God Stops Jonah

Started last week by looking at the first three verses of Jonah. Don't worry. We won't be going through it that slowly every week. We saw last week and we looked at the person of Jonah, who he is, what his background is. We also looked at who or what Nineveh was, and we saw that both of these names have a meaning.

Jonah was a prophet of God who preached to the Israelites before this time, we assume, and saw that God heard or saw the need of Israel, and he relented from punishing them and protected them against their enemies. We saw that in two Kings 14. And then we also looked at Nineveh, and we saw that Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, the real threat to the nation of Israel, especially the northern tribes. And we heard that they eventually would be overcome, the Israelites, by the Assyrians.

So this was a political threat for the Israelites, and yet God came to the prophet Jonah and said, go and preach against Nineveh. And we saw that Jonah rebelled and decided to go in directly the opposite direction of where God was guiding him, to a place called Tarshish across the Mediterranean Sea. Let's see how that goes for him, his decision to do that. Open with me to Jonah chapter 1, and we'll read from verse 4 to 16. Verse 4:

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 laid down and fell into a deep sleep. The captain went to him and said, how can you sleep? Get up.

Call on your God. Maybe he will take notice of us, and we will not perish. Then the sailors said to each other, come, let us cast lots to find out who is 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 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 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 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 to the Lord, O Lord, please do not let us die for taking this man's life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, O 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. So far our reading. There are two great themes involved in Jonah chapter 1 that we're going to be looking at this morning: man's responsibility, humanity's responsibility, and God's sovereignty. The story we find in chapter 1 highlights the interplay between these two things, of what theologians sometimes refer to as free will, humanity's choice, and God's sovereignty.

Now for some of us, this theology gives us a headache. We need a good Panadol and a lie down after we think about this, but we'll see this morning the decisions of Jonah and what those decisions were and the results and the consequences. And we'll see some insights on how we make decisions. You see, Jonah, at this point in time that we started reading, thought that he was successful in his plan to escape God, to flee from God. He had gone all the way from his hometown to Joppa, the port city, and he was able to get there on a donkey or walk or whatever, protected or at least safe all the way down.

He was able to pay the fare. He had enough money to pay the fare and was able to get onto the boat. But God has another plan, we see. You see, we may think that we've arrived, that we've survived our disobedience to God, but think again. Because the Lord we see waits.

And He waits. And He waits. We may harden our hearts to disobey Him. We may rise up and flee. We may make it all the way to Joppa.

We find the ship ready. We find the sailors willing to take our money. You may feel that you've gotten away scot free and think that your little battle has been won. You can be so sure of your success like Jonah was, so sure of your success and fall asleep in the bottom of the boat. Peaceful.

Clear conscience. The whole thing goes without a hitch. The plan is airtight. The project is secure.

We see that last step of Jonah into the boat was the final moment that God was waiting for. And you can almost hear that door of the furnace, God's refining furnace, shut tight behind Jonah as he steps onto the boat. It was time for God to do some refining. There may be things in your life that you know is directly against God's will for you, and the possibilities are endless, aren't they? Guys with our lust.

Girls with our envy, we with our two-faced natures, our one church face and our one rest-of-the-week face, our one youth group face and our one Facebook face, our one husband face, our one abuser's face, our one best friend face and our one slanderer and gossip's face. And we know maybe that this isn't God's will for our lives. And we may know the Bible really well, and some of us may even be able to justify what we do from verses in the Bible. And we can sneak past our consciences and we can compromise on our self-worth and we can hide in the shadows so that God won't see. Or maybe we don't even think that far ahead.

Maybe we don't even factor God into these decisions that we make. But whatever the situation is, it might just be that you're not really getting away with it, but that God is waiting, or that God is simply giving you enough rope to hang yourself with. And that's what happens here with Jonah. I read an article recently, and it was disturbing, of church pastors and leaders caught in adultery. And nine times out of 10, they only sought help when the porridge had hit the floor.

And everyone knew about it, and it had come out. Nine times out of 10. But by then, a church and a family was left devastated. You see the temptation in our world is to look at others to determine our actions. If no one knows, then that's good.

