Salvation Belongs to the Lord

When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, 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 the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

This is God's word. Well, when I was a kid, I used to do Taekwondo, so I'm obviously very dangerous. Be careful with Pastor Ben, not really. But the reason I'm telling the story is, when I was early on in my Taekwondo training, I was a yellow belt, just one above the white belt, so still a complete novice. And there was another kid in the class who was also a yellow belt, so we're both novices, and he was probably one of the worst yellow belts in the class, but this cringey thing that he did, he used to go up to the instructors after class and say, yeah, that was a good session, you just need to make a few improvements on some of the things that we're doing here. So, you know, we just need to work a little bit harder and make sure that, you know, the technique is a little bit better and that sort of thing.

And even as a kid, I was around eight years old, I was like, oh, that feels cringey, like this isn't right. He's a complete beginner, and yet he's giving instructions to the advanced, the masters of Taekwondo. Now, the reason I share that with you is because in our Bible reading that we just heard, it gives us a cringey picture of a hopelessly blind man. Now you may not see it yet. The prayer that Jonah has there, it's full of religious language.

It might sound okay, but by the end of our time together, I hope you'll see that Jonah's prayer is actually pretty cringey. He seems to lack self-awareness. Now we're in a series right now, a four-week series called Jonah, the Relentless God and the Reluctant Prophet. We're looking at God's grace in the life of this prophet called Jonah, and we kicked off the series last week as we looked at a reverent prophet among reverent pagans. We looked at Jonah chapter one, it's full of these references to fear, or we talked about the reverence of the Lord, the fear of the Lord, and how Jonah claimed to fear God, but he was actually running away from God and disobeying God, and yet these sailors who were pagan idolaters, they hardly knew the one true God.

They took lots of steps to try and please God and do what was right in His eyes, and by the end of the passage, it was them who were worshipping Yahweh, the one true God of Israel. And we learned that if even wind, waves, and pagan sailors fear God and obey Him, then why shouldn't we as God's people who know God so much more? Now this week, we're going to learn that salvation belongs to the Lord, from a man who appears to have no clue what that really means in his own life. So it's important to hear what God is saying through this text, because like Jonah, it's possible for us to be blind, as God's people, to our own need for God. This is why Jesus said to the church in Laodicea, he said, you, Laodiceans, say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realising that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

That's quite a contrast, isn't it? The Laodicean church thought we're doing well, and Jesus is like, you're really not doing well. Now, I'm not saying that's us, but I am saying we just need to be humble enough to say that it's possible for God's people to be blind to their own need for God, and so we need to listen in to what God is saying through this text and just humbly ask, are there any blind spots in my life? Reveal them to me if that's me, God. Or if you're here this morning and you've got questions about Jesus, you're not yet a follower of Jesus, you've just got questions, we're so glad that you're here.

We welcome you. If you want to ask us questions, we'd love to journey with you in your faith, in your spiritual journey. But Jesus, along the way, as you search His teachings and read about Him, He's going to offend you at times. In Matthew chapter seven, Jesus calls us evil. Now that's not something that you would normally go up to someone in the street and say, you are evil.

That would be offensive. Right? Maybe hearing that, if you're not a Christian or even if you are a Christian, you might feel like, you know, I'm not perfect, but evil? Sounds a little bit harsh. Sometimes Jesus says things that will offend us, but he's not surprised that it will offend us, because we're dealing with a spiritual reality.

We aren't always aware of our own need for God. The Bible actually says that we're blind to God's beauty and blind to our own need for Him, and that can be offensive to be told you're blind, but that's just what the Bible teaches. In 2 Corinthians chapter four, it says, the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. Now that's offensive if you're not a believer, but I'm just sharing that with you to say Jesus doesn't teach us these kinds of things, the Bible doesn't teach us these kinds of things, just to offend you.

