The story now reaches its climax. God revealed to Jonah how out of harmony with His own heart the prophet, though obedient, was. He contrasted Jonah's attitude with His own.
Compassion (Heb. hus, concern [NIV], be sorry for [NEB], pity [RSV, RV]) is the key attitude. Jonah had become completely indifferent to the fate of everyone outside Israel. He knew His God well (4:2). Nevertheless his appreciation for God's love for Israel had evidently so pervaded his life that it crowded out any compassion for people who lacked knowledge of and relationship with Yahweh. To reveal his lack of compassion to him God dealt with him as any ordinary person. He exposed him to the pleasures and discomforts that everyone faces and made him see that his theology made him no more compassionate than anyone else. It should have. Knowledge of a sovereign, compassionate God whom He feared should have made Jonah more submissive to God's will, more compassionate toward other people, and more respectful of God.
God had invested much work in Nineveh and had been responsible for its growth. This is why it was legitimate at the most elementary level for God to feel compassion for its people. Jonah's compassion extended only to a plant but not to people. God's compassion extended not only to plants and animals but also to people. The 120,000 people that God cited as the special objects of His compassion were probably those who for various reasons could not care for themselves (babies, the mentally incompetent, et al.).
"Not to be able to distinguish between the right hand and the left is a sign of mental infancy."76
We normally have compassion for those with whom we can identify most closely, but God also has compassion on people who are helpless. Spiritually they are those who do not know God, those who are "lost."
People naturally go to one of two extremes in their attitude toward animals. We either look down on them and treat them inhumanely feeling superior, or we elevate them to the level of persons and grant them rights that they do not possess. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tries to guard us from the first attitude. The "animal rights movement"tends to promote the second attitude. God has compassion on animals as creatures living below the level of humans that need His grace. This should be our attitude to them too (cf. Gen. 1:26, 28; Ps. 8:6-8). The reference to animals concludes the book and is the final climax of God's lesson to the prophet and through him to God's people in Israel and in the church. If God has compassion for animals, how much more should we feel compassion for human beings made in God's image who are under His judgment because of their sins (cf. 3:8). We must never let our concern for the welfare of God's people keep us from reaching out with the message of hope to those who oppose us.
The book closes without giving us Jonah's response, but that is not the point of the book. Its point is the answer to the Lord's question in verse 11 that every reader must give. Yes, God should have compassion on the hopeless Ninevites, and we should have compassion on people like them too (cf. Luke 15:25-32; Matt. 20:1-16).
"It is not only the unbelievers in the Ninevehs of today who need to repent; it is also we who are modern Jonahs. For no one begins to understand this profound and searching little book unless he discovers the Jonah in himself and then repentantly lays hold upon the boundless grace of God."77
"As so often, the effect of this OT book is to lay a foundation upon which the NT can build. God so loved the world' is its basic affirmation, which the NT is to conclude with the message of the gift of his Son.
"Throughout the story the figure of Jonah is a foil to the divine hero, a Watson to Yahweh's Holmes, a Gehazi to Yahweh's Elisha. The greatness and the goodness of God are enhanced against the background of Jonah's meanness and malevolence. Look out at the world, pleads the author, at God's world. See it through God's eyes. And let your new vision overcome your natural bitterness, your hardness of soul. Let the divine compassion flood your own hearts."78
Does this book constitute a call to foreign missionary service? It contains no such call though it records God's call of one of His prophets to this type of ministry. However, we must remember that this was a rare ministry in the Old Testament period. Typically Israel was to be a light to the nations by providing a model theocracy in the Promised Land that would attract the Gentiles to her. They would come to Israel for the knowledge of God that they would take back home with them (e.g., Exod. 19:5-6; 1 Kings 10; Isa. 42:6; Acts 8:26-40). In the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20) Jesus changed the basic missionary method by which people were to learn of God. Now we are to go into all the world and herald the gospel to everyone rather than waiting for them to come to us for it. The Book of Jonah shows an Old Testament prophet doing reluctantly what Christians are now to do enthusiastically. It was not God's plan that all Old Testament prophets, much less all Israelites, were to do what he did. Nevertheless they were to have a heart of compassion for those outside the covenant community and to show them mercy, as this book clarifies. Christian missionaries can use the Book of Jonah, therefore, but they should do so by stressing its true message, not by making Jonah's call the main point.
"This book is the greatest missionary book in the Old Testament, if not in the whole Bible. It is written to reveal the heart of a servant of God whose heart was not touched with the passion of God in missions. Does it strike home, dear reader? Are we more interested in our own comfort than the need of multitudes of lost souls in Israel dying in darkness without the knowledge of their Messiah and Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ? Are we more content to remain with the gourds,' the comforts of home and at home, than to see the message of Christ go out to the ends of the earth to both Jew and Gentile?"79
