Father, we know that no one is good enough to warrant going to heaven.
That as the Creed said, in a sense, whatever righteousness we have comes from Jesus, not from ourselves.
And to fulfill your good and perfect will is to put our faith and trust in Jesus, not as a work,
but as a fulfillment of the leading of your Holy Spirit and the desire of your heart,
that we might trust Jesus and him alone as our Savior and Lord.
Father, we ask that you would pour out the Holy Spirit upon us today,
that you would bring your word and touch our hearts,
that we might be disciples of Jesus who are gripped by the gospel, learning to live for your glory.
And this we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.
Please be seated.
So quite a few years ago, it's not one of my kids who are at church today,
but quite a few years ago, one of my children was in the car with my mom and dad,
and they were on the Queensway, and somebody cut my dad off, and my dad said,
what an idiot.
And my son, because it was a son, he piped in, I think he was like eight years old or something at the time,
my son piped in with just the innocence of a child and said, yeah, that guy's a jerk.
And then he continued, there's lots of jerks on the road.
My dad says that all the time.
As we're on the Queensway, he's always talking about all the jerks on the road.
Just complete level innocence.
And I, of course, just, my parents came and told me about it afterwards,
and I just wanted to cringe.
I didn't realize that I said I had an anger problem on the road.
That's a problem that other people have, not me.
But obviously, my children heard differently, and in a sense, it not condemned me.
It really challenged me about how I drove.
Today, we're going to talk about anger, amongst other things, but we're going to talk about anger.
And one of the things about anger is that often people like myself,
who have bouts of anger or maybe even constant low-level anger,
we don't recognize it in ourselves, but we think we see it in others.
It's often a sin or a fault, as I said, that we don't acknowledge ourselves as having,
but we think other people have.
One of the things, and that's actually one of the reasons why,
for old Christians, when they were coming up with ways to try to understand how to live a moral life,
they came up with this idea of the seven deadly sins.
And this is going to be a bit of a surprise to some of you if you are a guest,
but in the list of the seven deadly sins, lust was there,
but lust is the least deadly of the seven deadly sins.
And part of that, of course, is that,
I mean, I've told this story before.
I used to visit a man in a hospital who was 100 years old,
and we got talking about it someday or another,
and he just told me when you hit 100, lust isn't much of an issue in your life anymore,
not compared to when you were a 16-year-old male.
So that's one of the reasons it's a bit of a less deadly sin than some of the others,
because just with your body getting old and tired,
it just becomes a little bit less of an issue.
And the other thing about it is that often people know when they're filled with lust.
But just as one of the things that makes cancer so deadly is not only will it kill you,
but there's many forms of cancer that you don't know you have it
until it's too late to do anything about it.
So it is that anger and pride,
which in fact are the two most deadly of the seven deadly sins, pride and anger,
anger is a deadly sin because it will do great damage to our lives,
but at the same time we often don't recognize that we actually have an anger problem ourselves,
or anger-driven.
So today we're going to look at a famous story about anger in the Bible.
It was read earlier to us by Deborah.
If you don't have a copy of a Bible to look, there'll be a text up on the screen.
But it's always good to bring your own Bible to church
and be able to make little notes on it as we go through and talk about this text.
So we're going to be looking at Jonah chapter 4,
and we're going to be looking at,
and for some reason I also have it open to Micah,
we'll turn to Jonah, Jonah chapter 4, just these four verses.
And if you're curious about why we're doing this,
one of the things we do at Church of the Messiah is we preach through books of the Bible,
we're preaching through Jonah.
And a good way to understand the book of Jonah
is to compare it to watching a good BBC series on Netflix or Crave
or whatever it is that you happen to subscribe to.
And in a really good BBC series,
what you'll do is it tells you one story,
but it tells you one story by telling maybe four or six or eight or ten stories,
whatever the number is.
In this particular case, there's four separate stories.
Think of them as episodes.
And each episode is a story,
but when you talk all four of them together,
it tells you a very different, like it's nuanced.
And we're not going to look at all of episode 4 today.
We're going to break episode 4 into two parts.
We're just going to look at the first part of episode 4, so to speak,
4A, and then next week we'll look at 4B.
