When God Loves the People You Hate

Well, I wanna start with a question. How do you know that somebody understands grace? How do you know that they really get it? That they really love it? As Christians, grace is at the very heart of what we believe.

It's one of the things that makes Christianity different from all other religions. Other religions, whether it's Islam or Buddhism, whether it's saying we must do what Allah says to earn His favour, or Buddhism, we must follow these steps to achieve enlightenment, they give you paths and laws to keep in order to achieve enlightenment or favour. But Christianity is altogether different, because at the core of Christianity is grace. Jesus comes along and says, not follow this path and you will receive favour. Jesus says, I've gone down the path for you.

I've done for you what you could not do for yourself, and I wanna give you my Father's favour as a gift. That's what grace is. It's a gift for the undeserving. It's at the heart of our faith. But how do you know someone really gets that, whether they're a Christian or not?

How do you know that they get and understand and love grace? How well do you, as a follower of Jesus, know grace? Love grace. Understand it. We're about to find out, because Jonah chapter four exposes our deepest feelings about God's grace for the undeserving.

This is why the sermon today is called When God Loves the People You Hate. How would you feel if God lavishes grace on someone you hate? Or maybe it's not someone you hate, but it's someone who's betrayed you or someone who hasn't said sorry. How would you feel if God lavishes grace and transforms and pours out blessing on somebody that's done that to you? Because that will say a lot about how much grace has taken root in your own heart.

Now if you're here and you're visiting us this morning, first of all, welcome, or if you're here and you're seeking the truth and you wanna know whether Jesus is the right one to follow, then welcome. And you might think that Christianity is just another religious option among many, but please don't patronise Jesus like that. Jesus didn't claim that He was one way among many. Jesus said in John 14, "I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."

Jesus made an exclusive claim, and Christianity really is different at its core from other religions. They can't all be the same if they have competing claims. At the core of Christianity is grace, and my prayer is not only that you'll see the difference in Christianity this morning, but my prayer is that you'll come to see the necessity and the beauty of God's grace. So today is our fourth and final week in the book of Jonah. We're finishing our series about the relentless God and the reluctant prophet.

God has relentlessly pursued this reluctant and rebellious story throughout our time together in this book. We opened it up with chapter one, where God came to Jonah and said, I want you to preach a message of judgment against Nineveh, but he got up, got in a boat, and went as far away as he could. But the relentless God pursued him, and He sent a storm which threatened to break up the ship, and eventually Jonah was thrown into the ocean, and he was drowning at the bottom of the ocean before God provided a great fish, this sea monster, which swallowed Jonah up and rescued him. And then in chapter two, Jonah prayed this elaborate prayer full of scripture, full of quotations from the Psalms. It was sophisticated, but it was superficial.

He didn't repent. He didn't acknowledge that he was a rebel running away. He was thankful to be saved by the fish, but he wasn't repentant, and you can still see his attitude towards people like the Ninevites. He still hated pagans and foreigners. And we see how God felt about his prayer because He told the fish to vomit Jonah out on the land.

And then Jonah finally listens to God the second time. He goes to Nineveh as God says, but he still seems reluctant. It's a city that's a three days' journey in breadth, and he just goes a day's journey in, and it's five words in the original Hebrew that he preaches to the city, and he seemed to be hoping that this message will fail, that they will not turn. And yet what happened last week in chapter three? Revival broke out.

All the people of Nineveh, even Daisy the cow and Sean the sheep, were repenting in dust and ashes. It's kind of this humorous, comprehensive revival amongst this wicked pagan city. And now this week, we pick it up at that point, after God has relented of the disaster that He pronounced because of their repentance. Let's take a look at Jonah chapter four together, and we're gonna break down this story into three scenes. And in the first scene, we see that Jonah judges God.

Jonah judges God. So at this point, as we open up chapter four, Jonah is still in the city of Nineveh. He's just seen all these people that he didn't want to help repenting in dust and ashes, and God chose to relent of the disaster that He was bringing. He chose not to bring the judgment against them because He saw their repentance. And Jonah, if he was a missionary, surely he would be praising God at this point, on his knees celebrating, "Thank you, Lord, this message has been more successful than I ever believed," but no.

What is Jonah's attitude? Verse one, we read, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. Now the original Hebrew this is written in, "but it displeased Jonah exceedingly" can also be translated, "but it was exceedingly evil to Jonah." Jonah saw God's mercy to Nineveh as exceedingly evil. And then Jonah spills the beans and tells us what he really thinks. Verse two, he prayed to the Lord, and he said to Him, "Is this not what I said to you when I was in my country?"