He actually loves you, and He wants to open your eyes to your need for Him and your own need for God in order to love you, to forgive you, to save you. And so if you're searching, can I just ask you to keep your eyes open, to keep asking God to reveal Himself to you, to keep seeking, because the Bible says you will find as you seek? So it's great to have you here. We're going to think about what this passage has to say to all of us, but before we get into it, I feel like I just need to deal with the big fish in this chapter first. I think lots of people have questions about this big fish.

Was it a whale? Could this really happen scientifically? And all that kind of thing, and I don't think those questions are really the point of the passage, but I'm just going to deal with them now quickly so that we can get into the prayer itself that Jonah prays. Now, if you're a believer and you believe that God can raise people from the dead, then I don't think you should have a problem believing He can use a fish to save a man, like that's easier than raising people from the dead. But if you want to know a bit more about what this big fish is, well, I'm going to put a slide on the screen which I'll explain to you.

I did a bit of a word study on this fish, so in the original Hebrew, which this was written in, Jonah's fish is called dag or dug, so next time someone's called Dug, you can make a joke if you want. But anyway, that's just, it's called this great Dug, this great fish. But a couple of centuries before Jesus, these Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, which we call the Septuagint, and they used the Greek word kertos. They could have used the Greek word ichthos, which means fish, but they used kertos, which means sea monster. Interesting.

Now when you get into the gospels, the New Testament was written in Greek. When Jesus talks about Jonah's fish in the gospels, He doesn't use the word ichthus, He uses the word kertos, sea monster. Okay? So was this a fish or was this a sea monster? Well, if we go back to the beginning of the Bible, we say, well, where do we first see this word coming up?

You know, the Bible wants us to look through it. It's like the Bible's hyperlinked everywhere, all these hyperlinks to other passages that come before. If we go back to Genesis chapter one, we see this Greek word come up in the Septuagint, kertos. So in the fifth day of creation, by the way, this insight is from Tim Mackie, a scholar, it's not my insight, but in Genesis 1:21, the fifth day of creation, it says in the Greek version of the Old Testament, God created the kertos, the sea monsters.

In the Hebrew version, it doesn't use dag, it uses tanin, and that Hebrew word means sea monster or sea serpent. See, if you go to your Bible at Genesis 1:21, it might say the great sea creatures or something like that, but I think they're softening the translation a little bit. It's talking about God creating these great sea monsters, which became associated with Leviathan in the Bible. It seems like in Genesis one, at the very least, what God is doing is He's interacting with the other ancient Near Eastern cultures. Some of them worshipped this sea serpent as a god, and it's as if under the one sovereign God, Yahweh, this sea monster that's worshipped by other pagan religions is nothing more than just one of His creatures in the ocean, and that might be what Jonah is actually doing.

It's kind of like a funny, humorous thing. The sea monster that would normally have meant certain death for him is nothing more than just a great fish that God has appointed as his means of salvation. So that may be what's going on. It may not be right, but there's a little bit of nerding out for you on the original words and that sort of thing. Just one more comment before we get into it.

This chapter is the only chapter that's not narrative, it's poetry, and so when we're reading poetry, we need to be aware that there's lots of images and metaphors that are being used to communicate the emotion of what Jonah was feeling. So it has a true message, but it's not meant to be read literally and woodenly. So when Jonah says, you brought up my life from the pit, he's not saying he was actually in an earthen pit. We know that he was in the ocean literally, but he's using the pit because it's a metaphor for death or the grave. Right?

So we've got to be open to the fact there's metaphors, there's images here, and sometimes poetry uses hyperbole. So Jonah uses lots of language that sounds like he's died, but I think he's basically saying, I was as good as dead in this passage. Right? So let's just keep that in mind as we get into it, and we're going to try and understand Jonah's prayer by exploring it from three different angles. And the first angle is this, Jonah's emotions.

Jonah's emotions. So what was Jonah feeling according to this prayer? Well, let's just take a look at some of the metaphors or the word images that he uses. So keep your Bible open. In verse two, he says that he was in the belly of Sheol.

Sheol is the Hebrew word for the grave. So he's saying, I was right down there in the grave. Verse three, I was in the heart of the seas. The sea doesn't have a heart, but he's saying he's right in the depths of the ocean. In verse six, he says, I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.

