Our scripture tonight is taken from the book
of Jonah as we continue tonight in our
studies in this prophet, this book of the
prophet in the Old Testament, the book of
Jonah, tonight reading chapter 1 as we come
to a conclusion in the first chapter this
evening at verse 11 through to the end
of the chapter at verse 17.
So let us hear the word of God
to us this evening, Jonah chapter 1 at
verse 11.
The sea was getting rougher and rougher.
So they asked him, what should we do
to you to make the sea calm for
us?
Pick me up and throw me into the
sea, he replied, and it will become calm.
I know that it is my fault that
this great storm has come upon you.
Instead, the men did their best to row
back to land, but they could not, for
the sea grew even wilder than before.
Then they cried to the Lord, O Lord,
please do not let us die for taking
this man's life.
Do not hold us accountable for killing an
innocent man for you, O Lord, have done
as you pleased.
Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard,
and the raging sea grew calm.
At this, the men greatly feared the Lord,
and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord
and made vows to him.
But the Lord provided a great fish to
swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish
three days and three nights.
Amen.
May God bless to us this reading from
his word this evening.
Let's pray together as we prepare our hearts
and our minds for receiving his word.
Let's bow together.
Father, we thank you this evening for your
word.
We pray that you would speak to us
through it, that you would calm our minds
and our hearts, and by your spirit make
us open to what you would teach us
through this chapter, through this message this evening.
We pray for the one who seems to
be troubled this evening, who's left our midst,
and our Father, we pray that you would
surround him with your grace as well at
this time.
In the name of Christ, we pray.
Amen.
Abraham Maslow once said that most of us
suffer from the Jonah complex at one time
or another in our lives.
There comes a time in all of our
lives when we sometimes run away from God's
commission to us, from God's call, and we
turn our back on the great challenge that
God has for us, that God has lined
up for us.
The Jonah complex, according to Maslow, means the
evasion of our greatest opportunities and our greatest
responsibilities.
We run, he says, not because we fear
the worst, but sometimes we run because we
fear the best.
We're intimidated by the possibilities.
We recoil from what life offers us because
we are afraid of the struggle and we
don't want to risk failure.
We pack up our faith and we pack
up our confidence and we head in the
opposite direction until something happens to trip us
up and to bring us back to reality,
to bring us back to our senses.
Well, tonight we meet Jonah himself at particularly
this point in his life.
He's on the deck of the ship now.
His flight from God, as you will realize,
has been interrupted by a storm.
Jonah had refused the great commission which had
been given to him to go to evangelize
Nineveh.
His narrow-minded nationalism, you will remember, and
his truncated worldview, which we saw a couple
of weeks ago, led him to refuse the
commission that God gave him, and he wouldn't
go to preach the gospel, to preach God's
judgment to a people that, in fact, he
despised.
So he sinks down for a long snooze
in the bottom of a ship headed in
the opposite direction for Tarsus, and he's oblivious
to the events that seem to be unfolding
about him and around him until he's awakened
in the lower hold by the captain who
comes to wake him up.
And the sailors, you'll remember, want to know
why this storm has been unleashed upon them.
They want to know its cause.
They want to know who Jonah is.
They want to know where Jonah has come
from.
They want to know what Jonah does.
And confronted now by the sailors and their
penetrating questions, Jonah is struggling to come to
some answer as to what he can possibly
tell them.
Confronted by the penetrating questions of these sailors
who are struggling for survival, Jonah now has
to come clean.
Jonah is confronted with reality.
And so he admits, as we saw in
verse 10 last week, that he's a Hebrew
prophet.
He admits that he's on the run from
God, that he's a fugitive, and he admits
that he's the reason for the mess that
they all find themselves in, in the midst
of this storm.
Now verses 11 to 17 of the first
chapter, which we've read this evening, are really
the end of the beginning of this story,
and in a very real sense, they're also
the of the end.
Because in a very real sense, this is
now the turning point in this story.
Jonah runs headlong into the sovereign power and
into the sovereign grace of God, and what
it means for him is a Copernican revolution
in his thinking.
A kind of 180 degree turn.
He's going in one direction, opposite from the
way that God wants him to go, and
now he has to deal with the reality
that God has caught up with him, and
he has to face that reality, and something
has to be done about it.
And so it's really the turning point, in
a sense, of the story.
But it's also a low point in the
story, because at this point, Jonah faces death,
and Jonah faces despair.
