Jonah and His Despair

Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night 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?” (Jonah 4:5-11 ESV).

I love the irony of the last verses of this little book. Had Jonah gone to Nineveh just as an enemy Israelite, he would have most likely been ignored, maybe even killed. His failure would have resulted in the destruction of Nineveh by the Lord due to their wickedness. Yet he rebelled, and Nineveh accepted him as a messenger and quickly repented when he got there. The very thing he did not want was assured by his rebellion. There is a wonderful lesson here for us. The Lord is working with Jonah trying to get him to see the value of every soul, not just the Israelites. That is where the Gourd and the Worm come in. Jonah is depressed and miserable due the fact that the city would not be destroyed. He had prophesied doom and destruction in the name of the Lord, but due to repentance it wasn’t going to happen. Jonah is mad at the Lord, and gently the Lord begins to teach him. The Lord provided a gourd or plant that protected Jonah. The next day he sent in a worm which destroyed the gourd leaving Jonah open to the elements. When Jonah adds that to his list of complaints the Lord uses it as a teaching moment. The Lords states that Jonah mourns the loss of the gourd which came up in a day and was lost in a day. It should have been a trivial thing. Yet the city of Nineveh had 120,000 people (v. 11) who didn’t know any better and Jonah thinks their preservation is a bad thing. We ought to be struck by the incredulous nature of his anger. The record of Jonah ends there, so we don’t know what happened to Jonah after that, but we can hope that he learned what the Lord wanted him to learn and that he repented of his attitude and actions. This is something we all need to be careful of, not to let our own wants and desires blind us to what is truly important. R.C. Sproul tells us that Jonah’s depression over the death of a plant (vv. 5-9) means that the prophet cared more about plants than about people. Jonah forgot that no sinner deserves God’s forgiveness, even a prophet of God Almighty, and wanted to withhold the possibility of pardon from those he deemed unfit for the kingdom. But we are all unfit for the kingdom, so we should long for the Lord to save others just as He has saved us.