Allergic to God: Angry at God

Because here's how it reads if you're going through just chapters one through three. God calls Jonah to go and preach this message to the enemies of Israel. Jonah runs away. God goes and scoops him up by means of a giant fish, right? Recommissions him. Jonah goes to Nineveh like God told him to. He preaches the shortest sermon ever, eight words to the greatest effect ever. 120,000 people repent from their sin, and God is merciful. Amen, we're all done. And then you get to chapter four. Like why didn't we quit while we're ahead?

You know, we find Jonah here at the beginning of chapter four after all those events, and he is really angry. You can see this in four ways, just in that little passage we read there.

First is his face. Now in Hebrew, it says this: his face became evil with the evil he saw. Man, that is rough. I mean, that's angry, angry, right?

Second is where he's sitting. Jonah's got a lawn chair. Okay, maybe it doesn't say that in Hebrew, but he's sitting over this hill looking over the city and he is saying, "It's a great day to die, right?" Like he is waiting for fire from heaven to come down and destroy the enemies of Israel.

Third thing is Jonah's prayer. This is a remarkable prayer in verses two to three. I imagine Jonah praying this through clenched teeth. Like, "This is what I knew would happen because you're so gracious, so kind, so loving, right?" Like, you could see Jonah is just angry and remembers—we've been walking through this. Jonah is not afraid of what God's going to do to him. Jonah is not afraid of what the Assyrians are going to do to him. Jonah is afraid of what God is actually going to do for the enemies of Israel, that he's actually going to be kind and gracious and loving and forgiving. That's why he ran away.

And finally, his conclusion. This is what Jonah says:

Take my life from me.

Now literally in Hebrew, it says, "Take my soul from me." I mean, that's some of the strongest self-destructive language you'll find anywhere in the Bible. This isn't just angry. This is rage. This is really angry. This is the "should quit while we're ahead" ending to Jonah as we turn to chapter four.

And this is what it tells us—I just want to make sure you catch this: it's possible to be a person who has been around the things of God, who knows lots of God's Word, who knows all the right things to say, has the Scripture in your head, and to be deeply allergic to God, deeply opposed to God and His purposes, deeply at odds with God. But the fact that this book doesn't end with chapter three tells us something. It tells us that God's purpose all along is not project Nineveh, it's project Jonah. This book is all about God's pursuit of this one rebel prophet's heart and God's pursuit of your heart and my heart. That this is what God is after.

Three Aspects of Anger

We're going to look at anger this morning through three headings. I want to look at reading anger. I want to look at the roots of anger. And I want to look at the remedy for anger. Three R's delivered up special for you this morning. I work hard on that stuff.

So reading anger—that's a strange phrase. But what do I mean by that? We know you and I are people who know a lot about anger. We're angry people who live in a very angry world. Do you ever feel this way, that it's exhausting but it's absolutely necessary to be angry? Like this is sort of what it is to be in this world right now. Somebody tweeted this recently: "Being angry all the time is exhausting and corrosive, but not being angry feels morally irresponsible somehow."

Second, it's bad for us. We all know this. Anger is bad for us. Ongoing anger raises your blood pressure. It makes you at risk for a heart attack. It's bad for you.

But third, anger feels impossible to stop. You know, I admit it: I'm an angry person. I wouldn't necessarily say it's my favorite emotion. But I grew up in a family where we didn't do emotions very much. And so anger is my most go-to one, right? Like you're sad, you get angry. Like you're hurt, you get angry. It just works. It's very, very effective. And as such for me, I'll just be honest, it's hard for me to stop being angry. It's hard for me in traffic not to be angry. It's hard for me when I'm in an argument or I feel stupid or I feel vulnerable not to get angry. It feels like if somebody says, "Stop it," I'm like, "I can't. I can't."

What do we do with our anger? Some of y'all grew up on Mr. Rogers. Anybody else grow up on Mr. Rogers, right? I love how he puts it. He says this:

What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so mad you could bite? When the whole world seems oh, so wrong and nothing you do seems very right. What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough?