Or if someone else is doing what I want to do, then maybe it's okay. We see Joe Blow getting away with sneaking money or other material from the job site. We hear of Susie Vanderwatzer face living a Hollywood lifestyle on the Gold Coast, complete in a self-love with the new wardrobes and the new romances, and we think, why can't I give myself just that for a little bit? Why can't I think of myself? And we swallow the lie that Satan tells us, and we think surely God won't know or God won't care.

Surely my situation is different. Surely, surely me not having a wife means that I can be promiscuous. Maybe God's provision is not good enough. I should take this into my own hands. And we do just what Jonah did, and we turn and we go in the opposite direction of where God wants us to be going.

And this is an act of free will. Now, the Bible does talk about that, our choice to obey or to disobey God. But this is the irony as well. Though we have a capacity to choose God, we don't. Though God has created within us the capacity to choose God, we don't.

Jonathan Edwards, the great reformed preacher of the eighteenth century, put it this way: We are free to choose, but we are always a slave to our greatest desire. Free to choose, always a slave. Apart from the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, Romans 1 says that we will always choose to disobey God. Before you meet Christ, you will always choose to serve yourself over God. Romans 6 says that in one way or another, you are a slave to sin.

But when you become a Christian, the reality changes. The reality, however, is not that you will always choose God, but like Jonah, you may fall back into the trap of pride and selfishness. But the difference is, however, the difference is that because of Christ's sacrifice, the power of the resurrection, the whole of sin, the power of sin over our lives has been broken. And we become slaves to God. No longer slaves to sin, slaves to God.

Now this is the process we call sanctification or holiness. And unfortunately, we may say it's not immediate. It's not an instant holiness because we realise as well that we live in a sin-indulged world, but our free will, our free will, when we become a Christian becomes free. And we can choose to follow God or to disobey. So Jonah goes and grabs his set of earphones from the stewardess, his newspaper, as he walks onto the boat with his hand luggage and stows it in the overhead cupboard. And he falls asleep.

But now while we've talked about man's responsibility in life, we come to God's sovereignty. And actually, this whole chapter is about God's limitless power and how He guides and shapes life, even the life of one man. And God now begins to deal with Jonah for the purpose of bringing him back to repentance and obedience. He permitted Jonah to carry out his little escape plan, to make all his way down to Joppa, and this wouldn't have been just an afternoon car trip. It would have taken quite a while.

There would have been intent behind it. God leaves him to succeed all up until this point. But now Jonah goes and he steps into the boat, and God prepares to teach him a good lesson. A terrifying wind comes on the waters and creates a huge storm. But notice where this storm comes from. Have a look at verse 4.

It says, the Lord sent a great wind. It's not that the wind suddenly arose as part of a cyclical pattern, as part of natural variances in weather. The Lord, God, sends a wind. The God who created the sea, the God who created the sun and the moon, the stars and the soil, now shows Jonah just who really is in charge. Psalm 107 verse 25 speaks of how God does this.

It says, for God speaks, He simply speaks, and He stirs up a tempest that lifts high the waves. God simply needs to speak, and the waves and the sea obey. Now the poor sailors on the boat, man, you can just realise their fear. They realise they're in trouble. In fact, verse 4 says that the boat is dangerously close to breaking apart.

That's how vicious the storm is. And all of them start to cry out to their god, their various gods perhaps. And they pray and they plead. And the captain goes down to wake up Jonah who is still asleep, amazingly, and he tells him, get up and call to your god because maybe he will hear us and he will save us.

So they're so desperate. They're not even relying on their affiliations, their club membership to their gods. They're willing to try everyone and everything to see maybe one of them works. Get up and call to your God. Perhaps you met someone like that who, when they're going through some real tough times, they're willing to buy the rosary beads. They're willing to get the Quran out.

They're willing to burn some incense, whatever, to see if they can go through this thing. They can cure cancer. They can survive a divorce. But that's where these guys are at. Now interestingly, they realise that someone is to blame for this storm.

