Reluctant Believer
A series in Jonah
Outrageous Grace
May 14, 2023 • Jan Vezikov • Jonah 4
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com Heavenly Father, we thank you for your grace. And in many ways, Lord, your grace is unfathomable. We can't understand it. And in many ways, your grace is scandalous. You're going to save those people after they did that? In many ways, your grace is outrageous. I pray, Lord, that you give us the grace today to humble ourselves before you recognize no one deserves grace. Grace is unmerited favor. You can't deserve it. We have it only because of the work of Jesus Christ, his life, his death, his burial, and his resurrection. Jesus, we gather here today, redeemed as your children, children of God, the Father, thanks to your sacrifice on the cross for us. Holy Spirit, come in to the space if there's anyone who is not yet reconciled with God, is not a worshiper of Yahweh, has not been saved from their sins, does not have eternal life, I pray, today, save them and show them that life is short and we are not guaranteed tomorrow and that eternity is forever. Lord, bless our time in Jonah chapter four as we look at him. And let us not stand over him in condemnation but let us learn from him. As from an older brother, he was not perfect. We are not perfect. He didn't fulfill his mission perfectly. We haven't fulfilled ours perfectly. You gave him grace, Lord, and give us much grace. We pray this in Christ's name, Amen. So, today, we're continuing our sermon series through Jonah. We're finishing it next week. We're starting a new series, our summer series through the end of Genesis 37 through 50. We're entitling it Graduate-Level Grace Study in the Life of Joseph. And we're calling it that because we're saved by grace through faith. Salvation is by grace. But growing in usefulness to the Lord, growing in usefulness and fulfilling our calling, well, that also takes grace, and that also takes faith, and that also takes a lot of work. So, we're excited for that series. Join us starting next week. Today, we're in Jonah 4. The title of the sermon is Outrageous Grace. And hopefully, you've enjoyed this little book. It's strange. It's surprising. It's convicting. It starts with Jonah. God comes to and says, "Go preach to Nineveh." Jonah flees from the presence of the Lord. It takes an unexpected detour on a boat. And God sends a storm, Jonah's thrown overboard by the repentant sailors, and then he spends three days, three nights in the belly of a great fish. Finally, and this was last week, Jonah goes. He fulfills his calling. It's incredible. He preaches unwillingly. He's the most reluctant preacher in the history of reluctant preachers. He does not want to do it. He didn't even plan the sermon. There's no points to the sermon. Just five words. Just judgments coming. And the crazy part is people got saved. The king got saved. They prayed. They fasted. And I know they're truly penitent because their priorities are in order because the king said, "We're all fasting including the cattle. Including the animals. Lord, save our souls but also save our meat. Please, Lord." They got everything in order. And Jonah 3:10 tells us when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. The Ninevites were ripe for the picking. The harvest was plentiful, although the worker was only one. And this should have been the end of the story. And what a perfect story. It would've been so beautiful moving from crisis to resolution, moving from Jonah's rebellion all the way to his obedience, from Nineveh's impending destruction all the way to immediate deliverance. It's the perfect narrative arc. Amen. Boom. End of chapter three. We're done. That's how it should have ended. Here's God's saving Nineveh through the witness of even the most reluctant evangelist. That's me. That's you. There's hope for him. There's hope for us. Isn't that encouraging? But that's not how it ends at all. I was thinking about this. It ends like a Russian novel. Like the Tolstoy, Dostoyev. You made me read a thousand pages to get to this ending, man. Super disappointing. That's kind of how it ends. But there's many a lesson here for us. So, today we're in Jonah 4:1-11. Would you look at the text? "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, "Oh, Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country. That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it's better for me to die than to live." And the Lord said, "Do you do well to be angry?" Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, until he should see what would become of the city. Now, the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So, Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, "It is better for me to die than to live." But God said to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" He said, "Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die." And the Lord said, "You pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came up, came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" Amen. This is the reading of God's holy, inherent, infallible, authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our heart. The last word of the story is cattle. That's how the book ends in the Hebrew. It's much cattle. What a disappointment this is. Jonah here is left in a worse situation, spiritually speaking, than he was when he ran from God. He's still locked in the old patterns of xenophobia and ethnic and religious superiority. He had a besetting sin that he seemed to have repented of in the belly of the fish, though that wasn't a true repentance, and here, it was subdued for the time he was preaching in Nineveh. But now, it flares up and it flares up suddenly. What kind of ending is this one? Well, it's a realistic ending. It's a realistic ending in that we need grace to be saved from our sins, from the condemnation that our sins deserve. But we also need grace to grow in our relationship with the Lord. Jonah doesn't come out being the hero of this. The book's only disappointing if you thought Jonah was the point. Jonah wasn't the point and he wasn't even the main character. God is the main character. The chapter here is composed in three great moments, beginning and then ending with an interview between God and Jonah. And between those two bookends is an enacted parable, a little object lesson about a little vine and a worm and a wind. What's going on there? While this text reveals three contradictions in Jonah's heart, and these are the points. First, contradiction is he understands grace confessed, he confesses. Grace confessed, but misunderstood. Second, providence enjoyed, but ignored. And third, love felt, but disordered. So, point one, grace confessed but misunderstood. Jonah 4:1, it, what was the it? But it. The great revival of Nineveh, you're talking about a million people, maybe 120,000 commentators say, "That's probably children. They don't know the right hand from their left." So, if there's 120,000 children, might be upwards of 600,000 to a million people. There's a lot of people. They get saved. Jonah, not only is he not exceedingly glad about it, he's exceedingly displeased. He's actually angry. What pleased God only made Jonah mad? It's strange to the point that it's inexplicable. You would think that Yahweh's chosen prophet would be thrilled to see people come to faith. Yes, pride is a sin, but there is a certain allowable sense of satisfaction about witnessing people come to faith. I can tell you just from my experience in the Christian walk, the greatest thrill is the moment you get saved. There is no greater thrill in that. When you recognize that you have been transferring from the domain of darkness, from the kingdom of light, you were a child of Satan, now you're a child of God. That right there, the greatest thrill. Right up there, I am telling you, friends, is seeing people get saved. Seeing people who are far from the Lord, pagans who want nothing to do with God, living for themselves, selfish, thinking that the world revolves around them, entitled, proud, self-righteous, everything that you and I were, are, were. And then they get saved. They see Jesus Christ and they're like, "Ah, I need grace." And they're praying. There's nothing greater than that. Jonah should have been pumped. He should have been in the city. They should have had a parade. He should have said, "Okay, the cattle. Stop fasting the cattle. We're going to have a barbecue. We're all going to enjoy the fact that there's a revive." He doesn't do any of that. What happened? Why is he back to where he started, angry at God and angry at the people of Nineveh? And in the Hebrew, it says that the repentance of Nineveh was actually evil to Jonah. It was a great evil to him. The same word here that God said, "Nineveh, there's evil there. Your evil has risen up." That same word is used to describe Jonah. Jonah's feelings are evil. Why? Because Jonah's a loyal Israelite. He's a Jew. He's a prophet of Yahweh and loyal to the northern kingdom. And the northern kingdom was long at war with Syria and Assyria to the north. And we know from the books of the Kings, that Yahweh used Assyrian aggression to weaken Syria. And so, now, Assyria is growing in strength. Nineveh is the capital of Assyria. Jonah knows if these people gets it and they get the power of God, who knows what'll happen with Israel because Israel is under judgment of God. Partially, what's happening here is God wants Israel to be jealous in that the Ninevites got saved. Maybe we should get saved. Maybe we should stop being idolatrous. But they don't. So, Jonah, he looks at these people and he is like, "They don't look like me. They don't smell like me. They don't talk like me. They're not me. These are not my people. These are my enemies. God, do you not know how bad these people are? They are degenerate to the core. They are unredeemable. God, why would you save Assyrians and then use them to bring judgment upon Israel? How can that be?" And what he doesn't understand is that God is not a territorial God. God is not just a God of one group of people or one nationality, one ethnicity. No. God has elect from all of the nations. And God's purpose is to save his elect, which includes both Jews and Gentiles and even Ninevites. Now, sadly, in Jonah's reaction, we may see our own sinful prejudices that God may choose to save some people whom we do not think he ought to save. And his grace may extend to places where we do not think he ought to extend it. And Jonah should have known better. He knew the Psalter. Psalms 145:9 says, "The Lord is good to all and his mercy is over all that he has made." So, Jonah turns what should have been a time of great celebration into a little pity party about his Jewish nationalism. His politics win out over his faith. Those people, their politics, diametrically opposed to mine, I don't want them in the people of God. I don't want them in my church. I don't want them in my community group. I don't want them in my friend group, et cetera. That's what's going on. And you see his self-justify, accusatory tone in verse two. "And he prayed to the Lord and he said, "Oh, Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee at Tarshish, for I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it's better for me to die than to live." What's he saying? He's saying, "God, I told you this is what... God, you should have listened to me. God, you never listened to me. I told you this is what you were going to do. I knew you were going to forgive him." That's what he's become, so self-absorbed, he's wagging his finger at God. Because of this self-pity consumed with himself, he's forgotten who he's speaking to. And yet, by the way, this confession is tremendous. It's all true. Everything he says, it's all gloriously true. But it's conflicted, his little confession. It is true. But here it comes as a complaint and he is quoting scripture Exodus 34:6-7. This is how God revealed himself to Moses. "The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, a God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation." This confession we see all throughout the Old Testament scriptures, the Book of Numbers, second Chronicles. And we see this in Nehemiah. We see this in the Psalter. This is who God is. God is a God who is gracious. He wants to forgive people and Jonah is not happy with that. He loves the idea of a loving God, loving toward him and his people. It's a precious concept when it's directed toward him. But the moment grace is turned to Israel's enemies, Nineveh. Well, now, God's grace is a problem. Now, it's a source of frustration, not a source of joy. Jonah confesses the doctrine of grace, "God, you're gracious. I knew you were. I knew you were going to be gracious." But he can't accept the reality of it. He confesses the religious part. He can't accept the reality. Confesses the theology of grace, but there's no room for the working out of the grace. In his reality, he's happy with grace as long as it's within the boundaries of his comfort levels. And friends, here, you just got to pause it in. This is a reminder. You're in Boston. Once in a while, you need a reminder. You got to get out of your heads. In your head, theology, it's all tremendous. That it doesn't make a difference in the world when you have all the perfect theology pristine in your head. It does have to take root in your heart and you can't let orthodox theology mask an unloving, unchanged heart. Jonah, man, you should have known better. You know how gracious God is. Bro, you ran from him. You wanted to die in the ocean. God says, "No." He sends the grace of a fish. It didn't feel good for three days and three nights, gastric juices, and all but whatever. You didn't die. He didn't die. He is living proof of God's grace, but he can't stand the idea of that grace being given to others. If gospel truth is something you really take pride in knowing, if you're like, "Yes, as a believer, I know the truth." But you never share it. You're not much better than Jonah. Jonah shared it only because he was forced to. He didn't have a choice. God has given us the truth and we are to take pride in knowing the truth, but it's only by grace. But if you keep it to yourself, then we're just as much as sinners as Jonah. Although Jonah is angry, he does the right thing and complains to God in prayer. So, as much as we want to knock Jonah. First of all, when he's really angry, who does he go to? He prayed. He's like, "Lord, I don't get it." He doesn't complain about God to his readers. He could have done that. And he does not curse God. He doesn't take even Yahweh's name in vain. He pours out his heart to God even when nothing made sense. A lesson in there for us. Jonah verse three of chapter four, "Therefore now, oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live." And the Lord said, "Do you do well to be angry?" Now, Jonah's complaint crosses the line from asking the God grant him understanding to just, "God kill me." Moses pled to die in Numbers 11, the prophet Elijah pled to die in 1 Kings 19. And I don't even want to ask, but many of us have been there. "God, I see the test before me. I see the circumstances I'm in. Kill me." And that's the easy way out, just FYI. How much easier to seek to escape life's difficulties than face the fact that God does transform us and he does sanctify us by taking us through trials, tribulations like this. What's fascinating is that God doesn't rebuke Jonah. He could have right here rebuked Jonah. He could have killed him right there. He could have rebuked him. Like, "What are you doing?" No. God asks him a question. And in this, we see God's grace, his mercy, his love, his patience, his willingness to relent his love, even for Jonah. "Jonah, is it good for you to burn with anger, to kindle the fire already within you? Look within yourself. Examine your heart. See if your anger is justified," that's what he is saying. "Art thou very much grieves," the King James version says. Jonah doesn't respond to this first question. He's still stuck in his patriotism that prevents him from loving his neighbors. Here, we need to pause and say, "Look, there's much to be learned here." Jonah has no right to be angry with God merely because of God's purposes in saving someone other than Jonah. And neither should we be angry with God when God extends his grace to those in different socioeconomic groups, cultures, ethnicities, political parties. Let's have a moment of honesty before God, shall we? What class or group of people in our society do you find it most difficult to trust, to relate to however you define that group? Maybe it's ethnically different, or economic, or educational, or professional, or political, or maybe it's more personal in that. A person that looks like that abused you or hurt you, sinned against you. So, the thought of grace for abusers, that's beyond you. Which group of people do you find at hardest to trust, to be around, to talk to, to want to know? Be honest. What if next Sunday, you are late to serve? You come in at 9:16, like 90% of service one. At 9:16 you mosey in, and that person is sitting in your assigned seat. They don't know it's your assigned seat but they should have. And they're on time because new people always are. How do you react? What happens in your heart? What if our church begins to fill up with people like that? What happens? Is there room in your heart for them? Is there room in your gospel for them? Is there room in your life for them? Would you talk to them? Would you do the hard work of building a relationship? Or is grace just for you and only of those whom you approve? That was Jonah's problem. He confessed grace. He misunderstood grace. So, God continues to teach him. This is point two, providence enjoyed, but ignored. And this is verse four of Jonah 4. "And the Lord said, "Do you do well to be angry?" See, he didn't answer. "Jonah went out of the city and sat in the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade until he should see what would become of the city. So, here is the finger of God pressing into the festering wound of Jonah's sin. And God does ask him, "Do you do well to be angry?" It's the first of three questions, "Jonah, do you actually think it's justified? Do you think your anger is justified? Do you really think that your anger is without sin?" Instead of wrestling with God's question, Jonah ignores it and goes camping. And what's he doing? He camps outside the city to the east to sit and wait." What's he waiting for? He's waiting to see if God will relent from his relenting. God said, "I'm going to punish Nineveh, condemnation, unless they repent." They repent. He relent. Jonah wants God to relent of his relenting. He wants to see the fireworks. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, like fire from heaven, brimstone. That's what he wants to see. Jonah 4:6, "Now, the Lord God," so, he's waiting, "Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort." So, Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. Three times, we see this phrase in the book, in this chapter, in verse six, seven, and eight, that God appointed as the same verb that that's used in chapter one, verse 17 when God appoints a great fish. And what it's doing is it's pointing out the absolute sovereignty of God over all of his creation. What's the vine all about? What's this plant all about? Is it an ivy? Is it a gourd? Is it a castor-oil plant? I don't know. It's pretty big and it grew rapidly and it provided shade. Why the vine? Symbolically, I don't know if it really means anything, but it shows us that it completely changed Jonah's mood. Jonah, in the beginning of the chapter, was exceedingly mad, exceedingly angry, and now he's exceedingly glad. Why? What's changed? Well, what's changed is his comfort. And so, he is sitting very comfortably. So, he's sitting. He wants to see fireworks, condemnation. He wants to see the people of Nineveh in great discomfort. That's what he wants to see. And then God sends him a little vine, a plant to comfort him. And what we see here is incredible irony that the personal comfort that Jonah receives is the absolute opposite of what he wants for Nineveh. He wants all of Nineveh to burn. He's got ringside seats and popcorn as he waits for fire and brimstone. And as he's waiting for fire and brimstone, God sends him a plant to comfort him. Now, what is God doing here? I can't wait to find out when we get to heaven. But I think what God is doing here is he's teaching him. Jonah is too blind to realize what God is doing through providence. So, verse seven. "But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered. And when the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, "It's better for me to die then to live." For the fourth time in the book, Yahweh directly intervenes, this time, by sending a worm, completely withers the plant that Yahweh had just raised up the day before, leaving Jonah completely exposed to the sun. And then God, on top of that insult to injury, sends him a wind, a sirocco wind, which it rises quickly and raises the temperature and drops the humidity. It's unbearable. And by the way, if you take that Jonah was still alive in the fish, gastro juices, his skin was definitely damaged. This guy is in pain right now. So, he cries out, "It's better for me to die than to live. Just kill me already, God. If you're going to spare Nineveh, just kill me." So, verse nine, "And God said to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" And he said, "Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die." And again, instead of rebuking Jonah, God teaches him. Asking him a version of the same question, "Jonah, are you glad I judged the plant? Are you glad I killed the plant?" And this time, Jonah actually responds to God's question. Jonah said, "Yes, I do well to be angry. Angry enough to die." Jonah's come to the end. He still expects that Yahweh will relent of his relenting, but he just can't deal with the misery of what's happening here. He's losing all perspective. We don't know the state of mind that he's in, but he just can't believe that God would extend mercy to people unworthy of it. And here we see the lesson of providence. Did Jonah know that the plant was from the Lord? Did Jonah know that there was a worm from the Lord? Did Jonah know that there was a wind from the Lord? I think he knew. I think he knew. But there were times when it's like, "I don't want to know." He enjoyed the comforts of providence. The vine goes up, he's comfortable. But he's unwilling to listen to the lessons providence is teaching. God sometimes teaches us through supernatural revelation. That's primary where we learn from holy scripture. But God does, through providence in our lives, teach us. And if we are wise, we will pay attention to the events of our lives and see what God is teaching us. Often when something bad happens, no, no, no. God has nothing to do with this. No, no, no, God's hand is sovereign. He's absolutely over everything. Often, we're too quick to run to Romans 8:28 that, "All things work together for the good of those who love him and are called to be his." Something bad happens in your life and you're. But all things will work together. Good. We are to go there and we'll learn much of that from Joseph. But we are to go to Hebrews 12 as well. And sometimes, the difficulties in our life are actually a result of God's discipline. And we are to endure hardship as discipline because God is treating us as sons and daughters, if we are wise to learn the lessons of that providence. And I say that because in Hebrews 12:11, it says, "For the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." Meaning that you can go through discipline which is unpleasant and you never reap the harvest of righteousness because you refuse to learn the lessons. Don't be an unwise. Don't be a foolish child. The wise child, you speak to the wise child. The wise child learns. The foolish child, words are not enough. We are to be trained up by its possible. Hebrews is saying to endure the providential discipline of the Lord and not bear fruit because we weren't listening, we weren't paying attention like Jonah here. He should have stopped and said, "God, why did you send me that vine? Would it not be to expose the hypocrisy in my heart that I care about my comfort, my comfort, my body's temperature, I care about more than someone else's soul?" By the way, I can get this because my body temperature runs high and when I'm sweating, I can't think. Maybe Jonah is here, I don't know. But he is idolizing, prioritizing his comfort over everything else. And here's the lesson God is teaching us in the hard blows of frowning providence. He's teaching us that through providence, he is training us to become more effective instruments in his hands. So, Jonah didn't learn the lessons of providence. And point three, he has a love. He feels a love. Love felt, but it's disordered. So, verse 10, and the Lord said, "You pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and all so much cattle." The truth is, Jonah had no right to the plant, did he? It was all a gift of undeserved grace. It was nothing but a misguided sense of self entitlement that made Jonah resentful that he lost something that was not even his. And what the Lord here is teaching through this question is teaching the same lesson that we see in Matthew 20. In Matthew 20, Jesus Christ tells a parable. And then the parable, so, this guy owns a vineyard, he needs day laborers. And he goes to the market, he takes some laborers, he says, "Okay, I'll pay you this amount." And he comes back three hours later, comes back three hours later, comes back. What happens is not everybody worked the same amount of time. Some of the workers worked all day, some of the workers worked just a few hours and they all got paid the same. And the guys that worked all day come up to the owner of the vineyard, they say, "That's not fair." That's not fair. They worked an hour, we worked all day in the sweat of our brow, in the heat of the day. And the owner responds by saying, "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?" And this is exactly what's happening with Jonah. Jonah is like those workers, "I have served you all of my life. My whole family, we have served you. And God, you're going to welcome these people in and give them the same blessings you've given us?" And what God says here to Jonah is, "Jonah, I made them. I'm their God. I'm their Lord. They are mine. They depend on me. Do I not have the right to do what I want with them?" And Deuteronomy 7:6-8, "God does remind the people of Israel that he did not choose them because of anything great in them. Verse six, for you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were much more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt." It wasn't because you were greater than any of the other people, that it wasn't because you were more noble, more mighty. It wasn't because you were worthy. It was because, "I'm loving," that's what God is saying, "I don't love you because you're lovely. I love you because I'm loving." And in Christ, this is exactly what the Lord teaches us, that we do not deserve any. Christ died for us when we were yet sinners. We all deserve condemnation. We all deserve wrath. Jesus Christ died for us when we did not deserve the grace. And this understanding of grace, this is what begins to change us. I didn't deserve it. And this second, I'm receiving grace. I don't deserve this grace either. Every moment, every second, the gospel extends grace to us. And we're not doing everything we're doing for the Lord because we are trying to earn grace. No, it's all from him. It's all free. And what grace does is it reorders our loves. And this is crucial. Because a lot of people, they follow the Lord and they go to church. What you don't understand is that God doesn't want to just transform your mind with truth, he wants to transform your heart by reordering how much and what you love by reprioritizing. So, we're not wrong to love fervently our people. We're not wrong to love our comforts. We're not wrong to be patriots. But we are wrong when we put any of those things above God and above what God loves. So, what this is what God is doing with Jonah. God is saying, "Jonah, look into my heart. You love a vine more than you love people." These are image bearers of God with eternal souls. God is saying, "I love them. I love the lost. I love the nations. I love Nineveh, that great city." It's a love just glimpsed here in Jonah, we see just a glimpse of God is gracious, God relents when we repent, he does forgive. But we see the fullness of the supreme expression of the love of God on the cross of Jesus Christ. Here is God incarnate. Here is God who is gracious and merciful. Here is God on the cross, who is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Here's a God who relents from disaster. And here he is, that same God nailed to a tree. How did you get there, God? Jesus Christ, God and, how did you get on a tree? How did you get nailed to a tree by the people that you came to save? How did that happen? Well, Jesus Christ is answering the questions, the contradictions that are within the heart of Jonah. Jonah is saying, "God, you're too just to forgive those people. No. You can't be that loving so that your love actually satisfies your justice." How does that work? He can't make sense of it. And then Jesus Christ makes all the sense of it in the world, that the way, the only reason that God can forgive us is because someone paid for our sins. The only way that God retains his justice, retains the fact that he is just. And he gets to justify, is the only way that happens is the cross of Jesus Christ. On the cross, Jesus became our sin. On the cross, Jesus absorbed the wrath of God that we deserve. Jonah wanted to see that. He wanted to see the wrath pour down on the Ninevites. He didn't get to see it. But in the sign of Jonah, that's what Jesus says, and it says the sign of Jonah. In the sign of Jonah, we do see the wrath of God poured out on Christ. Jesus died so that the Ninevites can get saved, but also the Brooklynites and the Bostonians, so that all of us can find a home in the family of God. And the measure of the love of God for the nations is ultimately in the cross of Jesus Christ. In Romans 15:8-12, "For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles may glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, "Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name." And again, it said, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people." And again, "Praise the Lord, all you gentiles, and let all the peoples extol him." And again, Isaiah says, "The root of Jesse will come, even he who arises to rule the Gentiles, in him will the Gentiles hope." That's what the cross was all about, to bring into his kingdom men, women, boys, and girls, from every tribe, every language, every nation under heaven to be saved by grace through faith. And when we see people where we want to say something like, "Ah, they don't deserve grace." You got to be a reminded, of course, they don't deserve grace. No one deserves grace. That's what makes grace, grace. It's undeserved. It's for the unworthy. It's unmerited favor. What do you love more than your neighbor, that you'd put before the great need of their souls for Jesus? I think, in Boston, it's reputation. That's what I think. I think we love our reputation more than we love the souls of our neighbors. I think that's true. I've seen, I've been watching this for a while. "What are they going to think of me?" That question doesn't matter. Well, because that question's the same thing as Jonah crying out about the vine. "My comfort. I'm discomfort. I'm uncomfortable. They don't like me. I'm uncomfortable." It's the same thing. You like being liked more than you love the souls of people. And if that were not true, we'd be sharing the gospel all the time with absolutely everybody. God calls Jonah to give up his misplaced pity for himself and learn to pity the nations. He calls him to give up his misplaced love for himself, for his comforts to love like God loves, like Christ loves. This is the call to cruciform love, a love that gives and goes and serves and sacrifices for the sake of the lost. Did Jonah learn his lesson? I want Jonah chapter five. Where's chapter five? I want to know, did he learn his lesson? That he repent? That doesn't matter. That's not the real question. The real question is, will you learn the lessons that God has for us from this book? Will you give up being satisfied with knowing truth but never sharing it? Will you learn to love this great city in which we live, in which there are more than hundreds of thousands of souls, many of whom don't know Jesus Christ? These are questions that Jonah presses into us. Will we go where God is already? And where is God already? He's on mission. Our God is a missional God. Our God is a missionary God. God had one son and his son became a missionary. Someone said, "Jesus Christ came as a missionary to seek and to save that which is lost." Christopher Wright, in his book entitled The Mission of God, makes this statement, he says, "Mission was not made for the church. The church was made for mission, God's mission." Well, that's true that God has given us some missions, a great commission to go and make disciples of all nations, God's already on mission, that God is on mission, that you and I have this great privilege of joining him in that. That's part of the grace we get. And the more you know this missional God, the more you care about mission, about people through your life, through your words, through your actions coming closer to meeting Jesus Christ. Jonah, as an example to us of a very flawed man, being chosen by God and being used by God. He's sinful, he repents, and then he sins again. He's flawed in every way. And yet Jonah is the one who's preaching, converts an entire city. Is the power in the man or is the power in the message? Well, what is the book of Jonah teaches? What is the Romans teaches? Romans teaches, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. And you should take comfort in that. If you've never shared the gospel, a lot of people don't share the gospel because they feel unworthy of it, of sharing it. If I tell people that I'm a Christian, what are they going to think about Christianity? Well, first of all, you should probably rethink a few areas of life. Second of all, man, what are we giving people? When we share the gospel, what are we giving people? Are we giving people our own righteousness? Did you die in the cross for someone's sins? Or is your righteousness going to be imputed to someone? No. Obviously, we need to live lives of integrity. But also, obviously, you're never worthy enough. The power is not in you. The power is in the Holy Spirit, as the Holy Spirit takes the gospel of Jesus Christ. As you take these words and you proclaim, "Yeah, I'm a sinner." You are a sinner. I'm a sinner. We're all sinner. We've all sinned. We've all transgressed the commandments of God. And God is holy and we all deserve condemnation for all of eternity. That's how holy he is. But God is also loving and because he's loving, he's provided a way for all of your sins to be forgiven. All you have to do, you repent of your sin, you trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, you turn from sin, you turn to him, and then you devote your life to worshiping him. And when you do, man, I'm telling you, when the power of God takes that, takes the opportunity, takes that scenario, takes your words, and people, the lights start coming on, you get addicted to it. You get so addicted to seeing people come to faith. I want everyone addicted to it. I want this whole church addicted to people coming in faith. Share the gospel. The power is not in you. The power is in the Holy Spirit and the power is in the word. Romans 9:14-16, "What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means, for He says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." So, then it depends, not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy. So, huge, huge breath of, sigh of relief. You can't mess up someone else's salvation. You can't say the wrong thing and then they're like, "Oh, you said the wrong thing. So, now, I'm not going to get..." God does the saving. You can't even get in the way. But what I'm saying is there's a huge blessing in sharing the gospel and being used by God. Under the new covenant wherein God extends his saving mercy beyond Israel to the ends of the earth, the principle that God saves whom he will becomes even more clear. And he does it. The power resides in the message. Revelation 7:9-17 of vision, "After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb." And all the angels were standing around the throne, around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God saying, "Amen. Blessing glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen." "Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city?" Oh, my God. Lord, would you pity Boston, this great city? "Should I not pity Boston, that great city?" Lord, pity this city. And don't just pity the city in general, a lot of the city in general, Lord, there's people in my life that are far from you. Lord, you've poured out your pity on me. Lord, show your pity to them. If you're not a Christian, if you're not sure of where you're going when you die, if you're not sure of your relationship with the Lord, if you are not a worshiper of God, of Jesus Christ, well, turn to God today. A couple passages from Isaiah, Isaiah 45:22-23, "Turn to me," the words of the Lord, "And be saved, all the ends of the earth. For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone out in righteousness, a word that shall not return. To me, every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance." And Isaiah 55:6-7, "Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near, let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God for he will abundantly pardon." Amen. Let us pray. Lord, we thank you for this great message from the book of Jonah that points to a greater Jonah. Jesus Christ, Jesus, we thank you in the same way that Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. You were the heart of the earth and yet you rose from the dead, and we thank you for that. And Lord, Jesus, we pray, continue to strengthen our souls, and give us the power of the Holy Spirit and continue to build up your church. And Lord, we do pray for a revival upon this great city. Draw many to yourself and use us in the process. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.