That's a good question. What do we do with our anger? And I think sometimes our goal—my goal at least—is just to be less angry, right?

So we try practices like counting or meditation—those little techniques—but our goal is to be less angry. But I want you to notice what God does with Jonah in his anger. God asks Jonah a question. Now anytime God asks somebody a question in Scripture, it is never for God's benefit, right? God is not like, "I need to do a little investigation here. Not sure what's going on here." Anytime God asks a question, it's for the benefit of that person. He's trying to get Jonah to do something. He's trying to make Jonah ask the question.

And he asked this question: Do you have a good reason to be angry? In other translations, you have a right to be angry. What does that question mean? Now you could hear that as a rebuke, but I'm not sure that that's a rebuke. Anger is a very flexible term. If you read the Psalms, there are all kinds of angry voices in the Psalms saying all kinds of things. There's frustration anger. There's sadness anger. There's disappointment with God anger. There's wrestling with God anger. When I read the Psalms, I feel like there's an invitation here for us to bring our anger before him—to wrestle with it.

Listen to God's question: Do you have a good reason to be angry? I think this is what God is doing. God is inviting Jonah to take a look on the inside, to understand and see his own heart. I think that our anger is likewise an invitation for us from the Lord to look on the inside. In other words, anger is a terrible end in itself but it is a decent guide. That's my main idea for today: anger is a terrible end but it's a decent guide.

Anger as a Guide

What does that mean? It means that with Jonah, God is trying to get us to look at our anger and ask some questions. What's behind our anger? What's under our anger? Where is our anger coming from? It's a clue to follow. You get to play private investigator with your own heart. It could tell you a lot about yourself.

If you want to know how to do that, I've got two things for you. Number one is asking God to help you. In the Bible, we hear over and over that God is the searcher of hearts. We also hear that a person's heart is like deep waters, and only a person of understanding can draw that out. It's like the depths of a very deep sea, really dark, hard to know what's down there. Ask God, "Lord, you're the searcher of hearts. Help me know myself."

And second is this: tracing your anger to its roots. You might know what wisteria is. Wisteria is this vine, and we planted one in our backyard when we first moved into our house. We had this awesome trellis and this thing growing over it. Every spring around this time, wisteria produces these gorgeous flowers. They look like clusters of grapes. And that's about the best and only good thing about wisteria because the rest of it is just this unbelievable vine.

Wisteria grows at such an alarming rate and with such strength that if you don't watch out, wisteria will pull down your house. It can tear down a brick wall. If you go out in the country, driving around, you see those vines with the purple grape-looking things on them. That's wisteria killing trees. That's not pretty. That's destruction.

So we decided last year, "Hey, we're going to get rid of the wisteria and change our deck. I'm going to build something new up there." So I got to kill the wisteria. I spent a whole weekend doing this, cutting this thing down—tons of branches, tons of leaves, big mess. But when I'm done with that, I've got to cut all the way to the ground. I've only just begun.

If you know anything about wisteria, the thing about wisteria is it has as many branches underground—the roots—as it does above the ground. This is frankly amazing. So I've got to figure out a way to kill this thing. When I cut it to the ground, all over my yard, places like 30 feet away, little shoots start coming up through my grass. I've got to kill it not just there, but all over the place. So I try to dig it out. Truth be told, the best $25 I spent last year, I bought a flamethrower. It attaches to a propane tank. My kids can attest—I love this thing. I burned the heck out of that stuff. I tried Roundup. I've burned. I've dug. I've poisoned. And you know, I'm sure that I am not done with my battle with wisteria. I think it's going to fight me for years to come.

In other words, getting to the roots and dealing with the roots is really hard. I think that's also true with regard to our anger. A lot of times we're people who want to deal with what's above the ground.

So you cut it back and you're like, I'm done. Right? You're in an argument, and your anger flashes. Suddenly you ask for forgiveness and you think you're done. When the reality is it goes way deep. You got to go down to the roots to deal with it. Otherwise, it's gonna keep popping up in different parts of your life.

