We have heard about the patience of Job, but it is nothing compared with the patience of God that we see in this chapter. Jonah was very angry with God for relenting on His destruction of Ninevah.
“This is exactly what I thought You’d do Lord, when I was there in my own country and You first told me to come here. . .Please kill me, Lord; I’d rather be dead than alive when nothing that I told them happens.” (Verses 2-3).
Unfortunately, Jonah wasn’t alone in his opinion. One day early in my first pastorate, I was riding with one of the church leaders down the road the church was on. He was telling me about the people who lived in each house and the need for me to contact those who were not attenders at our church until we came to one house where he said, “You don’t have to worry about that house; they are not our kind of people.”
That next summer we knocked on many doors in our rural community and had the biggest Vacation Bible School the church had in many years. After it was over, the only comment I heard about the VBS was, “It was so successful it is a shame we spent all that money on children that weren’t ours”. Yes, Jonah wasn’t the only person to have a negative attitude about God’s love, grace, and mercy. The people I referred to were good Christians but who had lost God’s vision of their mission.
Jonah continued to sulk even after God asked him, “Is it right to be angry about this?” God made Jonah’s life miserable for a few days to try to get Jonah to see that his attitude was wrong. Finally, “the Lord said, ‘You feel sorry for yourself when your shelter is destroyed, though you did no work to put it there, and it is, at best, short-lived. And why shouldn’t I feel sorry for a great city like Ninevah with its 120,000 people in utter spiritual darkness and all its cattle?”
Is God asking us the same question today? As His church, His kingdom priests, are we concerned about the millions of people we know will spend eternity in hell if they do not trust Christ as their Savior? Do we have the compassion to pray for a Great Awakening among the lost or are we content with our own concerns?