Runaway Bride | Jonah 1

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.

But Jonah rose to flee to Tars from the presence of the Lord.

He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish.

So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.

But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.

Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his God, and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them.

But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship, and had lain down and was fast asleep.

So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper?

Arise, call out to your God.

Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we might not perish.

And they said to one another, Come, let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.

So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

Then they said to him, Tell us, on whose account this evil has come upon us?

What is your occupation?

And where do you come from?

What is your country?

And of what people are you?

And he said to them, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, What is this that you have done?

For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them.

Then they said to him, What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?

For the sea grew more and more tempestuous.

He said to them, Pick me up and hurl me into the sea.

Then the sea will quiet down for you.

For I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.

Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them.

Therefore they called out to the Lord, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and laid not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.

So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging.

Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

This is the word of the Lord.

Let me pray for us.

Heavenly Father, we pray over this gathering.

We want to hear from you, Lord.

We know your word is sharp.

May it pierce our hearts this morning.

We know that your son took on the cross that we may have life.

May we taste the sweetness of his sacrifice this morning.

I pray all this in your glorious and wonderful and holy name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

Maggie Carpenter was the most eligible bachelorette in all of Hell Maryland.

She was charming and attractive and intelligent.

And one day she met Mr.

Wright.

His name was Brian.

Brian was Maggie's opposite in almost every way.

He was calm and settled.

She was spirited and vivacious and spontaneous.

It seemed like a perfect match.

And everything was going swimmingly all the way up until the wedding day.

The day of their wedding, the chapel filled up with all of their friends and all of their family.

And then Maggie got cold feet.

And so getting more and more nervous as she saw more and more people come in, Maggie ends up running and leaving and abandoning the wedding altogether.

Brian is so traumatized by what he's experienced that he ends up swearing and taking a vow of celibacy and becoming a Catholic priest.

In fact, Maggie would go on to jilt four more fiancés at the altar, and she would develop a nickname, the runaway bride.

So it's a story of a bride who's always on the run.

She's always searching for herself and searching for her freedom and searching for her happiness.

And interestingly enough, this is actually exactly the way the Bible describes us.

That we are Jesus' bride, and yet we're always on the run.

In Jonah, we find a prophet on the run, don't we?

This is an old movie, by the way.

You know how old you are, but whether or not you know this movie, don't you?

We find a prophet who's on the run, but you know where we find God?

We find God where we always find him throughout the scriptures in hot pursuit, running after his bride.

And so as we open up chapter one this morning, I think we begin to get a pretty clear picture of why Jonah ran and why it is that we run too.

See, the reason that we run from the Lord is we have conflicting interests.

We have conflicting interests.

In premarital counseling, one of the goals of bringing the couple together is I want them to develop a common vision for their family, a common vision for their marriage.

There's no surer way to conflict in a marriage that I know of than to have two competing visions for where the marriage ought to go and what the marriage ought to look like and what the family ought to become.

That these competing visions actually can work to pull apart from the very beginning that which is intended to be woven together.

And that's really where we start with Jonah in Jonah chapter one.

That's the reason that he runs away.

He has a competing vision, a competing vision with the Lord over what his life ought to look like.

He's chasing down his own vision for his own life and his own world and his own country because he wants to go his own way.

You'll notice that verse 2 there starts with two imperatives.

Arise, go.

They're placed side by side.

I remind you that Hebrew doesn't have punctuation, okay?

So they had different ways of making sure they could drive home a point.

And by putting two imperatives side by side, this is his way of saying, go like now.

Do not cross go, do not collect$200 like go.

Go yesterday, go urgently.

This is a pressing matter.

You need to move on.

And Jonah responds immediately, doesn't he?

He doesn't pray about it.

He doesn't deliberate.

He doesn't think it through.

He doesn't have uh, you know, 40 days of prayer and fasting.

He responds immediately.

He gets up and he goes in the exact opposite direction.

Quite literally, Nineveh would have been north and to the east.

And Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria.

So for him to go to Nineveh would be up and to the east.

To go to Tatars and down to Joppa would have been to go down south and to the west.

