"The Kind of Prayer God Answers" Jonah 2 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Let me ask you to open your Bibles to the book of Jonah, chapter two.

In contrast with how we have rolled the previous weeks, we're gonna look at the whole chapter today.

And uh God willing, we'll look at uh chapter three next week and finish the book in in a few weeks.

Let me read up for us Jonah chapter two.

To begin, I'll give you a few more seconds to make your way there.

Finish downloading your Bibles.

Jonah chapter two.

Verse one.

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 your waves and 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 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 Yahweh, my God, when my life was fainting away.

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.

This is the word of God.

This is the not just the word of God, but this is the word of God from the belly of a fish, huh?

I don't know if there's another passage in Scripture written under these circumstances.

I don't think so.

The theme of this chapter is a word that in the ESV is not even in there.

The theme of this chapter is the word grace, the concept of grace.

As I mentioned, unless you're reading the NIV, which uses it down in verse 8, it's not mentioned in this whole chapter, but the concept of God's grace hangs over this story like a cloud.

If you remember, Jonah was told to go to Nineveh.

He was told by God clearly.

We don't know how and in what way, but he was told by God clearly what he was supposed to do and where he was supposed to go.

And Jonah did not argue with God with his lips, but defied God with his feet.

God said, Go 50, 75 miles northeast.

Jonah set his sight on a thousand miles to the west and took off, got out of dodge, and the Lord did not let him get away.

And that really is the story of Jonah.

Now we have made much about the problem of the book of Jonah for the Jewish people.

And I've mentioned that the Jews read Jonah every year on Yom Kippur.

They end their reading by the echoing of this phrase.

When Jonah is read, everybody says in unison, we are all Jonah.

And that's their way of harmony with Jonah.

After all, Jonah, the first words out of his mouth in this book is that I'm a Hebrew, and so the Jews view it as their obligation to resonate with that and to declare that they too are Jonah.

But the real issue in Jonah is the question the book ends with that Jonah is going to grapple with in chapter two.

And that's the question is is it okay for God to show grace and mercy to wicked people?

And remember, this is not just in the abstract of wicked people like, you know, there's mean people over there or bad people.

Hey, we're all sinners.

Should God show grace to anyone?

This is wicked people in the context of those that did the first Holocaust, that attacked Israel, that destroyed their capital city, that executed untold hundreds of thousands of them and took them into captivity.

This is that group of people.

And so God's question is should I show mercy to them?

You know, it became a popular political gotcha question a few years ago to ask somebody.

Could God forgive Hitler if Hitler asked for forgiveness?

And that's an impossible question for a politician, of course, to answer in a way that doesn't either, you know, go against Christianity or defy political expectations.

Multiply that question by a million, and you have the question the book of Jonah ends with.

Is it okay for God to forgive those people?

And Jonah says no.

But Jonah is too much of a sophisticated prophet to say no with his lips.

And so he runs and God catches him and drags him back.

That's the problem behind the book of Jonah.

And you need to have that in your mind to get Jonah's prayer in chapter two.

The problem is, should God show grace to that nation that is going to do the first Jewish Holocaust?

Should God show grace to them?

And Jonah is caught on the boat, of course, in a storm.

Jonah does not receive the storm as a token of God's grace.

He receives a storm of punishment, punitive.

And this is definitely the way the human mind views God's interaction with us.

If we do good, God should do good to us.

If we are disobeying, then that's probably going to result in God punishing us in some way.

That's the normal works righteousness approach to interacting with God.

So when you encounter a trial in your life, people's hearts, they first go to that question, what did I do to deserve this, right?

You even have friends that may ask you that.

They're going through a trial, and their question to you might be, What did I do to deserve this?

I don't feel like I did anything to deserve this.

There was that one time I lied, or the one time I stole, or the one time I was mean to my wife, or whatever, but this is an overreaction by God.

That's the normal way the human mind works.

It associates whatever negative consequences we're experiencing right now with our own action, and we try to, you know, balance it out.

That leads to negotiating with God.

Like, God, I promise that I won't do that bad thing again if you take away this bad thing from me.

And I want you to compare those two thoughts in your mind.

First of all, Jonah doesn't want to go to the Ninevites because there's no way they deserve God's grace.

They're too wicked.

