. Joshua Kehler: Alright, if you have your Bibles, turn to
Jonah chapter 2 this morning.
we're going to begin in verse 17 of chapter one.
And it says, I love this story.
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.
It's chapter two, verse one.
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 to take my life, the deep surrounded me,
weeds were wrapped about my head.
At the roots of the mountains I went down to the land whose
bars close upon me forever.
Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God.
When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer
came to you and your holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.
But I, with a 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 Jonah up upon the dry land.
This is the word of the Lord.
Father, we thank you for this amazing story of your
unrelenting grace in our lives.
We thank you for your constant rescue and your enduring patience as
we slowly, like through quicksand, grasp your holiness and your love and
your everlasting grace in our lives.
Thank you that our standing is not based on us this morning, but based on you.
That we are favored, not because we earned your blessing, but because you
blessed us because Jesus was favorable and obeyed perfectly on our behalf.
So Lord, capture our hearts, shock us by this story.
It's insane.
And Lord, just change us from one degree of splendor to the next this morning.
In your mighty name, Lord, we thank you for your church.
Thank you that you save in all different kinds of ways.
And Lord, a thousand different people have a thousand different stories of
how you rescued them, but we all have one thing in common and we all say this
morning, salvation belongs to the Lord.
That is all our story, that it was you from beginning to end who did it.
Thank you, Jesus.
We are saved.
We are set free.
We have been brought from death to life.
So we love you and thank you and praise you.
Bless our brothers and sisters who gather all over the city,
all over the Central Valley.
Be close to them this morning.
May they know your grace and love.
In Jesus name, Amen.
Amen.
Francis Thompson, the poet said, and you might recognize this line.
The hound of heaven has one mission.
And that is to track you down, to magnificently defeat
you, and to bring you home.
Thompson would write in that poem about his own story, I fled him, down the
nights and down the days, I fled him, down the arches of the years, I fled
him, down the labyrinth ways of my own mind, and in the midst of tears, I hid
from him, an under running laughter.
Thompson fled God.
as is so true of our story, but God, hounding him from heaven, gave long
pursuit, as he would write, with strong feet that followed after him, and didn't
stop? You have magnificently defeated me.
Is that not like the best description In my own will, in my pride,
in my arrogance, in my sin, in my bigotry, you've defeated me.
The story of Jonah shows us that we can run, we can always run, but we can
never hide from His love and grace.
Sure, yeah, run.
go to Tarshish, but you can never hide from His love and grace.
In Hebrews 4 16 it says, Let us then with confidence draw near
to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace.
It's there, but we discover it.
Grace and help in the time of need to draw to him and confidence and boldness.
So today I want to look at this section chapter two and three parts.
I just, I had read that quote and I just think it breaks this chapter up perfectly.
The Hound of Heaven has one mission, point one.
Point two, to track you down and magnificently defeat you.
And point three, to bring you home.
To bring you home.
Point one, The Hound of Heaven has one mission.
A little background for us in this book of Jonah.
Jonah's a weird book.
All the other prophets opened the same way, and God spoke to or through Amos,
or, God spoke to the prophet, and they gave the words of God to the nation.
But this story opens the same way, and yet Jonah is a narrative.
It's a story, that, we are told.
And Jonah represents the people of God, and we realize that
he is not the best person.
That...
Everything in this book is upside down and extreme.
It's a great fish.
It's a great storm.
It's a great, you know, everything is heightened It's a great city that
Nineveh is And this book is being aimed to critiquing the tendency in
God's people towards being judgmental, towards being prideful, towards being
arrogant, towards being thinking that oh, we get grace, but they don't.
That oh, we get God's forgiveness, but those people, they don't deserve it.
And it's a critique on that.
These stories have become so familiar that they can wash over us.
And we have to see it with new eyes, like we're reading it for the first time.
It's a storied version of the gospel, it's a shocking display of God's grace.
Like, it's a story of God's man, God's person, you know, being sent, and he's
like, No, God, screw you, I'm going away, and then everything goes to hell
around him, like people are gonna die around him, and he's like, throw me
in, and he gets thrown into the sea.
And then he's like, finally, I'm done with this call.
And then a fish swallows him and we'll just see how it goes on and on and on.
And one at the end, I just want to draw our attention to the
fact, well, I'll just do it now.
I had this at the end.
We get this whole chapter two.
He's like, I've found your grace, God.
Salvation belongs to you.
this whole wrestle for three days, and he's spit out on the ground.
It says in chapter three that Nineveh, was a great city.
It took three Jonah preaches for?
One day.
So he's like, you know what?
That's good enough.
And then he goes and he sits and he waits for God's judgment to come.
And so God obliterates Jonah, right?
God wipes him off.
God's like, I'm done with you, Jonah, you hard hearted person.
I sent a whale.
I sent a storm.
I sent all this.
I'm done with you, Jonah.
No.
He keeps going after him.
Because here's the story of Jonah.
It's not ultimately about the rescue of Nineveh.
That happens.
But ultimately it's the rescue of Jonah.
It's the rescue of you and me.
And so, Jonah represents these people.
So Jonah sent and warned Nineveh of their evil.
And these people were evil, you guys.
We talked about it in Stockton.
I'll be brief.
But they would, were the cruelest people in history up to that moment.
they would skin people alive.
And then they would bury them up to their neck.
And then they would nail their tongues into the ground so that
they would slowly die of thirst.
They would make families carry the heads of the patriarch of the family on poles
and do some crazy parade through the city.
It was a way to show, don't mess with us.
Very cruel and they boasted about it.
They boasted about rape and pillaging.
And the nation of Israel, the northern tribes are directly to the west.
And so they were the first to encounter Nineveh when they went on the war path.
So in verse one and two, Jonah's told to go to Nineveh and Jonah doesn't do it.
