Leonard Holt was a solid guy. He was a middle-aged, hard-working lab technician who had worked at the same Pennsylvania paper mill for nineteen years. He was a Boy Scout leader, a loving father, a member of the volunteer fire department. He went to church every Sunday, and was admired in his community.
Then, one brisk October morning in the mid-1980s, on the way to the mill, he stuffed two pistols into his coat pockets. When he arrived, he walked very slowly through the shop, stopped, pulled out the guns and unloaded on his co-workers with a Columbine-style frenzy. Many of his friends had two or three bullets in them a piece. He fired more than 30 shots, killing some men he had known for more than fifteen years. The whole town, not to mention his family, was shocked. But the police investigating the case finally made some sense of this puzzle. Leonard Holt was resentful. Many of the victims he shot had been promoted over him while he remained in the same position. More than one of the victims quit riding with him to work in the morning on account of his reckless driving. And so, he became angry. The story was in TIME magazine, and, underneath his picture was the caption: “Responsible, Respectable, and Resentful.” On the outside, things looked good. Within, it all came to a boil.
Jonah’s story is somewhat the same. Do you know much about Jonah? He was eaten by a big fish. The fish spit him out. God sent him to the 120,000 godless people of Nineveh, to whom he preached one very severe sermon, and, do you know what happened? They listened. All of them. Even the king. He put on sackcloth and ashes and commanded that everyone worship the true God and repent of their sin. This is the bible’s single greatest conversion; the most people to come to faith ever at one time. 100% of the city turned from their ways and listened. On the outside, things looked really good. Within, Jonah was very angry, depressed, and just about to blow up his entire ministry as well as his relationship with the God who called him to it.
Anger doesn’t care how things look on the outside. It doesn’t care how much money you have. It cares about how that compares to what your neighbor has. It doesn’t care how many friends call, but why you think so many others never do. It doesn’t care if you’ve had a job for 20 years, but it does care about the promotion that should have, by now, been given to you. It doesn’t care if you’ve been married for 30 years, but it does care if your spouse still fawns over you. And if they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily change how things look on the outside – you still have your marriage and your job and your friends and your money, and you can put on make-up, and dry your tears, and put on your boots and go to work just like you have for the previous 19 years, and because everything looks the same nobody will know the extent of your pain, except maybe those who really know you. But even if they ask you, you don’t have to tell them. And many never do, just like Leonard didn’t. Most people, like Leonard Holt, believe they can handle it – until they can’t, but by then it’s too late.
I don’t want to freak you out here. But I do want to look at Jonah’s life today to help us understand why someone once correctly pointed out that “Anger is just one letter short of danger.”
(5) Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. (6) Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. Do you know who George Burns was? George Burns was an actor who lived to be a hundred years old. He was famous for having a cigar in his hands at almost all times. Late in his life, someone asked him what the secret was to his long, happy life. Do you know what he said? He said, “Bacon.” George Burns had a couple of slices of bacon every morning for breakfast. That makes me very happy because I love bacon. I also love eggs. In fact, I have been eating eggs every morning for breakfast since I was in grade school. I am anticipating that a doctor may some day tell me to stop eating so many eggs. And if one does, I’m not sure if I will because I love eggs so much.
What do you love? What makes you happy all the time? This is very important because you will always find reasons to be angry, and if you do not counter those by finding something that makes you happy, you will be consumed by your anger rather quickly. What can’t you live without? What would you save from your burning house? Do you children give you a happy equilibrium in your life? Grandchildren? Spouse? Job? Income? Electronics? Your hobbies? Any one of these can be an escape from all of life’s troubles and tragedies, can’t they? But how would you feel if it’s all of the sudden taken away? Just because God knows what makes you happy and promises to always take care of you doesn’t mean that you can’t lost those things and people that are most valuable to you. Job lost his children, his wealth, his health, his land, cattle, and all he owned in one day.
In our text, Jonah loses the vine that gave him joy. And maybe you think that getting attached to a vine is kind of nuts. And maybe for you. But for him it was normal. And the feeling he had when it was taken away was very recognizable.
(7) But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. (8) When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” (9) But God said to Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” “I do,” he said. “I am angry enough to die.”
Do you know the warning signs for heat stroke? Getting into the Fall and quickly into Winter, we don’t really have to worry about it so much. But outside Nineveh, where the desert temperature easily reached 110 degrees, it was good to worry. Heat stroke is when your body temperature begins to rise to dangerous levels, sometimes as high as 106 degrees. The signs of heatstroke are nausea, vomiting, fatigue, headache, cramps, aches, dizziness, a rapid pulse, difficulty breathing, hallucination, confusion, agitation, disorientation, and, if refuge is not taken, death.