There's a bit of hyperbole, exaggeration there. We know that he wasn't down there forever. He ended up being delivered by the fish. Right? But that's how he felt.

When he was drowning down there in the ocean, he felt like he was right down in Sheol, in the grave, and the bars of, well, it says land in our translation, but the Hebrew word can also mean underworld, which I think is what he's getting at. It's like this underworld, this grave, this Sheol that Jonah has found himself in. So let's just understand for a moment that when Jonah's saying from the belly of the whale he prayed, he's praying mostly and thanking God mostly for his experience before the fish swallowed him. So he was thrown overboard, and all these waves and breakers crashed over him and pushed him down. He was drowning.

He talks about weeds wrapping around his head, like he's in this shield, this prison, this watery grave. He was saying, I was as good as dead, and this was terrifying. As you may know already, I'm a beginner surfer, and I'm trying to learn how to surf, and a couple of weeks ago, I went out and the swell was really big, and being a bit of a knucklehead, I thought I'm just going to go out and try it anyway. So I went out to Burleigh Beach and I was just paddling out, and man, it was so hard to get out there because the current was so strong, it was pulling me north along the beach, and I was paddling, paddling, trying to get out, I was exhausted. By the time I finally got up to these waves, one came closer than I was expecting, and it barrelled over me and crashed over me, and it pushed me down right to the bottom of the sand, and while I was down there, I was surprised how long the water kept me under, and I freaked out for a second because I was already really puffed, and I was like, oh, this is scary.

As soon as I got up, I got on my board and just got straight back to the beach. Right? That's not nearly as bad as what Jonah went through, but when I was studying this passage, I got like minor PTSD thinking, oh, I know what Jonah was feeling, right? Right down there, pushed down, feeling like you're about to die. He was terrified.

He's trying to communicate, I was as good as dead, and it was scary. It was freaky. But one of the other emotions that we see in the passage is also gratitude. So we see in verse two, he says, I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and He answered me.

Verse six, yet You brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. These are some of the emotions we see in the passage. Fear, as good as dead, but also grateful for deliverance. But there's something missing. If we think about what we learned about Jonah last week, this prayer feels deficient.

It doesn't seem to match up with reality. It doesn't feel like Jonah has responded rightly. Let's take a look at that next as we think about some of the things that Jonah leaves out of his prayer. So we've looked at the prayer in terms of Jonah's emotions, and now let's look at it from the angle of Jonah's omissions. Jonah's omissions, the things that he's left out.

It's actually very interesting to think about this. Jonah's prayer is actually a sophisticated combination of quotations from the Psalms. He quotes about nine or ten Psalms in his prayer, so he was like a Bible genius. He wrapped all the quotations together, so it's full of scripture, and it's very interesting to see how he uses the quotations. Some of them he conveniently leaves off the next part of the line.

It's very interesting to think about which Psalms he chooses to put into his prayer, and it's very interesting to think about what he omits about his own life and his own state before God. So let me just run through a few of those things. Take, for example, his reference in verse three where he says, all your breakers and your waves passed over me. Now that's a direct quote from Psalm 42, but Psalm 42 is a psalm of lament. It's a psalm that comes from a righteous sufferer, someone like Job, who we know in the Bible, he was suffering greatly, but it wasn't because God was punishing him for sin.

God was accomplishing other purposes through his suffering. So Jonah's positioning himself, he quotes a number of these psalms of lament rather than psalms of penitence or confession. You've got lots of psalms of confession in the Bible as well. Jonah doesn't quote a single one of them. Was Jonah really a righteous sufferer who God needed to, you know, rescue, that he's being persecuted by all these wicked people?

Well, no. We learned in Jonah chapter one that Jonah was a runaway rebel. He was running away from God. He was disobeying God's call in his life. He was fleeing to Tarshish.

He was putting his fingers in his ears and ignoring God when the storm came through and was putting innocent sailors at risk. He continued to ignore it until God exposed him through the lot. See, Jonah was a complete rebel, and yet there's no mention in his prayer of, I was running away, I shouldn't have done this. He doesn't mention, thank you for your mercy.