In fact, he went in the complete opposite direction.
You can't, in fact, get any further opposite than the city of Tarshish.
biblical scholars say it's literally the last known port of the known world.
The rest was open water at that point.
So he literally, God's like, go.
He's like, no, I'm going the furthest possible way a human can go away
from what you called me to do.
Why?
A lot of people think it was fear, right?
man, you send a guy in to, you know, a natural enemy of a people,
and you say, hey, you guys are bad, God's gonna judge you, and they're
like, oh, is that what you think?
When we find out that's not really his issue, that he was afraid
that they were going to kill him.
He had a problem with the job, but a greater problem with
the one who gave him the job.
He knew God's mercy was great.
He would have won if he knew God was going to fry these fiends, right?
Nothing would make Jonah happier.
If Jonah's sworn enemies were obliterated, he would have gotten a
first row seat to watch it happen.
And in fact, that's what he thinks is going to happen.
Jonah knows if he preaches God's word to them that they
may actually repent and believe.
And if they do that, God will do the very thing which angers Jonah the most.
God will actually forgive them.
In his audacious, scandalous love, he will let them off scot free.
And Jonah can't stomach kind of grace.
In fact, he says that.
In chapter four, I knew you were compassionate.
I knew you were gracious.
I knew you were forgiving.
I knew this was going to happen.
We find out that Jonah appears somewhere else in the Old Testament,
and as he's getting started, he's called to prophesy to Jeroboam II,
who was a very wicked king, that God was going to expand his borders.
Jonah was sent to preach a message of grace to a wicked
king, and guess what happened?
God expanded his borders, and God blessed this wicked king.
And he lived a regular, long life.
And there's something in Jonah that goes, That is just not right.
And he mistook God's patience as giving them time to repent.
And it's not just saying an okay in their sin, but Jonah here, he's called to preach
this message of grace and he's done it before and he's seen the fallout from it.
And so now he's called to go, okay, it's one thing to go to your people
and preach to Jeroboam the second.
It's one thing to go and, you know, preach to a king who's blood of
your blood and flesh of your flesh.
And it's one thing to say, okay, God's being compassionate to us.
We are his covenant people.
It's another thing to your hated enemy to say, I want you to go
and preach that message to them.
And that's where Jonah's line is.
He's like, no, there's no way I'm not going to do it.
Jonah didn't run because he was afraid the mission would fail.
He was afraid the mission would succeed.
And this is the best.
This is one of our lines that we say from this study.
He cannot trust God to be unmerciful.
And one of the hardest things about God to be honest is his willingness to
forgive and love and restore those who I have decided deserve the exact opposite.
And that happens to us as Christians!
That's like, crazy.
Do you ever read 1st John?
I'm reading through 1st John right now.
Whoosh!
It's gnarly!
There's no, like, gray.
He's not like, Hey, if you say you love God, but you don't like
your brother because they did this, you know, to you, It's good.
He's like, Now if you say you walk in me, and other people are saved
by my grace and they walk in me.
And you say you're saved by my grace and you walk in me, then
we've got to walk together.
There's no other way.
Hoo!
hoo!
The ultimate object of God's rescue isn't ultimately Nineveh in this story.
It's Jonah, and it's us.
The Jewish people, this is so awesome.
We shared this with Stockton.
On Yom Kippur, every year, read the book of Jonah.
And they say together in unison, I am Jonah.
Every year on the day of atonement, they read the book of Jonah and
they say together, I am Jonah.
Might be a good habit.
Why?
A rabbi said two reasons.
He said to remind themselves of the tendency to think God's
love and grace is just for them.
That the blood sacrifice is only for them.
And not open to others and second to remind them of God's relentless
pursuit to bring them back to that humble, grateful relationship with
himself, despite arrogance and pride.
And so they say they read that story on the day of atonement,
on the day of that sacrifice, on the day of Passover to remind
themselves, I'm so similar to Jonah.
The Hound of Heaven's one mission.
What's next in Jonah's story is by far our biggest shock yet.
As an amazed John Calvin wrote, The event is recorded as though
it were an ordinary thing.
You know, he's reading this story and you're like, And you imagine, right?
Jonah is in the storm.
And he's with these pagan sailors.
And this is in chapter one.
And the pagan sailors, he's asleep on the boat.
He keeps going down, down further.
He, you know, goes down to Joppa.
Then he's gonna go down to Tarshish.
Then he goes down to the boat.
Then he goes down into a great sleep.
Very beautifully written story.
And then, the sailors are running around.
And they're like, what is this storm called?
And they're praying to their gods.
They're praying to their idols.
They're carved images.
And they're like, they're not doing anything.
And so then they cast lots and they're like, wow, it's this guy Jonah.
They wake him up, wake up.
Oh, you sleep or what's going on?
He's like, yeah, I ran from God, the God who made the
heavens, the earth and the sea.
And they're like, do you hear yourself?
You're running from the God who made the sea.
And so he's like, yeah, I disobeyed throw me over.
And, everything will be good.
They're like, no, we're not gonna have your blood on our hands.
These pagans.
So they begin throwing all their cargo off their ship, their livelihood.
They're doing everything.
And it literally says narratively, the ship was thinking about breaking apart.
Like the ship itself is a character.
The ship is like, I can't even bear this guy.
I think I'm done with him.
Like, I've been shaped, I've been cut, I've been planked, I've been oiled, I've
been, built and put for a purpose, and I play my purpose, and the ship itself is
like, this guy won't play his purpose.
People, even to his himself as a prophet, idolatry was the source of his own sin.
He thought it would be better to disobey and hold on to the things that he loved
than to obey God and hold on to God.
He valued what he loved his life, his identity, his racial hatred.
