The scripture reading, you may be seated. The scripture reading for today's, I'm sorry. Please stand. Thank you. Just keeping the legs fresh. The scripture reading for today's sermon will come from Jonah chapter two, and I'll be reading the whole chapter. Jonah chapter two. Hear now God's word. 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 look again upon you. 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, O Lord my God. 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 had vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. Thus ends the reading of God's Word. You may be seated. Let's pray together as we come to this wonderful passage of Scripture. Our Father, as we come today, we come with grateful hearts. We're so thankful, God, that You have revealed Yourself to us. We're so thankful, Father, that You have revealed Your Word to us, that these are Your words, and that they have come to us with living and active power to expose the sin that remains in our hearts, and to expose it to the great grace by which we have been saved. For salvation truly belongs to You, and You are our God, and we give You thanks. So Father, as we come and study Your Word today, would You help us to understand it? Holy Spirit, would You illuminate to our minds and to our hearts the meaning of these words? And would You continue to use the living and active Word of God to transform us by the renewing of our minds? Father, we pray all of these things in Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Well the title for our sermon this morning comes straight out of Jonah's own mouth there in verse 9 of Jonah chapter 2 where at the end of what is essentially a great prayer that comes in the form of a song, like a psalm in the book of Psalms. Jonah, there in chapter 2 and verse 9, proclaims as the apex of this great outpouring of prayer and praise to God, he proclaims that salvation belongs to the Lord. And having worked our way through Jonah chapter 1, and having some idea also of what's coming in chapters 3 and 4, in terms of Jonah's attitude towards God, this outcry of praise that salvation belongs to the Lord might seem a little bit surprising. Might seem a little bit out of place. And in fact, there are some scholars who are not believers, These are scholars who study the Word of God at a very scholarly level, but they don't believe that it's the Word of God. So they treat it like any other piece of ancient literature, just a product of ancient society, an artifact of the Jewish and Christian religions, but they don't believe it's the uniquely God-breathed, inerrant, living, active Word of God. So there are some unbelieving scholars of the book of Jonah, who take this statement of Jonah's here in verse 9, and in fact all of chapter 2, and they don't believe that it belongs in the story. They think it was added later. That's evidence to them that this is not the Word of God, because it's got errors in it, and they think this is one of them. And so they take Jonah's statement here as an evidence that the book of Jonah is not really the Word of God. Let me give you an example of a scholar who treats the book of Jonah this way and why. His name is Jacques Ellul. He was a French philosopher and a sociologist who taught at the University of Bordeaux in southern France. And he died in 1994. And he wrote a very, very well-known study of the Book of Jonah, which is called the Judgment of Jonah. And the title gives you an idea of the main theme that this particular scholar sees in Jonah's story. To this guy, this is a story all about God's judgment against Jonah because of how Jonah despised the people of Nineveh because Jonah was a racist. Jacques Ellul was a sociologist, see, and that was his main interest. So he believes that, or believed, that the story of Jonah was a myth and that the main point is that when people groups despise one another and treat one another prejudicially instead of equitably, then bad things happen. in society, and so for this scholar, Jonah is kind of like one of Aesop's fables. It's a fictional story, he thinks, that's geared to teaching some moral principle to help people and societies be better. And one of the main evidences that he lists for why he doesn't think that this is a true story, let alone the product of divine inspiration, and why he doesn't even think that chapter 2 belongs here, that it was added later, one of the main reasons is because, see, in chapter 2, which is in between Jonah's defiance of God in chapter 1 and then Jonah's frustration with God in chapter 4 after God saves the people of Nineveh in chapter 3. In between these sections where Jonah is chafing against God is chapter 2 where Jonah is praising God and this scholar doesn't think it belongs. He can't see a connection. And he and many other critical scholars of the Bible don't see how in the world a psalm of praise and thanksgiving is consistent with the theme of the book. And so he says, the great argument against the validity of this chapter is that this is not a psalm of appeal or petition, it's an act of thanksgiving or praise and it just doesn't belong. So he thinks it was added later. And all of that, see all of that disbelief by this scholar, is because Jacques Ellul may know quite a bit about ancient literature, and he may know a lot even about the Bible, but he doesn't know anything at all about God's grace. And God's grace is in fact, not God's judgment, God's grace is in fact the primary thing that the book of Jonah is all about. And God's grace is what explains Jonah's prayer here in chapter 2, as we're going to see together today. