Speaker 1: Our scripture tonight comes from Jonah in chapters 3 and 4. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, oh Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster.
Therefore now, oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live. And the Lord said, Do you do well to be angry? Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant, and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head to save him from his discomfort.
So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die, and said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.' But God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, yes.
I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.' And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night? And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than a 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? This is the word of the Lord.
Speaker 2: Thanks be to God. Let's pray. Our father, the very last thing that anyone here needs tonight is to hear words from me. Because we are here to hear from you. For your name and your renown are the desires of our hearts.
This afternoon, we beg you by your spirit and by your word to speak to us. We ask that you would turn our attention and our affections away from worthless things and fix our eyes and our ears on you. That we might say as Simon Peter did to Jesus, where else would we go, lord? You have the words of eternal life. Lord, we confess that all flesh is like grass.
And the grass withers and the flower fades, but your word abides forever. So this afternoon, we pray that by your grace and your mercy, you would write the truths of your scriptures upon all of our hearts. We pray these things in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Good afternoon.
How's everybody doing? Good. I'm not gonna lie to you. The morning was a lot better at that. How are you guys?
Good. Great. Thank you. That was a warm welcome. My name, for those of you guys who don't know, is Matt Francisco, and I'm the pastor of college and worship leadership here at Redeemer, whatever that means.
It's been a great joy for my wife and I to be here these last 18 months. So thank you so much for having us. It's great to see what the Lord is doing here at this church and get to know so many of you guys. Over the last several months, Friday nights at the Francisco household where we have a trio of tiny children have become family movie nights where our 2 oldest kids take turns picking which movie we're gonna watch together. And for the most part, this has worked out fantastically.
Except for a really brutal stretch where both kids only wanted to watch Moana. And we're fine. Everybody's great. Thank you for asking. And it's great if, like my wife, you love Moana.
I just don't understand this group of people who would try to convince me that Moana is somehow different than any other Disney movie. Because if I get fired from this church tomorrow, and I really hope that that doesn't happen because I like being here and I have small children, I think I could, tomorrow, have a job as a screenwriter for Disney. You guys ready? This is the plot of every single Disney movie you've ever seen. K?
You have a young, innocent character who's suddenly thrust into adult responsibilities. And why are they thrust into adult responsibilities? Because, I don't know, the parents forgot to read the warning label on something. They're most likely dead. They're not around.
Okay? So this character has to face overwhelming odds. Incredible obstacles. And how do they overcome those obstacles? Not by taking somebody's well meaning advice.
Right? Not by assembling an all star team. Right? But by shutting out every single outside voice looking inside themselves, and figuring out who they were always meant to be. And with this new, absolutely unassailable identity, they walk out into the world in confidence.
Right? And they defeat Scar. Winter is ended, and the island is saved. That's it. And the credits roll.
It's amazing. The reason it's so easy to predict how Disney movies are gonna go is because every Disney movie has the exact same moral. Be yourself. Remember who you are. And there's a sense where, biblically speaking, right, we could affirm that, but we don't mean the same things as Disney means when they say remember who you are.
And this mantra is maybe the main cultural narrative that our whole culture has grasped onto. You do you no matter what anyone else thinks. The problem is, is that for most of us, unlike Moana, when we are the ones who are responsible for constructing our own identities, when we're the only people who can actually affirm who we are, we don't end up more secure. We end up radically insecure. And maybe one of the great ironies of our increasingly individualistic and affirming culture is that when we're the only ones who can speak into our identities, it makes us latch on to people who are like us, who think like us, who have the same background as us, and who will not challenge us.
And when we're confronted with people who don't look like us or have different backgrounds than us or maybe have different politics than us. Can we say that in this church? Can we talk about politics? I'm not going to. Don't worry.
It's really easy to look at the other, whoever the other might be, and transform them into the enemy. And how do we as Christians engage in a world like that? What does the gospel have to say? I'm very glad that you guys asked. And that is how you transition from Moana to Jonah.
Is anybody else really sad that Jonah is coming to an end? I've had a blast studying this book. And in case you missed any part of our series, I'm gonna do like a quick montage speed of the first couple chapters of Jonah. So just imagine, like, Led Zeppelin playing in the background because that's what was playing in the background while I was writing this. So in chapter 1, Jonah receives a word from the Lord.
