Jonah 4

Jonah 4:1-11

JONAH’S GOURD Jonah 4:1-11THE discourse of a week ago saw Jonah triumphant. In a single day, through preaching the preaching that God had bidden him, he had sent all Nineveh to sackcloth and ashes. The revival had reached even to the throne and Sardanapalus, the king, realized his sin and the sin of his people, and proclaimed a fast in consequence. That was a mighty conquest; and we would expect the man who wrought it to walk upon the mountains, to be dwelling in spirit in the heavenlies. But Jonah disappoints all such expectations. In the first verse of this fourth chapter we find the hero of that greatest of all pentecosts displeased and in the dumps.

The preacher of mighty power of yesterday is the complaining dyspeptic of today. But, for my own part, I cannot join with those who have only words of condemnation for him; with those who regard this an uncalled-for fit of anger, who esteem it a sufficient reason for writing the Prophet down as “small”, for finishing with him as unworthy of a place on the roll of God’s heroes. Do you remember in “The Marble Fawn” how Hilda condemned Miriam for “having shared in an awful crime, and then having permitted herself to make the deed a topic of conversation with her friends,” to which Kenyon replied, “Ah, Hilda, * * they are perhaps partners in what we must call awful guilt; and yet I will own to you, when I think of the original cause, the motive, the feeling, the sudden concurrence of circumstances thrusting them onward, the urgency of the moment, and the sublime unselfishness on either part, I know not well how to distinguish it from much that the world calls ‘heroism’ ”. Might we not render some such verdict as this, “Worthy of death, but not unworthy of love?”When I think of the original cause of Jonah’s displeasure, of the motives and the feelings back of it, of the sudden change of circumstances, and of the urgency of the moment, as he saw things, I am not ready to write him down as a coward, nor yet to call his behavior purely petulant, and his complaint mere peevishness. As Kenyon suggested, it is impossible to justify him, but not impossible to love and admire him.First of all let us think of—The Occasions of His Displeasure.His prophecy would fail. He had said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown”. It is a strange streak in human nature that it would have all its predictions, good or bad, come to pass. Here is a woman, who, on the first meeting, becomes prejudiced against her sister, and whispers to some of her friends her opinion of the new acquaintance.

In nine cases out of ten she will forever live in hope of seeing her predictions come to pass. Here is a man who takes a dislike to a business competitor and the whispering winds bring him a breath from somebody to the effect that this man is about to fail.

He takes a few people into his confidence and says, “I prophesy there will be a collapse in that institution ere long,” and from the day he makes the prophecy, he hopes to see it come to pass, for men do not like their predictions to fail. So in-wrought in fallen human nature is this disposition that even the churchman who predicts in advance of the pastor’s coming that he will fail sets himself to the task of bringing his own words to pass. It is easy enough for us to condemn the man for his conduct, but who of us is worthy to cast the first stone? Let us search our hearts and see before we say aught else against Jonah.Are we not, every one, involved in this same weakness of loving to see his prophecy come to pass, and being privileged to say, “I told you so”? Jonah’s disappointment is better justified than the average for the simple reason that he had said what God had told him to say, and he had perfect right to expect to see his prediction fulfilled. Possibly there is no man in the world who is so chagrined and sorrowed to learn that what he has said will not endure the test of time as the man who honestly believes that he is preaching the Word of the Lord.

Again, Jonah expected now to see his own people perish.This very Nineveh was the capital of the country which, in the process of time, would overcome and conquer Israel. Had Jonah’s prediction, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” been fulfilled, then he might have hoped to see Israel escape the Assyrian scourge.

Long ago God had said of His own people and of their idolaters, “They have moved Me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked Me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation” (Deuteronomy 32:21).Jonah was familiar with this prediction and feared its fulfillment. To him it seemed serious business that Nineveh should be spared. He saw that it meant Israel overthrown; and we may believe that he loved Israel as Paul loved her. You remember the great Apostle said,“I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. “For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: “Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the service of God, and the promises” (Romans 9:2-4). Think back a little, and you, as a patriotic American, will come into sympathy with this Prophet’s spirit. All through this land of ours, Christian men hailed with delight the news of the sinking of the Spanish fleet in the Manila harbor; and again the same joy took possession of us when we heard how the second fleet had been sunk at Santiago. We saw in it the falling of a power which must go down, or else our own people would suffer before their guns, and only a few, of even our Christian men, were great enough to join with Capt. Philip, the noble naval officer, in his splendid Christian speech, “Boys, don’t cheer; those poor fellows are dying.”We wanted to see them die! We wanted the Spanish power broken, and we called our feelings “patriotism”. The Prophet Jonah had better reason to call his disappointment by the same name.