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Jonah's crying that out there at the end of chapter 2, right in verse 9, as he has scaled in his own mind and heart, scaled the summit of God's wonders and God's greatness and God's mercy in his prayer here in chapter two. And one of the central points of this whole chapter and of the whole book is that in the great discipline of God's sovereign grace and often severe mercy, he very often ordains in our lives hard trials. and afflictions and sufferings in order to teach us as his children to abandon our foolishness and our sinfulness and to return home to him like the prodigal son and to rest in the freedom of embracing him both as our Lord and our Savior. Charles Spurgeon said, you're going to like this quote better than the French guys. Charles Spurgeon said that Jonah learned to affirm the good theology of verse 9 that salvation belongs to the Lord. He learned to affirm that good theology in the strange collage of the belly of the great fish that God had appointed to swallow him. The affliction, right? The storm and the sea and the fish's belly. These were God-given ways that Jonah graciously and mercifully learned to say everything that he says here in chapter 2, and especially that salvation belongs to the Lord. Spurgeon says, and listen to this one, this is pure gold that you can absolutely camp in. Listen to this one. Spurgeon says, most of the grand truths of God have to be learned by way of trouble. They must be burned into us with the hot iron of affliction, otherwise we will not truly receive them. No man is competent to judge in matters of the kingdom of God until he has first been tried by great sufferings in this world. And since there are many things to be learned in the depths, which we could never learn in the heights. We discover many secrets in the caverns of the ocean, which though we had soared to heaven, we could have never known. Isn't that wonderful? Most of the grand truths of God have to be learned by trouble. Does that not give you comfort in your times of trouble? That God loves you so much, and is so graciously sovereign and merciful over every affair of your life, that He would ordain the trouble that you endure not to punish you, not to destroy you. but to teach you, and to sanctify you, and to make you radiate His glory even more. So this is one of the great lessons that we can glean from the book of Jonah, and that God has to teach us here. It's the lesson that Jerry Bridges has summed up in a quote that's, by the way, On the next page of your bulletin, page 15, after the sermon notes, you can save this one and take this one to the bank also. It's this lesson that God never wastes pain. He always uses it to accomplish His purpose. And His purpose is for His glory and for our good. And therefore we can trust Him when our hearts are aching and when our bodies are racked with pain. Now Jonah had to learn that lesson the hard way. But learn it he did, and the evidence is here in chapter 2. And in his pain, in what was surely the darkest hour of Jonah's life, God graciously used Jonah's miserable circumstance in order to draw Jonah back to himself, back to God. And so Jonah chapter 2 is a record of one of the great prayers that we have in God's Word. That's what it is. It's a prayer in the form of a psalm. And this is remarkable because so far, right, in the book of Jonah in chapter 1, of all of the things that Jonah's been doing and going through up to this point, praying is not one of the things that he's been doing up to this point. When God told Jonah to get up and go to Nineveh, Jonah didn't pray about it, did he? I mean, on the one hand, when God discloses His will to you in the kind of way that He did to Jonah, on the one hand, you don't need to pray, because God has spoken directly to Jonah here. We don't know exactly how God revealed His will to go to Nineveh, but it was in some kind of immediate way that He worked through His prophets in Scriptures. a dream, a vision, a spoken word, some kind of direct divine revelation straight to the prophet that they knew, as much as they knew that the sky is blue, came directly from the mouth of God. Ordinarily today, now that we have the finished Word of God in the 66 books of Scripture, ordinarily God speaks to us through His written Word, and not through this same kind of specific get up and go to Nineveh way. But God does. We've already seen He gives us all that we need for life and godliness here in His all-sufficient written Word. And so for us, a huge part of knowing God's will for our lives, what should I do? Where should I go? What decision should I make? As we're being transformed by the renewing of our minds and taking our thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ, revealed in Scripture, and framing our lives up according to God's Word in every way, a huge part of knowing God's will for our day-to-day decisions is prayer, right? We have to pray in order to be able to discern the wisdom from God's Word and how to apply it to our daily decisions. Well Jonah had an added advantage of knowing exactly and precisely what God's will was because God said to him directly, go to Nineveh. And still, even with the added advantage, still Jonah's decision making was prayerless, right? And so it was disobedient. He had no impulse at all to talk this over with God even. Not even to ask a