And just if you're not familiar with the story,
what's happened in episode 1, God shows up and speaks to Jonah
and tells Jonah he has to go to Nineveh and proclaim a message.
And Nineveh was the major power of the ancient Near East at that time.
Israel, which is where Jonah was from, was a vassal state.
They'd been conquered by Assyria and had to pay tribute.
And God says to Jonah,
go to Nineveh, the capital, and proclaim this message against him.
And Jonah reacts by saying, I'm not going to do it.
I'm going to get as far away from God as I can
and as far away from Nineveh as I can.
And of course, the rest of episode 1 is what most people think of
when they think of Jonah.
There's a huge storm,
and he ends up that Jonah gets thrown overboard
to stop the storm by the pagan soldiers with Jonah's permission.
And in a sense, episode 1 ends with a cliffhanger.
The storm stops, so the pagans got it right.
And Jonah's sinking into the water.
Episode 2, that's how you want to watch episode 2.
What happens to Jonah?
Episode 2, God appoints a huge aquatic beast
to show up just as Jonah's about to die in the water.
The huge aquatic beast swallows Jonah,
takes him right into the entrails, the intestines.
And chapter 2 is Jonah's, in a sense, reflection and summary
upon what it was like to be in the belly of a great aquatic beast
for that period of time.
And he ends up putting it in the form of a prayer.
And it's really a form of a prayer about how he comes to realize
that the Lord is merciful, slow to anger, filled with compassion,
and that the Lord has delivered him.
And Jonah's filled with gratefulness.
How does episode 2 end?
In a way that humbles Jonah, Jonah is vomited onto the land
by the great aquatic beast.
If you're vomited by a fish, that would be a humbling experience for you.
So, episode 3, what's going to happen next?
Well, in episode 3, we find Jonah actually showing up in Nineveh.
And Jonah goes throughout Nineveh proclaiming,
in 40 days, the Lord is going to overthrow you.
And the word overthrow is the same word that's used about Sodom and Gomorrah,
how they're completely destroyed.
So, Jonah proclaims this message.
And lo and behold, everybody in Nineveh, the capital city, repents.
The king repents.
The nobles repent.
The people repent.
Everybody repents.
And as a result, the Lord sees their repentance,
and he stays his judgment.
Now, here's the question.
We have episode 4.
What on earth could go on in episode 4?
If you think about it, this is the perfect Hollywood movie.
It's the type of Hollywood movie that people like to watch.
Hollywood movie that people like to watch,
it would be as if, from your point of view, it's a J, right?
In a good Hollywood movie, you begin up here.
Some type of crisis happens.
You're all being defeated.
Everything's going.
It looks like it's just going to be disaster and tragedy.
But then, things conclude.
And at the end, you're higher up than when you began.
And in a good Hollywood movie, I just watched Hunter Killer, a not very good movie on Netflix.
How does it end?
Classic American ending of a J story.
Everybody's clapping because the good guys win.
The bad guys die.
High fives, hugs.
Everything's going.
And in a good Hollywood movie, it either ends up that the guy gets the girl,
or the girl gets the guy, and they ride off into the sunset,
or there's applause, or there's both, or there's all of that type of stuff.
Lord of the Rings, it has it all.
The wedding, and of course, the applause and the ceremony.
So you think, Jonah should end with chapter three, but there's episode four,
which we're going to do in two parts.
Why?
Because Jonah is like the movie The Sixth Sense.
And if you haven't seen the movie The Sixth Sense, I'm not going to give you a spoiler.
I did that in another sermon, and a couple of people told me off for it.
What I can tell you is if you watch The Sixth Sense,
something happens in the last three or four minutes of the movie
that makes you reconsider everything that went on in the entire movie.
It completely and utterly blows the whole storyline away.
You have to rethink everything that you saw, and that's what's going to happen in Jonah.
And here is how it begins to happen.
It happens with three questions in terms of what happens to Jonah.
So chapter four, verse one,
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.
And just sort of pause.
Very, very good translation.
But what it actually says in the original language is far worse.
They can't actually indicate the full depth of what's being communicated in the original language.
It says displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.
What it says is it was a catastrophe to Jonah what had happened.
A great catastrophe.
And it burned him.
The word for anger there is actually that he's so consumed, he's burning with anger at the great catastrophe which has just happened.
