Heroes of the Faith- Jonah, In the Shadow of a Tree

August 31, 2003, 8:00, 9:30, 11:00 AM

Rev. Ronald Burcham

Typed from audio transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jonah has got to be the most reluctant hero of the Old Testament. In fact, Jonah doesn't want to be a hero at all. You may recall from the first two chapters of the Book of Jonah that Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh to begin with. It starts out with God saying to Jonah, "Jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh and I want you to deliver a message over there." So Jonah does the thing that he thinks is best. He heads down to Joppa and he jumps on a boat. The problem is the boat is going in the opposite direction of Nineveh. He's heading to Tarshish.

So Jonah, with full knowledge, knowing that he is disobeying God from the very beginning, knowing exactly what God wants him to do, does the exact opposite thing that God has asked him. God is not pleased with this, so God causes a storm to erupt. And so they're in the middle of the sea, and it looks like the ship is going to break in half and everyone is going to die. Finally, Jonah gives it up. He says, "This is all my fault. I'm running away from God. He asked me to go to Nineveh. I'm heading to Tarshish. You know what you need to do is just throw me over the side of the boat." Jonah makes his confession that what he's doing is sinful and he recognizes that, and he's willing to take on the consequences even to the point of having him thrown over the side of the ship and go to death.

Well, reluctantly, the people in the ship do just that. They throw him over. But God, in His grace and compassion and mercy, provides a giant fish. The large fish swallows Jonah up. He stays inside the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. While he's there, he composes a magnificent prayer, a prayer that speaks of God's grace and His compassion and His love for all people. And he ends that prayer by saying, "Salvation belongs to the Lord." With that, God has the giant fish vomit Jonah up onto the side of the shore. He's alive. He didn't drown. He didn't die in the storm. God kept him alive for three days and three nights inside the fish. Jonah has received God's grace. God has been so merciful to him, had such compassion upon him. He spared his life.

So then we pick up this morning in Chapter 3. God once again asked Jonah, "Jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh and I want you to preach the message there." Ah, what a difference this is. Now instead of Jonah running away from God, Jonah recognizes having received God's grace and responds. He responds to God's love by wanting to share that love, by wanting to be obedient to God. So now he heads straight over for Nineveh, and he begins preaching to the people. It couldn't have turned out better. Could you believe it when you read it? What a miraculous story. What an incredible story.

He goes into this pagan city, this city that doesn't have a relationship with the one true God. He is the enemy. He comes from Israel. He's coming over to Nineveh and Assyria, so he's the enemy; he comes in as this foreigner. He must have been quite a preacher. He must have put Billy Graham to shame, because he walked into the city and he preaches them, not about God's love, not about God's grace. He says, "Listen up, Ninevites. In 40 days, you're going to be toast. In 40 days, God is going to destroy this place. You're going to be overturned." And then comes the miracle. It says the people repented. They put on sackcloth. From the greatest to the least, they sat down in the dust. They humbled themselves before God. They relented from their evil ways. In fact, it says, the king of Nineveh takes off his royal robes, puts on sackcloth himself, and he commands that every human being in the city and all of the livestock are not to eat. They're not to drink. Everyone is supposed to put on sackcloth. Everyone is to call up to the one true God and maybe, just maybe, God will relent and God will have mercy and compassion. Sure enough, God looks down. He sees that the Ninevites have turned from their evil ways. He sees that they have repented, that they have turned to Him, the one true God, and so God doesn't bring destruction on the city.

You would think that Jonah would end right there. There would be no Chapter 4. What a story. What an incredible event. Jonah goes to run away. He gets swallowed by a giant fish. He comes to his senses. He preaches the word of God. It couldn't have turned out any better. What a powerful preacher. All the people repent. They turned to God. God relents. The whole city is saved. Sing hallelujah in the streets. You'd think that Jonah would be walking through Nineveh. Everyone would be slapping him on the back. "Quite a sermon you did there, Jonah. Oh, you brought us to our senses. Hey, Buddy, you saved us from destruction. Thanks." That's what you'd expect to happen.

Then what happened in Chapter 4? What's the deal with that? The first time I read Chapter 4, I shook my head and said there's got to be something wrong here and so I had to read it again. It starts out from the very first verse. Jonah was angry with God. Jonah was angry with God? Jonah was angry with the fact that the Ninevites turned to God? Jonah was angry with the fact that the Ninevites didn't get destroyed? Jonah had gone there to preach a word of destruction, and then he wanted to park himself on a hill outside the city and watch the fireworks happen. That's what he thought. He thought, "Yeah, God is going to rain down destruction on these people. I'm going to go and I'm going to preach to them. I'm going to tell them what's going to happen. And I'm going to sit back and I'm going to watch it take place." It doesn't happen. Jonah gets mad. Jonah gets angry. In fact, he says back to God, "See, this is why I didn't come to begin with. I knew you'd do this. I knew it. I knew that I'd come over here, you'd have all this grace and compassion and they wouldn't be destroyed." Jonah wanted to see the people annihilated.