And yet there is a vast deal called “patriotism” by a poor employment of the term. The “Clarion” says: “The Loyalist patriot’s creed is, ‘My country right or wrong; my party right or wrong.’” But, though the preacher of the Gospel so define his patriotism, God will not regard it. When my country is wrong there is but one possible way to prove my patriotism, and that is to point out the error, and like these prophets of old, plead for reform. When my country is wrong I must love her still, and like Jonah, I could not help feeling sadness, I could not escape heaviness of heart, if I saw her enemies preserved and increased in power, and knew that God would yet use them to humble my homeland to the dust.Jonah, in this displeasure, was voicing exactly what the Apostle Paul uttered when he said,“Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might he saved. “For I hear them record that they have a seal of God, but not according to knowledge. “For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God” (Romans 10:1-3). In the next place let us considerJonah’s disposition to die.“And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray Thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto 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, O Lord, take, I beseech Thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live” (Jonah 4:2-3). This was a weak moment, not necessarily a weak man. A weak moment does not prove a weak man. On the contrary it would seem that almost all great men are peculiarly subject to weak moments. The very elements in them that push them to the very heights are liable to reaction, and a consequent falling to the depths.Take Elijah as an instance of this claim. In all the Old Testament history there is not a braver Prophet. He does not hesitate to face the king and tell him his faults. In all of the Old Testament there is not a man of more marvelous faith! Regard the instance of Mount Carmel, the climax of man’s expectation from the Lord.

Although alone, Elijah felt no fear in the face of 450 prophets of Baal. He knew his God to be true. He knew their God to be false. The test he put to them of fire coming down from above to consume the altar and the sacrifice was a test which only the most trusting would have dared. The answer of God was so prompt, so complete, that Elijah must have been lifted to the heights of rejoicing; the overthrow of the prophets of Baal so sudden and terrible that one would imagine Elijah walking with head erect, and bearing about in his bosom a stout heart all his remaining days. But, alas for the disappointment!

A day passes, a woman utters her threat against Elijah’s life, and Elijah loses hope and heart, and is found under a juniper tree making Jonah’s request.—“It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers”.Do you say that Elijah was a weak man? No; this was a weak moment in the life of a man of might.Think of Peter, the Apostle of Pentecost, and see how he illustrates the same fact.

Ready today to die with his Master, declaring in his enthusiasm, “Though all men shall be offended because of Thee, yet will I never be offended”; tomorrow filled with fear before the face of an insignificant maid, denying with cursing and swearing that he ever knew the Lord. Do you say Peter was a weak man? No! Peter was a man of might, but subject to weak moments.I doubt if there is a single name in American history more revered by the whole people than that of Abraham Lincoln. The people admire him because he was the very embodiment of political integrity and of conscientious courage; and yet John Gilmer Speed is responsible for the story that when Lincoln came to marry, January 1, 1841, his heart failed him. He left the gowned bride heart-broken by his failure to put in appearance, and when his friends found him, they saw he was so overcome with melancholy as not to be responsible for his actions, and for twenty-two months he was utterly unable to muster the courage necessary to meet his love at the marriage altar, and only then, after having been assured by one of his most intimate friends, who had back of him a marriage experience of eight months, that the marriage estate was a more happy one than he had ever hoped to find it.

Do you tell me that Abraham Lincoln was a weak man?No; but Abraham Lincoln had his weak points and his weak moments. One of the reasons why people often misjudge their fellows exists in the circumstance that they fail to discern between the moment and the man.

It ought not to be forgotten either that the highest mountain peak must be followed by a valley, and that the highest human attainment is almost sure to be succeeded by a sense of weakness.After the great sculptor, Thorwaldsen, had realized his ideal in marble, his friends found him sitting with his head between his hands, sobbing as if his heart was broken. In answer to their inquiry concerning his trouble he said, “I have realized my ideal. I fear I shall never have another great thought.” But there was another secret in his sobs. That ideal had aroused every energy of body and mind, and upon that ideal he had wrought until every muscle and nerve was overworked, and when at last the chisel had given the finishing stroke, tired nature collapsed and despondency was the consequence.Everywhere there are people longing to die, ready almost to take away life, who need only the rest of a week, the recuperating benefits of proper slumber and food, to find themselves again and feel that life is worth the living.More and more I believe that a well-balanced mind will so clearly apprehend these things that self-destruction will seem to it at once foolish and sinful, and even the prayer put up by Elijah and voiced by Jonah, one that must come up before God as a proof that the man making it is in his weakest moment.The answer to this prayer was as Divine as the petition was human. Oh, how human to be discouraged! How human to be displeased!

