Jonah: The Judgment Seat or the Lifeguard Chair | Guest Speaker: Bill Fullilove

Well, we're reading this morning from the book of Jonah, chapters one and two.

So if you'll read with me and then we'll pray and be seated.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amitai.

Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.

But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish.

He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port.

After paying the fare he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.

Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up.

All the sailors were afraid, and each cried out to his own God, and they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.

But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep.

The captain went down to him and said, How can you sleep?

Get up and call on your God.

Maybe he will take notice of us, so that we will not perish.

Then the sailors said to each other, Come, let us cast lots to find out who's responsible for this calamity.

They cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

So they asked him, Tell us who is responsible for making all this trouble for us?

What kind of work do you do?

Where do you come from?

What is your country?

From what people are you?

He answered, I am a Hebrew, and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

This terrified them, and they asked, What have you done?

They knew he was running away from the Lord because he had already told them so.

The sea was getting rougher and rougher, so they asked him, What should we do?

What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?

Pick me up and throw me into the sea, he replied, and it will become calm.

I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.

Instead the men did their best to row back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before.

Then they cried out to the Lord, Please, Lord, do not let us die for taking this man's life.

Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, Lord, have done as you pleased.

Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm.

At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.

Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God, he said, In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me.

From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry.

You hurled into me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the current swirled about me, all your waves and breakers swept over me.

I said, I have been banished from your sight, yet I will look again toward your holy temple.

The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me, seaweed was wrapped around my head, to the roots of the mountains I sank down, the earth beneath barred me in forever.

But you, Lord, my God, brought my life up from the pit.

When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you to your holy temple.

Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God's love for them.

But I with shouts of grateful praise will sacrifice to you.

What I have vowed, I will make good.

I will say, salvation comes from the Lord.

And then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land.

This is God's word to us this morning.

Please be seated.

Let's pray.

God our Father, we would come to this slightly strange and perplexing story, and we pray that in coming to it we would not just learn about Jonah, but we would learn about ourselves and that we would meet you.

And in asking that, we're really asking, Lord, would you meet with us this morning?

So bless the meditations of our hearts as we look at the scripture together.

In Jesus' name we pray it.

Amen.

So about 2008, an acquaintance of mine, it'd be a little too much to call her a friend, she was a friend of a friend who is a documentary filmmaker.

Name was Laura Walters Henson, released what to me is one of the most powerful documentaries I've ever seen.

It's titled As We Forgive, and it chronicles some of the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Now, some of you remember this, others of you, I may need to give you the backstory.

In 1994, the nation of Rwanda just exploded into a just spasm of intratribal violence, racial violence, in which in just days, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan citizens were murdered, now, often with things like machetes, by their neighbors just because of what race they were and what tribe they came from.

And in the aftermath of this, the government was just completely overwhelmed.

You see, you don't set up a justice system to simultaneously investigate about 400,000 murders.

And years later, having this unbelievable backlog of cases and no clear way to deal with it, the Rwandan government released 50,000 perpetrators back into the very communities that they had tried to destroy.

In such a situation, justice just isn't going to happen.

It didn't and it wouldn't.

And so the Rwandan people were faced with the challenge of a much more difficult road to try to understand what forgiveness and reconciliation would look like in a situation like this.

And this documentary that she created follows the story of two ladies.

Two ladies who are trying to follow forgiveness as they, in fact, meet the two men who slaughtered their families years before.

And this is no happy clappy kumbaya trait forgiveness.

It is bracing, it is gut-wrenching on everyone involved.

And I can't watch that documentary without just wondering, could I do it?

I'm not sure I could.

I mean, I know I should.

And it's really easy to say things like, every sin can be forgiven in the gospel until there are sins against you.

And then suddenly forgiveness isn't trite or easy or anything else.

Could I do it?

I don't know if I could.

And this gets to something about the human condition.

We find it incredibly difficult to forgive.

Now, I mean, if you don't return my email or you don't call me back or you blow me off, you know, I can get over that.

You know, I've probably done it to half of you.

But when it's a deep gash in your soul, or sometimes even when it's not that deep, but it's, do you believe he did that?

Do you believe what my boyfriend said?

Do you believe what she did to me?