Remember the great catastrophe is that the people of Nineveh listened to his preaching, repented,
called out to the Lord for mercy, to God for mercy, and God stayed his judgment against them.
And to Jonah, this is a huge catastrophe.
And it's such a huge catastrophe that he's completely and utterly burned up with anger.
So, well, why is he so filled with anger?
Well, that's what verse two begins to tell us about.
And look at verse two.
So Jonah prayed to the Lord and said,
Oh Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country?
That's in chapter one.
That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish.
Chapter one.
For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster, from catastrophe, from calamity.
That's the different ways that that word disaster could be translated.
So why is he angry?
He's angry that Nineveh was spared.
And all of a sudden, and his great anger shows how much he hated Nineveh.
You see, one of the reasons why anger is considered a bad thing by almost everybody in Canada
is that anger is a very, very, very quick road to hatred.
And not only is anger a very quick road to hatred, anger is a very effective way to maintain and deepen hatred.
And that's amongst other reasons why it's generally viewed as being a bad thing, even in our culture today, that anger is a bad thing.
We're going to talk more about it in a moment.
But all of a sudden, you realize, one moment.
So, in fact, sometimes if you hear people talk about the story of Jonah,
they'll describe that the reason that Jonah left and didn't want to go to Nineveh was because he was afraid.
Because Nineveh would sort of be like going to Tehran and telling the leaders to repent or something like that.
It would be going to the capital of North Korea and telling the leader to repent.
And people will often use those analogies.
But that's not actually what the text says.
He didn't want to...
The reason he ran away from the thing wasn't because he was afraid,
but because he was worried that God would listen, that they would repent and God would listen,
and they wouldn't all die.
Jonah wanted them to all die.
He wanted God to kill them.
And whoa!
Well, that changes your reading of the first thing.
Like, do the pagans there, who were all, like, sort of trying to be nice to Jonah in that first story,
do they realize how much he hates pagans?
They don't.
And then in chapter 2, where all of a sudden God saves Jonah,
now you go to yourself,
why on earth did God save a guy who's so filled with hate?
And then you go to chapter 3,
and then you think to yourself,
why is it that God used a guy who's so filled with hate so successfully?
Like, if you're a guy like me,
and I, you know, I have some anger issues,
but I, you know, generally I try to fight against him,
I don't have that success.
So, God, why is it that Jonah has this success,
and he's filled with hatred,
and I'm trying to do a good job,
and I don't have anything even remotely close to his success?
Like, what on earth is going on with the whole story?
You see, all of a sudden, it's like the sixth sense.
It changes the way you look at all the earlier stories,
when you see that Jonah
actually did not want to go to Nineveh,
because he was worried
that if he went and did what he was supposed to do,
that God wouldn't kill them all.
And then some of you might think,
some of you have heard me,
if you've been here before,
I like saying that in conversations,
when it can come up with a non-Christian,
I like to tell them that I don't believe in the God of Canadians.
I don't believe the same God that most Canadians believe in.
I believe in a different God altogether,
and then I go and try to describe the difference between the gods.
For many Canadians,
if it's not a deistic God or an impersonal force,
they worry that the God is like bloodthirsty.
I've shared this with you before,
that the God they're afraid of exists,
and they don't want to believe,
is a God who likes to have people die.
He likes to kill people.
He's bloodthirsty.
And I tell them,
the God that I believe exists,
that's revealed by Jesus,
isn't a God that likes to kill people,
but a God who died for people.
The complete opposite.
So maybe that's what's going on here with Jonah.
But no, that's not what's going on with Jonah.
Jonah has a very, very, very, very good
Orthodox Old Testament, New Testament view of God.
Look again at what he says in verse 2.
How does he describe God?
I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love
and relenting from disaster.
Like that's bang on.
And it's really puzzling.
If you go back later on and you read Exodus 34,
the same words are used to describe God.
But these very descriptions of God,
that he is gracious, merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,
that's the entire basis of the writer's hope.
Because the nation of Israel,
after they had been delivered out of bondage
and slavery into Egypt,
and they're on the way,
and even though they've done all these terrible things,
they refuse to obey God,
and they create idols.
