Rock Bottom

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Heavenly Father, we thank You for the blessing of us to gather as Your people. We thank You for the holy scriptures. We thank You for Your holy people. You call them saints. You call us saints. It's not because of any righteousness in and of ourselves. We have none to commend ourself to You. We come to You only on behalf of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, we thank You that you were cast away from the presence of the Father in order to provide a way for us to never be cast out. If there's anyone who is outside Your family, outside of the elect, today, draw them to Yourself by the power of the Holy Spirit. Lord, in each one of us, develop a humility, a contrition of heart, a trepidation before Your Word, the same that we see with Jonah. You gave him the gift of hitting rock bottom, and I pray that that's not what it takes for any of us. But even if anyone of us does, we thank You that You meet us there. We pray that you bless our time, the holy scriptures today, and we pray You minister to us where we are and help us take the next step in obedience of faith. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Today we continue our sermon series through the Book of Jonah. The title of the sermon today is Rock Bottom. Jonah, as we met last week, is a reluctant believer, he's a rebellious prophet, and on top of that, he is a resentful missionary. God comes to Jonah and says, "Go." And Jonah says, "No." Jonah runs away. He runs to Tarshish, it's the opposite direction of Nineveh. It's not that he was afraid that people in Nineveh would believe in God and have their sins forgiven, no, no, no, that they wouldn't believe. He actually feared that they would believe he hated them. He didn't think they were deserving of the Word of God. He deemed that God had made a mistake. "No, God, You have to be wrong about these people."

So Jonah boards a ship bound for Tarshish, pays the fair. It's a long trip, maybe a year, would cost a small fortune. He probably sold everything he had. So he's all in on running away from God. Yahweh the Lord hurls a great storm, God never misses, and the storm threatens the ship and the lives of the crew members. The pagan sailors don't know what to do. They do everything they possibly can. They jettison the [inaudible 00:02:55], they pray to their gods, they cast lots, they confront Jonah. Finally, Jonah confesses who he is. He says, "I fear God." And last week we saw that his fear of God was very half-hearted, and he confesses to what he's done. "I'm trying to flee from the Lord, that's why the Lord has cast a storm."

They toss him overboard and the storm calms. The moment Jonah's off the ship, Yahweh relents from His wrath, calms the storm, delivers the crew, and the crew actually gets saved. They repent of their sin. They turn to Yahweh because they see the power of Yahweh even working right in front of them. The prophecy of Jonah reveals that it's Yahweh's redemptive purpose to save everybody, including gentiles. This was the whole making a covenant with Israel. God wanted Israel to be missionaries in the promised land, to serve as witnesses to his holiness and righteousness to neighboring gentiles. They didn't do it in the same way that Jonah didn't do it. The lesson that we can draw from here is you can run, but with God, you can never hide, neither from God nor from His purposes.

Philippians 1:6 promises us, "I'm sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." And often God does allow us to hit rock bottom to fulfill, to complete His work in us. He doesn't just do it passively. Sometimes He actively determines it as He does with Jonah. He gives him the gift of rock bottom. Jonah wanted to literally hit rock bottom. He wanted to die. God says, "No," sends a big fish, big enough to swallow him whole. Obeying God is costly. Disobeying God is even more costly. But this book isn't about Jonah.,It's about a God that meets Jonah even at rock bottom. The book is about a God who loves us. I don't know when's the last time you meditated upon that, that God does love you and therefore God does pursue you. God does confront you. He will arrest you to awaken you, and He does this to bring us to the end of ourselves and bring us home in faith back to Him.

The text here before us in Jonah 2 focuses not so much on what happens in the belly of the fish, but what happens in the heart of Jonah himself. Jonah's experiencing death itself. He's in a living tomb, perhaps even physical death. We'll get into that. If you take the sign of Jonah language, literally Jesus says, "I will send you a sign of Jonah," and then He compares a sign of Jonah to His own death, burial and resurrection. A sign of Jonah could have been that Jonah did die. We'll get into that. Either way, the miracle is that God doesn't just save this man physically, but He saves his heart and He saves his soul.

Before Jonah can effectively preach repentance, he must first learn to repent himself. So that brings us to Jonah 2. Would you look at the text with me? "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 Sheol 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 and take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped about my head. At the roots of the mountain, I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever, yet you who brought up my life from the pit, O 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 Joan out upon the dry land." This is the reading of God's holy, inherent, infallible, authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time, first, the merciful wrath of God's discipline. Second, the missing words from Jonah's prayer. And third, the mysterious ways of the Lord's salvation.