Do you believe what my mom, what my dad, what my cousin, what my kid.

And even when we say we forgive, let's be honest.

Most of the times we don't.

We say the words, but we know and we make it clear that they've got to earn their way back into our good grace.

You know, we get cold, we get quiet, we get loud, we make them come back to us, we cut off contact.

We have a million ways of taking it out on the other person, even while we're saying, oh, I forgive you.

Something about forgiveness just doesn't come easy.

And this morning we want to ask the question, why?

Why are we that way?

Why is forgiveness so hard?

And being so hard, why is it almost always untried?

And as we trace the narrative of Jonah that God's given us here, we learn why.

Because we're going to see that this is a story of a prophet who just doesn't get it.

Even more than that, it's actually the story of us, why we just don't get it when it comes to forgiveness.

Because ultimately, God doesn't tell us about Jonah so that we'll know about Jonah.

God tells us about Jonah so we'll know about us.

And Jonah 1 and 2 tell us that the reason we find it so difficult to forgive is because we haven't really understood what God's done for us in Jesus Christ.

The reason we find it's so difficult to forgive is because we haven't really understood what God's done for us in Jesus Christ.

And we'll look at that in three things.

First, the fact that we sin.

Second, the fact that God forgives us.

But third, the fact that we just don't get it.

So let's think about the first of these, that we sin.

This passage makes a lot more sense if you can hold in mind what you might call the distinction between a surface level sin, a behavioral sin, and a deep sin, what you might call an identity level sin.

Jonathan Edwards, who is the great Puritan preacher, used to talk about this.

And he would say there are all sorts of sins we commit that are behavioral sins.

They're up at sort of floating on the surface of our life, and they're wrong, and we should stop them.

But it's really hard to stop them if you don't get underneath them and ask the deeper question, why am I doing that?

What deeper sin is driving the behavior?

So here's one from my life.

Um, and maybe this will illustrate it.

I have spent about the past ten years consistently overwhelmed from the combination of being a student, working full-time, and trying to be a husband and a dad.

So my inbox is a disaster.

My voice inbox isn't much better, and I've lived life on the tyranny of the urgent.

And so oftentimes I get sent an email that's not a problem.

But of course, because it's not urgent, I don't deal with it for five weeks.

And five weeks later, now it's become a problem, right?

And so the person picks up the phone and calls me.

And I'm getting better about this, but it still happens.

I find myself saying, Yeah, I was just picking up the phone to call you.

Now, for starters, it's not even a smart sin, right?

I know I wasn't.

They know I wasn't.

It's just dumb.

And it's a lie and it's wrong.

And I could say, you know, I've just gotta quit doing that.

And I might for a while.

But it still comes back, right?

Because ultimately the question isn't why did I commit this surface-level sin?

The question is, what do I believe about myself and about God underneath that that drives me to behave that way?

You know, at the moment I commit that sin, it's more important to me to look good in one of your eyes than it is to be truthful before the Lord.

And if you can start to work on that sin, if I can get over my silly fear of everybody else, maybe the stuff on the surface will start to change.

You know, if you're dealing with anger, this is the kind of thing you could say, I've just got to stop blowing up at people.

But it's not really gonna happen unless you get underneath it and say, what is it that's driving this?

What is the sin about myself that feels like I deserve better than this?

You know, if you're looking at stuff on the internet that you shouldn't, you can say, I just gotta stop it.

And maybe if you get disgusted with yourself, you'll stop it for a little while.

But it's gonna come back.

Unless you get to the deeper question and ask the question, what's the sin underneath the sin?

What is the hole in my heart that I feel like is somehow going to get filled up by this stuff I find online?

Life change happens when you get down a level.

And this is a concept Edwards talked about.

Look at our text with me.

Look at Jonah chapter 1.

Jonah 1 · chapter mention

At one level, it's really simple what Jonah's sin is, right?

His job, verse one, is to be a prophet of God.

A prophet's job is to say what God tells him to say.

So, what does God tell him to say?

Verse 2 go to Nineveh, preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.

But what does Jonah do?

Well, knowing a little geography will help.

Nineveh is to the north and east of Israel.

You go there by land.

There's no water involved in the trip.

