I want us to appreciate the context from God’s perspective. We know from Jonah 1.1-2 that the Ninevites were bad folks: Jonah 1.1-2 (ESV): 1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” What is sin? A sin is when someone does something that is contrary to God’s nature. The Ninevites were doing things that were offensive to God – literally contrary to his nature. And God was offended. That’s the important part: God. Was. Offended.

We don’t know exactly what the Ninevites’ sins were, but we can say at least 2 things that are true of all sin. First, their sins were evil. To sin identifies you as the enemy of what is good. Sin is nothing short of an incarnation of evil. Second, their sins were personal. Because God is the Lord of goodness, to do something evil is a personal affront to Him.

Connect with that for a second. God looked at what was going on in Nineveh and He determined: “It’s not good. It is against who I am.” Where do you see this kind of feeling in your life? Where do you feel: “This is not the way it should be?” or  “What you are doing is offending me!”

How does God respond when He gets offended?

In the book of Jonah we see God respond to these personal offenses in two ways: 1) He pursues the offenders. What do you normally do when you get offended? If you are like me, maybe you’ll try to find a way to hurt them like they hurt you. If you get cold angry, maybe you try to hurt them by taking away the privilege of relationship with you. You withdraw until they have seen the error of their ways and come groveling back to you. God had every right to do that: stand back and wait until the Ninevites got their act together and seek Him. Instead, God pursued them by sending Jonah to them. God did not withhold the privilege of relationship from the Ninevites until they came to him, but He came to them to try and reconcile their differences. 2) He relents. If you get hot angry, maybe you seek to hurt those who offend you by making some attack against them to make them know how offended you are. God had a right to that: to pour out wrath on those doing evil. Instead God relented. Somebody is going to say: “He only relented after they repented.” But God relented at first by not striking them down immediately, and choosing to pursue them through Jonah in the first place. Without God relenting immediately, the whole story of Jonah would not have happened. The point for us is this: God was slow to anger.

What was in God’s heart that helped Him pursue and relent from his anger? Compassion. We can see this through God’s speech at the end of Ch4.

10 And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

The word “compassion” shows up in different ways in different translations: pity (ESV), have concern for (NASB) , care about (CSB). But what is this compassion in God’s heart which seems to, in some sense, overrule his anger? Maybe the best picture of this compassion outside of God’s relenting on Nineveh is Jesus’ prayer over Jerusalem. This is recorded in Matt 23 and Luke 19. Luke says that Jesus looks over the city and weeps for it because he knows that bad  things are coming to that city and he is sad about it. Matthew’s account adds that Jesus names Jerusalem as the city which kills prophets (as opposed to Nineveh who repented when a prophet was sent to it), but still Jesus cries out that He “would have gathered [Jerusalem’s] children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Jesus knows that Jerusalem has done serious wrong (killed prophets, basically rejecting God’s word). But within days of crying over this rebellious city, Jesus sacrificed himself to restore Jerusalem as well as all the people of God. How could Jesus suffer such injustice? Because he was more concerned about God’s people than what they had done.

Many of us conceive of God’s grace to his people as special outlier in God’s otherwise angry character. But let’s remember God’s compassion on the lost people of Nineveh, as well as Nineveh’s cows! God had compassion His enemies cows!

In order to transform our anger, we must seek a heart which is more focused on the person in front of us than on any wrongs we have suffered, or any circumstances we face.

In the next post, we will look at some hands on ways we can slow ourselves down enough to reach out to people who offended us.