Jonah chapter four. We'll read verses one through four here in just a minute. But before we get there, a quick review. Jonah divides up nicely into four chapters. Of course, it wasn't originally written in chapter form.

Chapters were added, later, but the chapters really do make a lot of sense, in the book of Jonah. Chapter number one, we see Jonah Jonah running from God. In chapter one, Jonah ran from God going the opposite direction from what God had instructed him. God told him to go to Nineveh. Jonah headed for Tarshish.

God told him to go over land to Nineveh. Joshua going on a ship to go by sea as far away from Nineveh as he could get. Why? Fear, selfishness, ambivalence, malice toward the Ninevites. I think we'll see a little more clearly in chapter four this evening what the main issue for Jonah was.

And as we saw it was never wise, it is never wise to run from God. God did catch up with Jonah. Matter of fact, God was never really behind. He was there, all the time and you cannot run from God. And Jonah found that out, though I think Jonah in his heart already knew that.

He was hoping maybe God would leave him alone. How many Christians sometimes do the same? Well, I I don't wanna do what God wants me to do with my life. I'll just kind of ignore him and hope he goes away. Well, if you're a child of God, he isn't gonna just go away.

As a loving father, he is going to keep trying to get your attention. In this case, it took a storm and a whale. As it is with Jonah, so it is with us, especially his children. He has a will for us and every one of us would be better off to listen and to obey the first time rather than forcing God's hand, which is what Jonah did. In chapter two, we see a repentant Jonah submitting to God's will.

So he ran and then in the belly of the whale, he had a change of heart. Well, I mean, you know, wouldn't you have a change of heart in the belly of the whale too? Sometimes it does take that to get our attention and for us to have a change of heart. Sometimes people assume, well, you know, it was in a we're in the midst of this terrible situation and then they had a change of heart and it must not be real. Well, sometimes it is real.

Praise the Lord. And he does sometimes use various trials and and sufferings in order to bring us to that point where we will admit, confess our sin as Jonah did in the belly of the whale. He did it with a now humbled heart. He did it in repentance, and he pled for God's what? For God's mercy.

Now it was Jonah, not Nineveh, but Jonah that needed God's mercy. And it's a good thing God's mercies are new every morning, because we need it that often. Psalm 51, David said, a broken and a contrite heart, oh Lord, thou will not despise. And he didn't despise Jonas. God responded when Jonah repented as he will when we do, when we do as well.

Restores us, mends us, forgives us, shows mercy and compassion. And as long as we're here, we have a second chance. And so with that, the whale spat Jonah back up on dry ground and the Lord said to Jonah, let's try again. That brings us to chapter three. So running from God, submitting to God's will, and now fulfilling God's will.

As we see, Jonah didn't tell God what God wanted to hear in the middle of the distress, he actually followed through with what he told the Lord this time. He he fulfilled God's will. He submitted, he obeyed, he took his second chance, he did the right thing. Praise God that he is so patient and merciful toward us because sometimes we need that same patience and mercy as Jonah did. And hopefully, like Jonah, we will learn to obey the second time if we don't the first.

Or maybe it's the third or the fourth. Praise God again for his patience. Hopefully, we too learn from our failures. As a result of Jonah learning from his, the people of Nineveh repented before the Lord and thanks to Jonah's obedience, a city of hundreds of thousands were spared. Lives that continued, which otherwise would have ended and sent them out into an eternity lost.

Praise God. We're told in Peter, God is not willing that any should what? Perish, but that all should come to repentance. In that, we see the care of God for a pagan city. Hundreds of thousands of souls and God did spare them.

They repented and God responded. And in his mercy, he did not destroy them. God used Jonah to save an entire city of people. Maybe God would use you if you're willing to save the life of a friend or a coworker or a relative or a neighbor if we too would be willing to be used of God, if we too would be willing to share God's message. Jonah had a message of warning for a specific city of God's coming judgment.

Do we have a message to the world today of God's coming judgment? Yes, we do. Not only do we have the message of God's coming judgment, the knowledge of God's coming judgment, but we also have the remedy to God's coming judgment. Look and live. Look to Jesus now and what?

Live. We have the answer. God has given us this opportunity also. And you do not know who might repent and who might be saved if we are willing to share. So in the first chapter, Jonah ran from God.

In the second chapter, praise God in repentance, he submitted to God. In chapter three, he followed through and fulfilled God's will and the people of Nineveh were saved. And then we get to chapter four and we read some of the most ironic words it was seen in scripture. So verse 10 of chapter three again, and God saw their works that they turned from their evil way and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them and he did it not. He didn't destroy the city.

