Jonah 4:1

The chapter opens straight after Jonah 3:10, where God saw that the people of Nineveh had turned from their evil way and spared them the judgment he had warned of. The whole city, from the king to the common people and even the animals, had answered Jonah’s short warning with fasting, prayer and sackcloth (Jonah 3). The great repentance of a whole city ought to have brought the prophet joy. What follows is the opposite: “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.”

The Hebrew behind “displeased” is yâraʻ, from the same root as raʻ, the common word for evil or bad. Literally the thing was evil to Jonah, and the words behind “exceedingly”, raʻ and gâdôwl, mean evil and great, so God’s mercy was a great evil in his eyes. He judged it to be wrong. “Very angry” translates chârâh, a verb that literally means to glow or grow warm and is used of anger that blazes up. Scripture uses this one verb for the anger of God and for the anger of people, and in this chapter it is the prophet who burns while God shows mercy.

There is a hard irony in this. Jonah had himself just been brought up alive from the belly of the great fish, rescued by the mercy of God, and now he is angry that God has given life to a city.

“And he prayed unto the LORD.” This is a prayer in form, but in content it is a self-justifying accusation against God’s character. “I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country?” Jonah tells God that this outcome is exactly what he said at home, before he ever set out. The word for “country”, ʼădâmâh, means ground, soil or land, and here it is Jonah’s homeland in Israel.

“Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish.” The verb bârach means to flee, moving in haste to escape. It takes us back to Jonah 1:2–3, where God sent Jonah to Nineveh and he went the other way. Only now do we learn why. He expected that if Nineveh repented, God would spare it, and he wanted the city destroyed. His flight was a deliberate act, and he explains it here as the logical result of what he believed.

“For I knew” uses yâdaʻ, to know. Jonah’s knowledge of God was accurate and personal, and it came from what God had revealed of himself to Israel. He rebelled with his eyes open, resenting the very nature of God, which stood in the way of what he wanted for Nineveh.

“Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me.” The “therefore” carries on from the complaint of verse 2. Since God is the merciful God Jonah always knew him to be, and since Nineveh has been spared, Jonah wants to die. The word for “life” is nephesh, the breathing self, a person’s very life. “I beseech thee” shows how earnestly he means it.

“For it is better for me to die than to live.” “Better” is ṭôwb, good in the widest sense, used here to compare. “To die” is from mâveth, death, and “to live” from chay, living or alive. Jonah would sooner die than live to see God’s grace given to his enemies. A man who had just been saved from death so that he could carry a message that brought life to a city now asks for death because the city lives. His distress is real, and he brought it on himself. It comes from his own anger and prejudice, and nobody is persecuting him.

Other servants of God have prayed for death. Elijah asked the LORD to take his life (1 Kings 19:4), and Job lamented that life was given to those who long for death (Job 3:20–21). Their prayers came out of extreme suffering. Jonah’s comes out of anger that God has been kind.

“Then said the LORD.” The name is Yᵉhôvâh, God’s covenant name, which the KJV renders “the LORD”. The God whom Jonah has just accused answers him personally. He steps into the prophet’s anger and stays with him, patient and committed to teaching him.

“Doest thou well to be angry?” The verb yâṭab means to be good, or to do good and do well, and God is asking whether Jonah’s anger is good and right. “Angry” is chârâh again, the same verb as in verse 1. God asks this question to make Jonah look at himself, since God already knows the answer. It is a gentle but firm rebuke. It turns the conversation from what God has done to how Jonah has reacted, and it makes Jonah answer for his own feelings. It is God’s first reply to the outburst, and the object lesson on compassion that fills the rest of the chapter grows out of it.

The rest of Scripture gives the answer to God’s question. James writes, “For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Proverbs ties slowness to wrath to great understanding (Proverbs 14:29), and Jonah’s God is slow to anger. In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the householder answers the men who grumble at his generosity to others: “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” (Matthew 20:15). God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8–9), and his grace is his to give.

Jonah wished his enemies destroyed. Jesus taught his disciples to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44). Jonah fled from a mission to a hostile people. Christ came willingly into a hostile world, sent by the Father “that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:17), so that whosoever believes in him should have life (John 3:16). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and he came “to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). He welcomed tax collectors and sinners, Samaritans and Gentiles, the kind of people many in his day despised as Jonah despised the Ninevites.

Jonah was angry that a city was spared. Jesus wept over Jerusalem, longing for its repentance (Luke 19:41–44). Jonah carried God’s message grudgingly, while Christ obeyed the Father to the point of death on the cross (Philippians 2:8) and died for us while we were still sinners and enemies (Romans 5:8–10). Jesus spoke of “the sign of Jonah” and tied the prophet’s three days and nights in the fish to his own death and resurrection (Matthew 12:39–40). He then sent his followers to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19), and the end of the story is a great multitude from every nation standing before God (Revelation 7:9). The compassion Jonah could not accept is the compassion Christ embodies perfectly.

These verses show a God whose mercy reaches a cruel and hostile city the moment it turns to him, and whose patience reaches just as far toward his own resentful prophet. Jonah had the right words about God, and his heart still fought against them. Knowing who God is and loving his mercy toward others are meant to go together, and in Jonah they had come apart. The measure of a heart shown here is how it takes God’s kindness to people it finds hard to love.

God meets that heart with a question. He could have struck Jonah down, and he asks him to think: “Doest thou well to be angry?” The same God who is slow to anger with Nineveh is slow to anger with Jonah, and the question he asked his prophet is one he asks with the same patience whenever his grace to others makes his people angry.