This is learning to read our anger. What does God do to get Jonah to trace his anger to the root, to learn to read his anger? He asks questions. And this is what I really push at you: beginning to ask questions of yourself about your anger. You could journal about this stuff. You could say, "Hey, is there something too important to me right now? Is this thing too important to me? Is that why I'm angry about it? Is this something that I think I have to have? Is that why I'm angry? Is there some kind of blockage in my life? Like, I can't get through to this other thing that I really, really want. That's why I'm angry."

Asking questions of your own heart is one of the ways we learn to read our anger, to trace the roots.

The Two Roots of Jonah's Anger

So what's at the root of Jonah's anger? And what's at the root so often of our anger against the Lord? Well, two things that I want to show you. I think Jonah is angry about what God does. And Jonah is angry about who God is.

Angry about what God does or what God doesn't do. Here's the first root of Jonah's anger. He has mistaken priorities for God. He's got like a list for God. He's like, "God, I got all these things that I want you to do. And you're not doing the things on the list."

His anger came in part from the fact that Jonah can't control God. Jonah runs from God in this book because Jonah can't run God. God's not doing what Jonah wants.

You know, isn't this what we sing about in our church every Sunday? We sing all these songs. These great people up here lead us in singing songs about God being our comfort and our hope and those are great. I love God as my comfort and my hope. But truth be told, if I'm just really honest with you all, God sometimes scares me. God doesn't stay in His lane. God doesn't always do what I want him to do. And I can't make God do what I want him to do. God is never on my timetable. He's always doing other things. He does things I can't understand. I can't manipulate him. I can't control him and in that sense for me, just being real honest, God isn't safe all the time.

I think we all feel this way. I wish that there are things I could do to get God to do what I want God to do. Like, okay, if like a checklist, if I check off these items, God, you're going to bless me, right? If I pray more, God will protect my kids from the bad stuff. If I give, God will fix my marriage. If I serve God in the church, He's going to bring somebody along who's going to love me. Finally love me. If I give myself to the Lord, He will give me a good life. That would make things so much easier.

In other words, here's what we do with the Lord. We come to Him with my will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That's what we want from the Lord. That's what we bring to Him. Lord, my will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Many of the conversations that I have with people I meet with in our church are people who want to talk to their pastor about the ways that they are disappointed with God. They're frustrated with God. God hasn't held up his end of the deal. Those are all code words for being really angry. They're really angry because God doesn't do the God things that we want God to do.

I want you to picture an old fashioned teeter totter. Do they still have those on playgrounds? I'm not sure they do. I think it's like insurance liability, but I grew up with those. So what you do is you get on one end, you have your friend on the other end, and you take turns, right? You're going up and down, and up and down. And then when you want to be really mean to somebody, you know what you did? You jump off. That's what we did. You jump off. And the other person—wham—they hit the ground and their teeth are shot, you know, like, it's just bad, right?

But this is what many of us feel with God. Like we've been going up and down and God's doing all the God things and I've done my things and God jumped off. Wham, you hit the ground and you're like, what is that about?

Elizabeth Elliot, the writer, she retells this old legend. Now, let me tell you, this sounds like it's in the Bible. This is not in the Bible. So don't write me and ask me where this is in the Bible. This is not in the Bible. It's called the Legend of the Stones.

Here's how it goes. One day Jesus is walking with His disciples and He asks each of them to pick up a rock and carry it for Him. So they all pick up a rock. Here's Peter. Peter picks up a rather small stone. John picks up a bigger one.

Jesus leads them to the top of a mountain, then commanded that the stones be turned into bread. Disciples are all about this, right? They were hungry by this time. So of course, he gave them permission to eat the bread. Peter, who got a little bitty rock, carried it up was like, got a little bit. John got a lot. So John shared with Peter.

So on another occasion, the same Jesus took his same disciples for a walk again and asked them, would you pick up a rock and carry it for me? This time you can imagine what Peter did, right? Pick up a big stone. But this time Jesus did not take them to the top of the mountain. He took them to the river. And as they stood on the bank, looking with questions in their minds to Him, He said, Take your rocks and throw them into the river, which they did at once in obedience to His command.

