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You've no doubt heard of the statistic that 80 to 90% of drivers think that they are better than average. Does anyone heard of that statistic? Yep, and it's troubling from a mathematical point of view, but more troubling, really, from a self-awareness point of view, isn't it? And there are plenty of other statistics about this, and some of them even have sources and data, believe it or not.

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Percentage of people who think that they would leave a note when they bump another car in a car park is pretty high, 70, 80. That's what they say. What they do is about 15 to 20% actually, depending how old you are. There's another statistic, and this is from the psychologists, and this says that around 95% of people say they are self-aware. Whereas actually only 10 to 15%

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of people seem to meet objective criteria of self-awareness. Whatever that is, you know. I'm not aware of that, neither way. Psychology would just say we have very little idea about ourselves, and the Bible agrees and said so two to three thousand years ago, didn't it? Jeremiah 17, verse 9, says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?"

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Proverbs 21, verse 2 says, "A person may think their own ways are right, but the Lord weighs the heart." Do you see that disjunction there? Or Psalm 19, verse 12, "Who can discern their own errors?" Our hearts are just a little bit like icebergs, aren't they? 10 to 15% is sort of visible to us, and the rest of it is just underwater invisible. It's just a mystery to us as to what

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happens there, and they're like black boxes hidden to us, and one of the clues, I think, to the part of our hearts that are underwater is our emotions sometimes, and they're like, they're like bits of that iceberg, bits of our heart that sort of break off and come to the surface and sort of bulb there, and if we analyze them, we can sometimes find out a bit about what's

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in our hidden heart yet there, which is in a sense what we're doing in IMR here, and I might be stretching the metaphor of the iceberg and all that sort of stuff a bit far, but there are a lot of emotions in chapter 4 in the end of our book, and they reveal the heart of Jonah, and they reveal the heart of God. And Jonah, chapter 4 is the extra awkward bit of Jonah. If Jonah had been

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a film, it would have changed its genre the whole way through, wouldn't it? Starts off as a quest to go, then it ends up in a pursuit as Jonah flees, then it ends up kind of an adventure film with action on the high seas, then it takes a slightly surrealist turn when he swallowed by the fish, and then it ends up in a musical while he's singing in the fish, he's not sort of, you know,

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then it goes into horror with the vomit, then it comes out and he goes to an universe a bit of a western with a show down there, and then that turns into drama with the repentance and the axacloth and ashes, and finally we end up in this fourth chapter with all of emotions thrown everywhere like confetti, it's really a soap opera, and you might think are really the story should have

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finished with God forgiving Nineveh, that would have been nice wouldn't it? But it would have missed the main point of all of Jonah. Jonah is not Disney, Jonah is a bit more indie, and it's a bit dark, and so it's the peak moment of the book when all pretenses cast aside, I don't know if you've noticed, but just until now they haven't really converse Jonah in God. God's told Jonah something,

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but he flays, then God, the Jonah prays to the Lord, the Lord doesn't respond, and then the Lord tells Jonah to go again, and Jonah again doesn't respond, and it's here that they finally converse, the gloves are off when we find out what they really think, and so we're going to pick it up from the end of chapter three. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways,

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he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened. But to Jonah, this seemed very wrong, and he became very angry. He prayed to the Lord, 'Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home?' That is what I tried to restore by flame, detaches. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love,

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a God who relends from sending calamity. Now Lord, take away my life, for it's better for me to die than to leave. But the Lord replied, 'Is it right for you to be angry?' Let's stop there, talk to the person next to you for 30 seconds. 'Is it right for Jonah to be angry?' 30 seconds go.

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And that was 30 seconds. Sorry about that, anger. Jonah's anger is there in every verse. He's angry because God's not angry. He's angry because the divine mercy is taking priests over the divine judgment. He seems to be a flaw in the divine character, Jonah sees. He's angry there. And just before we

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leap to laugh and condemn Jonah, and we will, let's try to appreciate where he's coming from. I think it kind of gives us a little insight into his mind, perhaps, if we remember if anyone knows where the ancient city of Nineveh, what modern city is it quite next to in these days this modern era? Does anyone know where the ancient city of Nineveh is? The site? Well, it's Mosul,

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Mosul in Iraq, which was the capital of the ISIS caliphate from 2014 to 2017. If we just remember the horror of that time, if you remember the fearsome black hoods and black flags and black balaclavas, if you remember the gruesome televised beheadings, if you remember the horrible ethnic cleansing in genocide, if you remember the awful sexual enslavement of

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women and young girls or the terrible public crucifixions, that was an awful expression of evil. In France, I heard the bombs go off at the stadium there in 2015. We ran in the stampede, we worked our way through the night, through past all the police gathered around the awful massacre at the Bataclan. I can't imagine what people who lost loved ones in that terrible circumstances.

