Jonah 4:10-11 - “But the Lord said, ‘You have had pity on the plant for which you have not laboured, nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night, and should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right and their left – and much livestock?’” “But the Lord said, ‘You have had pity on the plant for which you have not laboured, nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night…” In our last devotion we looked at how Jonah preferred death when the Lord removed the plant that offered him shade from the heat of the sun. We looked at how the Lord asked him whether he had a right to think the way he did about the plant and how Jonah had answered in the affirmative, adding that he even had the right to be angry to the point of preferring death to life. Today we’re going to look at the Lord’s response to Jonah – a thought-provoking response that left him
Jonah 4:8b-9 – “Then he wished death for himself, and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” 9 Then God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” And he said, “It is right for me to be angry, even to death!” Then he wished death for himself, and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” The heat of the day was undoubtedly quite unbearable, but it’s sad to know that the only option Jonah could think of to deal with the situation he was in was that of a defeatist. He could have done other things like returning to Nineveh and taken shelter from the heat; he could have tried building another shelter or something more creative but instead, he wished he could end it all and die. How often we’ve either heard of someone talk this way or more closer to home, have we thought this way? Instead of making every attempt to change the situation one is in, the only seemingly available solution is to end one’s life. We know that this is not the solution