Then they looked at Him waiting expectantly for what was going to happen. Nothing happened. They waited. They watched, nothing happened. And Jesus with great compassion looked on these disciples whom he loved and said, For whom did you carry that stone? Do you get it?

See, the parable reveals that so often, we have a my will be done on earth as it is in heaven with regard to our God. Like I've been doing all the things and you didn't hold up your end of the deal. And now I am really angry. You owe me. I waited till marriage. I didn't cheat the system. I trained up a child in the way that they should go. I've been carrying this for you. I thought we had a deal and it feels like God jumped off the seesaw. And the older brother types—we are really angry about it. That's one of the roots of our anger at God.

Who God Is

I think the other one goes like this. We're not so much angry about what God has done, but who God is and this one's a lot deeper. Let me show you. Look at what Jonah says here in his prayer. Something goes something like this: I knew it. I knew it. I knew that you were so compassionate and kind. This is why I ran away. This is why I didn't want to go to the Assyrians. I knew you were going to forgive them. And again, here's Jonah. He's so angry about this. You're so gracious, right? Like, this is how Jonah feels about God.

Now one of the things that I want you to notice is that Jonah is quoting another part of the Old Testament. He is quoting from Exodus chapter 34. This is one of the most famous passages in all of the Old Testament. If you were a Hebrew, you had this memorized, guarantee. This is the passage where God causes all of His glory to be paraded in front of Moses. And there's these words that are said about who God is:

The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth, who keeps loving kindness for thousands, forgives iniquity, transgression and sin, yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation. — Exodus 34:6-7

Everybody knows this one. This is like the statement about who God is in the Old Testament. But Jonah misquotes that passage. Jonah misquotes it, he leaves out a part.

Some of you are old enough to remember like me, the old Superman cartoons. They had a title or tagline for Superman. This is how it went. It had three parts. You ready? He's faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Dude, you are on this morning, right? Y'all know this. A bunch of dorks here this morning with me, right? Y'all know you're superheroes. But anyway, so imagine I'm talking about Superman. And I'm like faster than a speeding bullet able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. You'd be like what? You don't think he's more powerful than a locomotive? See, it's by leaving that out, that I'd be saying something is deficient in Superman.

And by leaving out a phrase from Exodus 34:6, Jonah saying something is very deficient about his God. He leaves out two words. Listen again: the Lord the Lord compassionate, gracious, slow to anger abounding in loving kindness. Here's what Jonah leaves out—and truth. And truth. Yeah, God, you're gracious. Yeah, you're full of mercy and loving kindness. Yeah, you forgive inequities, but you are not about the truth.

You may not realize this, Jonah's father is introduced in the first part of this book: Jonah, son of Amatai, which means truth in Hebrew. Jonah is all about what is true. And here Jonah is saying, God, if you were true, you would punish our enemies. You wouldn't just sweep their sins under the rug. You would see the cruelty, the injustice, and you would do something about it because you are just and true. And he can't handle it. Jonah cannot handle this.

Imagine the scenario. Now this is a hard one. So hang in with me. God forbid this happened. But let's say, last year, we'll say pick a date, May 12. Something horrible crime is committed against someone that you love dearly.

Somebody close to you—a son, daughter, a brother, sister—somebody who's really, really important in your life. And now you're walking through a year later, all the charges have been filed, and there's a case going on, and you're having to go and relive all the pain of that walking through the case. And then one night, in the middle of the night, you get a call from the judge, and the judge calls you and says, "Hey, you know, look, I've spoken with the defendant and he wants to come by your house for a beer tomorrow. And he's willing to offer you apologies for what may or may not have occurred on the night of May 12. I want you to call up a press conference and just say, we're letting bygones be bygones. We're gonna let this one go."

Now, how would you feel about that judge? You'd be like, "There is no truth or justice in the world if that's really how you expect me to behave. This is somebody I love. How can you do that?"

And yet, even if that was happening, you could still say, "Well, there's a God in heaven. He's the God of all justice. He will put everything right. In the end, everything will be right."

