Around the Throne
Transcript
How are we doing this morning? My name's Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We're finishing up. Today is the last week of our Home Sweet Home series where we've been looking at the church and how the church ought to organize, how the church ought to act in some ways, what makes for a healthy church. And so we're going to be in the book of Revelation today.
And in the book of Revelation, we're getting a picture. It's where we're going to be reading. And in a lot of the book of Revelation, we're getting a picture of future events. We're getting a picture of some things that haven't happened yet that are going to happen. And I got to thinking about it as we were going to study this passage today. I got to thinking about that this is real.
Like this is our actual future for the church. This is a real picture of what's going to happen in the future. And I just got to thinking about how that ought to affect us. And so you ever watch a movie where it shows a clip of the ending at the beginning of the movie? So it's like the heroes walking out of a building.
It's blowing up behind them. They're smoking a cigarette. And it's like they're scuffed up, but they're still like good looking. Like I don't know how they did it, but it's like something dramatic has happened, but they're okay. And then it'll be like, it'll just change. And they'll be at an office at their desk at their computer wearing glasses.
They weren't wearing glasses a second ago. Somehow over the past couple of weeks, whatever, their eyesight got better or the future weeks, whatever. And it says like two weeks earlier. And it's like, so, you know, what I just saw was a picture of the end. And now what I'm looking at is pre-adventure version of this, this person. And so I got to thinking about like, what if in life you had a moment?
I don't know how it worked. I don't know how you got to see this, but you got to see three weeks from now. This is you. You're smoking the cigarette. You're walking out of the exploding building. Like, what have you got to see that?
And you knew this is how this ends up. And then when this adventure starts, like when this thing happens, when you get called by the CIA, they pick you up in a limo. And they're like, we need you to quit working at your desk and to come on a secret mission. Like you would think, okay, I saw the end of this. Like I know, like, and I got to think about how that would make you act, like how that would make me act. So my first thought was that would make me excessively, aggressively lazy.
Because I would think, I don't, I don't really have to do anything. The building blows up. I still have my cigarette. We're going to be okay. Like I know how this ends. Like I would think it doesn't really matter how all this plays out because I know how the end, like that was my first thought.
And then I got to thinking about it. And I really got to thinking about it. And I think actually, knowing that that's how the story ended, it would have the exact opposite effect on me. I would do the craziest stuff I could come up with. Because I knew two weeks from now, I'm still standing. I got, I got a two week window where all of the action hero stuff works.
That's what I would think. So when the CIA said, we need you on a mission, I would have said, because I'd just be so absolutely confident. Usually I'd be freaking out, but I'm so absolutely confident because I know the end, I'd be like, you came to the right guy. Like I would try to do, I would go buy sunglasses and cigarettes. I don't smoke, but I'd have to smoke for the next two weeks because I've got to have a cigarette at the end of the explosion. Like the biggest, baddest dude would come walking out.
Like he, he would look like the Russian that Rocky had to fight in Rocky four. And I'd be like, I got this. And the reason was I saw my face. It wasn't smashed in. I was still walking. I don't know how this is going to go down, but I know I'm going to walk away from it.
I'd be like, don't, don't even worry about it. And I'd just walk out and I'd be like, I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be great. I might would start the fight just by kicking his shin. Cause I can. I might say something derogatory about his family members on my way over there because I can. Like I know how this is going to work out.
There would be times where I probably would have just been, everyone would be hiding and I'll be like, I'll handle this. And they'd be like, do you need a gun? And I'll be like, no, just to freak them out. Cause I don't need a gun. Cause I know how it ends up. Like I get to walk out of the exploding building.
Like this is what I got to thinking about. And I spent way too much time thinking about it. As you can tell, I got really excited. That's the picture we're getting today of the church. We're getting this picture of where we end up. We're getting this picture of the church walking out of the exploding building, uh, still intact.
We're getting this picture in the book of Revelation of where we're headed. And it is a real reality in the future for us. And I think we're going to go through the same process, which is at first we're going to think, oh, this will make me excessively aggressively lazy. But I think it's meant to have the opposite effect that God gave us this picture to have the exact opposite effect on our hearts and our souls. It's to help us see this is where it's going to end up. So you can have the bravery, the courage, the energy to, to accept the call that Jesus has placed on his church.
So let's go to Revelation five. Now, uh, there, if you've been around the church for a while and you hear we're going to be in the book of Revelation, maybe you've read the Bible. So maybe, you know, very little about the Bible, but there's a little bit of like, oh, Revelation, like this is about to get interesting. There's going to be a lot of crazy things. And in some ways there are, there are some things in the book of Revelation that are hard to understand. The book of Revelation is the Revelation of Jesus Christ.
So you've had people walk through the book of Revelation and they want to talk about all the crazy imagery and the pictures we were met with in the book. Uh, but it's, it's the, the point of the book is to reveal Christ to point to Jesus. And so, uh, what we have in the book of Revelation is John, the apostle. So who followed Jesus around, he's been exiled to the isle of Patmos. He's worshiping God and Jesus shows up and basically is like, I'm going to show you some things. And then John writes them down through the leadership of the Holy spirit.
John pins the book of Revelation. And I think, uh, it's very helpful for us that this was funneled through John, that John has shown these images. And he writes them down as best he can, because John's going to explain them to us in a way we can kind of understand. There are places in the book of Revelation where John says things like, uh, he said this and his voice sounded like a waterfall. And it's because John was doing his best to describe. It's like if a waterfall could talk, that's what it sounded like.
There's times where he's like explaining these pictures and he's just writing down as best he can. This is what it was like. And, and instead of having all the right words for it, I think he has all the words that God designed to be right for us to be able to understand. So there are some parts in this passage that we're going to read where it's like, what does that mean? I don't know. But we're going to apply a pastor named John Piper.
He has a rule that he calls the law of least meaning, which means when you come to a text in the scriptures, there are times where you're not going to understand completely what it's saying. But if you can understand something that it's saying, then that was worth understanding. Like that was good. And so what we're going to do is there's some stuff that's really crystal clear in this passage. And there's some stuff that's really confusing. We're going to kind of just go past the confusing parts because we want to see the part that's crystal clear.
And that's the part we're going to, we're going to take out of this. And so as we get to look at this picture of future us, I just, I'm going to pray that God would reveal himself to us in it and that he would use it to embolden us as a church and as his people. So let's pray real quick. God, we thank you for the images that we have in the book of Revelation. We thank you for you giving us this glimpse into your presence, into eternity, into the future of your people. We pray, God, that you would use it to equip us and embolden us today to accept the mission you've called us on.
We love you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. Revelation chapter 5 is on page 665 if your Bible looks like this. If you don't own a Bible, this is our gift to you. Take it home with you. Then I saw, so this is John, he's writing down this vision that he's seeing.
Then I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne, a scroll written within and on the back and sealed with seven seals. Okay. He's in heaven. He sees someone sitting on a throne. Kings sit on thrones. That's God.
So he sees God and in God's right hand, he's holding a scroll. It's rolled up parchment written all over it. So it's not just parchment that would be written in the middle part. It's written all over it and it's sealed with seven seals, meaning that this is a very important parchment. This is a very important scroll. We find out as we continue to read that this scroll contains the end of human history.
It contains how the earth plays out. It contains some of God's wrath and God's judgment on the earth as they begin to undo these seals. So what we see, we're met with this picture of God sitting on a throne, holding human history in his hand. That's what John is seeing and writes it down. Verse 2. And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?
So this angel asks, who can ascend to the throne of God and take something from his hand? Who can come up here? Who has the audacity? Who has the worthiness? Who has the glory to walk up to the throne of God and remove something from his hand? Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?
And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or look into it. And I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. This angel stands beside the throne of God where God holds human history in his hand. And he says, who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals? And there is dead silence. No one in heaven.
No one on earth. No one under the earth. No one. No one. No one. No one.
No one. No one. Worthy. And the silence is broken by the loud weeping of John, whose heart and soul have just been crushed. As he stands before the throne of God and realizes no one's worthy. No one can ascend to God.
No one. No one can open the scroll. No one has the glory or the weight or the value. No one. You just made a cameo in the story. I'm going to read it to you again.
No one. No one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or look into it. I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or look into it. You're going to be in one of those three places when this call rings out in eternity. You're going to be in heaven, on earth, or under it. You didn't pipe up.
No one's worthy. That's all of human history. No one's worthy. That's every king, every astronaut, every scientist. That's every loving, gracious, wonderful person you've ever met. No one gets to say, I can walk up to the throne.
No one gets to say, I can walk up to the throne. No one gets to say, I can walk up to the throne. And in this moment, John's heart breaks. Because we have nothing to offer. Humanity has no ability to approach God. And it's crushing.
And John, I love that John says it this way. And I began to weep loudly. John didn't write. And tears began to roll down my face. John said, I was a blubbery, snotty mess by the throne of God. Because I had no worthiness.
And no one else did. I couldn't catch my breath. I was doing the... Like, I made a scene in heaven. An angel, a mighty angel spoke. There's dead silence.
And then I went... Like crying, embarrassing, sobbing in front of the throne of God. Because nobody can approach Him. And one of the elders said to me... These are some men, elders that are around the throne. Weep no more.
Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered so that He can open the scroll and its seven seals. That's reference to Old Testament prophecy. The lion of the tribe of Judah and the root of David are talking about the same person. And that's Jesus who came in the line of David the king. Who came out of the tribe of Judah. Who was the lion of the tribe of Judah.
And He has conquered. He is worthy to open the scroll. So an elder looks at John and says, you don't have to weep. You don't have to be heartbroken. You don't have to be crushed by this. I want you to hear that as declared to all of us who were found unworthy.
He says, you don't have to be crushed. There is someone who is worthy. There's someone who can go in our place to the throne. There's someone who can walk to God on our behalf. He doesn't just say, yeah, you should keep crying, but this guy is worthy. No, He says that His worthiness lets your weeping stop.
His worthiness unbreaks our heart. And between the throne and the four living creatures. Those are some big scary angels around God's throne. And among the elders, I saw a lamb standing as though it had been slain. John's told to look at the lion of the tribe of Judah. And he says, I looked for a lion and I saw a lamb.
I looked for the one who's conquered. And I saw someone who looked like they had been conquered. I looked for the one that has the glory and the worthiness. And I see a lamb who's been crushed. I see a lamb who's been slain. Jesus Christ went to the cross so that our unworthiness, so that our weeping can stop.
Jesus was slain. And in His death on the cross became ultimately worthy to ascend to the throne of God. In His sacrifice for His people, He bought our worthiness and represents us to the King. That's our hope that we have this morning. I saw a lamb standing as though it had been slain with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And He went and took the scroll from the right hand of Him who was seated on the throne.
I want you to see that. God of the universe holds the human history in His hand. And Jesus Christ walks up as a lamb who was slain, as the root of David, as the lion of the tribe of Judah. And on humans' behalf, on all of heaven and all of earth and everything under the earth, He walks up and He takes history from God's hand. Because He's worthy. Because He was slain.
And when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals. For you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God, from every tribe and language and people and nation. And you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. They said, By your blood you have ransomed. We don't use that word ransomed as much as they did in their culture.
We still use it. It still means the same thing. Recently ISIS captured a journalist, and they asked for $132 million in ransom. Ransom is a price paid to retrieve a hostage, or to retrieve a slave. And they say, Jesus is worthy because by his blood he's ransomed a people for God. The church was held hostage to sin.
The church was in slavery to our enemy, was in slavery to our sin, and Jesus, by his blood, bought us. By his blood he ransomed a people for God. And it says he ransomed them from every tribe and language and people and nation. And you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. When Jesus walked to the throne, and he grabbed history out of the hand of God, because he was worthy, he was worthy through his sacrifice on the cross, and he was worthy on behalf of all the people he's ransomed. He was worthy on behalf of the church.
That's why John can stop weeping. That's why you don't have to be crushed by your sin and your unworthiness. Because we have one who ascends the throne on our behalf. Flip over a page. I want us to see the picture of what he's accomplished for us. I want us to get to see this clearly.
So I just, we're going to spend some time here, and I want us to clearly see. We're in chapter 7 on page 666. We're going to look at verses 9 and 10. So some more things begin to unfold in this moment in heaven. The seals begin to be opened. There begins to be wrath and judgment poured out on the earth.
It begins to be the unfolding, the unraveling of human history. And then John says this. Verse 9. That's a celebration of purity. None of those people wear those outside of Jesus' sacrifice. They get to enter heaven dressed in white because Jesus entered heaven dressed in blood.
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. Salvation doesn't belong to good work. Salvation doesn't belong to our effort. Salvation belongs to God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. So we're wrapping up our series on what the church is, on who the church is.
We started the series by saying the church is the people made the people of God by Jesus. That's the church. The people throughout all time and history, all space, all geography, all nations, all borders. It's the people made the people of God by Jesus. And then we walked through and said, okay, what happens to a person when Jesus makes you one of his people? What happens to you when he becomes king?
We said, what does a church look like? How do we organize? What are some practices we ought to have? Like we walked through this and now we're finishing up. Last week we said that Jesus told the church, go make disciples of all nations. Go make disciples of all ethnicities.
It's ethne in the Greek. Go make disciples that aren't Jewish is what he was saying to them. That's one of the ways they would have heard it because he had been working and discipling Jewish men who had the Old Testament and understood these prophecies and these promises. And then he says, go make disciples that aren't Jewish. How many Jewish brothers and sisters do we have in this room right now? Thank you, Jesus.
That it wasn't to a certain type of people, that it wasn't to a certain type of language, that it was, that he fulfilled this promise that they listened to him and did what he said, which was to take the gospel to people who weren't Jewish. So I was, with this picture in mind of us getting to see what heaven looks like, I just want to point out a few things to us. I was hanging out with my cousin, Bumi. My grandparents were missionaries to Nigeria, West Africa. They adopted my uncle, Abel. He married my aunt, Abike.
I have three first-generation Nigerian-American cousins. My uncle's been in the family as long as my mom has. He is blood to me, even though not really. And I was hanging out with my cousin, Bumi. This is last year around 4th of July because he comes down a lot and helps us sell fireworks. That doesn't have anything to do other than that's why he was here.