Over here, I'm experiencing this penalty from God, this storm from God, this God's hitting me in the face with a hurricane, which has to be punishment for my actions.

Do you see how it's the same thinking?

They don't deserve grace because they're wicked.

I am being punished because I'm wicked.

And so Jonah, in the midst of the hurricane, doesn't pray for grace.

He doesn't pray at all.

Despite the fact the captain is grabbing him and yelling at him and begging him and beseeching him, Would you please pray to your God?

Maybe he can help us.

And Jonah even lets the cat out of the bag, so to speak, when he says, My God is the one who made the oceans.

But no, I won't pray to him.

You're on your own there, Captain.

And of course, this ends with Jonah being a pre-incarnate substitution here before the death of Christ.

Jonah becomes a symbol of substitution, of propitiation, that the sins of Jonah have been placed in the sailors.

They're now stuck in the hurricane.

The sailors then transfer their sins back to Jonah, imputing their sin unto Jonah.

Jonah becomes the sacrifice for their sins as he goes overboard to propitiate the wrath of God.

God's wrath is held back based upon the sacrifice of Jonah, and the sailors have forgiveness.

And they begin worshiping.

It's a little picture of the gospel right there on the boat.

And that should be a hint about what's going to happen next, because God is not dealing with the sailors as their deeds required.

The sailors are being wicked and idle worshiping.

The sailors were literally rowing against God.

And yet, despite the sailors doing nothing to earn forgiveness, God forgives them based upon the sacrifice that God Himself expressed the desire for.

Jonah, as the prophet said, you throw me overboard and you'll have your forgiveness.

Now you have Jonah in the drink, Jonah treading water.

And I don't even picture Jonah treading water.

I picture him giving up and going down.

Jonah has submitted himself to the execution here.

And so you should ask yourself, in what terms is God going to deal with Jonah?

Is God going to deal with Jonah on Jonah's terms, which is Jonah's been doing bad, and so he deserves punishment?

Or is God going to deal with Jonah on his own terms, which is namely grace?

Is God going to show Jonah grace in this moment?

And the answer, of course, is yes, if you've read the rest of the book, the word grace is going to become a theme in chapters three and four.

God is going to demonstrate that he is a grace-showing and a grace-giving God.

He showed grace to the sailors even by letting Jonah be a castaway.

That's going to be the means of their salvation.

They took a renegade prophet on board, and that's going to be the means of their own salvation.

God is going to show grace to Jonah here in a very unusual way.

This passage here describes the point of impact between a gracious God and a runaway sinner.

The sinner here is running away from God, but they has a head-on collision with God anyway.

And I just find that humorous.

Normally, head-on collisions don't work that way.

Normally, if if you see things are going in different, if this guy's going away from God and God's going that way, they're not going to have a head-on collision unless they go all the way around the whole world, you know?

But here Jonah thinks he's running away from God.

He can't get away from him.

He even says in chapter 1, he's fleeing from Yahweh's presence.

In fact, it says that twice.

He's trying to get away from him.

If anything, you would picture God catching him from behind.

But what a powerful picture that God doesn't catch him from behind.

Jonah thinks he's running away from God and he collides head on.

A hundred miles an hour.

And it's a collision of the gracious God with his runaway saint.

The sinning sin.

I want to even give that as an outline this morning.

What happens when Yahweh's grace meets the sinning saints?

And I say Yahweh's grace here.

The most common word in the book of Jonah is Yahweh, and you know, the 40 verses or whatever in Jonah, you see Yahweh's covenant name, God's covenant name used 29 times.

It's in almost every verse of this book.

It begins this scenario here in chapter 1, verse 17, Yahweh appointed the great fish.

It ends this chapter, verse 10 of chapter 2.

Yahweh spoke to the fish.

This is all about Yahweh.

He is the only one who's really acting in this narrative, isn't he?

Everybody else thinks they're acting.

Everybody else is spinning their wheels.

Everybody else is going through their emotions.

But God is the only real actor in this.

Everybody does what they want to do, but it's God's will that will come to pass according to the method God has desired.

It's God in verse 17 of chapter 1 who appoints the fish to swallow Jonah.

It's God who sends Jonah back to the Ninevehes.

It's God, who in verse 10 of chapter 2, who speaks to the fish.

This is all Yahweh is doing.

