11 And am I not to have mercy on Nineveh, that great town, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons without the power of judging between right and left, as well as much cattle?
Up! go to Nineveh, that great town, and let your voice come to it; for their evil-doing has come up before me.
And your little ones, who, you said, would come into strange hands, your children, who now have no knowledge of good or evil, they will go into that land, and to them I will give it and it will be theirs.
Was it not right for you to have mercy on the other servant, even as I had mercy on you?
But he was angry and would not go in; and his father came out and made a request to him to come in. But he made answer and said to his father, See, all these years I have been your servant, doing your orders in everything: and you never gave me even a young goat so that I might have a feast with my friends: But when this your son came, who has been wasting your property with bad women, you put to death the fat young ox for him. And he said to him, Son, you are with me at all times, and all I have is yours. But it was right to be glad and to have a feast; for this your brother, who was dead, is living again; he had gone away and has come back.
All of them are waiting for you, to give them their food in its time. They take what you give them; they are full of the good things which come from your open hand.
The Lord is full of grace and pity; not quickly angry, but great in mercy. The Lord is good to all men; and his mercies are over all his works.
Come now, and let us have an argument together, says the Lord: how may your sins which are red like blood be white as snow? how may their dark purple seem like wool?
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Jonah 4
Commentary on Jonah 4 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 4
We read, with a great deal of pleasure, in the close of the foregoing chapter, concerning the repentance of Nineveh; but in this chapter we read, with a great deal of uneasiness, concerning the sin of Jonah; and, as there is joy in heaven and earth for the conversion of sinners, so there is grief for the follies and infirmities of saints. In all the book of God we scarcely find a "servant of the Lord' (and such a one we are sure Jonah was, for the scripture calls him so) so very much out of temper as he is here, so very peevish and provoking to God himself. In the first chapter we had him fleeing from the face of God; but here we have him, in effect, flying in the face of God; and, which is more grieving to us, there we had an account of his repentance and return to God; but here, though no doubt he did repent, yet, as in Solomon's case, no account is left us of his recovering himself; but, while we read with wonder of his perverseness, we read with no less wonder of God's tenderness towards him, by which it appeared that he had not cast him off. Here is,
Man's badness and God's goodness serve here for a foil to each other, that the former may appear the more exceedingly sinful and the latter the more exceedingly gracious.
Jon 4:1-4
See here,
Jon 4:5-11
Jonah persists here in his discontent; for the beginning of strife both with God and man is as the letting forth of waters, the breach grows wider and wider, and, when passion gets head, bad is made worse; it should therefore be silenced and suppressed at first. We have here,
Let us therefore own that we do ill, that we do very ill, to be angry for the gourd; and let us under such events quiet ourselves as a child that is weaned from his mother.