Is God Good? What Jonah 4 Teaches Us About Trusting God

By Pastor Steven Castello | Jonah Sermon Series | May 3, 2026

Is God good — even when life doesn’t go the way you hoped? It’s one of the oldest questions human beings ask. And it turns out one of the most honest voices asking it isn’t a skeptic or a cynic. It’s a prophet sitting alone in the desert, seething with rage at the God he’s spent his life serving.

That’s where we find Jonah in chapter 4. And if we’re honest, most of us have been there too.

The Unexpected Reaction

Amy and I have had some memorable fights over the years. But one of the biggest? A paint color. She and the kids had gone to visit her family in Alaska, and I decided to surprise her by painting one of the kids’ rooms. She had asked for “Robin’s Egg Blue.” We just had very different ideas about what that meant. I was thinking bright. She was thinking muted.

After a thirteen-hour flight and a two-hour drive home from the Atlanta airport, I walked her to the room. “I have a surprise for you.” She looked at it and said, without missing a beat, “I hate it.” She was right — it was the wrong color. But that was not the reaction I was expecting.

When you get to Jonah 4, the reaction you find is not what you would expect either. After one of the most dramatic revival moments in the Old Testament — an entire pagan city turning to God — you would think Jonah would be overjoyed. Instead, verse 1 tells us he was exceedingly displeased and very angry. The original Hebrew is even sharper: Jonah considered what God had done “evil, very evil.”

Here’s what we need to see underneath that reaction. We tend to think resentment is mainly emotional. But underneath every deep resentment is an accusation: God, if you were actually good, this wouldn’t be happening. That’s Jonah 4. And if we’re honest, it’s a lot of our stories too. If God was good, I wouldn’t be alone. That traumatic event would not have happened. I wouldn’t have lost my family. The world would look different.

Jonah 4 functions like a mirror. Eventually, we all ask the question: Is God actually good when I disagree with His vision of goodness?

This morning, I want to challenge that question by looking at three truths about God’s goodness that we can plant our trust in.

1. God’s Goodness Is Rooted in His Character

Here’s the strange thing about Jonah’s anger — he isn’t angry because God changed. He’s angry because God stayed the same.

In Jonah 4:2, Jonah essentially admits it: “Is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish.” Jonah ran from God’s calling in chapter 1 because he knew what would happen. He knew God would show mercy. He wasn’t surprised by God’s action — he was infuriated by it.

And then Jonah quotes a description of God that would have been immediately recognizable to any Hebrew: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. Trace those words back and you find them first in Exodus 32–34, when God describes himself to Moses in the aftermath of the golden calf disaster. Those exact words are repeated at least eight times in the Old Testament. God is not making a new announcement in Jonah 4. He’s being exactly who He has always been.

This is where Jonah’s complaint starts revealing something about us more than about God.

God’s consistent character exposes our inconsistent one. God could have let Jonah drown. He could have said, “I’ll find a different prophet — you’re done.” He didn’t. But Jonah wants the same mercy God showed him to be withheld from Nineveh, because they were the really bad ones. They don’t deserve grace.

See, all our questioning of God’s goodness reveals how inconsistent we actually are. “God, why do evil people prosper?” — but what about when we do evil things? “God, take all the evil out of the world” — but what about the evil in our own hearts? It’s a double standard we rarely notice in ourselves.

Every culture reshapes this struggle in its own image. Jonah’s problem was that God was too merciful — too soft on Israel’s enemies. In much of Western culture today, the complaint runs the opposite direction: God seems too judgmental, too restrictive, too involved. But both complaints reveal the same root problem — we want to remake God in our image.

This is why the unchanging character of God isn’t a dry theological claim — it’s a genuine comfort. If goodness is anchored in shifting cultural opinion, we’re all in trouble. But if God’s goodness is rooted in who He eternally is, we can trust it even when our pain, our culture, or our upbringing tells us otherwise.

One more thing cuts especially deep here: we often get mad at God for things He never actually promised. Jonah is furious at God for being God — for having mercy on the nations. But that was never withheld. That was the plan from the very beginning.

In the same way — are you angry at God for something He never promised you? He never promised people wouldn’t die. He never promised you’d find love or have an easy marriage or live a pain-free life. In fact, in John 16:33, Jesus said the opposite: “In this world you will have trouble.” Christianity is remarkably honest about that. But Jesus doesn’t stop there: “But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

What has God promised? That He will never leave you. That He is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That in Christ, He absorbed the cost of your sin Himself. Your past is paid for. Your present has hope. Your future is secure. Trust in what He actually promised.

2. God’s Goodness Is Upheld by His Control

Most of us believe God is good — as long as life unfolds roughly the way we think it should. As long as the diagnosis is manageable. The relationship works out. The prayer gets answered. But when the world refuses to cooperate with our vision of how things should go, we need this second truth.

In Jonah 4:3, Jonah tells God he’d rather die than watch the Ninevites receive mercy. He is throwing a full-blown adult tantrum. And I love how God responds — He doesn’t panic or catastrophize. He just gently challenges Jonah: “Do you do well to be angry?” In other words: what right do you have to be angry? And how is this anger actually serving you?

