Jonah sat down in the desert outside
Nineveh after preaching in the city that the people would be destroyed in forty
days. He wanted a front-row seat to the holocaust. But there were no fireworks and
he preached God’s destruction. When God didn’t destroy them, he got angry with
God. The last thing Jonah wanted was to meet Ninevites in heaven!
The desert is a hot place. If you
sit there for long, you’ll get heat stroke. So God prepared a vine to shield
Jonah from the sun, to “save him from his discomfort.”
“His discomfort”? Consider the irony
of Jonah’s situation. He’s waiting for a holocaust, and he’s worried about his
own discomfort? He prays for shade while thousands are under a death
sentence? It’s like passing out
umbrellas at a public hanging!
So why does God help Jonah? He’s
doing it to teach Jonah a lesson. After Jonah was comfortably situated under
his vine, God sent a worm to eat it.
Then Jonah got mad. “It’s better to me to die than to live!” He
whined, because God took his shade away. He even says. “God, what have you got
against this poor plant?”
God rebuked Jonah in vs. 10-11, “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?” You felt nothing for a city full of people, so how then
can you care more for a plant than for them?
When I was a boy, we went to a
drive-in theatre to see a re-release of Gone
with the Wind. (Drive-ins were places where young people went to ignore
movies). We all had a great time, though one boy talked constantly every scene.
“Booring!” he kept saying. One scene showed the burning of Atlanta, and a huge
field of dead and wounded soldiers. “Boring,”
he said. Later came a scene where a horse was being beaten, and this boy turned
out to be an animal lover. He started crying, “Look at that poor horse!” Thousands
didn’t move him, but one horse did.
We’ll get upset about our pets.
We’ll get angry about the destruction of the environment, yet we can stomach
the quiet holocaust of souls all around us.
Most people don’t know their right hand from their left when it comes to
the things of the Spirit, yet we only look at our personal vines. The rest of
the world may go to hell, but if things are OK at home, then we’re fine with
it.
What if Jonah weren’t angry with the
Ninevites, but only indifferent? It would have made no difference, whether he
was mad at them or cared for them. As long as he camped outside the city, the
result would be the same. The only way he might have made a difference was to
stay in the city and teach them right from wrong.
In college we preached in the jails,
bus stations, college campuses, and streets, telling others about Jesus. Many
people made decisions for Jesus. We told each other about numbers and converts
and bragged about our witnessing. But at the end of the day, the people we led
to Jesus went back to their lives. If some of them stayed with Jesus I wouldn’t
know, because we abandoned them. We went home and sat under our vines.
There is no record of Nineveh’s repentance
anywhere except in Jonah. We have many of the official records of Nineveh, but nothing
is written of this Jonah or this repentance. It didn’t last. They went right
back to conquest, tyranny, and idolatry.
It’s more fun to make babies than to
raise them. It’s more fun to make disciples than to disciple them. But if we
don’t continue to care for them, then we are pretty much guaranteeing their
failure. Changing a soul takes time. When we are born again we start out as a
baby, but without nurture we die. Conversion is a process that requires training,
patience, love, and a sense of acceptance into a new community. People receive
just enough Gospel to get inoculated against it. We have to continue to be
involved in the lives of those we help.
But in Nineveh, the only person who
could have given them care and instruction was sitting in the desert under a
vine, waiting for their destruction! Why wasn’t he in the city?
This is typical of our modern
approach to charity. We want to help the poor, the lost, and the sinners, as
long as we don’t get our hands dirty. Keep them at an arm’s distance, while we
sit under our comfortable vines.
Jonah didn’t have to go into the
city to follow up with the Ninevites--he might have taken one or two with him
out into the desert and taught them the Bible as they sat under the vine. Those
two people might have gone back and trained the others, but he didn’t do that,
because he didn’t care. He had already done the preaching, let someone else do
the training! Jonah didn’t sully his hands becoming involved with Ninevites!
In the 60’s Joseph Bayley wrote a
wicked little satire on the problems of modern evangelism called The Gospel Blimp. In it, a group of
Christians are attending a barbeque in the back yard of a church friend. The
friend, George, asks them to pray for his next door neighbors, who are not
Christians. The group strategizes over how they could reach these neighbors,
and they decide to hire a blimp with flashing signs to display Scripture over
their house. They organize a ministry “International Gospel Blimps, Incorporated”
to take donations for the blimp. They wrap Gospel tracks in cellophane (called
firebombs) and throw them out all over town. Soon his neighbors’ gutters are
clogged with tracts. The ministry grew and grew, until there was a fleet of blimps
in other cities. There were constant fundraisers to keep it going. Eventually
the ministry falls apart as they squabble about who should lead it, and what
vision they should pursue. George becomes disillusioned and drops out.
Then one day, George holds another
barbeque, and invites the same old people. He also invites his neighbors, who had
just became Christians. The others are excited. What led them to Christ? Was it
the billboard flashing in their window, or the tracts clogging their gutters?
No, they confess that all that just made them mad. What made the difference was
that when George quit the Gospel Blimp, he and his family had time to make
friends with them. They treated them as people, not projects. In that
friendship, they saw the light.
Preaching to the lost, feeding the
hungry, housing the homeless, and healing the sick isn’t all that God wants. If
we hold ourselves aloof from the people we try to reach, we will fail. People
don’t want to be numbers or objects. They want to be treated as people, who are
individually of infinite value to God. We have to love lost, disciple the lost,
and identify ourselves with the lost. They are not objects—they have names and
faces. We must not be aloof from them, we have to stay with them.
Jonah didn’t get this until God
killed his vine. When God took away his comfort, he had to live like a Ninevite.
This last summer in July, the
temperature in Nineveh reached 53 degrees centigrade, or 126 degrees Fahrenheit.
If I had been there, I would sure have appreciated a vine, or better yet--air
conditioning! But they don’t have vines, and few have air conditioning. I
wonder how people keep their sanity under such conditions?
It’s easy to criticize the lost when
we don’t have to live under their conditions. It’s also easy to misunderstand
the difficulties of their lives. But when God identifies with them and wants us
to do it, too. We must be willing to live
among them if we are going to help.
Christians in America for
generations have lived under a comfortable vine. We’ve enjoyed the protection
of the state. We’ve had worship days preserved by law for church use, respected
by the schools and stores. There was a time when employers would not dream of
making us work on Sunday! Movies and
television shows respected Christian values. We thought it would always be that
way. Conversion was easy when the
culture was halfway Christian already. Most people went to church, and all we
had to do was get them to come to our
church. There were more churches than
restaurants and gas stations—one on every corner. Even if the culture did not
embrace Christianity, it certainly embraced churchianity!
We were wrong to think that would
last forever. People forgot that Jesus
and America were different. We made an
idol of the vine that kept our churches and families safe. But today the worms
have just about eaten that vine. There is no protection for the church or the
Christian family, nor is it likely to return.
God allows this for a reason, so we’ll
get ourselves out of the desert and back into the world, making disciples and building
friendships. It isn’t enough to preach to the lost-, but we must also embrace,
accept, and include them. We must not compromise our morals or our message, but
take that message out into the world in which we live like strangers and aliens
in a hostile world. We must show our world—our Nineveh—a caring face, following
Jesus into the dirt and mess of their lives. Not only that, but we must invite
them into our lives, opening our homes and our hearts without feeling sorry for
it later. We must not seek comfort for ourselves, but we must seek to comfort
others.
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