Preparation for the Siege of Boston
May 7, 2023 • Andy Hoot • Jonah 3
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com/ Today we're thrilled to continue our series in the Book of Jonah. This is week three and next week will be our final week. Today we are continuing in the series, it's called Reluctant Believer. And again, we are engaging the fact that Jonah does present himself in many ways as a reluctant believer throughout the book, but today chapter 3 is where he is walking in tune with the Lord. And there are a lot of lessons for us to glean and take away for how we should be looking to God to prepare us for the missions that he calls us to. This is really just one of the most exciting chapters of Scripture in my mind. The Lord's used it profoundly in my life and today I will pray right now that he does the same. So let me read Jonah 3 and then I'll pray and deliver the word. Jonah chapter 3 and the full chapter, verses 1 through 10. This is the word of our Lord. "Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, 'Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.' So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, 'Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!' And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. "The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, 'By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.' When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented on the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it." This is the word of our Lord. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we praise you this day for the chance to hear your word almost 3,000 years after the life of Jonah. Lord, your word still stands. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And today we ask that your word would go out in power as it did in the day of Jonah when he went to Nineveh. Lord, we ask that we would get to see your might at hand in the form of changed hearts, in the form of humility and contrition and repentance before you. We pray that all of us here would be inclined to look to you for grace and mercy and receive it with gladness. Holy Spirit, we pray, remind us of the specific callings that you have put on our hearts, those callings to bring you glory. Remind us of your grace if we catch ourselves and having failed in our callings. Remind us of just the ways that you have prepared us to be your servants. And Lord, I just pray, let us be faithful to your formation today through the delivery of your word. I pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. I want to begin with a question. Are you doing anything that requires you to live for a cause greater than the glory or good of yourself? Are you doing anything in life that requires you to live for a cause greater than the glory or good of yourself? I am. I recently started playing on an organized sports team for the first time in 11 years. I did the whole work too much in my mid-20s, get married, have kids, gain weight, have my first reconstructive joint surgery thing over the past decade, and now I'm back on the soccer field with the co-ed parents team for my child's elementary school. And you know what? It's a blast. It's not been a blast because I'm 35 and the average age of everyone else is 40 to 50. It's not been a blast because I'm able to get a workout in that I've been lacking. In full sincerity, I love playing on this team because in locking arms with my teammates, I'm doing something that is blatantly bigger than myself for a couple of hours in the week. I'm playing for a team and essentially it feels good and right to be forgetting myself as I join my teammates. After my first game of playing on the team, I honestly had to ask myself while just feeling good to have joined this greater unit, "Have I been doing this anywhere else in my life? Have I been working for the good of something greater than myself for a while?" And you know what? I realize that I have. I realize that actually day to day as a husband, as a dad, as a pastor, a church member, I've actually been seeking to live for many causes greater than myself as I've tried to serve faithful in each of these roles. And you know what? As hard as being a husband, dad, pastor, church member can be with this renewed perspective from playing soccer, I realized that grinding it out each day in all of these callings is the blessed life. And so why is that? Why do I see it this way? Because I know that to live for myself, for my glory, my desires, my preferences, my plans alone leads to nothing but wasting away and self-deceptions and efforts to try to numb myself to the fact that living in such a way does not satisfy. I tried that approach for five years from the start of college to a year out before I found Mosaic, and I know it doesn't deliver. How many of you have tried that before? To live for yourself for extended periods and it just does not deliver? The pain of the grind to be faithful, though it's not quite as fun as losing oneself while playing soccer on a team, is so much better than the stagnancy and stoutness that mark a life without ambition beyond one's own desires or life with ambition that is too small. So I again ask, are you doing anything that requires you to live for a cause greater than your glory or good? You see, I asked this because I'm trying to draw out something that's inherent in human nature. We were made to live for so much more as the Switchfoot early 2000 song says. Man was made to live for so much more than himself and if he doesn't do this, he gets lost and blind and rots away. The Scriptures attest to this. When God creates men and woman, he gives them a commission, Genesis 1:28, "And God blessed them and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'" Furthermore, when someone is saved in Christ, Jesus commands all... In Matthew 28:18-20, the Great Commission: "All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go with therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." As humans and especially as commissioned Christians, we can't get rid of this inner calling to live for something greater than ourselves. The specific calling to live for God, our creator, to live for his purposes, his glory, the spreading of his dominion through the preaching of the gospel on this side of creation is our unique and grand calling in life. And we can't get rid of it, we can't shake it. I say to you, this is the calling that God places on the lives of all people, whether they profess to be Christian or not. And beyond the Scriptures, what's my further evidence for this? A lot of Scriptures that I can't really spell out today because it'll distract too much from Jonah 3, they tell you to simply look within your heart and you will find this out. It's something about being an image bearer of God that he has imparted part of his attributes to you, that you are going to want to live for his glory. You are going to want to make use of the skills, the gifts, the qualities, the characters, beings, the longings in your heart in this life. And that's a little spiritual, it's a little hard to flesh out with Jonah 3, but I want to just argue with it that we just know this, that we have this part of our human nature just by looking at just literature and media over the years. Look how big and successful the book and movie industries about heroes and heroines who single-handedly take on the world for a great cause are. Ask why are anti-Nazi World War II movies still being churned out like rapid fire constantly in our day? Why are superhero movies so popular? Why are action movies where The Rock, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone just automatic ways to make a ton of money and draw big crowds? Why are so many stories like The Lord of the Rings where a little or simple man or woman like Frodo takes on a tremendous force of evil against all odds, so popular? The answer is that as much as modern, post-modern and India authors and artists try to badmouth these stories and write these narratives out of the human story, they can't. There's something in the heart of the narrative of these one-man army stories, of the underdog stories that appeals to our heart. We can't shake the call to do something great in life. We can't prevent our hearts from being stirred and amazed at the stories of one man taking up great tasks because it's written on our hearts that we must do so ourselves. What does this have to do with our passage today? It has everything to do with it. What takes place in our passage? One guy, one man, a prophet of God, Jonah, with a really shaky track record, in a short moment of wholehearted obedience goes to a great city and God uses his simple message to inspire the most sincere and astonishing revival recorded in all of Scripture. Just think, they didn't even let their... They clothed their animals in sack cloth and ashes. They had their animals fast, not just the people, not just the king and the nobles. There's true humility and contrition with the hope that God would relent of the disaster. The most unbelievable part about the Book of Jonah is not that Jonah is swallowed by a great fish and then spit up on the shore. It's that the great city of Nineveh turns from its evil ways and true contrition and turns to God for mercy. This city great in every way, in size and riches, in population and architecture and security. It had these great walls. In reputation and culture, in military might and wickedness. The people were known in history for cutting off the noses of their captured enemies, skinning them alive, placing their skins on the walls when they captured their city. This great city and its king, its nobles, its people is brought to its knees in sack cloth and ashes before the Lord by the efforts of one man. Jonah's seize and conquering of Nineveh is none other than the classic story of good conquering evil, God conquering Satan, a man carrying out the duty that all men were created to do by God. Just like being on a team has reminded me, just like all the classic hero stories and blockbuster movies do, Jonah's conquering of Nineveh should pull out of all of us that which is inherent in our nature. It should pull out the desire to live for the greatest cause in the universe; to live for the spreading of the rule and reign of the kingdom of God. When we look at this story, it should inspire us. So think about how God can use us in this great city of Boston to think about how we can be more than conquerors for Christ here, to think about how we can take down the giants that are in this land. We should truly believe that through hiding God's training and call in our lives, we can bring this great city perhaps pound for pound, person per person, the most influential city in the world except where it matters most to its knees before God. Today we study Jonah 3 with the intention to identify how God prepares his servants to accomplish much more than they should, to identify how God is preparing us for the seize and conquering of Boston. So how does God prepare his servants for this great service? That's what I want to talk about today as we look at the text. And I say persistent calling, generous grace, strategic planning, giving of power and suffering. Said differently, how's God trying to fight the cynicism that is built up in your heart as an adult, as you've sought to only build your own kingdom or preserve your small cup of peace? Persistent calling, generous grace, strategic planning, giving of power, suffering. So persistent calling. How's God prepare his... How does he prepare his servants for great service? Persistent calling. Jonah 3:1 says, "Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time." This is one of the most encouraging pieces of Scripture, encouraging verses in all of Scripture. How many of you need to hear this right now after walking out the door and saying something to your spouse or your child or your roommate that did not honor them as an image bearer of God as you're trying to rush here today? By nature, as I mentioned, God sends and calls. He doesn't claim or save his children and leave them to stay where they are. He tells them to go and claim dominion for him. With Jonah, there's no ounce of pity toward him after he spent his time in the fish. He doesn't give him a week off. God knows that after his experience in the fish, he has Jonah's heart and he calls him to go to Nineveh a second time. This is encouraging to me. What it tells us is that mission isn't for the elite, it's not for the well-rested, it's not for those who have all authority, have all the resources. It's not for those who are professionally trained, seminary educated, overflowing with resources. It's for anybody who claims that they are the Lord's. God by nature is ascending and calling God. Those who genuinely know God know that he will come to you not just a second time but a third and fourth and beyond to press you into action to get you to stop living for yourself and live for him. Live for the spreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Live for other people. God constantly pushes and plows us out of our comfort zones in an effort to ask us, "When do you really want to start learning who I am? I live to make things new, to change people, to renew them from the inside out. You can never find out who I am if you're never in action dependent upon me." God never sucks us in, swallows us without spitting us out and telling us to go. Think of God's calling of Abraham in Genesis 12. "Now the Lord said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.'" He never saves without calling you to save. He never blesses someone without calling them to be a blessing. And the only way you can be a blessing is if you go, you leave, you leave your comfort zone, your safe space and you get out. God calls us to leave that which is familiar in order to engage that which is foreign and scary and requires vulnerability. It takes these things to bless others. You can't be a Christian and not expect to be on mission without engaging the own mess of your heart and engaging the mess of the hearts of the people that you're trying to serve and love and be used by God to convert. If you don't follow God's call, it's not just that you can't be a blessing and be used by God, it's that it prevents you from becoming like God. Many more years after Abraham, 700-plus years after Jonah, God the Son, Jesus Christ, left the ultimate safety zone, the throne of God's radiant and infinite glory in heaven to take on flesh. And when he was on earth, he faced every tension, every challenge, every hardship that was possible. He spoke, he engaged the world in order to reach out to us and in doing so, he created many followers but many enemies. The same thing we experience in being Christian here in the city. And yet in doing all of this, by humbling himself, Jesus exalted himself. By losing himself, he found himself. The very opposite of what happens when someone lives for themselves. Just thinking about how God just persistently calls us. Just practical application. Just ask yourself, are you living for something beyond the maintenance of your schedule, your work, your reputation, day in and day out? Are there any places where you are extending yourself, making yourself uncomfortable for God and for others, for the sake of saving others, for the sake of encouraging other Christians? Through your giving, through your service, are you actually sacrificing to God? Can you really convince yourself or others that you're doing this? There's a lot of Christians who are like Monday morning quarterbacks. They go to church on Sunday. They have a little analysis of the word, whether it essentially entertained them or not, and then they live as if they're not Christian throughout the week. They're not on mission. We need to be on mission. The great hope when we look at Jonah, the reluctant prophet, the reluctant believer is that we don't really need to be talented, we don't need to be that smart. We don't have to have the gifts, the resources, but we need to give God our will, our willingness to submit to his call. And when we do, he will always accomplish his intended purposes and make us new in the process. Until you understand this, you're going to live life in a fake reality. It's going to be the size of your own head and you're going to be out of touch with who he is and who you are and who you are created to be. And so we have to receive God's call like Jonah, even if we reject it like he did the first time. Next, how do God prepare his servants to do great things? He gives them generous grace. Still talking about verse 1 here, "Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time." Those of you who know the story so far of Jonah, that God's calling of Jonah, again, you know that it doesn't make any sense. Why? Because Jonah didn't obey the first time. God called him, he disobeys, he sins, he goes in the complete opposite direction that God wants him to. Jonah let God down. And I don't know about you. If you think of God's tactic right here, it just doesn't make sense. When you look at... If you're at war, do you go and find an officer who's just been court marshaled to go and place him at the front and be the commander at the most important battle? That's essentially what God does here in sending Jonah to the great city of Nineveh. Jonah's second call and second commissioning is given purely out of the grace of God. He's recommissioned not because of his own merit, but because of the undeserved favor, merit, the undeserved kindness of God. You see, the way that God works to accomplish his great works is completely contradictory to the ways of the world. According to the world's practices, who does the most important tasks? We know very clearly here who that is. It's the Harvard grads, the MIT grads, those who are the richest, the strongest, the most beautiful, the most deserving on paper. But God doesn't work like that. Here he chooses to work through the foolishness of men through a guy like Jonah to show the world his power. He works through Jonah's racist and prejudice tendencies. Jonah talks about this. Jonah really does not want Nineveh to be saved because they're the arch rival of his home nation Israel. He does not want God to give them his mercy. In the New Testament, who does God work through? He works through disciples, fishermen, laborers. And who does he give leadership, a seeming position of leadership among them? Peter the fisherman, the guy who betrayed him three times on the eve of his crucifixion. God gives generous grace over and over again to his servants. He works through people who are saved by grace and powered by grace. People who have no heirs about them because they've already acknowledged to themselves to be complete failures in their own right. People saved by grace who've cried out like Jonah, "Salvation belongs to the Lord," as he did at the end of chapter 2. They're humbled. They don't take up tasks and callings to prove themselves, hide their insecurities or to show themselves to be something that they're not. They take up great responsibilities with a pure desire to honor God out of thanksgiving for his forgiving of them, out of thanksgiving for calling him to his work. And so this is as a Christian, as a servant of God, we have to receive his generous grace over and over. And do you know it? First of all, do you know that the alternative, what you really deserve on the opposite end of being called by God to do his work is wrath? Have you run to him and received forgiveness by looking to the cross, looking to the blood of Jesus Christ to get peace with him, to avoid eternal condemnation, to avoid judgment? Are you powered by grace or are you powered by self-ambition? And that's something that a lot of Christians here will say, empowered by grace, but you really have to ask this question to yourself multiple times. If you're the kind of person drawn to the top programs, drawn to the schools, drawn to the industries and big companies