Sermons
A Vine, A Worm And A Wind
Series: Man Overboard: Jonah In JeopardyA VINE, A WORM AND A WIND
Pt#11 / Man Overboard: Jonah In Jeopardy
Sermon Outline By Terry Siverd
Cortland Church of Christ / April 17, 2016
Our sermon series on the book will come to a close next Sunday.
The title of this series is Man Overboard: Jonah In Jeopardy.
I borrowed the first part of the title from a book by Sinclair Ferguson, Man Overboard.
I enlarged my sermon series title by adding a second phrase, Jonah In Jeopardy.
From the start - - at least in my thinking - - this secondary phrase was not intended to be a description of Jonah
in the raging sea or Jonah swallowed up and incarcerated in the belly of the whale (chapters one and two).
Although one could easily surmise that Jonah was indeed “in jeopardy” in that predicament.
Had Jonah not begun to pray and repent, the story would have ended quite sadly:
a noteworthy prophet of Jehovah God - - LOST - - due to his own stubbornness and unforgiving heart.
Rather, the real JEOPARDY (double jeopardy) for Jonah is found in chapter four.
As we saw last Sunday, Jonah suffered a relapse. He fell back to being his old prejudiced self.
What happens in the situation is spelled out in the last verse of chapter three coupled with the
first few verses of chapter four and can only be properly described as truly ASTONISHINGLY PERPLEXING.
The city of Nineveh, terribly wicked though they were, from the greatest to the least repented.
This should have been a great cause for rejoicing on the part of Jonah the prophet.
But it is not. Instead Jonah sulks. He is displeased. And he is angry with God.
He is in a self-righteous huff - - expressed by Sinclair Ferguson as being, “sinfully mad”.
And MAD he is. Not just angry mad, but “spiritually out-of-his-mind mad”.
He even has the gall to tell God that he knew better than GOD in the first place.
He is put out that God is willing to relent and pour forth His grace upon the nation of Assyria.
He can’t stand it, so he leaves the city (Jonah 4:5) and sits down, apparently hoping against hope
that the judgment of Jehovah God might yet fall on the Gentile dogs of the city of Nineveh.
He is so bent out of shape that he prefers to die (Jonah 4:3).
Geographically he is outside of Nineveh. Chronologically he is in the midst of an unprecedented revival.
But spiritually he appears to be back to square one.
Instead of rejoicing at the revival and at God’s relenting, he runs again (like he did in the first place) and pouts.
At this juncture most of us feel like we’d like to slap a knot on his head and shake some sense into him.
There is a bigger picture here that we must see or we’ll never fully understand this little book.
All of the other prophetic writings in the Old Testament are filled with actual prophecies.
Hosea…Joel…Amos…Obadiah…Micah…Nahum…Habakkuk…Zephaniah…Haggai…Zechariah…Malachi.
Likewise for the major prophets: Isaiah…Jeremiah…Ezekiel…and Daniel.
Each and every one of the prophecies contained specific and detailed words to certain groups of people.
But the book of Jonah is cut from a different cloth.
It is about JONAH, but it’s not just about Jonah.
Let’s re-read the quote we shared from Theodore Laetsch (it is in my essay in today’s FamilyMatters).
“…The Jews were always in danger of forgetting that it was part of their mission to be a light to the Gentiles.
Too readily they were satisfied with possessing the Gospel for themselves; finally they became bigoted nationanlists,
opinionated separatists, repelling the nations rather than attracting them and winning them for Jehovah.
In this particular respect Jonah was thoroughly a Jew. The very idea that the Gentile nations,
particularly wicked Nineveh, were to participate in the saving grace of God was repugnant to him…
Jonah was merely the representation of Jewish particularism.”
This quote helps is to properly conclude the crux of the prophecy of Jonah.
Yes, it is a story about Jonah himself.
But it is actually a message written to the Jews about the Jews as a whole.
Homer Hailey (A Commentary On The Minor Prophets, pg.78) echoes Laetsch’s assessment:
“In Jonah we see the narrow, sectarian spirit that too often characterized the people of God.
He reflects the very spirit and nature of the Jewish people: Jehovah was their God
and He was not to be shared with any other people. The Hebrew nation belonged to God,
and upon the people of that nation alone were the blessings of Jehovah to be bestowed.”