"When you came and told me to speak to Nineveh, this is what I said you would do. This is why I fled to Tarshish, because I know that you are a gracious and merciful God who forgives, who is steadfast in love. This is why I ran away. I knew this would happen. Now please take my life."

"It's better for me to die than to live." It's kind of twisted what's happening. It's ironic. It's weird. It's not something a man of God should be saying.

See, the really weird thing is that he uses God's character there, that phrase we've seen throughout our service today, that the Lord is gracious and merciful, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, that beautiful phrase that appears time and time again in the Old Testament as something praiseworthy about who God is. Jonah throws that phrase into God's face as a complaint against God. Jonah sees what God has done as exceedingly evil. Jonah, in some twisted way, his moral intuitions have been turned upside down, and he sees the good and praiseworthy character of God as evil because of His mercy to the Ninevites. Now before we are too quick to stand over Jonah, let's just remember who God has extended grace to. Remember who the Ninevites are.

In the first week when I explained who they are, we literally have archaeological evidence in the British Museum in London that comes from the Assyrian Empire. That was part of, that's where Nineveh was, a part of. They were the Assyrians. And on those tablets that we have in the British Museum, they boast about how they skinned people alive. They boast about how they impaled people on poles. This was a brutal, violent, aggressive nation.

Any of us today would think wicked. They were like the Nazis of the ancient world. How would you feel if the Nazis repented and God said, "Mercy. I'll give them mercy." You might understand a bit more how Jonah was feeling when this happened.

Nevertheless, the Lord says to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry? Is it good? Is it right for you to be angry?" Now this is an interesting phrase in the original Hebrew. The word well is the word yitav, and the word for angry is the word harah, and those two words first appear in Genesis chapter four.

One of the things that helps you as you're reading your Bible is if you hear phrases come up that are a bit interesting or they remind you of something, is to go back and to look them up and see how the Bible develops them over time. Now the first time we see these words for well and angry, yitav and harah, come up, they come up in Genesis 4, in the story of Cain and Abel. Now you might be familiar with the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain and Abel offered sacrifices to God, and God was pleased with Abel's sacrifice, not Cain's. And this is what God says to Cain in Genesis 4.

It says, "The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?" What's going on here? So it's very similar to what's going on with Jonah. God is coming to Jonah saying, "Do you do well to be angry?"

Similar to what He said to Cain, "Why is your face falling? Why are you angry? Is this well? Should you be like this?" You see, what's going on here is Jonah is being presented like another Cain.

He's a man who has been confronted over his misplaced anger. He's infected with the same sin problem that Cain was infected with. See, Genesis 4, the Cain and Abel story, is really an illustration of what happened after sin entered the human story, after God's curse came upon us. All of the descendants of Adam and Eve became corrupted with this thing we call sin, and that's why in Genesis 4, we see the effect that sin has. Moral intuitions turned upside down.

Cain shouldn't have hated his brother, and yet he was angry. He hated him enough to murder him. That's what sin does to us. Think about Genesis chapter three, just before the Cain and Abel story. That's where we see and learn a lot about what sin is.

And if you remember the story, God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Genesis 3, this crafty serpent, Satan, comes along to Eve and says, "Did God say you can't eat of any tree in the garden?" And Eve's like, "Oh, well, no. You just can't eat of this tree, and neither shall we touch it lest we die." And the serpent says something really crafty.

He says, "No. God doesn't want you to eat of it because He knows that you'll become like Him, knowing good and evil." Now when I was growing up and I heard that story, I just thought, okay, so Adam and Eve were dumb, and to eat the fruit, they all of a sudden realised what's bad and what's good. That's not what's going on. Adam and Eve weren't dumb.

They were sophisticated, glorious human beings. They knew that they weren't supposed to eat from the tree. God commanded them that clearly. They're not dumb. What the serpent is doing, he's doing something really crafty.

He's saying to them, "You will become like God, knowing good and evil." In a sense, you can usurp God's place. You can choose to be your own god and decide what is good and evil for yourself. So what God calls evil, eating from the tree, you can call that good and eat of it, and what God calls good, you can call evil. And you see, this is what sin does. Ever since that story, ever since the curse of Adam and Eve, sin has twisted our moral intuitions just like Jonah's and turned them upside down.

All of a sudden, there are certain things that God calls good that feel evil, or certain things that God calls evil that don't feel that bad to us. We're tempted to rule our own lives, to go our own way. And isn't that just a normal cultural message in Australia these days? We say to one another, "You do you. You go your own way."

