Sermon Transcript
Jonah 4:1-11. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry, and he prayed to the Lord and said, O Lord, Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee from Tarnish, 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, O Lord, please take my life away 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 could 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 the discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. When dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm to attack 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, it is better for me to die than it is 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 I should not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?
Over the past several months, our elders and I have discussed the vision for our church. What are we about here? What do we want to be about? What do we want people to think when they think of Bridges? We have lots of programs.
We have lots of activities. The calendar is full. We spend lots of money on various things, lots of money on missions, praise God. Last year we created a compassion pastor role. Steve took that on.
We place a high value on expositional preaching. We host BSF on our campus. If you didn’t know that, it’s Tuesday nights, BSF, Bible Study Fellowship. Great teaching of God’s Word in a small group environment. We have life groups.
We have coffee and snacks after our service. One of our largest ministries is a school here during the week providing Christian education for students. We have a fantastic worship ministry. Why do we have all of these? And are all of these ministries tied together somehow?
Are all these activities pointing toward the same goal? Or do they have different goals? So our elders have been discussing, where do we want to point all of our effort? What do we want to be about? What do we want to be known for in the community?
It’s our vision for who we are. We’ve landed on 3 points. We want everything we do to center around 3 points. People matter. Truth matters, and the gospel is our only hope.
People matter, truth matters, and the gospel is our only hope. In everything we do, we want to stress people matter, truth matters, and the gospel is our only hope. Now, I’m afraid you may have heard me say something that I didn’t say. I’m afraid you may have heard me say some of our activities stress the importance of people. Other of our activities stress the importance of truth.
And sometimes we have gospel-centered activities, which I’m extra afraid you believe is only evangelism. And that is not our vision, and that’s not what I said. Our vision is everything we do, we want to declare all 3. So it’s all 3 all time. We don’t want to do something, we don’t want to teach something, we don’t want to sing something, we don’t want to provide assistance to someone unless doing— unless through doing so we can express in some way all 3: people matter, truth matters, and the gospel is our only hope.
So for this week and 2 more weeks, we are explicitly rolling out what we are about. Who we are and who we want to be, because some percentage of the vision is descriptive of what we’re already doing, and some of it is aspirational. It’s what we believe we can be, what we hope to be. And more than that, we believe it’s what God wants us to be. It’s what God wants his church to be.
Because people matter, truth matters, and the gospel is our only hope is not only something that came out of our elders’ heads. It’s thoroughly rooted in Scripture, and we’re going to study it over the course of 3 Sundays. And because all 3 are tied together, we’re not going to pick one passage that teaches people matter, another passage that teaches truth matter, and a third passage that shows the gospel is our only hope. Instead, we’re studying 3 passages that teach all 3 because we don’t want to give the impression that our vision is simply cherry-picked like, unconnected verses and concepts that we happen to believe are important, because that’s not what we’re doing. We want to show God ties together all 3 of these over and over and over again throughout Scripture.
In fact, it’s a fair way to summarize the Bible. People matter, truth matters, and the gospel is our only hope. And if God ties them all together, then that is where we want to put our church. So today we begin with Jonah. Many of you are probably already familiar with the story of Jonah and have been ever since you were a little kid because the story of Jonah and the whale is in every little kid’s Bible, illustrated and sung all over the place.
But Jonah was an Israelite who was sent by God to the city of Nineveh for the purpose of warning Nineveh to turn away from their wicked or they would be destroyed. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, which at the time, Assyria was by all measures the biggest, most ruthless empire that had existed on earth to that point. And Nineveh was one of the largest cities in the world. The average city at the time was between 3,000 and 4,000 people. And Nineveh, as you just heard, had 120,000 people.
People. Nineveh was huge, and in order to have a city at that time, you needed to have a wall around it for protection. So Nineveh would have been one of the most imposing structures in the world at the time. The Israelites, like Jonah, would have both feared and hated them. And in Jonah’s day, the Assyrians were the enemy knocking on Israel’s door.
They had already erased other nations off the map, and it looked like Israel would soon be next. So the Israelite fear was really justified. In fact, 60-some-odd years after Jonah, the Assyrians did destroy Israel’s northern kingdom. They were the enemy. They were the big, big bad guy.