of Boston, are you driven by grace? Are you driven to act in every area of your life out of thankfulness for what God has done for you? And the hard part about being Christian is you have to receive it daily. In my marriage, one of the hardest things is... We've been married nine years and now it's just been hundreds of times where I know that the only way forward is to receive grace from my wife. The only way forward is to just accept that she needs to forgive me for my sin. There's nothing I can do to justify what I did, but I've got to stop. I've got to receive it. I've got to praise God that I have a woman that is happy to give me grace, happy to work forward together just simply out of the kindness of her heart in the same way that God forgives me for my sin. And as Christians, when we're called on task, we're stretched to our limits. We're at the end of our widths. It reveals the inner insecurities that remain in us. It reveals the bad habits and tendencies that are sinful part of the old man that don't honor God. And when we're out on mission, we just need to constantly come back to him and go to the cross of Jesus Christ. So Jonah in this moment, he knows that coming right out at the belly of the fish. Furthermore, how does God prepare his servants for great work? With strategic planning. Verse 2 says, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you." So God gives Jonah strategy. What is that strategy? He sends Jonah into the city, he sends him into Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, the great power of the north of Israel. This is the same strategy that the Apostle Paul used on his mission trips. The man who God used more powerfully than any other person, aside from Jesus Christ himself to spread the gospel. He went to cities to spread the gospel. And why does God employ the strategy? People in the city throughout history, they've always been a little more open to change. The nature of the city, the engagement with different kinds of people, trades and challenges, forces them to think more deeply about issues and seek solutions regarding life, death, heaven, hell, and human flourishing. I can attest to this. I'm from the suburbs. I've worked on staff at a suburban church before and I can tell you... Ask Mosaic staff. I can tell you just for hours and hours all the good things about Southeast Pennsylvania, suburban Philadelphia life, I can go on and on. It's a special place in the world. But as much as I love the people there and confess that they could teach us city dwellers a lot about contentment and resting in the Lord, living there, working there, being on mission there, it was really hard to get them to think about beyond what they're going to eat at their big Sunday family dinner or beyond the big game that afternoon. The best part about living in the city is that people press hard for answers, press hard for truth and don't avoid tensions. Further, God sends Jonah to the city and gets his disciples to employ a city-centered strategy because life primarily runs through the city. Commerce primarily runs through the city. Immigrants arrive at the city and live in the city for a generation or two before considering moving out as the city provides a safe net. Media, theater, publications are still centralized in the city and their material is spread from there. The city is the heart from which all of the lifeblood of a land flows. And that's Boston. That's our pride. Our license plates say, "Spirit of America." That's not for Massachusetts, you know that's Boston saying that. That's so true when you think of the power of the institutions, power of the companies, the power that young 20-somethings and beyond get when they work on companies that you see touch the global market. The city is the heart from which all of the lifeblood of a land flows. And as Christianity, just one point to think about is, as Christianity gripped the Roman Empire and spread rapidly in the early centuries after Christ's death, those who were called pagans were the people who typically stuck their fist up to Christianity and chose to live outside of the city as it spread there in the city. The word pagan can actually mean countrymen. People who lived outside of a city, carried on with all kinds of idolatry. And again, I'm not trying to say that about modern, rural or suburban America. I will never stop feeling homesick for my place where I grew up, suburban Philadelphia, but the Book of Jonah and all of Scripture has a very clear acknowledgement of the importance of the city. Jonah 4:11 says, "And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" And that's saying people who do not know their right hand from their left is probably children. And so when you consider the amount of adults, the number probably gets to 500,000, 600,000. So God reminds Jonah of how many image bearers in this case, particularly children are there in the city. Jonah's upset about God taking away a plant at this point that gave him shade from the sun, but he does not care about the salvation of hundreds of thousands of people. And we just need to be careful that just even being residents in the city, that cynicism toward the city does not grow. We have to be careful that we don't lose heart for the image bearers of God around us. And the question is, do you care for the city? Do you actually have a heart for the city? I think as a church of people who were pent-up in small apartments for an extended time in COVID, we were left panting for space, panting for breathing. Our view of the city might have become a little more matured or nuanced, especially as transplants who just don't know a city life that well, many transplants here. We really need to pray for God to renew our hearts for this city, for Boston, for Brookline, Jamaica Plain, Cambridge. Furthermore, are you here to use the city or just get out? Or are you here because you view your time here as a person who was sent by God to be here to first and foremost do his service or work? A lot of people, the typical Mosaic person who comes for a program just says, "I'll ask these questions later. I'll think about the good of God's name in this city when I'm done my program." And I say, "Don't hesitate, engage them now." Next, God prepares his servants to do great things by the giving of power. And this is from Jonah 3:3-4. "Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, 'Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.'" So Jonah goes into the city. The way the text describes his efforts, the focus isn't placed on the quality of the sermon. It's just eight words here in the English, five words in the Hebrew. Many think this is just a summary. There's a lot of debate. Was this his full sermon or was it just a summary of what Jonas said? I think it's more of a summary statement. I see the limited content on what Jonas says to draw us attention not to his words, it's to have us keep our attention on the power of God in this moment, how God used Jonah. Verse 5 says, "And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them." The people of Nineveh believed God. They didn't believe Jonah, they didn't hear Jonah through his sermon, they didn't hear his words. They heard God, his words. It was God, his power, which gave the people of Nineveh the ears to hear his voice, which led to their complete and wholehearted repentance, which is chronicled in more detailed verses 6 through 9. Verse 6 says, "The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes." And it says, "The word reached the king." Better translated, "The word touched the king of Nineveh." That's God's power touching even the heart of the king. So how did Jonah strike the hearts of all the people of the city and ultimately the king and the nobles? He repented in his own life and the Lord used his sermon, paired it with his power to lead the city to repentance. What does the city need more than anything? This great conversion that we see or this great repentance that we see in the city. What does the city need more than anything in Nineveh? What does it need more than anything today? Repentance before God. Individuals, heads of households, heads of state weeping for their sin before God, turning from their violent and evil ways and turning to God for mercy. The city more than anything needs more people with repentant hearts before God. Do you think that Christian, or do you agree with what you hear out there in the media? Do you ever hear modern politicians, local or nationals say that that's what the city needs? Individual repentance, a turning from sin and turning to God, a change, a true change in the hearts of people? No, it's always band-aids. It's diplomacy, negotiation, urban planning, therapy. That's what the politicians, that's what anthropologists, that's what sociologists, that's what college professors, that's what counselors say, but it's repentance before God. It's a new heart, a changed heart, a heart that does a complete 180 that stops looking for itself all the time and starts looking to God continually. So God's called children need to trust that when he sends them, he sends them in power. That's the only reason why I'm here in Boston today. I have no confidence in my own strengths. I'm a preacher because I truly believe that God gives us power. When we speak, when we spread the word faithfully, when we fight for holiness in our daily lives, he uses us in our weakness for his glory. We need to remember that. And this is what Mosaic believes. This is what has built this church. I've been blessed to see Mosaic grow from 15 people in 2011 to what it is today. And the strength of Mosaic has always been its fight to stay faithful to the word of God. And it's not because we have a website with nice design. It's not because we do have lot of young, cool, trendy, attractive people. It's because we have gathered people around the preaching of God's word and God's power has gone out as he says it would. We believe that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to the Jew first and also the Greek. It's what everybody in the world needs to be saved to be right before God and to live a righteous and holy life going forward until Jesus returns or until they die. The local church isn't to focus its energies and resources on efforts focused on big picture systemic change and politics, but on individual soul salvation, which makes people new from inside out. God will be glorified, the city will be renewed when one person, one household at a time turns from their evil ways and turns to receive mercy from the Lord. So do you believe this? Are you expending all of your energies in all of these other areas at the cost of being faithful to the stewarding, the sanctification of your own heart? At the cost of being faithful to being present with brothers and sisters in Christ who are asking hard questions of God, of the gospel, who are asking for help and encouragement as they fight sin? For the Christian, there should be a whole recalibration of how I'm saved in Jesus. Now, how do I better invest my time to honor God, to bring glory to his name? And a lot of young people are... Sometimes that means stay there, stay where you are and really try to be a witness to God there. But if you're not accepted after faithful effort, after faithful effort, God says, "Stomp your feet off and go and find somewhere else." And so how are you actively trying to identify your calling today? And a lot of it, it begins with loving God. What did you say? Love God, love your neighbor. Are you looking to be present to serve God with the people who are physically next to you? Not the people online, not the people on social media. And even I say if you've left mom and dad and they're in a city far away, you have to be present with the people who are there in person before then. You have made the choice to actively leave them to be present somewhere else. And you either accept that and own it and be present where you are. And you still praise God. We get to call them and have FaceTime and video chats in our day. Or you say, "All right, I've got to go home. God wants me there." And so we need to be present with the people that God place in our life. We need to love God, love neighbor. Do you believe what the world needs is the gospel, is Jesus, is repentance and faithfulness before him? And it's so easy, it's such an easy offer. All people have to do is turn in faith, believe the good news, and they get the Holy Spirit, the power of God to work about a new identity rooted in him. It's the greatest deal in history. So Christians, we need to share God's word with boldness and faith, trusting that his power will go out. The God who once used the delivery of gospel to save you at some point, to convict you of your sin before him, he will send the power out when you share the gospel and try to live it out faithfully. We need to stop being ashamed. If we're in the gospel, we have what all people hear, whether rich or poor need. That's the message which brings about peace and restoration before God. So God, he gives us grace and he calls us here to go out in power. And furthermore, how does he prepare his saints for great service like he did for Jonah? And last is the suffering. God gives his servants suffering to equip them to do great things. He gives them suffering to be as powerful of a one-man army as Jonah was in this book. And I don't get this text from Jonah 3, I get it from Matthew 12:38-40, which is Jesus's analysis of this text. It says, "Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him saying, 'Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.' But he answered them, 'An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.'" Jesus is communicating here that it's out of his death that others will receive life. It's not miracles that ultimately show his power and authority and make him worthy to follow as God, but it's out of his weakness, his death, that the sufficiency of his saving power will be born, that he himself will show himself worthy of worship. Jesus was the suffering servant. It's through suffering that Jesus makes his followers good servants. A servant cannot be greater than his master. When we are saved, we are called to be formed by suffering in our service. There's no doubt that the greatest form of preparation for Jonah's ministry was his suffering, the dissent into the deep, into the abyss, a near-death experience because of his rebellion against God that he was prepared to take up this task. And why is that the case? Why is suffering a good thing? Particularly in this instance, Jonah's suffering enabled him to embody the message that he delivered to the Ninevites. What's the message that he had? What's the message of the gospel? God is both righteous and merciful. He's not just merciful. The church is really good. Modern church is really good at hitting mercy, mercy, mercy, grace, grace, grace. God is both righteous and merciful. He is holy and righteous by nature, and he cannot and will not accept anybody into his presence who is marked by sin. At the same time, he is a gracious God and merciful, slow to an anger and abounding and steadfast love and relenting from disaster toward anyone who repents of their sin and calls on the name of Jesus Christ. That was Jonah's message. That's the message of the Bible. That's the message of Jonah. That's the message of the gospel. And Jonah knew this very well. He knew of God's righteous condemnation of his sin because he was put in the belly of a fish for it. He knew of God's grace and mercy through his experience of being spit up by the fish and given a second chance at life, a second chance to do the work of God. Jonah's ministry to the Ninevites was so powerful because his life embodied the message of God's righteousness and mercy towards sinners, and that is the same of Jesus Christ. When we look to the cross, when we look at Christ's life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and ultimately his return, we see the righteousness and mercy of Jesus. Jonah, when he would've told of the judgment coming for a sin, he would've told them with all sincerity of its inevitability and reality. When he would've told them of the grace and mercy of God, he would've told them in a way that convinced them that he knew it personally. He knew this all because God allowed him to suffer. Remember chapter 2 he says, "Your waves, your breakers were cast over me in this experience in the water, in this experience in the belly of the fish." God appointed suffering is what gave Jonah the humility, gave Jonah the appreciation of grace, gave Jonah the humility to rely on the power of God in service, even in a place as wicked as Nineveh through his suffering. And he does the same with us. And just Jonah, why was his ministry so powerful? Because his life, his presence embodied the message that he delivered to the people. And I ask, is that true of you? All Christians know upon conversion, they're going to have a moment of true conversion. They're going to know that they're under the conviction of a holy God. And that strikes the fear of death, fear of hell in you. And the thing is, you can't stay there. A lot of people stay under conviction that's an old historic word before they turn and receive grace. They're there for too long and they think they just have to self-loathe and feel guilty for their sin. But no, when you feel this, when you see your sin, your folly before God, you have to look quickly and receive his mercy and find forgiveness, love, joy, freedom in him. So Christian, are you benefiting from your suffering? Are you learning in your suffering? And I press this point that it's up to us to... We have the power to decide how suffering affects us. This isn't what a lot of counselors, this isn't what the world's going to tell you. We have the choice to let suffering embitter us and paralyze us, or sharpen us and embolden us. It's all a matter of faith. When you suffered, you trust that God could be using it to better enable you to embody the message of salvation that you offer to other people, to understand just how much your savior went through for you, to understand his righteousness, his grace better, or do you harden yourself and get angry and close yourself off to him and others? So God used suffering in the life of Christ. He used it here in the life of Jonah, and he can do it in yours. To close, I just want to ask, how are you going to start living for something greater than your own glory or good today? How are you going to start living for something greater than your own glory or good today? As you ask that question, remember that to do that, God has persistently called you. He has generously offered grace time and time again. He has given you the strategy, he has given you his power, and he has blessed you with suffering to embody the message that you deliver. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, we praise you that we have this great passage of Jonah before us. We thank you for the hope that it offers to us as sojourners, as aliens living in a foreign land away from heaven, away from the fullness of your presence right now. We have this hope that you can use us, jars of clay, just weak vessels for your glorious and grand purposes. We praise you that you do not change, that we have hope that you can move here in Boston today as you once did in Nineveh. Lord, we ask that you would shine your face upon us, that you would give us grace, that you would continue to give all of us here as individuals and as a body, just great mission, great call, and great purpose, the honor to serve you and the tensions between heaven and hell. The honor to serve you as we face the thorns and thistles of life. The honor to be a part of your calling home of your children. Lord, we ask, give us eyes to see all the ways that you are forming us, training us, encouraging us, sharpening us, molding us to be more humble, more faithful, more repentant servants in your kingdom. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.