How human to utter our complaints! How human to tell God what we want of Him!How Divine to answer, as God here answered, “Doest thou well to be angry”?

How Divine for the Creator of the Universe to come down to the level of His creature and reason with him; yea, even plead with him in love; yea, even provide him with a temporary respite from his troubles, and a refreshing shadow against the sun!God did both. He reasoned with Jonah, “Doest thou well to be angry”? He regarded Jonah’s exhausted condition, his physical collapse, and his mental aberration. “And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief”.Possibly we have never understood the full import of Jonah’s position here, and the full meaning of God’s grace in this vine. In this far northern climate we cannot imagine the sweltering heat of Assyria. A sojourner in that land speaking of their climate says of his experience in the early summer, “The spring was now fast passing away; the heat became daily greater; the corn was cut; and the plains and hills put on their summer clothing of dull parched yellow. The pasture is withered; the herbage faileth; the green grass is not.” He also makes reference to this vehement East wind by saying, “It was the season, too, of burning winds, which occasionally swept over the face of the country, driving, in their short-lived fury, everything before them.

We all went below (ground) soon after the sun had risen, and remained there (in the tunnels) without again seeking the open air until it was far down in the western horizon.”It was from such a sun, and from such a wind that Jonah’s God-given gourd had shielded him. No wonder he was “exceeding glad of the gourd”.I dare say that every man here has had an experience of God’s favor right along with his being called to pass through the furnace.

I hear people talk sometimes as if life was all clouded, and God never shoots their darkness through with one rift of the sun. I hear people talk sometimes as if life was utterly exhausted, and God never sends them a single grateful shade in which to recover strength. But I confess I don’t understand them! Nay, more, I don’t believe them!I have seen the shadows; but for me, at least, God has shot them every one through and through with some rays from the sun; and I have felt the scorching heat of the days that burned, but I am compelled to admit, nay rather I would gladly testify to the fact, that God has not forgotten His own; and when the flesh could endure no more He has never failed to furnish rest and shade. I believe that the man who does not see it so, or the woman, does not understand God, and is blind to the very blessings that our Heavenly Father is always bestowing upon His own.Won’t you stop now and think of all your complaining petitions, and then with the power of memory, compute all your blessings, and see if the latter are not as Divine as the former are human; and, like Jonah of old, be “glad for the gourd”?I do not know in what experience God has provided for you this grateful shade, but I dare say He has provided it. There is your neighbor languishing upon a bed of sickness, but you are enjoying good health; is not that God’s gourd?

There is your neighbor who has been reduced from plenty to poverty, and does not now know whether on Thanksgiving Day he shall be privileged to dine; but you fare sumptuously every day. Is not that God’s gourd?

There is one of your children who has been to you a burning Assyrian sun, bringing you almost to the grave, but there is another who has been your pride and is at present your precious one;t is not that God’s gourd? On the street you pass the friendless man, who is going from door to door seeking employment, or pleading for bread, but in that same street you are greeted by friends at every turn; are not these God’s gourd? You who charge God with having forgotten you, count your blessings and be ashamed!Again, this is—God’s Parable of grace.First of all it evidenced His grace to Jonah. As we have seen, He was good to His own.In these days, when “the universal fatherhood of God” is preached from so many pulpits, people are almost forgetting that God has any people He peculiarly calls His own. But whatever may be the theological philosophy of the present, I think a careful study of sacred Writ will show that God lays claim to certain people as His own children, and for all such He has particularly pledged His grace and favor. Those who, by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, He has adopted, because they have been willing to become His—these are always experiencing the fulfillment of His promises of blessing.When Henry M.

Stanley was making his trip across Africa he came often to the very point of starvation. Once for nine days on the way to Iturn, it seemed every day as if death would come through sheer want.

Once, when flying from Bumbire, he and his company endured great pangs of hunger. But a more severe experience awaited him when he went on his expedition to relieve Emin Pasha. The last banana had been devoured. Meat they had not tasted for days. The starving men were saying, “This time we die,” when Stanley answered, “It is said that the age of miracles is past, but why should it be so? Elijah was fed by ravens at the brook Cherith, but I suppose there is not a raven in all this forest; and yet we can pray.”While they plead there was a sound as if a large bird were whirring through the air.