How Israel felt about Assyria is probably similar to how a lot of Ukraine feels about Russia. Russia. They think, here’s little old us. We’re not defenseless by any means, and we are going to put up a good fight, but we are certainly outgunned unless a massive amount of assistance comes from someone else. And our enemy seems to hate us.
Our enemy wants to wipe us out. They’re really trying hard to wipe us out. So we hate those guys because they hate us. They’ve hurt us. They intend to hurt us some more.
That’s how Israel felt about Assyria, understandably. And then God tells Jonah, an Israelite, to go to the capital city of Assyria, Nineveh, and warn them to turn from their wickedness or they will be destroyed. Jonah, as you know, was less than enthused to go to Nineveh, but eventually he goes and he tells Nineveh that God will judge the city and 40 days. Rather surprisingly, the whole city of Nineveh repents. They turn to the Lord, and the Lord relents from judging them, which we might assume is a happy ending to the story and is often where the little kids’ Bible ends the story.
But here is where the book of Jonah takes another unexpected twist. After Nineveh repents of their wickedness, Rather than rejoicing, Jonah is upset. And he’s upset with God because God has shown mercy and compassion to the Ninevites. Jonah wanted God to smite the Assyrians, and he didn’t do it. God forgave them.
And Jonah says, I knew it! I knew, God, that you were loving. I knew you couldn’t— I couldn’t count on you to destroy these wicked people. I knew you’d just forgive them, for crying out loud. Jonah is mad, and he goes up on the side of the hill to pout.
But rather than leaving Jonah to sulk by himself, God goes after him. God speaks to him. God begins to reason with Jonah, and God says, and this is where we’re going to spend most of our time today, verse 11, God says, Jonah, should I not pity Nineveh? That great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left? God asked, isn’t it right for me to care about these people?
Which means basically God said to Jonah, people matter. People matter to him. And look at this, it’s not just good people that matter, it’s the wicked people of Nineveh. It’s not just Israel, Israelites that matter, it’s Assyrians. It’s not just religious people, but it’s irreligious people.
It’s not just people who know about God, it’s people who don’t. It’s not just Jonah’s friends, but it’s Jonah’s enemies. Jonah’s enemies matter to God even though they don’t matter to Jonah. That’s what God says. Shouldn’t people matter to me, Jonah?
As compelling of a case as God laid Jonah was not convinced. After God’s speech, Jonah does not get on board. He doesn’t suddenly care about the Assyrians. I think there’s good evidence to believe that Jonah eventually, someday, agreed with God, more on that later, but it does not happen in the timeline of events within the story itself. God says, Jonah, shouldn’t people matter to me?
And Jonah doesn’t say anything. The story just ends, which makes Jonah look bad. It does not shed him in a good light. Jonah is not the hero of the book of Jonah. But at the same time, it’s hard for us to blame him for how he feels, for holding a bit of a grudge.
It makes sense Jonah would hold a grudge, right? It would be like God telling Ukrainians, shouldn’t I care about Russian political leadership who is trying to wipe you out? Shouldn’t I care about those top-level decision-makers who are plotting your demise and would erase you from the planet if they could? Shouldn’t I care about them?
How would you respond? No?
Maybe you should? No, No, don’t care about them, God. See, it’s hard to blame Jonah for not being on board with what God says, but that is what God says because people matter. Even these wicked Assyrians matter. So, let’s self-evaluate.
Who makes you feel like Jonah felt? Who makes your blood boil? Who are you fed up with? Who do you think is ruining our country? Who, if you had the power to make them disappear, who would you make disappear?
Is it an individual? Is it your spouse?
Is it a whole group? Is it people of a certain ideology? Who do you think there are too many of them? I wish I could live in a country without so many of them. Who is them?
Okay, everybody thinking of someone?
Whoever that is matters. Whoever that is bears the image of God. Whoever that is is worth pursuing with compassion and mercy. Because people matter. They matter to God.
Again, at Bridges, we want everything we do to highlight the importance of people. So in our sermons, it’s happening right now. It’s ISF event, which you can have an opportunity volunteering in October 23rd. Man Day, October 28th. Student ministries, our school, everything.
