other than God. If the Maker of the seas were otherwise, Jonah would have been fish food. If the Lord failed to be as merciful to us as He is to our enemies, we all would perish and wouldn’t have an angry prayer to scream at Him. The divine freedom that gives one child overprotective parents is the same mercy that gives any of us parents at all. The mercy that keeps one marriage from immorality is the same mercy that is patient when your spouse needs great improvement in your eyes. That patience that gives you a house at all is the same patience that will alleviate your financial problems when God is ready for them to be liquidated.

Therefore, believers must seek after God as He is revealed in truth in the Scriptures. Attitudes despairing of the Lord’s mysterious, sovereign freedom behind His grace, mercy, patience, and covenant faithfulness must humbly return to the cross and to the empty tomb in order to gain a perspective that is cleansed by the blood of Christ and invigorated by resurrection power. Let God be God and hear His words: “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Jonah 4:5-8

Jonah leaves the city and builds a shelter of branches to make a shady spot as he hopes for life to go differently. Seemingly, he has made himself a front-row seat with peanuts, nachos, and beer while he waits for God to change His mind again and rain down fire on Nineveh. He is so mad that while building the booth he does not think about the booth as a reminder of the shelters the Israelites lived in after God delivered them out of Egypt and dropped them into the promised land. All he can do is pout.

John Piper’s insights on anger and bitterness seem apropos for this moment of the story:

What gives so much force to the impulse of anger in such cases is the overwhelming sense that the offender does not deserve forgiveness. That is, the grievance is so deep and so justifiable that not only does self-righteousness strengthen our indignation, but so does a legitimate sense of moral outrage. It’s the deep sense of legitimacy that gives our bitterness its unbending compulsion. We feel that a great crime would be committed if the magnitude of the evil we’ve experienced were just dropped and we let bygones be bygones. We are torn: our moral sense says this evil cannot be ignored, and the Word of God says we must forgive. (Future Grace, 265)

God has something for Jonah’s pouting. It is hot where Jonah sits—hot enough that the makeshift booth cannot provide enough shade. So the Lord appoints a plant with large leaves to grow up over Jonah to give him more shade—in one day’s time no less (which itself is mercy). The story reveals that the Lord gives this provision to save him from his discomfort, or literally, to “rescue” him from his “evil.”

When the passage speaks of the Lord appointing (or providing) the vine, worm, and scorching wind, it is referring to the providence of God—God’s works that are “completely holy, wise and powerful, preserving and governing every creature and every action,” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism states (Meade, Training Hearts, 40). Just as the Lord appointed the storm and the fish in Jonah 1—because He absolutely controls the winds, waves, and storms, and all animals—so now He decrees that a plant will grow in a short day to shade Jonah. In the Hebrew a play on ambiguous terms is created in which God appoints the plant to rescue Jonah from his evil heart and not just to shade him from the sun. Jonah likes the shade of the plant. He is rejoicing greatly in the shade appointed by God.

The next day, however, things do not go the way Jonah likes. For the same providence of God that brought the shade now brings a “very hungry caterpillar,” so to speak, to tear up the plant, taking away the shade. That is followed by Providence sending a scorching wind to bring Jonah to a place of heatstroke. Broken, and again despairing of life, now Jonah starts that “I wish I were dead” mantra again (4:8).

When Providence determined to give him shade, Jonah was happy. When Providence determines to give him a time of fainting, Jonah balks. Jonah likes mercy. But Jonah does not like seeing how precarious and desperate life is without it—what he would feel if he received what he wishes for Nineveh. On this, James M. Boice said of Jonah,

Jonah should have perished miserably inside the great fish. He had renounced God. It would have been only proper if God had renounced him. Yet God had showed him great mercy, first in bringing him to repentance and then in saving him and recommissioning him to preach in Nineveh. Jonah had certainly experienced mercy at the hand of God. But there was a long journey across the desert, and man’s memory is short. Jonah had forgotten God’s mercy and was therefore ill-prepared to appreciate it when God showed the same mercy to others. (Minor Prophets, 206)

Instead of hoping for the destruction of someone else, we need to think of how much we like mercy and how impoverished we would be without it. We love that God has given us a job or kept us during periods of unemployment. We rejoice in the Lord watching over our children and grandchildren or keeping our minds at peace when a child tragically leaves this world. We are glad that our Savior has seen us through major health issues or given us grace to live with them while still enjoying life.

Think now, instead, of what your life experience would be if the Lord had not appointed open doors for good jobs, or appointed angels to watch over your children (Matt 18:10; Heb 1:14), or appointed medical care and praying people into your life. We would be crippled, debilitated, balled up in a corner with grief, living like beggars.