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I can't imagine what they think about those awful things that have happened. Nineveh was as or more brutal than ISIS. Not only are they brutal and wicked and deserving of judgment. Jonas feelings of it, the injustice, they're not completely wrong, are they? How can he say, God has shared about their wickedness and their evil has come up before him.

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Jonas, he's right, and Jonah almost senses that mercy to Nineveh might mean trouble for his people later. And if he did think they'd be right, we know a Syria 722, they do come and take away Israel. So Jonah, Jonah's anger is just a little bit understandable. But it's also hypocritical, isn't it? It's deeply hypocritical. Because here's another question. Again, why did

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Jonah and the book leave the revelation of his motivation till all the way to chapter 4? Why does he leave it hanging over chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3? I mean, it's suspense, it's a good narrative technique for creating suspense first, but probably only the first time. And we've talked about how this textual information gap makes us put in our assumptions and then we sort of unconsciously

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find out later whether they're right or wrong or not. But also, I think, think about this. If Jonah had responded straight away with maybe his critique of the divine character, well, we'd only have that, wouldn't we? But after three chapters, what have we seen? Well, we found out a little bit about Jonah, haven't we? We found out he's the kind of guy who can run

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away from God, sleep in a storm while everyone else is panicking, tell them to force them to throw him in and not repent and then have a lovely sojourn and a fish where he does a nice song and again doesn't repent. We found out a bit about Jonah and his disregard for others. We've also found out if you remember the reading from 2 Kings 14 with Jeroboam doing evil in the sight of the Lord

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and the people of God's suffering and God gives them not judgment but mercy and even expands their borders. Jonah and his country Israel, neither of whom repented, have experienced the mercy of God and not his judgment. And now Jonah wants Nineveh who has repented to experience the judgment and not the mercy of Israel. Jonah is wildly hypocritical. And he's also like two other biblical characters

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from opposite ends of the Bible. Can you think of who they are? The clues and the readings? Moses and the older brother, wasn't he? But it's slightly different. Moses, just listen, if you remember that, that scene where Moses was with the Lord, he was receiving the Ten Commandments and the people of following idols and God says, "Get him away, I'm going to destroy them." And

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Moses lays his life on the line for the people and appeals to God's name and God's character. Listen carefully to Exodus 13, 14 again. Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people with a disaster he had threatened. That is almost word for Hebrew word, exactly the phrase of God facing Nineveh. And then very soon afterwards the Lord describes his character in Moses, the Lord,

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the Lord compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in love. There's a great connection there between Moses and Jonah but of course it's inverse, isn't it? As Moses leverages, lays his life on the line for the people of Israel to talk God out of destroying them. And Jonah tries to lay his life on the line to talk God into destroying Nineveh. He's Moses is a type of

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Christ, Jonah is a kind of anti-type, isn't he? But Jonah is also like that character at the end of the Bible in Jesus' parable, the older brother who's so disgusted by his father's extravagant love and forgiveness of his wasteful Sunday. So sort of the party and he stays in the field and he won't come in as the father graciously comes out to him. And the older brother has the same

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critique about justice and fairness and about God's mercy and what's deserved. And it's notable that the father and the parable doesn't respond to this justice talk. He doesn't say, "Yeah, you're right, I'll get another calf, come on let's let them get this together." No, he just talks about grace and being lost and found and his mercy because God is merciful not only with Nineveh

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but with all of us and with this obnoxious, ridiculous prophet. And now he shows Jonah and us in his actions. He shows Jonah's heart and he shows us his own heart as well. So let's get into the next bit. Jonah had gone out from there and sat down at a place east of the city. There he had made himself a shelter and sat down and waited to see what would happen to the city.

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Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made a grow-up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort. And Jonah was very happy about the plant. But then the Lord God, the next door and the next day, the Lord God provided a worm and it chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun came up, God provided a scorching

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east wind and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he fell faint. "I wish I were dead!" God replied to Jonah and said, "Is it right that you are angry about this plant?" "It is!" He said, "I'm sorry, angry, I wish I were dead!" And the Lord replied, "You have been concerned about this plant that you did not

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hand it or make it grow. It's praying up over night to die overnight. Should I not be concerned about that great city of Nineveh, in which more than 120,000 people live, who cannot tell their right hand from their left and also many animals." God reels a lot about Jonah's heart in this little bit here, doesn't he? With a sense of humour. And because Jonah is a searing critique