You see, Jonah's problem was Jonah wanted to limit God's grace. He wanted to contain God's grace just to the people he wanted. He wanted only the select people in his mind. Only his own people, the Israelites, were to receive God's compassion. Only they were to be saved. Not these Ninevites. Not this enemy of Israel. That's not what he had in mind. Jonah wanted to limit who God would be gracious to, who God would be compassionate and merciful to.

Can you imagine? What a shocker as you read it. Don't you want to just shake your head and say, "Gee whiz, what is up with this guy Jonah? First he runs in the opposite direction. Then he goes in there with this kind of attitude and he gets mad at God. Hard to believe, isn't it?" You probably say to yourself, "You know, if I were there, it wouldn't happen this way. No. I'd be walking down the street shouting hallelujah with all the Ninevites. God relented. We've got more into the kingdom of God. Praise the Lord. His church has grown." Would you?

You know, what Jonah does rather forthrightly, blatantly, I kind of think that we do it just on a more subtle basis. It's easy for us to look back several thousand years and, sure, the Ninevites, we want them saved? Well, sure we do. Who are the Ninevites anyway? We don't know any Ninevites. Yeah, the Ninevites, they can be saved. They can be in the kingdom of God. That's wonderful.

Okay. How about this? You know, scripture tells us that in heaven there's a giant mansion and that there's a room reserved for each one of us there. Would you like the room next to Ted Bundy? Because they said that he made a last minute confession of faith before he died, so would you like the room next to the serial killer? Would that seem right to you? Would you be overjoyed if tomorrow morning you read in the paper that Saddam Hussain has turned himself in because he's turned his life over to Christ? He's come to faith, and he's willing to take on the consequences of whatever they may be but he trusts and believes that his Lord and Savior will take care of him. How would you react if you read that Osama bin Laden was found? He was in a little town called Wittenberg, Germany. They caught him in the Lutheran Church there. It seems that he gave his life to Christ and now he was an active part of the congregation. How would you like that? How would you respond? How would you react if a convicted murderer sat down next to you in church? Do you really want all people to receive God's grace? Do you really want everyone to receive His mercy? What about the foul-mouthed neighbor that lives two houses down? Does he really deserve God's grace and mercy? What about that one person in the office, the one that has no ethnics, no morals? All they do is slither around working behind everyone's back trying to inch their way to the top. Do they deserve God's grace? Do they deserve His mercy? Should they be part of God's compassionate plan?

Haven't you at least secretly thought to yourself, "You know, some day, one day, these people are going to get what they deserve, that someday they're going to have to stand before God, that someday they're going to fall under judgment? And we'll let God judge them. We'll let God's wrath come down upon them." Don't you just get fed up with a certain group of people or maybe an individual that seems to you so evil, so hideous, that their crimes are so heinous that the only thing you can imagine is for them to come under the wrath and the judgment of God and secretly you look forward into your mind, you say to yourself, "You know, sooner or later, they're going to get their just rewards. They're going to get what's coming to them."

You see, you and I can fall into the same trap that Jonah did. Jonah wanted to limit God's grace. He wanted to limit the people that could have mercy on his God. For Jonah, he had a very clear line that he drew in the sand. The clear line for Jonah was God's grace, God's mercy, and God's compassion. That was for the people of Israel, no one else. The people of Israel were the chosen race. They were God's chosen people. Therefore, God's people receive the grace, they receive His mercy. All those people outside of Israel, especially those who were enemies of Israel, they would be outside of God's grace. They would receive nothing but God's judgment and wrath.

So put yourself in Jonah's place. Jonah's going over to the enemy. He's going over to Nineveh. These are the Assyrians, the ones who have kind of pounded them year after year and attacked them, killed their people. Now he's going to go and preach the word of God to them. As far as Jonah's concerned, they're outside of God's grace. He wants to see destruction happen upon them.

Jonah had a real clean line. Our lines aren't so clean. Ask yourself this morning and be as honest with yourself as you can. Where would you draw the line? Where would you draw the line that says, "Yeah, up to this point God's going to forgive them. But once they cross that line, once they cross that threshold, once they commit a certain crime, once they do something which is so hideous, so heinous, at that point you can't imagine that God would forgive them. You can't imagine that God's grace and compassion would reach out to them. Where would you draw that line?