And it's not at all clear that he's
going to get out of this alive.
Either he goes down with the ship, and
all of the sailors who go to their
death, or else he's tossed overboard and drowns
in the sea.
Either way, the end seems imminent for Jonah.
Either way, the end seems to have come.
Either way, the end of the story seems
to be upon him.
Running from God has led him into a
dead end.
So what happens?
What happens at this point, as Jonah's in
this situation, faced with these realities?
What does he do, and how is it
handled?
Well, the first thing I want us to
notice as we come to this text tonight,
in verses 11 to 17, is that Jonah
acknowledges his responsibility.
And this is a change now.
It already started in verse 10, as we
saw last week, but in verses 11 and
12, we read, the sea was getting rougher
and rougher.
So they asked him, what should we do
to you to make the sea calm for
us?
And he says, pick me up and throw
me into the sea.
I know that it is my fault that
this great storm has come upon you.
The jig is now up for this fugitive
prophet, because the sailors now know that this
storm has been sent from God by God
because of Jonah's actions.
But I want you to notice that the
ship's crew, in fact, is not a lynching
party.
They're not anxious to do away with Jonah.
They're not anxious to immediately get rid of
him to solve their own problems.
They had determined the cause of this catastrophe,
but they don't immediately run to Jonah and
seize him and toss him overboard.
Rather, they put the matter to Jonah.
And I think this is a very interesting
part of the story.
They ask Jonah what ought to be done.
They put the question to him.
And now Jonah has the question put back
to him.
What will he say in response to this?
What should be done?
And Jonah now stands face to face with
reality.
He is the one who has to make
the call.
It would have been a lot easier if
the sailors had simply decided themselves to toss
Jonah overboard.
If they hadn't really involved him in the
decision, it would have made so much more
sense if they had just taken him and
pitched him into the sea without any questions
asked at all.
It would have been much easier, so much
easier, had they decided to just be done
away with him.
But you see, their question to him forces
Jonah out into the open.
He has to become his own judge and
jury at this point.
He not only has to acknowledge that his
flight from God has caused this storm, but
he also has to prescribe the solution.
He also has to tell them what needs
to be done in order for this storm
to stop.
He has to face the awful fact that
his death will bring calm to the sea
and bring life and survival to the sailors.
He has to own not only his own
sin in fleeing from God, but in fact
he also has to own now his own
judgment.
His personal rebellion is broken at this point,
and he's forced to make a courageous confession.
And he says, the only way out of
this is for me to bear the punishment.
The only way out of this is for
you to throw me overboard.
The only way out of this is for
me to come clean and to acknowledge that
I'm the one who has caused the storm
to come upon us all.
And so Jonah, in a rather poignant moment,
sentences himself to death.
In his book, The Judgment of Jonah, Jacques
Allul, the French writer whom I quoted last
week, says at this point that Jonah lets
himself be put into question in the totality
of his life.
It is for him now a matter of
life and of death.
He is ready to be condemned for his
unfaithfulness and to lose his life to save
the others.
And Allul says at this moment, Jonah makes
the move from being a fugitive running away
from God to once again being a witness
and ultimately a martyr.
With these words, he becomes again a true
prophet of the living God.
Now I want us to think about this
and to reflect on this in terms of
our own lives a little bit, because it
does seem to me that when we find
ourselves in flight from God, there always comes
a moment in which reality has to be
faced, in which the truth has to be
confronted, in which we come face to face
with what we've done.
We may have to deal with the consequences
of certain actions that we've taken.
We may have to deal with the fallout
from certain decisions that we've made.
We may have to deal with the realities
which thrust themselves upon us as a result
of a whole number of things which we
might have done, but particularly in our flight
from God.
You see, the first step in returning to
God when we're on the run is to
acknowledge our responsibility, to acknowledge our sin, to
acknowledge in fact our culpability to admit our
flight from God.
You become a Christian.
You take the steps to becoming a Christian
when you acknowledge that your sin has contributed
to the chaos of the world and to
the storms of life.
You begin to become a child of God
when you own the fact that the judgment
born by Christ on the cross in fact
is your judgment.
That's what's happening here with Jonah.
He begins to acknowledge his own responsibility.
He begins to admit his own culpability.
He begins to acknowledge that maybe in fact
there's something that he's done that's created and
caused all of this.
Last Monday evening, my wife Lynn and I
watched a video, a movie at home called
Dead Man Walking starring Sean Penn and Susan
Sarandon.