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of insular Israel, it asks us, it asks us the people of God this same question, are our hearts cartoonish, comfort junkies like Jonah, or are our hearts concerned for the lost like God? And I must say, Jonah seems quite cartoonish here, but as we've tried to sail all the way through, there's a thread in Jonah that wants to poke fun, that wants to reflect on the human

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condition. And we are not so dissimilar, we can be cartoonish too. Wearing this French shirt reminds me of a time in France, early on in our time there, when I got into a government building with important documents for our stay there and it had been closed because it's lunchtime. And government buildings are closed at lunch, the only time you could go. No, well they have to have

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lunch, don't they? I was furious, I was stressed, I was angry, I was riding home again, another visit to French official, them completely wasted and failed. And as I rode back, I clenched the handlebars and I just lifted the front of the wheel a bit and bounced it down a bit. And that felt good and it just released an anger and I just did it again and I bounced the front

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wheel again and again, I got some anger out and so I gave it one more big bounce and I bounced myself over the top of the handlebars onto the road and my bike fell on top of me that did not make it into the prayer letter. The point is we can be as absolutely ridiculous as Jonah at any time if we watched ourselves like a movie at every stage in our life. But the point is more

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than where ridiculous, the point is that we can be trivial and superficial and hypocritical and our loves, our disordered loves, get out of all proportion to the things that God loves. You see the logic that God gives him there is a classic lesson more, isn't it? It's a classic biblical argument from the lesser to the greater you're concerned about the plant, shouldn't I be concerned about

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the people? But as he does so, God reveals something about Jonah as Jonah's anger, doesn't it? He reveals that Jonah's anger and concern for his comfort is as angry as the same level of intensity as his anger and concern for those theological questions that seem so important before. Is he, Jonah has this cartoonish comfort junkie heart, concerned more concerned for his shade

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than for the nations? And we have to say, is he really that different from us? Churches struggle to get people to go to certain places. Certain churches in Sydney struggle to get people because it's not as nice an area, it's a bit harder in other ways. It's hard to get people to move to certain places. I know a church in Adelaide that's looked for years from

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Assistant Minister and just cannot convince anyone to come over there. And many people won't consider overseas work because of the cost to their kids or the cost of tearing them away from grandparents or the cost of missing out on opportunities of getting behind financially, of maybe growing up in pollution or isolation. And we can laugh at Jonah with his little plant, but what comforts

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are we unwilling to go without to give up? What costs are we unwilling to pay? God finishes the book of Jonah with his heart on display here with the question for Jonah, that's a similar question to the older brother, isn't it? And that question should I not have concern for these people? We don't hear what Jonah says, just like we don't hear what the older

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brother says, because in the end the question is for the listeners, it's for us and for those of us who know God. And we see the heart of God, this is our God gracious and merciful for this ridiculous prophet and for this Nineveh who can't tell their right hand from their left. And he's concerned for them ends up at the cross. About 20 years ago in a town in the north of France, they renamed

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a small street after a certain corporal in the British army named Robert Keys and he died in World War I. They rang up his family in England to sort of say this and ask them if they wanted to come over for the ceremony. And the family were just shocked. They said to him, they said to the official, why would you do this? Robert died, we know, away from the front lines,

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playing with his own grenade, he's been a source of shame to us for decades. Why would you bring this up? And the French official said back to them, I'm so sorry, there's been a miscommunication during the war, that wasn't what happened at all. Robert was away from the lines but he'd been walking in the village and he'd seen some children playing with a grenade. And he got there just as

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one of them had pulled the pen and Robert had seized the grenade and turned his back on the kids and had borne the blast of the grenade and died for the sake of these kids. This story that seemed so shameful was a wonderful, wonderful story. And brothers and sisters, this wonderful story is nowhere near the story of Jesus, isn't it? It doesn't touch it because Jesus dies,

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not bearing the blast of a grenade, but bearing the judgment that Jonah was so angry about, God wasn't unjust, God was bearing that justice himself. And Jesus dies, not for lovely children, he dies for enemies, horrible enemies. And that story needs to seize our hearts, it's more beautiful, more wonderful, more life changing, more transformational, and more inspirational. It's more costly

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and yet it's ours for free. How can that not move us to bear whatever costs we need to to see other nations hear about this, Jesus? Let's pray, shall we? Our Father God, we often don't understand our hearts and yet we see your hearts so clearly here. Please change our hearts to be so seized, so gripped by Jesus's love for us as shown at the cross

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that we'd be willing to bear whatever costs come to us for the sake of taking that, to Sydney, to regional stride, to the borders of Australia and beyond and across the world. Form our hearts after your heart, we pray, Lord. Amen.