Now he realizes that has kept him from the one great source of life and fulfillment
and peace and joy, and so you've got this beautiful thing that he says.
Oh, it's not just them who commit idolatry, it's me.
It's me, and that's the sin underneath every other sin.
What is idolatry except making something more important than God?
And remember, that could be good things.
That's not just the...
the hissing and booing, that's not just the, like, the scandalous prodigal son
who went out and spent his life on a faraway living, sleeping with this person.
It's the older brother, who's on the property, but will never go into
the feast, saying, I've earned this.
I know the way that the world should work.
I want to prove my, I want, this is how I see the world.
And I'm gonna, I'm gonna live that way.
Idolatry, is anything that is more valuable to us?
Is there anything in our lives that if we lost it, we would feel
that life wouldn't be the same?
Like, worth living?
Like, I'm not talking about loss, and loss is terrible, and
it's like, we roar at the curse.
We roar at the curse of death.
It's horrific.
It's not the way it's supposed to be.
But is there something that if you looked at in your life and
you're like, If I lost this...
My life would be over.
I've had that I've had that and there's so much bondage to that
because what are you doing?
If you get it you find it's not fulfilling and there's like such
depression and discouragement or maybe you feel like well Maybe there's
another level so you keep trying or maybe you get it and now you've got to
keep it and now you're a competition But it's a life of slavery as Bible
says Idolatry is the life of slavery.
And so those who cling to worthless idols run away from God's grace for them.
So this amazing thing happens to Jonah.
So we ask, what do you want more than God?
One of the Hebrew words for worship or related to worship is Gloria Kavod.
We talk about this.
It means weight.
What do you give more weight to in your life than God?
Is it the opinions of people?
That happens if you seek their approval.
Like, what you think of me matters more than what God thinks of me.
That's a struggle, that I'm giving glory to that over glory to God.
Is it, am I giving weight to the control that I can have in this life?
You know, that I can juggle, you know, 10, 000 plates and keep them all in the air.
And then when they all come crashing down.
Or is it, can I sit back and can I give weight to the fact that God
is sovereign sitting on His throne?
And that he's good and that he's marshalling every atom in the universe
to bring about the furtherance of that glory in my good and my joy.
Here's what Martin Luther wrote, he said, To whatever we look for any
good thing, and for refuge in every need, That is what is meant by God.
To whatever you give your heart and entrust your being, that,
I say, is really your God.
And so Jonah came to the place and he's like, Oh, I haven't been
grabbing hold of your grace because I've been holding on to my own life.
I haven't been grabbing on and like drinking that 180 proof cocktail of
your amazing grace because my hands are filled with worthless things.
And he realizes that, and he lets go.
Bring us home, verse 9.
And this is so awesome.
But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you what
I have vowed I will make good.
I will say salvation comes from the Lord.
Guess where he is?
Is he out on the land?
He's in the belly.
That is the deliverance.
Isn't that so much more transcendent than a change in circumstances?
Isn't that what, like, God is after in us?
Isn't that, like, he's still...
He's pushing octopus beaks out of the way, having the gastric juices
on him, and he begins to worship.
He doesn't know if he's getting out.
This isn't an arm bar to get God to do what he wants, he says, I get
it, salvation belongs to the Lord.
It's up to you.
In fact, This is such a pivotal place in the Bible.
Scholars say this is the entire theme of the Bible right there summed up.
It is the most concise theme of the entire Bible.
People say this is the crux, right?
not in, it's like the hinge that, you know, the Bible is all about.
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
This is the message of the whole Bible.
There's three kinds of people.
Irreligious, religious, Christians.
Those who've been born again.
Those who've been saved.
irreligious and religious people are very similar, more similar than we think.
We think that, you know, the irreligious are like, you know, I don't want anything
with God, I'm making up my own morality, I'm making up my own way, but it's a
way that they keep themselves from God.
Like the prodigal son.
The religious, they say, I will obey God.
I'll do everything that he says, and I'll be good enough, and I'll
make myself acceptable to him, but guess what they're doing?
They're keeping their distance from God.
There's never that desperation and that plea that has to come about, as
a Christian, that has to come where you're like, Holy Christ, where Christ
wakes up your heart and you're like, I need Jesus, I need him, I have no
hope in God of the world except Jesus.
Like, that has to happen, that desperate coming to that end, that,
that place of like, I need rescue, I can't save myself, like, I'm hopeless
without God of the world, wait!
Wait, I can't.
Can you, like, think about it.
You're in the belly.
Can you steer the fish?
Can you grab the whale?
Can you steer him up?
Can you swim out from the depths and hold your breath long enough?
Can you kill the beast from within?
You're doomed!
You're in a tomb that is keeping you alive enough to find grace.
That is like my story.
I'm in a tomb long enough to discover God's grace.
Like, salvation is of the Lord.
And what's beautiful about that is he gets to pick who he saves.
If it's all him and he does it from beginning to end, then guess what?
I can't be mad at the Ninevites if he decides that he wants to give the
same grace to them that he gave to me.
I can't be mad at my brother who slighted me because God washed him in the blood.
He's his blood brought bride.
I can't!
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
It comes from the Lord.
Religious people believe salvation belongs to themselves.
Irreligious people don't believe they need salvation.
Gospel people understand salvation belongs to the Lord.
What is grace?
As Gospel Tom says, it's demerited favor.
undeserved.
It's a gift by an unobligated giver.
Do you ever think about it?
I get too familiar with grace.
If you give a gift to your child, and your child is rebellious and you still
give them a gift, and he's hateful to you, but you still take care of them,
they are an undeserving recipient, but you're still an obligated giver.
You're supposed to take care of your kids, On the other hand, if you got
together and, you know, it's your co worker's birthday, and you're like, got
a gift for them of appreciation just because you love them and they're super
helpful, That might be an unobligated gift, but they are a deserving recipient.