And so quite literally, Jonah is going as far in the opposite direction as quickly and as urgently as he possibly can.

In fact, you'll notice that in verse 3, you begin this emphasis on down, down, verse 5 says down again.

It's not on the screen, but it's down, down, down.

Like you're going away.

You're going the opposite direction.

You'll also notice that in verse 3 that it emphasizes that he is fleeing from the presence of the Lord.

It says, away from the presence of the Lord.

It says this twice.

It's emphasizing, drawing out exactly what it is that Jonah is doing.

Now, you understand Jonah was a prophet, and he had graduated from the school of prophets.

So he was a studied theologian, and he was a good enough theologian to know that God was omnipresent.

There was actually nowhere that Jonah could go that God was not.

Jonah would have realized this.

And so when it says that he is fleeing from the presence of the Lord, what that's effectively saying is he's abandoning the call of God that has been placed on his life.

That he's abandoning the word of the Lord that has come to you.

You know, we're prone to do the same thing, aren't we?

We're prone to run away from the callings that the Lord has placed on our lives.

By calling, what I mean is any Godward step that you know the Lord has placed in your heart.

We're prone to, as God nudges us in one direction, as he nudges us north to immediately and without deliberation turn and head down, down, down into Joppa, aren't we?

That we'll find virtually anything else to do.

It reminds me when you're in college, right?

And you have that big term paper that's coming up.

What do you do?

Well, this is a great night to organize my closet, right?

Tonight I'm gonna go through my clothes and give some to the goodwill, right?

Like I'm gonna sort out all of my life.

I'll do literally anything other than write the paper.

Seems like very often this is our response when the Lord has placed something on our lives, doesn't it?

When he's placed a call.

That the Lord will call us to adopt, and what will we do?

Well, you know what?

This is a great opportunity for me to serve in the nursery.

I have to serve in the nursery, Lord, right?

We know that the Lord calls us to pray with our families or to teach our children the Bible.

You know what?

Let's go bowling.

Everybody loves a good night of bowling, right?

We'll know that the Lord has called us to teach in our church or to preach in our church or maybe to go on missions.

Maybe, maybe, maybe to be a missionary.

People are called to be missionaries.

We'll find every reason possible to go down, down, down to Joppa, won't we?

Have you ever wondered why is that?

Why are we so allergic to the will of God?

Why are we so allergic to go where God is sending us and to do what God has sent for us to do?

The issue is that we are allergic to someone else establishing the priorities of our lives, even if that someone else is the Lord God Himself.

Because we want to be the ruler of our own domain.

We want to be the masters of our own destiny.

We, we want to be the gods of our lives, don't we?

And so Jonah is like us.

He goes his own ways because he has his own priorities.

There's really a unique feature to Jonah's call that stands out from any other story in all of the Old Testament.

Jonah is the only one of the prophets, he's one of the minor prophets, he's the only messenger sent from God to a foreign land to go and pronounce judgment over them.

He's the only one.

You can read all of the Bible, it's only Jonah.

So Jonah is able to take that.

He, again, he's a studied man, he understands the context of the scriptures.

He takes that and he's able to deduce that the reason that God is sending him to Nineveh is to do something unique.

That he's not just going to pour out wrath and judgment upon Nineveh.

Why wouldn't he just send the wrath?

That's what he's always done.

No, he sent a messenger.

Uh, Jonah is able to deduce because he is sending him on a mission of mercy, not of judgment, not of wrath.

That he's gonna draw Nineveh into repentance by his own kindness.

So it's a trip of mercy, and Jonah hates it.

Jonah hates it.

He hates his call because he hates Nineveh.

Nineveh is the great city of Assyria.

And you have to understand that in the Old Testament context, Assyria is literally public enemy number one for all of Israel.

This is the long disputing, conflicting, painstaking enemy of Israel.

And they had brought all kinds of travails and all kinds of tragedy and all kinds of trauma to the people of God.

They hate, they hate the Assyrians.

And so Assyria, it represented quite honestly the exact opposite of every single thing that Jonah believed in, and every single thing that Jonah loved.

