“When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened” (3:10).  Hallelujah!  That’s what God has been looking for all along: people turning from their ways to God’s way, life on God’s terms.  Beloved, if we all lived the way God teaches and invites us to emulate, this would be a very different world!  You and I can help nudge it that way, help make the kingdom visible!

But what then would become of all those global disaster movies, those extravaganzas of cataclysm?  It’s one thing to be seated in the theater or at home, marveling at the special effects—earthquakes making chasms out of cracks, tsunamis the height of the burj khalifa; it’s quite another to be in the midst of an actual disaster, one of those “acts of God” that bankrupts insurance companies.  Harvey wasn’t much fun for anyone.  You can just bet that folks in Deer Park want no more tornados.  That God should be pleased to relent should cause us all to fall on our knees with joyful weeping.  We are spared.  We are spared.

“But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry” (4:1).  Is it so odd?  Nineveh was Sin Central, Sodom on steroids: whatever wild way was okay.  The old gods of the old chaos, the lust and the blood, demanded service, and those weak, benighted, fallen Ninevites slavishly obliged.  Hopelessly, helplessly spellbound.  But God’s Word breaks the spell.  God’s light exposes the darkness.  God’s strength drives out the old gods, the old chaos.

But God told Jonah to proclaim aloud, for all to hear, that Nineveh would be overthrown in forty days.  Jonah knew what that meant: God would tear up the very earth beneath Nineveh and turn it over, like preparing for the spring planting, manuring His field.  Forty days—just long enough to reflect upon all one’s wickedness, maybe even long enough to begin to feel true remorse about it, just long enough to acknowledge, as God scraped you from the face of the earth, that you deserved it.  Sad, yes, but Jonah knew God means what He says.

And God hadn’t followed through.  Well, something had happened in Nineveh, for sure, but it wasn’t what Jonah expected.

Jonah had been faithful, did what God told him to do, said what God told him to say.  Jonah had done his part; it had cost him!  Now, Jonah felt like a fool.  Where is justice, God? Jonah seethed.  I did what you said; now You do what You said!  I’d just want, gently, to say to Jonah here that Scripture says something somewhere about man’s wisdom and God’s foolishness.  Why, Jonah, did you think God intended to, wanted to destroy all those people at all?  Don’t you, Jonah, a prophet of God, know your own God?  A God of salvation: not so very long before, Jonah himself had been singing, “salvation comes from The Lord” (2:9).  Salvation even for the furthest of all those who are far from God.

Jonah “prayed to the Lord, ‘Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home?  That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish.  I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity’” (4:2).  If You were going to save them, Lord, why send me at all?  Just save them and spare me the trouble.  What did you need me for?  Besides, I knew You would have mercy, all along, and, You know, I wasn’t really running away!  No!  I was giving You time to think better of Your threat, calm down from Your anger: You should be thanking me, really, Lord.  If you were just going to have mercy on them, anyway, then have mercy on them already, and leave me out of it!  What do you need me for?

God was never really going to punish or destroy.  There’s no seriousness, no substance to it!  A bunch of hot air from the old windbag, Jonah.  If only that were true in every instance.  God spared Nineveh, but not Sodom and Gomorrah.  Why?  What was the difference?  God sent the flood, after all, as He said He would; He didn’t change His mind about that, didn’t relent.  Why?  What was different?  He sent the Babylonians, the Romans.

What’s eating at Jonah is that God wasn’t really serious, this time.  Couldn’t God just as well have left Jonah alone, left the poor man to his routine faith, his comfortable, convenient religion?  Beloved, sometimes a comfortable, convenient religion becomes a religion of comfort and convenience.  All the seriousness goes out of it, then.  Life might well be a serious business, but not faith.  If nothing is really at stake . . .  Do you remember that some of the first words the Gospels record from the mouth of Jesus are “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand”?  Turn now, before it’s too late.  Forty days, and Nineveh will be overthrown.  The time to turn is now.  The time to live for God is now.  This is always the prophetic message.  This is always the call of salvation.