Except for if you imagine this nightmare scenario that was Jonah's. It's God who's the judge, and the God of all the universe calls you up and says, "You know what, I just want you to have a beer with this person and let bygones be bygones."

And Jonah's like, "You're asking me to do what? You want me to go and just hear the apology—the half-hearted apology of our enemies—and we're just gonna let this go? How can you be true? How can God of all the universe be true?" And if that were you, like Jonah, you would want to run away from him. This is not okay. This is what we're seeing here.

Jonah's Snapshot of God

Jonah has a snapshot of God in his mind. He's got a picture like he pulls it out of his pocket. "This is who my God is."

Exodus 34

"This is what I see. How do these go together? How can God be true? How does this match?"

It's not—and I want to make sure you know this—it's sort of like Jonah's deconstructing. Let's use that word. Jonah's deconstructing, and it's not that his faith is crumbling. It's that he had a faulty view of who God is. God is bigger even than Jonah imagines. And so even though Exodus 34 is still true, he's like, "I don't get it. I don't get who you are in this scenario. And I don't know what to do with this."

The truth of the matter is that our anger at God—let's use a nicer word, our disappointment with God. Let's use another nice word, frustration with God, because we don't want to say we're angry, right? A lot of times it is rooted in this snapshot that we have. We're like, "God, this is how you're supposed to be, and this doesn't match up. This doesn't make any sense."

And so this is why God comes to him and asks him a question: "Jonah, do you have a good reason to be angry?" What is God doing? He's helping Jonah go inside and see his heart, and he's inviting Jonah into a deeper relationship with him.

I want to ask about you this morning. Your frustration with God, your disappointment with God—you're looking at the events of your life in this world, and you're holding up this snapshot, you're like, "This is not who I thought you were. This is not what I thought you were."

Maybe, like with Jonah, God is inviting you to take another step this morning to deal with not just what you thought, but who the real God is.

The Remedy for Our Anger

You know, it doesn't fit. We're angry people, but God has provided a remedy for our anger. And I want to be careful with that word "remedy" because remedy can sound like, you know, patching up a bike tube on your bicycle like, "Oh, it's patched and we're ready to go and everything's back to normal."

I don't want to make this sound like one and done. In dealing with our relationship with the Lord, it's complicated. So remedy, I'm talking about going back over and over again and bringing our anger before the Lord and asking God—who's the searcher of hearts—to search our hearts.

See, what angry Jonah doesn't understand is that anger is so often blind. We can't see.

So let me show you this first: Angry Jonah is blind to the fact that trying to control God is sin. The desire to control God is a desire to be God. An angry me and angry you—we're blind to the fact that our trying to control God is also sin. But the desire to control God is the desire to be God.

Second, angry Jonah is blind to the fact that his desire for justice for the baddies also has to include Jonah, right? If you want God to punish the bad people, that includes you. One of my sons said this—it's a Radiohead song called "Karma Police," right? Angry you and me are blind to the fact that our desire for justice and God to punish the baddies also has to include us. If you want God to punish the bad people, that includes you.

Third, angry Jonah is blind to the fact that he can only see right now, like this present moment. If Jonah can't see God's justice, then God must not be just. But God is playing the long game and you and me, we can only see what's right in front of us right now. If we can't see God being just, surely he must not be just. But God is playing the long game.

Jesus Christ: The Answer to Our Anger

You know, in Jesus Christ, we see the answer, the remedy to all of Jonah's anger at the Lord. First, in the Garden of Gethsemane—this is the time of year when we walk the paces with Jesus to the cross. In the garden, Jesus prays and he kneels before the Father and his tears were like blood pouring out as he prays:

Not my will, but yours be done.

He's the only person in human history who has the right to pray and could exclude himself from the company of the guilty—"Lord, bring justice"—and not include himself. And yet Jesus comes and willingly says, "Not my will but yours be done" and submits his will to the will of the Father for him to be punished.