And the writer, it's Moses, is saying,
the whole reason I have any hope
is because you are gracious, merciful,
slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love,
and relent from disaster.
Go read the book of Lamentations,
a very, very wonderful book.
And if you read at the very heart of Lamentations,
in chapter 3,
for the first 20 verses,
it's our memory verse this week,
it's 21 to 23 in Lamentations 3.
It's a great verse to memorize.
And all these things that the person has done wrong,
and the nation has gone wrong,
and then it comes,
the whole basis of my hope
is that
you are a gracious God,
and merciful,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love,
and relent from disaster.
But this
is why Jonah
Jonah
is angry at God
and hates him.
In fact,
you know,
there's something
which is going to be really interesting
that happens in the next verse.
Just remember,
this text of Scripture
was probably written
around the year 755 B.C.
755,
758 B.C.
So 20,
almost 2,800 years ago.
One of the interesting things about it
is this text
in the story
brings out something
that modern psychology
discovered in quotation marks,
which is the connection
between depression and anger.
Look what happens in verse 3.
So,
Jonah's burning with anger.
Whether he recognizes it or not,
we don't know.
But verse 3,
Therefore now, O Lord,
please take my life from me,
for it is better for me
to die than to live.
That's a perfect description
of depression.
I just want to,
depressed,
I just want to fall asleep
and not wake up.
Many people commit suicide.
They want to die.
They'd rather die than live.
It's a very powerful description
of depression
in this text
written in 755 B.C.
So how does,
how does the Lord respond?
Verse 4,
And the Lord said,
now,
this is very interesting.
It's a good translation.
You know,
one of the things
when you're going
from one language to another,
I know there's people here,
lots of people here
who know multiple languages,
and you know the experience
of trying to translate
from one language to another.
Two summers ago,
I was in Angola,
and I got,
I had this great honor.
I was on the edge
of the Kalahari Desert,
and I got to preach
at a mission statement
to a semi-nomadic tribe
that was just beginning
to hear the gospel,
and I got to preach to them,
and it was a great honor.
When I spoke,
I really had to work on it.
I really tried to pray
about how to make
cultural connections with them,
and I, you know,
how could I do that?
I didn't know them very,
at all,
and I had to preach
simply from the Bible,
and every time I said
a few words,
it would be translated
in Portuguese,
and it would be translated
into the tribal language,
because many of them
spoke Portuguese,
and one of the things
I wanted to do
at the beginning
was just to try
to describe
how different I was
from them,
and I'd looked up
how much snow
we had in Ottawa
the year before,
and so I said to them
that where I come from
last winter,
we had three meters
of snow,
and they translated
into Portuguese,
and then all of a sudden,
there was a five-minute
discussion amongst them,
because, of course,
they had no word
for snow,
and they were trying
to think of what word
they could give for snow,
and they ended up
coming up with ice,
which just made
the whole room look,
how could there be
three meters of ice
that lands on him?
I mean,
it was, anyway,
but so when you translate,
there's some issues.
This is a perfect,
but in the original Hebrew,
it's very powerful.
There's two senses
in the original Hebrew
when it says here,
do you well to be angry?
The one is,
is in a sense,
the Lord asks,
in Hebrew,
it's just three words,
actually,
and what he says is,
is it right for you
to be angry?
Great question.
Is it right that you're
so angry
that I stayed judgment
on this city,
that I didn't do
Sodom and Gomorrah
on this city?
Is it right for you
to be that?
And the other thing is,
it's actually
a searching question.
I remember being really,
really being angry,
short-tempered,
not realizing I was angry
and short-tempered,
and the person I was with
said,
they knew me very well.
They said,
George,
you're grumpy,
angry,
and short-tempered.
We've got to get you
something to eat
because they knew
that if I had something to eat,
I'd be a little bit
less grumpy and angry,
which was true.
I didn't recognize
I was feeling grumpy
and angry.
They did,
and so the other thing,
so the first thing
that God says,
in a sense,
with the Hebrew,
has this wonderful
double sense.
Is it right for you
to be so angry?
And the other thing is,
do you realize
how thoroughly,
deeply,
completely angry
you are?
Do you realize it?
That's the two senses
of this great,
these three words
in history.
