For Abel, would you please remain standing for the reading
of God's Word this morning I'll be reading from the book of
Jonah, chapter 2, beginning with verse one.
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the
fish, saying, I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and
he answered me out of the belly of shale.
I cried, and you heard my voice, for you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the Seas, and the flood surrounded me.
All your waves and your billows passed over me.
Then I said, I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall
again look upon your holy temple.
The waters closed in over me to take my life.
The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose
bars closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from
the pit. Oh Lord my God, when my life was
fainting away, I remember 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 the word of the Lord. You may be seated.
I want to begin this morning with a bit of a thought
experiment. If you are trapped in the belly
of a huge fish, what would you do now?
Just go with me on this? How would you pass the time?
Would you panic? Would you poke the sides of its
stomach to try to get you out? Or would you build a fire like
Pinocchio to try to get it to sneeze you out?
Well, this fall we're working our way through the Old
Testament book of Jonah. It's incredible story about a
prophet, one of the 12 minor prophets, the last 12 books of
the Old Testament between the turn the page to the New
Testament. What we've learned is that Jonah
was a prophet called by God. And see, all of God's prophets
were called to speak to his people.
The minor prophets called to speak to his people, Israel.
But Jonah, Jonah was given a new assignment.
Jonah wasn't just called to speak to Israel, but he was
called to speak to Israel's enemy, Nineveh.
Jonah hated Nineveh and so he wanted nothing to do with God's
mission and he ran from it and so doing he wanted nothing to do
with God and he ran from the presence of the Lord.
And so God sent a storm after Jonah and then he said a great
fish. Last week we looked at Jonah one
verse 17 and the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up
Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of
the fish 3 days and three nights.
And what we saw last week is that there is something greater
than Jonah here. That just as Jonah was in the
belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so Jesus
Christ the Son of God was crucified and he died and he
spent three days in the tomb, and on the third day he rose
again. That all who trust in his name
would have life. There is something greater than
Jonah here. But what we will see this
morning is that there is more to the story than Jonah being
swallowed by the great fish. What we will see is that Jonah
will then move on to tell us what happened inside the fish.
Something that anyone with even a little bit of curiosity would
wonder, what was Jonah doing for those three days?
But what we will see is that the book of Jonah not only gives us
a glimpse inside the fish, but more importantly, the book of
Jonah gives us a glimpse inside of Jonah.
We'll see the heart of a man, a man who has come to the end of
himself because they're in the belly of the fish.
Jonah did something he had not done since the beginning of the
book. Jonah stopped running and he
finally prayed, and they're imprisoned by a fish.
Jonah faced his own rebellion against God and to discover the
freedom of repentance that repentance that I want us all to
see this morning. First way is this repentance
confronts the depths of our depravity.
I want you to look with me at Jonah chapter 2 Jonah 2 verse
one we're told that then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from
the belly of the fish saying I called out to the Lord out of my
distress and he answered me out of the belly of shale.
I cried and you heard my voice to the bulk of this chapter is
written in the form of poetry and it's bookended by two verses
that are prose, their narrative to tell the story.
And so chapter 2 begins with verse one.
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord as God from the belly of the fish
and it ends in verse 10. And the Lord spoke to the fish
and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
Everything in between these two verses is Hebrew poetry.
And if you're reading along in your bulletin this morning, you
can't really see it what we've printed there.
But if you're reading in a Hebrew Bible, or really any
English translation, you'll see that these verses have been set
apart. It's a poem.
In fact, it's a poem that's been so beautifully and intricately
written that it's often called the Psalm of Jonah.
And for these verses, Jonah is calling out the Lord.
He's crying out him in poetic fashion.
And just as many skeptics have doubted that Jonah was really
swallowed by a big fish, many skeptics doubt that Jonah could
have written this poem. They say it's too beautiful.
It's too well written. There's no way Jonah could have
actually written it, especially from the belly of a fish.
You see, just like there's something greater than Jonah
here, there's something more than poetry here.
See, not only is this the Psalm of Jonah, but it's his prayer.
It's a prayer of praise. It's a prayer of confession.
It's a prayer of repentance. What we see is that in this
moment, Jonah is both literally and spiritually at the lowest
point of his entire life. And this descent has been
happening since Jonah chapter 1 and Jonah one verse 3.
We're told that after God told Jonah to get up to arise and go
to Nineveh, Jonah went down. He descended, he went down to
Joppa, and then we're told he went down to the ship to flee
from the presence of the Lord. After God sent the storm after
Jonah. We're told that Jonah then went
down further into the ship into its innermost parts to sleep it
off. Jonah was on a downward spiral
of sin and rebellion. Many ways.
It's why we say that we hit rock bottom.
Jonah was confronting the depths of his own depravity from the
belly of a fish. Verse 3 Jonah says, you cast me
into the deep, into the heart of the Seas.
The flood surrounded me. All the waves and your billows
have passed over me. You hear the language.
This was both literally true for Jonah, that he had been thrown
overboard into the middle of a storm.
Can you imagine what that must have been like for him?
Thrashing about in the waves, gasping for breath, his head
going underwater? But Jonah's also beginning to
understand that this is who he is spiritually before God,
running away from him. He's flailing his arms, running
from the presence of the Lord, descending deeper into his own
deprivation. Now, when we use the term total
depravity, what we mean by that is that as human beings, it's
not as if that we are utterly sinful.
It's that no, we are totally depraved, and that every part of
us is affected by sin. It affects our hearts and our
desires, beckoning us to go after false gods and all of
their empty promises. But it doesn't just affect our
hearts, it affects our bodies. That because of the fall, we
experienced the frailty of human life, even death itself.
And it affects our minds. It clouds our judgement, it
prevents us from seeing God rightly and causes us to rebel.
This is exactly what we see in Jonah.
Jesus said that whoever sins as a slave to sin, this is what
total depravity describes, that we are in bondage to sin and
this is sins. Great irony that we think when
we run from God and all those commandments, that that is where
freedom was found. That when we see God as some
kind of totalitarian dictator trying to push his thumb against
us and we think it's better for us to go our own way.
We think it's freedom, but it only leads in slavery and death.
But here, as Jonah confronts the depths of depravity, he sees sin
for what it truly is. More than that, Jonah says not
only has he descended into this belly of the fish, but Jonah
says he's gone down into the belly of shale.
And what does that mean? That phrase, the belly of shale,
is unique only to Jonah. The word shale isn't, but for
him to put it with the word belly.
Now clearly Jonah is playing off of where he currently finds
himself in the belly of a great fish, but he's recognizing that
far worse, he's descended the belly of shale.
The word shale throughout the Old Testament refers the
dominion of death in this language that led many people
over the centuries to ask a very important question about Jonah's
story. Did God send the fish after
Jonah out of his judgement or out of his mercy?
Was the fish an act of God's judgement to go after Jonah, To
say to Jonah, you can't run from me, I am the one true God and I
must pour out my wrath upon sin and rebellion.
Or was it God's rescue? Did God send the fish after
Jonah because of his mercy? Was Jonah's language here that
leads many people to say it must be judgement that Jonah has
descended to the depths of shale, to death itself.
And throughout the beginning of Jonah's prayer, he's confronting
his own sin and rebellion and is recognizing that he is enduring
the very judgement that he wished upon Nineveh.
I want you to hear that Jonah wanted God's judgement for
Nineveh, and now God's judgement had come for him.
But the story doesn't end there. Second, repentance not only
calls us to face our own depravity, but it invites us to
turn to the mercy of God. Look with me, verse 4.
Then Jonah says, I'm driven away from your sight.
I think Jonah's choice of words here is significant.
Jonah has been purposely running away from the sight of God, but
notice how he puts it. I have been driven away from
God's presence. God has given Jonah exactly what
he wanted and it's led to his own self destruction.
Apostle Paul in the book of Romans describes this in this
way. Romans one verse 21, he says,
for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give
thanks to him, but became futile in their thinking, and their
foolish hearts were darkened. Doesn't it sound like Jonah
running away from God, his foolish heart become darkened?
But if we're honest this morning, doesn't it sound like
us when we rebel against God too?
And then listen to this in Romans one verse 24.
Therefore God gave them up, and the lust of their hearts to
impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves,
because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and
worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator
who is blessed forever. Amen.
This is one of the greatest acts of judgement that God could give
us, that He would leave us alone to our own sin, that he would
allow our sin to consume us, to eat us alive.
And This is why the great fish was not only an act of God's
judgement, but was also an act of God's mercy.
Because God didn't leave Jonah alone.
God didn't leave Jonah alone. He sent a storm after him, and
then he sent a great fish after him.
And so here is Jonah, the end of verse 4.
Notice what he says. I'm driven away from your side,
yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.
That's one of two yet 2 yet. And Jonah's prayer, and both are
beautiful evidences of his repentance.
Jonah says, Yet I shall again look on your holy temple.
Some have suggested that this is Jonah and all of his confidence,
knowing that some point he's going to be rescued, that he's
going to live. At some point he's going to get
out of the fish, and one day he will look at the temple again.
But really, throughout the Old Testament, this language of
looking on the temple is used as a metaphor for prayer.
Let me give you an example. This is Psalm 186IN my distress,
I called upon the Lord to my God.
I cried for help from His temple.
He heard my voice. My cry to Him reached his ears.
Jonah will use this kind of language again.
And Jonah 2 verse 7, Jonah says, when my life was fainting away,
I remember the Lord and my prayer came to you into your
holy temple. So what is happening here?