I help run a firework store. So if y'all like to buy some fireworks, Aiken, South Carolina. I'm just kidding. So he was down helping us do that and he and I went. He loves local, good restaurants. I took him to Rivera's Food, which is a very good Mexican food place over here in West Columbia.
And I took him over there and we were eating. I was introducing him to some different things there that I really like there. While I was there, I ordered horchata, which is delicious. It is cinnamon rice milk. And I ordered one and I'm used to, like when you order like a milkshake, you get that one. So I'm sitting there, we're talking, hanging out.
The guy walks by with a pitcher and goes, more horchata? And like I just stared at him because fuses had blown in my brain because I did not realize I could just have them give me more. I drank like three giant glasses of horchata. Now, I'm going to advise you on something. Rice milk is different from milk milk. I found this out later in the day when I had like a sloshy bowling ball in my stomach.
I was like, I feel terrible. It was worth it. I can't move. I'm going to die. After we ate there, we went by, I was showing him another place I like, which is a Mexican bakery. And I won't try to say the word that's listed on the front, even though I really want to because I would butcher it and I might just say a different Spanish word.
But it's a Mexican bakery. They don't speak English. You have to, you just got to, you know, fumble through at the end. I walked in. I was looking stuff up on how to say things in Spanish and I was like, point at ones because, you know, they might have cream inside and I had to figure out how to say, con crema. And she'd say, you know, no, whatever.
And I'd say, okay, okay, like I want this one or whatever. So we order. I'm eating a churro. Then we walk over to the little, like Tienda place, like store there and got aloe drink. Did y'all know you can drink aloe? Like I only had ever rubbed it on my pasty skin after sun had assaulted me.
It's the only thing I'd ever used aloe for. I saw this thing and it was like aloe. It looked about the same. It was just a little more liquidy. And I thought, I'm not sure you can drink that. But you can.
It's apparently an edible thing. Maybe y'all knew that. I didn't know this. And so I was hanging out with my cousin and we were talking about stuff. And then it just dawned on me as I was eating this churro and drinking aloe drink, which again, should not have been chasing a gallon of horchata. But I went for it.
And I looked at him and I said, dude, my version of heaven has been really racist. And I didn't know it. Whenever I had pictured heaven, I had known that it would be this fulfillment of God's glory on earth. So I was just transferring a bunch of white things there. Like I know biscuits are in heaven. I know barbecue is in heaven.
Like I know they're there. I knew that. I was eating a churro. I had just drank horchata. I'm hanging out with my first generation Nigerian African-American cousin and I'm thinking, this stuff's there too. Horchata is there.
My aunt and uncle's achara is there. Like it's going to be there because look at this picture. John's looking in heaven and what does he see? 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. we don't become some sort of generic human form in heaven. He sees tribes, ethnicities, languages and peoples before the throne. He sees everybody makes it.
That declaration that the angel's saying in Revelation 5 which is he's ransomed by his blood people from every tribe and language and nation. John turns around and in two chapters says, I saw them and they still came from that tribe and they still had that language and they still had that nation and they all gathered before the throne of God to praise his name because God is the God of all humanity and he made all the peoples and in every culture there's stuff that lines up with what God designed it to be in every culture there's stuff that is absolutely sinful and broken and there is no right culture before God because all of the cultures belong to him. And I had inadvertently made America some form of heaven. There will be some stuff from the U.S. there.
I mentioned a few biscuits is one of them. but it's going to be so much more miraculously beautiful than that. There's going to be so much more depth and richness than that and I know in my limited human version God had to meet me on my love language which was food particularly that day things made out of cinnamon to tell me that he had much more in store not only for then but for now. I want us to see something here and I want us to talk about this. I got on Joshua Project the International Mission Board has some different statistics but both of them kind of reveal the same thing. Joshua Project studies people groups so does the IMB International Mission Board.
To tell me that he had much more in store not only for then but for now. I want us to see something here and I want us to talk about this. I got on Joshua Project the International Mission Board has some different statistics but both of them kind of reveal the same thing. Joshua Project studies people groups so does the IMB International Mission Board. Joshua Project though we're going to just look at their statistics Joshua Project
Says that there are 16,510 people groups so this is languages this is locations 16,510 different types of people groups unreached people groups meaning people from them there's no significant amount of Jesus followers among them sometimes it means nobody as far as we know has even made it to them no Bible has been translated no gospel has been preached in their language they may have never
Even heard the name of Jesus 6,672 people groups no gospel no followers of Jesus that means about 40% of the people groups on earth no gospel no Bible no proclamation of the hope that we have they don't have an elder looking at them and saying weep no more just sin just brokenness no hope
Let me do it by population because you might would say as I would say hearing that statistic yeah but I'm sure a lot of those people groups are really small there's about 7.29 billion people on earth according to the Joshua Project population of unreached people is 3.07 billion that puts about 42%
Of the humans on the globe no gospel no Bible no Jesus no hope no weep no more now I want us to with crystal clear vision see that the angels said Jesus had ransomed from every tribe from every
People from every language from every nation people for his own possession Jesus has bought them and I want us to see with crystal clear vision that John says they make it John
Says I saw before the throne people from every tribe and every language and every nation praising Jesus we know the cross happened we know that Jesus has purchased by his blood worthiness on behalf of his
People and we know that there's this moment in time where an angel stands up and says who is worthy and Jesus with audacity walks to the throne of God and we get to weep no longer and there's a time when we stand before
The throne of God among our brothers and sisters proclaiming that Jesus owns salvation and that it belongs to the God who sits on the throne and we're placed in the middle with a call that says proclaim the gospel how does
God count people groups how does God count languages and tribes and nations is it the same way that Joshua Project does I doubt it Joshua Project and IMB don't even do it the same Jesus
Hasn't come back yet the job is not finished so we don't have to get caught up in that I don't care if they're off by a miraculously high number and it's only two billion people the job isn't
Finished we're still sent I want to push us here for a second and this may feel like I just want us to see something in heaven your family includes people that don't look like you in the eternity
As a Christian that you will spend before the throne of God your brothers and sisters aren't going to have the same skin tone same language same background same social economic standing right now
And if statistically in the US I think it's 90 ish percent nine out of ten of your friendships for everybody are same race generally same look the same as you same background
Same race I just want to push us here a little bit if that is the case for you that all of your relationships friendships look exactly like you do I'm not saying you're wrong it may have to do with the job
You work the neighborhood you're in I'm saying you might be wrong because it may have to do with the fact that that's easier because you think about things the same your backgrounds the same you talk about
Things the same it's an easier connection I know that within 10 10 minute drive of this building there's 70,000 people you got in your car anywhere you could drive in 10 minutes some of
You are like I drove 20 to get here yes there's a lot more people in that circle 10 minutes 56% of them are white 31% of them are black 8% of them are Hispanic 4% of them are Asian and Pacific
Islander but for some people that means you live in an apartment complex I know one family in our church family lives in an apartment complex that about one third of them are from India just in their apartment complex
I know of an apartment complex that we try to do stuff on a regular basis that's 50% Hispanic even though they make up only 8% of that 70,000 and God's told the church go to everybody
I'm not I'm not fussing at us I don't mean that at all I think in a lot of ways our church is very open to everybody I am saying that going to everybody will take more intentionality than going to the
People it's easiest to talk to and I am saying that this is what the church has been tasked with and I am saying that one
Day it's realized and we get to participate in that now we get to make our church look and feel as much like heaven as Jesus will allow us right now that's one of the reasons
We repent of sin it's one of the reasons we do all the things we do it's why we gather and sing to Jesus we've only read two bits of chapters they sang a lot already we get to gather
Around his throne and make much of Jesus and we get to as intentionally as we can be as a church family go out of our way to build relationships with everybody in your neighborhood at your office at your Job where you work
In your school in your classes we know the crosses happen we know this moment in history happened and rather than looking at that and going oh they all make it I don't have to do anything I think the more
We see this moment the more it has the opposite effect on us which is they all make it we get to go for it there are unreached people groups part of the reason they're unreached is because they're very hard to get to and when
You get to them they don't like you that's one of the reasons they're unreached if you can't if you just hop on a plane walk over there and they were like oh Americans we love you those people
Are reached the reason a lot of these Numbers are so high is that when you show up they kill you but here's the promise that's been given to the church we can keep going and they can keep killing us somebody's coming out we can keep going
They can keep killing us and at some point somebody from that tribe from that language from that people group will stand next to you by the throne and proclaim as loud and as violently as they can
Salvation belongs to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb we can keep going because we're going to make it you can right now go home pick a people group off of the Joshua
Project look at heaven and tell Jesus I'll go to them if you want me to and I'll die if you want me to because I know for a rock solid certainty that one day somebody
From that unreached people group will be there and they'll be my brother or my sister because you've bought them and I don't know if it'll have anything to do with me but I know you've called us and I
Know they'll be there and if I get to get that started I'll go some of you that's what you're supposed to do you're supposed to have us bring you up on stage and say we're going to
Lay hands on this sister we're going to lay hands on this brother and we're not telling you where they're going because you can't know where they're going because the people they're going to can't know they're coming and we're
Going to pray for them we're going to ask God to use them and if they get to come back praise Jesus and if we don't ever see them again praise Jesus because at no point was that not worth
It and at some point we'll stand before a throne and as loud and as violently as we can declare we'll say salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb
Some of you you're supposed to go plant a church in a place that still speaks English you're supposed to go with a team we're going to take you to our
Pastor training process you're going to go to Atlanta you're going to New York where Chris Romalia says there's unreached people groups in New York
We're going to bring you up on stage we're going to pray for you we're going to stand and say a lot of you need
To leave and go with them they're moving to Atlanta you need to move to Atlanta and go with them they're moving to San
Diego you need to go with them some of you need to stay because staying is your version of going because God has already
Sent you you live in an apartment complex with an unreached people group some of you are going to stay in apartment complex in
South Carolina even though you want to get a house because 96% of the people in apartment complexes in South Carolina are not a
Part of a church 96% of people in an apartment complex in South Carolina are not a part of a church and God has
Already sent you you live there because God said I want my church here because I want that person around my throne some of
You are in the class you're in because Jesus has blood bought people in that class and he has infiltrated that class with you
Some of you picked the major you picked you prayed about it and you were like I guess just this one I don't know
Randomly some of you that was the worst interview I ever had they at the end they said we'll call you if we've decided
We're going to consider you for the Job and I responded I'll call you for the consideration of the and then I just trailed off
Because that sentence didn't make any sense and I walked out and I'm crying in my car and you got the Job because God
Has blood bought people at that Job and he sent you I don't know where you're supposed to go I don't know to whom
You're supposed to go I know you're supposed to go and I know I know that wherever God sends you your destination is with
Every tribe and language and people and nation around a glorious throne staring at a glorious king and as loud as we can proclaim
It salvation belongs to our God and to the lamb there's cards in front of you and there are cards on the seat beside you if
You're in the front row I want you to grab one and I think there are enough pins to go around if not I
Want you to share it's very heavenly and I just want you to for a second I want you to if you're a Christian
I want you to prayerfully ask where and who I want you to sit and listen who has God put you around already who
Has God let you not quit thinking about who has he just brought to your mind right now you've never even heard of I
Want you to ask where and I want you to ask who and I want you to sit for a second I want you
To sit and listen I want you to write down what you think and if you think something and you think no that's crazy
I want you to write it down I'm going to pray for us as we do this God we know that your son has purchased a people
You've ransomed them from sin some of them are still held hostage we know God that you've bought people from every tribe and language
And nation God I pray that right now through your Holy Spirit you would lead Christians to write down names to write down places
To write down businesses to write down schools to write down friends to write down neighbors and neighborhoods to write down nations and peoples
That you might begin something today with one of your followers that there might be more followers of you I ask for you to
Speak I want you to take very seriously whatever the Lord led you to write down band's going to come back up here we're going to spend
Some time singing as we will one day do as brothers and sisters around the throne of our king and I pray for us
That God will forever keep us situated fully between the cross and the throne so that we'll never forget what matters I pray that he will sear in our
Minds this image of us as his people with his people before his throne so that we will forever have the courage and the boldness to have awkward conversations to fight
Through friendships that shouldn't have been friendships but we wouldn't go away to to go to places that no one in their right mind should go to carry a message that no one in their right mind can believe
Outside of the gracious power and presence of the king through his holy spirit redeeming and calling people to himself I pray that among our
Church there will be more church plants there will be more missionaries there will be those who are found worthy to bleed and sweat
And cry and die for the king I pray that there would be so many people who live their life as if a cross
To a throne to gather as many people as they possibly can to one day stand beside and with everything we have to declare
Salvation belongs to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb let's pray God I pray that you would give us courage
And boldness to accept your call that as we see what the end looks like we would be able to say yes to the
Mission now that you would use this church to take very seriously sin and the gospel that this would be a group of people
Who believe and know for a certainty that we have no worthiness outside of the lamb that you've ransomed us by your blood and
That you're going to bring all your people there we love you and we praise you in Jesus name amen
Grace and Superiority
Transcript
My name is Chet Phillips. I'm one of the pastors here. I'm excited to be back. My wife gave birth to a baby boy on March 17th. So his name is Archer O'Daniel Phillips.
It was going to be Archer Daniel Phillips, but he was born on St. Patrick's Day. So what are you going to do? And it's been interesting. This is our first kid, so I'm learning a lot. It's a weird responsibility having, like, now we have a son, and I've got to help him grow up and be a full-grown adult male.
And so there's a lot of weight there. I'm already trying to work with him on some stuff. So he, I was talking to him the other day. He's a baby, so he cries a lot. And he cries every time, like screams and cries every time he's gassy. And so I've been trying to tell him that's going to be weird if he doesn't outgrow that.
Because that's, like, an odd thing to walk through adult life with. So he's just, you know, I'm trying to coach him up and make sure that he gets ready for adulthood. But that's what's been going on in my life. It is Jonah. We're in Jonah chapter 4. And so we've been, for the past three weeks as a church family, been walking through one chapter a week in Jonah.