question. Are you sure you want me to go to Nineveh? Oh God, I really don't want to go to Nineveh. What's in it for me? No conversation at all, right? Jonah just got up and ran the other way and fled from the presence of God. And then even when God hurled that massive tumultuous storm against the ship that he had boarded, still Jonah didn't pray to God. He was sleeping in the bottom of the boat. And even when the pagan captain of the ship woke Jonah up and said, hey, pray to your God. Still, Jonah didn't pray to God. Why not? Well, the bottom line very simply is he didn't pray to God because he didn't want to. He didn't want to talk to God, and he certainly didn't want to hear from God because the last thing he heard from God was not something he was comfortable hearing. And if we're honest, sometimes it's the same with us, right? Sometimes we don't want to talk to God, and we certainly don't want to hear from Him. Whether it's because of the impulse of self-sufficiency, that is strong in our sinful flesh, right? The sort of, I don't need God. I've got this on my own. I don't need to talk to Him. I don't need His wisdom. I don't need to couch every decision in my life by the wisdom of the Word of God. I've got this on my own, right? That's just pride. Because the Bible clearly says, apart from Him, you can't do anything. We're hopeless without Him. We're hopeless without His Word. So whether it's that impulse of self-sufficiency or because we've already decided what our will is and we don't want some possibility of God's Word saying that His will is different than our will. We don't want the wisdom and truth and righteousness of His Word coming to bear on our decision making because it might change our minds and convince us that God wants something different than we want and we don't want that. Maybe it's our willful, sinful disobedience to God's word and revealed will for our lives that gets us into all kinds of messes. And then when we're in the mess, we should be calling out to God, but we don't really want to because we're full of shame, or we're full of guilt, or we're full of fear, or we're full of bitterness and resentment. Or we're just still stuck in self-willed stubbornness, right? And so having been prayerless and having been foolish and having been disobedient, now we're in this place. And not only do we not remember to pray, we resist prayer. Ever been there? The last thing I want to do now is pray and speak to God, let alone listen to God, because my heart's hard. Well, this is what was going on in Jonah's life. It was the path of prayerlessness that paved the way for Jonah's descent into foolishness and disobedience, rebellion, and now ruin. Right? Jonah didn't pray because talking to God about it and listening to God was the last thing he wanted to do. Disobedience to God leads to prayerlessness. And prayerlessness leads to foolishness and more sin. And foolishness and sin lead further and further towards disaster and destruction. That's the gravity of the spiritual life, right? This is the spiritual law that you can count on and take to the bank just as surely as you can count on the reality of the law of gravity in this world, right? What goes up must come down. The foolishness and the arrogance and the questioning and the scoffing at the law of physics that says that on this planet whatever goes up must come down, right? If you laugh at that law and scoff at that law and say I'm not going to pay any attention to that foolishness, that leads to great foolishness, right? Like maybe jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. And if you do that, it definitely leads to disaster, right? The disaster of meeting the ground at terminal velocity. It's the same thing spiritually. Self-willed pride leads to disobedience to God, and that leads to prayerlessness, and that leads to more foolishness and more sin, and that leads to impending disaster. as you approach terminal velocity. You can count on it. You can count on it more certainly than you can count on gravity in the physical world. Well, in Jonah, God very, very graciously orchestrated and used the disaster in order to provoke prayerfulness in his prophet. In his grace, God brought Jonah low. In His grace, God did not waste Jonah's pain, but used it to remind Jonah of his need of God, and of God's great goodness, and of God's great graciousness. Richard Phillips says, sometimes the very best thing that can happen to us is the very thing that we dread the most. And this, for the simple reason, that it strips away our self-reliance and humbles our pride and removes from us every other hope except hope for God Himself. And that's really what we need. What a mercy it is, isn't it? When God removes from us our tendency to hope in ourselves more than in Him. Our tendency to hope in our own strength, our own understanding, our own self-reliance. What a mercy when God removes from us our tendency to anchor our hope to someone else other than Him. Maybe a family member or a friend or a wife, a husband, a child, something else, someone else, anything in this creation, money, property, physical health, comfortable circumstances. If your hope's anchored to any of that and you are a child of God, He will mercifully give you trials and hardships to teach you what you could not learn otherwise as He strips away and shakes all of those things that you're clinging to in order to pry your fingers off of them and leave you like this. I just need you. And if I have you, I have