Last week, I preached an overview message of Jonah 1-2: Compassion Received. This week, I’m preaching a message on Jonah 3-4: Compassion Given.
I began last week by observing that the world appears to be confused. I argued that the heart of this confusion seems to be an incorrect, distorted, or false view of God, self, and how to live fruitfully in God’s world. That’s quite a claim. However, it’s also quite apparent in more ways than one that culture has been remarkably proficient at clouding our vision through its various enterprises.
Consequently, we experience some level of confusion, from parenting practices to determining what to watch on TV, what fashion statement to make, what language to use, and more. Culture offers many things that are not only intriguing but also accessible. Yet, it becomes detrimental when our thoughts, desires, and actions are confused and begin to express values that are less like Christ’s and more like the culture. Are there any solutions?
In the last message, I provided one answer: to receive and give biblical compassion. A biblical view of compassion moves beyond noticing suffering in others with the aim of pain alleviation to moving toward someone with the dual aim of relationship restoration and empowerment so that compassion can be given to others.
In the Book of Jonah, we’ll see how God conveys compassion and calls us to express it ourselves.
Jonah opens with a prophet’s rebellion and then reveals the outworking of his defiant disobedience to God. The book would have been short had Jonah sought to turn the boat around and go back east; however, he persisted in his sin until he finally convinced the sailors to throw him overboard to his death. In God’s compassion, Jonah was saved and given new life and a renewed responsibility to deliver God’s message of judgment to the Assyrians in Ninevah.
Now, in Jonah 3-4, we will see the essence of reluctant obedience and the giving of compassion. In this message, I aim to explore:
- How Compassion Leads to True Repentance
- The Essence of Self-Centeredness
- Why Christ is the Only Hope for Receiving and Giving Compassion
1. How Compassion Leads to True Repentance
a. (3:1-4) Jonah and the Message of Judgment
Jonah heads to Ninevah as a reluctant instrument of judgment.
- Obedience: This act is set directly opposite his first encounter with God’s command to preach to Ninevah. He obeys this time, but we’ll see how he likes it.
- Judgment: The message was simple, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
b. (3:5-10) Assyrian Repentance and Compassion Given
Assyria’s response to the message is one of turning to God. The expression of compassion and the face of repentance is not uniform. As shown here, its variations are from Israel to Assyria. God loves the nations and raises instruments to express that love, albeit through judgment if necessary.
- Word: It was the Word of God that led to repentance.
- Reach: The Word spread through the people and then to the king.
- Repentance: The king’s decree reached far and wide, including turning from evil and violence.
- Ashes: This word is used in 22 verses throughout the Old Testament. It is primarily a physical expression of an inward reality. It can mean worthlessness (being the waste from burned wood), but more than anything, it signifies a recognition of dependency.
- God’s promise to the nations: “If that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it” (Jer. 18:8).
2. The Essence of Self-Centeredness
a. (4:1-5) Jonah’s Response to God’s Compassion
To be self-centered is to seek truth (comfort, etc.) from any source outside of God. On the one hand, it is autonomy; on the other, it is selfishness. Combined, these two lead to a faulty understanding of our relationship with God, which impacts our view of how God relates to others and how we relate to others. This is first seen in Genesis 3:6 when Eve “saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her husband…”
- Displeasure: faulty conclusions resulting from faulty thinking.
- This word relates to evaluating the acts of another and determining that they are evil. In this case, Jonah views God’s acts as incongruent with his, thus evil, causing him displeasure. Tie this to Nehemiah 13:8.
- Anger: faulty emotion resulting from faulty expectations.
- This word means to burn. The same word is used in Genesis 4:5-6 with Cain and implied in Luke 15:28 with the older brother (Pharisees and Scribes).
- Justified forestalling: faulty obedience resulting from a defective view of God.
- This word means to keep from making contact or meeting. Jonah did not want God to make contact with the Assyrians through him, so he fled.
- Resigning: faulty conclusion resulting from a defective view of life.
- This is the second of four references to Jonah wishing he was dead rather than alive.
- Waiting for destruction: faulty rest resulting from a defective view of relationships.
- He removes himself from the group he had been with for three days. Their repentance does not earn his discipleship but disapproval!
b. (4:6-9) Contingency Object Lesson Experienced
God teaches Jonah that he is physically contingent (dependent) on Him so that he can also understand his spiritual dependency.
- Comfort: God uses a physical experience as an object lesson to teach Jonah a spiritual reality. He receives comfort from a plant that God provided, without work.
- Pain: The discomfort of the plant’s removal shows Jonah that he is physically contingent and entirely dependent on God. Thus, he should see the connection to his spiritual contingency and complete dependence on God, i.e., like the Assyrians, Jonah is spiritually needy.
- Resigning: He seeks for his life to end again. A world where God forgives freely is a world in which Jonah is unwilling to live.
- Anger: Jonah’s anger again burns against God’s compassion expressed to his enemies.
- Resigning: He reiterates a fourth and final time his desire to perish. He has descended into despair.
c. (4:10-11) Contingency Object Lesson Explained
- The lesson: Jonah, the compassion (physical and spiritual) that you have freely received is the same compassion that you should have freely given and sustained with the Assyrians.
- Spiritual compassion: being born into the Jewish nation as God’s kingdom of priests and ministers of reconciliation to the nations.
- Physical compassion: In this book, it was, at the least, being swallowed by a great fish and shaded by a plant.
- Therefore, compassion received leads to compassion given as it is rooted in God’s heart of compassion.
- Tie this to Matthew 18:21-35.
Jonah failed to realize God’s view of compassion. He was like the older brother in Luke 15:28: around the father but without a relationship with the father. Thus, we need someone like Jonah, but greater. We need God to become man and express God’s compassion in its fullest measure. We need a Savior!
3. Why Christ is the Only Hope for Receiving and Giving Compassion
a. Through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, He provides contact between sinful humanity and God.
- Instead of forestalling and running in the opposite direction away from pain, Christ went forward and received the pain so that we would receive God’s compassion.
b. When sinful humans turn to Christ in faith, they receive God’s full compassion and relational restoration.
- Receiving God’s compassion results in a right relationship with God, enabling a right view of our relationship with Him, others, and His created world. Thus, we’re humbled as we realize our total dependency on Him and His complete sufficiency in Christ.
c. Therefore, having received compassion, we give compassion to others.
- The outcome is that because we know we’re dependent, having learned it by receiving God’s compassion, we give it to others.
Jonah was swallowed with sin and received God’s mercy to prevent the Ninevites from receiving God’s wrath. Christ was swallowed without sin and received God’s wrath to give the world God’s mercy.
— July 10, 2024