Some of you may have seen this movie.
We usually don't watch very many movies in
our house because and if we do they're
usually children's movies.
But last Monday we went out and got
one.
There's a video store in our community where
you can get videos for 96 cents on
Monday nights.
And since Monday is my day off, sometimes
in the evening we watch a movie.
Well we watched this movie and found it
to be a very powerful movie and it's
not a movie I would recommend unless you're
prepared for a rather intense experience.
It's a powerful story about a man named
Matthew Poncelet who is sentenced to death for
the rape and for the murder of a
young couple deep in the south of the
United States.
And the movie, the entire movie revolves around
the relationship which develops between this man who's
on death row and a Roman Catholic nun
who's assigned to be his spiritual advisor, his
spiritual counselor as he faces death.
And throughout the movie Poncelet absolutely refuses to
acknowledge his guilt, his culpability, his responsibility in
any way.
He admits that he was there when these
events occurred but he tries to download the
blame first of all on his accomplice and
says that it was all his doing.
He then begins to blame the drugs and
the alcohol which have ravaged his mind and
he says he really wasn't responsible for any
actions that he might have done.
He blames the fact that he never experienced
any love in his life as he was
growing up.
He never was accepted and at every turn
he tries to evade responsibility.
He tries to portray himself as the victim
rather than as the victimizer.
But this Roman Catholic nun will not let
him off the hook.
She's gentle, she's kind, but she's persistent and
she will not let him evade the fact
that he is responsible for his actions.
And in the hours just before his execution
he finally comes to terms with the fact
that he is being executed for something that
he in fact did.
And when he admits it, when he comes
to terms with that reality as evil as
it is, it becomes for him a transforming
moment of love and grace at the end
of his life in the midst of death.
And I want to suggest to you that
that's what's going on here in the life
of Jonah and that's what goes on in
the lives of all of us as we
run from God.
There comes a point when we need to
admit our responsibility.
In the Bible this is always the beginning
of salvation because you see the Bible does
not paper over the awful reality that we
in fact are accountable for our decisions, for
our actions, for that which in fact we
undertake to do in the midst of life.
The Bible realizes and teaches that the awful
reality of sin must be dealt with.
It refuses to let us get from out
underneath our responsibility.
Now we're living in a culture of course
where this kind of talk is not very
well understood.
Where talk about sin and personal responsibility is
not popular.
But we need to understand that in Scripture
there can be no personal salvation where there
is no personal acknowledgement of sin.
We're all more than victims but in fact
many of us all of us are implicated
in sin in one way or another.
It's not enough to claim that we are
victimized although in fact sin often does victimize
other people.
But in fact it's also true that all
of us are implicated in the evil which
ravages our souls.
No one gets out of this untouched and
Jonah admits his responsibility.
Secondly then I want us to notice as
we look at this text that in a
very interesting way I think Jonah then becomes
the instrument of salvation as the story moves
on particularly in verses 13 to 16.
Notice that the sailors at first recoil at
the thought of throwing Jonah overboard.
Instead they do their best it says to
row back to land and to safety but
they discover that it's no use.
The harder that they row the harder that
they try to save themselves the more difficult
it becomes the rougher the sea is and
so having explored every avenue they finally finally
cast Jonah into the sea.
Having tried everything else they finally give in
to Jonah's instruction but they do it reluctantly
and notice that they cry out to God
to forgive them should they be taking the
life of an innocent man.
They cry out to God for forgiveness in
the taking of a human life but nevertheless
they put him over and notice what happens
then the sea becomes calm and it says
that as the sea became calm this greatly
greatly put fear into the sailors.
It offered a sacrifice to the Lord and
made vows to him.
The sailors are converted.
They are made to believe in the Lord
the God of the sea the God of
the land the God who made all that
is all that exists and they are converted
from the worship of their own gods upon
whom they called earlier in the story now
to realize that the God of Jonah the
God for whom Jonah is a prophet is
indeed the true God who is to be
worshipped.
Now do you see what's going on here
and I want us to notice this because
I think it's a very powerful and a
very profound part of the story.
The sailors become the instrument of God's judgment
in the execution of Jonah and Jonah becomes
the instrument of God's salvation for the sailors.
Now let me say that again the sailors
become the instrument of God's judgment in the
execution of Jonah and Jonah becomes the instrument
of God's salvation for the sailors and I
want to suggest to you my friends that
here at the heart of this story we
bump into the New Testament gospel at the
very heart of the Old Testament.