Go to Nineveh and preach. And Jonah does his best Usain Bolt and runs exactly in the opposite direction as fast as he possibly can. He hops on a boat, hoping maybe to escape God or God's plan or maybe that God will use somebody else, forgetting that God actually rules the wind and the waves. Maybe he doesn't forget because he seems to remember on the boat. These sailors cry out to their gods.
The gods don't answer. Jonah, meanwhile, is asleep in the bottom of the boat. They wake up Jonah, ask him to call out to his God. He tells them exactly who the God over everything is and who is responsible for the storm. The sailors who have pity on Jonah, even though seemingly Jonah did not have pity on them, reluctantly cast Jonah into the wind and the waves.
And Jonah, he's drowning. And in his last breath, he throws up a Hail Mary, the football like pass, not really the Catholic prayer because I don't really know what that is. He calls out to God, save me. And what has to seem like an insult to injury, he knows he's about to die, and he sees a great fish coming towards him to swallow him. It's like, I get it God.
I deserve to die. But God doesn't use the fish to kill him. He sits inside the fish in 3 days in darkness. And he writes the beautiful prayer that is chapter 2. And then the fish spits him out on dry land.
Jonah makes his way to Nineveh, which brings us to chapter 3. Now my one of my heroes is the great missionary Adnanam Judson who spent 6 years in the sweltering jungles of Burma, now Myanmar, before he saw a convert. Hudson Taylor spent 7 years in China before he saw somebody come to faith in Christ. Jonah, only after he had resigned himself to the fact that God would literally direct all of the forces of nature against him to get him to Nineveh, preaches for, I don't know, maybe 15 seconds, if it is actually just a 5 word sermon. And what happens?
The king of Nineveh declares a fast, The whole city falls into repentance. It's revival. It's every minister or missionary's dream come true. Right? Verse 10 of chapter 3, When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that He had said He would do to them.
And He did not do it. So, if you were writing a Disney movie, this is exactly how you would end it. Jonah is saved. Nineveh is saved, and everybody lives happily ever after. But that's not how the story ends.
As Joel said 2 weeks ago, if saving Nineveh was all that God wanted to do, then he could have just sent a better prophet. But God was also saving Jonah. And verse 1 of chapter 4 says, But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. You see, instead of rejoicing at God's mercy, Jonah is raging against it. The word that is translated displeased in verse 1 is actually the same word that's translated disaster in 3:10 and in 4:2.
In other words, God's relenting of disaster towards Nineveh was to Jonah the real disaster. Jonah is perhaps the first missionary in the history of all missionaries who hopes that all of his work would be in vain. Verse 2, And he prayed to the Lord and said, O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish. For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.
If those phrases sound familiar to you, it's because it's one of the most common Old Testament refrains describing who God is. The first time that we see it is in Exodus chapter 34. In Exodus 33, Moses asks to see the glory of God, and God responds in chapter 34 like this starting in verse 6. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for 1,000, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But who will by no means clear the guilty?
Visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the 3rd and the 4th generation. You see Moses asked to see the glory of God, and God showed him his character. You wanna see my glory Moses? This is who I am. The pagan sailors and the Ninevites, they hoped what Jonah already knew.
That God is merciful. That he is gracious. That he is abounding in steadfast love. And this steadfast love is perhaps the most significant old testament description of how God relates to his people. It's the Hebrew word hesed.
And what it means is the enduring, the steadfast, the immovable immovable, covenantal, loyal, relentless love of God. What it means is that God has promised to forever be with His people and forever be for his people. It's like Jonah has memorized all the right answers to his seminary exam, but he's just now beginning to understand what those words actually mean. God, I knew that you were merciful. I knew that you were compassionate.
But how could you show mercy and compassion to those people? Why would you do this for them? And it's not just that Jonah can't stand God showing mercy to the Ninevites. It's that when God shows mercy to the Ninevites, Jonah can no longer stand God. Jonah starts to see God as he really is, not how he had always imagined him to be.
And I don't know if this has ever happened to you before, but it's happened to me. And when it happens, it's devastating. This is why it's so important for us to know and read all of our Bibles. Right? This is why I'm so glad that you guys are here at this church where we preach book by book and not just topically.
Because there ought to be some places where you come to scripture and you wonder how could God act like this? I never thought that God would do something like this. It's one of the ways that we know that we're worshiping a real God and not just us. Verse 3. Therefore now, oh Lord, please take my life from me for it is better for me to die than to live.