It's when both are true.
Like, have you ever had a bad neighbor who's just an absolute jerk?
They're rude.
They call the cops on you, because for crazy reasons, they purposely
dump their leaves into your yard.
And on and on, there's animosity, mean looks, flip you off.
It's just this tension that's always there.
But you find out that they're sick,
and you go and take care of them.
And they're still resentful, and you keep taking care of them.
And they can't work, so you pay their bills, so that they can keep
the lights on and heat in the home.
And you do their yard, and you don't throw the leaves in.
That's an unobligated giver to an undeserving recipient.
And that's the grace of God.
We are both those things.
When we were dead, when we were rebels, Christ died.
We didn't deserve God's grace.
He wasn't obligated to give it to us.
His holiness would be satisfied to cast us out into the lake of sea.
Or, the lake of fire.
Lake of the sea.
Sea of Galilee.
But He's rich in mercy.
And He's rich in grace.
And where sin did abound, His grace hyper abounded.
And He keeps giving it.
Super amount and it never stops and it will never tap.
You know how you watch the coffee pot, the water go down and you're
like, okay, I can get a cup now.
Cause now it's not too strong, but it's not too weak.
You can watch his grace.
And it never moves never decreases, never runs out, never empties.
It's just always infinite to you.
God getting you to a place where we can see that is often the
storm in the whale that he sends.
But not only see it, but feel it and understand it.
It can be a pretty painful process.
No joke will feel like somebody is doing surgery on you and forgot the anesthesia.
I mean, that's, is, remember, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.
S.
Lewis writes about Edmund, is it, I think?
Who's like a dragon now, because he, lusted after gold.
And Aslan comes in, C.
A.
R.
E.
where he is, and he begins to tear, with his claws, the dragon skin from him.
He says, it was so painful, I wanted him to stop.
But, like, underneath, he was like, the flesh of a baby.
God does that in our lives.
He wants, again, not angrily to take away our freedom and strip
us of that, but to affectionately set us free from our slavery that
we're still often addicted to.
Charles Wesley, in his remarkable hymn, said, And can it be that I should gain?
And here he describes his own conversion and essentially that of every sinner.
He said, Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night.
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray.
I woke.
The dungeon flamed with light, My chains fell off, my heart was free, I
rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
And that's the freedom offered to all and made available to all by God's relentless
pursuit through the storm of Jesus Christ.
For just as Jonah in Matthew 12, 40 says was three days and three
nights, this is Jesus talking in the belly of the great fish.
So the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Both in Jonah in the New Testament, three days and three nights reflects the
idiom from Hebrew culture which counted any portion of the day as a full day.
Jonah may have been inside the fish for the same length of time as Jesus
was buried in the heart of the earth.
for an evening and all the next day and a few hours the next but Jonah's
foreshadowing of the burial and resurrection of Jesus was so strong
that Paul would declare how Jesus was buried in 1st Corinthians 15 4 and was
raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures in accordance with
which scriptures only twice in the Old Testament is this three day element
prophesied here in Jonah's story and less clearly in Hosea which was written
just a generation after Jonah's time in ministry and In Hosea, a passage,
God's people say collectively, and this is beautiful, a beautiful pairing.
On the third day, he will raise us up that we may live before him in Hosea 6 2.
Taking together Hosea's prophecy along with the statement of Jesus, we again
see the significance of Jonah's life intertwined not only with Christ, Emmaus,
Would cite Jonah's story while he interpreted to them and all the
scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24, 27.
I'm sure they talked about the story of Jonah and they're like, What?
Mind blown!
That's crazy!
Later that night, when Jesus met with a large group of disciples, He would
likely refer to Jonah once more as He opened their minds to understanding
the Scriptures and declared to them that everything written about Me in
the Law of Moses must be fulfilled.
Luke 24, 44 45.
They'd be like, That's in Jonah?!
What?
It was there the whole time.
It was in front of her eyes.
What?
I'm blown.
The guys on the road to Emmaus, they like run seven miles.
They're like, did our hearts not burn within us?
That's a, what Jesus declared in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself.
Jonah's story, he would say, is about me.
When Jonah was feeling death's approach in the depths of the sea, he had evidence.
of a typically limited Old Testament understanding of the afterlife when
he instinctively spoke of sinking into Sheol, a place of death, and
the land whose bars closed upon me.
But we know better.
For our Savior Christ Jesus not only abolished death...
But also brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
Second Timothy 110.
Christ's resurrection made clear forever by our true and thrilling
hope of eternal life which is ours for the taking all by faith.
Jesus is the greater Jonah.
Jonah was cast out into the sea because he ran from God, because he hated people.
The greater Jonah was sent by God to a people that hated him, and he kept
running after them and towards them.
The storm in the whole Bible represents chaos.
It represents wrath that represents judgment and here these pagan soldiers
are standing on the deck they have no idea they're they're praying to false
gods and jonah says throw me in and i'll be calm and part of it is to run
away from his calling to go into the place of death not because he cared but
because he didn't want to go And yet the greater Jonah, Jesus said, throw me
into the sea, into that place of wrath.
And as he was thrown in, the sea was stilled, the wrath settled forever.
That that there is therefore now no condemnation to those
who are in Christ Jesus.
that it's gone, it's obliterated, it's been stilled, that he went down
into the depths, the bars closed to him in Sheol, the place of death.
But that he took the keys out of the fangs of death and he rose in
victory and he stomped on the head of the serpent and he rose that third
day and he came and he preached good news to a people, not reluctantly,
but passionately to his enemies.
to the Gentiles, to the people who didn't want anything to do with him.
And he showed himself for 40 days and he said, there's a bigger world here.