Jonah’s spirit is the same spirit that controlled the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son (Lk.15:11ff).
In that story the younger son is the one who, like the Gentiles, was living a degenerate life in the far country.
James and John were once sent on ahead by Jesus to a Samaritan village to make arrangements for Jesus.
Here we see this same spirit animating James and John to request of Jesus,
“Lord do You want us to call down fire from heaven and consume them” (Lk.9:54).
After all, they were Samaritans, and as such they were not worthy of the gospel.
What a shame that the goodness and graciousness of God would be used to foment such self-righteousness.
_______
We left off last Sunday with Jonah 4:3-4.
In light of Jonah’s request to die - - death is better for me than life,
God poses a question back to Jonah: Do you have good reason to be angry?
Read from Jonah 4:5-8
Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it.
There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it In the shade until he could see what would happen in the city. So the Lord appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort.
And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant.
But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day, and it attacked the plant and it withered.
And it came about when the sun came up that God appointed a scorching east wind,
And the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying,
‘Death is better for me than life.’
Let’s notice a few things within this text.
Jonah is behaving like a child. There is no better word to describe him than, petulant:
unreasonably irritable or ill-tempered; peevish.
One writer nails it when he suggests that Jonah was suffering from infantile spiritual regression.
Jonah creates a makeshift sunscreen (probably using some sticks and his cape or outer-garments).
And then God comes to his aid by appointing a rapidly-growing gourd VINE to provide additional shade.
It was probably something similar to kudzu, which grows so quickly down south.
Actually you probably have a footnote in your Bible text that says it was a “castor oil plant”.
This is somewhat comical - - especially for those of us who grew up as children who were frequently
directed by our parents to use castor oil (and cod liver oil) as a remedy for almost every ailment.
Here we see God in His Fatherly kindness dishing out a little medicine, applying some castor oil treatment.
Martin Luther suggests, that at this point “God begins to play with the prophets to teach him a lesson”
We can only hope, in this case, that it will work in the long run.
In the short run, it displays an immediate positive impact on Jonah’s dispositon.
Vs.6b states, And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant.
We note with great sadness that this is the only place in the entire book where we read that Jonah is HAPPY.
But, God follows up the vine with the appointment of a WORM.
At God’s directive the worm voraciously consumes the vine - - it withers and dies.
And then to add an exclamation point to His fatherly schooling for His dear child Jonah,
God appoints a WIND - - a scorching east wind which served as a blow torch to make Jonah utterly miserable.
It is important to notice that Jonah’s first fit of anger is because Nineveh has not been destroyed.
Now he is angry again - - but this time it is because his precious little vine has been destroyed.
This is SOMETHING VERY WARPED here. And God is going to verbally dress down (scold & reprimand) Jonah.
Or, as I said last week, God is going to “undress” Jonah - - leaving him standing in his ugly and sinful nakedness.
(But we’ll hold that end of the story for the end of series next Sunday.
Jonah’s anger has become quite intensified over this period of time - - during the vine,
the worm and the wind - - such that he has refused to answer God’s question.
Again, like a peevish and irritable child, Jonah’s not talking to God…
Finally … Jonah answers God question, Do you have good reason to be angry?,
by declaring a second time, Death is better for me than life.
It’s a sad and selfish answer, one which His Heavenly Father must have surely anguished over.
We when first read this story, we find ourselves waiting with bated breath hoping that Jonah will snap out of it.
As to whether he does or doesn’t we’ll speak more about this in our closing sermon next Sunday.
We mentioned early on in this series that the book of Jonah is read every year
by the Jewish people on Yom Kippur - - The Day of Atonement.
There is a marked irony in this observation. Not only did the Jews often fail in being a light to the Gentiles,
so many of them because of their self-righteousness rejected Jesus outright as their Messiah sent from God.
While the story of Jonah was very likely written as a prophetic warning to the nation of Israel,
IT CONTINUES TO SPEAK TO US ALL, reminding us of our tendency toward arrogance and self-righteousness.
It is a powerful and vivid reminder that the gospel is not just for some, but for ALL who will believe unto life eternal.