You see, God revealed His glory and His character to Moses and Moses came back radiating. God revealed His character and His glory to Jonah and Jonah wants to die. And God would have been totally justified in giving Jonah exactly what he wants right here. Right? Listen, Jonah.
I have taken care of you your entire life. Every piece of food that you've ever eaten, I gave to you. Every shell every shelter you've ever been under, I provided for you. You grew up in the family that you grew up in because I put you in that family. You only know me because I directed all of the world so that you might have the opportunity to and I spoke to you.
Who do you think you are? But He doesn't do that. Isn't it amazing that we can go to God in our anger and with our questions and like Jonah He just wants us to come to Him. That He doesn't crush Jonah in this moment. He engages with Jonah.
And then God goes after Jonah with a counselor's precision. And the Lord said, do you do well to be angry? So one of my friends said earlier this week, how's this working out for you? Are you sure that you understand what exactly is going on here? Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there.
He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city. You guys what realize what's going on? Jonah should have been in the middle of that city. He should have been telling people who this God really is and what it means to follow him. But he's not.
Instead, he waits out these 40 days and he goes to sit up upon a hill hoping maybe that he heard God wrong or maybe that God was wrong or that God is somehow gonna judge Nineveh anyway. Verse 6. Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered.
When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind. The sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, It is better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.
See, just as God had appointed the great fish, so too He appointed the plant and the wind and the worm. God is using all of these things not to punish Jonah. But like a surgeon going after a tumor, God is using these things to remove the spiritual cancer for Jonah's heart so that he might be set free and to bring Jonah's heart to himself. And just as that shady plant that Jonah so loved was a sign of God's grace and love towards him, so too were the worm and the wind. Now this is incredibly important.
It's not that this situation caused the sinful anger or the self pity to come out of Jonah's heart. Right? It simply revealed the disordered love that had always been there. This is why, it's so easy for us to blame our sin on circumstances. Right?
If you'd only been there and heard what she said, if you knew what kind of day that I had at work or at home, you would give me grace right now. It's remarkable that almost every single person says how hard the 1st year of marriage is or how hard the 1st year of parenting is. It's not like this other person suddenly entered my life and caused me to be selfish. Right? Only someone with like a Michael Scott level lack of self awareness would say something like that.
It's that it shows how we've actually always been. And for Jonah, this is a moment of uncomfortable grace because God is intent on exposing Jonah's heart in order that he might transform it. God is relentlessly committed to Jonah's sanctification, to Jonah's holiness, just as in His steadfast love, He is relentlessly committed to yours. I don't know about you guys, but I had memorized Romans 828 a long time before I understood what Romans 829 said. Romans 828, And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
Yes, amen. All things work together for my good. For those whom He foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed into the image of his son. So what does Paul mean when he says that God is going to work all things together for your good? It doesn't necessarily mean that if you're single, God is going to provide a spouse for you.
It doesn't mean that if you lose your job there's gonna be another great job waiting just around the corner for you. The way that the world often talks about everything happening for a reason. Everything does happen for a reason, but for God's children the reason that everything happens is so that you and I could become more like Jesus no matter what it costs us in the process. God is so committed to our ultimate good that he will bring circumstances into our life. Be it a cancer, or an unexpected injury, or a failed business, or a loss of a relationship, or even have you locked up unjustly for years like Joseph, so that he might remove the snare of idolatry from our hearts.
Psalm 51, which David writes is his confession when he slept with Bathsheba. David says, Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. In other words, God will break your bones if it means He gets your heart in the process. If you're His, it doesn't matter how hard you rebel or how far you run, because He will hunt you all the way down to Tarshish, to extend to you grace and mercy that may feel a whole lot like wrath. Verse 10.
And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than a 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle? Listen. Jonah is part of the people of God. Right?
He's got this special connection with God. He's a prophet. He knows the scriptures. We saw that in chapter 2. And yet his heart is actually hardened to the things that God loves.
Jonah longs for his comfort and God longs for Jonah's holiness. Jonah loves the plant, but God loves Nineveh. God or Jonah loves his own people, but God so loved the world. Listen. Is it wrong for Jonah to want good things for himself, or for his people, or for his country?
Absolutely not. But the great danger lies in what the great Puritan Thomas Brooks used to say, that Satan is really good at painting sin with virtues colors. Satan is really great at presenting greed as good financial planting. Planning is what I meant to say. He's really good at presenting drunkenness as good fellowship.