They realise someone is to blame for this storm. So they cast lots, verse 7 says. Now scholars aren't exactly sure what this looked like, what casting lots were, what they used to do this. Some say that it could have been as simple as what we do today, drawing straws, and the shortest straw is the person that's involved or wins a prize or whatever, casting lots. Some say that it could have been stones that are marked with a little marking and whoever picks that stone is it, or even dice.

So dice that we use today has been around for a long time. They're not exactly sure what this looked like, but they know that for them there was a certain chance involved. Whatever the method they used, however, they get a definite result. A definite answer. Notice again the sovereignty of God.

Notice the sovereignty of God. Jonah thought that luck or good fortune brought him all the way safely onto the boat, that he was able to flee God, that he was able to go in the opposite direction without God's intervention. But God shows that He can control even the smallest of details, the roll of a dice. Nothing is outside the control of God. And just to maybe put a pause button on the story here, there is a reason, or this is part of the reason Christians are wary of gambling.

And I feel we need to just have a chat about that. Many worldviews and many religions have an understanding of luck or of karma or of fortune, some impersonal system that allows for us to win or lose in certain aspects of life. And people take this attitude into gambling and putting money on the pokies, on the lotto, on the horses, on blackjack at the casino. But as Christians, we believe that God controls all aspects of our life.

The question comes down to, should we really be testing God to make us wealthy? Is that a righteous cause? You see, believing in an impersonal system of luck outside the control of God makes it easier to gamble, doesn't it? But believing that God is in control of our lotto numbers makes it a little bit more personal. It makes it a little bit different.

Is it okay to test God with our hope, our desire to be wealthy? Now some people take this to mean that, on the other hand, all forms of, you know, dice or cards for playing games is also wrong. And I just want to say that I personally wouldn't take it that far because I believe it comes down to the purpose of these things. If we use dice to play a game of Monopoly, I think the end result is different than using it to gain money, to gain personal wealth. The reward in a board game with dice is the actual playing.

With gambling, the reward is always money, even if you try to tell me that part of it is having fun. The fun comes from the chance to win. Now this is obviously in addition to all the other problems associated with gambling: the addiction, which is a classified psychological condition now, which comes down eventually to idolatry. But I'm going to leave it there.

I thought we just needed to talk about this because there's not a whole lot in the Bible that actually directly talks about the issue of gambling. But this is what they were doing. They were using a game of chance to determine who was responsible for this. And God intervened, or God made those dice work in such a way that it came down to Jonah. Now the sailors, realising this, they asked Jonah, so who are you and what have you done to displease God?

Where are you from? What people group are you from? Jonah replies, and this is important, probably the most important part in this chapter. I am a Hebrew, and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land. Now this terrifies the sailors, and they ask, what should we do to you to make this storm calm?

And Jonah replies, pick me up, throw me into the sea, because I'm the reason you're in this mess. Now there are some significant things that happen here. Firstly, Jonah says, you can pray to your gods and each person on this boat can pray to their respective idol, but there is only one real God. And He's the God who created the heavens and the earth, the sea and the land. Everything is under His control.

He is a God of gods, the one and the only. And only my God is really able to change this situation. Why? Notice that Jonah mentions that God is the creator of the sea. The one who created the sea surely can and will have the power to calm this ocean.

But we also see a few other things. We see the sailors having an immediate sense of fear, of belief in the Lord God. Jonah, ironically, didn't fear God as much, and he runs away. The sailors are immediately in awe and fear and humility before God. Isn't that amazing?

Secondly, we also notice the cause and the effect of sin. Jonah's disobedience does not simply result in his punishment or correction by God on him personally. God, or the consequences of sin, should I say, affects an entire crew and its passengers of a boat. Our decisions to depart from God's will and to do our own thing may not simply damage us, but there's collateral damage. And it may damage our families.

It may damage our friends. It may damage strangers around us. Jonah's responsible not only for his safety and the consequences of his sin, but he's placing these lives of innocent men in danger. And he realises it. He says, I know that this is my fault, that this great storm has come upon you.

