Salvation Belongs to the LORD (Jonah 2:1-10)

For Abel, would you please remain standing for the reading

of God's Word this morning I'll be reading from the book of

Jonah, chapter 2, beginning with verse one.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

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 shale.

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. Oh Lord my God, when my life was

fainting away, I remember the Lord, and my prayer came to you

into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain

idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.

But I, with the voice of Thanksgiving, will sacrifice to

You what I have vowed. I will pay.

Salvation belongs to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish,

and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated.

I want to begin this morning with a bit of a thought

experiment. If you are trapped in the belly

of a huge fish, what would you do now?

Just go with me on this? How would you pass the time?

Would you panic? Would you poke the sides of its

stomach to try to get you out? Or would you build a fire like

Pinocchio to try to get it to sneeze you out?

Well, this fall we're working our way through the Old

Testament book of Jonah. It's incredible story about a

prophet, one of the 12 minor prophets, the last 12 books of

the Old Testament between the turn the page to the New

Testament. What we've learned is that Jonah

was a prophet called by God. And see, all of God's prophets

were called to speak to his people.

The minor prophets called to speak to his people, Israel.

But Jonah, Jonah was given a new assignment.

Jonah wasn't just called to speak to Israel, but he was

called to speak to Israel's enemy, Nineveh.

Jonah hated Nineveh and so he wanted nothing to do with God's

mission and he ran from it and so doing he wanted nothing to do

with God and he ran from the presence of the Lord.

And so God sent a storm after Jonah and then he said a great

fish. Last week we looked at Jonah one

verse 17 and the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up

Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of

the fish 3 days and three nights.

And what we saw last week is that there is something greater

than Jonah here. That just as Jonah was in the

belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so Jesus

Christ the Son of God was crucified and he died and he

spent three days in the tomb, and on the third day he rose

again. That all who trust in his name

would have life. There is something greater than

Jonah here. But what we will see this

morning is that there is more to the story than Jonah being

swallowed by the great fish. What we will see is that Jonah

will then move on to tell us what happened inside the fish.

Something that anyone with even a little bit of curiosity would

wonder, what was Jonah doing for those three days?

But what we will see is that the book of Jonah not only gives us

a glimpse inside the fish, but more importantly, the book of

Jonah gives us a glimpse inside of Jonah.

We'll see the heart of a man, a man who has come to the end of

himself because they're in the belly of the fish.

Jonah did something he had not done since the beginning of the

book. Jonah stopped running and he

finally prayed, and they're imprisoned by a fish.

Jonah faced his own rebellion against God and to discover the

freedom of repentance that repentance that I want us all to

see this morning. First way is this repentance

confronts the depths of our depravity.

I want you to look with me at Jonah chapter 2 Jonah 2 verse

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

one we're told that 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 shale.

I cried and you heard my voice to the bulk of this chapter is

written in the form of poetry and it's bookended by two verses

that are prose, their narrative to tell the story.

And so chapter 2 begins with verse one.

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord as God from the belly of the fish

and it ends in verse 10. And the Lord spoke to the fish

and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

Everything in between these two verses is Hebrew poetry.

And if you're reading along in your bulletin this morning, you

can't really see it what we've printed there.

But if you're reading in a Hebrew Bible, or really any

English translation, you'll see that these verses have been set

apart. It's a poem.

In fact, it's a poem that's been so beautifully and intricately

written that it's often called the Psalm of Jonah.

And for these verses, Jonah is calling out the Lord.

He's crying out him in poetic fashion.

And just as many skeptics have doubted that Jonah was really

swallowed by a big fish, many skeptics doubt that Jonah could

have written this poem. They say it's too beautiful.

It's too well written. There's no way Jonah could have

actually written it, especially from the belly of a fish.

You see, just like there's something greater than Jonah

here, there's something more than poetry here.

See, not only is this the Psalm of Jonah, but it's his prayer.

It's a prayer of praise. It's a prayer of confession.

It's a prayer of repentance. What we see is that in this

moment, Jonah is both literally and spiritually at the lowest

point of his entire life. And this descent has been

happening since Jonah chapter 1 and Jonah one verse 3.

Jonah 1 · chapter mention

We're told that after God told Jonah to get up to arise and go

to Nineveh, Jonah went down. He descended, he went down to

Joppa, and then we're told he went down to the ship to flee

from the presence of the Lord. After God sent the storm after

Jonah. We're told that Jonah then went

down further into the ship into its innermost parts to sleep it

off. Jonah was on a downward spiral

of sin and rebellion. Many ways.

It's why we say that we hit rock bottom.

Jonah was confronting the depths of his own depravity from the

belly of a fish. Verse 3 Jonah says, you cast me

into the deep, into the heart of the Seas.