Here is an a gospel principle which will
be extended and which will be fulfilled in
the New Testament in the one who is
greater than Jonah the one who is yet
to come.
Jacques Ellul puts it this way if it
is true that the sacrifice of a man
who takes his condemnation can save others around
him that is Jonah then this is far
more true when the one who is sacrificed
is the very son of God the eternal
son of God.
You see there's a principle of solidarity here
there is a principle of representation here there
is a principle of substitution going on here
which is at the very heart of the
gospel of the New Testament because on the
cross Jesus bore sin and judgment it is
not his own sin for he had no
sin it is not his own judgment because
in fact he deserved no judgment this makes
it different from Jonah who bore his own
judgment because of his own sin but remember
the words of the apostle Paul in 2nd
Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 21 God made
him who had no sin to be sin
for us so that we might become the
righteousness of God.
You see what's going on in the New
Testament is that Jesus owns our sin.
Jesus embraces our judgment and takes it upon
himself he is the one rightly who is
in a position to judge but he becomes
the judge judged in our place by bearing
the sin of the world in his death
on the cross Jesus becomes the instrument of
salvation for the very world which has executed
the judgment of death upon him.
Jesus becomes the instrument of peace in a
stormy sinful world and already here we have
this principle of solidarity this principle of representation
this principle of substitution of one giving up
his life so that others might be saved
and so Jonah has a lot to do
with Jesus and Jesus of course pointed to
Jonah as a witness as a forerunner of
in fact what he himself had come to
do.
Many of you will have read Charles Dickens
novels A Tale of Two Cities or perhaps
you've seen the movie I think a couple
of movies have been made of this novel
you'll know that it's the story of a
young French aristocrat who was condemned to die
by the guillotine during the bloody French revolution
and his punishment of course was based solely
on the crimes that his family had perpetrated
as nobles upon the peasantry.
Just hours before his execution he's visited by
a young English friend of his named Cartwright
who could have passed for his twin who
could have passed for his double and this
friend had largely wasted his life he had
largely not done very much with his life
not done very much of significance with his
life and after the guard had left them
alone the friend overpowers the doomed man with
an anesthetic and he changes clothes with him
and then pretending to be the one who's
condemned to die he calls the jailer and
he asks that the body of his unconscious
visitor supposedly this visitor who's overcome with grief
be removed and returned to his home and
of course what happens is the guards carry
out this French young French aristocrat whom they
think is the visitor and they carry him
off back to his home and he's free
and then left in the prison is this
young English man this friend condemned to die
in the place of his friend and on
his way to the guillotine the young Englishman
spoke these final words and they're words that
I'm sure many of you have read he
said it is a far far better thing
that I do than I have ever done
it is a far far better thing that
I do than I have ever done he
was substituting his life for the life of
a friend his largely wasted life so that
a friend of his might be set free
the principle of substitution the principle of representation
the principle of solidarity and Jonah realizes too
that it's this principle which is at work
the principle of substitution excuse me atonement which
we find here in Jonah now Jonah realizes
that it's too late to change his mind
it's too late perhaps for him to go
to Nineveh the least he can do is
to offer himself as a sacrifice in an
effort to avert the danger that he's brought
upon the others in one sense it's an
act of desperation in one sense it's an
act of despair it's the act of a
man who realizes that he's come to the
end he no longer sees his life as
having any value or meaning but on the
other hand he realizes that it would be
a far far better thing for him to
die in the sea than for all of
the sailors to die and for the ship
to go down so he dies he's prepared
to die so that the ship will be
saved and so that the sailors will live
and then thirdly and finally notice that Jonah
experiences the providence and the saving hand of
God in verse 17 it says but the
Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah
and Jonah was inside the fish three days
and three nights now some people will look
at this verse this final verse of the
first chapter and in fact see it as
an example of further judgment Jonah gets thrown
overboard and then he's followed by swallowed by
a great fish that'll teach him he finally
gets what he deserves but I want to
suggest to you this evening that this in
fact is the beginning of Jonah's salvation think
about it Jonah's tossed overboard he begins to
sink into the seaweed as he struggles for
life as he struggles for survival trying to
come to terms with the fact that his
life is over he struggles to swim and
catches his breath he's at the mercy of
the wind and the waves going down for
the last time and what happens God sends
a submarine in the form of a big
fish that comes along and that swallows Jonah