This week, what, or this weekend, was the 25th anniversary of September 11th.

And if you're of a certain age, that's one of the, maybe the preeminent mile marker in your life, isn't it?

I remember exactly where I was.

And if you were alive then, you remember exactly where you were.

I was a sophomore at White Plains High School between second and third period, walking the halls when all of a sudden you could just hear sweeping across the entire high school that a tower had been hit and they thought it might be a terrorist.

We go immediately into my next classroom and they we throw the news on for the rest of the day, and we watched live television when the second plane hit the other tower.

And you remember the anger that you felt.

And you remember the fear that you felt and the grief that you felt, even though it was so far away, maybe from where you were.

And there was a recognition, wasn't there, that this wasn't just an attack on towers.

This was an attack, an assault on our values, an attack and an assault on our way of life, an attack and an assault, a contempt for our culture.

And so one of the things that I most vividly remember is the response.

That starting the very next day on September the 12th, tens of thousands of Americans courageously began to enlist in the armed forces because we wanted to go and defend our homeland and defend our people and defend our culture and defend our values.

And so much of it was driven with a righteous anger and a rage, wasn't it?

And that was the right thing to do.

Don't you imagine though?

On September the 12th, in the aftermath of your grief and the anger, in the aftermath of watching those towers fall, in the aftermath of seeing on the live news people jumping from a burning building to their death.

God called you not to be a soldier, but to be a missionary to Al-Qaeda, to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan to share with them good news and to call them to receive salvation, to put down your arms and to take up the sword of the Lord.

You're getting the part of why it would be so difficult for Jonah to want to go to Nineveh.

So difficult to want to go and to offer to them God's mercy.

For the mercy of God to reign upon Nineveh would be for much of Jonah's worldview of national superiority and separatism and the condemnation of the enemies of Israel, all of it to come crashing down at one time.

Now, what we can see is that Jonah and the call of the Lord, there are conflicting interests that are taking place here.

They wanted different things for the world.

They wanted different things for Jonah's life, they wanted different things for Nineveh, certainly.

They wanted different things for the message of the good.

They wanted different things.

And Jonah loved his worldview more than he loved God.

You see, you don't have to love your calling.

You realize that?

That's shocking.

You don't have to love your calling.

The Bible is replete with messengers and uh servants of the Lord who loathe their calling.

Look at Moses, look at Balaam, look at Jeremiah, look here at Judah.

You don't have to love your calling.

But you do have to love God enough to still want to please him and obey him.

See, Jonah, Jonah loved his anger and his bitterness and his hatred more than he loved to please God.

That's what we see.

That Jonah had his own priorities, and his priorities were different than the Lord's priorities for his life.

Do you do you have your own priorities?

Do you have different priorities for your life than the Lord has for your life?

I wonder how many of us are forsaking God's call on our lives to love our neighbors as ourselves because we love our political systems more than we love them.

I wonder how many of us are forsaking God's call on our lives to adopt because we love our standards of living and we love our way of life more than we love the call that God has placed in our bones.

I wonder how many of us refuse to honor and love a harsh boss because we actually prefer to hate him.

This morning, are you running away from your calling?

Are you the runaway bride?

See, the question isn't, do you love your calling?

That's it's irrespective.

It's irrelevant.

That's not most important, that is not preeminent.

The question is, is do you love God enough to do what God has called you to do even though you don't like it?

That is the evidence that you can put forward that you are living a life that is holy, wholly devout to a Him.

So we run away because we have conflicting interests with the Lord.

And we run away because we have an identity crisis.

One of the most telling uh parts of the movie is Ike, who's played by Richard Gere, if you don't remember, goes and he's interviewing all the different all the different fiancés from which Maggie has run away.

And at the end of each interview, Ike asks all the fiancés, how did she like her eggs?

And and and each one of the fiancés responds the exact same way.

Well, she likes her eggs the same way I like my eggs.

We always got the same.

Except all four of them like their eggs completely different.

And so you start to realize that Maggie just does what she thinks other people want her to do.

She just does what the person across from her seems to expect from her because she just wants to please them.