Well, Jonah the rebellious prophet has finally stopped
running and he's turning back to the Lord.
Jonah is praying Lord his God and looking upon his face,
gazing upon the temple and setting his sights on the mercy
of God. This is the very definition of
repentance. Now when I use that word
repentance, I wonder how it sounds to some of you.
If you've grown up around Christianity, it's possible that
you associate repentance with legalism, or you associate it
with hypocritical Christians who tell people to live one way
while they do the exact same thing.
Or maybe for you, it brings up images of televangelists and TV
preachers telling people to repent.
I don't know how that word comes to your ears, but I want you to
hear this morning that what we see in the story of Jonah is
that repentance isn't legalistic, it's not inherently
hypocritical, and it's anything but restrictive.
Now what we see in Jonah's story is that repentance leads to
freedom. Notice what Jonah says in verse
5. The waters closed in over me to
take my life. The deep surrounded me.
The weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the
mountains. I went down to the land whose
bars closed upon me forever, yet you brought up my life from the
pit. Oh, Lord, my God, did you hear
it? It's the second yet.
And notice the imagery that Jonah is using in his prayer.
He's saying here I am in the belly of the fish.
And it's not just that I'm trapped inside a fish's stomach,
but seaweed is wrapped itself all around me.
Can you feel it wrapped around my limbs and around my neck?
It's choking me out. Not only that, but he says he's
gone down to the depths of the mountain, to this land whose
bars closed upon me. It's the image of a prison.
Jonah is recognizing that his sin has become a prison to him.
His rebellion has enslaved him. I want you to think about your
own rebellion, those times that you are tempted and even give in
to run from God. I once met with a man who'd
become addicted to online gambling.
He'd been trying to beat it for over a decade, and you know what
he told me? He said, I don't even want to do
it anymore, but I can't stop. This is what all sin is like for
us. It entraps us.
It enslaves us. It puts us into bondage.
It wraps around our limbs and our necks and holds us down and
becomes a prison to us. And so repentance is not
restriction, it's freedom. It's liberation.
It's when we stop running from God and run without abandoned,
right? The mercy of God.
And if one of the greatest acts of judgement that God could give
us is to abandon us to our sin, then one of His greatest acts of
mercy is to break us down in order to bring us back to
himself. This is exactly what he's done
with Jonah. He's brought Jonah to the end of
himself in order that he could truly begin to see the holiness
and mercy of God. One of the other minor prophets,
Hosea, puts it this way. Hosea 6 verse one.
Come, let us return to the Lord, for He has torn us that He may
heal us. He has struck us down and He
will bind us up. After 2 days He will revive us,
and on the third day He will raise us up that we may live for
him. Do you hear Jonah's story here?
God struck Jonah down in order to raise him up, and after three
days in the belly of the fish, he delivered Jonah.
But do you also hear it, that there is something greater than
Jonah here, even in the book of Hosea?
He struck down his own son to heal us, and after three days he
rose him from the dead. That we could have life.
The only way for us to truly receive the glory of the gospel
is for us to confront our sin, but also to run to the arms of
Jesus. And this is what true repentance
is. You see, Jonah's problem
ultimately was not that he thought he was superior to
Nineveh. That's just a symptom of a much
deeper disease. Now, ultimately, Jonah's problem
is that he no longer viewed himself in the shadow of the
holiness of God, so now all he could see was himself and see
the people around him. That's known as the sin of
comparison. And if you're like me, you do it
every day. We are so prone to compare
ourselves to others. Why do we do that?
I think we do that because if we search hard enough, we'll find
some people that we think are worse off than we are.
But you see, comparison always leads to moralism.
It leaves us stuck in our sin. We might turn from our sin, but
we never turn around to actually look at God.
We only look at ourselves. We look at the people around us.
The 19th century English minister JC Rile put it this
way. He said let her let us never
measure our religion by that of others and think we are doing
enough. If we've gone beyond our
neighbors. So many of us think that that's
what Christianity is. And so for us, repentance just
looks like turning from our sin, looking at ourselves, looking at
people around us thinking we're at least we're not as bad as
they are, and eventually turn right back to our sin.
But genuine repentance is what we see after Jonah says the
word. Yet genuine repentance is
turning from our sin and turning to the mercy of God in Christ
Jesus. In our church, we hold to a
confession to to a way of thinking about what we believe
that's been passed down from generation to generation.
That means we believe that we as a church are rooted and those
who've gone before us. It's called the Westminster
Confession of Faith. At the end of the confession,
we're given the Shorter Catechism.
Now catechism is just a way to teach us what it is that we
believe through a question and answer.
If you think that sounds archaic, let me just tell you,
you're being catechized every single day by the world around
you. You're being shaped and formed.