So,
let's try to bring
this whole text
home to us,
to you and me,
now that we sort of
understand the story.
So,
here,
I'm going to do
a simple test
because,
remember I said
how one of the problems
with anger
is that we tend
to think of all
the other people
that it applies to.
So,
imagine,
now you guys
have to figure out
which category
you're in,
okay?
You're driving
home today
and whatever it is,
Apple News
or whatever it is,
but somehow,
you're driving
with somebody,
they get a tweet
and they tell you
what's going on
and they tell you
of some terrible,
stupid,
evil decision
that Donald Trump
made
or Doug Ford
just to be Canadian
and they tell you,
did you hear
the terrible,
Doug,
Trump just did this.
Can you believe it?
Or,
the rest of you,
it's Trudeau.
You're driving home
and they just get
some news announcement
of this terrible,
terrible,
terrible thing
that Trudeau just did.
Now,
that's not the test.
The test is tomorrow
in the afternoon,
there's a news item
to say,
we apologize
for that last newscast.
It didn't happen.
Now,
here's the test.
How do you respond?
Do you say,
oh,
thank goodness
Trump didn't do that.
Thank goodness
he's not as bad
as it sounded.
I'm so relieved.
Or,
you say,
thank goodness
Trudeau didn't do that.
I mean,
he's our prime minister.
I'm glad he didn't do
something like that.
I'm so relieved
that he's not as bad
as I thought he was.
Is that how you respond?
Or,
do you not believe
the news report?
Do you want to hang on
to how bad they were?
If you do not respond
with relief,
you have an anger problem.
You and I
have an anger problem.
Because our anger
at these people
wants us,
we rejoice
that they're bad
and we don't want
to let it go.
we have an anger problem.
Our culture
is very conflicted
about anger.
It's a very,
very common thing
if you go into psychology.
They'll talk about
negative emotions
and positive emotions
and anger
is almost always
a negative emotion.
We
have a very,
we have a great problem
about it
because
we want,
if not for ourselves,
if we think
we have an anger problem
or if we have a,
we're married to somebody
who has an anger problem
or a kid has an anger problem
and our boss
has an anger problem
or a co-worker
has an anger problem,
we want them
to go through
some type of therapy
or some counseling,
maybe take up
Buddhist meditation
or something like that
where they can
get rid of their anger,
it can be taken away.
We have a problem
obviously in our culture
which is being talked
about a lot
but we don't know
what to do about it
that it seems
as if our culture
with all of the social media
that in fact
we get into little tribes
and echo chambers
and it furthers anger.
We have a problem
as I maybe
have just shared with you
in terms of not recognizing
we have problems
with anger
as we describe
our opponents
as being anger driven.
The problem
with the Trump people
is that they're all
filled with anger.
The problem
with the social justice warriors
is they're all
filled with anger.
The problem
with the conservatives
is they're all angry.
The problem
with the liberals
is they're angry
and we see it
as other people
but not ourselves
but we're very,
very confused about it.
So just to get us
thinking back to the text
I want to say something.
The day
they discover
a therapy
or a meditation technique
or a drug
that removes
all anger
from human beings
will be the day
that tyrants
throw a party
and dance a jig.
The day
that somebody
invents a drug
or a therapy
or meditation technique
to take away
all anger
from human beings
will be the day
that tyrants
and oppressors
throw a party
and dance a jig.
If you could
help the first point,
Andrew,
we'll go through
these relatively quickly.
It is good
that the Lord
is slow to anger.
It means
that justice matters.
That's why I said
that if there was
something that could
take away
all anger
from human beings,
tyrants and oppressors
would love it
because we would have
lost our ability
to be concerned
about justice.
It is good
that the Lord
is slow to anger.
It means
that justice
matters.
Many Canadians
complain
that the Christian God
is angry,
an angry God.
Actually,
he's a slow
to anger God
and the slow
to anger
is very,
very,
very important.
The emotion
of anger
is connected,
intimately connected
to our experience
of right and wrong.
It's intimately
connected
to our experience
of right and wrong.
If we had
no anger
at all,
it would mean
that we never
thought that we
came across
things in this world
which are just
wrong.
A case in India,
they all got
convicted of a group
of men that raped
an eight-year-old girl.