Rock Bottom
April 30, 2023 • Jan Vezikov • Jonah 2
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com Heavenly Father, we thank You for the blessing of us to gather as Your people. We thank You for the holy scriptures. We thank You for Your holy people. You call them saints. You call us saints. It's not because of any righteousness in and of ourselves. We have none to commend ourself to You. We come to You only on behalf of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, we thank You that you were cast away from the presence of the Father in order to provide a way for us to never be cast out. If there's anyone who is outside Your family, outside of the elect, today, draw them to Yourself by the power of the Holy Spirit. Lord, in each one of us, develop a humility, a contrition of heart, a trepidation before Your Word, the same that we see with Jonah. You gave him the gift of hitting rock bottom, and I pray that that's not what it takes for any of us. But even if anyone of us does, we thank You that You meet us there. We pray that you bless our time, the holy scriptures today, and we pray You minister to us where we are and help us take the next step in obedience of faith. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Today we continue our sermon series through the Book of Jonah. The title of the sermon today is Rock Bottom. Jonah, as we met last week, is a reluctant believer, he's a rebellious prophet, and on top of that, he is a resentful missionary. God comes to Jonah and says, "Go." And Jonah says, "No." Jonah runs away. He runs to Tarshish, it's the opposite direction of Nineveh. It's not that he was afraid that people in Nineveh would believe in God and have their sins forgiven, no, no, no, that they wouldn't believe. He actually feared that they would believe he hated them. He didn't think they were deserving of the Word of God. He deemed that God had made a mistake. "No, God, You have to be wrong about these people." So Jonah boards a ship bound for Tarshish, pays the fair. It's a long trip, maybe a year, would cost a small fortune. He probably sold everything he had. So he's all in on running away from God. Yahweh the Lord hurls a great storm, God never misses, and the storm threatens the ship and the lives of the crew members. The pagan sailors don't know what to do. They do everything they possibly can. They jettison the [inaudible 00:02:55], they pray to their gods, they cast lots, they confront Jonah. Finally, Jonah confesses who he is. He says, "I fear God." And last week we saw that his fear of God was very half-hearted, and he confesses to what he's done. "I'm trying to flee from the Lord, that's why the Lord has cast a storm." They toss him overboard and the storm calms. The moment Jonah's off the ship, Yahweh relents from His wrath, calms the storm, delivers the crew, and the crew actually gets saved. They repent of their sin. They turn to Yahweh because they see the power of Yahweh even working right in front of them. The prophecy of Jonah reveals that it's Yahweh's redemptive purpose to save everybody, including gentiles. This was the whole making a covenant with Israel. God wanted Israel to be missionaries in the promised land, to serve as witnesses to his holiness and righteousness to neighboring gentiles. They didn't do it in the same way that Jonah didn't do it. The lesson that we can draw from here is you can run, but with God, you can never hide, neither from God nor from His purposes. Philippians 1:6 promises us, "I'm sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." And often God does allow us to hit rock bottom to fulfill, to complete His work in us. He doesn't just do it passively. Sometimes He actively determines it as He does with Jonah. He gives him the gift of rock bottom. Jonah wanted to literally hit rock bottom. He wanted to die. God says, "No," sends a big fish, big enough to swallow him whole. Obeying God is costly. Disobeying God is even more costly. But this book isn't about Jonah.,It's about a God that meets Jonah even at rock bottom. The book is about a God who loves us. I don't know when's the last time you meditated upon that, that God does love you and therefore God does pursue you. God does confront you. He will arrest you to awaken you, and He does this to bring us to the end of ourselves and bring us home in faith back to Him. The text here before us in Jonah 2 focuses not so much on what happens in the belly of the fish, but what happens in the heart of Jonah himself. Jonah's experiencing death itself. He's in a living tomb, perhaps even physical death. We'll get into that. If you take the sign of Jonah language, literally Jesus says, "I will send you a sign of Jonah," and then He compares a sign of Jonah to His own death, burial and resurrection. A sign of Jonah could have been that Jonah did die. We'll get into that. Either way, the miracle is that God doesn't just save this man physically, but He saves his heart and He saves his soul. Before Jonah can effectively preach repentance, he must first learn to repent himself. So that brings us to Jonah 2. Would you look at the text with me? "Then Jonah prayed to the Lord His God from the belly of the fish, saying, 'I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice. For You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me, all your waves and your billows passed over me.' Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall again look upon Your holy temple.' The waters closed in over me and take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped about my head. At the roots of the mountain, I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever, yet you who brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. When my life was fainting away, I remember the Lord and my prayer came to You, into Your holy temple. "Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to You, what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Joan out upon the dry land." This is the reading of God's holy, inherent, infallible, authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time, first, the merciful wrath of God's discipline. Second, the missing words from Jonah's prayer. And third, the mysterious ways of the Lord's salvation. First, the merciful wrath of God's discipline. This phrase, merciful wrath, was coined by Martin Luther to describe the fact that God does, as a loving father, often send fatherly discipline that feels severe in the lives of his children. There are times when a Christian wanders so far, backslides so far from the path of faithful obedience to God, when the virus of rebellion has spread so vigorously through our spiritual system that nothing but the merciful wrath, a wounding medicine, can cure. Sometimes God has to bring us to the end of ourselves before we're ready to turn back to Him. This is what happened with the prodigal son. It wasn't until he finds himself sitting in the muck and the filth in the pigsty, and he sees pigs eating and he actually covets their food. It says that he came to himself, he came to his senses, and then he began to make his journey home. This is what God is doing in Jonah's life. It's a merciful wrath. It's a spiritual chemotherapy on the cancer of his rebellion. It's hard, it's sore, and it's necessary. But God does actively pursue convict those whom He loves. The purpose of God's judgment on Jonah is to bring him to repentance. Look how far Jonah has gone from God in an attempt to run from God's presence. He goes down to the port to catch the ship in Tarshish, down to the hull of the ship, down into the sea. So part of God's plan was to let him go down, down, down. There are many different ways to run from God, not just getting on a ship and running in the opposite direction. Jonah was active in fleeing from God. Many of us, we do it more passively. Perhaps you work so much you don't even have time to connect with God, "God, You know why I'm working so hard." Or perhaps it's endless entertainment or perhaps it's just generally avoiding any talk about God whatsoever. This is a subject that we shall never broach, ever, ever, ever. That's how many of us live in the secular humanist in Boston. There's subjects that you do not touch in public company, but also even in our own minds. Do our minds gravitate toward God? When Jonah hits rock bottom, what's he left to do? What are we left to do when we hit rock bottom? Well, he prays. And what does he pray? What do you pray when you have nothing to say, when you don't know what to say? Well, he prays the words of God back to Him. He prays psalms from the psalter. All the words here are quotes from the [salter, at least seven different psalms he quotes, perhaps directly or perhaps he had so memorized the Word of God that when he had nothing else to do, nowhere else to turn, he meditates on the Word of God. The psalm in this chapter is a meditation on his fish belly experience. As he's marinating in gastric juices, Jonah is meditating on God's Word. This chapter is a memorialization of his desperation. He's on the brink of death or he is dead, and then he wrote this after, I don't know. But Jonah 2:1-2, "Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, 'I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and He answered me, out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice.'" To whom does he pray when he hits rock bottom? To the Lord, Yahweh, the covenantal, relational, loving, merciful name of God. But I don't know if you noticed, that's personal. God got personal all of a sudden. God wasn't personal. I wanted nothing to do with the presence of God, what God's telling me what to do. All of a sudden, when he's got nowhere else to go, God becomes personal. Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. Jonah 2:6, "'Yet You brought up my life from the pit, oh Lord my God.'" Well, contrast that with what he says to the sailors when he confesses his identity, Jonah 1:9, "And he said to them, 'I'm a Hebrew. I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea in the dry land.'" Did you catch that? Before he needed God, it's the God of heaven. As soon as he has nowhere else to turn, "You're my God." Well, what is that? That's just a child. He's finally awakening to the fact that he's a child of God and he needs his loving Father right now. Apparently, Jonah does not fear death. After all, he was willing to sacrifice himself to save the ship's crew. What Jonah fears is being abandoned to Sheol. He didn't know what that was going to feel like. What is the Sheol? You can spend a lot of time figuring this out, but it was an understanding of this is where you go, this is where the dead go, the place of the dead to await judgment, the final judgment. And more generally, it's the interior place of the departed. As you look at how he thinks of Sheol, look at verse six, "At the roots of the mountains, I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever, yet You brought up my life from the pit.'" So Jonah sinks to the roots of the mountain, rock bottom metaphorically. And now, alas, in the depths of the ocean abyss, the reluctant prophet desperately cries out to Lord, "O Lord my God." What got him to cry those words, O Lord my God? He thought death was it. He thought, "Okay, I don't want to do what God wants me to do. I just want to die. I don't want to die, Lord, kill me, the suicidal prop. Kill me. Kill me. And then the Lord says, "Oh, you want run for My presence? You want to experience what it feels like to not have My presence forever?" That's what the text says, "bars close upon me forever." What is God doing here? God is giving Jonah a taste of hell. Not just of death, not just of physical torture, He's giving him a taste of death, of hell, of being abandoned by God forever. And this is wounding medicine that God made Jonah fish bait, not to destroy him, but to deliver him, and deliver him not just from the storm threatening to shipwreck the vessel, but from the sin that was making a shipwreck of his life. What a sober warning this is for many of us, that when we think we are fleeing God's presence and we run and we run and we run, there might come a point where that's it. There's no more turning back. You do end up in a place called Sheol or hell or whatever you call it, a place where God's loving presence no longer exists. So Jonah here is brought to repentance. Rebellion is running from the presence of God, repentance is returning to the presence of God. So here we find this man, the most extreme of circumstances, in the belly of the fish and the depths of the sea and the jaws of death itself. And what does he do? He prays and he cries out to God. Lesson here, friends, is cry out to God wherever you are, wherever you are, however you find yourself, do not wait until you are at rock bottom. If that's what it takes, God will take you there. No, friends do not scoff this gift of salvation, this gift of forgiveness of sin, this gift of heaven instead of hell. Do not scoff at that. Look at this man of God, it took him experiencing hell to finally cry out to God. We don't need to get there. How did he get where he is? In Jonah 2:3, he acknowledges that God is sovereign, "For You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seeds, and the flood surrounded me, all your waves and your billows passed over me." How did he get there? "It was You," he says to God. Wait, I thought it was the sailors that threw him in. Well, yes, there were instruments in the sovereignly determining hands of God. The crew acted freely and out of desperation and prayerfully, but Jonah knows, "No, no God, You threw me in." The Bible frequently presents free human actions as the fulfillment of God's will with no attempt to resolve the apparent conundrum. Notice Jonas speaks of the seas, the waves, the storms as all Yahweh's possession, Yahweh formed the oceans, He controls the wind and the waves. These become Yahweh's means to both discipline and rescue the reluctant prophet. Verse five, "The waters closed in over me to take my life, the deep surrounded me, the weeds were wrapped about my head." He could feel his life fainting away, as verse seven says. It's a terrible, chilling, graphic depiction of a drowning man. He thought he was drowning. He thought his lungs were filling up with water, lungs with no oxygen, jaws closing in, and then he cries out, "God, you did it." There's two different ways. When you experience calamity in your life, you can say, "God, You did it. It's all Your fault. I'm going to blame You for the pain I feel. You are not loving, You are harsh." No, he doesn't blame God for his predicament, he says, "God, You did it, I deserve it, and this is for my good." He could say, "Lord has chastened me, and He's chastened me grievously, but not to give me over to prediction. I live, and while I live, I need to reassess my life. God has given me mercy and He's given me mercy for a reason." In 2:4, he begins to really wrestle with the heart of what it means to be abandoned by God. "Then I said, 'I'm driven away from your sight." Being driven away, another translation says to be banished. Leviticus talks about a spouse, a wife that commits adultery against her husband, the husband divorces or banishes her. As Jonah here is entombed in the belly of this great fish, he feels banished from the presence of God. He's been trying to flee from the presence of God, and God here gives him a taste of what that feels like. Hebrews 10:31, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." There are a couple ways of being in the hands of the living God. Jesus Christ talks about the fact that people who are Christians, the elect are children of the Father, and the Father holds us in His hands and He will never let us go. Sometimes the Lord's, the Father's hands are loving and tender and sometimes they are disciplinary and they're full of wrath. And this is the hands that Jonah fell in. Psalm 31:22, "I had said in my alarm, 'I'm cut off from your sight.' But You heard the voice of my please for mercy when I cried to You for help." So Jonah does cry out in verse five, "The waters closed in over me to take my life, the deep surrounded me, weeds were wrapped about my head," and verse six, "yet You brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God." Well, great, Jonah cries out to God, God saves him when he's meditating on the Word of God, he's repenting. But this brings us to point two, the missing words of Jonah's prayer. There's something missing. Reading Jonah's song of praise here is like listening to someone play a perfectly tuned piano, but there's one key missing. There's something missing. There's a good deal of beauty here, but that one note, and it's the note of repentance of the particular sin. There's missing lines, there's missing bars, if you will, of calling sin a sin. Jonah here has changed, praise to God, God's at work, but it's a gradual change. It comes in fits and starts like the blind man. Remember the blind man in Mark 8? Jesus restores the sight of the blind man. Jesus touches him and says, "What do you see?" And the blind man says, "I see men walking around like trees." He sees, but he doesn't see clearly yet. His vision was still in distinctive, still blurry. So what does Jesus do? He touches him again and at last he's able to see clearly. Isn't this how often God deals with us. The first time you come to the Lord, you're like, "I finally understand everything. I'm preaching next Sunday. I think I'm ready to preach the Word of God." And then little by little you begin to understand, "Oh, it's all a process. We're all in process." And some of the Lord's most important lessons, they take time and there's stages and changes that occur in our heart. Jonah has come a long way from his unbending rebellion. We get to a point where he's worshiping in the belly of a great fish, but he hasn't come far enough. He hasn't said the missing words. "Jonah, why didn't you go to Nineveh? Why didn't go to the capitol of Assyria, your arch enemy of Israel? Why didn't you go there?" "I didn't want to preach the word to them." "Why didn't you want to preach the word to them, Jonah?" "Because they might repent." "Isn't that a good thing, Jonah?" "No. No. I don't want them to repent because I don't want to call them brother or sister. I don't want to worship with them in the temple. I don't want to go back to my people and tell them, 'Hey, Israel, remember your enemies that killed you? Yeah, they're all repented and they're all going to come worship at the festivals.'" Jonah, he would get killed. No, Jonah should have repented. This should have been like verse two, "Lord, I repent for hating my enemies. Lord, I repent for hating the Ninevites." The one note that needs to be sounded loudest and longest and clearest is missing all together from this psalm is xenophobia, his prejudice that made him flee in the first place, his horror at the idea of those people becoming children of God. That's a festering sore that still remains in his heart, unaddressed, unrepented of. Look at verse seven, "When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, my prayer came to You, into Your holy temple." I remembered the Lord. The reminded you of Himself very clearly. You didn't do much to remember the Lord, good sir. And then he continues in verse eight, so he's just talking to himself, I'm awesome, I remember the Lord, and then, "Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I... " Do you see the contrast? "But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to You, what I have vowed I shall pay. Salvation belongs to Lord." The phrase for steadfast