And do you blame Jonah for wanting to avoid all that? Do you blame him for getting angry that his refuge was taken away, that what made him happy couldn’t stay? “Do you have a right to be angry?” God asked Jonah. Answer for yourself.
Do you have a right to be angry when you lose the thing that makes you happy? What was it that made you happy? How do you feel if someone hits your kid with car? If someone cheats with your spouse? If a less-qualified co-worker gets your job? If your insurance doesn’t cover the destruction of your house? Do you have a right to be angry when you lose time with family because your boss is too demanding, when you lose your self-esteem because your spouse is over-bearing? If what keeps your life balanced is taken off the scales, sending the weight of your anger in the wrong direction, then don’t you have a right to be angry with whomever committed that action?
Isn’t that why Jonah was angry with God? Did you notice who made all this happen to him? In verse 6, it says that God provided the vine that made him feel fine. But in verse 7, it says that God provided the worm that chewed the vine and made Jonah squirm. And in verse 8, it says that God provided the wind from the east that didn’t help him in the least. And earlier in the book, we all know (and it also says) that God is the one who provided the fish that used Jonah as his dish. Do you know what being in a fish does to you?
In 1891, a man named James Bartley actually survived being swallowed by a fish. He was thrown into the sea when a whale swiped their boat. His companions never found him, but they did catch the whale that hit them. The next morning, after working all night at removing the blubber, they hoisted the whale’s stomach onto the deck and noticed that something inside was moving. They cut open the stomach and found their buddy that went missing. By the time they got him out, he was unconscious. For two weeks he was a complete lunatic, but by the end of the third week he was back at work, but that doesn’t mean he was back to normal.
While inside the whale, the heat was terrible, so bad that it opened up the pores of his skin, drew out its moisture and filled them with the gastric juices in the whale’s stomach, bleaching his skin with a death-looking whiteness that never went back to his natural appearance.
Now, we don’t know what Jonah looked like after his encounter with a fish. But we do know that God provided the fish. God is not off the hook for the pain in your life. At times, like he did with Jonah, God causes it. At the least, like he did with Job, the God who can stop winds with his hand and demons with his voice, allows it.
And are you happy about this? Are you happy to be robbed of your comfort? To be stripped of your joy? To know that it is your Father’s will to suffer, to bleed, to heave, and hang; to be treated like a whipping boy instead of eternity’s King? Are you supposed to just zip your lip while they rip your back? Keep your mouth shut at every verbal attack? Are you supposed to just lift your eyes to heaven, knowing that the people who hate you most are wracking their brains to think of all sorts of ways they can keep sinning, knowing that the God who says he loves you has decided to allow all these things to hurt you, look up to him and say, “Father, not my will, but yours be done,” even if his will includes you dying for them, you being labeled God’s sinful enemy instead of them, looking at the people who nailed you to a cross and pleading that God would forgive them? Are you just supposed to happily zip your lip and go through with that? Ask Jesus, and he will tell you that, that he was not happy with the thought of what he would lose if he would just throw in the towel, get angry, and go away. He would lose you.
What was Jonah losing? He was losing a vine, which is no different from you losing your house, your job, your time, your best friend, your sweet kids, either parent, a plate of bacon, a dozen eggs, or a bowl of limes in that you didn’t make any of them.
When God asked Moses, “Who gave man his mouth and his sight?” the answer was, him. When God asked Job, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?” the answer was, nowhere. He didn’t exist back then. And neither did I. And neither did you. We existed in God’s imagination just before he formed us out of nothing, considered who exactly you would be with all of eternity’s wisdom, and, as Paul reminded the Athenians, “determined the times set before [you] and the exact places that you should live” so that he could find eternity’s greatest joy in loving you and you, in turn would use the abilities he loans you, the time he grants you, and family and resources with which he decides to bless you to love him.
When we lose anything on earth, we lose something that never belonged to us in the first place. When God loses a single soul, whether it’s Jonah’s, Ninevah’s, Jack’s, Judy’s, Ruby’s, Timmy’s, or Tommy’s; whether they have been faithful to him their whole life long, or hateful toward God and dedicated only to doing wrong, he’s losing the one thing he created that is most valuable to him.
(10) But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. (11) But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
You see, God can see the future. And he knows that someday, you will lose it all. Whatever on this earth is most valuable to you, someday, it will no longer belong to you. God gives us this earth and everything in it for our blessing and our enjoyment. But he doesn’t get the same pleasure from all these things as you and I do. He knows that the greatest pleasure in eternity will be when you are with him and he is with you. And if, from time to time, he has to strip you of a temporary pleasure just to remind you that there are more valuable treasures that can be held by you, then he will. He will do whatever it takes to keep you.