First, the merciful wrath of God's discipline. This phrase, merciful wrath, was coined by Martin Luther to describe the fact that God does, as a loving father, often send fatherly discipline that feels severe in the lives of his children. There are times when a Christian wanders so far, backslides so far from the path of faithful obedience to God, when the virus of rebellion has spread so vigorously through our spiritual system that nothing but the merciful wrath, a wounding medicine, can cure. Sometimes God has to bring us to the end of ourselves before we're ready to turn back to Him. This is what happened with the prodigal son. It wasn't until he finds himself sitting in the muck and the filth in the pigsty, and he sees pigs eating and he actually covets their food. It says that he came to himself, he came to his senses, and then he began to make his journey home.

This is what God is doing in Jonah's life. It's a merciful wrath. It's a spiritual chemotherapy on the cancer of his rebellion. It's hard, it's sore, and it's necessary. But God does actively pursue convict those whom He loves. The purpose of God's judgment on Jonah is to bring him to repentance. Look how far Jonah has gone from God in an attempt to run from God's presence. He goes down to the port to catch the ship in Tarshish, down to the hull of the ship, down into the sea. So part of God's plan was to let him go down, down, down.

There are many different ways to run from God, not just getting on a ship and running in the opposite direction. Jonah was active in fleeing from God. Many of us, we do it more passively. Perhaps you work so much you don't even have time to connect with God, "God, You know why I'm working so hard." Or perhaps it's endless entertainment or perhaps it's just generally avoiding any talk about God whatsoever. This is a subject that we shall never broach, ever, ever, ever. That's how many of us live in the secular humanist in Boston. There's subjects that you do not touch in public company, but also even in our own minds. Do our minds gravitate toward God? When Jonah hits rock bottom, what's he left to do? What are we left to do when we hit rock bottom?

Well, he prays. And what does he pray? What do you pray when you have nothing to say, when you don't know what to say? Well, he prays the words of God back to Him. He prays psalms from the psalter. All the words here are quotes from the [salter, at least seven different psalms he quotes, perhaps directly or perhaps he had so memorized the Word of God that when he had nothing else to do, nowhere else to turn, he meditates on the Word of God. The psalm in this chapter is a meditation on his fish belly experience. As he's marinating in gastric juices, Jonah is meditating on God's Word. This chapter is a memorialization of his desperation. He's on the brink of death or he is dead, and then he wrote this after, I don't know. But Jonah 2:1-2, "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 Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice.'"

To whom does he pray when he hits rock bottom? To the Lord, Yahweh, the covenantal, relational, loving, merciful name of God. But I don't know if you noticed, that's personal. God got personal all of a sudden. God wasn't personal. I wanted nothing to do with the presence of God, what God's telling me what to do. All of a sudden, when he's got nowhere else to go, God becomes personal. Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. Jonah 2:6, "'Yet You brought up my life from the pit, oh Lord my God.'" Well, contrast that with what he says to the sailors when he confesses his identity, Jonah 1:9, "And he said to them, 'I'm a Hebrew. I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea in the dry land.'" Did you catch that? Before he needed God, it's the God of heaven. As soon as he has nowhere else to turn, "You're my God."

Well, what is that? That's just a child. He's finally awakening to the fact that he's a child of God and he needs his loving Father right now. Apparently, Jonah does not fear death. After all, he was willing to sacrifice himself to save the ship's crew. What Jonah fears is being abandoned to Sheol. He didn't know what that was going to feel like. What is the Sheol? You can spend a lot of time figuring this out, but it was an understanding of this is where you go, this is where the dead go, the place of the dead to await judgment, the final judgment. And more generally, it's the interior place of the departed. As you look at how he thinks of Sheol, look at verse six, "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.'"

So Jonah sinks to the roots of the mountain, rock bottom metaphorically. And now, alas, in the depths of the ocean abyss, the reluctant prophet desperately cries out to Lord, "O Lord my God." What got him to cry those words, O Lord my God? He thought death was it. He thought, "Okay, I don't want to do what God wants me to do. I just want to die. I don't want to die, Lord, kill me, the suicidal prop. Kill me. Kill me. And then the Lord says, "Oh, you want run for My presence? You want to experience what it feels like to not have My presence forever?" That's what the text says, "bars close upon me forever." What is God doing here? God is giving Jonah a taste of hell. Not just of death, not just of physical torture, He's giving him a taste of death, of hell, of being abandoned by God forever. And this is wounding medicine that God made Jonah fish bait, not to destroy him, but to deliver him, and deliver him not just from the storm threatening to shipwreck the vessel, but from the sin that was making a shipwreck of his life.