He doesn't actually use the word repentance either. So the Hebrew word for repentance is shuv. It comes up in chapter one and chapter three, but it doesn't come up here in chapter two. It comes up in chapter one with the pagan sailors. They tried to repent, turn the boat around and get back to land where Jonah should have been, and then in chapter three, it comes up with the pagan Ninevites who repented when Jonah preached to them.

But in chapter two, Jonah, this rebel, this spiritual idolater, doesn't mention repentance. He doesn't mention what he's done. So there's this gratitude for being delivered. There was fear at the bottom of the ocean, but it seems like he's still either deflecting, refusing to acknowledge his own sinfulness, or he's really hopelessly blind and clueless to his spiritual condition. See, as we read through this prayer, it's actually kind of cringey.

It's like someone who's been super rebellious to God, and they know that God is coming after them, and God is judging them, and they've been put into the ocean, and they come out and say, oh, I'm sorry, God. They're like, oh, thank you for delivering me, and I was almost about to die, but you've rescued me now. You know, all the pagan idolaters, they forsake their hope of steadfast love, he says, but I, you know, you've delivered me. Salvation belongs to you. It's actually this really cringey, kind of vomit-worthy prayer.

The sad thing is that even though he's clueless and blind to his own sinfulness, he's very aware of how much other people need to repent. So he says in verse eight, those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. See, Jonah, we could see in chapter one, he didn't care about the pagan sailors who worshipped idols and statues. He didn't care if they were going to die, and he says it here again, those who pay regard to vain idols, they forsake their hope of steadfast love. But there's two questions I have about that.

First of all, Jonah, aren't you an idolater as well? Like, you didn't worship a statue, but you were fleeing to Tarshish. You were going the opposite direction from Nineveh where you were called, and Tarshish represented indulgence and luxury. He wanted the good life outside of God's authority. Isn't that something we lust after at times as well?

He wanted the good life outside of God's authority. He just didn't acknowledge, hey, I'm a heart idolater. I'm a heart idolater. Secondly, he says, those who pay regard to vain idols forsake the hope of steadfast love. Is that true? Because Jonah, you're an idolater in the heart, and yet God still rescued you from the ocean.

And these pagan sailors in chapter one, they were idolaters, but yet God rescued them from the storm, and they ended up worshipping God at the end of the chapter. So is Jonah right? He just seems to be so far off in this prayer.

He seems to be clueless, lacking self-awareness, blind to his own need for God. And the prayer gets more cringey. In verse seven, he says, when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. I get the sense that he's saying, you know, I was about to die, but God acted because I remembered Him. It sounds a bit like that.

Sometimes people can say that righteously in some of the Psalms, but I don't think Jonah can take that position here. We think about the Bible as well, generally the Lord says He remembers and acts. He remembers His promises. He remembers because of His own character and He acts, but Jonah says, I remembered the Lord. There are lots of little subtle narrative hints and lots of little things in the Psalm that make me think that Jonah's prayer is meant to be a pretty cringey thing for us to hear.

Really, Jonah? You remembered God? Is that why your prayer reached Him? Because of your impressive remembrance? See, God didn't save Jonah because Jonah remembered God.

God saved Jonah because God can save whoever He wants, even unrighteous Jonah. That's why he says at the end, salvation belongs to the Lord. That's what salvation belongs to the Lord means. It means God can save whoever He wants, even people who we think are cringey and vomit-worthy. He can save me, He can save anyone.

Jonah says something that's true without really realising how much it applies to him. He was self-righteous. And I guess that should make us stop and just ask ourselves the question. You know, Jonah was very biblically sophisticated. He was very proud of his belonging to God and going to religious ceremonies and all that sort of stuff. And it's good for us to ask ourselves, it doesn't matter how much Bible knowledge we have, or how often we've been going along to church, or what kind of religious badges we wear, are we aware of our own need for God's grace?