The book of Jonah, it's an Old Testament book, an Old Testament prophet. It's in middle-ish to a little bit to the right of the middle in your Bible. It's on page 503 if you have a Bible that looks like this. What we're going to do today is we're going to be in Jonah chapter 4, and we're finishing up this series before Easter next week. And so what we've said so far in Jonah, though, and what the story has been so far in Jonah is that it says that Jonah was a prophet, which means he spoke on behalf of God. And that God comes to Jonah and says, go to Nineveh, because their evil has come up before me, and proclaim against them, like preach against them.
And so, first of all, this is a little weird because Nineveh is a non-Israel, non-Juda city. It's not the people of God, and most of the time when there's a prophecy about a group of people that aren't Israelites, it's just about them. It's not to them. So it would have been more normal for God to say, hey, go tell Israel I'm going to destroy Nineveh. But it was weird for God to say, go tell Nineveh I'm going to destroy Nineveh, because most of the time God's prophecies through his prophets were to the nation of Israel.
And so Jonah gets the word of the Lord, hears what God says, and runs. It says he went to flee to Tarshish. So he tries to flee from the presence of the Lord, which we would think is dumb, because, you know, you would think that God would be able to catch you. Like, I don't know if he thought maybe at night God can't see as well. Maybe God will be paying attention to something else. I don't know how he thought this was a good idea, but he tries to flee from the presence of the Lord.
He gets on a boat, and God sends a storm, because God's in charge of everything, and that's very apparent in the book of Jonah. Jonah sends a storm and stops his boat. They figure out that Jonah is the reason there's a big storm, and they say, what should we do to you so that we don't all drown? And Jonah says, drown me. And so the people on the boat eventually, they don't want to at first, but eventually say, okay, God, don't be mad at us. You're the one who sent the storm, and they throw him in the water.
The storm stops, which is equally terrifying. So it's very obvious that God did want Jonah. And so all of the crew members switched teams, so they had other gods they were praying to, and they realized, oh, okay, this one's in charge of everything. So they begin to worship the real God. And then Jonah is drowning, and a fish swallows him. And so Jonah chapter 2 is Jonah praying from a fish.
And what we saw in chapter 1 is that God's willing to go further to chase us in our sin than we thought. That he's willing to chase after us more, that he's more in control than we thought, and he's willing to chase us more. And then in chapter 2, we look at this prayer of Jonah's, and it seems like Jonah kind of relies on himself more than on God. Like his prayer is kind of a religious prayer. And just so you know, if you're just hanging out with us, this isn't a religious place. Religion is basically the idea that do these things, don't do these things, and God will love you.
Like it's about the work that you put in. And that's not what Christianity is about. It's not about earning things from God. It's not about punching your ticket, and eventually you get enough hole punches, and then you make it to heaven. That's not how it works. The idea of what I do accomplishes something puts me, as Raz said the past couple weeks, in God's good books isn't true.
That's not how it works. And so Jonah, though, kind of seems like that's what he thinks it's about. It's about what he does. He even kind of promises. And he prays kind of like us, God, if you take this away, I just won't do this anymore. Or I'll do this in the future.
I'll be good from now on. If you'll just let this situation not work out. I won't date guys like this anymore. That kind of a prayer. Like he's praying about, I'm going to do this in the future. I'm going to be better.
And eventually, the fish spits him out. Jonah obeys. He goes to Nineveh. And he proclaims against Nineveh. He preaches against Nineveh. And his sermon is, you're all going to die.
That's a heck of a sermon. We're actually thinking about doing a series later this fall. This coming summer called the You're All Going to Die series. It's one week. The sermon is, you're all going to die. All right, now bow your heads and close your eyes.
That's his sermon. He goes and proclaims it to a city about the size of Boston. And he says, you're all going to die. And they repent. He doesn't even tell them that they should repent. He doesn't even give them like an option.
He just says, God's going to kill you. And they are all like, they genuinely repent. They genuinely are broken over their sinfulness. And they repent from king to cattle. Like they put sackcloth on cows. That's how genuine their repentance was.
The king declares, no one eats, not even the cows. And so if you're watching a cow, you put sackcloth on the cow. And if the cow tried to eat, you grabbed his face and you were like, no, you don't. You're an evil cow. You've been making evil milk for evil people. And you will not eat.
And the cow was like, you're right. And a little single tear ran down his face. I do have evil milk. And they all repented. There was genuine repentance, heartfelt repentance from king to cattle. Okay.
If Jonah, if the story of Jonah was the way I had always heard it, the way I had always seen it in cartoons. Some of you maybe grew up in church and you've heard the story of Jonah before. Some of you maybe didn't grow up in church and you just hear that the Bible has a story about a guy getting swallowed by a fish. And you're like, the Bible's nonsense. Okay. But some of you who grew up in church, you've heard the story of Jonah before.
You've seen the cartoon before. And here's how the story goes. God comes to Jonah and says, go to Nineveh. But Jonah's scared. He's scared. The Ninevites are evil.
They're twisted. They kill people. So Jonah runs. He's afraid of God's call on his life. So he runs.
As he runs, God chases him down. He gets swallowed by a fish. And he prays and he repents. And he says, God, I was wrong. I trust you. I see that you're in control of everything.
But if you can control a fish and you can control a storm, you can keep Ninevites from gouging my eyes out. I trust you. He repents. And then the fish spits him out. Because in the cartoons, the fish always spits him out. There's even like, if it's a drawing, it says like patui or whatever.
In the Bible, it vomits. But like, it doesn't write as well. So the fish spits him out. Jonah's genuinely repentant. And he goes to Nineveh. And he preaches to Nineveh.
Repent. And all of Nineveh repents. And then that's the end. And God's faithful. And we see how it all works out. And everybody's happy.
And that's the first three chapters of Jonah. If that's the way the story was, we wouldn't be doing chapter four today. There would be no chapter four. Chapter four would be, and Jonah and God jumped into the air, all slow-mo and high-fived. And everything turned technicolor. And it was like, yeah.
And then credits rolled. That would be, Jonah would be credits. Or maybe like catching up with Jonah in later life. Just letting us know how he worked out. Like, this is a terrible story if there's like the whole buildup and then the climax. And then it just contends for 25% more.
Like, that's just, that's terrible. Movies don't do that. Like, you don't resolve the conflict. And then, like at the end of Avengers, they sat and ate a meal. But that was like five seconds, just kind of seeing them eating a meal.
It doesn't make you last. Like, it's not 45 minutes of them eating. And just like hanging out and like Iron Man at his house working on his computer. Like, they don't do that because the conflict is resolved. So if the conflict was that Nineveh needed to repent, the story would be over.
But Jonah apparently is kind of like a Peter Jackson movie where you think it's going to end and then it doesn't. And we'll even find out that it's very much like a Peter Jackson movie because then it just ends when you think it shouldn't. Like, God says something and it's over. So Peter Jackson movie is like, oh, it's done. Oh, no, it's going to keep going. Oh, now we're done.
No, it's going to keep going. It's going to keep going. Oh, they walked over a hill. It's done. It should have kept going. What just happened?
The dragon just got out. How do you just end the movie now? Like, what are you doing? That's what Jonah does. And we're about to find out in chapter four that the story is a little bit different than we thought. So I'm going to pray and we're going to jump into chapter four and see what this is really all about.
God, we thank you. We thank you for your grace. We thank you that we have the opportunity to gather as a church family and study your word. And we ask that your Holy Spirit would teach us and lead us. Speak to us. And show us what you intended.
When you had your servant pen the book of Jonah. And it's been kept so that we can read it. And so we praise you and we love you. In Jesus' name. Amen. Jonah chapter four is on page 503 if your Bible looks like this.
We're going to read all of chapter four today and we're going to kind of wrap up the whole story. So, again, the conflict kind of seems resolved. We're going to pick up actually in, I know it says Jonah four, but we're going to pick up in the end of three. So that we can kind of see what happens here. The chapters were added later, so it would have just been written as a one big story. Chapters were added just for a quick reference to be helpful.
So verse 10, also added later. So this is chapter three, verse 10. When God saw what they did, and what they did was repent from king to cattle. Genuine, heartfelt, we were wrong. And we need grace, we need mercy from God. When he saw what they did, how they turned from their evil, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them.
And he did not do it. We should be very excited, first of all, that that's God's attitude. Should be very excited that when evil people turn to God and say, I'm wrong, and genuinely mean it, God doesn't say, sorry, too late, crush. But he wants to relent from disaster. He wants to not destroy people. He's not vengeful.
Okay, so God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them, and he did not do it. Chapter four, verse one. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. Okay. What? Like, if it was just that Jonah was scared, it should have been Jonah was stoked and skipped home.
Because everyone repented. Like, he's a terrible preacher, by the way. Like, this is a city about the size of Boston. If God came to a normal preacher and was like, hey, I want you to go preach against Boston. And the preacher showed up and said, like, one thing. And then from mare to dog park, they repent.
Like, mare to ferret. All of Boston per pence. Most preachers would have been like, man, that was a pretty good sermon. Like, the Lord showed up. This was great. Jonah's angry.
And what's a funny thing that happens in the Hebrew text here is that it says this. Verse 10. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil. So the word evil. God relented of the disaster. It's the same word.
Same root word. Almost exactly the same word. So evil and disaster, almost the same word. So they turned from their evil. God relented of his evil. His disaster that he was going to do.
That he said he would do to them. And he did not do it. And chapter 4 says, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly. That's the same word. So what it says is this was great evil to Jonah.
This was a disaster to Jonah. This could not have gone worse to Jonah. This was a train wreck. So we're learning something about Jonah. It couldn't have been fear because him not dying would have been like a win. What it says is they turn from their evil.
God turns from his evil, from his disaster. And this was evil to Jonah. It was a train wreck. And he's angry. Why? Why is Jonah angry that God's not going to destroy Nineveh?
Verse 2. And he prayed to the Lord. This is Jonah talking to God. 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. All right.
So the author of this story did not tell us why Jonah ran earlier. We could only presume that he was scared, afraid of the call that God had placed on him, maybe afraid of the Ninevites. But the author intentionally held it till now. He in night shamalam'd us. Shamalam'd. He in nighted us.
Because there's a twist on the end here. The story's taking a turn on us. Jonah's been dead for 10 years. Like it's that kind of thing. Like the story's about to turn. He hadn't actually been dead.
But it's that kind of twist on the end here. So, okay. Is this not what I said? So we're about to find out why Jonah actually left. For I knew. So he says, okay, let's start over.
This whole prayer is crazy to me. And he prayed to the Lord and said, Oh, Lord, is this not 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, relenting from disaster. What? His prayer is, oh, Lord.
I knew it. I told you this before I left. I knew it. We talked about this. This is why I ran. This is exactly why I ran.
This is what I told you. I told you you were good. Like his complaint about God is that he's good, that he's gracious. I told you you were gracious. I told you you were merciful. I told you you were abounding in steadfast love.
And I knew you'd do this. I knew you'd relent from disaster. I knew you were just getting my hopes up. You told me, Jonah, go tell him I'm going to kill all of them. And I knew I'd get here and you'd kill zero of them. I knew it.
I knew that as soon as I got here, they'd be all, oh, we're wrong. And you'd be like, you're right, and not kill them. Zero. Goose egg. That's how many Ninevites are going to die. You know how embarrassing and terrible this is.
His complaint to God is that he's gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love. Do you know what we just found out about Jonah? He's kind of a racist. He's overly nationalistic. Like, you should like your country and your people. But Jonah is so far ingrained in his nation and his people and his race that the Ninevites not dying is a disaster.
You see, Hosea and Amos at this time are proclaiming that Assyria is coming and Israel needs to repent. And the word of the Lord comes to Jonah and says, go to Assyria. That's where Nineveh is. One of their chief cities. And tell them to repent. Or I'm going to destroy them.
Tells them I'm going to destroy them. And Jonah doesn't want to go because he wants Assyrians to die. Jonah so cares about his nation, his people, and his race that he cannot, this cannot be good. Verse 3. Therefore, now, O Lord, please take my life from me. For it is better for me to die than to live.
Jonah says it's over. This could not have gone worse. Just kill me. This is such a train wreck. This is so terrible. Just kill me.
And the Lord said, do you do well to be angry? So God responds to Jonah and basically says, are you right? Here, is your response correct? And Jonah doesn't answer. So Jonah prays and says, God, I told you you were good.
I knew you would pull this. And then says, just kill me. Okay. That's kind of confusing. There's a little bit of me that says, okay, I want to understand a little bit more. This is part of the reason we've given Jonah such a hard time throughout.
Jonah 2 and 3, when it's like, well, he looks like he prayed and he repented. It's like, yeah, Jonah 4 kind of shows us where Jonah's heart is the whole time. So it's hard to be like, yeah, he genuinely repented. Oh, but also he's a racist. And he wanted God to kill them all. It seems more like what Rask talked about last week is that he religiously obeyed.
He did what he thought he had to do so that God would keep loving him. He could keep earning it. Okay, but this is a little bit confusing. Because you would think that Jonah said his message, that they repent, that Jonah should be excited. Or you're at least looking at this going, Jonah's just so off here. And let me try to help you see what he's doing.
And in order to do that, we're going to look at the one other place that Jonah shows up. But it's in 2 Kings, and we're going to show it on the screen so you don't need to flip there because it will be hard to flip there and then find it again and come back. But it's in 2 Kings. If I can find it in my notes, I'll read it from here. Yeah. Chapter 14, verse 25.
If you want to write that down so you can look it up later. It's talking about a king. So it starts with he. He refers to the king. He restored the border of Israel from Labo Hamath as far as the Sea of Ereba, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he, that's God, spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai. So it's the same Jonah, the prophet who was from Gath Heifer, which, by the way, Gath Heifer sounds like a lovely town.
Okay, so what we hear about Jonah here is that he's a servant and a prophet, and he speaks on behalf of God. This is a perfectly normal sentence structure, that this happened according to the word of the Lord, that he spoke by his servant and prophet Jonah. That's a normal thing. The Bible says that all the time. What did Jonah prophesy this time? That it seems like there's no conflict about.
