Jonah 1:16-2:10 | Finding Mercy at the Bottom

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

Take your Bible with me now to the Gospel according to Jonah.

In the Old Testament, if you're using a Pew Bible, you can find out roughly page 775.

Jonah, we're in chapter 2 this morning.

Actually, we're going to start in chapter 1, verse 17.

Interesting little dilemma in translations.

If you open up a Hebrew Bible today, you will find that chapter 2 in the Hebrew Bible begins with our chapter 1, verse 17.

Go figure.

I don't know why that all happened.

But that's where we're going to start in chapter 1, verse 17.

This morning we're going to read through chapter 2, verse 10, the end of chapter 2, if you'd like to follow along with me.

Says, then Yahweh, the Lord, appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

So that already sets the stage for us, right?

We are on the boat with Jonah in this storm that has been hurled from the hand of Yahweh like a 100 mile an hour fastball onto the Mediterranean Sea.

Everything's been done to save themselves to no avail.

The only thing left is to throw Jonah overboard.

And Yahweh 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 Yahweh his God from the belly of the fish, saying, I called out to Yahweh 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 of your waves and all of your billows passed over me.

Then I said, I'm 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 around 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 Yahweh, my God.

When my life was fainting away, I remembered.

I remembered Yahweh.

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 Yahweh.

And Yahweh spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

Amen.

Have you ever been convicted by God's word on a Sunday morning?

And then you leave church and you go home and you get wrapped up in whatever's happening and you find yourself falling into that same sin about which you were convicted of on Sunday morning?

If that hasn't happened to you, either you're dead or you haven't been in church long.

That means, if you've experienced that, that means you are Jonah.

I am Jonah.

Last week we watched God hurl a storm and Jonah slept through it.

We watched pagan sailors pray on the deck of a sinking ship while the prophet of God slept unconscious, as it were, in the hold of the ship.

We watched Jonah confess almost calmly, matter-of-factly, that all of that was his fault.

When he said, just pick me up and hurl me into the sea, and everything will be okay.

And when they did, the storm suddenly stopped.

Now every reasonable expectation says that's where Jonah's story ends.

A man thrown overboard in the middle of the Mediterranean does not survive.

The waves take him down.

And somewhere in the deep water, the story of a disobedient prophet ends.

That's every reasonable expectation.

But that is not what happens.

A runaway prophet ends up in the belly of a great fish for three days, prays a strange prayer, and then he's vomited out onto a beach to face the same God and the same commission all over again.

Now I want to look at this in a little more detail.

Not as much detail as I'd like to, but in a little more detail.

We're going to see in these few verses here that God's mercy pursued a runaway prophet all the way to the bottom of the sea, restored him to his purpose, and then indicted Jonah through his own prayer.

He indicted Jonah, convicted him, said, You're guilty.

Because he didn't want to extend God's mercy, even though he received it himself.

Friends, what you need to remember, regardless of anything else you hear this morning, is that God's mercy finds us at the bottom.

But when God's mercy finds us at the bottom, it isn't ours to hold for ourselves.

There's grace in this passage, but there's also a mirror that we hold up to see the depths of our own hearts.

The account here shifts from God's action to Jonah's actions and then back again to God.

So look with me first at God's action of sovereignly rescuing this prophet.

There's a whole lot that is left to our imaginations in this account.

The narrator doesn't give us very much detail at all as to the exact mechanics of what happened when Jonah went overboard.

Was it two guys, one on each side, one salty man on each side of Jonah, sort of one, two, three, and then overboard?

We don't know.

That's not told, right?

All we're told is that they hurled him overboard.

We're not told exactly what happened when Jonah splashed down into the water.

We do know that he was hurled overboard by the sailors, and we do know that the sailors worshiped when the sea was instantly stilled.

That's about it.

What the narrator does give us is a single theologically loaded word.

It says, Yahweh appointed a great fish.

I'm not going to spend much time on the fish.

Was it a whale?

Was it a blue whale?

Was it a whale shark?

Maybe it could have been an ancient dinosaur that still hadn't died.

We don't know.

Just as a great fish, a sea monster of some sort.