You do your own thing. Now sometimes that's a kind phrase saying, you know, be yourself, I'm not gonna judge you. But also, the prevailing message in our culture is you discover yourself, you go your own way.

And that doesn't sound that bad, but what the Bible is showing us throughout the storyline is if you do that, it always leads to death. Cain murdered his brother. Jonah wants the death of these people instead of wanting their mercy. Moral intuitions get flipped upside down. This is what sin does.

It convinces us to usurp God's place. Now as a Christian, this can show up for you in all sorts of ways, because even though we've been saved from sin, we still have remaining sin in us, and it can show up in all sorts of ways. So when God says to you, "I want you to be generous and give money to the poor," you might say, "Well, I've got a bit of money left over, but I'd rather save that first, God, because once I save and invest, I'll grow it, and I'll be ready to be generous a bit later. I think that's probably the better thing for me." I don't want to be generous just yet.

It feels like it's right, but God wants us to obey Him and go His way. Or maybe it comes to the Sabbath. Now there's debate amongst Christians whether Sunday Sabbath is a law that you have to follow or whether it's just God's wisdom, but even if it is just God's wisdom to have a restful day once a week to worship God, to enjoy His presence and His gifts, even if it's just wisdom, some of us say, "Well, we know, God, it's wise to do that, but I live in the real world, and this stuff's not gonna get done unless I work seven days a week, so I've gotta get this stuff done." That's what sin tries to convince us of.

It tries to deceive us and tell us, go your own way, you know better. And that's exactly what has corrupted Jonah's heart in this story. It's the same sin, just manifesting itself in a different way. Now if God wasn't gracious, He might have wiped this arrogant prophet right off the face of the earth right then and there, this ant who's telling Him, "Your ways are evil."

But He doesn't, because just like God loves to do, He extends more grace. He gives Jonah an uncomfortable grace, a painful grace, the grace of exposure. And let's look at that next in the second scene. So in the first scene of the story, we see that Jonah judges God. Now in the second scene, we see that God exposes Jonah.

So now Jonah exits the city, and we see in our text that he sits opposite the city, he makes himself this booth to create some shade for himself, so he can see what will happen to the city. And this is pretty twisted, because this is basically the opposite hope that Jonah has of what the king of Nineveh had at the end of chapter three. You can remember last week at the end of chapter three, the king of Nineveh told everyone to repent, and he said, "Who knows? Maybe God will relent and we won't perish?" But it's like Jonah's doing the opposite thing.

He sits down opposite the city, and he's watching. He's like, "Who knows? Maybe God will kill them. Maybe they will perish. Maybe God won't be merciful."

Jonah's hoping that God won't be, according to His character, merciful. That's why he's sitting there. It's pretty twisted. And then God causes this plant to grow up overnight that gives Jonah shade. Now the interesting thing about the Hebrew word there for appointed a plant in our translation, it also means provided, and it's the same Hebrew word that only came up once before this, at the end of chapter one, where God appointed or provided a great fish to swallow Jonah.

Remember, the fish was Jonah's deliverance and rescue. In other words, this gracious provision of this meagre plant is already just another subtle reminder to Jonah, you are a recipient of grace. You were the rebellious prophet drowning at the bottom of the ocean that God saved by providing a fish. Now He's providing you with a little bit of shade. Remember, Jonah, you have received grace.

You do not deserve God's goodness either. Now it's also interesting that after this plant grows up, it says that God did this to save him from his discomfort in our translation, but that word discomfort is also the Hebrew word for evil. I think there's another wordplay going on there. God obviously saves him from his immediate shallow discomfort, the heat, but God's not really after that because He's just about to destroy the plant. What God is doing through appointing this plant and then sending a worm and then sending wind, He's trying to save Jonah from his evil.

See, this is the grace of exposure. He's trying to show Jonah through these events that are about to happen, to expose him to himself, to help him see the evil that's in his heart, that he actually wants hundreds of thousands of people to die rather than to receive mercy. See, God, rather than wiping him off the face of the earth, is graciously exposing this rebellious prophet. So He sends this plant, and our text says that he was exceedingly glad. It's another twisted mirror image of what was going on in verse one. Verse one, he was exceedingly displeased that hundreds of thousands of people weren't killed.