What did he prophesy? Something good for Israel. I bet when this one came in, Jonah was ecstatic. God says, I'm going to restore this border. I'm just assuming that Jonah was like, yep, I can do that one. Sounds good.
Hey, everybody. We've got good news for you. And he gets to go tell the king. I'm assuming that if God had come to him and said, tell Israel, I'm going to destroy Nineveh, Jonah would have been very excited and run out to Israel and said, guess what God just told me? He's going to kill the Assyrians. It was when God came in and said, go to Nineveh and tell them that Jonah runs.
And here's why. And here's why we can see someone like Jonah who has it together in so many ways. Throughout the book of Jonah, he is spot on with his theology. His complaint about God is very, very true. It's a beautiful complaint. It's the best way to argue, by the way.
You get in an argument with your wife, be like, I knew it. I knew you were so pretty and nice. I knew that this would happen, that you would just be kind and thoughtful. Like, it's a great way to argue because then it's like, you're mad, but I, okay, like, good. I knew that you smelled good the whole time. So Jonah's complaint about God is spot on.
He's gracious and merciful. He's practically quoting what God shows up and says to Moses in Exodus when he describes who he is. And so Jonah says, I knew this about you. Jonah, when they confront him on the ship, he says, I worship the God, the creator of the land and the dry land and the sea. He knows things about him. When he prays, he has spot on theology.
Jonah knows stuff about God. He's willing to obey. We see that in chapter three. Here, he's a legit normal prophet. What's happened? See, Jonah's way more like us than we'd care to imagine.
Like, I actually, when I start seeing this in Jonah, I start seeing myself and I can kind of get on board with him. That's why he's such a confusing character because he's like you. He's like me. He's a person. All the characters in the Bible are pretty confusing except for Jesus. And he's terribly confusing because he's just good the whole time.
The rest of the characters kind of have it together, don't have it together because it's real stories about real people. There are certain things that you just crush. And there are other things you're terrible at and you run from God over. And that's what Jonah does. See, Jonah has this one area where if God messes with that, it's not okay for him to mess with. Because Jonah is doing what all of us do.
He's looking to something and saying, you make me have value. He has a system in his head that says these are good people. Those are bad people. This is how the world works. So there are certain parts of his interaction with God that perfectly line up with him.
There are certain things you should read in the Bible. There are times I'm reading the Bible and I'm just like, God, you are so smart. Like with your wisdom, you are crushing it right now with this stuff. This is brilliant. And there are other things I read in the Bible and I'm like, I kind of wish this wasn't in here. If I'm honest, if the Bible always agrees with you, by the way, you're probably reading it wrong.
For the record, you're making it fit you as opposed to it making you fit it. But here's what Jonah's doing. He has something in his head. He knows that he's a Hebrew. What do we know about Jonah? He's Hebrew.
He's from the northern kingdom of Israel and he's a prophet. And it seems like all of those are messed with by being sent to Nineveh. He has to leave his hometown. He has to go say good things possibly for people that aren't Israelites. And they're bad people. Israelites are good people.
Hebrews are good people. Everyone else is bad. They don't know the real God. They're bad. If being a Hebrew makes you good, being anybody else makes you bad. It has to.
It has to make them bad or Jonah can't be good. Does that make sense? That's why people who are racist, which by the way is one of the easiest ways to be superior to other people. What I mean by easiest is you don't have to do anything. Like if you think that white people are superior, like if my family thought white people were superior, that would be really nice for me because I was just born white. I didn't have to accomplish that.
That's why people like racism and nationalism. They didn't have to accomplish anything. They just had to be from their place and speak their language. Does that make sense? Like you don't have to do any work. That's what Jonah is doing.
He's Hebrew. And if Hebrews, what makes you good than being anything else has to make you bad or being a Hebrew doesn't make you good. That's why he has to put them down. He has to crush them. They have to be bad. They have to be wrong.
He has to leave and go talk to them. And something good has to happen for people that are bad. And it's messing with Jonah's brain. And what he declared was going to happen doesn't happen, which messes with his status as a prophet. Because the Old Testament says whatever a prophet says will come true. And if it doesn't come true, then he's not a prophet.
So everything that he's been basing his existence off of is taken from him. And now it makes a little bit of sense that he tells God, just kill me. You see, all of us have something that we're looking to and saying, you make me okay. You make me good. You're what makes me valuable in the world. One of the things I've consistently leaned into is hard work.
Because I'm good at that. I can do hard work. I started working when I was 13 for my dad's businesses. I've been working. And that's when I played football. I wasn't really fast or really strong.
When I went to college, our first football coach just wanted people who were mean and tried hard. So I fit in well. Then he left. And our next coach wanted guys who were good at football. And I was suddenly terrible. Because he wanted us to be like fast and accomplish things.
The other coach just wanted us to show up and try to hurt people. And I was like, I can do that. I may not hurt them. I can try. But I lean into hard work.
And so what that means is that people who are lazy, when I look at guys who don't want any responsibility, who don't want to work, who can't show up on time for things, who have no desire to take on any responsibility, I need them to be wrong. I need you to see that they're wrong so that you can see that I'm right. I need them to be bad so that you'll know that I'm good and so that I'll know that I'm good. And we do this with anything. You can do this with parenting. If what you use to give yourself worth and value is your children, then you have zero tolerance for bad parents.
Because you're looking at your kids and saying, if you work out, then I'm okay. If this works out, if you're good, if everything's happy, if I'm a good mom, then I know I have value. If I'm a good dad, if I've just been a good father, I know this will work out. And then when you see a parent that isn't living up to the standard, you need other people to see them fail. You need to see them fail. And they have to be wrong.
And they have to be bad so that you can be good. Grades. Athletic ability. Open-mindedness. Tolerance. That's my favorite one because it's sneaky.
So some of you are saying, I don't do that. I think everybody's welcomed in. I think everybody's okay. Yeah. Except for bigots and closed-minded people. Intolerant people have to be wrong for tolerance to be right.
So you have zero tolerance for intolerant people. And they don't deserve tolerance because they're intolerant. So they're not in the club. Does that make sense? Do you see how we do this with everything? And so Jonah's world is getting rocked because what he's using is his grading scale for what makes him good and valuable and worthwhile is taken from him.
God's messing with it. And that's where that shows up in us, too, because there are certain things that God is not allowed to mess with you about. There are certain things he just can't touch. You'll follow him fine. Jonah followed him fine when it was saying good things about Israel. When it was give Nineveh a chance, Jonah ran.
There's some things that you just crush. Maybe you just serve. Anytime there's anything that takes up your time, you're there. You'll sign up. You'll show up early. You'll leave late.
You serve. You're gifted there. You love that. And when God says, hey, I also want you to surrender your finances to me. No. No, no.
Can't do it. I have no obedience there. Some of us are the opposite. Man, you give. When you hear a need, your wallet magically appears in your hand. You ever met that kind of person?
Like, I thought I heard a need. Here's 20 bucks. Like, I just, I drop hints around those kind of people. Man, I sure could use 20 bucks. Like, those kind of people. But then when it comes time to give up time, ah, I'm just so busy.
I have no time for that. Some people crush both of those areas. And then it comes to relationships. You start looking at scripture where it says that your relationship doesn't honor God, isn't where it needs to be. And suddenly God can't mess with you there. We have something that gives us value.
And if it's our boyfriend, if it's our girlfriend, if it's knowing that we're loved, and God shows up and says, this doesn't honor me. You don't need to be sleeping together. You don't need to be living together. You need to stop this. And we say no. What we've realized is that something has taken the place of God and something is giving us our value that's not him.
And that can be finances. That can be work. That can be success. Some of you could care less about being a good dad. Some of you had dads who could care less about being a good dad. Because what they were using to give themselves worth and value was punching the clock and making a name for themselves and being successful.
And they looked down on dads who, you're going to take time off to spend with your kids? Do you not understand what makes us valuable in this world? And so God starts messing with what it is that Jonah has built around himself to know that he's a good person and it's a train wreck. And here's why. Jonah's religious. This is why Jesus butted heads with the Pharisees so much.
Because the Pharisees knew everything and obeyed really well. But that had to be what made them good. Knowing stuff and obeying. So whenever Jesus hung out with sinners, they couldn't have that. Because they can't be welcomed in because they're wrong and they're bad and if they're welcomed in, our position's gone. And so Jonah's looking at God and saying, you can't relent on Nineveh because if they're not wrong and they're not bad, my position's gone.
And so when that's taken from him, he says, just kill me. That's why people jump out of windows when the stock market crashes. Because what they've built their life on just disappeared. Their identity went with it. That's why some of you had a career-ending injury. And suddenly, if I'm not a soccer player, if I'm not a baseball player, if I'm not a football player, I don't know who I am anymore.
You had something that was good, but your identity left with it. Some of you had a relationship that fell apart and you didn't know who you were anymore. And not only were you sad, normal sad, you just didn't want to live. Because what you've been using to give yourself worth and value and fulfillment was taken from you. So Jonah says, just kill me.
Because we all have something that makes people good and something that makes people bad. That's all politics is. Democrats, conservatives have to be block-headed, close-minded, bigoted, backwards, gun-toting psychos. Have to be. They have to be wrong so that we can be okay, so that we can be right. So we can be what's right with the world.
Conservatives, liberals have to be fluffy-headed, open-minded, nonsense, family-hating, constitution destroyers. For us to be okay. They have to be. Obama has to be from another country. Has to be. For us to be okay.
Do you see how that works? One of the reasons we constantly, people are like, why can't we all get along? Self-righteousness. Why can't we all just tolerate each other? Self-righteousness. That's why intolerant people can't tolerate bigoted people.
Because we're all building something up to make ourselves good and okay and self-righteous and self-saved and self-sovereign. And that's Jonah's problem. So here's the thing. That's our problem. I fit with Jonah. I see this.
So how does God respond to Jonah? And what we're going to see is this really crazy, divine, God-ordained object lesson where God bends to teach Jonah something. So all of Nineveh repents. The story should have ended. But Jonah has a fit.
And then God bends. He says, do you do well to be angry? Verse 5. Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself. A booth is just like a three-sided tent that Israelites knew how to make ever since Moses' time. They actually had a feast of booths where they all made booths so Jonah knew it was up.
He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city. So he prays and thinks, okay, maybe God will stop being gracious, which is evil to me. Maybe God will relent from this disaster, go back to his original disaster, and destroy everybody. And I want to see the fireworks, so I'm going to go sit on this side of the hill and just hope, fingers crossed, everyone dies. I'm looking at you, cattle. Take the sackcloth off.
So that's what Jonah's doing. He's waiting to see what will happen. Now the Lord God, this is verse 6, appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah that it might be shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. All right, so he's got a little bit of, he's manic and depressed, like he's going back and forth here.
He's super pumped about this plant. And it's really cool because God shows that he's in charge of a storm. He shows that he's in charge of a fish, and now he's appointing a plant. So like God just appoints things, does what he wants. So I walk out in my backyard, and I'm like, I wonder which trees were appointed and which of them just grew.
But like he just does, he just tells everything to do what he wants. And so he appoints this plant. And it seems like Jonah knows that God did this on purpose because he builds a booth, and then overnight a plant just grows up. And so Jonah's very happy about the plant, probably feels like, okay, God's comforting me. God's showing me some honor. Maybe I'm okay.
Maybe I'm in a decent spot. Maybe he still does just love Israelites. That's what it seems like. But he seems like he's more excited about the plant than God. Seven, but when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm, again, in control of everything, that attacked the plant so that it withered. I love that part of the story because the worm wasn't sent to eat the plant.
He was sent to attack it. So God appoints the worm, and it's not, hey, go eat the plant. It's go destroy the plant. That plant must die. And so there's this worm sent on a mission from God, which is just really cool to me that God would do this with a worm, that he's bending this much, that he's kneeled and stooped this much that he would tell a worm to go attack it. And so the worm waits till dawn because that's the best time to attack a plant.
And so the worm's waiting, and he's like, hold, hold now. Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's just the way I see it, and he attacks the plant. This plant must die. Worm crushed it, did his job.
Worm attacked the plant so that it withered. That worm nailed it. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah. Which, if God's in control of the weather like this, I sometimes wonder what he's doing with South Carolina. Just 80, 40, whatever. It's better for me.
Sorry, okay. Some 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. So this is the second time Jonah does this. So God sends a plant, and then he sends a worm to destroy the plant, which is just God teaching Jonah, bending over.
He's stooping to interact with Jonah personally. So we see that he cares about this whole city. We see that he's in charge of storms and weather, and then he just bends to deal with Jonah. And so he's giving him an object lesson. And so he has this plant grow up, and then he has a worm attack it, and then it dies. And then Jonah says, just kill me.
Because God's sending a scorching wind. It's dried out. He's cooking him. And now he feels like, okay, God's picking on me. He's messing with me. He's taking away my honor, my privilege.
He's teaching me that Jews aren't the best. It's kind of what Jonah, I think he's feeling here because we know that what he's based his life off of, what he thinks makes you okay, is to be an Israelite. He says, it's better for me to die than to live. But 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. Crushing it with logic, Jonah.
You ever do that, just shout something in an argument that you know no longer makes sense, but you're so entrenched in your point? That's what Jonah's doing here. Yes! I love the plant. You don't know anything about the plant. Just kill me.
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? Okay, most scholars believe that means children. Don't know their left and right yet. So it could mean a bunch of people who don't know anything.
So 120,000, they know nothing. They're completely backwards. But most scholars believe that he's referring to there's 120,000 children there. Don't even know they're left from their right yet. Which means that it's about 600,000 to a million point two in the city is what people guess, which would be about the size of Boston. 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle.
The end. Best ending line in the book in the Bible. It's my favorite. He ends with and also much cattle. Question Mark. It's over.
Okay. Jonah runs from God. God prays a kind of piousy prayer in a fish. Gets vomited up. Obeys. And then throws a fit.