Yahweh is showing grace here to his runaway sinning saints, his prophet who's fleeing from his presence.

This is a wild display of God's grace.

And I love this picture of God's grace because it's at an extreme.

And so you can sometimes reason from the lesser to the greater and see small displays of God's grace, but the normal way that Scripture describes God's grace is from the greater to the lesser.

If you can see God chase down a renegade, runaway prophet like this, imagine what he can do in your own life.

First, Yahweh's grace can make you die.

God's grace can make you die.

And that's the language that Jonah uses.

It began in chapter 1, verse 17.

Jonah was in the belly of the fish.

This is the language Jesus picks up.

We looked at this last week to describe his own death.

It's the sign of Jonah.

As we mentioned, Jonah is quoted by Jesus by name more than any other prophet.

And Jesus loved to quote Jonah by name for this exact reason.

He was a prophet sent to the Gentiles to give grace to those that were opposed to the Jews.

This upsets the Pharisees, and it becomes the sign of the Savior that the prophet that sent to the Gentiles will die.

The gospel will go forward in the world built upon the wounds and the suffering and the martyrdom of the messengers, specifically the death of Jesus Christ.

As Jonah died, so Jesus will die.

Jonah was an arrow pointing to Jesus' literal death, and this is the grace.

Obviously, with the death of Jesus, you see how it's God's grace.

God treated Jesus according to our sins.

He was punished for our sins, and yet it becomes a display of God's grace towards us.

Here's where you see punishment and grace overlapping.

God put Jesus to death for our sins.

It was the death that our sins deserved.

And yet it's the vehicle for delivering us grace.

If Jesus didn't die for us, there'd be no means of us receiving God's grace.

And so you have that as your grid.

That the death of the messenger becomes the means of which grace enters the world.

The death of Jonah here in the whale is the door through which the gospel enters the Gentile world.

And it is true in this instance with Jonah's life as well.

Jonah's own being brought to the step of death.

Jonah's own entrance into the world of death is the door through which he receives God's grace.

Now God's grace has been after him this whole book.

The word of the Lord coming to him is God's grace.

The boat is God's grace because the boat's going to take him where he wants to go, even though he buys the ticket in the opposite direction.

He doesn't realize it was a round-trip ticket he bought.

The storm is God's grace.

And here in chapter 1, verse 17, then chapter 2, verse 1, the belly of the fish, the belly of the fish becomes God's grace.

And do you recognize that none of those, this is this first point, none of those are received by him as God's grace.

None of them.

They are all received as punishment when they happen.

It's only in the rearview mirror that you see they have, they were gracious provision.

The moment he experiences the call from the Lord, he takes it as vindicative of God, as God punishing him.

The moment he's stuck in the storm, he takes it as God punishing him.

The moment he plops in the water, he's submitting himself to death.

And we talked about this last week.

The moment he's swallowed by the fish certainly was not received as grace.

Nobody says, Praise God, I got eaten by a whale.

Yet only in the rear view mirror do you see that all of these things at the time he thought were punitive were actually displays of grace, of mercy on his life.

Jonah was expecting death because he expected God to deal with him as his sins deserved.

Jonah's not arguing with God here.

Notice that at no point does Jonah say, I don't deserve this.

He knows better.

He knows better.

He knows he deserves all this and more.

Instead, what Jonah doesn't deserve is grace.

And that's why it's so unexpected for him when he sees it.

Now Jonah knows this is the Lord who's doing this to him.

After all, it was the sailors who threw him overboard, but Jonah has dusted himself for fingerprints here and sees Yahweh's hands all over him.

He knows this was God who threw him overboard.

In fact, he says that in here in verse 3 of chapter 2.

Notice you cast me into the deep.

This is God who is doing this.

Notice the possessive pronouns in verse 3.

All your waves and all your billows passed over me.

Jonah knows this is from the Lord.

The waves are his.

The deep surrounded me, pre-fish.

He's drowning.

Now he's in the fish.

Weeds are wrapped around my head.

I mean, you don't want to make too much of the fish, but it is worth just imagining what in the world is going on in the belly of a fish.

I don't think it matters if it's a fish or a whale.

Certainly a shark could be big enough to do this.

There's a sea dragon.

It could be a sea dragon.

And I mentioned last week the word in the gospels that's used here, it's a word that could be translated whale.