But it what? Angered, displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the Lord and said, I pray thee, oh Lord, was not this my saying when I was yet in my country? Therefore, I fled before under Tarshish for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, oh Lord, take I beseech thee my life for me for it is better for me to die than to live.

Then said the Lord, dost thou well to be angry? And we'll answer that in just a second. So what was Jonah's response? Well, he should have been elated. He brought the message to the people, the people repented and a whole city of people were saved from from a sure destruction and many of them truly from their heart turned to who?

Turned to the Lord. I mean, you know, we you have people like Billy Graham that traveled the world and went to these stadiums full of people all over the world and held these crusades and and hundreds would be saved, but but nothing on the level of who? Of Jonah and the city. The whole city, hundreds of thousands of people, a majority of them repented. What what a story.

What a crusade. What a mighty work. And instead of Jonah being excited and elated, Jonah was what? Very angry. Who was he angry with?

He was angry with God. He was angry with God. Why? Well, he basically tells us, he feared all along that if he warned the people of Nineveh of God's coming judgment, they might repent and God might relent and not destroy them. That's why he was angry.

He says here, was not this my saying when I was at my own country? Therefore, I fled to Tarshish for I knew that you were gracious and merciful and slow to anger and of great kindness and would repentest thee of the evil. In other words, of the judgment. You would change your mind. You wouldn't do it if they did what?

If they repented. And they did. And Jonah got angry, very angry. This would seem to be his primary reason for going the other direction. It wasn't because he feared for his physical life or health.

The primary reason he fled was he feared that when he told the people, and and he knew that's why God sent him, If God if God just wanted to judge the people, he could have done it and never sent a messenger, but he did. And Jonah knew the reason for sending him was to give them a what? Another chance. God gave him another chance. But Jonah didn't want them to have another chance.

He wanted the people of Nineveh to Nineveh to be destroyed. Well, why is that? They were a cruel and they were a powerful enemy. Enemy of who? Enemy of Israel.

Israel was on the decline and Assyria was on the rise. About a hundred or so years from the time that Jonah went to prophesy to the people of Nineveh, the nation of Assyria destroyed Samaria, took the people captive, and Northern Israel was essentially no more. Jonah feared what Nineveh would do. He feared what would be the outcome for his people and he would have rejoiced in the destruction of his what? Of his wicked, cruel enemy.

The Ninevites were known to be an extremely wicked, detestable pagan people. Not only were they a a great enemy of Israel, he saw them as a great enemy of God and a great enemy of what was right and good. Jonah did not want them to have a chance to repent, to be delivered from their fate because they, these wicked vile people, they didn't want. They did not deserve it. At least so he thought.

Let them die. Problem with that is it shows a lack of understanding. Not only do they not deserve it, but guess what? I don't deserve it either. God's grace as is so clearly laid out in the New Testament is for all.

For Jesus died for the sins of the world and whosoever will may come. And he that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out. But Jonah and many of his fellow Jews felt that God's mercy and God's grace and God's goodness was only for Israel. And these pagan peoples did not deserve it. Even in Jesus' day, they did not like it at all when Jesus alluded to Gentiles being part of the kingdom of God.

Or when Paul preached the gospel to the Gentile Gentiles. Even believing Jews struggled to understand, even when the Old Testament scriptures made it clear that God would carve out for himself a people from the Gentiles who would acknowledge and worship him. Who is that? That would be us and many others around the world. In Malachi one eleven, God said this, for from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same, my name shall be great among the Gentiles.

And in every place incense shall be offered under my name and a pure offering. For my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts. Now, don't know if that if that verse applies only specifically to the millennial reign of Christ and his kingdom or if that applies to today. But in in a way, it does already apply to today. In in in the day Malachi wrote this, there were few people outside of just this little group of Israel that knew and worship the God, the true God of heaven.

But today there are believers all around the world. And as they used to say of the British Empire that the sun never sets on the British Empire, the sun does not set on the church of Jesus Christ. He has believers in every time zone, in every hemisphere, in every continent, likely in every country around the globe today. And his name is praised. It will be praised and worshiped even more so during his millennial reign and during his kingdom.

But even today, in part, that has already come to be true. Jonah couldn't see that. Jonah thought the Ninevites were past help, that they didn't deserve God's help. We need to be careful lest we judge people like Jonah did. And we forget that if not for the grace of God and the gospel that came to us, we would be just like them.

