“Sunday Sermon Manuscript for September 20”

God Cares

Jonah 3:10–4:11

Introduction — A Five-Word Sermon

1.     Have you ever wondered who the most successful preacher in all of Scripture was? Peter, perhaps? Paul? Those great names come quickly to mind—but, surprisingly, it seems the honor belongs to Jonah, a man whose entire sermon was just five words in Hebrew, barely a single sentence in our own language.

2.     Jonah’s sermon was exactly five words; translated, it amounts to only this: “Forty more days, and Nineveh will be overthrown.” And yet at that one short line, the whole of Nineveh—the cruelest and most wicked city of the ancient world—repented, from the king down to the lowliest servant, and even the beasts of the field were covered in sackcloth. It was an astonishing result, the kind you would scarcely see at any revival meeting.

3.     Yet the very preacher who delivered this message took no joy at all in such remarkable repentance. On the contrary, he was angry. “This was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry” (4:1). A successful preacher raging against the fruit of his own sermon—surely there is no scene stranger or more ironic than this.

4.     Today we want to step together into exactly this strange scene. And within it we will come to see a truth that Jonah himself could never quite grasp: that God’s heart is far greater than we imagine, and the reach of His love far wider than any line we would draw.

5.     Over the course of my life I have met a great many people. Among them were some of whom I thought, “There is simply no hope for that person”—and yet, as the years passed, I have watched even people like that come to live well within the grace of God.

6.     In truth, I need not look far for the evidence. These days I spend much of my time alone at home, and when I quietly look back over the road I have traveled, I find myself thinking that the life I am living can be explained by nothing except the grace with which God has led me all this way.

7.     You may not know very well what kind of person I used to be. Not long ago I met an old friend for the first time in nearly thirty years, since we graduated from high school, and the very first thing he said when he saw me was, “Well—you actually turned out to be a decent human being.”

8.     My whole youth is contained in that one remark, so I will leave it to your imagination what I must have been like back then. Almost anything you can picture is probably true.

9.     And yet God took a person like that and made me into this. Quite unlike the expectations my friend had carried in his mind about me, it seems God has shaped me into something far finer than anyone would have guessed.

10.   In just this way, our lives—and the way we see—are being written into a new story before God’s greater gaze, in ways we could never have understood. And today’s story of Jonah begins at exactly that point.

Do You Know What Kind of Place Nineveh Was?

11.   To understand Jonah’s anger, I think we first need to know what kind of city Nineveh was. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Assyria was a nation that trampled and conquered the ancient Near East without mercy, and in 722 BC it finally destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and carried the ten tribes away into captivity.

12.   Those ten tribes, once taken, vanished from history forever. The prophet Nahum cried out against Nineveh, “Woe to the city of blood!” So you see, to an Israelite like Jonah, Nineveh was no ordinary foreign city—it was the very heart of the enemy that had slaughtered his people and dragged them away.

13.   Assyria’s cruelty shows itself plainly even in its colonial policy. To rule its conquered peoples efficiently, Assyria’s chosen method was to force different nations to intermarry and mix together, shaking loose their very identity as a people. The clearest example is the people of Samaria.

14.   The Samaritans were originally the people of the northern kingdom of Israel, but as they were forcibly mixed with the foreigners Assyria resettled among them, their pure roots grew clouded. And so, to the Israel of Jonah’s day, the very name “Assyria” was one that made a person shudder just to hear it.

15.   So Jonah’s anger was not Jonah’s alone; we might say it was the shared anger of the whole nation of Israel. God sent Jonah to that very Nineveh, commanding him, “Go and cry out that Nineveh may repent”—and Jonah fled in the opposite direction, toward Tarshish.

16.   That flight was, in effect, a silent act of defiance against God, as if to say: “Lord, that city deserves to be destroyed. So why on earth would You give them a chance to repent?”

17.   Jonah did not want to see Nineveh repent. He wanted to see Nineveh fall. His heart was full of the conviction that what Nineveh deserved was not grace but judgment. And that conviction, most likely, was not Jonah’s alone but the heart of all Israel as well.

A Love Wider Than Ours

18.   If we look closely at the prayer Jonah poured out in his anger, we can find the real reason he fled to Tarshish instead of Nineveh: “I knew that You are a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger, overflowing in love—a God who even holds back the disaster He was about to send” (4:2). Is that not astonishing?

19.   This confession is, in fact, one of the most beautiful declarations of praise to God in all the Old Testament. It is the very word with which God introduced Himself in Exodus 34, and the song the psalmists sang again and again, generation after generation.

20.   Yet Jonah hurls this song at God not as praise but as complaint. The very same words—pointed in exactly the opposite direction. The grace for which Israel had been so grateful when it was poured out on them, he simply could not bear to see flow toward his enemy, Nineveh.

21.   I have come to think that the limits of the human heart are captured perfectly right here. We love the love of God—but only when that love comes to “me.” When that same love flows out even to the person I hate, the person I can in no way accept, our hearts, like Jonah’s, quietly grow uncomfortable.