It's also a word that could be translated sea dragon.

There's a, you know, it could be some species of fish that's extinct, but here it doesn't matter at all, except for this reason.

If it's a whale, a whale is a mammal, and it would be hot for Jonah inside.

Hot.

If it's a shark, a shark is a fish, and it would be cold for Jonah inside.

Neither are going to be kept at ambient room temperature.

So he's in there with fish guts.

I mean, I'm sure sharks and whales eat about the same thing.

I don't know what sea dragons eat.

Same sharks and whales, probably.

Seaweed is wrapped around his head, sloshing back and forth.

It would be loud, I would imagine.

I don't think they gave him the noise-cancelling headphones some of you are accustomed to.

And this is the trauma, and Jonah recognizes what he had said in chapter one, by the way, is that the Lord is doing this.

In chapter one, he knew the storm was of the Lord.

Here he realizes even the seaweed wrapped around his head is of the Lord.

The Lord is choking him out.

He's wrapped up here in burial clothes.

And you've seen the seaweed, and not the kind of thing you're thinking of like what's wrapped in a sushi, not that kind of seaweed.

Think of those big nets of stuff that wash on shore that have the leaves on it and those little syringes like you put in a baby's nose kind of thing, all attached to it.

That's the massive seaweed that's described here.

And he's all wrapped up in this.

It's choking him to death as he's inside of a fish.

This is described in Psalm 18, verses 4 through 5.

Psalms 18:4–5

The cords of death surrounded me.

Torrents and destruction overwhelmed me.

The cords of Sheol entangled me.

Remember, last week we talked about how Jonah borrows language from the Psalms about Sheol, about death, and uses it to describe himself.

Of course, Jesus picks up on that, and Peter picks up on that in the New Testament as well.

Here, he's wrapped in these seaweed, and Jonah 2, it's seaweed, but he's quoting from Psalm 18, which describes it as the cords of Sheol.

The snares of death confronted me.

And Psalm 18, verse 5 says, In my distress I called to Yahweh, and I cried to God for help.

Psalms 18:5

By Jonah quoting Psalm 18 here, he's letting you know that he's crying out to God.

Now, why would he call to God?

Because it's God who's doing this to him.

Psalm 69, verse 1, the waters have come up to my neck, the floods sweep over me.

Psalms 69:1

Also quoted in Jonah 2.

As I mentioned, all of this prayer is taken from the Psalms.

Jonah does not use original language here.

He takes the Psalms and applies them.

And he doesn't take random Psalms here.

He takes Psalms about death.

He takes Psalms about suffering and about the grave and applies them to himself in the belly of the fish.

Why does Jonah know that God works like this?

Why does Jonah have confidence that God is the one who's after him?

Because this is the typical way that God works.

God does not let people get away from him.

When God sets his sights on someone, he's going to go get that person.

God does not come back empty-handed.

He's the, of course, the shepherd who lost a sheep and goes after him and will find the sheep.

He'll leave the 99 to go after the one, and he will fetch the one and he will bring the one back.

The one never gets away.

Have you noticed that with God?

The one never gets away.

God knows how to get his children and he will bring them back to himself.

God has a gracious determination in himself to not let us get away from him.

Now, what means does God use to go after people with his grace?

Often it is suffering and affliction.

Seldom is it prosperity.

Seldom does God go after a wandering saint by blessing him with prosperity.

And that's the way we often think that if, oh, if God blessed me, then I'd be more inclined to worship him.

And that's not normally the gracious way God goes after his wandering people.

He normally doesn't let them win the lottery so they see what riches are like and then bring them back.

You have Ecclesiastes chapter 2 that maps out that I'm not saying God never does that.

Ecclesiastes 2 · chapter mention

He does do that in Ecclesiastes chapter 2.

Ecclesiastes 2 · chapter mention

Solomon writes about it so that you will learn that God doesn't have to do it to you.

And Solomon even says in Ecclesiastes chapter 2 that's actually worse for you that way than if God just went after you with suffering right out the gate.

Ecclesiastes 2 · chapter mention

We don't believe that though.

We say, oh God, I've you can come after me with a lottery ticket.

I'll learn the lesson of Ecclesiastes too.

I'll learn it.

But the normal way God goes after his wayward children is through suffering.

It is through afflictions.