So when Jonah goes down to a port and gets on a ship bound for Tarshish, which would have been one of several Phoenician ports, we don't know which one.

Any of the options are south and west of Israel.

So Jonah isn't just taking a roundabout way.

He's not doing slow obedience.

Jonah is going the exact opposite way from where God has told him to go.

And verses 3 and verses 10 tell us why.

Because he's running away from the Lord.

That's the surface level sin, but that doesn't really help us too much until we ask the question, why?

Why is Jonah running away from the Lord?

What's he after here?

Now, as we try to get to the sin under the sin in this passage, right off the bat, recognize that it's probably not an issue of knowledge.

Jonah knows a lot about God.

He's a prophet.

He talks to God, he prays, he hears from God in a way you and I never have.

Even in verse 9, when the sailors say, Who is this God you're running away from?

He says, Oh, it's the God who made everything heaven and earth, the sea and the land and everything else.

And they get real quiet.

Jonah knows, that's an orthodox confession.

Jonah knows all the stuff he's supposed to know.

Yet he's alien to God.

He's in rebellion to God, he's running from God.

And this raises a very disturbing point.

We can know all the right stuff.

We can say all the right things, we can pray, and yet still have a heart that is completely apart from the Lord's heart.

It's not knowledge that's, at least not much, the problem for Jonah.

What is it?

What's the sin under the sin?

Well, you know, it might be fear.

Let me tell you a little bit about Nineveh.

It's the capital of the nation of Assyria, which in the ancient world of that time was the biggest, baddest, most expansionist, most powerful nation the world had ever known.

These were bad dudes.

And they were ruthless on the battlefield.

They had taken over everything around them.

They in fact were busy taking over Israel at various points.

The worst dudes the world had ever known, with the biggest spears the world had ever known.

How do you think they're going to take it if this punk Israelite stroll into their capital city and says, You're wicked?

You can understand why Jonah might be a little afraid, right?

There's more going on than that.

Let me tell you a little more about the Ninevehites, the Assyrians.

They weren't just good at taking over countries militarily.

They were incredibly adept at terrorizing the countries they took over.

They had figured out how to impale men on stakes in such a way that they would last three days in the ancient sun before they finally died.

They abused women of all ages.

They would tear babies out of their mother's arms and throw them into the ground.

These were horrible people by any of the world's standards.

And we don't know exactly when the book of Jonah was written, but at any time when it might have been written, they were attacking Israel.

So these are Israel's sworn enemies, and they're vile.

Why doesn't Jonah want to go?

Because he hates these people.

They're the sworn enemies of him and everything he stands for.

But even that doesn't explain it.

Because look at verse 2.

What's the message God asks him to take?

Preach against it, for its wickedness to come up before me.

What prophet who's an Israelite wouldn't want to do that?

Guess what, suckers?

God has had it with you, and he's going to judge your sin.

But Jonah runs the other way.

Why?

Well, chapter 4, verse 3, that we'll look at next week will confirm this is why.

Because Jonah knows that if he goes and preaches the message God sends, it's possible that these people will actually repent and ask for forgiveness from God, and if they do, God's going to forgive them.

Jeremiah 18, you've got to understand this.

When a prophet comes and declares judgment, Jeremiah 18 says this is true in general.

Jonah 4 confirms this is what's going on in Jonah's case.

It's always because God wants people to come back to him.

It's not because God's bloodthirsty.

It's meant, you might say, to scare them straight, to make them realize how their behavior has an impact.

And so when Jonah goes, he knows that God intends to use this to cause them to repent and then forgive all their sins.

And Jonah doesn't want it.

Jonah can't fathom that someone like that might receive God's mercy.

Not with all the stuff they've done.

Jonah would rather run the other way from God before that happens.

That's the sin under the sin.

The prophet doesn't have God's heart.

He doesn't want mercy for the worst.

Now, this is important for us to get because we sin.

You know, if there's any empirical fact in the entire world I can establish, it's that we sin.

We do things wrong.

We do stuff we shouldn't do.

We don't do things we should do.

And if we want life change, we can't stay up at this surface level of just saying, oh, what is it?

I need to stop it.