What a sober warning this is for many of us, that when we think we are fleeing God's presence and we run and we run and we run, there might come a point where that's it. There's no more turning back. You do end up in a place called Sheol or hell or whatever you call it, a place where God's loving presence no longer exists. So Jonah here is brought to repentance. Rebellion is running from the presence of God, repentance is returning to the presence of God. So here we find this man, the most extreme of circumstances, in the belly of the fish and the depths of the sea and the jaws of death itself. And what does he do? He prays and he cries out to God.

Lesson here, friends, is cry out to God wherever you are, wherever you are, however you find yourself, do not wait until you are at rock bottom. If that's what it takes, God will take you there. No, friends do not scoff this gift of salvation, this gift of forgiveness of sin, this gift of heaven instead of hell. Do not scoff at that. Look at this man of God, it took him experiencing hell to finally cry out to God. We don't need to get there. How did he get where he is? In Jonah 2:3, he acknowledges that God is sovereign, "For You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seeds, and the flood surrounded me, all your waves and your billows passed over me."

How did he get there? "It was You," he says to God. Wait, I thought it was the sailors that threw him in. Well, yes, there were instruments in the sovereignly determining hands of God. The crew acted freely and out of desperation and prayerfully, but Jonah knows, "No, no God, You threw me in." The Bible frequently presents free human actions as the fulfillment of God's will with no attempt to resolve the apparent conundrum. Notice Jonas speaks of the seas, the waves, the storms as all Yahweh's possession, Yahweh formed the oceans, He controls the wind and the waves. These become Yahweh's means to both discipline and rescue the reluctant prophet.

Verse five, "The waters closed in over me to take my life, the deep surrounded me, the weeds were wrapped about my head." He could feel his life fainting away, as verse seven says. It's a terrible, chilling, graphic depiction of a drowning man. He thought he was drowning. He thought his lungs were filling up with water, lungs with no oxygen, jaws closing in, and then he cries out, "God, you did it." There's two different ways. When you experience calamity in your life, you can say, "God, You did it. It's all Your fault. I'm going to blame You for the pain I feel. You are not loving, You are harsh." No, he doesn't blame God for his predicament, he says, "God, You did it, I deserve it, and this is for my good."

He could say, "Lord has chastened me, and He's chastened me grievously, but not to give me over to prediction. I live, and while I live, I need to reassess my life. God has given me mercy and He's given me mercy for a reason." In 2:4, he begins to really wrestle with the heart of what it means to be abandoned by God. "Then I said, 'I'm driven away from your sight." Being driven away, another translation says to be banished. Leviticus talks about a spouse, a wife that commits adultery against her husband, the husband divorces or banishes her. As Jonah here is entombed in the belly of this great fish, he feels banished from the presence of God. He's been trying to flee from the presence of God, and God here gives him a taste of what that feels like.

Hebrews 10:31, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." There are a couple ways of being in the hands of the living God. Jesus Christ talks about the fact that people who are Christians, the elect are children of the Father, and the Father holds us in His hands and He will never let us go. Sometimes the Lord's, the Father's hands are loving and tender and sometimes they are disciplinary and they're full of wrath. And this is the hands that Jonah fell in. Psalm 31:22, "I had said in my alarm, 'I'm cut off from your sight.' But You heard the voice of my please for mercy when I cried to You for help." So Jonah does cry out in verse five, "The waters closed in over me to take my life, the deep surrounded me, weeds were wrapped about my head," and verse six, "yet You brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God."

Well, great, Jonah cries out to God, God saves him when he's meditating on the Word of God, he's repenting. But this brings us to point two, the missing words of Jonah's prayer. There's something missing. Reading Jonah's song of praise here is like listening to someone play a perfectly tuned piano, but there's one key missing. There's something missing. There's a good deal of beauty here, but that one note, and it's the note of repentance of the particular sin. There's missing lines, there's missing bars, if you will, of calling sin a sin. Jonah here has changed, praise to God, God's at work, but it's a gradual change. It comes in fits and starts like the blind man. Remember the blind man in Mark 8? Jesus restores the sight of the blind man. Jesus touches him and says, "What do you see?" And the blind man says, "I see men walking around like trees." He sees, but he doesn't see clearly yet. His vision was still in distinctive, still blurry. So what does Jesus do? He touches him again and at last he's able to see clearly.