Let's get these guys sent out and let's tell people about the
grace of God all over the world.
And he said, guys, you guys can't do this on their own.
So I'm going to give you the Holy Spirit himself to come live inside of you.
In the resurrected life, he made a way where the Holy Spirit doesn't
just come upon us, but comes into us in that regenerated heart.
And then we start to look like Christ, as we abide in Christ,
and we obey Him because we love Him, because He first loved us.
He's not after our obedience, he's after a whole new kind of obedience,
a whole new kind of life, a kind that, like, desires him, and wants to make him
known, that cares about his glory, that cares about his name being hallowed,
that wants to see him, in hallowed.
Spread and the good news spread wherever we are
being put into the belly of the whale can coerce your obedience.
Seeing Jesus went into the real belly of the whale is what creates
desire in your heart for him.
That's the gospel stirring our affections.
So we should say like on Yom Kippur, I am Jonah and be warned
that those tendencies are in me.
You should see in Jesus, though, that he's the greater Jonah and worship.
And that's not the end of the story, because again, Jonah gets up and he's...
Right back to his old ways, and so we'll keep going.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you for, your unending, relentless grace in our lives.
You're not obligated,
and yet you give.
We're not deserving, and yet you never stop.
Melt our hearts, Lord.
Man, you took the only storm that could really take us out.
That's the only one that could really do us in, was facing up to your wrath, was
facing up to that chaos and that judgment.
And you were thrown in so that, Lord, I might be rescued.
So that I might find you like those pagan sailors.
So Lord, keep going after us.
Be stronger than our apathy.
Be stronger than our pretended strength.
We just declare you are good.
When we think of Jonah, he kept mentioning the temple over and over and
the way he saw your grace is that the temple was the Ark of
the Covenant that held the law.
That was the standard to which you held the whole nation.
One he had fallen short of, but that Covering on the ark
was called the mercy seed,
and he could rejoice because it was sprinkled in the blood of another
that satisfied the demands of the law that he had fallen short of.
So us too, Lord, we like Jonah.
See that you are the great temple that you fulfilled the demands of the law that
you were the substitute a life for a life.
So remember that right now fuel our worship as we Worship the God
the transcendent one that I am The uncaused cause took on human
flesh so that it might be broken
the bloodshed So there would be no condemnation so that we could say
for those who are in Christ Jesus Salvation belongs to the Lord.
In Jesus name, Amen.
I think I'm done.
Kind of crazy, kind of an amazing story.
And, so finally they're like, Lord, don't lay this, blood on our hands.
They cast Jonah overboard, and it says it's still as glass.
The sea, the storm goes away.
And the sailors immediately fall down, these pagans, and
they begin to worship Yahweh.
And they say, we're going to make vows and we're going to make sacrifices.
maybe one of the things they decided to cast off their boat is these little
idols that they carved that were powerless in the face of the storm.
And they say, okay, we're going to worship you.
And I think Jonah, who knows, he hits the water.
Was it a sign of self sacrifice?
maybe he's like, you know, I can't let other people.
But I also think, in a way, it's his furthest way to run yet.
He's like, he could have said, Let's go back to Joppa.
I've got a mission to do.
Could they have turned the boat around and all of a sudden the storm stilled?
But he's like, throwing me into the water.
And so he gets thrown into the water.
And I think, maybe he's sitting there, and he's like, Oh wow, it worked.
And then he's like, Alright guys, maybe you can take me, you know, And all of
a sudden this fish, you see this fin come out of the water, And you're like,
And the sailors are like, Oh my gosh!
And this fish just swallows him whole.
God appointed a fish.
That's where we pick up in chapter 1, verse 17.
And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.
There's a character in the novel, Moby Dick, who thought about Jonah a lot.
He was the preacher in the story, and he said, his name was Maple, and he
said, And now behold Jonah, taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea.
And to say at least this would be an awful experience, to be
swallowed by a creature, right?
People have tried to figure this out.
The temperature would have been...
108 to 150 degrees the whole time, or 115 degrees the whole time, he
couldn't move his arm, gastric juices that would have continually washed
over him, bleaching his skin white.
I mean, you think about the smell, you've got, you know, octopus
beaks, you know, that you're rolling against, and all kinds of stuff.
The smell would be like an outhouse in an overcrowded construction site.
What was it like for Jonah inside there?
Mostly it's unimaginable.
What we can envision realistically is terrifying and repulsive to say the least.
But giving us an insider's take on how to survive three days and
three nights in the fish's belly is not where the story is heading.
It's not the purpose of the story.
The focus isn't Jonah and the fish, and that's one of the things
we get wrong, and all our kids stories about Jonah get wrong.
They focus on the fish!
That's not the story.
But, the story is Jonah and God.
It isn't about mere physical survival, it's about spiritual revival.
C.
S.
Lewis reminded us in Surprised by Joy, The hardness of God is kinder
than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
We read in Psalm 103, 13, As the father shows compassion to his
children, so the Lord shows compassion.
To those who fear him.
Chapter 2, verse 1, Then, you gotta underline that word, then, it's amazing.
Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God, from the belly of the fish.
Why underline then?
Because what does chapter 1, verse 17 say?
And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and he's there three
days and three nights in the belly.
Of the fish.
Then after Jonah had been there three days, he prayed.
It's a long time.
I have done a 48 hour Halo two party.
and I did it for youth group and I thought 48 hours.
That's not bad.
That's like two nights.
No, that's 48 hours.
Yes.
to try to stay up and to try to be engaged and try to play.
And it was long for the kids too, and it was so hot in the house.
We had like, 10 Xboxes set up, projectors, and this was back in the
day, we networked them all together.
Screaming at the top of the, you know, playing Capture the
Flag and all kinds of stuff.