22.   Beloved, the love of God was wider than the line Jonah had drawn. God’s concern was greater than the range Jonah had imagined. Jonah drew a line and said, “This far, and no farther, are the people worthy of grace”—but God’s heart had already leapt over that line, all the way to Nineveh. Our judgment is forever building walls; God’s love is forever climbing over them. God’s heart is bigger than ours.

That Great Love Saved Us

23.   But here there is one thing we must be sure to remember. As we read this story, it is all too easy to take our stand in Jonah’s place and look down on Nineveh. It is easy to nod comfortably and conclude, “Yes, God is the kind of God who loves even His enemies.” Yet if we look a little more deeply into the text, we realize that the place where we are standing is not so much Jonah’s place as Nineveh’s.

24.   When we consider it honestly, we too were once people who could not tell our right hand from our left before God. Had it not been for the grace of God, we too would have turned our backs on Him and gone our own way. If God had weighed our every qualification, set our merits on the scales, and given us only what we truly deserved, not one of us could stand boldly in this place today.

25.   We were saved not because we were even a little better than Nineveh. We were saved for one reason only: because the love of God was greater than our worthiness.

26.   This is precisely what Rev. Wesley called “the grace that goes before us.” Before we ever sought God, before we even thought to ask, God’s love had already come looking for us. And so our becoming God’s children today is not because we are anything special, but because that same great and wide love that spared Nineveh came to rest upon us as well.

27.   That grace Jonah so resented, that grace which overflowed even to the enemy—that very grace is what has given us life today. God’s heart is bigger than ours.

Between the Vine and Nineveh

28.   Now we come to the final scene of the story. Jonah settled down east of the city and kept watch to the very end, hoping against hope that Nineveh might yet fall. Even though God had spoken as He did, Jonah still secretly clung to the hope that judgment would come down just as he wished.

29.   This heart of Jonah’s, in truth, is not hard to find in us as well. There are surprisingly many people who expect God to work only at the time they have appointed, only within the fence they have put up. That longing for God to please move according to my way—that was the heart of Jonah, sitting there east of the city.

30.   To Jonah, sitting there, God caused a vine to grow up and gave him cool shade. Jonah was overjoyed because of that vine. But the next day, when God sent a single worm to wither it, Jonah again complained that he wanted to die.

31.   Over a single stalk of a plant that sprang up in a night and vanished in a night, a person’s heart can rise and fall this dramatically. And it is right then that God asks Jonah: “You cared about this vine, though you did not toil for it or make it grow. And should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, where there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and many animals as well?” (4:10–11)

32.   In this question appears the word “care”—a word that, in the original Hebrew, comes closer to “to pity” or “to have compassion.” So God’s heart is not a cold, detached “concern,” but a heart that aches with compassion for them.

33.   Jonah could grieve so bitterly over a single vine that had given him a little shade for a moment, yet before more than a hundred and twenty thousand living souls he felt no compassion at all. It was because his gaze was fixed only on himself—on his own comfort, on his own sense of right and wrong.

34.   Here we are led to meditate still more deeply on the heart of God. The difference between Jonah and God was, in the end, a difference of gaze. Jonah was looking at the vine; God was looking at Nineveh.

35.   Jonah was looking at the shade over his own head; God was looking at a hundred and twenty thousand souls. Jonah was looking at his own justice; God was looking at their tears. What we fix our eyes upon is what finally determines the size of our hearts.

Conclusion — Toward the Gaze of God

36.   Beloved members of Yeolin Church, the book of Jonah ends in a most unusual way. Most stories in Scripture wrap things up neatly—“and so it came to pass”—but Jonah tosses one question out before us and simply ends.

37.   “And should I not care?” What Jonah finally answered to that question, Scripture never tells us. Why is that? Because that question has now passed from Jonah to each one of us who reads these words.

38.   So then, what is the task left to us today? It is to move our gaze. It is to turn the eyes that were fixed only on my own vine toward the Nineveh that God is looking upon.

39.   Who is the Nineveh in my own heart? Who is the person about whom I have drawn a line and said, “Not that one,” “That one does not deserve grace”? God’s gaze has already reached that person. It is only our gaze that has not yet arrived there.

40.   We were saved not thanks to our own narrow measure, but thanks to God’s wide love. If so, then the fitting response for us who have received that love is to lay down our narrow gaze and lift our eyes toward the wide gaze of God.

41.   It is to lift our eyes from that place where we were weighing who is right and who is wrong, and to look together at what God is caring for even now, and toward whom His heart is breaking.

42.   God’s heart is always bigger than ours. God’s love is always wider than our judgment. That great and wide love has given us life today; so now let us turn our gaze toward God, the Author of that love. When our eyes begin to follow God’s eyes, we will at last become people who answer, with our very lives, the question Jonah never answered—“Amen.” Amen.