In this verse, he's exceedingly glad for a little plant that's grown up to give him shade. Again, like I said before, sin has twisted our moral framework and turned it upside down. Now after this, God provides a worm, which eats up the plant. The original Hebrew, we don't know what species of worm this is, if it was a beetle or whatever, but it's something that eats up the plant and destroys it. Then God sends a scorching east wind, this hot desert wind to blow against him, and the sun is beating down on his head, and Jonah grows faint, and then he asks God to take his life again and says, "It is better for me to die than to live." But God graciously confronts him yet again with His exposing question, "Do you do well to be angry?"

But then He adds a few words, "For the plant." "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" See, what God is saying to Jonah, He's saying, "You're getting really passionate and worked up and defensive for this plant which I've destroyed, but you don't care if I destroy hundreds of thousands of Ninevites." He's exposing Jonah's lack of mercy, but Jonah just doubles down. He says, "Yes, I do well to be angry for the plant, angry enough to die."

In the second scene, God exposes Jonah. It's the exposure of grace. But if we point the light, the torch back on ourselves, it begs the question, how has sin affected us? How has it twisted up our own moral intuitions? The scene of Jonah reminds me a bit of the exposing verse in Romans 12, where it says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep."

That's a command from God, but I'd also think that this verse exposes our moral maturity as people. Do you rejoice with those who rejoice? When you're scrolling through Instagram and you see your friend, they just got married like you wanted to, or they got the nicer car, or they got the nicer home, or whatever it might be, do you rejoice with those who rejoice, or are you secretly bitter and angry that they've gotten something that you wanted? And do you weep with those who weep? Maybe there's someone who has deeply wronged you, and then something devastating happens to them.

Are you rejoicing when they're weeping, or are you actually sad for them, praying for them, weeping for them? Romans 12 exposes our hearts just like God is exposing the heart of Jonah here. He wants to expose us not to shame us, but to heal us, to change us. But Jonah didn't see the light. He doubled down, sulked, held onto his anger, so God graciously takes it one step further.

So we see in the first two scenes that Jonah judges God, and then God exposes Jonah, and now God confronts Jonah in our third and final scene. Now this is the final speech of the book, and it's a little bit sad to be landing a plane on such a beautiful book. The more I've studied it, the more I've realised, wow, you could spend thousands of hours exploring this and not plumb the depths. Even just a little nerd fact for you, the first speech of Jonah is 39 Hebrew words in the original language, and this last speech of God is 39 Hebrew words. Just this beautiful symmetry, this exquisite design of the book.

Now God is going to use these final 39 words to take the message about the plant even deeper, and He says in verse 10, "Jonah, you pitied the plant for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came into being and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" Do you see what God's saying to Jonah here? Jonah did not plant the seed for this plant. He didn't make it grow.

God made it grow, and yet he feels like he owns the plant, and he's angry that it's gone. But God's saying to Jonah, "You're angry and passionate about the death of this plant. Should I not be passionate and have pity on Nineveh? I actually created all these hundreds of thousands of people. I even created their cattle, their sheep, their creatures."

They all belong to Me. Should I not be invested? Should I not have mercy on them? And that's how the book ends, with a question. It ends with God's question, and we don't get an answer about whether Jonah repented or learnt his lesson.

Did it save him from his evil? Did grace do its work in Jonah's heart? Well, I think that it did. I think I'll see Jonah in heaven, and the reason I say that is because of the fact that he's authored this book, or whether you wanna debate whether he provided all the stories and someone else compiled it, but he's provided this very embarrassing story about how immature and unmerciful he's been, and he's put it on display to teach us the same lesson of grace that he needed to learn. And I also think it's amazing that he puts something so embarrassing about himself, the fact that he's judging the God that he's meant to serve, and he doesn't put a little addendum at the end saying, "And by the way, I did change, and I'm, you know, doing well now, love God," he just puts this book out there, and he puts it all on display so that we can learn the same lesson he needed to learn.

I think grace did its work in Jonah's heart. Now the reason the book ends with an unanswered question is genius because it draws us into the story, and it leaves us with the question. Now we, the readers, have to answer it. What is our answer to God's question? Was God right to extend mercy to Nineveh, these ancient Nazis, the brutal Ninevites?

You see, you don't love God's grace if you hate seeing it given to your enemies. I think that's the bottom line of Jonah chapter four. You don't love God's grace if you hate seeing it given to your enemies. Now how do you think Jesus feels about this story, this story of mercy to Nineveh? Jesus is the one we worship, follow, the one that we wanna be like.

He is the image of God. He shows us clearly what God is like. Well, Jesus clearly would approve of mercy to Nineveh. I mean, He is God in the flesh. Jesus isn't angry when His enemies receive grace and love.