Suddenly it dropped in their midst, and the fox-terrier sprang instantly upon the prize, and held it as if in a vise of iron. “There, boys,” said Stanley, “the age of miracles is not past,” for the fat guinea-fowl God had sent in answer to the cry of His own. It was to Stanley what the gourd of old was to Jonah, the one thing needful in the awful hour.

And, if you consider well, you will find God is always making that contribution to His own.Again, this gourd was a parable of God’s grace to the Gentiles.When the caterpillars had smitten it that it withered, and sweltering Jonah was sick and ready to die, God said to him,“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 the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: “And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city”? (Jonah 4:9-11). The parable is this, “If you loved your gourd upon which you have expended neither time nor labor, how is it that you do not understand My love toward Nineveh, which I have planted, to which I have given hundreds of years of attention, and on which I have bestowed the labors of the everlasting God?”Herein is the ground of God’s grace toward all men. He has given His thought to them. He has expended His time upon them. He has poured out His love in their behalf, and He cannot endure to see them perish. Don’t you remember how Paul expresses this in Romans 5:8 : “But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”. What an evidence of the Divine affection!

Dying for rebels against His grace! What proof of the goodness of the heart of God!“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy Like the wideness of the sea.” Henry Van Dyke, once the lecturer in our Art and Literature Course, says in one of his volumes, “It is narrated of the great novelist Thackery, that he was walking with a friend at evening on the hills near Edinburgh. The sun sank slowly to his rest, leaving a trail of glory behind him, and the solemn splendors of the sky deepened above the crowded tenements, the dark, foul, noisome streets, the pain, and misery, and want, of the old town. Thackery looked at it long in silence, and then, turning to his companion, with tears in his eyes, he said, “Calvary”.Oh, my friends, I want you to see that over all the sins of men God spreads the glorious canopy of His grace, and above the heads of them that rebel against Him He unrolls the crimson banner of His compassion; and Jew and Gentile are alike proffered His lifegiving love.This grace is exercised also in justice.“Then said the Lord * * should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle”? How often the guilty are shielded for the sake of the innocent, we may never know. Certain it is that God is ever sparing sinners solely because His calling them to judgment would involve their innocent lovers in suffering. Here, the one hundred and twenty thousand little children who had committed no iniquity against Him, and the dumb cattle, which must also die, if Nineveh be overthrown, moved the heart of God to mercy, and the most wicked men and women were thus shielded from that just judgment.I wonder how many there are here tonight who are safe because loved ones stand between them and an angry God; sons, whose father’s petitions are their preservation; daughters, whose mother’s prayers have prevailed to stay the stroke of judgment; brothers and sisters and friends between whom and an offended God, praying friends, brothers and sisters have intervened; parents, preserved alive and blest, for the sake of the babes? Oh, that you would be wise and make the hour, big with opportunity for you, blessed by repentance, and sweet through surrender. Oh, that the innocent ones who have been shields against judgment might be privileged to share in the joy of salvation!Quite a while ago the Chicago “Inter-Ocean” told the story of two sweet-faced, white-haired women who went, with great bunches of beautiful flowers, into one of the hospitals of that city. They approached the bed whereon a young girl lay and requested the nurse to take the flowers and present them to the sick one; but the nurse glancing from the pale face to theirs, said, “She is too far gone”,—for the young woman seemed even then to be dying.

But the elder lady reached over the sufferer and laid on her pillow a cluster of sweet-scented honeysuckles. Suddenly the dying girl opened her eyes, and then starting up, as if in a dream of some bright day of the past, she said, “See, mother, it is blooming full, the honeysuckle—that I—planted—by the—garden wall! I am—so tired—mother—I cannot pick—the blossoms now!” The elder woman started at the voice, looked a moment into the eyes to assure herself, and then clasping the dying girl to her arms, she said, “Oh, Margaret, my daughter, have I found you at last! Oh, Margaret, speak to me, to your mother once more!”The prayer was answered, and the girl who, three years before, had gone out from her home to the great dty, to be taken by its temptations and swept down in the swirl of its sin, was so blessed with the consciousness that “mother has come,” made so happy with the sweet sense, “Mother does not condemn, but loves me,” that a miracle of healing was wrought, and in time this wanderer went back again to beautiful life, and to the pure joys of the old loves and home.Yet no mother ever loved her prodigal child as God loves a prodigal soul. Tonight, to the most sinful, He comes with His Rose of Sharon, and bending over those who in their iniquity are ready to die, He says, “My child, have I found you at last? Let Me lay upon you the hand of healing, and oh, let Me, with My own loving hand, lead you Home!”