Somebody asked me this week, if God is sovereign over everything, why does he keep telling us that he's sovereign over trials?

Why doesn't he just say I'm sovereign over everything and leave it at that?

And the answer is because when you're going through a trial, when you're in the belly of the fish, so to speak, do you appreciate how comforting?

It is to know that the fish belongs to God.

When you're going through suffering, what else are you going to do for comfort than believe that this is all under the authority of God and that He's actually using it not to punish you, but to be a vehicle of grace for you?

If you don't believe that, you're given over to a craven sense of fear and despair.

If you don't believe that God is at work in your trial for your good and his glory, then you would be given over to grief and anguish.

And so this is why God goes after Jonah with the fish to win him back.

And it will eventually be known by Jonah, and if not by Jonah, by us as a vehicle of God's grace.

This is if this fish had a name, it would be the fish of grace.

On a very literal sense, it's saving Jonah from death, but on a bigger sense, it's a bringing about God's will in Jonah's life.

So it forces you to ask yourself, is God's will better for Jonah or Jonah's will better for Jonah?

By the end of the book, you never know if Jonah's persuaded.

That's why the book ends with a question.

You never know which box of Jonah finally ends up checking.

But we know.

We know that God's will ends up being better for Jonah than Jonah's will.

So even though Jonah went screaming and kicking and vomiting out the whole way, God did this to him for his good.

There's a theological category called irresistible grace, and people have objected to it.

It's not my favorite name for it, the category of irresistible grace, and I've heard people object to it by saying there's no such thing as irresistible grace because anybody who wants to can resist God.

I'm sure you've heard that.

Anyone who wants to can resist God.

And that's true.

That's not what irresistible grace means.

It doesn't mean that you can't resist it.

It means that you can't successfully resist it.

Jonah becomes a picture of irresistible grace.

Did Jonah resist God's grace?

Absolutely.

Did he resist God's grace successfully?

Absolutely not.

I mean, where did God's grace want him to go?

Nineveh.

Where does Jonah end up?

Nineveh.

How does God get him there?

By almost killing him.

That's what I mean by God's grace makes you die.

You have to have a category in your mind for God being so persistent in his grace after you, for God so dogmatically wanting to catch you and keep you from running too far away that he will use his grace even to bring you to the point of death.

I have a neighbor whose dog named Jag.

I got to walk Jag last week.

Jag is the strongest dog I have ever walked.

You can't tie Jag to an oak tree because Jag would walk the oak tree.

And the choke collar on Jag, he doesn't associate the choke collar with punishment.

He doesn't.

So I tried explaining to him this week that the choke collar is actually a means of grace in your life, Jag.

The more it chokes you, the more you learn that I actually don't want you to run into traffic.

I don't want you to get shot by a police officer, Jag.

So you need to stay next to me.

Because Jag would totally do it.

The collar is the means of grace.

Now it's humorous when it's about Jag, but do you understand that God's grace is often a choke collar around your life?

That if you run from him, do not be surprised if he yanks you back.

And if at the moment you bark at him and you say, how dare you?

How dare you constrain me like this?

You have to zoom out.

Just remember, Jonah, that sometimes God's grace makes you die.

Sometimes God's grace brings you to the point of repentance.

Now I'm not saying that every form of suffering in your life is a choke collar from God.

I'm not saying that if you're suffering or going through difficulty right now, that it is because you've sinned in some way.

Remember, that's the wrong way of thinking about this.

God is not dealing with Jonah as his sins deserve.

His sins deserve death.

His sins did not deserve a helpful wail.

But oftentimes suffering is a means, not punitive, because if it was punitive, it wouldn't be gracious.

Not punitive, but offering, oftentimes suffering is the means that God uses to steer you.

And it becomes a form of grace.

It doesn't get worse than what Jonah experiencing right here.

His execution chamber, the location of his final torment, the means of him leaving this world in as painful a way as possible.

He will find himself opening his eyes in the very presence of the God from which he was running.

That's how you expect this to go.

But lo, the fish turns out to be a lifeboat.

A hospital for his soul, a means of deliverance for his life.

I remember Jonia Erickson Tata, the Christian apologist and evangelist.

You know her story.

When she was a teenager, she dove into a lake, hit her head, became paralyzed for the rest of her life.