Isn't this how often God deals with us. The first time you come to the Lord, you're like, "I finally understand everything. I'm preaching next Sunday. I think I'm ready to preach the Word of God." And then little by little you begin to understand, "Oh, it's all a process. We're all in process." And some of the Lord's most important lessons, they take time and there's stages and changes that occur in our heart. Jonah has come a long way from his unbending rebellion. We get to a point where he's worshiping in the belly of a great fish, but he hasn't come far enough. He hasn't said the missing words. "Jonah, why didn't you go to Nineveh? Why didn't go to the capitol of Assyria, your arch enemy of Israel? Why didn't you go there?"

"I didn't want to preach the word to them." "Why didn't you want to preach the word to them, Jonah?" "Because they might repent." "Isn't that a good thing, Jonah?" "No. No. I don't want them to repent because I don't want to call them brother or sister. I don't want to worship with them in the temple. I don't want to go back to my people and tell them, 'Hey, Israel, remember your enemies that killed you? Yeah, they're all repented and they're all going to come worship at the festivals.'" Jonah, he would get killed. No, Jonah should have repented. This should have been like verse two, "Lord, I repent for hating my enemies. Lord, I repent for hating the Ninevites." The one note that needs to be sounded loudest and longest and clearest is missing all together from this psalm is xenophobia, his prejudice that made him flee in the first place, his horror at the idea of those people becoming children of God.

That's a festering sore that still remains in his heart, unaddressed, unrepented of. Look at verse seven, "When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, my prayer came to You, into Your holy temple." I remembered the Lord. The reminded you of Himself very clearly. You didn't do much to remember the Lord, good sir. And then he continues in verse eight, so he's just talking to himself, I'm awesome, I remember the Lord, and then, "Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I... " Do you see the contrast? "But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to You, what I have vowed I shall pay. Salvation belongs to Lord." The phrase for steadfast love here, verse eight, God is steadfast love, he's got the theology. It's the word for hesed in the Greek, covenant love, covenant mercy, a love that sends Jesus Christ to die for our sins. A love that does not spare the Son of God but freely delivers Jesus up for us all.

Jesus experiences what Jonah had not experienced completely. Jesus experienced the wrath of God, the eternal wrath of God. Jesus experienced the full brunt of hell on the cross for us so that when we trusted him, repent of our sins, all our sins are forgiven, and we experience the hesed love of God, His steadfast love. It's a covenant love. It's a faithful love. It's a redeeming love of God for His chosen people. "Idolaters, Jonah says correctly, "have no share in the redeeming love of God." It's all true. But look at Jonah, he doesn't consider himself one of the idol doers. He considers himself as the one that did all the things right. "Unlike them, you see, I know who God is."

There is a self-congratulatory note, a self-centeredness that still persists. It clings to his heart tenaciously. His whole problem was he did think he was better than the Ninevites. "Well, of course, God loves me. I'm Jewish, I'm part of the Jewish people. I am a prophet. Look at the spiritual pedigree of my family." He may even be hinting that God saved him because he deserves to be. "Well, of course, God saved me. God still needs me to preach to the Ninevites. That's kind of what's going on here. He thinks the outsiders are beneath God. But he is absolutely right here at the end, salvation belongs to whom? To Israel? No. Salvation belongs to whom? Salvation belongs to the Lord. That's how he ends the whole thing.

What does that mean? It means that we contribute absolutely nothing to our salvation. Yes, we must exercise faith and we need to engage in repentance, but these contribute nothing to our salvation, to our justification before God the Father, to our reconciliation before God. We add absolutely nothing other than the sin that made it necessary. Salvation is of the Lord from beginning to end. If God doesn't save us, then we're not saved. That's what Jonah learned in the belly of the fish, that salvation is all from the Lord beginning to end. He kind of knew it, but now he's learned it in the crucible of trial and suffering.

So we're all in a process like Jonah, it's true, that God isn't finished with him yet. And praise to be to God, He's not finished with us either. But here we do need to take a lesson from Jonah's hypocrisy that's being exposed. Christian, where is there hypocrisy in your own life? There is the Lord putting His finger on some area of inconsistency in your Christian walk, someplace where you say one thing and do the other, some dimension of you thinking orthodox words are enough to cover selfish, prideful attitudes. Do you still struggle with xenophobia or partiality, where you would rather spend time with Christians like this not Christians like that?