Recently a man who had greatly harmed me lost his wife by a tragic death. Upon hearing the news, I immediately experienced the temptation to say, “He is getting what he deserves.” Yet in a moment of grace, the Spirit of God led me to praying for this brother in the Lord rather than gloating at his pain. I thought, I would not want my wife to die in that manner; neither would I want others rejoicing while I grieved losing her. I would want mercy, and I have experienced great mercy in Christ’s atoning work on behalf of my sins. Therefore I wished for the Lord to pour out that same great mercy on my offender. To do otherwise would be a shortsighted and selfish denial of my own need for the Lord’s mercy.

Jonah 4:9-11

Still seething, Jonah feels justified when the Lord asks about his right to be angry over the vine: “It’s right. I’m angry enough to die!” Literally, he “was inflamed” (Bruckner, Jonah, 109). As Bruckner surmises, “Jonah’s anger is a reflection of Yahweh’s anger (3:9) over Nineveh’s wickedness. But Jonah’s anger also stands in contrast to Yahweh’s, for he does not believe that their evil should be forgiven” (ibid.). For the first time Jonah admits his anger to the Lord (ibid., 116).

Jonah is concerned about a plant. The Lord is concerned about sinners in Nineveh. Jonah desires mercy on something temporal and nonhuman: “God, please save the plant!” God determines to give mercy to wretched, evil people.

Typically, people, even believers, tend to express more passion over the crash of a hard drive than over the souls of people who are in jeopardy of the wrath of God. When someone ponders, “Why did my cell phone screen have to crack today?” he really is asking, “Lord, why weren’t You merciful to my cell phone today?” With similar paroxysms of emotion in other disruptions of life we scream, “Lord, I need my car!” “I cannot afford a new oven!” “Why did You let me ruin my suit today?” “I need this job!” “Lord, I do not want to lose my house!”

As we grow in anger over the loss of such transitory items, we drain emotional energy that should be fueling an urgent concern for people who have not experienced Christ’s forgiveness. Being self-absorbed in worldly concerns, we can lose sight of the Lord’s mandate to reach the lost with the good news of the death and resurrection of Christ. Former missionary and seminary president J. Robertson McQuilkin posits,

A world, no matter how lost, will not move me to action while I am mired in self-love. On the other hand, once I am freed to make choices on the basis of compassion for others, the need of lost men and women does indeed become compelling. And what more compelling need is there than billions of people who today face a Christless eternity . . . ? The terrifying lostness that envelopes most in this world, pressing them with inexorable acceleration toward the blackness of hell—if this does not move us to action, what will? (The Great Omission, 20–21)

The Lord’s questioning of Jonah intends to reveal the self-centeredness, worldliness, and lack of love within Jonah—his shallowness, as well as the paucity of his understanding of the majesty of God.

First, Jonah has no real relationship with the plant, not in care or authority. He did not provide it nutrients, water, soil, or pruning. His only care is what the plant offers him and not what he could offer the plant.

Second, the plant for which Jonah shows concern had a limited existence. In a flash the plant arose, and in the blink of an eye it was no more. The amount of zeal Jonah expresses toward the vine is greatly disproportionate to its length of life. Based on the extreme actions Jonah desires, one might think Jonah experienced the death of a child or spouse, or loss of his life savings, the family’s five-generations-old farm, or his position with a firm he had served for three decades.

Third, Jonah’s love for the plant argues in favor of God’s love for Nineveh. The Lord has a real relationship with the people of Nineveh as the Creator. He has concern for those “who cannot distinguish between their right and their left” (4:11). The Ninevites are “ignorant of God in their culture of violence” (Bruckner, Jonah, 109) yet responsible morally for their actions.^[13]The gracious and merciful God responds to them as Savior, showing mercy even to their cattle. “Even if Jonah does not care about the people, perhaps, God suggests, he may have some compassion for their cattle,” says Alexander (“Jonah,” 131).

The Lord’s concern for the people of the great city of Nineveh is deep. His “care” is a term indicating He has tears in His eyes for Nineveh (Estelle, Salvation through Judgment and Mercy, 133). Jonah’s tribalism, anger, and hope for Nineveh’s destruction would attempt to rob the Savior of weeping for people whom He seeks to save. Like Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, who describes God’s freedom to choose to appoint for mercy whom He wills as a river, Jonah’s actions say, “I am haunted by these waters” (Maclean, River, 104). However, in order to have a heart for the world, including for one’s enemies, even as the Lord does in Christ (Rom 5:6-11), one must accept the freedom of the Lord to show mercy on people as wicked as ancient Nineveh. As Calvin writes,

Therefore, since God claims to himself the right of governing the world, a right unknown to us, let it be our law of modesty and soberness to acquiesce in his supreme authority regarding his will as our only rule of justice, and the most perfect cause of all things, . . . that universal overruling Providence from which nothing flows that is not right, though the reasons thereof may be concealed. (Institutes, 1.17.2)