The flood surrounded me. All the waves and your billows

have passed over me. You hear the language.

This was both literally true for Jonah, that he had been thrown

overboard into the middle of a storm.

Can you imagine what that must have been like for him?

Thrashing about in the waves, gasping for breath, his head

going underwater? But Jonah's also beginning to

understand that this is who he is spiritually before God,

running away from him. He's flailing his arms, running

from the presence of the Lord, descending deeper into his own

deprivation. Now, when we use the term total

depravity, what we mean by that is that as human beings, it's

not as if that we are utterly sinful.

It's that no, we are totally depraved, and that every part of

us is affected by sin. It affects our hearts and our

desires, beckoning us to go after false gods and all of

their empty promises. But it doesn't just affect our

hearts, it affects our bodies. That because of the fall, we

experienced the frailty of human life, even death itself.

And it affects our minds. It clouds our judgement, it

prevents us from seeing God rightly and causes us to rebel.

This is exactly what we see in Jonah.

Jesus said that whoever sins as a slave to sin, this is what

total depravity describes, that we are in bondage to sin and

this is sins. Great irony that we think when

we run from God and all those commandments, that that is where

freedom was found. That when we see God as some

kind of totalitarian dictator trying to push his thumb against

us and we think it's better for us to go our own way.

We think it's freedom, but it only leads in slavery and death.

But here, as Jonah confronts the depths of depravity, he sees sin

for what it truly is. More than that, Jonah says not

only has he descended into this belly of the fish, but Jonah

says he's gone down into the belly of shale.

And what does that mean? That phrase, the belly of shale,

is unique only to Jonah. The word shale isn't, but for

him to put it with the word belly.

Now clearly Jonah is playing off of where he currently finds

himself in the belly of a great fish, but he's recognizing that

far worse, he's descended the belly of shale.

The word shale throughout the Old Testament refers the

dominion of death in this language that led many people

over the centuries to ask a very important question about Jonah's

story. Did God send the fish after

Jonah out of his judgement or out of his mercy?

Was the fish an act of God's judgement to go after Jonah, To

say to Jonah, you can't run from me, I am the one true God and I

must pour out my wrath upon sin and rebellion.

Or was it God's rescue? Did God send the fish after

Jonah because of his mercy? Was Jonah's language here that

leads many people to say it must be judgement that Jonah has

descended to the depths of shale, to death itself.

And throughout the beginning of Jonah's prayer, he's confronting

his own sin and rebellion and is recognizing that he is enduring

the very judgement that he wished upon Nineveh.

I want you to hear that Jonah wanted God's judgement for

Nineveh, and now God's judgement had come for him.

But the story doesn't end there. Second, repentance not only

calls us to face our own depravity, but it invites us to

turn to the mercy of God. Look with me, verse 4.

Then Jonah says, I'm driven away from your sight.

I think Jonah's choice of words here is significant.

Jonah has been purposely running away from the sight of God, but

notice how he puts it. I have been driven away from

God's presence. God has given Jonah exactly what

he wanted and it's led to his own self destruction.

Apostle Paul in the book of Romans describes this in this

way. Romans one verse 21, he says,

for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give

thanks to him, but became futile in their thinking, and their

foolish hearts were darkened. Doesn't it sound like Jonah

running away from God, his foolish heart become darkened?

But if we're honest this morning, doesn't it sound like

us when we rebel against God too?

And then listen to this in Romans one verse 24.

Therefore God gave them up, and the lust of their hearts to

impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves,

because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and

worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator

who is blessed forever. Amen.

This is one of the greatest acts of judgement that God could give

us, that He would leave us alone to our own sin, that he would

allow our sin to consume us, to eat us alive.

And This is why the great fish was not only an act of God's

judgement, but was also an act of God's mercy.

Because God didn't leave Jonah alone.

God didn't leave Jonah alone. He sent a storm after him, and

then he sent a great fish after him.

And so here is Jonah, the end of verse 4.

Notice what he says. I'm driven away from your side,

yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.

That's one of two yet 2 yet. And Jonah's prayer, and both are

beautiful evidences of his repentance.

Jonah says, Yet I shall again look on your holy temple.

Some have suggested that this is Jonah and all of his confidence,

knowing that some point he's going to be rescued, that he's

going to live. At some point he's going to get

out of the fish, and one day he will look at the temple again.

But really, throughout the Old Testament, this language of

looking on the temple is used as a metaphor for prayer.

Let me give you an example. This is Psalm 186IN my distress,

I called upon the Lord to my God.

I cried for help from His temple.

He heard my voice. My cry to Him reached his ears.

Jonah will use this kind of language again.

And Jonah 2 verse 7, Jonah says, when my life was fainting away,

Jonah 2:7

I remember the Lord and my prayer came to you into your

holy temple. So what is happening here?