People matter. Everything we do, we want to say people matter, and you can participate. If you’re not in a life group, get in a life group and then get to know the people in the life group because they matter. After service, instead of rushing out of here, stick around on the patio, chat with people, chat with people you don’t know, actually prioritize people you don’t know because they matter. Don’t wait for them to come to you, Don’t expect them to come to you because that indicates you think you matter, right?
If we think others need to take the initiative to get to know us, that shows that we think we’re the ones that matter. We have it backward if we believe it’s the responsibility of new people to come up to us, like we go to them. At Bridges, we have First Fridays, which is the first Friday evening of every month. It’s a multigenerational gathering. Sometimes there’s food.
If you want to meet someone from a different generation and show them how much they matter, come to First Fridays. Small sampling of what you can do around here, but we do it all because people matter.
Second, truth matters. The reason Jonah is upset with God is because in Jonah’s mind, it seems like truth doesn’t matter to God. God just forgives these wicked people. How could he let so much evil go unpunished? The Assyrians plundered, murdered, massacred.
Isn’t God going to smite them? Because somebody needs to. Doesn’t truth matter? It’s the same thing we say whenever tragedy happens. We say things like, isn’t there any justice in the world?
Or what would Ukraine say if Russian leadership has some kind of repentance and God forgives them and they get to go to heaven, for instance. Would that bother you? Would you say that’s not fair? Or is there someone in your life you hope God doesn’t forgive, particularly if you are someone who has been seriously wounded by someone else and now the offender is just going to get off the hook, so to speak? Wouldn’t you be angry about that?
Jonah has a point, doesn’t he? For many of us, there is a group or there is an individual, maybe someone who hurt us, that we would say to God, God, if You include them, that’s not fair, just like Jonah. That’s Jonah’s complaint. He thinks truth doesn’t matter to God, but it does. Truth matters immensely to God.
Even in our same verse, still in verse 11, God tells Jonah, the Ninevites don’t know their right hand from their left. God says the Ninevites are messed up. They call good evil and they call evil good. They’ve got everything backwards. They don’t know their right hand from their left.
That’s, that’s what God says, which means truth matters to God. God is evaluating the Ninevites against some standard of what people should be, and he says they’re off. Off. They’re wrong. They fall short, which means truth matters.
If truth didn’t matter, God wouldn’t have ever sent Jonah to Nineveh in the first place. If God said everyone can live by their own truth, everyone can do whatever they want, who cares if they don’t know their right hand from their left? What even is right from left? Can’t everyone decide from themselves or for themselves what is right what is left? That is what God would have said if truth didn’t matter.
But God doesn’t say that. He sends Jonah to Nineveh precisely because truth matters. God wants Nineveh to repent, to come into alignment with what is true, because truth matters. And actually, God is working on Jonah in much the same way at the end of the book. Jonah needs to come into alignment with what is true.
Jonah doesn’t know his right hand from his left. Jonah is calling evil good and good evil because Jonah is unforgiving. Jonah is holding a grudge, and he thinks it’s okay for him to hold a grudge. So, God is correcting him. God wants Jonah to come to repentance just as He wants Nineveh to come to repentance.
God doesn’t tell Jonah, sure, you can be unforgiving. Sure, you can hold a grudge. Sure, you can be bitter. Everyone needs to do whatever works for them. No, God doesn’t say that because truth matters.
God is correcting all of us somewhere. A clue to where that might be is wherever the Bible offends you, for instance, is probably one place where God is correcting you. Wherever you resist what Scripture teaches, probably one place God is correcting you. You might be quite immoral like the Ninevites who were likely living in every kind of debauchery imaginable in the city and they thought it was okay. If so, you need to be corrected.
On the other hand, maybe you are very moral like Jonah was, and therefore you believe it’s okay to look down your nose at everybody else, think that you’re spiritually superior and you should be included as God’s people and these other people shouldn’t. If so, you need to be corrected. It is not better to be religiously wrong than it is to be irreligiously wrong. Some of the worst evils on the planet are from self-righteous people who believe the other side deserves annihilation.
But all of us need to be corrected somewhere, all of us. So, at Bridges, when we teach what Scripture says, we teach what Scripture says. When we teach on marriage or sexuality or gender or life in the womb, depending on what tribe you consider yourself to be part of, you may be offended. If so, it means you need to be corrected. Corrected.