She just wants to be accepted, she just wants to be approved.

What becomes evident, one order of eggs at a time, is that she's suffering from an identity crisis.

Jonah is suffering here from an identity crisis of sorts.

The sailors are practicing this old tradition where you would go and you would cast lots.

It's like it's like throwing dice.

And the belief was that the divine would actually cause the lot to fall on the person who was causing all of the problems.

And so this they interpreted all of life theologically.

And so they would have understood that whoever the lot fell on, that was the person that allowed this great storm to come up that was about to sink the boat and take all of their lives, that this would be the problem.

And so the hand of the Lord guides the lot and it falls on Jonah.

And they began to ask him a series of questions.

And the questions that they ask him are really identity questions, aren't they?

They're like, What do you do?

Where are you from?

Who are your parents?

Who's your daddy?

Like, what's going on in your life?

Like, what are you, where in the world did you actually come from?

And the answer of Jonah is really striking.

Because Jonah knows exactly who he is.

He's really clear.

That we've really, throughout the book, like if you're reading this for the first time and you don't have familiar knowledge, you're waiting for Jonah to speak.

Up until this point, he's not spoken at all.

The only thing we know about Jonah are his actions.

He's done a lot of talking with his actions, but he's not done any speaking of with his mouth.

And so when he begins to speak, the first thing that he says is, I am a Hebrew.

I am a Hebrew.

I fear the Lord.

And he is the God of heaven.

He made the sea and the dry land.

I am a servant of the Most High God.

I am one of his chosen people, living in covenant with him.

And this is exactly who the mariners are looking for, by the way.

They're looking for the guy who knows the guy, right?

They're looking for the guy who knows the God that made the sea and the God who made the dry land.

Why?

Because if he made the sea and he made the dry land, he's probably in charge of the storm too.

So this is who they're looking for.

And so Jonah is presenting himself as being distinct because he's presenting himself as being in a special covenantal relationship with the most high God.

The problem is he isn't living like it.

He knows exactly who he is, but he doesn't live like it.

That Jonah is quite literally a walking, running in this case, contradiction to himself.

That he says that he fears the Lord, yet he lives as though the Lord is powerless.

He actually uses here the covenant name of the Lord Yahweh to talk about the, to, to, to imply the covenant, the bond that he has with this God, and yet by his very actions, he is living in egregious and flagrant violation of that very covenant.

That he's saying that his God is the one to whom everybody else answers, and yet he is living as though he doesn't answer to him, as though God is just going to look the other way when it comes to his sin and not pay any mind at all.

That it's hard to imagine looking at Jonah a hypocrisy that's any starker than the one that we see in him.

See, Jonah had not.

Just forsaken his calling.

He had forsaken his very identity.

He lived like a person that didn't know God even though he was yet one of God's chosen sons.

And he didn't want to face it.

That's the issue.

He didn't want to face it.

Do you notice that they asked the first question they ask is, What is your occupation?

It's a really manly question, isn't it?

When two men meet each other for the first time, it takes about 30 seconds to get to what do you do?

I just don't think we know how what else to ask, right?

But what do you do, brother?

You know, like get on the golf course.

That's a quick way to shut down a conversation, I've learned.

Um, what do you?

I'm a pastor.

Okay, I'm gonna play through, right?

Um it's really a manly question.

So they come to him and they ask him, Well, what do you do?

Do you notice he doesn't answer it?

He answers every other question, but he doesn't answer that one.

Why?

What's he gonna say?

I'm a prophet, not going where the prophet was sent.

I'm a man meant to speak on behalf of God, but I don't want to say it.

He's ignoring it, he's denying it.

That what we see in Jonah is that he's doing every possible thing he can do to not have to look his hypocrisy in the eye.

That's why we run, isn't it?

That's why we run, isn't it?

We'll do almost anything to have to avoid the possibility of looking our hypocrisy in the eye.

We'll bail on accountable friendships, but because we don't want to hear the truth.

So we we run.

We won't pray with our children, and the reason that we don't want to pray with our children isn't because we don't want to pray with our children.

And it isn't because we don't believe in it.

