Useful Bible Studies > Jonah Commentary > chapter 4

Jonah’s love for the plant is like God’s love for guilty people

Jonah 4:10

We might expect that God would be angry with Jonah’s bold reply. However, in fact, God seems to approve both of his attitude toward the plant, and his answer. Jonah is starting to learn the lesson that God is teaching him.

By his anger, Jonah is actually expressing his love, care and sympathy for the plant that died. In verse 11, God will compare that with God’s own love, care and sympathy towards the people in Nineveh. So, in that way, Jonah is now behaving much like God behaves.

Love, care and sympathy are powerful (Song of Solomon 8:6; 1 Corinthians 13:4-7). They cause us to show the strongest possible reactions; those reactions can even be matters of life and death (John 15:13). For Jonah, his reaction was fierce anger at the loss of the plant. For God, his reaction was to forgive Nineveh’s people when they turned from their wicked behaviour (3:10).

Jonah genuinely loved that plant, although he only knew it for a single day. It was not a plant that he had carefully looked after in his garden for many months or years. It just appeared and then disappeared in a day.

That was very unlike the love that God showed to Nineveh’s people. God created them, even as he created all people. He gave them their lives; he provided their food each day (Psalm 136:25). He provided them a good place in which to live (Acts 17:26).

When they turned away from God into wicked behaviour, God desperately wanted to help them. In his love, he wanted to send his servant, Jonah the prophet (holy man), to speak to them (1:2). Even when God had to declare his judgment against them, he still loved them (3:4).

So of course God forgave them when they turned from their evil behaviour. God’s love for them was much too powerful for him to do anything else.

Next part: God's great love for all people (Jonah 4:11)

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