She writes in her autobiography, quote, I don't really mind the inconvenience of being paralyzed if my faithfulness to God while in this wheelchair will bring glory to him.

When God brings suffering into your life as a Christian, be it mild or drastic, he's forcing you to decide on issues you've been avoiding.

Today, as I look back, I'm convinced that the whole ordeal of my paralysis was inspired by, listen to this, was inspired by the grace of God.

God's grace sometimes brings you to the point of death.

Well, not only does God's grace make you die, second, God's grace can make you cry.

And here, Jonah cries out to God.

Look at verse 2.

I called out to Yahweh.

And it's a simple word.

It's all over the Psalms.

It was in Psalm 3, we read it.

It's all over the Psalms.

The psalmist keep crying out to God.

But it's unusual for Jonah.

This is the first time in the book Jonah has tried it.

Despite, remember, despite the sea captain yelling at him and saying, You need to pray to your God.

Jonah has not prayed until this point.

But now he opens his mouth.

And he opens his mouth in the most unusual prayer closet in Scripture, that's for sure.

Jonah 2, verse 3, he was cast down.

Jonah 2:3

Jonah 2, verse 4, he was cast out from Yahweh.

Jonah 2:4

Nevertheless, he's crying out to Yahweh here.

This is a reference to Psalm 34, verse 6.

Psalms 34:6

The poor man cried and Yahweh heard him and saved him from his troubles.

And this is a powerfully rich prayer.

At no point in this prayer, do you notice this when we read it earlier?

At no point in this prayer does Jonah ask for deliverance.

Jonah doesn't ask to be rescued.

Did you catch that?

He never said, God, get me out of here.

I promise I'll be he didn't do a Martin Luther prayer.

God, don't let me get eaten by the whale and I'll be a missionary.

I'll even go to Nineveh.

No, none of that here.

He doesn't pray for relief.

In that sense, this is a prayer of submission, not of petition.

This is a prayer where he submits his life to the will of God, not where he's petitioning for God to change his mind.

Jonah knows God's word.

He members it well.

And the remarkable thing about this is not only does Jonah know all these Psalms, not only does he so familiar with the Psalter that he knows it and can recall it in the most adverse of circumstances, but notice that he knows it, recalls it, and applies it to himself.

He takes these psalms and he's so gifted at applying them to himself.

And that should be a challenge to you, by the way.

It's one thing to know scripture, it's another thing to have it memorized, but it is an entirely different ballpark of practical theology to know it and have it memorized and be able to apply it to yourself in a situation like this.

And that's what Jonah does with ease.

The psalm flows out.

He doesn't have the Psalter with him, okay?

He doesn't have the treasury of David with him in the fish.

This is all from memory.

And he takes this random collection of psalms, mostly psalms about suffering in the ocean, suffering in Sheol, and applies them to himself.

It should be convicting to know that Jonah's not afraid to pray to God, even when he knows he's being afflicted for his own disobedience.

And this is where you start to see Jonah realizing that God is not dealing with him his sins deserve.

It plays out in chapter 2 here.

At the start of chapter 2, he knows he's being punished for his sins.

By the end of chapter 2, he realizes this is actually grace.

This is God working with him in a gracious way.

It's not giving him what he deserves, it's giving him the ability to follow God's word.

Jonah's desire to escape what he thought was God's judgment betrays, by the way, his knowledge of grace.

He didn't want the Ninevehites, but now that he's in trouble, he relies on God's grace and prays to him.

But even now he doesn't ask for forgiveness.

Instead, he submits himself to the gracious will of God.

I don't think that's reading too much into this because notice that his prayer here, he doesn't ask for deliverance, but he prays with confidence that he will still be a worshiper.

Look at verse 4.

I said, I'm driven away from your sight.

Notice that line.

I said I'm driven away from your sight.

I'm driven away from your sight.

He's the one who ran away from God's presence, remember?

Twice in chapter one he says that, but now I shall again in verse four look upon your holy temple.

He's quoting from a psalm of ascent.

One of the psalms of ascent we looked at on Sundays a few months back.

The psalms that they would sing on their way to Jerusalem, Jonah quotes from those psalms now.

And he's probably swimming by Jerusalem when he says that.

This is the most unusual place the Psalm of Ascents have ever been quoted.