What's important is that word appointed.

The word appointed carries the idea of something that's been prepared for a specific purpose.

We're going to encounter this word two more times in the next couple of chapters.

God will appoint a plant, kind of a castor bean plant, that will grow up and provide shade for Jonah.

And then God's going to appoint a worm to eat that plant and destroy it.

So what we find then is that just like Jonah has a commission, so does a great sea creature.

And as Jonah and a sea creature have a commission, so does a plant and a worm.

Our narrator does not say that the fish happened to be swimming by.

That it was just chance.

The book of Ruth uses that terminology sort of ironically, saying he chanced, this chanced by, or this happened, this just happened to happen.

Ironically, saying, no, God actually did this.

Jonah doesn't do that.

Jonah comes right out and says, God appointed the fish.

He doesn't say that this was an unusual marine biology incident that kept Jonah from drowning.

God appointed the fish.

God directed this great sea creature with sovereign precision, and it was there right at that moment, ready when it was needed.

The same God who spoke the world into existence and created all creatures, prepared a great fish, and the fish obeyed.

Jonah is full of natural theology.

Creation responds perfectly to a sovereign God.

The storm obeyed.

The fish obeyed.

The lot was in God's hand.

Everything in this account responds to God without hesitation, without question, without argument, without, but God, I don't really want to swallow a human being.

No, we don't see that.

The only element in this entire account that does not obey immediately and completely is a human being whom God is pursuing.

Think about that for a moment.

The same God who set the stars in place with his fingertips, who laid out their courses and established the foundations of the deep, has to pursue a single prophet across the Mediterranean Sea in the middle of a storm and through the belly of a fish just to get him to go to one city and preach one message.

When all the rest of creation obeys instantly.

Has that ever occurred to you?

It's humbling to realize that a fish didn't debate, didn't question God, did not look for a way out, it simply showed up and did what God told it to do.

God spoke to the fish, and the fish obeyed.

But let's not miss the incredible mercy in that action.

Jonah's overboard in the middle of the Mediterranean.

God didn't let Jonah drift away in the sea swells or become sharkbait.

We don't know exactly what those three days were like inside the fish.

But Jonah was alive and conscious and thinking.

He's praying to God in the middle of the Mediterranean, in the fish.

At least he was alive and conscious for most of those three days.

I think there's a possibility that Jonah actually died.

Think about it with me.

What is the land?

What is the land that whose bars close around you forever?

And verse 6.

I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.

Where is that?

Either Elijah had, I'm sorry, not Elijah, Jonah, either Jonah had come right up to the point of dying, or he did.

The man who had run to the ends of the earth to escape from God's command has nothing now to do but think and pray.

And at some point, in that unlit, dark silence with no options and no exits, Jonah decided to pray.

And maybe he died.

We'll leave that there for now as we look at Jonah's action.

His cry from the bottom.

He says, I called out to Yahweh 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, the floods surrounded me, all your waves and all your billows passed over me.

I am driven away.

Yet I shall look again upon your holy temple.

Jonah prays because he's reached the absolute point of desperation.

Have you been there?

Many of us have.

And he describes his situation in his prayer.

He's telling God everything that God already knows.

Out of the belly of the fish, I cried, no.

Out of the belly of Sheol, the realm, the place of the dead.

He says, I'm in the heart of the seas.

Waves crash over him.

Seaweed is wrapped around his head.

He describes himself as going down to the roots of the mountains.

So you can imagine in your mind the imagery here.

You've got the highlands of Israel on the edge of the Mediterranean.

He goes down to the seacoast, he goes down into the boat, and he goes down into the water, down to the very roots of the mountains at the bottom of the sea.

And he says he's gone down to a pit, to a land whose bars have closed over me forever.

Jonah's gone down as far as a human being can go.

In the ancient way of thinking, that place of greatest descent was the place of the dead.

And there, at the very bottom, with nowhere left to go, Jonah finally looks up.

He says, When my life was fainting away, verse 7.

I remembered the Lord.

And my prayer came to you.

It's always good to pray, friends.

Maybe especially so in a crisis.