The church is a missionary society, and we must never forget that. This is why we exist, we exist to bring glory to God and extend His praise from shore to shore. And our goal is to reach those who are far from the Lord, the other, with the gospel of grace. There is no room, if we believe in grace, if we believe that we're saved by grace through faith, then there's absolutely no place for any superiority complex. Jonah 2:10, "And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land." The Lord spoke. The Lord spoke to the fish. Next time you go fishing, you should pray, "Lord, speak to some fish to come my way." Lord speaks to fish, and when God speaks, the fish obeyed, and Jonah is delivered onto dry land.

Big fish don't usually beach themselves. The fish here is Yahweh's agent and does exactly as Yahweh commands, unlike Jonah, and deposits Jonah presumably somewhere near Palestine on a beach where Jonah will be recommissioned to preach the gospel. What did Jonah look like right now? I'll leave that to your imagination. I don't think he had eyebrows, and that's enough. If a guy comes to you and preaches without eyebrows that he lost in a belly of a fish, you listen. What we need to know here is that God is a God that can resurrect, and we need to know this, that this is the heart of our faith, that you must believe in the resurrection if you are to be a Christian.

Romans 10:8-13, "But what does it say? 'The word is near you, in your mouth, and in your heart,' that is the word of faith that we proclaim, 'because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the scripture says, "Everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame." For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord as Lord of all, bestowing His riches on all who call on Him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved'" This is as simple as it gets. If you are not a Christian, you're new to Christianity, you just want to know what this is all about, this is as simple as it gets. Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins, bearing the wrath of God that I deserve. He died, He was buried, and He was raised on the third day as proof that everything He taught was absolutely true.

Now, how does that impact me? When you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, when you believe that Jesus is Lord, and if you believe that He rose from the dead, that's all it takes, you will be saved. Saved from wrath of God, saved from being banished into a place called hell. Saved from your sin. Saved from the penalty of sin. Friend, if you're not a Christian today, don't put it off, don't put it off. Today, in your heart of hearts, pray to the Lord, "Lord, I repent of my sin, of my reluctance, of my folly, of my rebellion, of my law-breaking. Lord, I repent. Lord, I trust in You. Jesus you're king. And Jesus, I believe that You rose from the dead and I will rise from the dead one day as well."

Third, the mysterious ways of the Lord's salvation, Jonah 2:9, "But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you, what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord." So salvation leads to thankful sacrifice. God, thank You for saving me. What would You have me do? This is the natural inclination of every true child of God. It's the instinct of the redeemed soul. God, what would You have me do? True repentance always involves commitment, which means now, Lord, are You telling me to do the hard things like go preach to the Ninevites. Jonah had his Nineveh, what is your Nineveh? What is the thing that God is calling you to do and you're like, "No, no, no, that's going to take too much sacrifice."? Well, true repentance always includes a desire to sacrifice.

Why should I sacrifice to attain salvation? No, this is where Christianity separates itself from absolutely every other worldview or religion. No, we don't sacrifice to earn salvation. No, salvation doesn't belong to us earning. Salvation belongs to the Lord, completely, 100%. Jonah here isn't swimming in the sea saying, "God save me." There is no power for salvation. That's the picture here. All he does is cry out. All he does is pray. And yet you know what? It's an imperfect prayer. It's imperfect, but it's answered. Do you notice before we move on that the prayer Jonah prayed as he sank into the sea was imperfect, but God still answers it? This is part of the wonder of the story. Jonah, he doesn't even know what to repent of. All he does is cry out. He knows who can help him and he knows he needs help. He turns to God for rescue even though it's not a full repentance.

The whole Book of Jonah comes to a conclusion, as we'll see eventually, that we're still not really sure if Jonah repent. His heart hasn't changed as he prays, and God condescends to hear him anyway. Jonah is a hard-hearted, stubborn man, but he's still loved by God. He cries out to God, "God, I'm a sinner." And he's sinking of the ocean, the waves wrap around his head, his life faints away, he feels like he's entering Sheol himself. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't even think, "You know what? The Lord is getting my attention. You know what? I think I am here because I have disobeyed the Lord. He doesn't do any of that. All he does is cry out to God from his mess, from his brokenness.