And, I just remember kids, like, walking out, just stumbling
out, just to get some fresh air.
Cause it's just like, Junior high musk.
It was horrible.
I think we had to call in a exterminator, you know, to, to tent the house after
his death, but, you know, walking out and kids are just sleeping on the
driveway, you know, just trying to get some sense of coolness in the night,
you know, and I'm like, I felt like death store and that was 48 hours.
It was the longest 48 hours of my life.
He's in there three days, right?
And he doesn't pray and maybe he's still trying to get out of it.
Maybe he's like, I can feel being digested, you know, I can feel it.
I'm going anytime, Annie, you know.
But he comes to it, deep, deep down.
He laid there stubborn and unmoving for three days, and this shows
you the depth of Jonah's struggle and the struggle of his wrestle.
What?
With that he's scared to go and lose his life?
No, remember his wrestle is with the goodness and the
grace of God for his enemies.
That's the struggle.
Could God be kind and forgiving to those who are his enemies?
That's his wrestle.
God, I know you're good.
So often it's our wrestle.
It's my wrestle.
It's my greatest wrestle, actually, in my sanctification, just to let you know.
I see people and I'm like, ah, I thought my heart was better.
And it's just exposed.
And sometimes I see people and I'm like, oh cool, victory.
And sometimes they dream.
And I wrestle in my dreams.
of all the places mentioned in the Bible where people prayed, this has
to be the most unusual place, right?
And finally, Jonah's desperate.
And like most desperate people, he churns to God.
In Psalm 34, 6, it says, In desperation, he prays like David.
And this is what it says, This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him,
and saved him out of all his troubles.
In desperation, he prays like Hannah.
She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly for Samuel 110.
In desperation, he prays like Jeremiah.
Jeremiah says, Water closed over my head.
I said, I am lost.
I called on your name, O Lord, from the depths of the pit.
You heard my plea.
Do not close your ear from my help.
Lamentations 3, 54 to 56.
Have you guys ever been there where it's like, ugh, I'm down, I'm like,
that's all you have at that point.
In Desperation he prays,
In Gethsemane, in Luke 22, 44, and being in agony, he prayed more
earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the
ground and ultimately he would say.
There's any other way for man to be saved.
Let this cup pass from my lips, but not my will, but yours be done.
Wrestling in agony and desperation.
In desperation, Jonah prays exactly as God wants us all to do in such times.
James 5.
13 says, if anyone among you is suffering, let him pray.
Five times Jonah mentions the extreme anguish that prompted him.
Then each time he comes back to trusting awareness of an amazing
fact, he just can't seem to get over.
God has heard me and is rescuing me.
We discover a two part rhythm, don't we, in this psalm.
Like the serf, swelling and then receding, swelling and
then receding again and again.
He says, my agony in God's response, my agony in God's response.
Notice the pattern, in the first of these opening lines.
And I want, that's such a good picture of the wrestle.
You don't just pray and you're like, I'm good.
Isn't so often like you pray and then like 10 seconds later, you're like, Ah, the
agony, you know, and then you go back to it, reminding and preaching to your heart.
It is a battle to preach to your heart, especially in the belly of the whale.
It is a wrestle.
You, we're going to talk about Jacob in a second, who wrestled with the angel
of the Lord all night because Jacob was self sufficient all his life and
he had to learn to become dependent.
And guess how he gets blessed?
He loses.
He loses the battle.
And verse 2, I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me out of
the belly of Sheol, or the place of death.
I cried, and you heard my voice, even in the deepest, darkest place.
Jonah 2, 3, 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, but guess who it was who cast him into the deep?
He didn't say the sailors cast me in, he says it was you.
Equally significant here is how Jonah says it was God, not the sailors who cast him
into the deep, but it was God himself.
Jonah's world may be collapsing into unimaginable calamity, but still he's
enabled to see God is in control.
It's so beautiful, you know, before I really got the gospel, I was
preaching and I preached a whole sermon on, it's a psalm, I forget
the reference, but I know the verse.
It's those who regard iniquity in their heart, I will not hear him.
And I preached a good law message and people were like, Oh, beep.
They were cussing and they never cuss.
I got him to cuss!
Um, but just the law just boom.
And, and then I realized, yeah, before Christ that was my case
even as a religious person.
Because what is iniquity?
But something that's in our very nature when we're born.
Sin, my mother, did conceive me.
All have fallen short of the glory of God.
For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Like it was because the one who didn't regard iniquity, but was
treated as the one who regarded iniquity, that he'll always hear me.
And my deepest struggle, like Jonah, and the pit, and his rebellion, God is going
after him with his relentless grace.
Like, he was treated as the one, because that's what the holiness of God says.
I cannot be with sin.
I can't be in the presence of sin.
You, my holiness is so pure, sin comes in, it's just obliterated, you know.
And Jesus came and reversed that, right?
In the gospels, you've got a leper who's like, God, I know you can
make me clean if you're willing.
And Jesus is like, wait, what?
If I'm willing?
Because they've been told that they're impure.
That they'd already messed up their life, that they're too far gone, that
the religious kids were taught by the religious leaders, by the pastors, if
you see a leper, the godly thing you can do is pick up a rock and drive
them further outside of the city.
Throw rocks at them.
And that became their understanding of who God was.
And so when the man says, God, I know you have the power, I don't doubt that.
What I doubt is if you're actually willing to come into contact with
it.
And Jesus grabs him!
You don't do that to lepers!
But the purity of God is so powerful, His holiness is so powerful, that it
defeats all uncleanness and impurity.
It reverses it!
See, the whole concept was that impurity, you know, got dirty
what was holy, but God's holiness is so great that it literally
destroys and reverses the impurity.