It's because we know they know.

They know the truth about us.

They know how we actually talk to each other, they know how we actually live, and we don't want to face the hypocrisy, so we we run.

We skip church because we honestly don't want to think about the truth about God.

We don't want to think about the cross.

We don't even want to think about grace because all of those things require us to look our hypocrisy in the eye, and we just don't want to face us.

Instead, instead, we just want to run down, down, down to Joppa, to our TVs, to work, to wherever we can go, and still pretend like everything's fine.

This morning, I wonder if you're running.

I wonder if you're running.

I wonder if you or Christ runaway bride.

I wonder what hypocrisy it is that you don't want to look in the eye.

Can I tell you a secret?

Can I tell you a secret?

The longer that you run away from it, the longer that you refuse to look at it, the scarier, the lonelier, the more overwhelming it becomes.

Avoiding looking at your hypocrisy actually empowers it to live rent-free as the background of everything else that's happening in your life.

The Lord doesn't call us to repentance because repentance is hurtful.

The Lord calls us to repentance because repentance is helpful.

The Lord calls us to repentance so that we can stop running, so that we can stop running.

This morning, will you stop running?

Will you stop running?

Will you confess your sins maybe this morning to an elder?

Confess your sins to a close friend, confess your sins to a spouse.

You turn toward the calling that you've been so afraid of engaging, so afraid of failing at, so afraid of up-ending your life for.

Will you re-engage with the Lord and trust that He actually wants what's best for your life, even if it's different than what you want for your life?

Will you live like you're actually a child chosen by the living most high God?

We run away because we have conflicting interests with the Lord.

And we run away because we have an identity crisis, and finally we run away because we have a mistaken freedom.

Now look, throughout the, I I know this is the cheesy movie.

It's about the cheesiest movie I could possibly talk about.

But throughout this cheesy rom-com, what we have here is Maggie appears to be running so that why?

So that she can be free.

So that she can be free.

But the great discovery of the movie, the bait and switch of the movie, is that her running is actually what keeps her from being free.

We see something similar here in Jonah.

That if we were to boil all of it down to the one reason that Jonah ran, is that he ran for freedom.

He ran for freedom.

And if we're honest, that's the reason that we run too.

We run because we really just want the freedom to be able to do whatever it is that we want to do.

We want to be able to live our life, our way, without accountability, and to be justified in our way of life.

This is the American definition of freedom in the 21st century.

That we all want designer lives where we can pick and choose at the boutique of values and priorities, the things that matter and the things that are true and the things that we like and discard all of the things that we don't like and all the things that call us to be uncomfortable.

That we want editorial control over our lives to be able to curate our lives in the same way that we're able to curate them on Instagram.

And that's really why Jonah ran, isn't it?

Jonah wanted the editorial controls of his life.

Jonah wanted to be able to live a designer life with his values and his ways, getting the benefits from God that he wants, and discarding the hard callings of God that he wanted, didn't want.

But Jonah and really us too, just following in the well-worn footsteps of a running heritage that we inherited from Adam.

That he ran for freedom, but he ran like Adam.

You see, this is not just a story about Jonah.

This is a story about every man and every woman that's ever lived.

This is a story, this is a story that dates all the way back to the garden.

This is a story about Adam and Eve.

It's a story about Noah.

It's a story about the Tower of Babel.

It's a story that is pointing us toward the need for the person of Christ.

That you could take Adam's name or Eve's name or your name and my name, and you could replace Jonah's every time it comes up, and it would read the same, and all of us would say, Amen.

That's true.

That's true.

Think about how this looks.

Adam does the exact opposite thing that God calls for him to do, too, doesn't he?

Adam does the exact opposite thing too.

And Adam responds in the same way.

What does Adam respond?

He tries to cover himself.

He tries to put together some leaves to figure out how he can do it.

So for Adam, it's leaves.

For Jonah, it's the bottom of a boat.

For us, it's busyness or it's doom scrolling or it's success.

But all of it is the same.

All of it is running.

All of it is hiding from the Lord.

And just like Jonah, Adam fled from the presence of the Lord.