He doesn't even do it right. He is completely self-centered. He uses the pronoun I 10 times in eight verses, my seven times. He's making vows that he doesn't really keep later. The point here is you don't have to work through all your junk before coming to the Lord. You don't have to have figured it all out. I was talking to a guy, invited him to church, he's like, "But I've never read the Bible." I was like, "Bro, that's like half my church. Don't worry, just come to the church." No, it's not. I mean, you guys have read the Bible. But you know what I'm saying? You don't have to be a theologian before you come. He's nasty. He hasn't cleaned himself up, gastric juice, all that, not a full repentance. But he does turn to Yahweh, and that's where the power of repentance is.

What is repentance? Repentance isn't just confessing, acknowledging, chronicling all of your sins to God. He already knows them. Repentance is turning from sin and turning to the Lord. As you turn to the Lord, you're like, "Oh wow, You were gracious. You're so gracious to me." Jonah 2:1, "Jonah prayed to Lord His God from the belly of the fish." He prayed. Scripture says, "Seek me and you will find me if you seek me with all your heart." Scripture promises, "Come close to God and He will come close to you." This is how Jesus taught us to pray, "Seek and you shall find. Ask and you shall receive. Knock and it shall be opened to you."

Yeah, Jonah is in a mess, but it's a self-inflicted mess, and it's a miracle that God would even take time to listen. But God does listen. Here is a God more willing to hear than we are to pray, a God who knows the words on our lips before we speak them. But He longs for us to speak them so that we may know that He has heard our prayers. To pray is to admit that there is something greater to the reality that we're all experiencing. There's a God in this reality, a God who is distinct from our own reality. He's transcendent. It's a reality which is different from ours and possibly therefore threatening.

Who is this God? If I talk to this God, if I submit to this God, if I obey this God, will I be happy? Will I experience the life I want to experience? Once we come face to face with this reality, we realize, "Oh, this was the whole point the whole time. There is no joy outside of God. There is no joy outside the presence of God. There is no satisfaction apart from the presence. There's no comfort apart from the presence of God. Apart from the presence of God, all I have is darkness, Sheol for all of eternity."

The Lord our God is this reality. Yahweh is the only safe hiding place, the only secure refuge. Only in Yahweh, in God can we acknowledge and expose ourself as completely defenseless, powerless, and vulnerable. He meets us there and He does not banish us. He meets us there and He loves us and He comforts us. To unmask ourselves in prayer is to begin to discover who we really are in the presence of God. In prayer, the heart, the eyes, the ears of the human soul are open to the possibility of being touched and healed by the Holy Spirit. Prayer is the breath of life, and it is Jonah's last hope, and it's our last hope.

God appoints a great fish, and I take much comfort in this. In Jonah 1:17, "The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." When did God appoint a fish? How big of a fish does it have to be to swallow a man whole? That's a pretty big fish. I'm not an aquarist, but I assume that for a fish to get of that size, it takes time. I think God appointed this fish long before Jonah boarded a ship to Jhapa, before Jonah decided to flee from the presence of Lord to Tarshish, before even he had heard the call of God to go to Nineveh in the first place. I think God ordained this fish a long time ago knowing that this moment would come. Salvation really does belong to the Lord. And before Jonah was aware of what would happen, God had already made provision for his deliverance.

Did God know that Jonah was going to sin as egregiously as he... Yes, of course. God before that sin ordains a means of deliverance. God's salvation is a sovereign gift, prepared and provided long before we even knew we needed or wanted it. Scripture teaches us that God has demonstrated His love for us in this and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Friends, there are no unexpected eventualities in your life for which grace is unprepared. There are stages or seasons in your life that I know you're scared of. You're like, "I'm not looking forward to this part." I'm like, "Grace will come." There are no unexpected eventualities in your life for which grace is unprepared.

Jesus is a perfect savior to sinners, no matter the pattern or the contours of your particular sin. He is suitable to us. The Book of Hebrews says He's shaped perfectly to our need. Salvation belongs to the Lord, and He has provided it in Jesus Christ, a savior prepared in advance. Jonah 2:4. "Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall again look upon Your holy temple.'" What's the connection between being banished from the presence of God and the holy temple? Jonah, what are you saying? "I've been banished because of my sin," he knows it, "but I'm still going to look at the holy temple." Why is he thinking about the holy temple? Well, the holy temple breaks down the gospel in a way that shows us both the bad news and the good news.