Westminster Shorter Catechism infiltrates all of that and
helps us understand not just what we believe, but why.
Question 87 asks this question. What is repentance unto life?
Here's the answer. Repentance unto life is a saving
grace, whereby A Sinner, out of true sense of his sin and
apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, does with grief and
hatred of his sin, turn from it and unto God with full purpose
of an endeavor after new obedience.
Did you hear it? The two steps of genuine
repentance. It's not just turning from sin,
but it's turning to God and His sovereign mercy, driving down
only by grace to walk in new obedience.
So the third thing that Jonah and his prayer from the belly of
the fish teaches us, repentance is a saving grace.
Jonah concludes his Psalm by describing what this genuine
repentance looks like In verse 8.
He says those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their
steadfast love. Jonah's point is that the false
gods that we turn to ourselves and other people, the
affirmation that we might seek in the world around us, can
never deliver on its promise. And so we might try to turn from
our sin into these idols. And when we do, we turn our back
on the only one who has promised to love us to the end with a
never giving up, never stopping, always faithful and forever
love. He goes on in verse 9 and says,
but with the voice of Thanksgiving, we'll sacrifice to
you what I have vowed I will pay.
This is Jonah now turning to God, turning to his mercy and
grace, and now endeavoring to follow after God and his
commands and new obedience. But I want you to notice the
language that he chooses. Jonah says I will sacrifice to
you. Would I have vowed I will pay?
I don't think these words are an accident.
So we had already seen this kind of behavior earlier in Jonah.
One, not from Jonah, but from the pluralistic Pagan sailors
who in the middle of the ocean found themselves praying to the
one true God and making sacrifices and vows to him.
Even in Jonah's prayer of repentance, he's still comparing
himself. He's comparing himself to the
Mariners. Some have said, well, he must be
comparing to them because he says, well, their repentance
can't be genuine. I'm going to do better.
Others have suggested no, he's pointing to the Mariners
repentance because that becomes the model for him.
But either way, this is what I want you to see.
Even in Jonah's repentance, he's comparing himself.
And look, I don't want to give it away, but do you know how the
story of Jonah ends? After Jonah is finally delivered
from the fish, After Jonah finally preaches to Nineveh,
after Nineveh repents and God have mercy on them.
Do you know what Jonah does? He gets angry enough to die and
he ends up right back where he started.
And I can't help but think of the words of our confession of
sin. We need to repent of our own
repentance. We need our tears to be washed.
Because in case you might not yet understand what true
repentance is, repentance is not something we can do on our own.
Repentance is a saving grace. Even God works repentance into
our lives. Because you and I cannot save
ourselves. If you don't believe me, just
listen to the last words of Jonah's prayer, the end of verse
9. Jonah proclaims salvation
belongs to the Lord. You cannot save yourself any
more than Jonah could get himself out of the belly of a
fish. Salvation belongs to Lord.
He is the one who saves his people.
And if you still have a hard time believing that, just look
at what happens next in verse 10.
God save Jonah by commanding the fish to vomit him out on dry
land. Salvation belongs to the Lord,
and He will stop at nothing to rescue his people.
He sent a storm and a fish to save Jonah.
He sent a rebellious prophet to save Nineveh, and he sent his
own son Jesus Christ to save you and me.
And so repent, Repent every minute of every day.
Repent. The first theses of Martin
Luther's 95 theses that he nailed to the door of the church
in Wittenberg, Germany, said this.
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, he intended
that the entire life of believers should be repentance.
And if that sounds like a drag to you, let me suggest that
you're still not understanding repentance for what it really
is. Because what Martin Luther meant
was not that the entire life of believers is just trying to get
out of your own sin. Now what he meant is that the
entire life of believers should be 1 of running to Jesus,
running to Jesus of every minute of every single day.
And is there not a more glorious life than that?
And so repent this morning, if you've been trying to get
yourself out of your own sin and just like Jonah found it to
enslave you, you've never turned to Jesus Christ as your Savior.
Repent. Turn to him alone.
His arms are open wide. They're spread out on the cross.
He died and rose again for your salvation.
And this morning, if you are a follower of Jesus, repent.
We need the good news, the gospel, every single moment of
every day, and just like Jonah, to stop running from God and
instead to turn from our sin to look on the face of our Savior
Jesus and run to him. Let's pray.
Father in heaven, we pray that you would enable us to live
lives of repentance, that we would turn from our sin and turn
to you, Lord Jesus, and in walking with You that we would
walk in new obedience. We thank you that repentance is
a saving grace. So we pray that by your
sovereign grace this morning, you would work through your Holy
Spirit to work repentance deep into our hearts and bring us out
of the darkness and into the marvelous light of walking with
you. We ask this in Jesus name, Amen.
Let's stand and let's sing together.