Well, Jonah the rebellious prophet has finally stopped

running and he's turning back to the Lord.

Jonah is praying Lord his God and looking upon his face,

gazing upon the temple and setting his sights on the mercy

of God. This is the very definition of

repentance. Now when I use that word

repentance, I wonder how it sounds to some of you.

If you've grown up around Christianity, it's possible that

you associate repentance with legalism, or you associate it

with hypocritical Christians who tell people to live one way

while they do the exact same thing.

Or maybe for you, it brings up images of televangelists and TV

preachers telling people to repent.

I don't know how that word comes to your ears, but I want you to

hear this morning that what we see in the story of Jonah is

that repentance isn't legalistic, it's not inherently

hypocritical, and it's anything but restrictive.

Now what we see in Jonah's story is that repentance leads to

freedom. Notice what Jonah says in verse

5. The waters closed in over me to

take my life. The deep surrounded me.

The 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. Oh, Lord, my God, did you hear

it? It's the second yet.

And notice the imagery that Jonah is using in his prayer.

He's saying here I am in the belly of the fish.

And it's not just that I'm trapped inside a fish's stomach,

but seaweed is wrapped itself all around me.

Can you feel it wrapped around my limbs and around my neck?

It's choking me out. Not only that, but he says he's

gone down to the depths of the mountain, to this land whose

bars closed upon me. It's the image of a prison.

Jonah is recognizing that his sin has become a prison to him.

His rebellion has enslaved him. I want you to think about your

own rebellion, those times that you are tempted and even give in

to run from God. I once met with a man who'd

become addicted to online gambling.

He'd been trying to beat it for over a decade, and you know what

he told me? He said, I don't even want to do

it anymore, but I can't stop. This is what all sin is like for

us. It entraps us.

It enslaves us. It puts us into bondage.

It wraps around our limbs and our necks and holds us down and

becomes a prison to us. And so repentance is not

restriction, it's freedom. It's liberation.

It's when we stop running from God and run without abandoned,

right? The mercy of God.

And if one of the greatest acts of judgement that God could give

us is to abandon us to our sin, then one of His greatest acts of

mercy is to break us down in order to bring us back to

himself. This is exactly what he's done

with Jonah. He's brought Jonah to the end of

himself in order that he could truly begin to see the holiness

and mercy of God. One of the other minor prophets,

Hosea, puts it this way. Hosea 6 verse one.

Come, let us return to the Lord, for He has torn us that He may

heal us. He has struck us down and He

will bind us up. After 2 days He will revive us,

and on the third day He will raise us up that we may live for

him. Do you hear Jonah's story here?

God struck Jonah down in order to raise him up, and after three

days in the belly of the fish, he delivered Jonah.

But do you also hear it, that there is something greater than

Jonah here, even in the book of Hosea?

He struck down his own son to heal us, and after three days he

rose him from the dead. That we could have life.

The only way for us to truly receive the glory of the gospel

is for us to confront our sin, but also to run to the arms of

Jesus. And this is what true repentance

is. You see, Jonah's problem

ultimately was not that he thought he was superior to

Nineveh. That's just a symptom of a much

deeper disease. Now, ultimately, Jonah's problem

is that he no longer viewed himself in the shadow of the

holiness of God, so now all he could see was himself and see

the people around him. That's known as the sin of

comparison. And if you're like me, you do it

every day. We are so prone to compare

ourselves to others. Why do we do that?

I think we do that because if we search hard enough, we'll find

some people that we think are worse off than we are.

But you see, comparison always leads to moralism.

It leaves us stuck in our sin. We might turn from our sin, but

we never turn around to actually look at God.

We only look at ourselves. We look at the people around us.

The 19th century English minister JC Rile put it this

way. He said let her let us never

measure our religion by that of others and think we are doing

enough. If we've gone beyond our

neighbors. So many of us think that that's

what Christianity is. And so for us, repentance just

looks like turning from our sin, looking at ourselves, looking at

people around us thinking we're at least we're not as bad as

they are, and eventually turn right back to our sin.

But genuine repentance is what we see after Jonah says the

word. Yet genuine repentance is

turning from our sin and turning to the mercy of God in Christ

Jesus. In our church, we hold to a

confession to to a way of thinking about what we believe

that's been passed down from generation to generation.

That means we believe that we as a church are rooted and those

who've gone before us. It's called the Westminster

Confession of Faith. At the end of the confession,

we're given the Shorter Catechism.

Now catechism is just a way to teach us what it is that we

believe through a question and answer.

If you think that sounds archaic, let me just tell you,

you're being catechized every single day by the world around

you. You're being shaped and formed.