Do you remember the Lord going, walking through, thinking, Adam, my boy, like do you think you can hide from the ever-present, omnipotent, omnipresent God?

Where are you, Adam?

Come on out.

I know you're there.

Right?

So for Adam, it's his descendants.

You'll notice that around them, that they all, that the that it's not just the runner that suffers, is it?

It's all the people around them, too.

For Adam, his descendants suffer.

For Jonah, the mariners suffer.

For us, our families suffer.

Our friends suffer.

Our church suffers.

And then the author really brings it together in a way that's dramatic.

It's meant to provoke the image of the garden in Genesis 3.

I'm trying to draw this out.

It's meant to provoke this.

Did you know that the question that the mariners ask of Jonah is the exact same question that God asked of Adam?

In verse 10 of Jonah chapter 1, it says, What is this that you have done?

Jonah 1 · chapter mention

In Genesis chapter 3, God asked Adam and Eve, What is this that you have done?

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

In other words, God comes and he finds them in the garden, finds them on the boat, finds you doom scrolling, and he says, Why are you running?

Why have you run from me?

How could you be so arrogant and so deceived as to believe that you can escape me?

And why?

Why would you leave someone?

Why would you run from someone who loves you so much and has been so good to you and has provided for you so plentifully?

Why are you running?

And you remember?

Do you remember the deception of the serpent?

What was the temptation of the serpent?

The temptation of the serpent was death that was shaped like freedom.

That freedom is the carrot that Satan dangles to convince us to run toward our own destruction.

Freedom is what he dangles to cause us to run toward our own suicidal kamikaze mission.

And in both cases, both cases, it's a mistake in freedom.

You can see how this plays out, can't you?

College student goes off, feels like it's the first time that they've ever had real freedom.

Now, now they can do what they want to do.

Now they don't answer to anyone.

And so they spend their 20s doing whatever it is they want to do, feeling completely unaccountable, and then they spend their 30s in therapy trying to fix it.

And trying to unravel all of the brokenness and all of the regret from the it was death shaped like freedom, wasn't it?

Young, young families, young moms, young dads, they have all these ideals and raising their kids, and then they have all, and then when they you start having kids, you start realizing that a lot of other people have a lot of ideals that they're projecting onto you, and the culture has a lot of ideals, and there's a lot of standards you gotta feel like you meet, and you feel like you're overwhelmed.

And so you start realizing, man, like if I'm gonna make money, like this is my chance to make money, and if I'm gonna give them set my family up for success, this is my opportunity to set my family up for success.

I've got to get while the getting is good.

And so we kind of put down the spiritual walk, always intending to come back so that we can make money while we make money and set our families up while we can set our families up.

And so we go and we invest and we try to live up to all of the ideals and we leave behind the spiritual walk, believing we're gonna come back because what are we looking for?

Freedom.

We're trying to prepare, give our kids financial freedom, our families success and freedom.

And then our kids turn 16, 26, and we're trying to figure out how it is that we can overcome the warped values that they've inherited.

It happened one day at a time, one decision of a time, one running step at a time.

When you're an empty nester, you think, man, finally, finally I can just do nothing for a while.

Finally, I don't have to cook pancakes on Saturday, right?

Like finally, I can sleep in a little bit.

Like finally, I can I can just be free.

Finally, I can just go pick apples and coast, you know?

But I've met with enough over the years to realize that very often it's the empty nester years that you feel like you miss the most purpose, and you can feel the most lonely, and you can feel the most useless.

Brothers and sisters, what is all of this?

It is death shaped like freedom.

All of it.

But against the backdrop of the Bible's story, we don't just see who Jonah is, and we don't just see who Jonah is like.

We see who Jonah is not like.

That he ran for freedom and he ran like Adam, but he ran unlike Jesus.

The picture here is really, it's too beautiful to miss.

Throughout the scriptures, what you'll find out is that the sea, the sea is God's instrument of judgment.

The sea was a place of chaos.

The sea is where God's wrath, it was, it was bigger than the people could for.

No army could overcome it.

No, no, no, no king could overcome it.