And tells God three times, just kill me. And God's response to Jonah is to just teach him and talk to him. And that is so encouraging. Because if I was God and I had a guy consistently yelling at me and telling me, just kill me. I think at some point, God, I would just be like, fine. Like, yeah, I can do that pretty easily.
Do you really want a piece of me? And God's response to Jonah is, you're confused. You're off here. Do you not see that you're wrong? And he just tries to teach him. And what he shows Jonah is the stuff you care about is so fragile.
The stuff you're basing your life on, the stuff that you're using to give yourself comfort and worth and value, is so fragile and easily taken that it can show up in the night and it can be taken in the night and a worm can destroy it. And I just want us all to hear that. The stuff that we're looking to, and some of you know this, you painfully know this, because you've had it snatched from you. And some of us in this room haven't had it snatched yet, but it can be gone in the night. What we're looking to, to give ourselves worth and value and to know that we're good and other people are bad can be easily taken from us.
And it's not worth building your life on. You see, Jonah, when he looks at God and says, I knew you were gracious. I knew you were good. I knew you relented from disaster. I knew you were abounding in steadfast love. What he's doing is he's the kid who raises his hand and says, you forgot to take up the homework.
The only kid who raises his hand and does that is a kid who's done his homework. It's the only time you raise your hand and do that. You're never in the back of the class being like, didn't do my homework, didn't do my homework, bell ring, didn't do my homework, didn't do my homework. You know what, I need to be honest. You didn't take up the homework. You don't do that.
It's the kid who's back there going, I spent 30 minutes on this. I have nice handwriting. I assume most kids who do homework have a nice handwriting. I checked the back of the book. I knew I was right. But I didn't check the back of the book until I had done all of them.
Looking at you, Carl. Like, that's the kid who raises his hand and says, take up the homework. That's the kid who does that. And so when Jonah looks at God and says, I knew you were gracious. I knew you were merciful. I knew you abounded in steadfast love.
What he is saying, even if he doesn't realize it, is I don't need those things. That's a character flaw in you. See, if Jonah knew he needed grace and mercy and steadfast love, he would not be mad about it. What Jonah is yelling at God is, I'm one of the good ones. Take up the homework. You'll see I did just fine.
Jonah wants God to take everybody to task because Jonah thinks he's arrived. And Jonah wants God to take everybody to task because he needs God to see that he's arrived and other people haven't. But when we realize that we need grace, then we want it for everybody. When we realize that we need mercy, then we want it for everybody. When I didn't do my homework, I want everybody to not have to turn their homework in. I want the teacher to say, you know what?
I'm not taking up homework today. Best teacher ever. I want the kid who did his homework. You don't have to turn it in. It's fine. You did it.
Whatever. Everybody got points. That's okay. I think she gave points to everybody. You got your points. But that kid doesn't want everybody to get points.
He wants himself to get points and you not to get points. Does that make sense? So when Jonah says, you're gracious, that's a problem, he's saying, I'm good, you should know. And he's missed the point. As we see this bigger story unfold of how God interacts with humanity, and it's such a baffling picture that the God of the universe would send a little plant and a little worm to teach a little man. Does that make sense?
Like this just seems so small. What we see is that he's actually willing to stoop further. That God would actually come to earth. That he wouldn't just send a begrudging prophet to say a message. That he would actually send his son to pay a debt. That Jesus came because God was willing to stoop way further and be way more gracious than we see in the book of Jonah.
That he actually died for our debt. The Bible is very clear. There are not good people and bad people. There are bad people and Jesus. It is not us and them. It is us and him.
That's it. And all of the things that we've put on our resume mean nothing. We all need grace and we all need mercy. Now here's the thing. We don't know how Jonah responds. It just ends.
The end of the book of Jonah is and much cattle. God's saying, Jonah, the cows repented, man. I just can't kill a cattle with sackcloth on. I'm just not going to do it. But the end of the book of Jonah is and much cattle.
And do you want to know why? We are all given the opportunity to respond the way we wish Jonah would. Every person in this room, you're given the opportunity because God has actually stooped further. In the book of Psalms, it's a prophecy about Jesus and it says, I'm a worm and not a man. And it's talking about him dying on the cross. It's a prophecy about the death on the cross.
And he says, I'm a worm and not a man. I have my life taken from me. And you see, God sends a worm to teach Jonah a lesson and he became a worm to rescue us. He took on sin and death and paid our penalty so that we can have life and joy and hope. That we can be set free and all of us have the opportunity to respond the way we wish Jonah would. Turn in your resume.
Tear up your homework. Put your hand down. And be thankful for grace. That Jesus was good on our behalf. And he took all of our bad stuff, put it on himself and died for it. So that we can be free.
We wish Jonah would see his sin and realize that he needed grace too. That's what he's missed. That his thing that he's looking to say, this makes me a good person. The stuff that you're looking at and saying, this makes me a good person. And God is asking you to throw that away. To realize that it doesn't.
To realize that you're all bad. All in need. All in need of grace. And run to him. And trust in Jesus to be a good person on your behalf. That's the invitation.
And that's the response we get to have. And when that happens, we want grace for everybody. When that happens, something changes in us. To where we want everybody to be invited in. And we realize that all the stuff we fall short. All the stuff that we mess up.
Just points to how good and gracious God is. So David, Matt, and Raz are going to come back up. We're going to sing and praise Jesus. Jesus, you get the opportunity. Let me be very clear. The story of Jonah ended very abruptly.
Don't let yours end like that. Don't let the story today end for you with God asking you a question. Are you going to hang this stuff up? Are you going to quit trusting in yourself and you not respond? Some of you will let it be that. And you'll just leave and there will be no response.
But we have the opportunity to respond the way we wish Jonah would have. To see our sin. To see all of the stuff we've piled up. To say, God, take up the homework. This is what makes me good. And to realize that all of us fall short.
All of us need grace. All of us miss the point. And all of us get invited in by Jesus. Who stooped way, way lower for us than God did for Jonah. And to be radically changed by that. To have that sink into our hearts so much that we can't.
Not love him. Can't not lean into grace. And can't not want it for everybody else. God, we pray. That your Holy Spirit would lead us. That you would help us clearly see what it is that we're leaning into.
To give ourselves worth. And to give ourselves value. What we're using to say, God, you can take up the homework. Because I'll be okay. God, you can weigh everybody out now. You can check everybody out now.
Because you'll see that I've accomplished something. God, I pray that you'd help us to see. What it is that we're using to give ourselves value. That can be so easily taken from us. That can in a night be gone. God, help us see the things that we wouldn't feel like we deserved life.
Or needed life. Or had life. Or an identity or self anymore. If it was taken from us. And God, help us to see so clearly the cross. That sets us free from all of that.
Jesus who came to die on our behalf. Lord, help us to repent as Jonah should have repented. Help us to see our sin as Jonah should have seen his sin. Should have seen how his religion. And his obedience. And his knowledge was getting in his way.
From knowing you. And being close to your heart. So that he could celebrate when you celebrate it. And God, help us to be so in love with grace. That we want it for everybody. We ask all this in Jesus' name.
Amen.
A Prayer from the Deep
Transcript
We're in week two of Jonah, and this week is going to be especially puzzling for us because we come up against an aspect of God's character that most of us have heard of before but never really get, most of us don't truly believe in our souls. We're going to come up against this aspect of God's character: his deliverance does not depend on our excellence or our behavior. Now when I use the word deliverance, I'm not talking about delivery as in delivering a baby, although pretty much everyone has that on their mind at the moment. I'm not talking about delivery as in two-day free shipping for Amazon Prime members, which is always on my mind. I'm talking about the kind of deliverance that's more like a rescue against all odds, something that no one expects to happen, something that seems to defy logic.
Like when your wife, trying to be sweet and nice, says to you, "Let's watch a movie together, a romantic movie," and you go, "No." Then she entices you, she makes it sweet, there's popcorn involved and hot chocolate involved, and you know that the night is going to be horrible anyway. You're looking forward to hot chocolate, but not a romantic movie. And then it comes on, and you know what? It's kind of cute. The movie wasn't so bad. It kind of, you know, that movie delivered against all odds.
But beyond that, we're talking about deliverance where the God of the universe, creator of the heavens, creator of the seas, the dry land, creator of land animals, sea animals, birds in the air, insects... I don't know why he did that... the creator of man says to one specific man, "I want you to do something for me." And that man says, "Nope." Then God sends a giant fish, of all things, a giant fish, and says, "I'm going to make you do what I told you to do." And the giant fish scoops him up, travels I don't know how far, and spits him out and says, "Get on your way." We're talking about that kind of against-all-odds deliverance, something that should never, ever have happened, that blows our minds, that doesn't seem to make sense in any way. And we're going to learn that when God does deliver, it's not based off of anything that we do, but purely on his grace.
Now, we typically oppose that notion. We don't really believe it. We think that on some level, in some capacity, I can do something that contributes to this transaction. Most of us on some level still think that if I just do something, if I just be good, that will contribute something to this scenario. And even people who don't believe in God say, "If God did exist, surely good people would be blessed and bad people would not." This whole human transactional understanding that we have of what's fair and what's not fair is that good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things. It's kind of just ingrained in us.
But today's passage is tough because Jonah is a guy who knows a lot of the Sunday school answers. Obviously his parents sent him to kids' church, and he learned it from a very young age. He knows how to say good things about God. But then when it comes down to doing them, when it comes to getting out there and doing what he's told, he bails and does the exact opposite. It's tough because Jonah's the guy, he's a prophet of God, he's supposed to be the one who knows what to do and does what God says, and then abandons that. So what happens? What happens when someone says one thing and does the opposite? What happens when someone knows what they're supposed to do and chooses not to do that? Does God still deliver people like this? Will he only rescue the people who actually deserve it, who do things to earn things from God? And what happens to someone who thinks they have it all right, thinks that they're doing the right things, thinks that they know things about God and that that will save them, but actually do the wrong thing? And could that be me? Could I be that person?
Go ahead and open your Bibles to Jonah chapter 2. If you have a Bible that looks like this, it's on page 502. If you have a different Bible, then it's right between Obadiah and Micah. You're welcome. Somewhere in the middle you'll find it. Jonah chapter 2. We're going to read the whole thing up front. We're going to make observations about it, so leave your finger in there. We're not going to do the thing where you read a passage, talk about it, read a passage, talk about it. We're just going to read the whole thing up front, so keep your finger in there. Basically, the whole time, it's Jonah praying, and that's why we would do this up-front thing. The whole time is Jonah's prayer. And what's interesting about reading other people's prayers is it gives you an insight into how they think. It gives you an insight into how they relate to God themselves, how they see themselves before God, and how they think God relates to them. And we're going to see that in Jonah chapter 2.
Father God, we praise you and we thank you for this morning. And we pray that you can reveal things to us from your word. And we pray that, most of all, we will grow in our love for you and not depend on ourselves to be saved. We know that we will come up short if that is the case, and we praise and thank you that that is not. Please be moving in our hearts this morning that we may learn from your word and put it into action in our weeks. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, we're going to read the whole chapter up front. But we're going to start in the last verse of chapter 1. So chapter 1:17.
> 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.
> 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 closed 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,
> 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 Jonah out upon the dry land. (Jonah 1:17-2:10 ESV)
So Jonah got thrown into the ocean by the sailors in chapter 1. He got swallowed by a giant fish, and while he was living inside that fish for three days, this was the prayer that he prayed.
Now let's keep one thing in mind: Jonah got here by disobeying God. This wasn't just like a random thing that he decided to do. Jonah got here by disobeying God. He was told to go to Nineveh, and instead he planned to go to Tarshish. He was told, head east, but he headed west. The dude is now trapped inside a giant fish.
Most times when we think about this, and in fact most times when it's illustrated, when it's in a cartoon, maybe in a Bible story sermon series, it gets cartoonified. It gets made nice. There's theme music, like, trouble. And so the life of Jonah is summarized in disobedience, swallowed by a fish, delivered out on land, on your merry way. Let's time out and go back to the living-inside-a-fish thing for just one moment, because it intrigues me.
I've smelled a fish before from the outside. It wasn't very nice. It was okay. And then you put a knife in it, and you slide it open, and the guts fall out, which is gross. I know that. I'm sorry. But that doesn't smell any better. Jonah was inside those guts for three days. I have been on a boat before. I've felt this thing that I thought was imaginary called seasickness. Boats rock. I guess submarines would be even worse. They would go underwater and move around a good bit. Jonah's inside a fish. Those things wiggle, and then they jump, and then they dive down, and then they go up. And he's inside the thing, like floating, presumably in fish guts and water and nastiness. I assume he probably got seasick. I would. He probably vomited, and then it splashed back up on his face when the fish went down. Jonah was from the Middle East. He probably had a giant beard. He got fish guts in that beard. They don't come out real quick. I have a little itty-bitty mustache, and I get smells stuck in that, and it's right under your nose. Jonah was inside a fish with little fish-gut smells inside his nose. It cannot have been nice.
And what's worse is, I assume there's no light in there. I don't know if you've ever been in pitch black before. I have. It's terrifying. If you go down this hallway that way, the guys' bathroom lights are on a motion sensor. Do you know how stupid crazy that is? When you go to the restroom in the morning and the lights time out and you're stuck in pitch black in a restroom in a foreign school, you will never be more thankful for your iPhone in a moment like this. Jonah does not have an iPhone. He's feeling sick. He's inside a fish. But thankfully, this is the time when he chooses to pray.
Now, I know that's what I can be like sometimes. I wait until the final moment. I wait until life gets really tough. Maybe not that tough. But I wait until life gets tough, and that's the moment that I choose to pray. It's almost like when things are going good, things are going well, life, you're feeling healthy, you've got enough money to get through this week, you're feeling okay, there's not really any need to pray. And then as soon as you get chopped off at the knees, suddenly you're sick and you've got no money because you spent it all on medicine. Suddenly, now it's time to pray. And we've got a little bit of this urgency in times of need like that.
