SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/29/2025
10:11 AM
My
Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The Final Admonition”
Bible
Reading & Meditation Reference: Jonah
4:9-11
Message of the verses: ““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.” Then Yahweh said, “You
had pity on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came to be overnight. So should I not have pity 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 to make a
confession, and that is that I have bought a new laptop and in order to write
my Spiritual Diaries on it I am using a new word processor which is sort of
similar to the one I have been using, but there are many updates from the one I
was using before, and so it takes me a lot longer to write my Spiritual Diaries
that before. Getting old and then trying
something new causes problems for me. I
pray that the Lord will give me His grace to understand these new technologies.
With that said I think that because
I am behind this morning I will quote from John MacArthur’s commentary this
morning.
“But God pointed out that the
prophet’s compassion for the plant was superficial and selfish. It was superficial because Jonah hand not
personally invested in the plant; he did not work and did not cause the
plant to grow. The term work
conveys the notion of toil, referring to the arduous labor required to
cultivate agriculture. Jonah exerted no
such effort to care for the plant, nor did he cause it to sprout up and
flourish. Likewise, the plant touched
very little of Jonah’s life, for it came to be overnight and perished
overnight. Though it came and went
in a very short time, roughly twenty-four hours, Jonah was nonetheless furious
that it perished. Incredibly, he
did not care that the sailors (Jonah 1:6, 14) or the Ninevites (3:9) were about
to perish, yet he cared deeply about a transitory sheltering bush. The irony exposed the nature of Jonah’s
selfishness and hardhearted hypocrisy.
“Based on Jonah’s pity for a passing
plant, God declared, “So should I not have pity on Nineveh?” The
expression pity on Nineveh captures the entire theme of the book—the
great care of God for undeserving sinners who are perishing, including those
outside of Israel. In familiar Hebrew
fashion, God moved from the lesser to the greater. Since the prophet insisted that his pity for
a fleeting bush was reasonable, he was compelled to acknowledge that God’s pity
on the immortal souls of people was far more significant. The Lord reinforced His indisputable case by
providing five features that reveal His compassion on Nineveh as far superior
to Jonah’s pity for the plant.”
This looks like a good place to stop
as, Lord willing, we will begin to look at those five features that God’s
compassion on Nineveh was much superior to Jonah’s pity on the plant.
Spiritual Meaning for my Life today: I have to say that I am learning things, a
lot of things about the book of Jonah that I did not really know were in this
book, and one of the things that I am learning is that Jonah’s heart was hard,
hard over the salvation of Gentiles.
That really is not an issue for me as I pray that the Lord will use my
Spiritual Diaries to bring many to the Lord.
However there are other issues that this book has caused me to think
long and hard about.
My Steps of Faith for Today: I trust that the Lord will continue to use
the book of Jonah to search my heart so that I can draw closer to the Lord.
11/29/2025
10:37 AM
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