9 Then God asked Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant? ”

“Yes, it’s right! ” he replied. “I’m angry enough to die! ”

10 And the Lord said, “You cared about the plant, which you did not labor over and did not grow. It appeared in a night and perished in a night. 11 So may I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than a hundred twenty thousand people who cannot distinguish between their right and their left, as well as many animals?”

Jonah 4:9-11

The People God Invites (Jonah 4:9-11)

This week at NorthStar we continued our "Questions God Asks" series as we looked at God's question in Jonah 4:4 where God states,

"Is it right for you to be angry?"

The Great City of Nineveh

• "Great" : The adjective גָּדוֹל (gadol, “great”) can refer to a wide variety of qualities: (1) size: “large,” (2) height: “tall,” (3) magnitude: “great,” (4) number: “populous,” (5) power: “mighty,” (6) influence: “powerful,” (8) significance: “important,” (7) finance: “wealthy,” (8) intensity: “fierce,” (9) sound: “loud,” (10) age: “oldest,” (11) importance: “distinguished,” (12) position: “chief, leading, head” (HALOT 177–78 s.v. גָּדוֹל; BDB 152–53 s.v. גָּדוֹל).
• "120,000 people" - this large amount of people God showed mercy to.
• "People cannot cannot distinguish their left and their right"
• "Many animals"

Verse 9-11 show us God's response to Jonah's frustration at God's mercy to the great city of Nineveh.

Verse 11 tells us that God cares for the city of Nineveh despite the people's ignorance.

The text says that "more than a hundred twenty thousand people who cannot distinguish between their right and their left." Translators have rendered this phrase differently. Some translate it as "120,000 people living in spiritual darkness" or "120,000 people who do not know right from wrong." Regardless of the rendering, the thrust or the purpose of the phrase is to say that these people are lost and broken. May we be reminded today that:

God loves us, not because of us, but in spite of us.

We are a spiritually dark people, we do not know our right from our left, we do not know right from wrong. Yet God's love breaks through our inability and he meets us in the mess, not because of who we are, but because of who he is. These are the people that God invites into his family:

• The broken
• The lost
• The outcast
• The hurt
• The liar
• The cheater
• The prideful
• ....

God invites anyone who repents. May we turn from our sin again to day and trust in Christ.