We've got to ask, how is the gospel going to get to my heart at this deeper level?

And this matters so much because the scriptures say the wages of sin is death.

It's true for Jonah, it's true for us.

Look in Jonah.

Look at chapter 2 on the back side of your handout.

Jonah is thrown in the ocean in the middle of a hurricane.

Tell me what kind of chances he got?

If you look at chapter 2, he says he was dying.

Verse 3, you hurled me into the depths in the heart of the sea, the current swirled about me, the waves and breakers swept over me.

Verse 6, to the roots of the mountains I sank down, the earth barred me in forever.

This is the language of drowning.

Jonah has sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

When my life was ebbing away, verse 7.

Verse 5, the engulfing waters surrounded me, the deep surrounded me, seaweed was wrapped around my head.

He's at the bottom of the ocean about to die.

Jonah is going to die because of this sin.

Romans 6, verse 23 says, this is true for us.

Romans 6:23

The wages of sin is death, Paul writes.

They are due to you.

In fact, legally, you have to be paid them.

If your boss doesn't pay you, you can go to court to say that is owed me, it's mine now.

Well, the scriptures say the wages of sin is death.

We all, the wages are ready to be paid.

Here's the second point.

The great news is God has forgiven your sin.

God has saved you.

He has saved me.

He has saved us from certain death.

It's again true of Jonah.

It's true of us.

Look at Jonah.

Let's correct one of the biggest misconceptions about this book.

Most people think about the book this way: Jonah was supposed to go to Nineveh.

He rebelled and didn't, so God said, I'm going to punish you with the fish.

Take three days in the belly of a stinking fish and sit there and think about it, Jonah.

And decide if you don't want to shape up.

But recognize that the fish is not, in fact, the means of God's judgment on Jonah.

The fish is the means of God's salvation for Jonah.

Look at verse 17 of chapter 1.

Jonah is in the ocean, in a hurricane, drowning.

He's already dying.

The fish is what saves him from death, not what curses him.

Look at chapter 2, verse 1 and 2.

From inside the fish, Jonah prayed to the Lord his God, and he said, Past tense, in my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me.

From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry.

The story of Jonah two is not Jonah in the fish suffering and then being saved when the fish spits him out at the end of chapter two.

The story of Jonah chapter two is Jonah praising God for the salvation he's already gotten as he sits there in the fish.

And then, end of the chapter, verse 10, it's as if figuratively he comes back from the dead.

He was good as dead.

And God saved him and brought him back to life.

Now that's again the story of us.

We are forgiven.

We are, the wages of sin is death, dead man walking.

Yet, in Jesus Christ, God has saved us from our sin.

In Jesus, God came in the flesh, real, stubbornly physical human, died for sin so that we didn't have to receive our wages.

And the amazing thing about it is that it transfers to us.

That we, by God's grace, though we deserve the worst, get none of it, because he took it all in himself.

It is an amazing message of grace.

You know, Christianity, the Christian message at its essence is still not about morality, it is still not about ethics, it is still not about behavior.

It involves all that.

But it is stubbornly and forever and only about the message of grace received, grace that was bought at a deep price by God Himself for you and for me.

Jesus is talking.

It says, Some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.

And Jesus answered, A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

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

In other words, Jonah, three days in the fish, is there meditating on the fact that he's already been saved.

And then figuratively, he comes back from the dead.

Jesus, three days in the grave, literally dead, literally comes back from the dead.

It's the sign of Jonah, Jesus says, that you meditate on the grave, you meditate on the cross on salvation already received.

That God has himself paid for your sin, God has himself paid for my sin.

If that is true, nothing is the same.

If that is true, absolutely nothing is the same.

But here's the thing, we just don't get it.

Again, Jonah didn't, neither do we.

Jonah the prophet, prophet of Israel, knows this true God, doesn't want to tell other people, at least not those people, about that grace.

Why?

Well, we said in the first point, because he doesn't want people like that to be forgiven.

The prophet's heart is somehow all about wanting other people to get smoked and smitten for their sins, not receive God's love and be forgiven and transformed.

Somehow, though, he knows all this true stuff about God, somehow, though he hears from God, somehow, though he prays to God, the prophet's heart is absolutely the reverse of his Lord's.