it all. What a kindness there is in the severe mercy of Almighty God when He shakes the things that we so easily cling to in order to shake our confidence in those things and teach us to trust in Him alone. And in that process where God does that, where He in His goodness sovereignly shakes us and shakes the things that we tend to trust more than we trust Him, and that is a process by the way, He doesn't just do it once and then, bing, you've learned it 100% and you're perfect now, right? He's doing it over and over and over in our lives because we don't learn right away. And we very conveniently forget all the time and revert back to those old sinful habits of self-reliance. And so we need the lesson to be repeated again and again and again as we grow like children who are learning to walk and run. They have to fall over and then they learn and then they fall over and then you pick them up and they learn. This is what God does. It's a process of teaching us in our ability to trust Him and to walk by faith in Him. And in that process, one of the key things that we're learning is to call out to Him for help. I can't do this and I need you. To call out to our God who is good, who is merciful, who is gracious, who is kind. And who says, come and depend on me and I will help you. And to do that in prayer. And that's what Jonah's learning here, right? In the strange college, as Spurgeon called it, of the belly of the great fish, by the severe mercy of his gracious God, Jonah is learning to say, verse two, I called out to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me. He hasn't done that all through chapter one. Now he's doing it because of God's grace. And hopefully you all read through this chapter this weekend before we all came to church together today. And even as it was being read, as Ian was reading it just a few minutes ago, I suspect that a lot of you, as you're reading through and hearing and looking at this prayer, in chapter two that it sounds familiar, that a lot of it's ringing some bells, like where have I heard that before, right? And if that's the case, then good, it should sound familiar because this prayer of Jonah is composed very much like a psalm that we would find in the book of Psalms. And in fact, many of the things that Jonah says in this prayer psalm of chapter two are lifted straight out of the Psalms. and are echoing truths that God has revealed in the book of Psalms and in other places in Scripture as well. Like verse 1, Jonah says, I called out to the Lord out of my distress and He answered me. Well, David says in Psalm 3, when he was running from his own son Absalom who wanted to kill him, he says, I cried out to the Lord in my distress and He answered me. In Psalm 120, the psalmist says, in my distress, I called to the Lord and he answered me. Jonah says, out of the belly of Sheol, I cried. Sheol is the Hebrew word for the place of the dead. Out of the belly of Sheol, I cried and you heard my voice. Well, in Psalm 118, the psalmist says, the cords of Sheol entangled me and the snares of death encompassed me. And in Psalm 30, David says, Oh Lord, I cried to you for help and you gave and brought up my soul from Sheol and restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit. Now David, when he wrote Psalm 30, he hadn't actually died, had he? But the way things were going in David's life seemed to him to be leading to certain death. until the Lord saved him and brought him up out of the depths of that trouble. And Jonah's read those Psalms, see? He's had the Word of God seared into his mind. He's sung these things in the temple. And he's saying the same things here, see, in the belly of the great fish. And he's not making it up. He's quoting it. He's invoking the truth of God's Word in his time of trouble, see? That's what he's doing throughout this whole chapter. Verse 3, you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas. Listen to Psalm 88. You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions of the dark and the deep, and you overwhelm me with all of your waves. Jonah says, all your waves and billows have passed over me. Well, Psalm 42, deep calls to deep at the roar of your waters. All of your breakers and your waves have gone over me. Jonah 4, then I said, I am driven away from your sight. Psalm 31, I said in my alarm, I have been cut off from your sight. And then Jonah's confidence that even though he's been driven away from God's sight, he's going to once again see God in the temple. That mirrors and echoes the certainty that's proclaimed throughout the Psalms that God is in his temple. And the longing to be in the temple where God is, because that's where mercy comes from. It's better to be in the temple with God than to be anywhere else. This is what Jonah is thinking about in the belly of the whale. The imagery that he invokes there in verses 5 and 6, right? Waves and waters crashing over him, roots ensnaring him. He feels like he's been cast into the deepest kind of dungeon. He feels like he's in a prison whose bars have closed him in forever. Well, that sounds a lot like Jeremiah's words in the book of Lamentations. Water closed over my head and I said, I am lost. I called on your name, O Lord, from the depths of the pit." Jeremiah goes on to say, you heard my plea, you came near when I called to you, you said, do not fear. Just like Jonah confesses in verse 7, when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you in the holy temple. Now, Jonah lived more than a hundred years before Jeremiah lived. But see, the same truths of the same Word of God are permeating their minds in their time of trouble, undergirding their souls as prophets of God in their time of trouble, and becoming expressed in the same ways as they face huge trials and afflictions in their lives. Verse 8. Jonah, he's fixing his mind on the goodness and the grace and the nearness of God, and he contrasts the absolute worthlessness of idols, right? Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. Just like David in Psalm 31, I hate those who pay regard to worthless idols, but I trust in the Lord. Psalm 115 famously, right, remember, declares the worthlessness of idols that are made out of wood and stone. And somebody had to carve eyes into them and noses and ears onto those statues. And they have the eyes, but they can't see. They have noses, but they can't smell. They have ears, but they can't hear. And the psalmist says, those who make them become like them. They become senseless. because they're worshiping vain things, worthless things, instead of putting their hope and trust in the living God. And this is the same thing that Jonah's realizing and celebrating. And so in verse 9, when he cries out to God with his voice of thanksgiving and he's professing his worship and devotion to God, it sounds for all the world like Asaph in Psalm 50. Jonah again reaches the pinnacle of this mountain of praise and prayer and says, salvation belongs to the Lord. And that brings him all the way back around to Psalm 3, where he started. Psalm 3, verse 8, salvation belongs to the Lord. Your blessing be on your people, David declares. In that great Psalm of deliverance, where he's saying, God, I need your help because my own son's trying to kill me. So, see, the point is this. The point is not that Jonah is always quoting word for word from various Psalms and other places in the Old Testament Scripture. Sometimes he is, but all the time in this Psalm that he writes, in this prayer that he prays, Jonah has had the great truths of God that are revealed in the scriptures so seared into his mind and heart, so emblazoned upon his soul as an Israelite from his childhood, that now in his darkest hour, even though he's been fleeing from God's presence and refusing to pray and suppressing God's truth, now that all earthly hope has been lost, and all that's left is God and His Word, this is what comes pouring out of Jonah's life. Now that's something for us to cultivate too, right? Such a rich familiarity with the Word of God, that when you get squeezed like a grapefruit in times of great affliction, it's not your sin that comes pouring out of you, it is the Word of God that comes pouring out of you. This is why it's so important to be spending time in God's Word, where those great truths are revealed, where we learn who God is, where we learn how his people like David and Asaph and Jeremiah and Jonah clung to him and found help and strength and rest and hope in him when all around their souls gave way. So Richard Phillips writes, Christians who make it their practice to stroll frequently through the garden paths of God's Word will be well repaid in their hours of darkness and doubt and despair with words that are designed by God to take their faltering faith by the hand and lead it once again to the Lord. Like a child who falls off his bike And the hand of the Father reaches down and lifts him up and says, let's go home where there's help. Such is God's Word. And again, those divinely ordained times of trouble and darkness and despair, they come regularly, don't they? They come seasonally, don't they? We fall off our bike a lot, don't we? as a providential part of God's fatherly process to keep training us to trust Him. So Jonah, even after this great outpouring of praise in chapter 2, he wasn't perfect yet, was he? It's not like he got swallowed by a fish and all of the Word of God came to him and he prays this prayer and proclaims that salvation belongs to the Lord and emerges from the belly of the fish in sinless perfectionism and he's found the victorious life now, right? Look what happens when he goes to Nineveh and preaches the Word and God saves him. He gets angry at God. And then God mercifully gives him a plant to shade him from the heat And then God reminds him that his confidence can't be in the plant, it needs to be in the God who made the plant, so God sends a worm to eat the plant and he gets mad at that. And his heart's still hard, his heart's still stubborn, he's still foolish. He still needs God doing things like this in order to bring him along the path of sanctification and growth and grace. And that's like all of us. And the greatest conduit of God's strengthening and sustaining and sanctifying grace is His living, active Word and the prayerfulness that His providence provokes in us. And that the Word gives shape to, especially in the dark hours. And for Jonah, the hour was dark, wasn't it? Desperately, desperately dark. He's in the belly of a fish that swallowed him. Now some commentators believe that Jonah actually died physically there in the belly of the fish and that God resurrected him because of the things that he says in verse 1 about being in the belly of Sheol, right? Which is the Hebrew word for the place of the dead. But again, he's invoking the Psalms there, including David, who spoke the same way of the snares of death encompassing him and the pangs of Sheol laying hold of him and God delivering him. David didn't