Your Kingdom Come? - Jonah 4:1-4

[25th November 2015]

The other Saturday morning I watched a blackbird hopping around our garden looking very happy with a strawberry in its mouth which it had stolen out of my neighbour’s garden, and I thought to myself, “Little blackbird you’re very blessed – you can’t read the newspapers this morning.” It was of course as the news of the Paris ISIS atrocities was coming through.

What has struck me about the news from Paris was and is the unbalanced way it is reported. 130 people are murdered in Paris, horrible though it was I know, with continuous news coverage but at about the same time 43 were blown up and killed in Beruit to hardly a murmur in the press. But the great shocker is, that of the 33,000 killed outside of Syria by Islamic terrorism during the past 12 months, by far the most have been murdered by the Boko Haram in West Africa. These days their activities are barely mentioned.

So, why the lop-sided reporting? There is a sense in the West that it has a right to endure forever and never be threatened. There have been threats in the past, but these have been external and visible, but now it is being threatened by forces from within itself. Almost all the perpetrators were European passport holders.

This brings me to Jonah 4 …

4:1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2 And he prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. 3 Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 And the Lord said, “Do you do well to be angry?”

You remember the story – of Jonah running away from delivering God’s warning to Nineveh. Why Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh? It wasn’t because of fear. Jonah wasn’t personally frightened – we know that from earlier in the story, he was willing to be thrown into the sea to drown. But Jonah knew his God is a forgiving God – and would forgive this very evil nation of Assyria of which Nineveh was the capital city [4:2].

One traditional interpretation of the Book of Jonah – which I believe is correct - is that the story of Jonah shows that God’s loves is universal. And not just for the Israelites, and Jonah knew this all along. Yes, I think it should encourage us to preach the gospel to people who we don’t think deserve it, whom we might despise or fear.

But the main reason why Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh was not just because he knew that the Assyrians would be forgiven and God would spare them, but because the patriotic Jonah also knew that the Assyrians, whom God would preserve, would go on to destroy his home country of the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital at Samaria – which they did in 722 BC. Jonah would have read the prophecies of Amos, Hosea and Isaiah foretelling the coming destruction on his home country and he would have known what was going to happen one day. It would not just be conquered, but it would be obliterated, totally losing its identity with horrendous cruelty. Jonah’s home country would be wiped off the face of the earth.

I don’t have a blueprint for the end of the world – but I know my home country and your home countries will face divine judgment. It is not a myth or something just hung over us as an empty threat. One day it will come. As Billy Graham once said: “If God does not judge California he will have to apologise Sodom and Gomorrah.” I am not American, but this could easily apply to New Zealand or England or wherever.

But I don’t think we realise that for God to achieve his purposes sometimes some very hard things have to happen. I do not understand why God allowed such horrible persecution of the early church. Sometimes for God’s purposes to be fulfilled our world has to be turned upside down. Not just other peoples’ cultures.

Our world is being turned upside down with demographic changes and we might not like some of the side-effects. This is maybe God’s plan for the final evangelisation of the world I do not know. But you do not need to be a prophet to foresee trouble down the tracks for Western Europe with its ballooning Moslem population, caused by the their failure to assimilate and the attraction of extreme violence seemingly justified from the Koran itself. For large numbers of Moslem Arabs to become Christians, this may be the only way. As we pray, “Thy Kingdom come” in the Lord’s Prayer – do we know what we might be asking for?

Christians should be better equipped than anyone to face these changes and upsets, but you would not think so judging by some social media posts penned by Christians.

If we have an eternal perspective we should pity the millions of people heading to a lost eternity – this will cause disruption not only to our personal lives but to our national lives as well. Our God is the God who is in control of history and the God who greets his people with “Fear not!” That’s what I say to you in these days. Fear not.