In fact, look in the book about who keeps showing spiritual initiative.

The book actually lampoons Jonah.

Think about it.

Hey, Jonah, which is this God you follow?

Oh, it's the God who made heaven and earth and the sea and the dry land and everything else.

So I'll run away from him.

Where is he going to go?

Right?

And look through the passage.

Who is it that keeps showing the spiritual initiative throughout the passage?

It's not Jonah, it's the pagans.

The sailors are the ones who pray.

The sailors are the ones who try to figure out what's going on.

The captain is the one who's desperately trying to fix things.

Jonah goes to sleep.

And then they wake him up and say, Who is this God?

Remember, they're operating out of an entirely pagan worldview.

Who is this God you follow?

And he says, This is the true God, and they go, And then they pray to that God.

Now you don't need to think they suddenly became full Christians or something, but they're willing to say, Lord, they even try not to throw him in the ocean, but to row back to land to save the guy's life.

Even verse 12 is not Jonah's heroic self-sacrifice.

He says, okay, you want to know how to fix this storm?

Throw me in the ocean and it'll stop.

That sounds really good until you remember, did God call Jonah to die?

What did God want Jonah to do?

Go to Nineveh.

The right answer is not throw me in this ocean so it'll stop.

The right answer is turn the boat around.

I've got somewhere to be.

But Jonah would rather die than give in and show God's mercy to people like that.

Wow.

He just doesn't get it, does it?

But then you say, we don't get it.

You know, think about it.

Mercy has been received by the prophet, yet it can't be given.

What does that show?

It shows the mercy hasn't really been understood.

And tell me that's not a picture of us when we can't forgive.

Mercy has been received.

Christ has died for your sins, past tense.

He has risen from the dead, past tense.

He does live at the right hand of God.

But when somebody sins against us, here's our usual response.

Dang it, you did it again.

I don't believe you would do that again.

And then we make them pay for their sin.

Whether the shoulders cold, whether the rumors spread, whether the contacts cut off, whether we just make them come back to us to grovel.

We know it and they know it.

We aren't ready for them to be forgiven until they pay for their sin.

Here's Jesus when you and I sin.

Yes, you did it again, but I want you to know I love you and I died for you, and I will never, ever give up on you.

Why don't we have God's heart?

Why can't we get it?

Because at some level we still want to give ourselves a pass and make everybody else pay for what they did to us.

But that's not the Lord's way.

You've got to understand we're Jonah.

Again, Matthew 12, chapter 40, Jesus is talking to the people who are the religious people of his day.

Those are the people he calls the wicked and adulterous generation.

Why?

Well, the Bible is, the gospels are full of telling you why.

Because they loved to keep the rules, they loved to look right, and they love to scorn all those other people who've done all those awful things.

But our Lord went and hung around with all those other people who've done all those awful things.

And our Lord loved them.

Just like he loved you and just like he loves me.

There are some things just deep down that every one of us says, that one's not forgivable.

For Jonah, it was the Ninevehes.

And they did some pretty bad stuff.

For you, for me, it's something else.

But there's something in there that every one of us says, that one is a bridge too far.

It can't be forgiven.

But God says, no, you've missed my heart.

How do you know you've got it?

How do you know when you've got God's heart?

When the grace you've received really does open you to let it go, to get rid of it, to forgive it.

Now look, in the world we live in, it is very complex how to work that out.

There are some abuse situations, there are some other situations where it is terribly unwise, wrong, even dangerous for you to go back and be in touch with that person.

But you do have to forgive or it will eat you apart from the inside out.

So here's the action point.

Who do you need to forgive?

Why?

If we really get the grace we've received, then it is possible for anything to be forgiven.

So as we come to the Lord's table, as we meditate on, as we touch and taste reminders He gave us that He died for us, who do you need to forgive?

What would it look like for that to happen this week?

Let's pray.

Father, there is um much more we could say, probably much more we should say.

But we have prayed that you would be active in the preaching of your word.

We pray that that would be the case.

That your glory would go forth and that you'd change us and change our lives to our good and to your glory.

Would you do that?

We will give you all the praise for it, we pray.

In Jesus' wonderful name.

Amen.