So don't forget to remember God in your crisis.

But that's not the main idea here.

The main idea here is the direction.

Jonah's gone down, down, down, and it's only at the very bottom that he looks up.

Jonah's orientation is away from God for all of chapter one, away from God's presence, away from Jerusalem, away from the temple, away from Nineveh, away from prophetic commission.

Every step he took was in the wrong direction.

And the narrator tracks it very carefully for us.

Down, down, down, down, down, until finally, up.

Here for the first time, Jonah's orientation changes.

In the darkest of places, in the lowest of places, he turns toward God.

The prayer comes to God's holy temple.

The cry goes up from the bottom of the sea, and Jonah anticipates his life being brought up.

And the God who has been pursuing Jonah all the way down was already listening before Jonah formed the first word.

This is an extension of God's presence that we read in chapter 1 from Psalm 139.

There's nowhere that we can go where God isn't already present.

God pursued Jonah into the depths of his resistance.

And when Jonah finally stopped running and looked up, God was already there.

And the same is true with us.

But here's what makes this passage more than just a story about Jonah or a lesson about desperate prayer.

Jonah's presence in the realm of the dead points to something of much greater significance.

The Lord Jesus himself talked about it in Matthew chapter 12.

Matthew 12 · chapter mention

He said to the Pharisees, an evil and adulterous generation looks for a sign, proof of who Christ is.

But no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Three days to the belly of Sheol.

Three days in the heart of the earth.

Jonah's descent to the bottom of the sea, to the pit, to Sheol, to the place where the bars closed over him forever, is a foretaste of a much greater descent.

The Son of God, by whom all things were created and for whom all things were created, who made that great fish descended.

He descended into time and space.

He descended into the hands of his enemies.

He descended into beatings and mockery.

He descended into a tomb.

He descended to a cross, to death, and down into the grave.

He descended, unlike Jonah, out of obedience to the Father's commission.

So that God's wide mercy might find us at the bottom.

The descent of Jonah was the consequence of a prophet fleeing from God.

The descent of Jesus was the rescue mission for everybody else at the bottom.

What Jonah fled, the Lord Jesus obediently did.

And just as God brought up Jonah's life from the pit, the Father raised the Son, not vomited onto a beach, but raised in glory, having purchased redemption for his people, proving that salvation belongs to the Lord.

Friends, whatever the equivalent of seaweed wrapped around your neck and bars closing behind us, whatever those things look like in our lives, when we are there, desperate, with nowhere else to go, we're not looking up to a distant temple that we've been to or that we imagine.

We're looking up to see the risen and ascended Christ who had already descended to the greatest depths on our behalf and returned victorious.

Every cry from the pit is heard by the one who has been to the bottom and back.

God hears our desperate cries because his son has gone to the place of death and returned on our behalf.

Why would you not trust in him?

Now that divine work had not occurred at the time of Jonah.

But Jonah knew God's character and God's work.

He knew that God is a God who saves.

He says that.

Salvation belongs to Yahweh, verse nine.

He somehow knows that God will rescue him.

So he's received God's answer in some way.

So he gives thanks and he promises to sacrifice to God.

There's a vow that he's made.

But his thanksgiving is incomplete at best.

You see, Jonah's a theologian.

He's a great theologian.

He knows his Bible.

He knows his theology.

One of the things you can do if you want to is you can work through the book of Psalms and see how many Psalms are referenced in Jonah's prayer.

Jonah knows his hymn book.

His theology has been developed in a significant way.

He knows that idols don't give loyal love.

Only Yahweh can.

He knows that he has been the beneficiary of that kind of love that he didn't deserve.

And he is genuinely grateful.

He wants to give thanks to God.

He wants to sacrifice.

He wants to make vows to this God.

And so he commits to it.

He declares that salvation belongs to Yahweh.

He's making an exclusive claim.

Only this God is the Savior.

No idol, no other God, no human power could have done this.

Only Yahweh.

Jonah knows this because he's lived it.

And unless a God has done what the God of Jonah can do, it is no God who can save.

Only Jonah's God can save.

Which means only the one who has descended into the depths himself can truly save.