Now, in this whole story, the first time we hear of Jonah calling out to God is once he's been thrown off the boat. This is a time when he needs something to rely on. I don't know if they have this saying in America. I kind of grew up with it, at least in the church. Someone coined the question way back in the day: is Jesus your steering wheel or your spare tire? Do you turn to Jesus when you've got a flat on the interstate? Does he only ever come out when life is tough in the moment, and then as soon as the problem's fixed he gets put back in his little spot in the back? Or, alternatively, is Jesus your steering wheel, the one who guides the path at all times, gets you from A to B, completely relied upon for direction?
Now, it might be old, I don't know, that might be the first time you've heard it, but it's a valid illustration of what's going on in this situation. And you could say that, given that he hasn't prayed up until this point, he's left it until the very last of minutes. The time came for prayer earlier, and he didn't until he was drowning in the ocean. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with calling out to God in times of need. In fact, definitely call out to God in times of need. I say that, I do that, the Bible says that. The question is in motivation and attitude in the whole situation. What's going on in the thought processes, and what drives you to pray in that situation?
We have a guy here who's done a serious wrong by God, that God's chosen to rescue anyway, at least physically in this moment, at this point in time, and regardless of his disobedience. You might expect this to be the time when Jonah starts to repent. That is, he acknowledges his own sin and apologizes for it, feels broken about it, and says, "God, forgive me." You might expect this to be a time when he realizes how disobedient he is.
And on the surface, when you read through this passage, there's a bunch of things that look really good that he says. A number of really good things. In verse 2 he says, "I called to the Lord." Good. You should do that. In verse 4, "I will look upon your holy temple." Good. In verse 6, "You brought my life up from the pit." True. In verse 7, "I remembered the Lord." You should do that. Remembering God is good. Verse 9, "I will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord." Good. Good. It sounds like Jonah's on the right track, at least that he's starting to get it.
But actually, what we see of Jonah's character up until this point, and spoiler alert, in the future as well, is that he has a very self-centered understanding of his faith. He has a very self-centered attitude toward how he relates to God. He thinks that things he can do are what govern his relationship with God. We actually find in this prayer the inner workings of a man who is so self-centered that he ignores his own sin the whole time. He believes that he deserves to be rescued. Now, whether he thinks he's entitled to it because of his position as a prophet, some people probably would feel that. Maybe he feels that he's entitled to it because of his heritage as a Jew. Most likely, he thinks he's entitled to it because of what he does. This prayer is all about Jonah because he thinks he's earned something.
Now, there's a difference between these two kinds of prayers. One kind of prayer focuses on self and the other focuses on God. A prayer that focuses on God, a legitimate, authentic, heart-changed prayer, would sound like this: God, please have mercy on me. I'm busted. I'm broken. I'm sinful. I can't do anything right. Please save me from me. Jonah's prayer, not so much like this.
Now, maybe I'm throwing you under the bus and lumping you in with my own sin here. We typically pray in a way that treats God like an exchange program. We typically pray in a way that says, "God, if you'll just give me this, then I'll give you that. God, if you'll just deal with this, then I'll stop doing that. God, if you get me out of debt, I'll stop using credit cards. God, if you help me get healthy right now, if I feel healthier by the end of the day, I swear I'm going to quit smoking. God, if you just get me a girlfriend, I promise I will stop playing video games until next week." And we treat the whole situation like it's a cosmic exchange program, like we have something to offer God. That's kind of how Jonah does it.
Let's read some of the things that Jonah says. He doesn't start with, "God, you rescued me, I'm a sinner." He starts with, "I called out to the Lord and he answered me. I cried out and you heard my prayer." I initiated this relationship. It's my turn to speak, and I've done something to earn your attention right now. Then in verse 3, when he should be recalling all the things that God has done for him, instead what he says is, "You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas and the floods surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me." You put me here. This is your fault.
What Jonah's already forgotten can't have been more than a day later. What Jonah's already forgotten is that he put himself here. He was thrown into the ocean by the sailors who came to him and said, "What do we do?" And Jonah said, "Throw me overboard." Jonah disobeyed God, ended up on a boat where the sailors thought they were all going to die, ended up throwing Jonah overboard, and now he's saying, "God, you put me here."
Then toward the end of his prayer, right down at the end, in verse 8, he says, "Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love." Here's one of those cases where that is a true statement. Those who have idol issues, have idolatry problems, they do forsake the hope of steadfast love. But what Jonah does is he puts these people over here and separates himself from them. Jonah doesn't see himself as one of those people. He's talking about the pagans, the sailors, the guys who were on the boat who threw him over. He says those who pay regard to idols do not have your steadfast love. What he doesn't realize is he's a part of that group, and actually the sailors are less a part of that group because they renounced their idols, they feared God, and they made sacrifices to him. It's a true statement, but he doesn't understand what he's saying.
And then he says, "I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed, I will pay." Basically he's saying, I'm not like them. I have it right. And for the record, in the rest of the book of Jonah, there is no evidence that Jonah ever makes good on any of these vows. He never makes sacrifices, he never vows anything or comes through with any of this stuff. He might sometime in the future after the book ends. We don't know. But what we have here is a bunch of empty vows, empty promises. So while on the surface it looks like he's saying a bunch of good things, we actually have a guy who doesn't really believe the things that he says.
What Jonah doesn't see is that he's blinded to his own sin. What he doesn't see is that he doesn't think he's busted, broken, and disobedient. He thinks he deserves salvation. And even in his last-minute prayers to God, his emphasis is on himself, what he's done to earn that favor in the first place. And it's almost this half-hearted, last-minute, inside-the-belly-of-a-fish prayer to, yep, thanks for that.
Now, I know it sounds like a kind of a downer that we can be like that as well, that we think of this as a cosmic exchange program where we give him this and he gives us that, and it can sound bad to us that we can't do anything. It sounds really horrible that we have no power in this. But actually, if you see it in perspective, it's a massive relief. Because if God was a cosmic accountant and he had a list, a balance sheet of all your credit and all your debt, all your pros and your cons, all your good and your bad, your bad would be through the bottom. And you might be able to chalk up some good things, but you could never possibly tip that balance to the good-person status that we assume exists but doesn't. It's actually good news because we don't have a God that weighs us in the balance like this with a good and a bad list. We have a God who sets the list aside and loves us regardless. It means that we don't have to try to get more good than we do bad.
Now at the end of the prayer, the very last line of his prayer, he says, "Salvation belongs to the Lord," which is again a great statement of faith. You can't deny that he knows some good things. But what's interesting is this is a person reciting a textbook answer that doesn't understand what that means. It's like he studied for the exam but didn't understand the content.
Now, if you've passed high school, you're probably familiar with this concept of studying for exams but having no idea what's going on in that class. At least in Australia that was the case for most of us. For example, I took trigonometry. I can tell you the cosine rule. I'm pretty proud of it. A squared equals B squared plus C squared minus 2BC cos A. You impressed? Yeah. I even know the song. That's how I remember it. A squared equals B squared plus C squared minus 2BC cos A. And then you clap. A squared equals B squared plus C squared minus 2BC cos A. People in exams would clap in Australia. It was crazy. Thing is, I know it's to do with triangles. Something to do with sides. Cos means an angle. I know that. I have no idea how to use that. I may know the formula, but I still can't pass the exam. And it's the same thing that's going on with Jonah. He studied the formula but failed the exam. He knows things about God, but doesn't understand how that impacts life.
Now I reckon at this point in time God is pretty disappointed with Jonah. After the whole running-away thing, I can't imagine that he's in the good books, even though Jonah for some reason thinks he is. And I like to imagine the whole scenario. If Jonah's thoughts were right and God did like him, maybe it would be different.
We've established that being inside a fish is a gross way to do things. So if Jonah was in God's good books and God wanted to rescue him in a nice way, perhaps it would have looked differently. Perhaps it would have been he parts the sea and Jonah gets to walk back. That could have been nicer. Perhaps it could have been he's just back on land. But the funniest thing, and the best thing to me in this whole story, is that that's not how it happens. God kind of gives him a little slap on the back of the head, a bit of a bruise on his ego, and has a fish vomit him. That's the best.
God says, it says that God spoke to the fish, which I think is also funny because he... I don't know if it's a pet or if it's like, fishy, fishy, fishy. Fishy, fishy, go and vomit Jonah out on dry land. I just imagine the fish being like, woohoo, and then going off and doing that. It could have been even nicer with the fish. God can speak to fish, obviously. He could have said, fish, deliver Jonah to the dry land. Or fish, go and open your mouth on the beach and let him walk out. But instead God says, vomit him out. Make sure he gets the point that he's done something wrong. Make sure he gets a little bit of fish guts in his beard for the rest of the walk. I love it.
And that's how chapter 2 ends. Brilliant. Jonah walking on his way to Nineveh from the beach covered in fish guts and rancid smells that take weeks to go away. And that's the story of chapter 2. That's how Jonah got from in the ocean to a fish's belly, prayed to God, spit back out onto the sea.
Now let's pause for a second, set that entire story aside, and let's think for a moment on how it could have happened differently, what it could have looked like if Jonah actually got it, if Jonah understood from the start how it all could have happened. Option number one would be God says, Jonah, go to Nineveh, and Jonah goes to Nineveh. Yeah. Option number one.
Option number two: God says, Jonah, go to Nineveh. Jonah says, no, that sounds scary, I don't want to do that. Maybe I should. And then he goes back and goes to Nineveh. That's option number two. That's valid. That could have happened, would have worked. God would have been pleased with that. Option number three: Jonah, go to Nineveh. No, bump that, I'm getting on a boat, I'm getting out of here. Oh, this was a bad idea. Something's going to go wrong, I can just tell. Guys, turn the boat around, we're going to Nineveh. Turn around, go to Nineveh.
Option number four, this can go all day. Option number four: God says, Jonah, go to Nineveh. He says no, he gets on a boat, gets on the boat, goes to sleep, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. The storm comes, the sailors come to him and say, Jonah, pray to your God. And he goes, I should have done that earlier. He prays to God, the boat turns around, they go back and they go to Nineveh. At any point in time in the story, Jonah had an option of repentance. At any point in time in the story, Jonah could have done something. The only thing he could have done is repent. He could have said, God, I was disobedient. And he chooses not to.
The entire time, he is strictly disobedient. He sets himself up in his prayer as someone who deserves to be saved, when the exact opposite is true. But that's exactly the point. He doesn't deserve to be saved, but he is. Our actions do not govern God's deliverance, because he doesn't choose to save people based on their individual merit. He doesn't choose to save, to rescue people from sin, based on how good of a person they are.
And yes, we have this sense that there's a little bit of Jonah in all of us. We have this sense in us that there are small things we can do to influence God in some way, small transactions we can make where he will bless us if we do good for him. And if we think that, then we're just like Jonah. And if you think you're off the hook and that you're not like that at all, then you've proven that you are on the hook, but you're blinded to the hook and you're a whole lot like Jonah.
What we see in the story of Jonah is the prayers of a self-righteous man, one who thinks what he does will give him credit against God. But he's blinded to the fact that he's a sinner and has something to atone for before God. Yeah, God chooses to rescue him physically, at least by means of the fish in this moment. But the fact that he was physically saved by a fish does not necessarily transfer over to spiritual salvation, spiritual deliverance. There's a difference in this case between physical deliverance and spiritual deliverance.
And honestly, we don't know about Jonah at this point. So far, he has yet to repent. He's yet to admit that he's a sinner and ask God for help. And so the jury's still out on Jonah. But here's something interesting. Seven hundred and fifty years later, when Jesus was walking around, he was on the way to Jerusalem and he was confronted by a crowd, and he spoke to an incredibly similar situation. He spoke to a situation where there was the group of guys who thought they knew everything, thought they had it all under control, thought that God liked them because of the things that they had done, and they held it over other people.
So I don't want you to turn there, but I'm going to read from Luke 18. This is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.
> He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt:
> "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
> The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men,
> extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
> I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.'
> But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'
> I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18:9-14 ESV)
Seem pretty similar? The Pharisee emphasizes his own importance, his achievements, his credentials. He listed reasons why God ought to love him. And then he distances himself from other people. He distances himself from the tax collector. He distances himself from people who he thinks God doesn't love. He says, I'm not like them at all. And the tax collector, he beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
There's a massive difference between these two guys, and sadly Jonah's a whole lot more like the Pharisee. Only, at least the Pharisee actually did do some stuff. Jonah didn't do anything. So when it comes to spiritual deliverance, God chooses to deliver people not based on their merit, but by their faith and trust in him. God doesn't choose to deliver based on merit. He chooses because of his abundant mercy and amazing grace. That's what puts the tax collector, this guy who's lived a life of sin, miles ahead of a Pharisee who lives his entire life by the rules, trying to obey and do things to earn favor with God.
But Jonah did nothing to deserve being saved by God. He ran away from him and tried to escape him. So yeah, God did save him physically. We know that it's not because he deserved it. He definitely didn't. It's because God doesn't save on account of merit. He saves on account of his love and mercy. Now we don't know if Jonah even will be delivered spiritually. The jury's still out on that. But we know the truth that repentance and faith in Jesus are what grant deliverance.
I'm going to invite the band back up. We're all going to zoom out a little bit and try to land this plane. Let's distance ourselves from these figures, these characters, these stories. How do you picture yourself and your relationship with God? Do you picture God as the cosmic accountant, the one who keeps score of all the bad things you've done and weighs them up against all the good things? Or do you see God as a loving father who sets the score aside because he loves you?
When you pray, do you bargain with God as if you've got a stack of chips that he wants and that you can offer him things and that in return he'll give you things? Or do you praise him for what he has done in your life and beg him to forgive your sin? Do you see clearly your own sin and live rightly based on the merit of Jesus? Or do you point out the sin of other people and try to live by your own merit before Jesus? Is God the hero of your story, or are you the hero of your own story?
Do you trust yourself to make every good decision? Do you trust yourself with the steering wheel? And do you treat Jesus like the spare tire that only ever comes out when life gets tough? Or is Jesus your steering wheel, who guides every direction that you ever take? Do you know stuff about God like Jonah does? Or do you actually know God and understand God?
