Jonah 4:5

John 4:5

I. Jonah sat in his booth, dark and moody plunged into deep distress by the very things which brought relief and hope to the great city. The reasons for his displeasure were manifold. He was jealous, with a needless jealousy, for the honour of God. His own reputation as a prophet was touched. His country was in danger from the Assyrian power, which he had hoped was now to be utterly humbled and smitten. The course of Providence had seemed right to him, although dark, while justice had held the awful scales and looked at the glittering sword. But now when mercy fairer form than justice had sheathed the sword, and thrown vast forgiveness into the scale to outweigh all terrors and penalties, he sees, with jaundiced eye, the whole course of Providence running in a wrong direction. "The times are out of joint." Sorrows wait for him and his. Surely the Lord is not taking the best plan.

II. Then came the prayer. This verse shows us that his "displeasure" and "grief" were just such as come to men amid the reverses and thwartings of life. It was the sighing and fretting of a wounded spirit amid "things," but not the personal and conscious revolt of the soul against the living God. He prays that he may die. (i) There is a certain wild majesty in this desire from which we can hardly withhold the tribute of our admiration. He wanted to die there and then. This wounded spirit, realizing its immortality the more amid change and adversity, rises disdainfully above the mortal pathway, above the whole round of earthly toil and care, ambition and its reverses, honour and its shadows, joy and its close attendant grief, beats its wings in the higher air, and asks to be liberated for the last flight, up into immortality and heaven. (ii) This prayer shows weakness as well as strength. There is in it, after all, something of a child's waywardness. "Things have gone all awry, and nothing can ever be right again. Let me get away from such a disjointed world."

III. We can hardly doubt that Jonah thought of Elijah in offering the selfsame prayer, and that, in his own mind, he justified the presentation of it by the force of so great an example. Thus "the evil that men do," even in their prayers, "lives after them." Great men, when they err, are great tempters. A prophet can beguile a prophet.

A. Raleigh, The Story of Jonah,p. 252.

Reference: John 4:5. W. G. Blaikie, Homiletic Magazine,vol. vi., p. 358.