And when we teach on care for the poor or justice for the marginalized, and by justice we mean setting right what has gone wrong, putting back together what is broken in the world, when we teach on that, a different tribe of you may be offended. If so, you need to be corrected. We are not trying to align with any tribe of this world. We are trying to come into alignment with God’s truth, and God’s truth corrects all of us somewhere. It will correct every culture somewhere.
It will correct every ideology somewhere. It corrects all of us. I can’t tell you how many times I’m preparing for a message, studying how to teach a particular passage, and I end up being shocked by what says. And then I don’t want to say what the text says. I’m like, that’s what it says?
I can’t say that because I’m not in alignment with what it says on the page.
Either I’m not living that way or I’m not feeling that way. I’m not excited God forgives everyone. He does, for instance, since we’re in this passage. So just like everyone else, else, I have an impulse to twist the text to conform to me or to my tribe because I have one too, do some interpretive gymnastics so that it says what I want it to say. You know, forget about our commitment to expositional preaching around here.
I’ll only preach the verses that are comfortable for me. But you know what that would be doing? It would be saying truth doesn’t matter. And God will have none of that.
As God corrected the Ninevites, as God corrected Jonah, He is correcting you and He is correcting me. But notice why He corrects us. Why does He want the Ninevites to get their act together? He tells Jonah, shouldn’t I have compassion on them? He corrects them because He loves them.
And see how patient and compassionate God is with Jonah? I mean, why does it even matter to God whether Jonah holds a grudge or not? Why would He care if Jonah holds a grudge? Because He cares about Jonah, and holding a grudge is bad for Jonah, so God is correcting him. The reason God doesn’t bend on truth is because people matter.
People matter and truth matters are inextricably connected. If people didn’t matter, truth wouldn’t matter, right? We could do whatever we want. Who cares if we hurt anyone else? Who cares if we hurt ourselves?
People don’t matter, so do whatever. But because people matter, truth matters. And if we let go of one, then we have to let go of the other. If we hold on to one, we have to hold on to the other, which means phrases like, if you loved me, you’d let me do whatever I want, what? Or if you loved me, you’d affirm me.
Or if you loved me, you’d be happy that I’m happy. Like, phrases like that just defeat themselves because no, I can’t be happy if you’re hurting yourself, if you’re hurting others, even if you love it, even if you think it’s great. I can’t affirm you because you matter too much to me. If you didn’t matter to me, then sure, do whatever you want, but you do, you do matter, so I have to say no. But that will often create a problem for us if we’re holding on to both truth and people.
We will often feel tension trying to be both compassionate, caring, people matter, and at the same time immovable on truth. Truth, doing both of those. That’s often difficult. And we could relieve the tension by dropping truth, or we could relieve the tension by dropping compassion. You know, we just bowl people over with truth and not care what it does to them, right?
But we’re not going to do either. We’re going to hold on to both, which is hard. It’s why it’s amazing in the first chapter of John when John describes Jesus and John says, Jesus was full of grace and truth at the same time. Jesus was full of grace and truth. He wasn’t kind of gracious and kind of a stickler for what’s right and wrong.
He was fully both all the time. How do you pull that off?
And if that’s our vision for our church, and it is, it’s going to put us at odds with ourselves sometimes. So, how do we do that?
Which brings us to the gospel is our only hope. Let’s restate the tension between people and truth in a modern scenario and then show why the gospel is our only hope and the Ninevites’ only hope and Jonah’s only hope. So, imagine one of your most dear loved ones, a family member, a close friend, imagine that that person who you really, really love, who’s dear to you. Imagine that person is a drug addict, destructive to themselves, destructive to others, steals, lies, been to rehab, rehab hasn’t helped. Now they’re asking you for more money, asking to stay at your house again.
That’s a difficult call. And the reason why that’s difficult is because both the person matters and truth matters. You can’t enable the behavior and, you know, keep giving them money to fund their addiction because truth matters. At the same time, you can’t stop caring about them. You can’t write them off.
You can’t turn your back. You can’t say, once you get your act together, then we can be around each other again. You can’t do that. You must stay involved in some way because the person matters. So, you know what you do?
