SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/2/2015
10:37 PM
My Worship Time Focus: God listened to Jonah
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Jonah 4:1-4
Message of the
verses: “1 But it greatly displeased
Jonah and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, "Please LORD,
was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in
order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious
and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one
who relents concerning calamity. 3 “Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life
from me, for death is better to me than life." 4 The LORD said, "Do
you have good reason to be angry?’”
Do you remember the first time that Jonah prayed to the
Lord? It was inside the belly of the
great fish and his prayer then was much better than this prayer we find in
verses 1-3. This prayer that we read is
from and angry heart and perhaps it could be said that it was from a heart full
of prejudice. The Assyrians were the
great enemies of Israel, and therefore Jonah wanted to see God judge them and
not forgive them. I suppose that the
fair question to ask would be if that has ever happened to me, or does that ever
happen to you? It is easy to put the
blame on Jonah for some of the things that he has done, like running away and
not wishing that God would destroy Nineveh, but Jonah was not taking into
account what God wanted to do, and sometimes I may not think about what God
wants to do in certain situations either.
Now back to the first prayer again and we will compare
some of it with the second one. Jonah’s
first prayer was from a broken heart, his second from an angry heart. In his first prayer Jonah asked God to save
him and in his second prayer Jonah asked God to take his life. We see from this that Jonah would rather die
than not get his own way. He had great
conviction, but not in the right way.
One of the reasons that Jonah was upset with God had to
do with his reputation as a prophet. Dr.
Wiersbe writes: “If he announced
judgment to the Ninevites and they repented, God would forgive them and not
send His judgment, and then Jonah would be branded as a false prophet! Remember, Jonah’s message merely announced
the impending judgment; it didn’t offer conditions for salvation.
“Jonah was concerned about his reputation, not only
before the Ninevites, but also before the Jews back home. His Jewish friends would want to see all of
the Assyrians destroyed, not just the people of Nineveh. When Jonah’s friends found out that he had
been the means of saving Nineveh from God’s wrath, they could have considered
him a traitor to official Jewish foreign policy. Jonah was a narrow-minded patriot who saw
Assyria only as a dangerous enemy to destroy, not as a company of repentant
sinners to be brought to the Lord.”
As we see that Jonah’s heart was angry and that he did
not seem to want to see the Ninevites saved we can see that perhaps this could
be true in the life of a true believer.
I know the story of a fairly famous Christian leader who lived with one
parent who was very much over weight, and the other was a drunk. They lived on a farm and because the dad was
a drunk and the mom was overweight they had to hire a man to help out on the
farm. This man physically abused the son
who is this famous Christian and there came a point when he told the man if he
did this again that he would kill him.
His mom only wanted to see him graduate from school and once that
happened she just died. Once he became a
believer it was hard for him to even want to tell his father about salvation,
and low and behold his father became a believer and for a while this actually
angered him, but his father became a great witness to those in his town for
they saw a man who was a drunk, a drunk so bad that the son had to tie him up
in the barn when they got company. The town’s
people saw a changed man and this brought glory to the Lord.
I
have had a difficult time to pray for the salvation of our current President
because of all the harm he has done to this country. In church last Sunday evening the message
came from a man who was a Chaplin, and one of the things he said was that we
should pray for the salvation of our President and his family and also pray for
him to be surrounded by wise counselors to guide him. I have been doing this
and by God’s grace will continue to do this.
Dr. Wiersbe writes “When reputation is more important
than character and pleasing ourselves and our friends is more important than
pleasing God, then we’re in danger of becoming like Jonah and living to defend
our prejudices instead of fulfilling our spiritual responsibilities.”
We know from reading this book that Jonah had good
theology, but the problem it never got from his head to his heart.
One more thing and that is there is a story in the book
of Acts about when Peter took the salvation message to the Gentiles and even
went into their home to do this which was against their law. This became a big problem in the early church
and it had to do with prejudice something similar to Jonah’s story.
12/2/2015 11:10 PM
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