And he's really good at painting loving one's own. I'm saying all of these things wrong, but you guys are understanding what I'm saying. Right? We're just gonna try all of that phrasing one more time. Okay?
I'm just gonna read it so I don't mess it up this round. He's great at presenting greed as good financial planning, drunkenness as fellowship, and prejudice as caring for one's own. And God, in His relentless love of Jonah, is absolutely bent on exposing Jonah's particular prejudice. After all, Jonah has no problem fleeing his homeland to go to another foreign country, to Tarshish. Right?
It's just Nineveh that he hates. It's just Nineveh that he can't imagine God showing mercy to. And to be fair to Jonah, as one Jewish commentator said, the Assyrians were like the Nazi stormtroopers of the ancient world. These were bad guys. These were evil vicious people.
And Jonah was rightly afraid that if God shows mercy to them, if God relents from showing them disaster, then it probably means disaster for him and for God's people. In fact, the Assyrians, who are the people of Nineveh, would later destroy the northern kingdom of Israel. God sending Jonah to the Ninevites would be like somebody from Nanking going to Tokyo in 1930. Or like the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth being sent into the heart of Birmingham in the fifties and sixties. And if you guys don't know who Fred Shuttlesworth is, buckle your seatbelts, you're about to.
This dude is absolutely one of my heroes. He was the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, which is just 2 and a half miles from here, from 1953 to 1961. And if Martin Luther King was kind of the goodwill ambassador of the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was basically its battering ram. He led the charge for a number of years and on Christmas night in 1956, he's sitting in his bedroom reading his bible when 6 sticks of dynamite explode just behind his head. The roof collapses.
The walls fall. The mattress goes flying. But Shuttlesworth walks out of the house almost totally unscathed. He takes it as a sign from God and there's a police officer who shows up at the scene and he says, if I were you, I would get out of this town as quick as I could. And I love this.
This is Shuttlesworth's reply. Well, officer, you're not me. Go back and tell your brothers that if the Lord saved me from this, I'm here for the duration. From the pulpit, he forgave his attackers saying that they knew not what they did. And to his congregation he said, find you any crack you can hide in if you're scared.
But I'm walking downtown after this meeting and I'm getting on a bus. I'm not gonna look back to see if any of you guys are following me. As one of the co founders of the SCLC said, Fred was impatient with evil. Isn't that awesome? This is a guy who was so relentlessly committed to the good that he was arrested 35 times, that he was beaten numerous times, that he received tons of death threats, and he would be bombed again, The next time funded by 2 of Bull Connor's own detectives.
Confrontation is not bad, Shuttlesworth would say. Goodness is supposed to confront evil. I don't want you to miss this because this is incredible. Shuttlesworth was not just committed to the good of his own people, as just and as noble of a cause as that would have been. Shuttlesworth said that segregation is just as terrible on white folks.
We ain't fighting for just black folks. We're fighting to free white folks and everybody. Isn't that amazing? That Shuttlesworth didn't just love his own people, he loved all of this great city, our great city. He loved those who would have called him enemies.
Even those like Bull Connor who actively sought his destruction. What does it mean to love your enemies? It means that you bless those who curse you. It means that you pray for those who persecute you. And you treat them as though they were the ones who were in need, and you desire their good and their flourishing.
Shoto's worth, I think this is amazing, he made it a point every time that he was beaten and sent into the hospital to smile because he said, I didn't want the white people to think that I was mad at them. Him. He grasped that all prejudice, all tribalism, all making anyone else who is your other the enemy, was a denial of the biblical principle that we are all created in the image of God. And therefore, that we have infinite value and infinite worth and infinite dignity. He also understood that all prejudice is pitiable because it just stems from a spiritual blindness that fails to see that we all stand condemned equally before God because of our sin.
And then we can all only equally be saved by the initiating grace of God. Not because of our background, our ideology, our nationality, or our pedigree. And throughout this whole book, God has been trying to show this to Jonah. He's been trying to show them show him that he has never been the God of just a particular group of people. I mean, if God is actually sovereign, which he is.
Amen? Amen. Why do you think that he let Jonah get all the way to that boat? Because he had some pagan sailors that he wanted to save. Even all the way back in Genesis chapter 12, which is the beginning of the nation of Israel, God's call to Abraham is this, I'm going to bless you so that in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.