Normally it'd be on the road from Jericho down to Jerusalem.

Here it's on the Mediterranean Sea as he passes by.

One commentator said that he takes the Psalms of Ascent and makes some psalms of descent down into the whale.

He says, I will again look upon your temple.

Verse 9, I will pay my vows.

Notice that he is stalking, he's putting his hope here in the fact that he will be a worshiper.

He does not know how this is going to end.

He's not expecting to be vomited up in Nineveh here.

He doesn't know how the story ends, but he knows that he will still be a worshiper.

That's what I mean by he doesn't pray for deliverance.

He submits himself to God's word.

And he says, Lord, whatever you're going to do, I will look again on your temple.

And I don't think by this he means he's physically going to get back to Jerusalem.

Remember, he was a prophet in the northern kingdom anyway.

I think he means by this is he references that God is in his temple in verse 7.

I think he's taking confidence that he will look upon the Lord.

No matter what happens to him, if Sheol wins, if the seaweed chokes him out, he has confidence he will look upon Yahweh again.

He will pay his vows.

In other words, he probably made a commitment when he became a prophet.

He probably vowed that he would always carry God's word.

He's broken that vow now, clearly.

And so in the whale, he's repenting of that and saying, I will keep my vows.

He's learned the lesson of Psalm 139, verse 8.

Psalms 139:8

If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

And that sounds punitive, doesn't it?

If I make my bed in the grave, we even have the idiom.

You made your bed, now you lie in it.

Sleep in it.

Okay?

You made your bed, you deal with the consequences.

Jonas says, I made my bed in Sheol.

But the good side of that is that means you can pray to God from there.

No matter how bad your circumstance, listen carefully.

No matter how bad your circumstance, no matter how wicked you've been, no matter how much you've run from the Lord, you can still pray to him.

And there's an evil, wicked thought that gets into people's minds.

They feel like I have been too sinful and too wicked, I can't pray to God.

He wouldn't hear me.

Oh no, my friend.

You can make your bed and shiol, and guess what?

He's still there.

If you've run as far as you can get from God, guess what?

You're still one prayer away from a head-on collision with him.

And that's the good news.

And I pray that you believe that in your own life.

That you have taken your feet, not all of you, but I'm sure there are some of you in this room that have taken your feet as far away as they can get from God.

And you run, run, run, run Jonah's style, not wanting to honor him, not wanting to obey him, not wanting to listen to him.

And maybe you've finally given up like Jonah did and submitted yourself to whatever consequence happens to your sin.

You say, I know it was a mistake for me to sin this way, so God just let the bad things happen to me.

Do you recognize at that point that's where God can hear your prayer?

No matter how far you've run from him, you're one prayer away from restoration.

Always.

Always.

Well, thirdly, God's grace makes you die, God's grace makes you cry, and thirdly, God's grace can make you fly.

Literally, Jonas style.

The fish vomited him out.

But I don't mean that flying through the air in this style.

I mean that God can restore him, God can elevate him.

Look at verse 8.

Those who pray, pay regard to vain idols, forsake their hope of steadfast love.

Verse 8 in the NIV, those who pray their idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.

And I love that translation.

Those who pray to idols, forfeit the grace that could be theirs.

Let that sink in for a second.

If you pray to idols, you don't get this kind of grace.

This is another way of saying this.

Can your God do this, what you see in Jonah chapter 2?

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Can your God do this?

Let's look at the book of Jonah.

Can the idols the sailors are worshiping do this?

No way.

What happened to those idols, by the way?

They got pitched overboard.

Those idols were worthless.

They were dead weight.

They were causing the storm and that the boat couldn't balance them.

The idols get pitched overboard.

Can your God do this?

What do you serve?

What do you worship in your life?

What do you pray to?

If you don't pray to God, who do you pray to?

Who do you trust?

Yourself, your money, your job, your resources, your family, whatever.

Can any of those things do this?

Can any of those things go after you when you wander away and bring you back into God's will for your life?

Can any of them do that?

And the answer is no.

And if you worship the idols, or if you worship yourself, or if you worship money, or you worship success, or you worship your family, or whatever, you have chapter 2, verse 8 all over you.

Just a question to you: can those things give you grace?

If you worship those things, you forfeit the grace that could be yours.

God is a gracious God and is willing to give you grace.