This is what we see at the cross. The judge of all the universe—it's his Son who's killed in the worst way and the most appalling way. Jesus's death was an injustice of the greatest magnitude. The one innocent person is called guilty, condemned to death for the sins of the guilty. But it was no setting aside of God's justice. It was the fulfillment of it. At the cross, all of God's mercy and all of God's justice come together.

The cross is the reminder to us that God is playing the long game. You look at the events of this world, the events of your life, and you're like, this doesn't seem right. But on the cross, you see one—the first phase of his justice fulfilled: retributive justice. The wrath of God poured out for sin on Jesus Christ, so that you and I, there's nothing left of his wrath for sinners. That's retributive justice. But the empty tomb for us is a picture of coming attractions. It's a guarantee that the restorative justice of God will come when he comes back and says he will make everything right. He'll make all things new. He'll wipe away every tear. That is a guarantee for us. God is playing the long game.

For us, the cross and the empty tomb—this is the remedy for our anger. This is what we need to do with our anger. Here's my call for you. We come in here, we sing songs about the cross, we talk about the cross. I want you to start using the cross. I want you to start accessing the cross in your life with your anger because this is what we do with it. We take it to the cross.

Anger is Cold

One of the things that we may not realize is that anger isn't hot, it's cold. We use idioms that describe anger as hot—you know, blowing up, blowing your top—like all those kinds of pictures, like a tea kettle. But anger, especially anger at the Lord, is not hot. It is cold. It is cold and distant. It's closed off and pushed away.

How many of you all like ice cream? Man, my family, we love ice cream. And you know what happens when you get a brand new quart of ice cream out of the freezer and you try to scoop that stuff? All you can do is sort of chip off little bits off the surface. And everybody here knows the ice cream trick: you put it out on the counter for five minutes, scoop that baby real easy, right? It just moves, right? Because it's come out into the warmth, and it's been allowed to begin to thaw out.

Brothers and sisters, our hearts are like our angry hearts are cold and distant from the Lord. They've been stuck in a freezer of pain and misunderstanding and God doesn't make sense and God doesn't do what I wanted him to do. God is distant, far off, and I don't get it. As such, we're like those brand new quarts of ice cream. And we wonder why we come to worship and our hearts are unmoved. We wonder why nothing seems to be changing inside of me. We have these hearts that are frozen. And my invitation for you this morning is to bring your heart out of the freezer and come to the warmth of the cross and lay your heart before him.

An Invitation to Three Groups

Yeah, I'm talking to you. I'm talking to three kinds of people here this morning. I'm talking to those of you who've never given your life to Christ. Because there is a deep anger in us apart from the Lord. We're like, this world doesn't work and this God doesn't make any sense. What I want to invite you to is a dying Jesus on the cross and an empty tomb. God's wrath on everything that you're mad about. All the brokenness and sin in the world has been poured out on him. Bring your heart to him.

I'm talking to those of you who think you're Christians. And man, we're in the South. And a lot of us know the dance moves. You know, we can fake it.

And it's easy to fake it in church. But if you've never honestly given your life to Jesus, God is about your heart. He wants you to entrust him with your heart. He's going to make it into something amazing. Bring your heart to him.

And this sermon finally is for those of you who are longtime Christians, who at one time this good news was great news for you, and it moved you to tears, and you had a heart that was warm to the Lord, and you loved the Lord. And right now you're cold. And you're distant. And you're really mad. You know, I get it. But our Savior is such—He's so kind to hardhearted sinners. I mean, isn't that what Jonah's been telling us? Bring your heart to him. Bring your cold heart. Bring your angry heart. Let it thaw this morning.

Prayer

Let's go to the word in prayer together.

Father, we thank you. This morning, Lord, as we read your word, it continues to surprise me and us, Lord, that you don't work on the same equations the rest of the world does. You pursue hard hearted, angry people like Jonah, like me, like our congregation. Lord, thank you for the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you that there's a cross and an empty tomb. Thank you that you're playing the long game. Thank you that your ways are not our ways. Your ways are so much higher than our ways.

Lord, we pray that you would teach us, Father, to look to you, to bring our hard angry hearts to you. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

Let's stand and sing together.