If you don't think
that's wrong,
you have a problem.
It's very,
very interesting
that in Eastern
religion,
and it's actually
not a very good
thing in our culture.
This isn't just
dissing them,
but in Eastern cultures
at the end of the day
in the overarching
mythology of whether
it's Hinduism
or Buddhism
is this belief
that everything
ultimately
will become one.
The governing metaphor
is the drop of water
returns to the ocean
and when the drop
of water
returns to the ocean,
the drop of water
ceases to exist.
There's just the ocean
and within that,
there's ultimately
no real right or wrong.
And so,
attempts to do
meditation
or other things
to try to calm
our feelings of anger
on one level,
there's obviously
some things in there
that are good,
but the problem
is it's often
connected with
losing a sense
of right and wrong.
So,
I mean,
the fact of the matter
is that,
and this is beyond this,
we'll talk about this
a little bit next week
because anger's
going to return
at the last part
of Jonah 4.
I mean,
the problem with anger
is that our sense
of right and wrong
is wrong
and we get angry
too much,
we get angry
too little,
we get angry
too easy,
we get angry
about the wrong things,
we get angry
too quickly,
we can't get out
of anger.
There's a whole range
of reasons
by which anger
is wrong,
but God can't
remove our sense
of anger
without removing
our sense
of right and wrong.
And so,
the gospel
is going to try
to reorder
and heal
our sense
of right and wrong
as well as give
this other
very powerful
insight
about what it is
that can maintain
a sense
of right and wrong
but not have us
be so anger driven.
If you could put up
the second point,
that would be
very good.
Notice the key
slow to anger
which is very key
in the whole text.
You can have justice
without mercy
but you cannot
have mercy
without justice.
You can have justice
without mercy.
You just can.
And at the end
of the day,
we can't complain
that something
was unjust.
You know,
you did the crime
and you're going
to pay the penalty
and that's just
the way it is.
You did the crime,
you pay the penalty.
But mercy
is also connected
to a sense
of right and wrong.
You see,
what's at heart
of mercy?
There's obviously
sometimes mercy
can just be
shown towards
misfortune,
but primarily,
mercy is shown
when something
wrong has been
done to you
and you know
that it's wrong
and you want
to temper
your response
of justice
with a sense
of mercy
and compassion
for the other person.
See,
that's why
slow to anger
is so important.
It's giving this hint
and if you go back
and look at verse 2 again
when it describes
the Lord
that he's a gracious
God and merciful,
slow to anger
and abounding
in steadfast love,
is that when you
have the steadfast love,
when you have mercy,
when you have grace,
it doesn't mean
that you no longer
see things that are
right and wrong,
but you realize
that reacting
to something
which is wrong,
there's another response
other than just justice.
There is a response
that involves mercy
and the more
that mercy
and compassion
become important
to you,
it means,
if it's real mercy
and real compassion,
it means that
it will slow down,
it will temper
your response
of anger
at the injustice.
If you could put up
the third slide,
to offer mercy
is to offer
to personally
bear a cost.
To offer mercy
is to offer
to personally
bear a cost.
And that's very,
very hard
for all human beings
but increasingly hard
for our culture
which is so confused
about anger
and confused
about even the way
to move forward.
Back,
my first five kids
I had two boys,
a girl,
two boys
and my boys
were boys
and if they were,
if we had three of them
sitting at the back seat
of the van,
at some point in time
one of the boys
would do this
or do this
or move over
into the other person's space
and the other boy
would do this
or do this
and before you know it
you have lots of elbows
and stuff like that.
And there's other times
when you give them a push,
push, push, push,
punch, punch,
whatever,
you get the picture.
So one of the things
I would say to my kids
all the time
is I said,
we have a choice.
Do we want to live
in a house
where we're punching
each other
and calling each other names
or do we want to live
in a house
where there's some sense
of peace?
And the only way
there's going to be
any sense of peace
is if one of you
doesn't retaliate.
If one of you
lets the other one win.
Otherwise there's no peace.
Somebody has to be the one
who'll just say,
okay,
you hit me nine times,
I hit you eight,
you win.
And if there's nobody
willing to pay that cost,
then it just keeps going
and it escalates.