Westminster Shorter Catechism infiltrates all of that and

helps us understand not just what we believe, but why.

Question 87 asks this question. What is repentance unto life?

Here's the answer. Repentance unto life is a saving

grace, whereby A Sinner, out of true sense of his sin and

apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, does with grief and

hatred of his sin, turn from it and unto God with full purpose

of an endeavor after new obedience.

Did you hear it? The two steps of genuine

repentance. It's not just turning from sin,

but it's turning to God and His sovereign mercy, driving down

only by grace to walk in new obedience.

So the third thing that Jonah and his prayer from the belly of

the fish teaches us, repentance is a saving grace.

Jonah concludes his Psalm by describing what this genuine

repentance looks like In verse 8.

He says those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their

steadfast love. Jonah's point is that the false

gods that we turn to ourselves and other people, the

affirmation that we might seek in the world around us, can

never deliver on its promise. And so we might try to turn from

our sin into these idols. And when we do, we turn our back

on the only one who has promised to love us to the end with a

never giving up, never stopping, always faithful and forever

love. He goes on in verse 9 and says,

but with the voice of Thanksgiving, we'll sacrifice to

you what I have vowed I will pay.

This is Jonah now turning to God, turning to his mercy and

grace, and now endeavoring to follow after God and his

commands and new obedience. But I want you to notice the

language that he chooses. Jonah says I will sacrifice to

you. Would I have vowed I will pay?

I don't think these words are an accident.

So we had already seen this kind of behavior earlier in Jonah.

One, not from Jonah, but from the pluralistic Pagan sailors

who in the middle of the ocean found themselves praying to the

one true God and making sacrifices and vows to him.

Even in Jonah's prayer of repentance, he's still comparing

himself. He's comparing himself to the

Mariners. Some have said, well, he must be

comparing to them because he says, well, their repentance

can't be genuine. I'm going to do better.

Others have suggested no, he's pointing to the Mariners

repentance because that becomes the model for him.

But either way, this is what I want you to see.

Even in Jonah's repentance, he's comparing himself.

And look, I don't want to give it away, but do you know how the

story of Jonah ends? After Jonah is finally delivered

from the fish, After Jonah finally preaches to Nineveh,

after Nineveh repents and God have mercy on them.

Do you know what Jonah does? He gets angry enough to die and

he ends up right back where he started.

And I can't help but think of the words of our confession of

sin. We need to repent of our own

repentance. We need our tears to be washed.

Because in case you might not yet understand what true

repentance is, repentance is not something we can do on our own.

Repentance is a saving grace. Even God works repentance into

our lives. Because you and I cannot save

ourselves. If you don't believe me, just

listen to the last words of Jonah's prayer, the end of verse

9. Jonah proclaims salvation

belongs to the Lord. You cannot save yourself any

more than Jonah could get himself out of the belly of a

fish. Salvation belongs to Lord.

He is the one who saves his people.

And if you still have a hard time believing that, just look

at what happens next in verse 10.

God save Jonah by commanding the fish to vomit him out on dry

land. Salvation belongs to the Lord,

and He will stop at nothing to rescue his people.

He sent a storm and a fish to save Jonah.

He sent a rebellious prophet to save Nineveh, and he sent his

own son Jesus Christ to save you and me.

And so repent, Repent every minute of every day.

Repent. The first theses of Martin

Luther's 95 theses that he nailed to the door of the church

in Wittenberg, Germany, said this.

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, he intended

that the entire life of believers should be repentance.

And if that sounds like a drag to you, let me suggest that

you're still not understanding repentance for what it really

is. Because what Martin Luther meant

was not that the entire life of believers is just trying to get

out of your own sin. Now what he meant is that the

entire life of believers should be 1 of running to Jesus,

running to Jesus of every minute of every single day.

And is there not a more glorious life than that?

And so repent this morning, if you've been trying to get

yourself out of your own sin and just like Jonah found it to

enslave you, you've never turned to Jesus Christ as your Savior.

Repent. Turn to him alone.

His arms are open wide. They're spread out on the cross.

He died and rose again for your salvation.

And this morning, if you are a follower of Jesus, repent.

We need the good news, the gospel, every single moment of

every day, and just like Jonah, to stop running from God and

instead to turn from our sin to look on the face of our Savior

Jesus and run to him. Let's pray.

Father in heaven, we pray that you would enable us to live

lives of repentance, that we would turn from our sin and turn

to you, Lord Jesus, and in walking with You that we would

walk in new obedience. We thank you that repentance is

a saving grace. So we pray that by your

sovereign grace this morning, you would work through your Holy

Spirit to work repentance deep into our hearts and bring us out

of the darkness and into the marvelous light of walking with

you. We ask this in Jesus name, Amen.

Let's stand and let's sing together.