Jonah had one thing right. Jonah knew that salvation belongs to the Lord. But Jonah thought that his actions at least in some way affected what God does. We know that only faith in Jesus can save. Your only hope in salvation is trusting in God. It's the only way. The things that you do will not and cannot earn it for you. So trust in him, not in your own ability, not in your own talents, not in your own credentials. Trust in the God who laid his life down so that you wouldn't have to do that. Only he can truly save.
Let's pray. Father God, we thank you that you are the only way. We thank you that we can rest in your love, knowing that by the death of Jesus we can be saved. We thank you that you're not a cosmic accountant. We thank you that you do not give us a score based on the good and the bad that we do because we know that we can never match up. We thank you that you forgive us of our sins when we ask of it and that we can be saved through our faith in Jesus. And it's in his mighty name that we pray. Amen. Amen.
God's Response to Runners
Transcript
Well, good morning. We're going to be in the book of Jonah. You're going to go ahead and want to start flipping there. It's on page 502. If your Bible looks like this, it's really hard to find. If your Bible does not look like this, best of luck to you.
It's towards the end of the Old Testament with a bunch of names, Jonah, Obadiah, Amos. A bunch of just kind of names that sound like maybe they came out of Star Wars or something. But it will be 502 if you have one of these Bibles. What we're going to do is for the next four weeks, we're just going to walk through verse by verse, chapter by chapter, through the book of Jonah. And then it will be Easter. And on Easter, we celebrate.
We celebrate that Jesus is alive. And this Easter in particular, we're going to celebrate through baptism. So we're going to get together. We're going to celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead, that he is alive, and that he still calls people to himself, still makes people alive as they place faith in him. We'll celebrate with baptism in our Easter gathering. And then afterwards, we'll eat food, hang out, be church family, and just make a big deal out of the whole thing.
So we're going to walk through Jonah for four weeks. And then it will be Easter. And we'll have a lot of fun doing that. But so my wife is 38, 39, somewhere around in there, weeks pregnant, which means that at any point she could go into labor. So if she goes into labor this morning, I'm just going to tap out.
Someone else will come up and finish the rest of the chapter of Jonah, and I'm going to head on. It's actually not true. If she goes into labor this morning, she can just hold it. We're really close to the hospital. And first labor takes a long time anyway. And so she can just step out, wait in the hall, and we'll finish up.
We've got work to do in the book of Jonah. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to start in Jonah chapter 1. God, we thank you for your grace. We thank you for your word that we get to study together as a church family. And we pray, Lord, that as we look at this book that has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, this story that has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and been relayed for hundreds and hundreds of years, Lord, that you would help us to see clearly who you are through it and to see clearly your grace, your massiveness, and your relentless pursuit of those that you love in light of your will and your purposes.
And so, God, I just pray that you'd help us to see this as we study your word this morning. And we love you, and we praise you, and we thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. So we'll be in Jonah chapter 1. So as we look through Jonah, as we study through this book, there's going to be some things that just are striking.
I've really enjoyed getting to study and read Jonah multiple, multiple times. It's a really short story, and we just get to see some clear pictures of God. And so as we look today, we're going to see a few things about God that I think we see as a part of his nature and character throughout Scripture. But Jonah just shows it to us really clearly. So some of the things we're going to see about God today as we look is that he's bigger than we think.
He's more personal than we think. And he's willing to go further to chase us in our sin, to pursue us when we run than we think. And so that's kind of what we're going to see this morning as we study this book. And so chapter 1, verse 1. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai.
Now that's not super weird. That's kind of a normal way that prophetic books would start. The word of the Lord comes to a prophet. And what we know is that Jonah is a prophet. He's mentioned in 2 Kings. So he was like a legit normal prophet who did normal prophet things.
So people would come, inquire of the Lord from him. He would proclaim things. He was a normal prophet. So this isn't odd, although it doesn't happen to a lot of different people in the Old Testament. But it was a normal thing for Israel.
And so as we look at this, I just want us to give us an idea of where we are in the history of Israel. So we've got this timeline that Raz made for us. So you've got creation at the top. It kind of comes down. You've got Egypt. You've got the promised land.
And then the kingdom is divided. So the kingdom of Israel was one kingdom for three kings. So Saul, David, and Solomon. After that, it busted apart. And so we're going to be looking over here in Israel. That's kind of where we are.
So there was Judah and Israel. We're going to zoom in on that. So Jeroboam was the first king. It's during Jeroboam 2 that Jonah prophesies. Hosea and Amos are prophesying as well to the nation of Israel at the same time. And we'll talk about what they were saying in a second.
And then Jonah was a prophet at this same time. And Assyria in some years is going to come take over the northern kingdom. And then it would just be the nation of Jerusalem and Judah. So it would be that nation after Assyria comes in. And so here's what happens. It says, 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. Okay, so the word of the Lord comes and it says, Go arise and go to Nineveh and cry out against it. For their evil has come before me. This is weird. Because Nineveh is a very large city in Assyria. Most of the time, prophets prophesied to Israel.
They prophesied to the nation they were a part of. So they would proclaim to Israel. Now sometimes they would prophesy about other nations and other cities. But they were always giving their prophecy to Israel. Now there were times that other prophets had been carried away to other nations and would prophesy while they were there.
But Jonah is specifically told to go to Nineveh. Which is just weird. And at this time, Amos and Hosea are both prophesying to the nation of Israel, Repent or Assyria is going to come take you over. Repent. Turn from your sins. Stop it.
Or Assyria is going to come get you. And then God says to Jonah, Go to Assyria and cry out against them. Tell them basically the same thing. Because the generic prophetic message is, Repent. Turn. Destruction is coming.
That's kind of the basic baseline message. Now God would give them different ones at different times and be more specific. But it's really weird that he sent to Nineveh. Now, what we know about Assyria is that they were terrible. They were evil in a lot of ways. We've got historic accounts of a king who wrote bragging about when they took over a city how he skinned grown men alive.
They would show up and they would rape young women. They would torture young boys. They would kill and skin men alive. They would enslave people. They would just absolutely destroy stuff. They would dig holes, like post holes, and bury men in them.
And then pull their tongue out and stake it into the ground. And then let them die from exposure and bleeding out and mental anguish. They were bad people. And Nineveh was one of the primary cities. At this point it had at least 120,000 people that were a part of it. They had a 100-foot wall around it that three chariots could race on.
It was a big city. It could race along the top of it. And God says, go to them and cry out against them. Go to this evil city because their evil has come up before me. And here's something that Jonah learns when God says this. Jonah begins to see that God's bigger than he thought.
Because God primarily spoke to the nation of Israel and he was the God of the nation of Israel. So it's a little bit weird that God would just care about Nineveh. It's not in relation to Israel at all. It's just Nineveh. And so Jonah immediately would be going, okay, what does that have to do with us? Like, Hosea and Amos are saying these things.
Like, why would I be good? Like, he's got to have this running through his head is that God is involved in things that he would have, before this, probably didn't think he was involved in. Probably didn't see that clearly. He begins to see that God cares about Nineveh, has some paying attention to Nineveh, this Assyrian city. And he sees that God's a little bit bigger than he thought to send him to them. And so Jonah gets the word of the Lord, hears this, and we see how he responds to it.
So we'll start reading it from the beginning again. Now 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. One thing I want to say there real quick. We, in general, our culture pushes back some when we see God acting as a judge in the Old Testament. Like, we have a little bit of a pushback there. Now we're not super upset here because he says that they're evil.
But even if we thought a country was evil, even if we thought a nation was evil. So let's just take the problem with nations that are evil is we still think, okay, but there's like women and children there. There's people who aren't involved in this. And so you can't just carpet bomb the whole place. You can't just nuke the whole place every time a nation causes problems. And so when we look in the Old Testament and God stands as judge over nations, there's just a little bit of us that goes, Ah, you can't really just kill a whole city, though.
I mean, there may be some bad people there, but you can't just destroy everyone. And, like, you'll even talk to people and they'll say stuff like, My God is a God of love. And if there is a God, he's a loving and compassionate God. That's true. But for some of you who maybe have that pushback, if that's you, if you sit in this room today and you're kind of checking out this whole Jesus thing, you're checking out this whole God thing, and your general disposition is, Okay, I believe there probably is a God because of some things I see through science and the way the world exists.
Like, I think there's probably a God and how. But if there is a God, he's a loving God and he's a compassionate God. And he wouldn't judge and he wouldn't destroy. The only thing I would ask you to do is to investigate a little bit as to where you got that idea. Just look in a little bit as to where you got the idea that if there is a God, he's a loving God. And what you'll find is you got that idea from Scripture because no other religion teaches that about God.
Buddhism doesn't have a personal God. Islam doesn't teach that. That concept of a loving God came from Scripture. And so, honestly, the only way we can reckon that there is a loving God is to study Scripture and understand what kind of loving God is and what that means. And here's the truth. He can't be loving and not hate evil.
He can't be loving and not hate sin. He wouldn't be loving. That's how love works. So, if I love my wife and you slap her, I can't just be like, hey, bro, don't do that. Like, stop it. Or whatever.
Like, you'd be like, man, I don't think you care much about your wife. Like, I don't think... Like, if you have children and something comes against them, you hate whatever comes against them. Whatever we love and however much we love it makes us the most capable of hatred and wrath. Does that make sense? So, if God is a loving God, then he has to hate evil.
And if your God is only capable of just love, nice feelings, then honestly, he doesn't really love. And, just so you know, just to help you out, if you have a God in your brain that only ever agrees with you, he probably doesn't exist. Like, if I said, yeah, I'm married and my wife only ever thinks I'm right. And only ever wants to eat where I want to eat. And only ever thinks that all my ideas are good ideas. You'd be like, bro, your wife is a figment of your imagination.
Like, she's not real. I'm going to need to meet her. Because real entities disagree. So, if God is real, we would just assume, it would be logical to assume, that he and I wouldn't be on the same page on everything. Does that make sense? Okay, so God says, their evil has come up before me.
And I want you to go to him. And so, here's what we see. Verse 2. 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 to Tarshish. So, he paid the fare, went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. That just sounds dumb. Like, if we're reading that, we're going, okay, Jonah, he's not the brightest crayon in the pack, right? Like, he just, God comes to him and says, I want you to go, he says, go east to Nineveh, and Jonah goes west to Tarshish. That's what happens.
And we think that's dumb. It says he's fleeing the presence of the Lord. So, the word of the Lord comes and says, go to Nineveh. And Jonah says, mm-hmm. Now, I'm going to go get on a boat, and I'm going the opposite direction. And we'll find out as we read the story later why he did that.
But here, doesn't it just seem ridiculous to flee the presence of the Lord? Like, we're looking at this going, shouldn't Jonah have known better than to run from God? Doesn't it seem like God could hawk you down? Like, don't you think, like, don't you think if somebody could catch you, God could? Like, I mean, if I was going to, in a foot race, I'm not racing God. I'd just be like, no, you got this one.
I remember when I was growing up, my dad's a big, intense man. And I was like, I don't know, I was eight, nine, something like that. And my dad was fussing at a German shepherd. And this was a big German shepherd. It was like as big as I was at the point. And my dad has a very love-hate relationship with dogs.
Like, he's going to have a dog. He's going to do what he wants it to do. Otherwise, he's not going to have a dog. Like, he'll just give it away or whatever. And so he was fussing at this German shepherd. And we were down kind of in the woods.
And we were in a field. And there were some woods. And the German shepherd was probably 10, 15 feet from him. And he was fussing at it. And it was laying down. And he used to do this thing when he was getting fussed at it.
It would just kind of slowly crawl towards him, you know? And so it's laid on the ground. And he's going, come here. Come here. And the dog's kind of crawling. And then the dog stops and looks over his shoulder at the woods.
And my dad goes, you better not. And I'm like, I don't know if the dog understands English that much, you know? He's like, come here. The dog looks at him and then goes, he goes, don't do it. And about that moment, that dog, boom, I mean, just took off. My dad did not flinch.
Took off right after it. So this dog takes off running. And my dad, just as fast as he can, is running after a dog. Just, I mean, dog runs into the woods. My dad runs into the woods. Me and my two brothers are just like, all you hear is, shh, shh, all through the woods.
Two minutes later, my dad comes walking out of the woods, holding the German shepherd by the back of the neck going, you going to run from me? You going to try to bite me? Because apparently they got in a fight in the woods. He's like, have you lost your mind? And me and my brothers, we learned something that day. We ain't running from our daddy.
If he can catch a German shepherd in the woods, I'm in trouble. So he used to do the same thing with us. He said, boy, and you just knew, stand still. And he said, come here. You came here. There was no, none of that was happening with us.
And you got to think that Jonah knows. You don't run from God. Like you would just think, Jonah's got to know he's a prophet of God. He's got to see this, right? He does not. So Jonah automatically is like, man, I don't know.
You ain't cooking with much. Like, I don't know what you're doing. Verse 4. Okay, so it says he fleed from the presence of the Lord. Verse 4. But the Lord, which I love that it says, but Jonah, and then there's a rebuttal.
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, that's just sailors, that's the guys who were running the boat, who Jonah paid to give him a ride, were afraid. And each cried out to his God. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. Okay, so things, when the mariners are afraid, that's a problem because they're the guys who run the boat.
Like when the people who are running the boat get scared, like, you know, okay, we ought to be scared. When they start throwing the cargo out, like, they're like, man, we ain't going to eat. We ain't going to drink. We just going to hope we float around and survive. Like, they don't need the weight moving around. It says the ship was threatening to break apart, which means you're on this boat and it's going, like, you can hear it cracking and snapping.
And it's a bad storm. And we're about to find out how bad. To lighten them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had laid down and was fast asleep. So Jonah wasn't even, like, guilty.
He just, he's like, well, I'm running from God. I'm going to have a nap. Like, that's where he was. He wasn't stressing about this. What you would think that he ought to have been. All right.
This is how intense this storm got. Check this out. He 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. Captain of the ship. Best plan he's got working is have everybody pray. That's all he's got. If you're on an airplane in some turbulence and it's bouncing around and it's jerking and all of a sudden the captain starts walking down the aisles going, wake everybody up. We just need to pray.
Who's in the cockpit? Man, ain't nothing happening up there. Handle snapped off. We just we floating. You need to pray. Pray to whoever you got.