But there's something else going on here.

Jonah understands that because salvation belongs to Yahweh, it is Yahweh's to give.

It's his decision whether to grant it or not.

That power and position do not belong to Israel, do not belong to Jonah, doesn't belong to anybody else.

God alone determines who receives salvation and how and to whom it is extended.

And so Jonah confesses from inside this great creature that he had no claim on God's mercy.

But he's so thankful to have received it.

I'm so thankful for what God has done.

Do you remember Jesus' story about the man who was forgiven a great debt?

A debt that would take multiple lifetimes to pay.

Just forgiven, just in a single day.

And then he goes and beats up somebody else because he just owes him a day's worth of wages.

That's somebody who's grateful, but whose thanksgiving is incomplete.

Joan is very similar.

If salvation is Yahweh's to give, that means he's free to give it to anyone, even a rebellious prophet in the belly of a sea creature.

And we know now where this is going if we've been paying attention.

Have you been paying attention?

I hope so.

The same God who extended mercy and salvation to a runaway prophet is about to offer that same mercy to a city of extremely wicked people.

And when he does, Jonah will rage against it.

God, it's fine for me to receive mercy, but not for anybody else.

What?

That's an incomplete thanksgiving.

Jonah will resist the extension of God's mercy to people he believes should never receive it.

And so Jonah's prayer is self-indicting.

He has testified against his own resistance before it's happened.

We've never done that, have we?

Of course we have.

We've never judged somebody for their angry outburst and then turned around and been angry with somebody ourselves, have we?

Of course we have.

We've never been frustrated that somebody lied to us and then turned around and exaggerated to somebody else, have we?

Of course we have.

This prayer is a mirror into Jonah's heart, soul, and mind.

It should work that way for us.

We think sometimes Jonah should have been left in the belly of the fish.

And we should have been left in the depths, too.

But God.

Friends, it's entirely possible to genuinely have, possess, correct theology, and still be holding back from God.

It's possible to thank God genuinely for rescuing you from the consequences of your own running.

You can be sincere to God.

Thank you for rescuing me while quietly maintaining the same attitude that caused you to run in the first place.

It's possible to be grateful for the mercy that you've received in salvation without being ready to give that to others.

Jonah can declare from inside the fish that salvation belongs to the Lord while his heart has not moved an inch toward Nineveh.

We do this.

We receive grace and then sit on it without extending it to others.

We are grateful for the patience that God has extended to us while being impatient with others.

We sing the right words on Sunday morning while resisting the change that God has been pursuing in us for years.

Jonah's prayer from inside the fish is incredible because it's biblically and theologically rich and accurate.

The massive question is whether it comes from a changed heart and how complete that change is.

So we've seen God sovereignly chase down Jonah.

We've seen Jonah respond to God, and we return now to the second chance that God gives Jonah.

It's a single verse.

Verse 10.

Yahweh spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

What did God say?

We don't know.

We don't know, but it's reminiscent of Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Where God speaks and creation obeys.

God speaks again to a non-human creature.

Once more, the non-human creature responds immediately and completely.

There's no negotiation, there's no delay.

God speaks, the fish obeys.

Jonah lands on a beach somewhere, alive, probably disoriented, smelling of fish bile and seawater, skin bleached from stomach acid.

And he's about to receive the same command from God again.

The mercy of this moment is amazing.

And it's easy to miss because the verse is only one sentence long.

But imagine, if you can, what it would be like to be Jonah.

He's running from God as far as the ancient world allowed.

He was hurled overboard in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

He's dying inside of a divinely appointed sea creature, and now he's lying on a beach alive.

Crazy.

But the same God who sent the fish does not leave Jonah on the beach to figure out his next step.

Chapter three opens with the same words from the beginning of chapter one.

Arise.

Go to Nineveh, that great city.

The commission is unchanged.

The destination is unchanged.

The calling is unchanged.

Friends, God's grace and God's calling are not two different things.

The mercy that rescued Jonah is the same mercy that reassigns him.

The God who pursued him and turned him around sends him in the same direction he always intended for him to go.