Are we aware that we are saved, not because of anything in us, but simply because salvation belongs to the Lord, because He has chosen graciously to extend His hand out to us in Christ? When you slow down to understand what Jonah is saying, you realise his prayer, while saturated with scripture, is actually cringey and vomit-worthy, and this seems to be how God feels about Jonah's prayer. He literally tells the fish to vomit Jonah out. Let's look at the significance of that next under the heading, God's reaction. So we've looked at Jonah's emotions, Jonah's omissions, and now God's reaction.

So let me read it to you. Verse 10. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. Now I don't think Jonah included this detail as, like, this is literally just the mechanism by which the fish expelled me, and I continued my journey. I think Jonah has included this for a reason.

He's a very humble author to reveal this about himself. The word for vomit is always used negatively in the Old Testament, and particularly in Leviticus, God warns His people multiple times. He says, if you break my covenant, you break this arrangement that we have, if you break my promises, if you disobey me, the land will vomit you out. The land will vomit you out. And now Jonah prays this prayer that's tentative and cringey, and then the Lord tells the fish to vomit him out.

I think that's a subtle narrative hint telling us that God is not pleased with Jonah's state, his spiritual state. God is not pleased with Jonah's words. God was merciful to Jonah. He hadn't given up on Jonah. He still saved him from the ocean, but God is not pleased with where Jonah is at.

You see, Jonah's prayer was vomit-worthy to God. Religious hypocrisy is vomit-worthy to God. Two-faced religion is vomit-worthy to God. Self-righteousness is vomit-worthy to God. Christians who think they deserve God's grace are vomit-worthy to God.

Christians who point the finger at the world but don't ever hate their own sin are vomit-worthy to God. Do you hate hypocrisy? Do you hate it when you hear about pastors and Christian leaders getting exposed for horrific things behind the scenes? Well, God does even more. It's vomit-worthy to Him when He sees religious hypocrisy.

And yet, this passage shows us that God even loves vomit-worthy sinners. God still saved Jonah, didn't He? Jonah didn't deserve it. He's less likable than the pagan sailors from the previous chapter, but God still rescued him. The steadfast love of the Lord didn't leave him.

There are some people that you and I might think are so vomit-worthy that they're not worth saving, but God is far more gracious than us. He's far more serious about sin than we are. His Son had to die for sin, but He's also way more gracious and abounding in forgiveness than we are. Think about the oldest son in the parable of the prodigal son, that story that Jesus tells. I think Jonah is like an elder son kind of figure.

So in the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus talks about that, and the younger son takes his inheritance and wastes it and comes back to the father. He basically is deeply offensive to the father, very rebellious, but the father takes him back in when he comes home, forgives him, clothes him, throws a party for him, but outside, the elder son finds out that his rebellious younger brother has come home, and there's a party for him, and he's pouting, and he's angry, and he's disgusted at the father's mercy. And the father comes out to the elder son, and the father is a picture of God in the parable, and he doesn't go to his older son and say, man, your lack of mercy is cringey. You are so ungrateful. Everything I have is yours, and you're still not grateful.

Why don't you just come in? In fact, you know what? Just stay out there. But the father's response to the son in Luke 15:31 is instead, son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. See, he doesn't just throw aside or discard his older son.

He's still mercifully reaching out to him. That was the apostle Paul's story as well. Paul was a very religious, very self-righteous, very angry man, a murderous man who went about hunting down Christians, putting them in prison, like validating and approving of their killing. He was like the equivalent of an ISIS terrorist, and yet God had mercy on even Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament. God loves even vomit-worthy sinners, people we think, no.

They're too far gone. They're so cringey. Jonah's cringey, and yet God has mercy on him. And this is my story too. If you put my sin up against a holy God, it's cringey.

I'm worthy of rejection by God, and yet I've been accepted by grace by God. See, Jonah declared in Jonah 2:9, salvation belongs to the Lord, without really knowing what that means, but it's the truth. It's the climax of the prayer. Salvation belongs to God, and that's really good news for you and me because it means that even we can be saved. But if grace hasn't done its work in our heart, it's also really offensive because sometimes God saves people we think, what? They were wicked, like Paul was like a terrorist.

