In Jonah 4:4-8 we see that it is often easier to save a wicked city than it is to change a hard heart. I love this questioning of the Lord here. God is trying to get Jonah to look at where his heart is at. So what does Jonah do? Well, he goes for a walk up a hill that overlooks the city. Based on verse 5 I’m of the opinion that Jonah waited there 40 days as that is how long he had told them they had until they were destroyed. So Jonah finds a good spot to overlook the fireworks!
And while on that hill overlooking Nineveh God prepared a blessing for Jonah in verse 6 as it got hot, so the Lord prepared a plant to bless Jonah. It says here that God saw that Jonah was in misery. Did Jonah deserve to be blessed? No way! His attitude stunk; he had no compassion for those guys; in fact, you might say that he wanted them torched, but he did not want to be scorched! So what does the Lord do with Jonah? Well, He blesses him with comfort when Jonah least deserved it. Why? To show Jonah that grace is never shed upon the deserving, only upon the undeserving! This is the first time Jonah has been happy in this book, and it’s over a gourd!
But that happiness was short as in verse 7 God prepares a worm to destroy what He had provided to bless Jonah. Why? To show Jonah that he ought not value the temporal above the eternal. Jonah was caught up in earning God’s blessing, but had he done anything to earn the plant that provided him shelter? No, did Jonah plant the vine and water it? No, he just enjoyed the benefits of it. Folks, God is going to strip away from us the things that we value above Him.
Now in verse 8 we see if you are out in the hot sun and a scorching wind kicks up to where you start growing faint, what would you do? You would MOVE! That’s what God does here: He sends this wind upon Jonah to get him to move. But it wasn’t a change of physical location that Jonah needed, it was a change of heart! Jonah should have been down in the city ministering to all the new believers, but his heart was not in the right place.
So God prepares three things for Jonah:
•A plant to reveal His heart of grace!
•A worm to reveal the heart of Jonah!
•An east wind to get Jonah to move from his heart to God’s heart!
In all of this we see that God was doing more than preparing things; He was preparing Jonah!
Jonah wishes for physical death when he should have been dying it to himself spiritually! Oh folks, if we just change a few words around here with Jonah’s statement, we would have it: “It is better for me to die to myself so that I might live!”