You know how you resolve that tension Can’t resolve it by dropping truth. Can’t resolve it by dropping the person. So, you know what you do? Over my years in ministry, seeing a couple of different sets of parents walk through that exact situation, you know what those parents do? How they resolve the tension?
Anything it takes. That’s what they do. Anything it takes. And it’s extremely painful, but there is nothing they aren’t willing to sacrifice. They will do anything to get their loved one separated from the hold that the addiction has over them.
They’ll say to their kid, you can’t come in the house, but I’ll sleep outside with you.
I won’t give you money, but I’ll pay for all the rehab in the world. I’ll sell everything in order to help, every dime I have. I’ll pour it all out to break this, the addiction over, the hold the addiction has over you. One dad wanted to handcuff himself to his son for as many months or as years as it took. Then he found out it’s illegal to handcuff yourself to someone.
You can’t hold someone against their will, even if their will is wrong. Can’t do that. But you get the idea. Whatever it takes. I’ll sacrifice everything.
That’s what they do. That’s how they hold on to both people and truth. And that’s what God did. That’s what the gospel is. The gospel is Jesus died for our sins, 1 Corinthians 15.
The gospel is He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our inequities, Isaiah 53. The gospel is Jesus paid it all. All to him I owe. What does God do with the tension between, on the one hand, he loves us, he loves Nineveh, he loves Jonah, he loves us, and on the other hand, Nineveh’s messed up, Jonah’s messed up, and we are messed up, probably all in different ways. But what does he do with that?
He does what any parent would do. He sacrifices everything in order to save us. He takes the burden we have created onto himself. He carries for us the destruction that we’ve caused on the cross. The Bible calls that burden or that destruction sin.
He sacrifices everything so that sin won’t have a hold on us anymore. He breaks us free by becoming entangled in our mess himself.
The Ninevites should be judged for what they had done. They should be. But Jesus offers, I’ll be judged instead.
Jonah should be judged. Jonah is so bitter because God doesn’t smite the Ninevites. He’s so bitter that he’d rather die than live. Jonah’s anger has so polluted him, has such a powerful hold over him that he doesn’t want to live in a world where there are Ninevites. He says, just kill me, God.
If you’re not going to kill them, kill me. How does God break Jonah free from that sin?
By Jesus saying, Instead of killing the Ninevites, instead of killing you, I’ll be killed instead. I’ll die for your sin. I’ll carry the corruption that has so overtaken your heart so that you may be free. Your sin is my burden now. I will take it into the grave with me where it will die, and then I’ll raise to life again in victory over your sin its penalty and the grave so that you may now live victorious with the same power that brought me back to life.
That’s the gospel. And presumably, it really did save Jonah eventually. At some point, it must have clicked for Jonah because Jonah tells us this story. The only way we have this account is because Jonah told us. Nobody else knew about the plant.
Nobody else knew what God said to Jonah, only Jonah, which means at some point in his life down the road, Jonah begins telling the story of how big an idiot he was and how God responded to save him. It’s a testimony story. It’s a, how amazing is it that God didn’t give up on me?
Story. And you know the only people comfortable with telling a story like that? People who understand the gospel, people who know their only hope is Jesus. That’s who tells that story. How about you?
Do you see the gospel as your only hope? Do you let God’s truth examine you in such a way that you admit the places you are being destructive to yourself and to others? Do you cry out for Jesus to carry that burden for you? Do you see that his sacrifice has paid to set you free? Do you know that God is welcoming you into his arms because you matter to him?
No matter how far you’ve strayed or how long you’ve been gone, Jesus’ sacrifice is enough to set you free. So turn to him today. Whatever you find offensive about him is where he wants to rescue you.
Surrender. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for never letting us go. Thank you for doing it whatever it takes to bring us back to you. Thank you for being patient enough to correct us over the course of our entire lives.
Thank you for promising to set us free. Thank you for entangling yourself in our mess that we could become untangled. Lord, we pray that you would work in our hearts today, that you would reveal to us where we need to be corrected, and that we would surrender to you, trusting that you have already welcomed us because of Jesus’ substitution in our place. Place. We pray those things in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