Why would He save him? Jonah, I wouldn't want him in my church, he's so self-righteous, but yet God even had mercy on him. Salvation belongs to the Lord.

Great news for us, sometimes it's offensive because of who God chooses to save, and He can choose to save whoever He wants. He will have mercy on whomever He will have mercy. God saves even vomit-worthy people simply because salvation belongs to Him. And you know what's cool about verse nine? Salvation in the original Hebrew is the word Yeshua.

Does that ring a bell for anyone? The word Yeshua? Yeah, I see a few nods, that's Jesus' name in Hebrew. You see, Jesus' name means Yahweh saves or the Lord saves, and that's exactly what Jesus came to do. Jesus came to save unworthy or vomit-worthy people who we might have cringed over and rejected.

Jesus came to save people like me. You see, Jesus is the better and the greater Jonah. Jonah went to the brink of death. He uses lots of poetry and hyperbole. He was so close to it, and he came back out, but Jesus actually died.

He went to Sheol, the grave, for real. The great fish which swallowed Jonah would normally have been a vehicle of death. It's normally a sea monster that would have meant certain death, but instead, in God's wisdom and providence, it became Jonah's vehicle of salvation. And it's the same thing with the cross. That's normally an instrument of torture and shame, and yet in God's wise purposes, He turned it upside down, and it became an instrument of salvation.

Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, in the grave, saved from the brink of death. But Jesus spent three days and three nights in the grave, dead for real, before punching a hole through the grave and rising again in power in His resurrection. See, the death and the resurrection of Jesus are God's rescue, His appointed salvation for vomit-worthy sinners.

So I guess it just makes me say, like, why hold back anything from God? Why hold back any of our darkness, our shame, our secrets from our Father? Nothing surprises Him. Salvation belongs to Him. There is no one who is qualified enough to come to Jesus.

In fact, it's the very things we think disqualify us that qualify us to come, because all you need is need when it comes to Jesus. And you open up the empty hands of faith, and you say, I need you. Here's my sin. Here's my ugliness. Please save me, and clean me up, and cover me with the righteousness of Christ.

Jesus has proven that God saves even the most vomit-worthy people, because He saves whomever He wants to. It's all grace, it's all mercy, none of it is earned. And this is why the song Amazing Grace has resonated with so many people around the world. It was written by a man called John Newton, and John Newton was really a vomit-worthy sinner. He was a slave trader.

He was complicit in extraordinary human cruelty. He profited off the misery of slaves. He was morally hardened. But his story is remarkably Jonah-like. It's very interesting that in a violent storm, when John was out at sea, he was afraid for his life.

He feared death, and he cried out to God. And in that moment began a slow but genuine conversion in John Newton's life. Grace eventually got a grip of John Newton's heart. He left the slave trade. He became a pastor.

He publicly opposed the trade he once defended. And he wrote those beautiful words that so many of us sing, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. That's me. That's you. Wretches that God loves and that God has saved.

Near the end of his life, when he was almost blind, Newton said, my memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour. And that's the truth. That's exactly right. Great sinners are the only kind of people that God saves. God loves great sinners like me, like us.

God saves even vomit-worthy sinners because salvation belongs to Him, and He delights to save the unworthy. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for who you are. We thank you for your word. And we ask, Lord, that you would reveal to us our own need for you, not to shame us, but to free us from self-justification.

We want to be justified by Christ and Christ alone. We thank you for your incredible grace. It is our only hope. And Lord, we pray that your grace would do such a work in our hearts that we'll no longer find it offensive when particular kinds of sinners are saved by you. Lord, help us to see our own depth, our own need, and then just to be in awe of your incredible mercy and grace to us. May that buoy us and fill us up spiritually so we can go out and do what you've called us to do, to love you with all of our heart, to love our neighbours as ourselves, to share the good news of Jesus' love for sinners.

We pray this in His name. Amen.