Wait, wait that fool up. He better be praying. Like, that's the best plan the captain has is cry out to your God. Maybe we'll live like he ain't holding that thing anymore. He's just spinning. It's broke off.
Like, best thing we got is you pray. Everybody pray. You an atheist. I don't care. Pray to science. Pray to Oprah.
Whatever you got to do. Like you pray. Just start calling out. Like, I don't care who you got. Call out to him. We got to get everybody here.
That's all we got working. That's what the captain's doing. So he's waking people up. Ain't you supposed to be captain? And this is all I got. This is my plan.
This is plan A. Plan B is drown. That's what we got. All right. Verse 7. And they said to one another, so it gets worse.
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 to Jonah. Okay, so casting lots was like a way. It was kind of like flipping a coin, but it was more, you know, had more spiritual backing to it. And it was something that ancient Israel used to do, but other cultures did too. But it was basically like if we were going to cast lots, we split the room in half.
Y'all are heads. Y'all are tails. Oh, it's tails. Okay. Split the room in half. Y'all are heads.
Y'all are tails. And it's a real quick way to just divide it down until you got to one person. And then it comes to Jonah, which I wonder if in this process Jonah was thinking, I wonder if this is about somebody else. Like you think Jonah was like, you think he was sweating or you think he was like, if it's not me, it's probably that guy. Like came down to the end. Jonah every time was like, me again?
I'm in the group every time. Like, but it's gotten so bad that the only plan they have now is let's figure out who to be mad at. We're all going to drown. We might as well know who we ought to be mad at. Let's figure out whose fault it is.
We ain't doing nothing anymore but floating. Let's find out who we should be mad at. This storm is terrible. God's bigger than Jonah thought as he tears this sea apart. He's bigger than Jonah thought. 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 and the dry land. Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, what is this you have done? All right. You want to know why they're exceedingly afraid? God's at this point. Little G gods.
In their understanding, we're only over a certain piece of nature, a certain land, a certain area. God's at this point where they understood gods. They were local gods. That's why he's waking people up and saying, cry out to your God. Maybe he's close. Maybe he'll hear us.
Maybe he has something to do with water or with wind. Maybe he can help. So when Jonah says, I fear the Lord, the God of heaven. So in most cultures, the God of heaven was a big God. So immediately they're like, oh, okay.
This guy worships one of the big ones. He didn't just say the God of my field or the God of, he says the God of heaven. And then he says, who made the sea and the dry land. And they're terrified because he's bigger than the gods they were used to. So like in Egypt, there was a God of the sun and there was a God of the Nile.
And there was a God of like all these little gods, even in ancient Greece. Like you had Zeus was like the God of storms and the God of the sky. Poseidon was the God of the ocean and horses, which I have no clue how that worked out. Like, did they have a draft? It was like Poseidon's first pick. I'll take the ocean.
It's a good pick. Poseidon rolls back around. I'll take fire. Bro, you can't have fire and the ocean. Like they're opposites. Plus those are both pretty big.
Like you got to pick something else. All right, I'll take horses. You can't take horses and the ocean. Like you pick the ocean. Well, then give me fire. Okay, you can have horses.
Like, I don't know how it worked out. I don't know how you got the ocean and horses, but I bet in ancient Greek culture, seahorses were super cocky. Because they were the only thing in the middle of that Venn diagram. But that's how they understood gods. They understood that they were only limited to certain things. Like, I'm riding a horse.
You ain't got nothing to do with this, Zeus. Like, that's how they understood it. And so when he says, I fear the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land, they're terrified. Because this God they're just being introduced to is bigger. And there's no other God to call out to for help or hope. Because he's in charge of everything.
And here's what we begin to see with Jonah. And I want us to see. I want us to see very clearly with Jonah. You see, earlier, when it said, Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai. Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it. And then in verse 3 where it says, But Jonah rose to flee.
Every single one of us, our hearts should have skipped a beat. Every single one of us should have leaned forward in our chair. Because we suddenly became a part of the story. Every single one of us should have said, Oh, hold on a second. I want to find out what happens with Jonah now. Shush, shush, shush, shush.
We'll figure out what we're eating later. Shut your mouth. I've got to find out what's happening with Jonah. Every single one of us should have done that. Because when that happened, we all became a part of the story. When it said that Jonah knew the word of the Lord and then headed the opposite direction, all of us just became a part of the story.
And we should all be very interested to find out what happens to Jonah and how God responds to Jonah. Because for most of us, we have a pretty good handle on some of the things that God likes, some of the things that God wants from us, some of the things that He desires. Most of us, the word of the Lord is clear. In many, many instances, and we head the other direction. One of the things we do when we sit down with somebody and we're counseling through some sin stuff, one of the first questions I ask is, Okay, in this particular instance, do you understand that this behavior is sin? It's one of the first things I ask.
Eight out of ten times, the answer is yes. Okay. That's going to guide our conversation. The next part is, why don't you want to repent? If someone says no, then okay, let's study the word. Let's look.
You're ignorant as to what the scriptures say. But for most of us, and most of our sin, the word of the Lord is clear. And we've headed the other direction. We know what the Bible says about sexuality. And we head the other direction. We know what the Bible says about our finances, how we treat others, how we treat generosity, how we treat our money, and we've headed the other direction.
We know what the Bible says about being a husband or being a wife or being a father or how we're supposed to treat our parents. We know it. The word of the Lord is clear and we've headed the other direction. And so all of us should be going, what's going to happen to Jonah? How is God going to respond to Jonah? What is going to happen here?
Because I need to know, because it's personal now. Because most of us know about God, know who He is, and have headed the other direction. And here's what we see so clearly as we get to this section in Jonah. Jonah says, I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. Jonah did not have, he wasn't ignorant to God. He didn't misunderstand who God was.
He had very good belief. He knew stuff, but it wasn't here. There was something bigger that he cared more about, something that was driving his behavior more. See, Jonah knew stuff about God. He could have passed the theology test. He could give really good Sunday school answers.
Jesus, you nailed it again, Jonah. But he was heading the other direction, because it wasn't real to him. It wasn't actually true. It hadn't sunk in yet. So he knew the word.
He headed the other way. He knew God very clearly. As we read the rest of Jonah, we're going to see that Jonah understood who God was, but he didn't act like it. He wasn't acting on it, because it wasn't a real belief. He may have known it, but he wasn't, he wasn't here yet. And that's us.
Most of us have a good handle on who God is, what he's like. Some of us, maybe not. Some of us, maybe we're just learning some of this stuff. I'd say most of us, have a pretty good handle on what the God of the Bible is like. How big he is, how holy he is, what he feels about sin, and our attitudes, and our actions. And most of us, quite often, head in the other direction.
We see that, we feel that, understand that. Then the men were exceedingly afraid, that's verse 10, said to him, what is this you have done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them, God is bigger than we think. See, Jonah thought he could flee from his presence, which we all know at this point is nonsense. And God begins to bend nature to his will. It wasn't just that he set it up, and it just happened to be what was happening.
God bends nature to his will, because God is bigger than Jonah thought, and God's bigger than we think. We so often feel like, God doesn't care about this section of my life. Yeah, I do my church thing, but God doesn't care about work, or how I handle this part of my life, or God's not really paying attention to this, or God's not over this, or God doesn't care about those people. God's bigger than we think. And it's very clear as we look at this text. Verse 11, then 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. The sea's just growing worse and worse. Verse 14, therefore they called out to the Lord. Nope, I messed up. Let's see.
Tempestuous 12, and 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. Jonah says, the only way to pay for sin is death. Jonah says, the way that I get out of this is death. The way that you get out of this is death. Jonah's right.
He understands God. He understands the nature of God. He understands sin, and he understands that sin leads to death. The Bible says that clearly. And so Jonah says, the way out of this is death. Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they could not.
So they didn't want to kill him. They had showed compassion on Jonah, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. So it's getting even worse. Therefore they called out to the Lord, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood. For you, O Lord, have done it as it pleased you. So they picked up Jonah, they 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. So picture this. Jonah says, the only way out is for me to die. The only way for you all to escape is for me to die. I know it's because of me. And they don't want to do that.
But they weren't quick to kill him. And so they try to row, and then they can't. So they basically say, God, you're in charge of this. You chose. And so they grab Jonah. They throw him into the ocean.
The ocean swallows him, and then the sea ceases its raging. How terrified were these men? Let me tell you something. A storm is scary. When you feed the ocean a person, and the storm stops, that's terrifying. Just so you know.
Like there was a guy on the boat who was like, I'm glad it's been raining because I just wet my pants. And I don't want to be made fun of. Like that's how terrifying it is for the ocean to be tossing you about, and when you throw a man in it, it just ceases. And so what they did was they said, okay, you actually are God. I'm swapping teams. I'm not praying to that guy I was praying to anymore.
I'm praying to you. They make vows. They make sacrifices, and they say, you're God. You're in charge. The sailors see clearly who God is, and they respond appropriately, which is more than we can say for Jonah. 17.
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. Okay. That's weird. But God can do what he wants, and he's more in control of things than we think. So if you've ever been fishing and think, is it wrong to pray for fish?
Well, God is in charge of fish, so he can send one your way if he wanted to. But what we see is that God in this story sends this giant storm and then appoints a fish. He goes from this massive picture to this, hey, I got a job for you. Fish says, yes, sir. God's bigger than we think. He's in control of all of this, and the fish is grace.
It's grace to Jonah because it actually saves him from drowning. What we know is that God uses the fish to rescue Jonah. So the truth is, sin leads to death unless God intervenes. Sin leads to death unless God in his grace intervenes on our behalf. And here's what we see as we see this story. We see clearly that God's bigger than we think, that he's more involved in his world than we think, and we see very clearly that he's way more personal than we think because he's chasing after Jonah.
He's chasing after one man. So you think often, God doesn't really pay attention to me. He doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't really care what's going on with me. He's not really here. But you look at the story of Jonah where for God's purposes and his own glory, he's chosen to use Jonah and he's not going to give up on it.
For God's purposes and his own glory for Nineveh and for Jonah, he's not going to let him outrun him. This is beautiful because the answer to the question from earlier of how does God respond to us when we run from him? How does God respond to people when they know the word and they run from him? Grace. Unrelenting, unwavering pursuit in his grace. You see, it would have been God's judgment on Jonah to let him just go and use someone else.
But God wasn't willing to do that so he stops his boat, gets Jonah thrown in the ocean and swallows him with a fish because God was chasing him down. Because God cared about Jonah. You hear that? Like, I think we've gotten used to that idea, but God cared about Jonah. One man who was in direct disobedience. He could have just squashed him.
As we read the rest of the story, you're going to think, God, you should have just squashed him. But God chooses, chose us, mm-hmm, God chooses to chase him down because that's God's response to us in our sin, in our rebellion. And here's what's crazy. We read this story and we go, okay, big storm, big fish, a fish swallowed a dude and he was in the fish for three days. That's nonsense. This is ridiculous.
But you see, God's willing to go further than we think to chase us in our sin. God's willing to go further than we think to pursue us when we run. And the truth is, this is just a small picture of how far he's actually willing to go. You read this story and you think this is absolutely crazy that he would do this, but the truth is, the Bible has a more epic, more mind-shattering story that God's willing to go to more elaborate lengths to chase after us because he actually becomes a man, lives perfectly on our behalf in the person of Jesus and dies so that we don't have to. You think a big fish is crazy?
God died. The God of the universe who created, the God of heaven who created the dry land and the sea became a person who changed. The unchangeable God changed. The ever-living God, the eternal God, died. Ceased to exist. Was laid in a grave for three days.
And then he came back to life because Jonah is just a small picture of how far God is willing to go to chase us when we run. So the answer to the question, how does God respond to us when we rebel? Unrelenting grace. And he's willing to go to elaborate, mind-shattering lengths to chase us down. Bianca, Matt, and Raz are going to come back up. The appropriate response to this type of grace is repentance.
The appropriate response to God bending history and bending the world on our behalf is to turn away from sin and to run back to God. It's the appropriate response. I pray for some of you who know the word of the Lord and are headed in the other direction, I pray that God in his grace sends a storm. I pray that he stops you where you are. That he cares enough about you to wreck you. You see, when we love someone, we don't let them destroy themselves and I pray that God in his grace wrecks you to stop you and to bring you back to himself.
Some of you, you're in that storm. The appropriate response to God when he wrecks you is repentance because he's already gone farther for you than he went for Jonah. He's already done more for you than he did for Jonah. You think that fish is ridiculous? The God of the universe died. So that we could have life.
So that our debt could be paid for. Sin does lead to death and Jesus died in our place for our sin. So that we could have life. Some of you just needed to hear today that God's bigger than you think. More capable than you think. More willing to bend history on behalf of his people than you'd think.
Some of you needed to know that he's more personal. He actually knows what's going on with you and he actually cares. God cared enough about Jonah to chase him down. He knows where you are. He cares. And some of us absolutely need to know that God was willing to go farther than we'd ever think to rescue us when we run.
And our opportunity the grace offered to us is to stop running. To accept his rescue offered to us through the cross and to be given life that only he can give us. Let's pray. God, I pray that through your Holy Spirit right now you would draw people to yourself. That you'd help us to all clearly see that you went further for us than you went for Jonah. That you did something more elaborate, more crazy, more mind shattering.
God, I pray that you'd make that real to us. God, for so many of us where we know your word and we're running the other direction, I pray that you'd help us to stop and to repent. I pray that those who won't, Lord, that you'll send a storm in your grace to stop them. That you'll pursue them and draw them back to yourself. God, I pray for those in the midst of a storm that they would recognize it. Recognize that sin leads to death and that you died for us so they don't have to die.
They don't have to be destroyed. They can have life and salvation and hope. God, I ask that your Holy Spirit would wreck us. That we'd see your grace clearly and that those who need to trust you, place their faith in you, turn from their sin back to you, that they would. God, we thank you that you love us more than we see you here loving Jonah. That you love us as much as you loved him to chase him down and that you show it to us more clearly as you died for us.
You saved us through your own death. We praise you. In Jesus' name, Amen.