You see, it has always been God's plan that history is going to culminate with people from every tri, tongue, language, and nation, from reformed Nazis to Ninevites, all declaring, worthy is the lamb that was slain. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. The Lord really is gracious and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. This is why laboring for the good of all people, working towards things like racial reconciliation or ethnic diversity has nothing to do with being trendy or us taking our cues from the culture. This is God's unfolding plan from Genesis to Revelation.
It's about begging God to bring his kingdom on earth for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Verse 10. And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh that great city, in which there are more than a 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle? Now, just a quick clarification.
God is not saying here that the Ninevites are not responsible for their sin. They absolutely are. He's just saying in spite of their sin, he pities them. That he shows compassion to them. And whether or not Jonah intentionally omits any reference to God's justice when he quotes Exodus 34.
That God will by no means clear the guilty, but will visit the sins of the fathers to the children and their children's children to the 3rd 4th generation. It's absolutely clear here that Jonah doesn't think that God is acting in light of his justice at all. Jonah is effectively saying, how am I supposed to live in a world with this kind of a God? With a God who says that he shows steadfast love to his people and yet shows favor to his enemies? How am I supposed to live in a world where a God who says He's just but He forgives the wicked?
God, if you're not gonna confront this evil with people this wicked, is justice ever gonna come? And yes, Jonah, justice is gonna come. Justice is gonna come on a white horse and his name is gonna be faithful and true. But there's a reason why justice hasn't come yet. God's saying that I have compassion.
I have pity. I don't delight in the death of the wicked. I desire that all would come to faith and repentance. But I'm not slow as some people understand slowness, my kindness, my pity, my compassion is meant to lead people to repentance. That these Ninevites might be saved and know me just like you Jonah know me.
And you, oh prophet of mine, you may not have compassion or pity on this great city, but I do. While Jonah the prophet did not have pity over that great city, praise God that a greater prophet would come who would have pity on another great city. Saying, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it, how often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing. You will not see me again until you say, Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. And while Jonah entered the city, hoping that it would be destroyed for its sins, 2000 years ago on Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the city as people cried out, Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Knowing that in order for sinners to be saved, he himself would have to be destroyed. Jonah went outside the city in order to sit in judgment upon it. While Jesus, the one true judge, let the city's judgment fall upon him so that those of us who place our trust in him could rest in that relentless, steadfast, loyal love of God. So how is it that God can be both merciful and gracious, but will also by no means clear the guilty?
We can see what Jonah never could. That on the cross, God shows us that he is just. That he will by no means clear the guilty. Because he visited the sins of all of our fathers upon his one and only son. So that those of us who would lay down our sins and our self righteousness can say together with absolutely wide eyed wonder, our salvation belongs to the Lord.
The Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed is he who came in the name of the Lord. So how are we gonna have strength to love our enemies? How can we be changed like Jonah? And yes, Jonah was changed, otherwise how do we get this book?
We remember that while we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to God, not because of anything good that we had done, not because of our history or our pedigree, but because of the death of His one and only Son. When we turn our eyes to Calvary, we understand what it cost Christ to love his enemies. We finally understand our own identity, That it doesn't come simply from within us, that it comes from without. That we are evil. That we are just as evil as the Ninevites.
But we are forever loved because of what Jesus Christ did. And if you place Jesus dying for his enemies, at the center of who you are, you will have the strength to love your enemies, to love the other, to work for their good no matter how hard they work against yours. Because at the cross, the justice of God and the relentless covenant love of God meet because Christ drank the just wrath of God so that we could drink forever from his mercy. That, my friends, is good news. Let's pray.
Lord, You are great and greatly to be praised. And we say together, You are gracious and slow to anger. You are abounding in steadfast love, and you are good to all. Who is a God like you? Who pardons sin and forgives, who delights in showing mercy?
Because you haven't dealt with us as our sins deserved. But as far as the east is from the west, so far have you removed our transgressions from us. And it's all because of Jesus. All because you laid all of our sins upon him. We're not punished for our sins because Jesus was punished in our place.
And as we learn to marvel at your grace, Lord, we pray that you would teach us to extend that grace to others. Show us how to love as you have loved us, and break our hearts as you broke Jonas for whatever it is that breaks yours. Lord, and we rejoice this afternoon as we come to your table, because we remember that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases because it never depended upon us, but it depended upon the finished work of Jesus Christ, our savior and our lord. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.