It's the sea that represents it in all of its chaos and all of its fury and all of its blowing and all of its raining.

And so here, what do we have?

The sea.

The sea is God's wrath churning against Jonah.

And how is God's wrath going to be satisfied?

How are the mariners going to be saved?

By taking up Jonah and throwing him into the sea.

So that God's wrath would be satisfied.

But as we're going to see, is Jonah being thrown into the sea isn't just how the mariners are saved.

It's how Jonah is saved.

In fact, it's how all of Nineveh ends up saved.

That it's a picture for us to see that Jesus is always in pursuit of his runaway bride.

Oh, oh, Jesus isn't like us.

He doesn't run away.

He runs to the problems, he runs to the difficult callings, he runs to the cross.

He's completely different than Jonah.

That Jesus.

Jesus is the true and better Jonah.

Jonah says, You'll have to throw me over.

Jesus says, I'll lay down my life.

Jonah says, because of me, the storm and God's judgment has come against you.

Jesus says, because of me, grace has fallen upon this house.

See, one day soon, brothers and sisters, Jesus is going to make his final pursuit of his runaway bride, and God's wrath will never rage again.

Do you know what it says at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21?

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

No more anger, no more wrath, no more judgment, no more storms, no more tears, no more hard days.

Victory in the person of Christ, because the Son has come and he has caught his runaway bride.

When I was little, we lived on top of a mountain.

Our driveway was really, really steep.

It was straight and it was all the way down.

And anything that hit that driveway would go and it would go across the road, and you just lost complete control.

Like I lost a lot of basketballs that way.

And I saw more than one get hit by a car.

And I remember on one particular occasion, I would have been eight or nine, and my my little sister would have been four or five, and we had this little Tykes car.

I don't know if any of you remember their little red cars, and they had these, like they didn't have a steering wheel, it had like little levers that you pulled, and it turned it right or left.

And my little, we were having one of those great family days that you have on a Saturday where the whole family's just out in the yard, mom and dad are doing landscaping or whatever, and my sister and I were just playing in the driveway, and she was in that little Tykes car, and some way or another, she got that car turned so that it was facing down that hill, and then just away she went.

And she is flying down this hill as fast as she can go, and she is headed toward the road, and there is no way that she's gonna be able to stop.

And all out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad in a full sprint, never seen him move, still haven't seen him move like that since he's here this morning.

Moving as fast as he can as all I can think is he's running at the road.

He's running at the road, right?

Now, thankfully, the car turned at the last second, she flipped and tumbled out, everybody was fine.

But I remember thinking, my dad was willing to get hit by a car.

Get hit by a car.

Because he was gonna do whatever it took to save his little girl.

And that's a picture of our Heavenly Father.

We're racing down the hill, aren't we?

And we're racing toward our own destruction and our own death.

And he sends Jesus.

And Jesus stands between death, destruction, and us.

This morning, are you running?

Are you running?

Won't you look up?

Won't you look up and see that he's running after you?

Let me pray for us.

Heavenly Father.

This morning we come and we acknowledge that we are runners.

We are runners.

We are tempted to go every way but the right way.

We're tempted to do anything but the thing that you would have us to do.

And so, Lord, we come and we just we say thank you for Jesus.

Thank you for Jesus.

Who doesn't run away from your will but takes on your cross for us.

We say thank you for grace.

How many times should you have left us at the altar?

But we're the ones running and you're the one chasing.

Thank you for your grace.

God, forgive the hardened hearts that we have.

Have us turn our hearts back to you, oh God.

Turn us with your your kindness that we can stop running.

God, I am I am begging you.

I am pleading with you for my people.

That today you would turn some hearts toward you.

That today you would bring freedom.

That today you would allow some hypocrisy to be looked at and dealt with by the victory that we have in the person of Jesus.

God, make us new.

Make us whole and let us rest.

I pray for the brother or the sister who's difficult who's wrestling this morning with a hard calling.

Lord, let them follow after Jesus and not after Adam and take up the cross and find that your yoke is easy and your burden is light.

Thank you for Jesus.

Amen.