We live in a world today that is suffering, lost in the darkness of sin. Lost in the darkness as they are, they came they come to more ridiculous conclusions about life. And we see that all around us today. We hear about it on the news every day. They need Jesus.

They are not past the grace of God and we need to tell them. What was most sad is that while the Ninevites were repenting, the people of God in Israel were not. And as a result, God would use the Ninevites to judge the Israelites a few generations later. Another issue I think we deal with in The United States is we have thought of ourselves as a long time as quote unquote a Christian nation. And in some ways, that was true.

But to make the assumption that God is gonna continue to bless a people that are determined to walk away from him and think that there is no judgment coming is naive and ignorant and wrong. God's judgment will come especially on those who are not willing to what? To repent. We need repentance and people need Jesus. Verse five, what does Jonah do?

So God said in verse four, then said the Lord, doest thou well to be angry? The answer a rhetorical question. The answer to that is no. He didn't have a good reason to be angry. But what did Jonah do?

Well, Jonah went out of the city and he sat on the East side of the city and there he made him a booth like a tent and he sat under it in the shade till he might see what would become of the city. Now, as I understand it, Jonah already sorta knew what was gonna happen to the city. God was not gonna destroy it because they did what? They repented. But just to make himself all the more up sad and all the more depressed and all the more pity party, he sat there and to watch and see that God was not gonna destroy it.

Verse six, and the Lord prepared a gourd, that is a plant, a tree like plant that grows very quickly, and made it to come up over Jonah that it might be a shadow over his head to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad for the gourd. As he sat there sulking in the sun, God gave him what? Shade and he was thankful for the shade. But verse seven, God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day and it smote the gourd and it withered and so he lost his what?

He lost his shade. And it came to pass when the sun did arise that God prepared a vehement east wind and the sun beat up on the head of Jonah that he fainted and wished in himself to die and said it is better for me to die than to live. And God said to Jonah, doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do. Well to be angry even unto death.

Then said the Lord, thou hast had pity on the gourd for which thou hast not labored neither made us grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city wherein are more than six score thousand persons, a 120,000 persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand and also much cattle? The 120 that can't tell their left hand from the right hand is a way of saying they're too young to know their right from their left. So a 120,000 young what? Young children lived in the city of Nineveh who couldn't possibly have understood yet their sin and their rebellion against God. And yet, God's saying to Jonah, you wanted me to destroy those 120,000 children who didn't know their right from their left.

You didn't care about them. Jonah cared about who? Himself. Sound familiar? If we're not careful, that's where we go back to.

Our human nature, it is to worship and care for self first and others second. He cared for only his people because his people were special. But Jesus died for the sins of the world. We're not called only to care for our family or to care for our ethnic group or to care for our state, but for others also. So Jonas sat there and he sulked.

He had learned one lesson but he still needed to learn what? Another. Again, sound familiar? We learn one lesson, and then we gotta learn the next one. And then we gotta learn the what?

The next one and the next one. We're all in a process of growing. And before we knock on Jonah too much, we need to recognize that we are a lot like him. Lot Lot gets a lot of critical yeah. Critical acclaim, so to speak, in scripture.

Lot gets criticized a lot. Why? Well, Lot moved into the city of what? Sodom. And when the angels came to get Lot and his family and to see how many there Abraham, remember, debated, negotiated with God from 50 down to 10 people.

10 righteous people, God said, and I'll spare the city. Couldn't find 10 righteous people. Should have there been 10 righteous people? Yet, why should there have been 10 righteous people? Because God had somebody in the city.

The Bible calls Lot a righteous man. He was a believer in God. He should have won souls, but he didn't. He just kinda blended blended in. I'm afraid that's what's happening today with the church and with Christian.

We just kinda, you know, blending in. So before you get too upset with Lot, I think in many ways, we're a lot more like Lot than we would like to admit. And we're a lot more like Jonah sometimes than we would like to admit. So as Jonah waited, angry with God, God gave him relief That that's the kind of God we have even in our misery. God gives us relief, but the relief didn't last long.

God took the relief away. And then Jonah was even more angry than he was before. Jonah didn't have the heart of who? Another j. Job.

Why did Job say the Lord has given and the Lord has taken away? Blessed be the name of the Lord. The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. Sometimes, things are going smoothly and we see the hand and blessing of God and sometimes he seems to remove his hand. But if you know him and if you trust him, you know he really hasn't what?