And that's what God does with us, but crazily, and we'll get to this, like,
the cost, the Son of God himself had to be regarded as the one who had iniquity.
When he says from the cross, my God, why have you forsaken me?
He's like, God, you don't hear me!
When I'm calling out to you, it's the psalm fulfilled!
So that we could forever be heard.
Because he's covered us in his blood and his blood is effectual.
His blood is like, destroys every spot and blemish.
Like for all time, obliterates it for all time.
And, yeah.
It's beautiful!
That's why he says we open with that.
Like, we can come boldly to the throne of grace to obtain help in the time of need.
We don't have to come over here on our own and say, Okay, I really want
your grace, but, have I done this?
He says come and get help!
Come and find help!
Come and find the grace you need!
Fix yourself.
You can't kill yourself.
Remember, Christianity and growth and spiritual maturity isn't
going from strength to strength.
It's going from strength to weakness.
It's realizing how much more dependent on God's grace I
am every moment of every day.
I think a mature Christian is one who finds themselves
daily at the throne of grace.
And if they can't get there that morning, they have friends who
will throne into the throne.
Those are good friends.
That's preaching the gospel to your friends.
It's utterly beautiful.
It's what this story's about.
It's why it's crazy.
It's why I wanted to read it.
I wanted us to like, have our hearts like rocked by his grace again.
Jonah's the worst.
Jonah doesn't repent even at the end of the book and he gets a
book of the Bible named after him.
Who does that?
Jonah's me.
And there's nothing in here that, like, God's, like, God just
keeps patiently showing them.
God keeps patiently...
I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you another object lesson.
The whale?
I thought that was a big wake up call for you, Jonah.
Now I'm gonna give you a plant.
from whale to houseplant.
This story's hilarious!
And, just, he just keeps going after and after Jonah's heart to rescue.
And man, does he not do that in all of our lives.
And just the beautiful thing of Grace is that he's so
patient, and he knows our story.
He knows we're so slow to get it.
He knows we take so much time.
He knows that often, he sends storms and he sends whales, and we're
like, Finally, I've conquered!
Finally, my marriage is good now!
And then the next week, we're like, I think my marriage is over.
I don't know, you know, it's like, He's so, so, so patient.
But Jonah sees that it's God, and guys, this is so beautiful.
Because he tracks us down, no matter where we are, to magnificently defeat us.
He's so self assured.
He's like, stubborn.
He's so hard hearted.
He's so just, like, this is the way.
Like he's a Mandalorian.
where do we realize, where do we most often find God's grace?
It's there, just so you know.
Where do we most often find it?
When do we realize we have it and then draw on it once again?
It's when we think we've lost it.
It's when we're at the bottom.
It's when we're like, Oh yeah, His grace.
Have you ever lost your glasses?
For me, this is how I lose my glasses.
Babe, have you seen my glasses?
And I can't see, so I can't find them and I start to panic.
I've got to go to work.
Like, where are my glasses?
I have them.
I'm just not seeing very good without them.
God's grace.
They're there.
It's there.
It's never, He never pulls it away.
But so often it's in that moment of depth, at the bottom, that's
where we discover it once again.
That's where we realize, oh yeah, you're God, I'm not.
Oh yeah, your ways are higher than my ways.
Oh yeah, you are in control.
Oh yeah, you're good all the time.
God appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah.
This verb is used several times in the book as when God appointed a plant
to grow and then die in chapter one.
In each case, God orchestrated a circumstance in history to teach Jonah
something he desperately needed to know.
We would call this, a severe mercy.
The great fish is a perfect example of such a severe mercy.
Now, on the one hand, obviously the fish saved Jonah's life by swallowing him.
On the other hand...
He's still in a watery prison.
He was still sinking to the bottom of the world.
As he said, the roots of the mountains have, like, wrapped
themselves around my head.
Far from help.
Remember the text has been depicting Jonah as descending, going down to
Joppa, down to the ship, down to the depths of the ship, and then now
finally he goes even further down into the very depths of the ocean.
But not until he was all the way down that he comes to the
end of his self sufficiency.
I wish I could learn another way.
I feel like God's sanctification.
This is totally not true, but, One is like, the easy way, and there's like
one person in it, and one is like the hard way, and everybody else is
in it, we're like, Who's that guy?
Why, doesn't he know this is the line to be in?
I don't know.
For me,
the very things that I've held on to, that's things I would not let go of.
God brought a storm, and then a fish to swallow me, so that I'd let go of them.
Because the point, another point in the book of Jonah isn't that God is angry.
And trying to take away his freedom.
He's trying to set Jonah free from his slavery to idols.
Affectionately, like that father who pursues with compassion his son.
So Jonah's descending, it's not till he's all the way down that he comes
to the end of his self sufficiency.
these are critical, are a critical juncture in the development of
our dependence on Jesus and rescue from our pretended strength.
Two ways to the belly of the beast.
There's probably more but I want to highlight two.
I asked to be thrown into the sea.
Jacob.
Jacob was not prepared to lead the family of God until he had been forced
to flee from his home, experienced years of mistreatment at the hands of
his father in law, and faced what he thought was a violent encounter with an
aggressive brother, his brother Esau.
It was only then that Jacob, In that desperate place, who ran all his
life, met with God face to face.
That's in Genesis 32.
And he wrestles all night with the angel of the Lord.
And he's blessed through losing.
What was his blessing?
Two fold.
He got a limp for the rest of his life.
And I love, because as he's blessing, his kids at the end of Genesis,
he's leaning on his staff, right?
He had to lean on it the rest of his life.
He learned, right?
The second blessing
is he got a new identity.
He got a new name.
Jacob means Conard as teal catcher, thief, supplanter.
And he's given the name Israel, governed by God.
God's chosen people.
A whole new identity.
