SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/5/2015
3:14 PM
My Worship Time Focus: God
Instructed Jonah
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Jonah 4:9-11
Message of the
verses: “9 Then God said to Jonah,
"Do you have good reason to be angry about the plant?" And he said,
"I have good reason to be angry, even to death." 10 Then the LORD
said, "You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and
which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished
overnight. 11 "Should I not have compassion on
Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who
do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many
animals?’”
I have read and studied the book of Jonah a number of
times, that is studied it in a Bible study and also in a Sunday school class
and the ending has always puzzled me.
We see in this section that God is still speaking to
Jonah and Jonah is still listening to God and answering, but he is not giving
the right answers. Dr. Wiersbe writes “Unrighteous
anger feeds the ego and produces the poison of selfishness in the heart. Jonah still had a problem with the will of
God. In chapter 1, his mind understood
God’s will, but he refused to obey it and too his body in the opposite
direction. In chapter 2, he cried out
for help, God rescued him, and he gave his body back to the Lord. In chapter 3, he yielded his will to the Lord
and went to Nineveh to preach, but his heart was not yet surrendered to the
Lord. Jonah did the will of God, but not
from the heart.”
Dr. Wiersbe goes on: “Jonah had one more lesson to learn,
perhaps the most important one of all.
In chapter 1, he learned the lesson of God’s providence and patience,
that you can’t run away from God. In
chapter 2, he learned the lesson of God’s pardon, that God forgives those who
call upon Him. In chapter 3, he learned
the lesson of God’s power as he saw a whole city humble itself before the
Lord. Now he had to learn the lesson of
God’s pity, that God has compassion for lost sinners like the Ninevites; and
his servants must also have compassion.
It seems incredible, but Jonah brought a whole city to faith in the Lord
and yet he didn’t love the people he was preaching to!” God not only had compassion on the people of
Nineveh, but He also had compassion on the animals as seen in verse eleven.
We can see that God had compassion on the people of
Nineveh both the young and the old, for there were 120,000 people there in that
city. In Mark 10:13-16 we read “13And
they were bringing children to Him so that He might touch them; but the
disciples rebuked them. 14 But when Jesus saw this, He was indignant and said
to them, "Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the
kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15 “Truly I say to you, whoever does
not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all." 16
And He took them in His arms and began blessing them, laying His hands on them.” We see in this passage the compassion that
Jesus had for the children, so no wonder we see that God has compassion for
both the young and old in Nineveh.
Both Jesus and Jeremiah had compassion on the city of
Jerusalem as both of them wept over it and when Paul was in Athens he was
greatly distressed over the sinfulness and the spiritual lossless of it,
however Jonah still needed to have the same kind of pity that Jesus, Jeremiah,
and Paul had for people. I suppose that
even though God has compassion over people because one of His attributes is
wrath that He has to destroy certain peoples and cities because the people in
them reject Him.
Dr. Wiersbe has another main point in his commentary
entitled “The Marvel of an Unanswered Question” which comes from Jonah 4:11 and
so in our next SD I will probably just quote what he has written there because
it has been my experience in using his commentaries to study the Word of God that
these are really good to read and helpful to make things clear.
12/5/2015 3:36 PM
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