He really hasn't left. He's still there. And how can we complain about what we lose when we recall that everything we have comes from who? Comes from God. But not Jonah, thinking about himself, concerned for a plant that wasn't sentient, a plant that wasn't capable of feeling, a plant that had no eternal soul, but yet not for the 120,000 children in the city of Nineveh.

Jonah, you do not make good sense. And I'm sure God says that about us sometimes. You just do not make good sense. Nor do we when we deem others, other sinners like us unworthy of salvation and being redeemed as though they were less than human less human than we. They are not.

God made them, Jesus died for them and they need salvation. They need to know what sin is. They need to realize they're sinners. Yes. We need to stand up for what's right.

But we also need to warn them and we also need to tell them there is a remedy. Wouldn't it be so much better for them to be saved and for God to change them than for them to be destroyed and lost forever? We're studying from Acts on Thursdays. We're studying in Ephesians on Sunday morning. Acts tells us about the travels of a man named Paul.

Ephesians was written by a man named Paul. When we first meet him, his name is what? Saul. Wasn't it so much better that God stopped him on his tracks on the road to Damascus and saved his soul than that God destroyed him? How many millions of people are saved today, directly or indirectly due to the ministry of the Apostle Paul and others like them?

Most every great evangelist and missionary and preacher, well, matter of fact, every last one of them were sinners just like us. And many of them pretty vile and wicked, but God saved them and used them. How much better. We have some books back in the library by a guy named Josh McDowell. Some of you might recognize his name.

Josh McDowell was an atheist and a skeptic. He set off to visit places in the world to prove the Bible was a fraud. Instead, God got ahold of Josh McDowell as he traveled and as he found out the things in God's word were true and he got saved and he wrote a book called Evidence That Demands a what? A verdict. He wrote a second book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict two.

And he wrote a third book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict three. Books full of evidence and proof that the word of God we hold in our hands is indeed the word of God. And that the God that he thought to disprove was the God who saved his soul and turned his life around. I remember how upset I got a few years ago when I was driving my had it for about a year Mazda, Cool vehicle I liked, first one I'd ever had. And I was looking down and the traffic was moving in front of me, and I started moving and I looked up too late because the guy moved about five feet and jammed his brakes on, and his hitch, this long, went through the front of my nice vehicle and left a big hole.

Thanks to David Vogt, most of my hole is covered up with a license plate thing that he gave me to put there to cover up the hole in the front of my car, but I wasn't happy. It's just a what? It's just a car. It's just a piece of metal. Gets me from place to place.

Joshua is not here tonight, by the way. Appreciate your prayers for him. He had a he came down with a fever this afternoon. So he has forty hours of work and twenty hours of VBS this week. So I appreciate your prayers for him.

But but David Joshua can testify how upset I was one day when I walked in my living room and I backed up to my my loveseat and I sat down and when I did, immediately I knew what I did. Something went crunch and it wasn't me. It was the most beautiful ukulele that I have ever owned. Now you laugh, but but but it's made of spalted maple. It's it's special.

And I sat down and busted that thing, and I was not a happy camper. Don't ask Joshua. I don't want you to know how unhappy a camper I was. Over a ukulele. And that's the point God is making here to Jonah.

You're upset over this gourd. You should have been more concerned about who? About the people of Nineveh. You shouldn't have been angry that I spared them. You should have been what?

You should have been happy. You should have been excited. You should have been elated. Not only that I saved them, but I used you to do it. What a testimony.

The enemy walking into the city of Nineveh, giving them a warning and the whole city turning to God. How can these things compare to a human soul? How selfish and shortsighted and prideful human beings we must be to wake up. We must be. Wake up, open your eyes to see the bigger picture and souls of those around you mired in the tar pit of sin who need a way of escape.

And maybe God would use you to help. But you must be willing to share and you must be willing to care. We must be willing to swallow our pride and reevaluate the thoughts and and our priorities which sometimes get in our way. To take on the mind of Christ and see things through his eyes. Let's pray.

Dear heavenly father, thank you Lord for the opportunity to look into your word this evening to learn a little more about Jonah. And Lord, I pray that we might be willing to submit to your will, to follow through, to fulfill it, to be salt and light in this world, to be witnesses for Jesus Christ. And Lord, that we would see people as souls who need a savior. Not as people part of a just a pagan society that deserves to be punished, but as souls, sinners like us who need Jesus. Lord, help us, we pray.

Help us, use us, we pray. In Jesus' name, amen.