We aren't told how much time elapses between chapter 2, verse 10, and chapter 3, verse 1.

We often imagine it's instantaneous.

Jonah lies on the beach, maybe God lets him rest there for 30 seconds, and then, get up, Jonah, go.

We don't know.

We're not told.

It could be weeks, it could be months, it could be days, it could be immediately.

But one thing is certain God's pursuing mercy does not rescue you in order to leave you somewhere comfortable.

It rescues you to restore you to God's purpose that he intended in the first place.

It's comforting, isn't it, to know that Jonah's discipline by being swallowed by a fish and taken down is not the end of the story.

The belly of the fish is not punishment that concludes with Jonah's release from a prison.

It's the place where a man who had been running in one direction is reoriented to the one he had been running from.

Jonah's been brought so low that he finally is forced to look up.

And now that he looks up, he has nowhere else to go.

So the descent is over.

There's no more going down.

Jonah went down from Israel to Joppa, down into the ship, down into the hold, down to the seafloor, to the realm of death itself.

And every step he was going further from God's calling and further from the life God intended for him.

And at the very bottom, where every reasonable expectation says the story should end, there he found something he did not expect.

He found that God was already there.

Amazingly, God was not waiting to punish him.

Some of you know what it means when I say that sometimes the greatest mercy is the greatest punishment.

Because you know I deserve whatever I'm gonna get.

And instead you get mercy and you just feel terrible.

Jonah.

Jonah didn't receive punishment at the bottom of the sea.

God did not abandon him.

God was not done with him.

God's mercy pursued Jonah to the farthest, darkest, most inaccessible place that running could take him, and then God's mercy turned him around.

I'm sure that being vomited out by a great sea creature was not gentle.

But the intention of this passage within the scope of God's purpose is to make it a type, a shadow, a pointer towards a much greater story.

God did not merely pursue a runaway prophet into the deep, deep sea.

That's not all that happens here.

Because in the fullness of time, God sent his own son into the depths of death itself to pursue you.

God himself descended into a death we deserved, into a grave, into the darkness of the heart of the earth.

Whether Jonah died or not, I don't know.

Maybe we'll find out one day.

I do know that God the Son did die.

And he returned alive.

Salvation belongs to the Lord.

Jonah said it from inside of the fish, stinking like fish, his head wrapped in seaweed, and he was right.

Salvation belongs to the Lord.

And that salvation provides mercy at the bottom.

Because God the Son descended to the bottom and returned so that he might rescue those who look up to him from the bottom.

Maybe you need to hear that message.

Cry out to him from the bottom.

Look up.

And Jonah will tell you he hears.

Because he's already there with you at the bottom.

But there's also an irony that this chapter leaves us with.

The mercy that rescued Jonah is the same mercy he is about to be sent to announce in Nineveh.

He will go to Nineveh, he will announce that mercy to Nineveh, and he will sit on a hillside and wait for the fire of Sodom and Gomorrah that never comes.

And then he will tell God that he'd rather die than watch God be merciful to somebody else.

The truth is already in his mouth before he hits the beach.

Salvation belongs to the Lord.

And he's free to give it to anyone.

It belongs to him, so he's free to give it.

Even to those who are dead in their trespasses and sins.

Chapter 3 will ask whether we've repented and received God's mercy.

That's not the question here.

Jonah received God's mercy.

The question of this chapter, chapter 2, is whether you've looked up to the one who calls you to himself.

And then following that question is the question if you're willing to be the one who carries that mercy to the people you'd rather God didn't give it to.

We should rejoice with thankful hearts, like Jonah did when we receive God's mercy.

We should rejoice in his salvation.

We should.

Let's pray together.

Lord, we've always we've all been in a place where we've been hesitant.

We've lacked grace and mercy towards others and judged them in our hearts.

Forgive us.

Cleanse us and give us new hearts and new minds that desire for everyone to hear that salvation belongs to you.

Lord, keep on doing your rescuing work.

Rescue us if necessary, and rescue others.

Guide our hearts to always proclaim joyfully and be willing to receive all who have received your mercy, so that they too might proclaim that salvation belongs to you.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

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