Mercy or Misery?
“But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.” Jonah 4:1
One of the accounts in scripture of which most folks are familiar is the story of Jonah. God told him to go to Nineveh (present day Mosul, Iraq), preach His message of repentance, which implied a warning to the people that if they didn’t repent of their wicked ways, judgment would surely come upon them. Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh and preach so he ran and ended up in the belly of a great fish which must have been rather frightening and disgusting. After three days and nights in the dark and smelly fish’s belly, Jonah came to the conclusion that obeying God was certainly far better than being fish food thus he began to pray and vowed to co-operate with the LORD of his salvation. God heard his prayer and commanded the fish to spit him out on dry land. I am sure that fish was as eager to be rid of him as Jonah was to be freed from his ocean prison. A critical and complaining spirit can cause the bearer of such to suffer indigestion and misery among other maladies, and Jonah’s attitude had likely caused the fish to suffer the same.
God had not changed His mind about the Ninevites and again instructed Jonah to go and deliver His message. This time Jonah obeyed. Like Jonah, many of us have to sometimes learn the hard way. Jonah made his way to Nineveh, preached God’s message, which included a time limit of 40 days before judgment would come. The people heeded the warning, repented of their sin, and God withheld judgment. One would expect Jonah to be overjoyed that 1.) his preaching was very effective, 2.) that more than 120,000 people had become believers in God, and 3.) that God was glorified because he was obedient. However, that is not what happened.
Jonah became angry because God did not follow through on His threat to bring judgment upon Nineveh. If true repentance does not bring forgiveness from the LORD, then where could one find mercy? Jonah did not have mercy on the Ninevites. He wanted them to suffer. Perhaps he didn’t expect them to repent or perhaps he believed that they were such an evil people that there was no chance of them turning to the LORD. Jonah was so angry that he wanted to die. He reminds me in some ways of folks who just can’t seem to be happy for others when good things happen to those other folks. Just about everyone has to some extent an envious nature. Envy is one of the traits of our sin nature with which we are born into this world. We can become jealous when others are rewarded in some way. People desire what others have (covetousness, the 10th Commandment), but most people don’t know what hardships, risks, and sacrifices were necessary to obtain that position, award, notoriety, etc. People just want to “keep up with the Jones” as if that is some sort of achievement in life. On the other hand, some folks are secretly glad when calamities fall upon others. I suppose Jonah would have been happy, but only temporarily, to see Nineveh come under God’s judgment, but then that would have shown God to not be the merciful God that He is. Proverbs 17:5 tells us that “he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished.”
Jonah even admitted that he knew that God was a gracious God, full of mercy, slow to get angry, exceedingly kind, and would forgive anyone who repented of their sins and trusted in Him. Basically, Jonah was angry because God was good and true to His word. Jonah went away from the city and felt sorry for himself. God sent a gourd plant over him to shield him from the hot sun to give him some relief. Jonah was happy about that, but the next day, God sent a worm to destroy the gourd, leaving Jonah miserable in the hot sun and wanting to die. God confronted Jonah with his hypocrisy. He felt sorry for a gourd plant that he had nothing to do with, but angry because God had pity upon an entire city.
Jonah could have benefited from the advice of the Apostle Paul as he wrote many years later in Romans 12:15: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep”, because this is what Jesus does, and to be like Jesus is our goal.