love here, verse eight, God is steadfast love, he's got the theology. It's the word for hesed in the Greek, covenant love, covenant mercy, a love that sends Jesus Christ to die for our sins. A love that does not spare the Son of God but freely delivers Jesus up for us all. Jesus experiences what Jonah had not experienced completely. Jesus experienced the wrath of God, the eternal wrath of God. Jesus experienced the full brunt of hell on the cross for us so that when we trusted him, repent of our sins, all our sins are forgiven, and we experience the hesed love of God, His steadfast love. It's a covenant love. It's a faithful love. It's a redeeming love of God for His chosen people. "Idolaters, Jonah says correctly, "have no share in the redeeming love of God." It's all true. But look at Jonah, he doesn't consider himself one of the idol doers. He considers himself as the one that did all the things right. "Unlike them, you see, I know who God is." There is a self-congratulatory note, a self-centeredness that still persists. It clings to his heart tenaciously. His whole problem was he did think he was better than the Ninevites. "Well, of course, God loves me. I'm Jewish, I'm part of the Jewish people. I am a prophet. Look at the spiritual pedigree of my family." He may even be hinting that God saved him because he deserves to be. "Well, of course, God saved me. God still needs me to preach to the Ninevites. That's kind of what's going on here. He thinks the outsiders are beneath God. But he is absolutely right here at the end, salvation belongs to whom? To Israel? No. Salvation belongs to whom? Salvation belongs to the Lord. That's how he ends the whole thing. What does that mean? It means that we contribute absolutely nothing to our salvation. Yes, we must exercise faith and we need to engage in repentance, but these contribute nothing to our salvation, to our justification before God the Father, to our reconciliation before God. We add absolutely nothing other than the sin that made it necessary. Salvation is of the Lord from beginning to end. If God doesn't save us, then we're not saved. That's what Jonah learned in the belly of the fish, that salvation is all from the Lord beginning to end. He kind of knew it, but now he's learned it in the crucible of trial and suffering. So we're all in a process like Jonah, it's true, that God isn't finished with him yet. And praise to be to God, He's not finished with us either. But here we do need to take a lesson from Jonah's hypocrisy that's being exposed. Christian, where is there hypocrisy in your own life? There is the Lord putting His finger on some area of inconsistency in your Christian walk, someplace where you say one thing and do the other, some dimension of you thinking orthodox words are enough to cover selfish, prideful attitudes. Do you still struggle with xenophobia or partiality, where you would rather spend time with Christians like this not Christians like that? The church is a missionary society, and we must never forget that. This is why we exist, we exist to bring glory to God and extend His praise from shore to shore. And our goal is to reach those who are far from the Lord, the other, with the gospel of grace. There is no room, if we believe in grace, if we believe that we're saved by grace through faith, then there's absolutely no place for any superiority complex. Jonah 2:10, "And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land." The Lord spoke. The Lord spoke to the fish. Next time you go fishing, you should pray, "Lord, speak to some fish to come my way." Lord speaks to fish, and when God speaks, the fish obeyed, and Jonah is delivered onto dry land. Big fish don't usually beach themselves. The fish here is Yahweh's agent and does exactly as Yahweh commands, unlike Jonah, and deposits Jonah presumably somewhere near Palestine on a beach where Jonah will be recommissioned to preach the gospel. What did Jonah look like right now? I'll leave that to your imagination. I don't think he had eyebrows, and that's enough. If a guy comes to you and preaches without eyebrows that he lost in a belly of a fish, you listen. What we need to know here is that God is a God that can resurrect, and we need to know this, that this is the heart of our faith, that you must believe in the resurrection if you are to be a Christian. Romans 10:8-13, "But what does it say? 'The word is near you, in your mouth, and in your heart,' that is the word of faith that we proclaim, 'because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the scripture says, "Everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame." For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord as Lord of all, bestowing His riches on all who call on Him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved'" This is as simple as it gets. If you are not a Christian, you're new to Christianity, you just want to know what this is all about, this is as simple as it gets. Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins, bearing the wrath of God that I deserve. He died, He was buried, and He was raised on the third day as proof that everything He taught was absolutely true. Now, how does that impact me? When you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, when you believe that Jesus is Lord, and if you believe that He rose from the dead, that's all it takes, you will be saved. Saved from wrath of God, saved from being banished into a place called hell. Saved from your sin. Saved from the penalty of sin. Friend, if you're not a Christian today, don't put it off, don't put it off. Today, in your heart of hearts, pray to the Lord, "Lord, I repent of my sin, of my reluctance, of my folly, of my rebellion, of my law-breaking. Lord, I repent. Lord, I trust in You. Jesus you're king. And Jesus, I believe that You rose from the dead and I will rise from the dead one day as well." Third, the mysterious ways of the Lord's salvation, Jonah 2:9, "But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you, what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord." So salvation leads to thankful sacrifice. God, thank You for saving me. What would You have me do? This is the natural inclination of every true child of God. It's the instinct of the redeemed soul. God, what would You have me do? True repentance always involves commitment, which means now, Lord, are You telling me to do the hard things like go preach to the Ninevites. Jonah had his Nineveh, what is your Nineveh? What is the thing that God is calling you to do and you're like, "No, no, no, that's going to take too much sacrifice."? Well, true repentance always includes a desire to sacrifice. Why should I sacrifice to attain salvation? No, this is where Christianity separates itself from absolutely every other worldview or religion. No, we don't sacrifice to earn salvation. No, salvation doesn't belong to us earning. Salvation belongs to the Lord, completely, 100%. Jonah here isn't swimming in the sea saying, "God save me." There is no power for salvation. That's the picture here. All he does is cry out. All he does is pray. And yet you know what? It's an imperfect prayer. It's imperfect, but it's answered. Do you notice before we move on that the prayer Jonah prayed as he sank into the sea was imperfect, but God still answers it? This is part of the wonder of the story. Jonah, he doesn't even know what to repent of. All he does is cry out. He knows who can help him and he knows he needs help. He turns to God for rescue even though it's not a full repentance. The whole Book of Jonah comes to a conclusion, as we'll see eventually, that we're still not really sure if Jonah repent. His heart hasn't changed as he prays, and God condescends to hear him anyway. Jonah is a hard-hearted, stubborn man, but he's still loved by God. He cries out to God, "God, I'm a sinner." And he's sinking of the ocean, the waves wrap around his head, his life faints away, he feels like he's entering Sheol himself. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't even think, "You know what? The Lord is getting my attention. You know what? I think I am here because I have disobeyed the Lord. He doesn't do any of that. All he does is cry out to God from his mess, from his brokenness. He doesn't even do it right. He is completely self-centered. He uses the pronoun I 10 times in eight verses, my seven times. He's making vows that he doesn't really keep later. The point here is you don't have to work through all your junk before coming to the Lord. You don't have to have figured it all out. I was talking to a guy, invited him to church, he's like, "But I've never read the Bible." I was like, "Bro, that's like half my church. Don't worry, just come to the church." No, it's not. I mean, you guys have read the Bible. But you know what I'm saying? You don't have to be a theologian before you come. He's nasty. He hasn't cleaned himself up, gastric juice, all that, not a full repentance. But he does turn to Yahweh, and that's where the power of repentance is. What is repentance? Repentance isn't just confessing, acknowledging, chronicling all of your sins to God. He already knows them. Repentance is turning from sin and turning to the Lord. As you turn to the Lord, you're like, "Oh wow, You were gracious. You're so gracious to me." Jonah 2:1, "Jonah prayed to Lord His God from the belly of the fish." He prayed. Scripture says, "Seek me and you will find me if you seek me with all your heart." Scripture promises, "Come close to God and He will come close to you." This is how Jesus taught us to pray, "Seek and you shall find. Ask and you shall receive. Knock and it shall be opened to you." Yeah, Jonah is in a mess, but it's a self-inflicted mess, and it's a miracle that God would even take time to listen. But God does listen. Here is a God more willing to hear than we are to pray, a God who knows the words on our lips before we speak them. But He longs for us to speak them so that we may know that He has heard our prayers. To pray is to admit that there is something greater to the reality that we're all experiencing. There's a God in this reality, a God who is distinct from our own reality. He's transcendent. It's a reality which is different from ours and possibly therefore threatening. Who is this God? If I talk to this God, if I submit to this God, if I obey this God, will I be happy? Will I experience the life I want to experience? Once we come face to face with this reality, we realize, "Oh, this was the whole point the whole time. There is no joy outside of God. There is no joy outside the presence of God. There is no satisfaction apart from the presence. There's no comfort apart from the presence of God. Apart from the presence of God, all I have is darkness, Sheol for all of eternity." The Lord our God is this reality. Yahweh is the only safe hiding place, the only secure refuge. Only in Yahweh, in God can we acknowledge and expose ourself as completely defenseless, powerless, and vulnerable. He meets us there and He does not banish us. He meets us there and He loves us and He comforts us. To unmask ourselves in prayer is to begin to discover who we really are in the presence of God. In prayer, the heart, the eyes, the ears of the human soul are open to the possibility of being touched and healed by the Holy Spirit. Prayer is the breath of life, and it is Jonah's last hope, and it's our last hope. God appoints a great fish, and I take much comfort in this. In Jonah 1:17, "The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." When did God appoint a fish? How big of a fish does it have to be to swallow a man whole? That's a pretty big fish. I'm not an aquarist, but I assume that for a fish to get of that size, it takes time. I think God appointed this fish long before Jonah boarded a ship to Jhapa, before Jonah decided to flee from the presence of Lord to Tarshish, before even he had heard the call of God to go to Nineveh in the first place. I think God ordained this fish a long time ago knowing that this moment would come. Salvation really does belong to the Lord. And before Jonah was aware of what would happen, God had already made provision for his deliverance. Did God know that Jonah was going to sin as egregiously as he... Yes, of course. God before that sin ordains a means of deliverance. God's salvation is a sovereign gift, prepared and provided long before we even knew we needed or wanted it. Scripture teaches us that God has demonstrated His love for us in this and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Friends, there are no unexpected eventualities in your life for which grace is unprepared. There are stages or seasons in your life that I know you're scared of. You're like, "I'm not looking forward to this part." I'm like, "Grace will come." There are no unexpected eventualities in your life for which grace is unprepared. Jesus is a perfect savior to sinners, no matter the pattern or the contours of your particular sin. He is suitable to us. The Book of Hebrews says He's shaped perfectly to our need. Salvation belongs to the Lord, and He has provided it in Jesus Christ, a savior prepared in advance. Jonah 2:4. "Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall again look upon Your holy temple.'" What's the connection between being banished from the presence of God and the holy temple? Jonah, what are you saying? "I've been banished because of my sin," he knows it, "but I'm still going to look at the holy temple." Why is he thinking about the holy temple? Well, the holy temple breaks down the gospel in a way that shows us both the bad news and the good news. In the holy temple, in Israel, in Jerusalem, at the center of the temple was the Holy of Holies. And at the center of the Holy of Holies was a wooden box, the Arc of the Covenant. And in it were two tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. It's the Ten Commandments. They outline God's character, that God has called us to live a life of love toward God, love toward people. It's a law that requires what we in our heart of hearts want to be. Who doesn't want to be a loving person? Who doesn't want to be known as selfless or sacrificial or humble in the realest way? Well, that's what the commandments call us to. And the law tells us that this is the only relationship with God to keep the commandments. Well, the bad news is we've all broken the commandments. We've transgressed the commandments. If you're not even familiar with the commandments, I'll just tell you commandment number 10 is thou shall not covet your neighbor's house. All right? If you live in Boston or Brookline, you have broken that commandment. This is how we're bringing revival through the real estate market. You have all committed sin there, commitment number 10. We're all jealous, we need need grace. The good news is, over the Arc of the Covenant, over the law, there's a golden slab called the Mercy Seat. It was called the Place of Propitiation. Propitiation means to turn aside the wrath of somebody through payment. Here it's God. And once a year, on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, an animal was killed and blood was sprinkled in the mercy seat, and God says, "I will accept the fulfillment of the law through a substitute that was killed on our behalf." Well, all of this, the temple that Jonah is thinking about, what is he thinking? He's like, "Lord, I have transgressed your law." Commandment number one, thou shall have no other gods before me. Jonah, God comes to him, he's like, "No, thanks." So he puts himself in the position of God. He supplants God from the throne. "I'm God." There you broke commandment number one, Jonah. Jonah needs propitiation and he understands unless he gets to the temple, there is no forgiveness of sins. But how can he get to the temple if he's in the belly of a fish? And this is the great conundrum. Even today, dear friends, like if you're Jewish, this is what I tell my Jewish friends, if you believe your own scriptures, if you're truly Jewish, how is there atonement for your sins? How is that being done? There are no animals being slaughtered in the temple today. There haven't been since the year 70 AD. No, no, no, this right here, the whole temple, the whole temple system, the sacrificial system, the priest system, all of that pointed to a greater temple, a greater priest, the greater sacrifice, a greater Jonah that of Jesus Christ. Jonah sojourned in the fish for three days and three nights points to Christ Himself. Matthew 12:38-41, "Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, 'Teacher, we wish to see a sign from You." But He answered them, 'An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah's three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will a Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men in Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for their repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here." Reluctant Jonah's stay in the belly of a great fish was a pointer to Jesus Christ. That's what Christ is saying. It points to Christ. And Jonah is the anti example. One of the greatest ironies, I think, in the Book of Jonah, the fish is the savior, not Jonah. The fish is the savior. But Jonah the runway prophet is the type of Christ, pointing to Christ. In what way? In the opposite. Jesus Christ came to us willingly. He lived willingly to save the lost. Really, He willingly descended all the way down to death itself to willingly welcome us into the household of God. God gives us salvation in a mysterious way. He puts Jonah in the belly of a fish and He puts His Son on a cross. It was God who hurled His Son into death, into the sea of the wrath of God. Jesus Christ on the cross, He cries out, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" What happened on the cross that the Father would forsake the Son? Well, the Son became our sin. He who knew no sin became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. And because Jesus became our sin, He was banished from the presence of God the Father. He did in a sense descend into hell. We need to turn to Jesus Christ because He is a savior suitable to us. How can we be saved? The only thing you need to do is what Jonah did, cry out to the Lord. Do it even before you hit rock bottom. But even if you do hit rock bottom, He'll meet you there if you turn to Him with humble repentance. And for those of us who have been rescued from the storm of God's wrath, let's use our beautiful feet and mouths to preach the good news that salvation belongs to Lord Jesus Christ and is found in Him alone. Romans 10:14-17 to close, "How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent. As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news. But they have not obeyed the gospel for Isaiah says, 'Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?' So faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of Christ." Amen. Would you please pray with me in closing? Lord, we thank You for this word. And Lord, as we look at this sinful man, Jonah, we do not stand over him in condemnation or disdain. No, we look at him as one of us. Each one of us, we've sinned, we've run from Your commandments, we've run from Your presence, even from Your Spirit. Lord, we thank You that you've met us there, that You've given us the gift of hitting rock bottom, many of us, and You've turned us in repentance. For those who have not yet turned to You, Lord, turn them and their hearts to Yourself today and continue to make us a powerful, a missionary force here in the city and beyond. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen.