Throw me into the sea. But again, the irony is the irony is that these heathen, gentile, filthy, dirty, non-Jews seem more faithful to God's laws than Jonah was. Instead of immediately throwing him into the sea, which is what I would have done, oh, you're guilty. Alright, cool.

Hope you can swim. Instead of throwing him immediately into the ocean, they start rowing. They start fighting this massive storm trying to get to land. They don't want to kill Jonah. They risk their safety again to help him.

But when that ends up being futile and the storm gets worse, they actually pray to God and say, Lord, forgive us. Don't hold this against us. And they throw Jonah overboard. And immediately, the Bible says the wind starts dying down. And at this, the Bible says, they feared the Lord, meaning they believed in God, and they made sacrifices to Him and made vows to Him.

In other words, they gave their hearts to Jesus. Amazing, isn't it? How their disobedience, sorry, their obedience is contrasted to Jonah's disobedience. These Gentiles, it's amazing to see how man's free will is contrasted with God's sovereign power in controlling everything. This is a fresh reminder for us.

If you set yourself up against God, you are going to come off second best. You may be hearing this story and thinking it's too far fetched to see the waves, to be able to control that, but God wants you to know His power behind the scenes. You might be heading down a path that you know perhaps is not where God wants you to be going. And you may be thinking, well, God doesn't know or he doesn't care. But God is calling you back to repentance this morning before your family, before your friends get hurt. Perhaps for the first time you realise that God is really in control over every single aspect of your life.

That He can even control the dice that you roll in a Monopoly game. God knows about every single part of your life. He sees it. And the great promise in the Bible is that He cares about it too. You're not too far from His reach.

You're never too far from His eyes. Perhaps this morning you just need to know that God is with you in the storm. But even greater than this, the story reminds us of Jesus. When he also calmed a storm and a very similar situation happened where his disciples found him asleep in the bottom of the boat, and they come to him and say, don't you care that we're going to drown? And he says to them, you of little faith, why are you afraid?

He gets up, he rebukes the storm, and the waves and the sea calm down. Who is this man? They ask one another. That he can calm the storm? That he has control over the sea?

And the answer of course is this man is God. The Lord, the God of heaven, Jonah said, made the sea and the land. Who else but the creator can rebuke the sea? Who else can have the sea respond like a whimpering dog and calm down and stop acting up? It is this Jesus that we as Christians place our hope in, for safety, for security.

He is the image of the invisible God that the sailors who didn't see him came to believe in. And this morning, if you don't know God because He is invisible, perhaps you feel that He's silently standing by, you are invited to know that Jesus, who is flesh and bone, is God. And this Jesus is the God of heaven who calms the storm, who has the power to direct our lives. And in our weakness, perhaps like Jonah, we can think our way through things and plan our own steps, but this morning we realise anew that while we may have a plan, God guides it. Let's pray.

Almighty God, we are humbled by this. Humbled to know that, Lord, You are in control. And Lord, a world that is so self-sufficient, in a society where there is so much around us that enables and improves and increases and multiplies our life, our fruitfulness, our comfort, our wealth. Lord, it is humbling and reassuring to know that You are in control. Lord, and the temptation is for us as wealthy Westerners to really be able to just stand back and rely on ourselves, rely on our government, rely on our family, our support system, and completely ignore You.

God, You are the God of the heavens, the creator of the sea and the land. And Lord, sometimes it does take us to find ourselves in a storm, to be shaken to our very core, to realise that we don't have much power at all. We don't have any control really. God, we pray that this morning You move within us, that we will take on the assurance of Jesus Christ, that He is the image of You in flesh and bone, that we can place our trust in Him. And Father, for our shortcomings and for the fact that some of us may have been tempted to run away, have done what is not according to Your will, we pray, Lord, that You will forgive us, that You will restore us.

Father, if we are in the storm, we ask, Lord, that You will calm it and that You will bring us safely back to land. Father, we commit our hearts to You again, and we accept and we rejoice in the power of the cross to release us, to set us free from the power of sin, the tyranny of the devil. And we, we say once again, Lord, that we choose to follow in Your ways. In Jesus' name, we pray these things. Amen.