No. Jesus is the image of God. He shows us the depths of God's grace by loving His own enemies unto death. You see, we were all enemies of God before He saved us. This is what Romans 5 says.

It says, "While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son." See, this is why God has mercy on us. If we're honest, we acknowledge, actually, without God's grace, we were enemies of God. We were rebels against Him. We wanted to go our own way, but God extended grace.

God loved us, and this is why He extended mercy to Nineveh, because of God's love for His enemies. Now when God extends grace and mercy, like I said last week, it's not at the expense of His justice. He doesn't have to wipe everything under the rug in order to extend grace. God extends grace to us because He paid for justice Himself in Christ at the cross. That's what the cross is about.

The cross is God's vindication. It's the justification for why God has had mercy on countless people who don't deserve it, because He, in the person of Jesus Christ, took on our sin and our shame, and died in our place to pay the penalty we deserve. It'd be like if my wife and I went to Bali, let's just pretend she's an evil drug smuggler, and you can laugh at that if you want, it's a bit of a joke. And we go into the airport, and she's got drugs in her bag, and the Bali police discover it, and they say, "Well, in our country, you get the death penalty for this." Now whether you agree that's just or not, imagine I say, "No, no, no, no, let me go in her place."

"Let me die for her. I didn't know that it was in her bag, but let me go in her place," and they accept my sacrifice in place of hers. That's what Jesus did at the cross. He took our place, took the penalty we deserved, dying for us so that we can receive grace upon grace upon grace. God loves grace so much.

He's so passionate about it that He not only loves giving it to us, He gave up His Son to give it to us. He gave up His Son to secure it. How can you not love God's grace when you are the recipient of it? How can we hate our enemies when God loved His, when God loved us? There's a beautiful set of poems written on the book of Jonah by a man called Thomas Carlyle in the sixties, and sometimes poetry communicates a message better than direct prose ever can, and I want to read one of his poems to you.

This is what he wrote. "You, Jonah, how low, how deep will you go to secure sleep? You, Jonah, how high will you fare, hoping I will ignore you there? You, Jonah, how far will you aim, your mariner, to protect your name from My claim? You, Jonah?"

"And Jonah stalked to his shaded seat and waited for God to come around to his way of thinking. And God is still waiting for a host of Jonahs in their comfortable houses to come around to His way of loving." Are we ready to come around to God's way of loving? To love even our enemies who don't deserve it, because we have received God's way of loving for us. It's a costly love.

It cost God His Son to love us this way. It's enemy love. It's grace. There's a true story from last century, and I'll end with this, about a woman who actually did come face to face with a Nazi and had a choice about whether to forgive him or not, whether to extend him grace. You may know this woman, and her name was Corrie Ten Boom.

She was a Dutch Christian, and she lived in the Netherlands during World War Two. And during the war, the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, and her family, her sister Betsy and her father, they were hiding Jews in their house to protect them from the Nazis, but eventually they were discovered, and they were taken to a concentration camp as punishment. Now the Jews that were in their house, hiding in this false wall, they actually were safe. They didn't find them. They took Corrie Ten Boom and her family to a concentration camp called Ravensbruck, and obviously they experienced brutal and horrendous things. Her sister and her father died there.

Later on, after the war, Corrie was sharing her story at a church, and up walks to her after the service ended this man who she immediately recognised, and it was one of the Nazi guards at Ravensbruck. She remembered this man staring at her naked sister, and he came up to her, and he said to her, "Corrie Ten Boom, God has forgiven me. Can you forgive me too?" And Corrie shares in a message that in that moment, she said, "I can't. I couldn't."

How could I forgive someone who looked at my dying sister while she was naked? But then she started to pray and said, "God, I thank you for your love. I thank you for your grace," and she testifies that in that moment, the power of God just came down on her, and she was free from the anger and the hurt, and she extended her hand and said, "I forgive you, brother," to this former Nazi. See, Corrie Ten Boom loves God's grace. She proved it, because you can't say you love God's grace if you hate seeing it given to your enemies.

It's a confronting message, but it's a beautiful one that we all need. Let's pray together. Father, we have not plumbed the depths of your grace. Lord, we don't consider often how much we needed your grace ourselves, and so we pray that you would just press home into our hearts that while we are more flawed than we'd ever dare to believe, we are more loved than we would ever dare to imagine. Thank you for your great grace for us.

Thank you for adopting us as your children, and we pray that you'd help us to know your love deep in our souls so that we become people who, like Corrie, can extend forgiveness and love even to our enemies. We ask this for the glorious name of Jesus' sake. Amen.