One of the wonderful things
about South Africa
when Nelson Mandela
became the head
of that country
was that Nelson Mandela
understood the power
and importance
of mercy
and forgiveness.
And he knew
that unless
there were people
who were willing
to just say
we are not going
to pursue justice
to the end.
Doesn't mean
we're not saying
what they did
was right,
but unless there's mercy
there will be no peace
in our society.
He was a very,
very great statesman,
still viewed
as a great statesman,
probably one of the
greatest statesmen
of the 20th century.
And he understood
the importance
of mercy.
But you understand,
and he himself
was a living embodiment
of it,
he wasn't just
some ivory tower rich guy
who'd never had
anything wrong done
to him,
and goes off
and shows mercy
to people who,
well,
these people hurt
this group,
I'm going to show you mercy.
This people hurt
that group,
I'm going to show you mercy.
That's not mercy.
That's cheap grace.
That's telling everybody
else to suck it up.
Nelson Mandela
spent time in jail.
He was oppressed.
He knew what it was like
to be oppressed.
He knew what injustice
was like.
And unless you are
willing to pay
the cost
of showing mercy,
which is going to involve
something like forgiveness,
well,
it's not mercy.
Now,
just,
here's a bit
of a shocking thing.
So,
the story of Jonah,
in some ways,
it posits
a bit of a
riddle.
see,
the fact of the matter
is,
is that many of us,
if we went back in time,
we would probably
side with Jonah.
Because Jonah
was right
on one level,
that what the Lord
did
to Nineveh
wasn't just.
Because Nineveh
was terrible.
They were a terrible,
oppressive people.
I think I shared
with you last week
or the week before,
22 years,
23 years
after this,
when Nineveh's
gotten over
their repentance
and gone back
to their old ways,
they literally,
literally
practiced genocide.
And in
722 BC,
the Assyrians
invaded
Israel,
the northern kingdom
of Israel,
and they carried
all the people
away.
Those 10 tribes
of Israel
have been lost
forever from history.
they literally
practiced genocide.
And so the text
has a bit of a riddle,
and it has a bit
of a riddle
that only the gospel,
only the rest
of the revelation
of the Bible
can actually start
to help us
to understand.
Just one thing
is that what Jonah
didn't know
is that the Lord,
he's slow to anchor,
but he's still
concerned with justice.
He stayed
the judgment
on Assyria,
but eventually
when they returned
to their evil ways,
the judgment
upon them
for their horrendous
acts of genocide
and violence
were in fact judged
by him,
and Assyria
would later on
disappear from history.
But
what's going on
in Jonah's heart?
Well,
if you could put up
the next point,
Andrew,
that would be
very helpful.
your enmity
to the Lord
is always present.
See,
one of the problems
with anger,
one of the many
problems with anger,
is that not only
does it make
a very,
very quick road
to hatred,
and as I use
my example
about whether
you heard tomorrow
that Trump
and or Trudeau
were not as bad
as the news reports,
and we don't want
to let go
of our hatred
and anger
and desire
for them
to be humiliated,
and we don't want
to let go of that,
and it reveals
we have an anger
problem,
is that not only
does anger
quickly take us
to hatred,
but it deepens
hatred,
it nurtures
hatred,
it gives oxygen
to hatred,
but the other
thing that it does
is it creates
within you
a sense of
God-like,
God-like
virtue
and towering
over others.
That's what
anger always does.
You feel
God-like,
and you
like it.
I like it.
The Bible
describes
that every
human being
is at enmity
with God.
In Genesis
chapter 3,
when we chose
that we didn't
like the idea
that God
was God
and we were
not,
and we wanted
to be just
like him,
and that's
the beginning,
it's the
ur-sin,
the root
of all sin
is a desire
to no longer
love God
or trust God
or want to be
in submission
to God
or just
allow God
to be God.
We want to be
just like God,
in fact,
maybe even better,
and so we resent
his authority,
we resent the fact
that he is the creator,
we resent the fact
that he is infant
and we are finite,
we resent the fact
that we live in time
and he does not
live in time,
we resent these things,
and it is such a
common thing
of our experience
that we often
don't even realize
that we have this
as a low-level
condition in our lives.
It's exactly like gravity.
None of us experience
gravity right now
or we don't feel
like gravity exists,
yet it's just so common
to us that we no longer
think about it.