You see the trouble is each one of us would draw the line differently. You know how we would determine that line? We would think back to the worst possible thing that we've ever done, the most dastardly deed that we've ever committed, and then we'd stretch it out just a little bit further from that and we'd try to think of something really awful and that's where we'd draw the line.

Let me ask you this, though. What happens when you cross the line? What happens when you cross the line? All of us have said to ourselves and maybe to other people, "I have done a lot of things. But if there's one thing that I have never done, if there's one thing that I will never do," and then you list it. And I'll bet 9 out of 10 of us end up doing it. The one thing we said that we'd never do, the one word we said we'd never speak, the one action we said we'd never be caught doing, we end up doing it and we end up saying it. We cross the line. Now where does that leave us? Where does that leave you?

What Jonah failed to recognize, but I pray that we do this morning, is you cannot limit God's grace. You can't draw a line and say once you cross that, you're outside of God's grace, you're outside of His compassion, you're outside of His mercy and forgiveness. You cannot limit God's grace. You cannot limit God's love. You cannot limit His forgiveness.

You know, the funny thing is that the Ninevites understood that better than Jonah did. The Ninevites understood God's grace and mercy better than Jonah, even though Jonah had just experienced God's grace, had been saved by God's miraculous, large fish. The Ninevites understood God's grace and mercy better because the Ninevites were living a horrible life. They were in direct opposition to God, paid no attention to God whatsoever. Their acts were evil. But when they were confronted with God's word, they recognized what they had done and then when God relented, when God didn't bring destruction, destruction that they deserved, no question about it, then they understood. They understood that God was slow to anger, abounding in love, a gracious and compassionate God.

It's similar to a New Testament story. You may recall it from the Book of Luke. Jesus decides to have lunch with a group of Pharisees. Now Pharisees at that time were the religious leaders. Pharisees lived by the letter of the law. In fact, they were pretty righteous people. They stuck really close to God's law. That was their goal. He's having lunch with them. Well, in comes this woman of ill repute. Scripture says that she was a sinner. Well, one can almost guess what she did for a living. She comes in all raggedly. She's at Jesus' feet and she's weeping, and the tears are falling on His feet and she's wiping His feet with her hair. And the Pharisee at the head table says, "Gee whiz, this guy calls himself a prophet? If He knew what kind of woman she was, He wouldn't put up with her being here." Jesus knows his thoughts and comes right back to him. And the whole gist of what Jesus says to him is this, "Her sins are many and they've been forgiven. Therefore, she loves much. But he who has been forgiven little, loves little." Jesus was saying that this woman knew that she deserved nothing and God gave her everything.

But those who don't think that they've been all that bad, they don't comprehend the full impact of God's grace and love. The Ninevites got it. This woman at Jesus' feet got it. And I pray that you and I get it. You see, when it comes down to it, we are no different than the Ninevites. We are no different than the woman who is at the feet of Jesus. We are no different than Jonah. We are no different to the Pharisees. When it comes to our relationship with God, it is a flat playing field. There isn't one which is above the other. James tells us that if we break just one of the commandments, we've broken all of the commandments, which means that if you have sinned just one time that you're in the same ballpark as everybody else. You break one command, it's like breaking all the commandments and your relationship with God is done. What scripture tells us is that none of us deserve God's grace, His mercy and compassion, that all of us have fallen short of God's expectations, that all of us have done things which are wrong and hideous and heinous in His sight but all of us receive God's grace and mercy the same.

You see, when Jesus hung upon the cross and the sins were laid upon Him, he didn't suffer and make payment just for the sins of the people who believed in Him or would believe in Him. He didn't just take on the guilt of those who had believed in Him. He took on the sin; He took on the guilt of all of mankind, whether they would believe in Him or wouldn't believe in Him, whether they would accept Him or whether they would reject Him. It doesn't matter. All of the sins of all of mankind and everyone's guilt were placed upon Him, and He made the payment for everyone.

God's grace and His mercy cannot be limited. God's desire is that all people would be saved, that all people would come to a relationship with Him. There are no lines drawn in the sand. If there's someone out there that you don't think deserves God's love and forgiveness, think again. If you believe that you've crossed the line that you drew, if you believe that somehow you've done something in your past which is so hideous that you're outside of God's grace and forgiveness, think again.

You cannot limit God's grace and His love and His compassion. It's no more evident than in the reluctant hero of Jonah. We don't know whether Jonah ever got it or not, but the message of Jonah is clear. That God is a God who is slow to anger, abounding in love, and shows mercy, mercy and grace to you, mercy and grace to all people. Amen.

Copyright 2003 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church