"I Fear God, Kind Of"
April 23, 2023 • Jonah 1
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com Heavenly Father, we thank you for the blessing it is to gather as your people to hear from your Holy Spirit, from your holy scriptures. We thank you, Lord, that you did not leave us in the darkness of our ignorance. Often we have fled from you, from your presence, from your word, from community, and we've done it intentionally, and we've done it in order to further our ignorance. Instead of leading us groping in the darkness, Lord, you send us people, messengers, ambassadors, evangelists, missionaries, Christians, believers, those who spoke the truth with love in a way that compelled our hearts. Lord, if there is anyone who is not yet a believer, a follower of Christ, a child of God today, save them. Today, override their reluctant will, and, Lord, save them from their sins. And for those of us who are your children, Lord, remind us that you have commissioned each one of us to go and make disciples, people of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Bless our time in the holy scriptures today, continue to expand your holy church, Lord. Jesus, you promised that you will build your church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, so continue to expand your kingdom, your church, and take territory from the enemy. I pray all this in Christ's holy name. Amen. We are beginning today a brand new sermon series through the Book of Jonah. We're really excited about it. It's four chapters, four weeks, and then we believe the Lord is leading us to do a deeper study of the life of Joseph, in Genesis 37 through 50. And then that'll take us through the end of the summer. The series title is Reluctant Believer. The title of the sermon is I Fear God, kind of, and that's who Jonah is. He's a rebel. He's not just reluctant or recalcitrant. He's often resentful of God in his ways. It's the only book about a prophet gone rogue. I had a brother approach me after the service and he said, "When I was younger, I scoffed at Jonah, and said, 'What a moron. Why would he run from God?'" And he said, "After 10 years in the faith, I can relate." And I think we all can relate. The other reason why we chose this book is because as we studied through the Book of Romans, we saw that the gospel, it's not just new news, like new news. No, the gospel was grounded in Old Testament, Hebrew scriptures. The Apostle Paul constantly quotes from the salter and the prophets to show us this was the plan from the very beginning. Romans 1:16, "For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, the good news for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek." The gospel is for everyone. This isn't new. This was the plan from the very beginning, God's family has room for everyone. This is the message at the heart of the Book of Jonah that God's compassion extends to the most wicked, even to the Gentiles, even to us. That nothing can thwart God's purpose to save sinners. And that purpose is not limited to any one group. The Gentiles, or the nations, we're always in the heart of God. He longs for people of all nations to come and to pray to him. The Jewish people were blessed with possession of the scriptures. They were told by God to bring this message that every person can be reconciled with Yahweh, to bring this light to the Gentiles. But they failed miserably as missionaries to the nations, as we'll see with Jonah, mostly because they started taking God's grace for granted. "Well, of course God loves us. We are the chosen people, of course." And we as Christians, we have to fight that tendency as well. Paul and the other apostles had to be taught, this is surprising, that God had always included the Gentiles in the number of his elect children. And that for they not all Israel, who are of Israel, Paul writes. So Jonah was the first Jewish missionary to a Gentile nation. He's called one of the 12 minor prophets. Minor, not because lesser in importance, but because of what they wrote was just shorter. Jonah was only four chapters, compared to Isaiah 66, Jeremiah 52, Ezekiel 48 chapters. The book is all about God's love. It's not about Jonah, it's about God. It's about God's pursuit of rebels. It's about God helping us overcome our pride, showing us our sin, exposing our self-righteousness and leading us to repentance by giving us the gift of grace. And then we see that God is a missionary God. God longs to save people from all nations. And ultimately, this book is all about the gospel that God's love, the Lord, Yahweh is a God of boundless compassion, not just for us, Christians, or in the story Jonah, the Israelites, but also for them, the pagan sailors, the Ninevites. And we have to keep a guard of our own hearts and the culture of our church to make sure that we continue to be welcoming to absolutely anyone and everyone. It's not us and them. It's not, "We are Christians because we're better." No, no, we're Christians because God saved us. God superimposed his will upon our will. He regenerated us. And if there's hope for us, even us, there's hope for absolutely everyone. This is the message of the Book of Jonah. So today we're in Jonah 1:1-17. Would you look at the text with me? Now, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of amortized saying, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me." But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going down to Tarshish. So he paid the fair, went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship and to the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone into the inner part of the ship and had laid down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, "What do you mean, you sleeper. Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us that we may not perish." And they said to one another, "Come let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us." So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. They said to him, "Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country and of what people are you?" And he said to them, "I'm a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the city in the dry land." Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, "what is this that you have done!" For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. And they said to him, "What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?" For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, "Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you." Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Therefore, they called out to the Lord, "Oh Lord, let us not perish for this man's life and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, oh Lord, have done as it pleased you." So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. This is the reading of God's holy, inerrant, and infallible, authoritative word may write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Is it a fish or a whale? Let's start with a really important questions. According to our graphic, that looks like a whale, looks like a whale in the graphic. I don't know. The Hebrew says fish, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Billy Graham said, "If you believe that in the beginning God created the world," and he's like, "even if it said Jonah ate the fish, I'd still believe it." So that doesn't matter. What matters is that God is sovereign. There are many lessons to learn from this text. Three points to frame up our time. First, the compassionate commandment of God. Second, the stiff-necked rebellion of a religious man, and the relentless pursuit by the hound of heaven. First, the compassionate commandment of God. God comes to Jonah and says verse one, now the Lord, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me." Well, first of all, you got to pause and say what an honor. What a great honor that God's word would come to you, and that God would so be gracious to you to give you a job, to give you a calling. A prophet being called by God to journey to Nineveh to deliver this message. This is an extraordinary phenomenon. Prophetic Oracles against nations were commonplace, but they were spoken in the prophets native land for his fellow nationals. So if we follow the pattern of the other prophets, it would be word of Lord comes to Jonah. Jonah get up in front of the Israelites, and say, "The people in Nineveh, they're terrible." And obviously, everyone in Israel is like, "Yeah, we agree." That's not the mission. Here he is given the mission and he's selected for a role to bring a word of judgment upon the people, kind of like the angels were sent as agents of divine destruction against Sodom in Genesis 19. Jonah, what do we know about him? He was a contemporary of Elijah, most likely he was one of the sons of the prophets of Elijah referring to Elijah's school. Elijah was a man and Saint john tells us that, "Elijah was a man." Elijah, one of the greatest prophets. And in the same way that Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are, we can pause here and say, you know what? Before we start knocking Jonah, "You should have known better as a great man of God." He's still a dude. He's still a guy. The fact that these prophets were given a divine commission and divine inspiration did not make them not human. They still had a temper and they still had their own character and their own flaws, and the prophetic call was something apart from and altogether independent of their intellect or even their will. So what do we know about Jonah as the man? Well, the Hebrew name for Jonah means dove, which is nice. And if you go the allegorical route, you can infuse lots of meaning here, dove and the New Testament is a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Jonah, like the Holy Spirit brings revival to Nineveh. But what's fascinating is that Jonah is more like a hawk than a dove. He's not a dove at all. He's not happy about this mission. He's not happy about being a man of God. He's not happy about having to preach the gospel. He's not happy about people getting converted. But God can use the personality of even a stubborn person or a strong-willed person, like Jonah or Peter or Sampson or Paul. But first, God needs to break a man before he uses a man. He has to teach him, or a woman, obedience before they're used in service. The other thing I want to point out here is that God has been incredibly compassionate to Jonah. Jonah grew up in a believing family. His father was a believer, follower of the Lord, and Jonah has given the task of being a prophet, and he's given grace to live in a time where the people of God deserved judgment. 2 Kings 14:25 sets Jonah in the reign of eighth century BC King Jeroboam II. Well, Jeroboam II, he was a sinner. He did not do what God wanted him to do, and yet God, because of his grace on these people, on Jonah, he allowed the kingdom to expand. So 2 Kings 14:25 about Jeroboam II, he restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he had spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher. So Jonah had experienced God's grace firsthand. He saw that God can restore even a kingdom for his people, because of God's great compassion. His compassion overrides the waywardness of the people. So Jonah has been given grace, and it's expected that Jonah who has received grace is going to now share that grace with the people of Nineveh. He did not want to do that. Why? Because Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, the sworn enemies of Israel. Nineveh was found in east of, today, Syria, northern part of Iraq. It's on the east side of the Tigress River. Even today, Jonah's association with that place is well known. There's a Muslim shrine there to the prophet Yunus or Jonah. And this is the last capital of the Assyrian Empire. From excavations, we know it was a grand city, had famous hanging gardens, dams, parks, a 50-mile aqueduct, great roads, a double wall protecting the city. The wall was world renowned, greater than Babylon. The wall was a 100 feet high, so broad that three wagons might be driven on it at the same time. The walls were fortified with 1500 towers at proper distances. Each rising 200 feet in height, rendering the city seemingly impregnable. No one can touch us, we're fortified. The city was also wealthy. It was the center of commerce between the East and the West. And the wickedness of Nineveh kept pace with its commercial importance and external greatness. Why Nineveh? Why Nineveh? Well, God chose Nineveh, but also we see that God often uses this same method to reach a people. This is the same way the St. Paul reached the Roman Empire. He picked city centers, urban city centers, places of influence, places where ideologies were formed and from which they were shipped. And this is where he wanted to plant the gospel. So you see the New Testament, you see all the epistles and the epistles are usually written to city centers, churches in city center, the epistles to the Romans, you got Rome, Ephesus, Thessalonica, et cetera. So in a way, this city, Nineveh, was a city set on a hill, unrivaled in splendor, but also an influence. Something that happened here would be heard about everywhere. So if the gospel, if the message of mercy, that God is a loving God, a merciful God, that our evil has come up before Him, but if we repent, He will relent of sending the wrath that we deserve. God is saying, "Jonah, go plant the gospel in the heart of your enemy's greatest city." That's what He's doing. Obviously, the parallels to what we're doing here in Boston are very clear. The reason why we came here, the reason why we're working so hard to establish this church in this city, is because Boston, pound for pound, is the most influential city in the world. Historically speaking, between the last three, four, five decades, look at the influence of this city upon the world. This is an ideology center of the world. People come here, their minds are filled with ideology, and the export the ideologies elsewhere. What is God telling us? He's saying, plant the gospel where you are. Plant the gospel in the heart of your enemy's greatest city. Plant the gospel in the heart of your enemies. This is how the Lord operates. And what's the job that Jonah is given? He says, "Call out against the city, for their evil has come up before me." None of us described as a great city, great in population, great in resources, great in the enormity of its crimes. Later on in chapter four at the end it says that there are 120,000 people that know neither left or from their right. Most likely it's talking about children. So if you say that children are one fifth of a population, you're talking about maybe 600,000 people in population, maybe upwards of a million. Incredibly, incredibly powerful, but also sinful. People who are committing acts of evil against God, heaven daring iniquities. And we're reminded from the very beginning that that God is holy. And before Jonah brings a message of forgiveness, which he didn't want to bring, he does bring a message of judgment. That evil, our evil, the Ninevites personal evil, their evil has come up before the Lord. We're reminded that God is holy. There are things that you and I get used to, but God as our holy creator never will never get used to, He's revolted by. Idolatry and lying and cheating and stealing and hatred, adultery, murder things we get accustomed to. Things we write off as weakness, God deems wickedness. He does use the word evil. So point number one, well, I said that God is given a message of compassion to Jonah. Well, where's the compassion in going to a people and calling out their evils? Where's the compassion there? Well, friend, that's the most compassionate thing you can do. The absolute most... If we believe that God is truly holy, and if we believe that one transgression against his commandment is enough to render us guilty for eternity, and unless we repent of our sin and turn to Christ, we will spend eternity in hell, and internal damnation. If you really believe that, the absolute most compassionate thing that I can do is to tell you the truth that God can do. This is the most compassionate thing. That there is evil that you have committed that has come up before the Lord. We need to know this and we need to respond to this mission. Realize the gravitas of the situation that we stand condemned before a holy God. So what does God do in his love? He sends a messenger who will bring this message. And this is a good reminder that our salvation does not begin with ourselves. How did you come to faith? And by the way, this is a great practice in your community group. Maybe this week share a little bit, maybe one to two people about how you came to faith. And specifically about whom did God send into your life to nudge you over? Whom did God send to nudge you over? He sends a lot of people to prepare us, and I was kind of like this. I grew up in a Christian family. I went to Christian camp. My dad would be like, "Yeah, believe in Jesus." And I was like, "Yeah, but you're my dad." And then one time I went to this, randomly, this conference, I heard this guy speak. He was a Slavic immigrant that grew up here, was educated here, spoke Russian fluently, spoke English fluently. What's dead serious about God, did not take himself seriously at all. So he cracked jokes, and I was nine and I liked that. And he just explained the gospel. He was like, "Yeah, you're a sinner, you're going to hell." I was like, "Yeah, that's true." And he's like, "Just trust in Jesus." And I was like, "That's all he takes." He's like, "Yeah." And I was like, "All right," so I repented my sins. I trusted in Jesus. He didn't say anything that was new or novel or different, but for some reason the Holy Spirit took his words and just nudged me over the edge. So God, this is how He operates. Did God bring someone to preach the gospel to you, to explain the gospel to you? Praise God for those people, but also understand that it wasn't them. Before they came and they spoke this message to you, God moved their hearts. God filled their hearts with compassion, and God moved their will to speak to you. So friends, also a reminder that you perhaps are that person for someone. You are that person for someone. There are people in your life perhaps that are ready. You just need to nudge them over the edge. Continue speaking the truth. Continue speaking it in love. Point number two is a stiff-necked rebellion of a religious person. Tarshish got all my S's messed up. Jonah 1:3, but Jonah rose to fleet to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa, found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fair and went down into it, to go with them at Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. What's fascinating, first of all, whenever God tells you something or tells someone something, if the next word is, "But Jonah," the story isn't going well. This is only verse number three. Come on, we're just getting started, so that's... The other thing, I call the guy stiff-necked because Tarshish is literally the opposite direction of Nineveh. He literally went to the ship station and he is like, "Where is diametrically opposed to this place? I want to go there." And that's why I call him stiff-necked. Stiff-necked is you know exactly what God's will is, but you're doing the opposite. I use that phrase because in the Old Testament, that's how God describes the people of Israel, stiff-necked. Over Christmas break, I went shark hunting. It's just a cool way of saying I went fishing for sharks, but I went shark hunting and I caught a bunch of sharks. They were epic. They were massive. They were so big, they almost ate me. No, they were tiny. They were so small. And so you reel it up, and then like you got to grab this thing by the neck to take the hook out. My goodness, I've never felt a more powerful neck on a tiny little creature, and I've got children, so that's why that's a big deal. He's stiff, "No, I'm not going. I'm going the opposite direction." Literally, he goes, trying to get away from God away from the presence of the Lord. You see this phrase over and over, away from the presence of the Lord. It sounds ludicrous. You can't get away from the presence of the Lord. So what is happening in your mind, Jonah? Well, first of all, you've got to ask and say, who's running? Well, this is a prophet. This is a religious man. This is a man of God, but for some reason, something happened where there is just a major gap between his relationship with God and his religion. In some ways, his religion became more important than his relationship with God and his word. It was his religion that prevented him from obeying God, because his religion taught him, he thought, and that was actually a man-made interpretation. No, no, no, no, no, love your enemy? No, no, no, you got to hate your enemy. Hate your enemy. Despise your enemy. That's your sworn enemy. That's who the Assyrians were. That's who Ninevites were. If your religion friend prevents you from loving your enemy, then you are not a child of God, because God loved us when we were yet enemies. God loves His enemies. He loved His enemies so much that he gave his son up for us. Lesson, you can be religious and sitting at the same time, and Jonah was running away from the revelation of God. He believed that God only spoke to his prophets in Israel. He thought, "If I get out of Israel, I get out of the confines of God's presence." But what we see here more than anything else is that Jonah gives us a