and Jonah survives inside the fish three days
and three nights what's going on here yes
this is the judgment of God but I
want to suggest to you at the same
time that it's the mercy of God it's
wrath tempered with mercy it's judgment filled with
grace and with providence because you see this
is a story of salvation God is prepared
even in the midst of death to rescue
Jonah out of the depths why because God
intends to display his mercy and his grace
to Jonah and to do it in such
a way that he will again later do
to the people of Nineveh and God isn't
finished with Jonah yet God has a task
for Jonah to complete God will see to
it that the people of Nineveh will be
preached to that the gospel will be proclaimed
to them that they will be given an
opportunity to hear the saving message of God
you see Jonah can't even escape from God
in the face of death at this point
Jonah's plucked from the grave and given a
second chance given an other opportunity to fulfill
the commission that God has for him now
the New Testament interprets this part of the
story in a very interesting way it's interpreted
in the New Testament as a witness to
the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ and
that's how our Lord himself in fact interprets
this part of the story and into chapter
2 in Matthew chapter 12 and verse 40
Jesus says as Jonah was three days and
three nights in the belly of a huge
fish so the son of man will be
three days and three nights in the heart
of the earth but in the resurrection of
Jesus of course one greater than Jonah again
has appeared just as in the substitutionary element
of this story there is one greater who
comes in Jesus so now in the resurrection
there is one greater who has come Jonah
was saved from a certain death and restored
to life but Christ was actually crucified dead
and buried before he rose from the grave
the third day nevertheless Jonah's life and death
experience points to the cross and to the
resurrection of Jesus Jonah experiences the grace of
God the life-giving grace of God the
saving grace of God in the midst of
what would have been otherwise a certain death
and he's given new life and so I
want to suggest to you that even when
you run from God God's grace can force
you to confront reality God's grace is greater
than our sin God's grace is greater than
our rebellion this is how C.S. Lewis
whom I mentioned briefly last Sunday evening described
his conversion in his autobiography surprised by joy
he says you must picture me alone in
that room in Magdalene which is a college
at Oxford night after night feeling whenever my
mind lifted even for a second from my
work the study steady unrelented approach of him
I so earnestly desired not to meet that
which I greatly feared had at last come
upon me he says in the Trinity term
of 1929 I gave in and admitted that
God was God and Nelton prayed perhaps that
night the most dejected and reluctant convert in
all England I did not then see what
is now the most shining and obvious thing
the divine humility will which will accept a
convert on even such terms the prodigal son
he says at least walked home on his
own feet but who is brought kicking struggling
resentful and darting his eyes in every direction
for a chance of escape the words compel
them to come in have been so abused
by wicked men that we shudder at them
but properly understood they plumb the depth of
the divine mercy the hardness of God C
.S. Lewis says is kinder than the softness
of men and his compulsion his compulsion is
our liberation he says I never had the
experience of looking for God it was the
other way around he was the hunter or
so it seemed to me and I was
the deer he stalked me took unerring aim
and fired and I am thankful that this
is how the first conscious meeting occurred it
forearms one against subsequent fears that the whole
thing was only wish fulfillment something one didn't
wish for can hardly be that you see
C.S. Lewis came to the reality that
the sovereign God was invading his life and
he could no longer run and he could
not escape Jonah a prophet of God realized
that the sovereign grace of God had caught
up with him and he could no longer
run and he turns in despair and realizes
and acknowledges that he has to come clean
he becomes the instrument of salvation for the
sailors and he himself in the end experiences
the providential saving grace of God when you
run from God the sovereign grace of God
will eventually catch up with you you can
run but you cannot hide is it the
case that tonight perhaps the sovereign grace of
God is bumping up against your life not
willing to let you go not willing to
let you run but rather wanting desiring calling
compelling you to not only come to yourself
to not only come to reality to not
only face reality as it is but in
fact to come and to bow in humility
before the God who is the God of
all creation the God who made heaven and
earth the land and the sea the God
who has come to us in Jesus Christ
let us pray gracious
God our father we confess that in your
sovereignty you are lord that your ways are
mysterious to us but that you work and
move in our lives and in the lives
of those around us and we acknowledge before
you tonight our need of you and if
it is the case our father that some
of us are on the run tonight help
us to come clean before you help us
to acknowledge our need of you and help
us to give in to your sovereign grace
and to the pursuit of your love for
the sake of Jesus we ask it amen