In the holy temple, in Israel, in Jerusalem, at the center of the temple was the Holy of Holies. And at the center of the Holy of Holies was a wooden box, the Arc of the Covenant. And in it were two tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. It's the Ten Commandments. They outline God's character, that God has called us to live a life of love toward God, love toward people. It's a law that requires what we in our heart of hearts want to be. Who doesn't want to be a loving person? Who doesn't want to be known as selfless or sacrificial or humble in the realest way? Well, that's what the commandments call us to. And the law tells us that this is the only relationship with God to keep the commandments.

Well, the bad news is we've all broken the commandments. We've transgressed the commandments. If you're not even familiar with the commandments, I'll just tell you commandment number 10 is thou shall not covet your neighbor's house. All right? If you live in Boston or Brookline, you have broken that commandment. This is how we're bringing revival through the real estate market. You have all committed sin there, commitment number 10. We're all jealous, we need need grace. The good news is, over the Arc of the Covenant, over the law, there's a golden slab called the Mercy Seat. It was called the Place of Propitiation. Propitiation means to turn aside the wrath of somebody through payment. Here it's God.

And once a year, on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, an animal was killed and blood was sprinkled in the mercy seat, and God says, "I will accept the fulfillment of the law through a substitute that was killed on our behalf." Well, all of this, the temple that Jonah is thinking about, what is he thinking? He's like, "Lord, I have transgressed your law." Commandment number one, thou shall have no other gods before me. Jonah, God comes to him, he's like, "No, thanks." So he puts himself in the position of God. He supplants God from the throne. "I'm God." There you broke commandment number one, Jonah. Jonah needs propitiation and he understands unless he gets to the temple, there is no forgiveness of sins. But how can he get to the temple if he's in the belly of a fish? And this is the great conundrum. Even today, dear friends, like if you're Jewish, this is what I tell my Jewish friends, if you believe your own scriptures, if you're truly Jewish, how is there atonement for your sins? How is that being done? There are no animals being slaughtered in the temple today. There haven't been since the year 70 AD.

No, no, no, this right here, the whole temple, the whole temple system, the sacrificial system, the priest system, all of that pointed to a greater temple, a greater priest, the greater sacrifice, a greater Jonah that of Jesus Christ. Jonah sojourned in the fish for three days and three nights points to Christ Himself. Matthew 12:38-41, "Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, 'Teacher, we wish to see a sign from You." But He answered them, 'An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah's three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will a Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men in Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for their repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here."

Reluctant Jonah's stay in the belly of a great fish was a pointer to Jesus Christ. That's what Christ is saying. It points to Christ. And Jonah is the anti example. One of the greatest ironies, I think, in the Book of Jonah, the fish is the savior, not Jonah. The fish is the savior. But Jonah the runway prophet is the type of Christ, pointing to Christ. In what way? In the opposite. Jesus Christ came to us willingly. He lived willingly to save the lost. Really, He willingly descended all the way down to death itself to willingly welcome us into the household of God. God gives us salvation in a mysterious way. He puts Jonah in the belly of a fish and He puts His Son on a cross. It was God who hurled His Son into death, into the sea of the wrath of God. Jesus Christ on the cross, He cries out, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"

What happened on the cross that the Father would forsake the Son? Well, the Son became our sin. He who knew no sin became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. And because Jesus became our sin, He was banished from the presence of God the Father. He did in a sense descend into hell. We need to turn to Jesus Christ because He is a savior suitable to us. How can we be saved? The only thing you need to do is what Jonah did, cry out to the Lord. Do it even before you hit rock bottom. But even if you do hit rock bottom, He'll meet you there if you turn to Him with humble repentance. And for those of us who have been rescued from the storm of God's wrath, let's use our beautiful feet and mouths to preach the good news that salvation belongs to Lord Jesus Christ and is found in Him alone.

Romans 10:14-17 to close, "How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent. As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news. But they have not obeyed the gospel for Isaiah says, 'Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?' So faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of Christ." Amen.

Would you please pray with me in closing? Lord, we thank You for this word. And Lord, as we look at this sinful man, Jonah, we do not stand over him in condemnation or disdain. No, we look at him as one of us. Each one of us, we've sinned, we've run from Your commandments, we've run from Your presence, even from Your Spirit. Lord, we thank You that you've met us there, that You've given us the gift of hitting rock bottom, many of us, and You've turned us in repentance. For those who have not yet turned to You, Lord, turn them and their hearts to Yourself today and continue to make us a powerful, a missionary force here in the city and beyond. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen.