He Made Himself a Little Shelter

Here is a sentence from the Bible that I do not think gets read slowly enough.

He went out of the city, sat down on the east side of it, and made himself a booth.

Picture the afternoon that sentence covers. A grown man, a prophet, walking out through a gate with the dust of a very long errand still on him, going a good way up the slope, and then stopping. He looks at the view. He picks his spot. And then he starts breaking branches.

Because a booth is not a thought, it is a job. Somebody has to gather the wood. Somebody has to lean the pieces together so they hold, and prop the ones that keep sliding, and stand back, and adjust. That is a couple of hours of work in the heat, minimum, and the entire purpose of the construction is to give a man somewhere shaded to sit while he waits to find out whether the city he has just walked across is going to get what he thinks it deserves.

He is not hiding. He has front row seats. He has built himself a small private box at the theater with an uninterrupted view of the whole city, and he has done it carefully, and he has done it in a temper.

And then the plant comes up. God prepares a gourd, it grows up over his head, and the shade improves, and Scripture records something at that point which I find almost unbearably tender: he was exceeding glad of the gourd.

Read the whole book and that is it. That is the one moment of recorded happiness in the man's entire story. Not the ship. Not the deliverance. Not the city turning. A plant, some extra shade, and a prophet in a bad mood cheering up about it for one night.

Then the worm gets the plant, and the wind comes in hot off the desert, and the sun gets on the back of his neck, and he says the thing out loud that he had already been thinking for two chapters.

You know the hillside. Everybody who has walked with God for any length of time knows the hillside. It is the place you take yourself when you have obeyed, and it worked, and the outcome has not agreed with you. You do not stop believing. You do not walk away. You go and sit at a distance with a good view of the whole business, and you build yourself a little shelter, and you make it comfortable, because you have every intention of staying up there for a while.

What God did next, which was not what you would expect

Now look at what happens on that hillside, because this is where most of us have quietly filled in the wrong picture.

God does not shout. There is no lightning, no fresh commission, no rebuke of the kind a person would write if a person were writing the scene. Three times in that chapter God speaks to Jonah, and the whole of what He says arrives as a question. Is it right for you to be angry. Is it right for you to be angry about the plant. Should I not have pity on this city, where there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also much cattle.

Sit with the fact that a question is what God chose. A shout ends a conversation. A question keeps one open, and you only keep a conversation open with somebody you intend to keep.

You are being asked, not shouted at. Jonah 4:9 has God putting a quiet question to a man who has just said he would rather be dead than watch mercy happen, and the Holy Spirit still moves the same way with the version of you that is up on the ridge in a temper.

And notice what God does with His hands while He is talking. He prepares a plant, for shade, for a man who is angry with Him. The text says plainly that the gourd came up to deliver Jonah from his grief. Nobody had apologized. Nothing had been resolved. God grew a plant over the head of a prophet in a sulk because the sun was hot and the prophet was miserable.

You have a God who prepares shade for people who are not currently speaking to Him kindly. It is written that He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and Jonah knew that verse better than anybody, since it is the reason he gives for running in the first place. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line a person can already quote and finally lands it in the body that is sweating under a broken shelter.

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death.Jonah 4:9

The part of you that argues is not the part God is finished with

I love that answer of his. I do well to be angry. He does not soften it, he does not manage his tone, and he does not give the answer a prophet is supposed to give. He tells God exactly what he thinks, on a hot hillside, with his plant dead beside him.

And nothing in the chapter suggests God is scandalized. He asks him another question.

That matters for you, because I suspect somewhere along the line you were taught, or you absorbed without being taught, that the honest version of your mood is the one thing you must not bring into the presence of God. So there is a tidied version of you that prays, and there is the version up on the ridge who has thoughts about how things have been handled, and the two do not meet.

You are not disqualified by the part of you that argues. Scripture kept Jonah's answer in the book, unedited and unimproved, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that a prophet's worst moment was preserved for you to read, which is not how anybody would run a public relations department.

There is a second thing on that hillside, and it is quieter. Jonah is grieving something. The text says the plant was given to deliver him from his grief, and it does not say the grief was silly. He had walked into a foreign city, he had preached, the thing had happened, and something in him could not hold the result. Anger on a ridge is very often grief that has not yet found anywhere to sit down.

You have His pity already, and it was never released to you on the basis of your mood improving. He promised that as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him, and the Spirit does not wait for a person to be reasonable before He moves toward them.