Jonah is arguing with God, and himself, that God isn’t really serious about these warnings of doom and disaster, which is strange, coming from a prophet.  The prophets had urged the people many a time to turn to God before He sent His fearful judgments.  Together with the people, the prophets lived through all those fearful judgments.  God was serious; He wasn’t bluffing.  He really wants His people to live on His terms.  Persistent, habitual, willful refusal to do so has consequences.

God sent the pagans—the powerful Ninevites and others—and these overwhelmed the Israelites, seized the land, made a waste of land and people, leaving only grief and bitterness.  There indeed continued to be people of genuine faith and devotion in those times, but they were always in the minority: they, also, had to live through the fearful judgments, yet I believe they experienced God’s mercy, too, even in the midst of the storm.

Jonah tells God, “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity,” but to my ears, this sounds like the servant saying, “I knew you were a hard master, taking what did not belong to you . . .”  Where’s the justice, Lord?  Destroy the wicked, Lord!  Bless Your people and destroy the wicked!  We hear several psalms that pray for God to cleanse the earth of the wicked.  That sets the wicked against the righteous in very stark terms, and we sometimes behave as if it wasn’t so very difficult to tell one from the other, but what Jesus shows us, what Jesus and that cross ought to remind us of always, is that no one is good; no one’s heart is completely pure.  All have fallen short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23).  Except for one.  It’s not me.  It isn’t you.  It isn’t Jonah, who ran in disobedience and tried to hide from the Lord—there’s an old story.

In Christ, God cleanses the wicked.  By the Spirit, God is cleansing His earth of wickedness.  It doesn’t always look like it—sure seems like wickedness is on the increase—dramatically!  We walk by faith and not by sight.  I’m here because I need Jesus.  I’m here because I was a wicked man: still too much so for my own peace of mind!  There isn’t much of which I could be accused of which I wouldn’t be guilty.  I didn’t fall into it: I discovered it was already there, inside!  I’ve gone for many a swim, in those waters.  And God gives me peace and promises me peace, with Him!, in Jesus Christ.  “Yes, you’ve sinned terribly,” God tells me.  “And you know it,” He tells me.  “Know what I am doing about it,” He tells me.  “I am cleansing you, because I have chosen you; I am cleansing My earth.”  Not the way some people seem to expect, not the way the disaster movies entertain us, with their CGI cataclysms, faceless millions wiped out in a five-second scene.  Oh, they had it coming, anyway!

Jonah is unhappy.  Jonah had expectations of God, you see.  Jonah feels a little betrayed; he was sure this wasn’t how things ought to be.  Why does Jonah expect destruction and death from God?  Death and destruction for others establishes Jonah’s righteousness, at least in comparison to the obvious guilt of those whom God destroys.  I may not be perfect, Lord, but You and I both know those ones are really awful and fully deserve divine destruction.  “But the Lord replied, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’” (4:4).  There’s a devastating question.  You, Jonah; you?

How should Jonah feel?  The anger we can feel toward strangers is not quite the same as the anger we feel toward those we know and love.  Sometimes, we can say things, even do things to strangers that we would never want to do or say to those whom we know and love, but we are all known and loved by God.  No one is a stranger to God, though plenty estrange themselves from Him.  We all do and say things that anger God.  And what will God do?

God asked Cain why he was angry.  The father goes to the elder son, who in anger, resentment, and hurt would not join the celebration.  “Why are you so angry?” the joyful father asks.  The owner of the field asks the first-hired workers why they are angry that the last-hired are receiving the same pay.  What is the right response to salvation?  When a fellow human being comes by the Spirit to salvation, what should be the response of those already saved?  It hadn’t been so long since Jonah had been flung back onto the warm, salty, bright, loud sands of the seashore.  How had he felt, all at once feeling that sand, the sun, hearing the surf and the gulls calling, drawing in deep breaths of the cool, salted air?  There he knelt, head to the ground, sifting tense fingers through the warm, dry sand, shuddering, weeping, overwhelmed, joyful, saved, surrendered.