definition of sin. Sin isn't just transgressing a commandment, it's transgressing the will of God. There are sins of co-mission, when we break a commandment we have committed a sin. But there are also sins of omission, where if you know the good that you ought to do, the good that God has called you to do, and you do not do it, you've disobeyed God in the same way as if someone transgressed the law. So what is sin? It's disobeying the will of God. And if that's the definition of sin, my goodness, everyone's guilty, and that's the point from the very beginning. The wicked Ninevites are as guilty as Jonah, the prophet. The pagan sailors, who at the end of this chapter bring sacrifice to the Lord, they are in trepidation, trembling, fear of God. They're making vows worshiping God, because they understood that they also were sinners. A definitive word comes from God. When Jonah chooses to disobey, he chooses to base his understanding of reality on religion, on nationalism, ethnicity, tradition, et cetera. So he runs from God. He isn't running from the spacial presence of God as much as he's running from the relational presence of God. Do you know that feeling, when you know you're in sin? We know it. It's like the Bible becomes kryptonite. It's just like a magnet, it's pushed away from you, the Bible is. Christians, no, all of their phone numbers blocked. Blocked, you're not reaching. First thing you do, you drop out of community or drop out of church, you drop out of... What are you doing? You know that when you're with the people of God, you feel the presence of God. You know when you're a holy scripture, you feel the presence of God. So when you know when you're in sin, you're stiff-necked and you're like, "I want to get away from the presence of God," because at that moment, the presence of God is not comfortable. The presence of God is convicting. It's a fool's errand to run from the spirit of God. He's everywhere. Psalm 139:7-12, where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol,, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night," even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. It was not that God was not everywhere present, but that there were consecrated places that represented the presence of God, and he wanted to get away. Obviously, it was silly, but we've all been in situations like this. Where you know the Lord has brought you in a situation, perhaps a relationship, and he's like, "So you got to stay here," or in a church community, sins been exposed, "stay here, work through it." Sometimes we run like Jonah. Perhaps God has a particular call on your life. Are you fleeing it? Tarshish was a city on the coast of Spain. So they're headed there. And we see in the language, it just describes this dissension that's happening with Jonah. He arose to flee. He goes down to Joppa. He found a ship, pays the fair, went down into it, down, down, down. Trying to flee from the presence of Lord always brings you down. Why did Jonah run? Well, he tells us in chapter four, the thought is he's afraid. Assyrians, they're going to kill him. That's what he's afraid of. Well, I don't think that's the theory because for a number of reasons. First of all, the guy's suicidal. Four times he's like, "Just kill me. Just kill me. I don't want to do anything. I don't want to be here. Lord, just kill me." And God's like, "Nope. Nope. Nope." He also does tell us, he's like, "Lord, I knew what would happen if I preached to the Ninevites." This is Jonah 4:1-4, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. He preaches to the gospel one time. He goes through a stroll. He is like, "You're all going to die. You're all going to die." That's like the dream sermon, man. I would love to do that. Just walk the streets to Boston, "Everyone's going to die!" But the thing is, I got to keep living here. Jonah gets to leave. So he preached the gospel. Everyone gets saved, and he's bummed about it. He's so mad. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, "Oh, Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore, now, oh, Lord, please take my life from me, for it's better for me to die than to live." And the Lord said, "Do you do well to do anger?" He was afraid not that the Ninevites would not repent, no, he was afraid that they would repent. That's how much he hated them. He's like, "God, I would rather die than spend eternity with these losers." That's the sentiment in his heart. So God sends Jonah to preach to the Gentiles, even though Jonah despises them. This would be like Yahweh sending a patriotic South Korean evangelist into North Korea to preach to Kim Jong Un, same situation. And so Jonah is representative of his people, as the elder brother in Luke 15 is representative of the Pharisees. It's like Jesus spending time with tax collectors and sinners. Similar to the parable of the unforgiving servant who's forgiven a huge sum only to deny forgiveness to a colleague over trifling debt. Jonah too is a sinner saved by divine grace who wants to do everything possible to not allow pagan sinners to be the same recipients of the same grace. We're all like Jonah in many ways desiring justice for others, but grace for ourselves. "Yeah, I don't deserve it, but that person deserves it even less than I do." This is the sinful, self-righteousness in Jonah. So what happens? Well, point three, the relentless pursuit by the hound of heaven. And I get this phrase from CS Lewis who talks about God like that. He said the night of his conversion, he was in his dorm room on his knees. He felt the presence of God really heavy in the room, didn't want to repent. He's like, "I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it." And then finally submits to the Lord. And he said, "That night I was the most reluctant and despondent convert in all of England." Like, "Yeah, I'll believe in you, but I'm not happy about it." That's the same situation with Jonah. Verse four, but the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so the ship threatened to break up. Who sends the storm? God sends a storm. God sends a storm because Jonah needed a storm. And God at times uses pain to get our attention. It's a means of grace. In storms, the real you comes out. Storms reveal who you are and your need for God. That we are contingent, we are dependent. As Lewis writes, "Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." This is the function of pain on the lowest level. It's to shattered the illusion that all is okay and to plant the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel's soul. On a higher level, pain shatters another illusion that we are self-sufficient. We are not. Verse five says, the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the seat to lighten it for them. And Jonah had gone into the inner part of the ship and had laid down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, "What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish." So you see the sailors using emergency measures, jettisoning cargo. This is the last grasp at life. And the captain comes in and says, "What do you mean? What do you mean?" I like the King James version, "What meanest thou?" Where it was like, he just doesn't have any. Like, "What are you doing? We're all in the brink of death and you're sleeping here." And Jonah's like, "Yes, that's the point. I'm trying to die." And in storms, we see that people do get religious. All the sailors, they're pagans, and they're like, "We're praying to our god. Do you have a god? Our gods aren't working. Do you have one? Try your god out." And of all the men in the ship, Jonah was the person that should have been awake more than anyone else. Nevertheless, he was asleep, fast asleep. The creaking of the cordage, the dashing of the waves, the howling of the winds, the straining of the timbers, the shouting of the sailors nothing can arouse this guy. He's fastened in the arms of sleep. The Hebrew word here is radam, which means the deepest sleep. The word is used to describe the sleep that God puts on Adam when he takes the rib from him, like anesthesia, deep sleep. Many a preacher commentator said that, "Jonah hears asleep because his conscience is asleep." The great pastor Charles Spurgeon has a great sermon on this. If your conscience is asleep, you should read that sermon. But I don't think that's what's going on here. I don't think he's asleep because of a seared conscience. Later on, because I see that he's very quick to repent. No, I think there's something else going on here. I think this is an anguish of the soul. The Holy Spirit has been convicting him and he's been trying to fall asleep. Just before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed in Gethsemane. And as he prayed, he sweat great drops of blood, and then Jesus found his disciples asleep. Why were they asleep? Luke 22:45 tells us, and when he rose up from prayer and had come to his disciples, he found them sleeping from sorrow. Sometimes the response to grief is sleep. I will tell you that rebelling against God is exhausting, and it's exhausting at the soul level. Jonah's retreating from God, from the presence of God. Perhaps God had removed His gracious presence and replaced it with His disciplinary presence. We're not sure. A Jonah 1:7 says, they said to one another, "Come let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us." So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. When the trial by lot was resorted to figure out what was going on. I think at that moment the lot falls on Jonah, Jonah felt the arrest of God's hand upon him. It said, "Jonah, you're exposed, sovereignly exposed, what do you do now?" Verse eight, then they said to him, "Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?" And he said to them, "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea in the dry land." Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, "What is this that you have done!" For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. Jonah, maybe he doesn't understand, maybe it's cognitive dissonance or something, but even the sailors get it. "You just said you fear the Lord and then you told us that you're running from the presence of God. We're all about to die and you keep telling us that you're a great follower of the Lord." No, no. They're rebuking him. The pagan sailors are rebuking a man of God. God rebukes him, the storm rebuked him, and the pagan sailors rebuked him, because this is not fear of God. Fear of God is to hate evil. Well, it's evil to disobey God. So no, you do not fear God in the moment that you disobey him. You fear something greater. You can't but admire the frankness of Jonas confession of guilt, and he's willing to surrender to the claims of justice as we're about to see, when he could have denied the whole thing. At this moment, the captain comes to him and says, "Wake up owe you sleeper, what meanest thou?" And Jonah wakes up and says, "I meanest nothing. Leave me alone. I'm ready to die." "Is this your fault?" "Nope, not my fault. Not my fault." "Who do you believe?" "Don't worry about it. I'm going back to sleep." He doesn't do any of that, so that's why I don't take the interpret interpretation that he was asleep because of seared conscience, because as soon as providence forces him to deal with this issue, we hear of no shuffling excuses, no dishonest evasions, no blame shifting, but only the unreserved utterance of a heart already conscious of guilt. He's ready to take on the judgment that he knows he deserves. Verse 11, then they said to him, "What shall we do to you, that the sea might may quiet down for us?" For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, "Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great temp has come upon you." Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. These men are over overawed by the manifestation of divine justice that they're seeing right in front of their eyes. Some preachers would get up and like, "Hey, you should believe in Jesus. Here's my testimony. Everything was terrible. I believe in Jesus, and everything was awesome." Jonas, the anti-testimony, he gets up and he is like, "Look, if you disobey God, this is what's going to happen to you." So they're absolutely freaking out and they think that they see God's vengeance upon this person, and they're like, "This same God sent the storm," so they are absolutely humbled by God. They're doing everything possible to protect themselves from God's judgment. That's why they're rowing so hard. And finally, verse 14, they called out to Lord, "Oh, Lord..." Oh, Lord, that sounds like believers. They believer. "Oh, Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, oh, Lord, have done as it pleased you." Oh yeah, they believe in the sovereignty of God. So they picked up, Jonah hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. And then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Jonah feared God, kind of, because of his example. We see these men that fear God and they fear him exceedingly. The fish, this was miraculous, but it just shows the sovereignty of God. Here, I want you to meditate with me real quick on both severity and the mercy of God toward Jonah. Did you notice it's not enough for Jonah that he confessed his transgression and condemned himself on account of it? Why doesn't the storm stop at that moment? Jonah gets on his knees and says, "Yahweh, I repent of my sin. I'm so sorry. Forgive me." The storm should have ended. That should have been the end. He should be like... they all get saved. And then he's like, "Church isn't a cruise ship, it's a battleship. Let's go, gentlemen. We're go to Nineveh." Rallies up the troops and goes take Nineveh. That's not what happens at all. There wasn't enough. Why doesn't God stop the storm immediately after the confession? Why? Because justice demands more. Why such painful severity here? Because the ends of the divine government required it. First, in the instance of Jo Jonah himself, he had sinned presumptuous against God. He must bear the penalty. It was a righteous thing for God to do and inflict such judgment. Hebrews 12, dear Christian, a lot of Christians live and they operate with theology that's completely removed to Hebrews 12. And in Christ, there's no condemnation for my sins, but if I sin against God and I do it willfully, like Jonah does, Hebrews 12 kicks in friends. Hebrews 12, go back and read Hebrews 12:5-12. It says, if God loves a son or daughter, and the son or daughter are walking wayward, disobeying, what does... God does discipline those whom he loves. Still more was, which this is an example of severity needed for the good of others. The honor and the cause of God were at this time particularly bound up with the faithfulness of Jonah and having failed in the way of duty to promote the glory of God, he must in another way, become an instrument in advancing the glory of God. He should have glorified God by preaching to the Ninevites. And God would've blessed them and God would've been glorified. Instead, God will be glorified through this man, even though the man doesn't want to be glorified as an anti example, don't be like this guy. Thus, we learn from his experience that a near relationship to God purchases no immunity from sin or from discipline, and that's Hebrews 12:5-11. 2 Timothy 2-20-22 talks about this. Do you want to be a vessel of honorable use in the house of God or dishonorable use? I would recommend you read that. What befell Jonah was severity, but also the mercy of God. No sooner is he cast out, as a victim of divine justice into the raging deep, a great fish was ready to swallow him. Not for instant destruction, but for safe preservation. Jonah is spared final death with a temporary death. People wonder how in the world did he live 72 hours in the belly of a fish simmering in gastric juices? I just like saying that phrase. That's a juicy phrase. You can practice it, gastric juices. I think he died. I don't know. I would've died. I don't know. Whatever happened, he was entombed. Did God keep him alive? Did God resuscitate him? Did God resurrect him? That doesn't matter. What doesn't matter is he's taken to darkness to finally be brought to light, and God often does that. 2 Corinthians 4:6, for God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Fast-forward about 750 years from the storm, from Jonah's entombment in the belly of the fish, comes Jesus Christ, the greater Jonah. Jesus began his messianic mission by preaching the gospel to crowds in the Galilee region, which was at the heart of the northern kingdom one time, before being captured by Syria. As the crowds grew, Jesus' popularity grows. His opposition from the religious leaders, Pharisees, also grew. So Jesus is doing miracles, and yet they won't submit to him. They finally come to him and they say, "Give us proof that you are the Messiah." Matthew 12:38-42. Mind you, this is after Jesus had healed a man with a withered hand, healed two blind men, restored the life of a young girl along with countless other miracles. Matthew 12:38-42, then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him saying, "Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you." But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here." Knowing that they were trying to trick him, Jesus says, "The only sign that you're going to get is the gospel, the sign of the prophet Jonah. What is it? It's death, it's burial and it's resurrection." And Jesus says, "What happened with Jonah was just a sign pointing to Jesus Christ." Jesus speaks of this forthcoming sign, His death, His resurrection as the sign of Jonah, those Ninevites who believe Jonah's preaching will be called by Yahweh as witnesses on judgment. They will testify that they believe in Jonah's preaching on far less evidence than Jesus has given the scribes and the Pharisees, because it's never a question of evidence. It's never a question of evidence. It's always a question of will. If the gospel of Jesus Christ, if you seeing what God did there and the gospel of Jesus Christ, where God should have just killed all of us, a storm on all of us, we're all just dead, spend eternity in hell. No, no, no. Jesus Christ, willingly, Himself, God comes incarnate, lives a perfect life, perfectly, in this broken world, surrounded by evil people, surrounded by sinful people. This same God goes to the cross to die for our sins. What is Jesus doing there? He's bearing the wrath of God that we deserve for our evil. The same condemnation that the Ninevites deserve, that Jonah deserves, and that the sailors deserve, we deserve. And Jesus goes, and on the crust, he's bearing the wrath of God for our sins. He's taken the storm of the wrath of God, the raging of the wrath of God that we deserve for choosing our own will. For every single moment in life, when we said, "No, no, no, God, not your will, my will be done." For every single one of those moments, Jesus Christ comes and he says, "No, no, no. For that moment, I paid. I paid by saying, "Not my will, Father, but yours be done." Jesus Christ, the perfect servant of God, submits himself not just as a testimony to us and an example to us. That's all good and well, but he does that to save us from our sins. He wasn't forced to do it, he did it willingly. Out of love for us here. Here just a message for believers and unbelievers alike. I've met many of people who like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll come to God on my time. All right, I'll, I'm going to go to Tarshish for a bit. I'm going to take a ship. I'm going to get on a boat, and I'll come back. I'll do my job." Let me just tell you something. After studying Romans and studying Jonah, do I believe in free will? The closest we get to free will in the book of Jonah is the fish, Free Willy. There is no free will. There's zero free will in this book. Jonah does not want to preach. "Jonah, you're going to preach." "I'm not going to." "You're going to preach." "God, I want to die." "You're not going to die yet. You're not going to die. You're not going to die." "God, I don't want them to get saved." "They're going to get saved." This guy is stubborn and he was forced by God into submission to bow. His lips were compelled to utter words, which of himself he would've never done. It was all the Lord's doing. God will accomplish His will in your life. The only question is, will you come willingly and joyfully? Which you should, come on. Or reluctantly and begrudgingly? Christ's death and resurrection is the foundation for the gospel, which is to be preached to the ends of the earth and is the sign of Jonah, which lives on. And the commission that God gave each one of us go and make disciples of all nations. So friend, if you are not yet a Christian, a child of God, if you're not sure, just know your evil has come up before the Lord, and if your evil is not dealt with on the cross of Jesus Christ, it will be dealt on you for eternity. So we plead with you, receive God's grace, repent, and believe in Jesus Christ. And for those of you who are Christians, let us not forget our marching orders. We are to follow Christ in making disciples. Amen. Let's pray. Heavenly, Father, we thank you for this wonderful text. We thank you for this wonderful book. We pray that you continue to make us a people full of your compassion, the same compassion you feel for others. Let us feel it as well. In particular, in sharing the gospel, helping people meet you and be ushered in to the kingdom of God. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.