The reason we get so mad when life doesn’t go our way is simple: we want to be in control. But control isn’t just an idol we cling to — it’s also a myth we believe. We think that if we could just manage every detail, arrange every relationship, move every piece on the chess board exactly where we want, we’d finally be happy. But life is a vapor. Every breath is a gift from God. You don’t know what’s around the corner, good or bad. You just don’t.

And yet the God who knows every hair on your head also knows every moment of your life.

You see this beautifully in how a single word echoes through Jonah 4. When God provides a plant to shade Jonah from the scorching desert heat, the text says God appointed it. That word isn’t new. In chapter 1, God appointed the great fish — to save Jonah’s life. In chapter 4, God appointed the plant. Then He appointed a worm to eat the plant. Then He appointed an east wind and scorching sun to press down on Jonah.

Why give and then take away so quickly? Because Jonah needed to feel both the mercy and the judgment of God in the same afternoon. He needed a fresh reminder that God had spared him — and that what he actually deserved was punishment, not comfort.

Job understood this better than most. His life fell apart — not because of sin, but because God allowed it. And he arrived at this honest, hard-won place: “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). Nothing in this life is actually mine. God is the giver of all good things. He’s the one in control, not me. So I can trust Him whether good or bad enters my life.

As James 1:20 says plainly: “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” Jonah’s rage wouldn’t have produced anything good even if Nineveh had been destroyed. He would have remained consumed by his anger because he was consumed with himself. He wanted to be right. He wanted his way, even over God’s will.

When you look at your heart honestly, you start to see that God being in control is actually good news. If God is perfectly consistent in His character, then He is perfectly trustworthy in how He works out His goodness toward us — even when it looks nothing like what we expected.

3. God’s Goodness Is Demonstrated in His Compassion

How do we know definitively that God is good? Not as a theological proposition, but as something we can stake our lives on? Through compassionate action.

After Jonah storms off into the desert, the text notes he went east. For anyone who knows the biblical storyline, that detail lands like a weight. Every time a character moves east in Scripture — Cain after killing Abel, the builders of Babel, Lot leaving Abraham — they are moving away from God. Jonah is as far from God as he has ever been, sitting in a makeshift shelter, waiting for the city to burn.

And God shows him mercy anyway.

The plant grows overnight — a miracle Jonah doesn’t even stop to notice. His mood swings from furious to genuinely delighted when the shade arrives. But when the plant is gone the next morning, he doubles down: “I have every right to be angry, even to death.” He pities the plant. He doesn’t pity the city. He never pauses to ask how that plant got there in the first place.

How many times do we miss the unforeseen mercy of God in our own lives? Being given something we didn’t deserve. Being spared from something we can’t explain. When I was seventeen, I was driving way too fast around a curve — probably eighty miles an hour, just being an idiot teenager. I spun out and barely missed oncoming traffic. We’re talking six inches. I should have died that day. That was God’s unforeseen mercy. I’m guessing you have stories too — moments where there’s no explanation other than grace.

Meanwhile, God looks at Nineveh — over 120,000 people who don’t know their right hand from their left, morally lost, with no idea where to turn — and asks Jonah the question the entire book has been building toward: “Should I not pity Nineveh?” As scholar Kevin J. Youngblood observed, Jonah’s complaint was provoked by the very same mercy that once inspired his own praise. He received it. He just didn’t want others to.

The Question the Book Leaves Open

Here is what makes the ending of Jonah so striking: it’s unresolved. We never find out what Jonah does with God’s question. We never learn whether he came around, whether his heart softened, whether he walked back toward the city or just sat in the desert and simmered.

Because the final question isn’t whether Jonah trusted God’s goodness.

The final question is whether you will.

Will you trust God’s goodness when His mercy offends you — when He extends grace to someone you think doesn’t deserve it? When His sovereignty confuses you and life makes no sense? When His timing hurts you and the answer you need doesn’t come? When His compassion stretches toward people you’re struggling to love?

The book ends open because the invitation is still open.

For those who already follow Christ: the answer to Is God good? is not found by auditing your circumstances. It’s found at the cross — where God’s goodness, justice, mercy, and sovereignty all converge in one place. The ultimate proof of God’s goodness is not that your life goes the way you want. It’s that God would rather suffer for sinners than abandon them. If Jesus demonstrated the compassion of God for you through His life, death, and resurrection, then you can trust that God has good for you — that your past is paid for, your present has hope, and your future is secure.

And if you’re not yet a follower of Christ: you don’t have to clean yourself up, figure out God, or earn your way in. The God of Jonah didn’t wait for Nineveh to deserve mercy before He sent it. He doesn’t wait for you either. Put your trust in the finished work of Jesus. His goodness isn’t contingent on yours.

God is better at being God than we are. And that is the best news there is.

This message was preached at City on a Hill Church on May 3, 2026, as part of our series through the book of Jonah. Listen to the full sermon on our podcast, connect with others in a Community Group, or plan a visit to join us on a Sunday.