And the Bible describes
that Jonah
and every human being,
you and me,
that we have a problem
with enmity against God.
And we are people
who always need
God's mercy.
I am not better
than anybody else.
I am one
who is completely
and utterly dependent
upon the mercy of God.
If you could put up
this almost last slide,
Andrew.
On the cross,
Jesus bore the full cost
of the Lord's mercy to you.
Remember I said,
all mercy always involves
bearing a personal cost.
If you forgive the person
who ripped you off
when you bought your vehicle,
if you show mercy to them,
it means you're going to have
to absorb some of the lost money.
Maybe not all of it,
but some of it.
There's a cost to be borne.
If you don't get the vengeance
which you desire,
you have to give up something
when you do that.
You have to give up
your right for vengeance,
your desire for vengeance.
You have to bear
the personal cost.
And you do it
because at the end of the day,
mercy is so worth it.
Forgiveness is so worth it.
But there's a cost
to be borne.
And it helps us
to understand why it is
that Jesus had to die
on the cross.
Why it is
that in Matthew
and in Luke,
Jesus is described
as the true
and greater Jonah.
He is the true
and greater Jonah
not only because
he didn't just spend
three days
in a great aquatic beast.
He spent three days
in death
and in hell.
He's a true
and greater Jonah
not only because
he can speak
the words of God
but he is the word of God
and he speaks
the very, very true
words of God
in everything that he does.
And he's the true
and greater Jonah
because in fact
what he does
with his life
is to make real
to us
a mercy
that every single
human being needs
because we are
at enmity with God.
And he takes that
when we understand
that there is a price
to be paid
to show mercy
and if God
is to show mercy
to us
he has to absorb
the cost of that
and the cost
of him showing mercy
to you and me
is what we see
when we see Jesus
dying on the cross.
It is the cost
of mercy
to you
and to me.
If you could put up
the final point
which is just a prayer
I'm going to invite
you all to stand.
Every week
in the mailing
I do a blog
I do a growing
in grace
and I also try
to put the scripture
text to a prayer
and today
if you look at this
you'll see both
part of Jonah chapter 2
but you'll also
see James
as well
which is a reflection
upon Jonah
I mean Jonah chapter 4
verse 2
and I put both
of those together
in the form of a prayer.
You see it's
it says we're gripped
with the gospel
as we come to understand
that I experience
enmity towards God
and enmity towards other
in my life
without realizing it
in the same way
I experience gravity
without often thinking about it
when I begin to understand
that my whole
and only standing
before the Lord
is because
at great cost
to himself
he showed mercy
to me
as that story
begins to grip me
that it's not
as if God
gave me a pass
because I'm Canadian
or because
I'm nice
or because I'm me
but he
he didn't forsake justice
but he responded
in the justice
that I'm deserved
in a different way
he responded
with mercy
in such a way
that justice
was still maintained
by paying
the cost
of mercy
and the cost
of the punishment
in his own person
as that story
grips me
it helps me
to understand
why I need
to grow
in mercy
and compassion
without losing
a sense of right
and wrong
to temper
the anger
of my life
that it will not
consume me
or take me over
and I've tried
to put it
in the words
of this prayer
so if the Lord
has touched your heart
if you would pray
this with me
if you don't pray it
that's fine
it's up to you
but let's pray
this prayer together
Lord
you are full
of grace
and mercy
slow to anger
and abounding
in steadfast love
you take no delight
in the death
of a sinner
but desire
that we turn
from our wrongdoing
and live
please bring
the good news
of who Jesus is
and what he did
for me
deep into my heart
so that I will be
slow to speak
slow to anger
and quick to listen
in Jesus' name
Amen
Father
pour out the Holy Spirit
upon us
that we might be
gripped by the gospel
and so gripped
by the gospel
that we learn
the importance
of mercy
and compassion
and without losing
a sense of right
and wrong
healing our sense
of right and wrong
that we would look
at the world
with compassion
and the importance
to show mercy
and to be described
as a person
of mercy
deliver us from the lie
help us to love
the truth
and be filled
with mercy
and we ask this
in the name of Jesus
Amen
God bless you
Amen
amen
thank you
thank siz