But it was through that wrestle, it was through that struggle, it was through
his own I'm gonna run and I'm gonna run and I'm gonna run from God I'm gonna go
as far and as hard as I can I'm gonna use, I'm gonna manipulate I'm gonna go
my way until he meets God face to face.
Number two, the other way to fall into the belly of the
beast, and this is really hard,
is to get thrown in by others against my will.
There's a story, we love it, we quote it, in Second Kings 6, 13 17, where
Elisha is in Dothan, and he's surrounded by this army who's gonna take him
captive, and Elisha's servant is freaking out, and he's like, What do we do?
What do we do, Elisha?
Like, there's an army all around us, and they've come to capture him.
This whole army's encircled the city.
and then all of a sudden this simple prayer is uttered, and God opens the
eyes of his serpents, and it says that he sees the hills filled with
chariots of fire, and the angels of the Lord of hosts way outnumbering
this little group of soldiers.
And he's like, oh, okay.
Dothan, this amazing place of victory, right?
The angels of the Lord showed up.
Guess where else we see Dothan in the book of the Bible.
It's where Joseph's thrown into the well by his brothers,
and there's no angels.
They're there.
He doesn't see them.
In fact, the only sound he hears probably at that point is his own voice
crying for help echoing off the well.
And the sting of his brother's hatred against him.
And he cries out, and he cries out, and there's not the kind of deliverance that
Elisha and his servant had that day.
And he's sold into slavery.
He's all alone.
He's in Egypt.
And he's still standing up for his covenant to God.
Like, He won't lay with Potiphar's wife and he stands up for what's right and
he does what's right in a foreign land as a young man and what happens to him?
He's thrown into prison.
And then these guys come in and they're like, Oh, we had these crazy dreams and
he interprets them and they come true and he says, just one thing, don't forget me.
And literally it says, and he forgot Joseph
thrown into the sea.
Swallowed by the beast, by the hands of somebody else.
There's not only the wrong we do and the consequences that we suffer from it, and
the wrestle that we have as God pursues us in that, but he also rescues us, and it's
also a pit, the wrong that's done to us.
But what does Joseph say?
What's his story?
He says God doesn't work despite his brothers and the evil done to him.
He works above it.
I quote this verse a lot, and I want to just read a little fuller picture of it.
Genesis 21, it says, But Joseph said to them, So Jacob dies, and the brothers
think they have a little meeting.
They have a powwow.
They're deciding whether we should form a labor union, or if we're
going to, you know, talk to Joseph.
So what happens is they say, Joseph's only being kind to us because Jacob's alive.
And as soon as he passes away, Joseph's gonna release the full
fury of his power against us.
So they go to him and they make up this story and they're like, Well,
Jacob said, you've got to be nice to us, and in honor of him, and...
But Joseph said to them, this is crazy.
Remember what they did to him.
He says, do not fear,
for am I in the place of God?
This little section of scripture we'll preach, this is so
much theology right here.
For how we handle people who've wounded us.
Number one, am I in the place of God?
As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to
bring about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.
Calls out their evil, doesn't just dismiss it, doesn't say, oh,
nothing, water under the bridge.
No, he says, yeah, you did wrong, but God had a higher purpose.
And he is so great, and he's so good, that he can take even the evil done
against me and bring good out of it.
That is the ultimate defeat of evil.
And then he says, So do not fear,
I will pray for you and your little ones.
So there's care, there's practical, like, compassion, and listen, Thus he
comforted them and spoke kindly to them.
That is a good litmus test.
Cause he's not just like, yeah, I forgive you, I'm gonna keep my distance.
He's like, hey, how are you kids doing?
Tell me your story.
He's like, interested.
He's speaking kindly to them.
He's caring about their fear.
He's telling them, oh guys, don't be He's caring about them,
and they're the ones he wants.
That is Jesus.
That's what Jesus does in life.
That is utterly beautiful.
But, man, what a journey to get there.
How many whales to get there.
How many nights did Joseph cry out in the prison?
Have you forgotten me?
Where are you?
It's been said, you never realize that Jesus is all you need
until Jesus is all you have.
Jesus says in Matthew 10, 39, you must lose your life to find your life.
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground.
The way up was for Joseph and for all of us first all the way down.
The usual place to learn the greatest secrets of God's grace is at the bottom.
But it's not simply being at the bottom that brings to, begins to change Jonah.
And this is the key, prayer at the bottom.
He churns his face, and he begins to pray, and he begins to wrestle.
It's one thing to get swallowed, and just be swallowed the rest of your life.
I've known people who've had an experience, and they're in a storm.
And they're in a storm for their soul, but they just come out bitter.
They come out twisted, gnarled through the experience.
because they don't wrestle there.
They don't churn their face to the Lord.
verse eight.
And this is from the NIV.
Translates it the best, I think.
Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God's grace,
or the grace of God for them.
And this is the key verse in Jonah.
It's the 24th verse.
There's 24 verses before it, 23 after it.
It's literally right in the middle.
And it's the first question we have to ask is who is he talking about?
Those who churn from idols forfeit the grace of God that is for them.
You see he uses two concepts in that verse.
Idolatry, which makes you think immediately as the reader he's
talking about the pagan sailors who were praying to their little idols.
In chapter one they had their little idols praying for deliverance.
But then he also uses the covenant, word in Hebrew, Chesed, which
is often translated grace, or steadfast love, or loving kindness.
Covenant love.
It was God's special love for his children.
And Israel only thought about that kind of love in terms of themselves.
So you've got idolatry, which makes you think of pagan sailors or the
Ninevites, but then you've also got the Chesed, which makes you think Jonah is
talking about himself, since after all, he's the one praying for deliverance.
Scholars say that in that verse, something remarkable just happened.
Jonah has applied the sin of idolatry to all