He's willing to dispense grace.

But if you worship idols, you forfeit that.

You don't experience that.

This is a classic kind of setup in the Bible of can your God do what my God can do?

I have a picture go to my daughter's swim team and the two teams chant back and forth about how you'll be eating our bubbles, you know, those kind of swim team trash talk right there.

And that's Jonah style right here.

Can your God do this?

Can your God show this kind of grace?

Can your God use a whale to be a vehicle of grace?

Can Dagon do this?

If Jonah had prayed to Poseidon or to the Phoenician gods, he would still be at the bottom of the ocean, right along with their idols.

But because he prays to Yahweh, his prayer is heard.

Psalm 86, verse 13, you've delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.

Psalms 86:13

Chapter 2, verse 3, God, you cast me down, but God, you bring me up.

My sin cast me out, he says in verse 4.

But then God brings him back in.

Jonah at the end of the Psalm is expressing to God that this all belongs to you.

Look at verse 7, it sums it all up.

When my life was fainting away, when he was dying, I remembered the Lord.

So now he cries out to him.

My prayer came to you.

So the grace made him die at the start of verse 7.

The grace made him cry in the middle of verse 7.

And then in verse 8, I'll be back in your holy temple.

The grace makes him fly.

It goes in that order.

He died, he cried, and he fled.

Not good English, but it rhymes, okay?

The end of the psalm, Jonah is expressing this basic fact that God will kill him to show him grace.

So he prays to him to resurrect him.

This is exactly the sign of the Savior that Jesus will take our sin, will suffer and die in our place.

He will cry out to God.

God will hear his cry.

He will be resurrected from the grave, giving us newness of life and forgiveness of sins.

And that's how this verse ends.

This prayer ends.

Look at the last phrase in verse 9.

Salvation belongs to Yahweh.

Salvation belongs to God.

Salvation is his.

Salvation comes from God.

And you can picture this with what's called the doctrine of Asiody.

Life is in God.

Life belongs to God.

If you have life, it's because you've borrowed it from Him.

The same thing is true with salvation.

Salvation belongs to God.

It is His.

And if He dispenses it to you, you can possess it.

If you have salvation, you didn't get it from Dagon.

You didn't get it from the Phoenicians.

You didn't get it from the idols.

You didn't get it from yourself.

Salvation belongs to Yahweh.

That's the theme of this prayer.

That's where this ends.

Salvation is his.

It has a source in God's plan in eternity past.

The plan of salvation, a phrase we use all the time.

The plan of salvation.

Whose plan of salvation?

God's plan of salvation.

It belongs to him.

It's enacted in the world through God's dramatic intervention, and it's all of him.

Psalm 119, verse 67.

Psalms 119:67

Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep your word.

When the New Testament picks us up, that's exactly where it goes.

The New Testament picks us up that this is a sign of Jonah that will be given.

The last sign the Jews will get, of course, they get all the other signs that Jesus does after that, but the sign that will remain as condemning them is that Jesus did die.

He did rise from the grave to bring salvation to the world.

This whole book is summarized with this main point.

Salvation comes from Yahweh.

Jonah has his return ticket to Nineveh.

He's going to be puked out there at the end of chapter 2, verse 10.

And we'll see what happens to him there next week.

Salvation belongs to you and to no one else.

You are the author, as Scripture says, of salvation.

The book of life is written by you.

It is your book.

Jesus Christ, our crucified and resurrected Savior, is the word of God incarnate.

It's your word.

Salvation is all of you.

We would never have designed it this way.

We would have never designed a fish to swallow a renegade prophet to go to a recalcitrant people.

That would not have been our plan.

We would never have designed a cross where God Himself becomes a man and goes to it to make atonement for sins.

This would never have been our plan.

And yet it's yours revealed to the world clearly through your word.

I pray for anyone who's here today that has never trusted you.

I pray today that they would stop running from you.

I pray for anyone here who is a sinning saint, anybody who is who knows who you are as Jonah did, but is running away from you.

I pray this morning they would stop their running and would turn to you and pray as Jonah did.

Lord, we're thankful for the knowledge that no matter how far we have run, we're always one step back.

We're grateful that step is all it takes to turn and to call to you and you hear our prayers.

You forgive us our sins, because you are a God who is gracious and who will save.

We give you thanks in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.