actually die. but he was saved from death only by the powerful merciful hand of the Lord." And I think that's exactly what Jonah is saying. He hasn't actually died. He just realizes that the only reason why he hasn't died and why he's still alive and why he's somehow breathing oxygen in the belly of a fish and not being digested by stomach acids is because God is saving him from that fate and from the snares of Sheol and the jaws of death that are trying to consume him. God's the only one holding him back. So this prayer of Jonah's is focused on that single main theme that verse 2 speaks of where Jonah says, I called out to the Lord out of my distress and He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol even I cried and He heard my voice. That's what it's all about. It's all about God's merciful answer to Jonah in Jonah's most desperate need of mercy and deliverance. And Jonah's impulse to call out to God and his confidence that God would answer him, that was rooted in three realities. And this will take up the balance of our time here. First, Jonah understood in the belly of the fish the reality of his true situation and where his foolishness had brought him to. Second, he understood the reality of his relationship to God. And then third, he understood the reality that this God that he's related to is the kind of God, is the God who gives grace to sinners. And it's the combination of those three things. The reality of the seriousness of my situation. The reality that I'm in relationship to the God of heaven and earth. And the reality that He is the God who gives grace to sinners. That's what got Him through. And will get us through. So first, we see Jonah describing the reality of just how desperate his situation really was, right? Just how dire. The straits were that he'd gotten himself into. I mean, he's been thrown overboard in the middle of a massive storm and then eaten whole by a giant fish. It's bad. Now don't be tempted to think, well, none of this applies to me because I've never gotten myself into that kind of a mess. and I'm not likely to. You've never been eaten by a fish. You've never done something so ridiculous that you got yourself thrown overboard and swallowed by a fish, right? So how does this apply to me? My life's going pretty well. Well, don't be tempted to think that way, because first of all, the emphasis here is on the fact that it took this ridiculous circumstance, which was all designed and orchestrated and ordained by God, to wake Jonah up to how foolish and stubborn he was. Hopefully we don't need to get swallowed by a whale to realize we're no less stubborn and foolish than Jonah. Even though you may have never had this same kind of extreme wake-up call in your physical life, none of us are any less stubborn, none of us are any less capable of defiance towards God than Jonah was. So sure, he got himself eaten by a fish, and we all, every single one of us, have earned for ourselves the wages of sin which is everlasting death and hell. Eternally worse than a fish. The fish is a divinely ordained picture of the hell that we all deserve and the sovereign grace of God that we've all been given without which none of us, none of us would survive. So this is what Jonah says from the get-go. He says that he's in great distress because he's in the belly of Sheol. Verse 7, he says, My life was fainting away. His condition is so miserable that he describes it like being in the most hopeless kind of prison, right? Weeds were wrapped around my head and I went down to the land where bars closed upon me forever. Forever! That's what he thought. He saw death as the outcome of this plight and he knew that the consequences of his sin were eternal. He knew that it was his sin that had brought him here. And that the worst part of it wasn't how bad it must have smelled to be in the gut of this fish, or the fact that he was about to surely die, The worst part of it, he says, was that because of his sin, he had separated himself from God. Verse four, then I said, I am driven away from your sight. That's the worst part. He knew, Jonah knew, that he was now tasting the terrible fruit of his own rebellion against God. His own flight from the Almighty. It's all coming to full terms now with the absolute foolishness of his sin. His soul is choking on the bitterness that his sin has brought him to. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever done something that you know is wrong, but you did it anyways because you wanted to? And you ignored God's Word and you ignored the conviction of the Holy Spirit in your heart and you just did it your way? And indulged in the sin that God hates and that Jesus died to pay the price for? Have you ever, as a Christian, done that? And felt then the pangs of conscience and shame and guilt Or maybe even had to face some pretty bitter consequences that came from the disobedience against God. And wished, like nothing else in the world, that you'd never, ever gone there and done that. Well, that's where Jonah was. He has come to realize the full reality of his situation, not just his presence in the fish's belly, but his separation from the blessings of his God. And when you willfully sin against God, that's what you do, you place yourself outside of the sphere in which he gives his blessings. You don't wanna do that. And Jonah recognizes he's put himself so far out that he is deserving of the fullness of divine judgment for eternity forever. But then secondly, having realized that, Jonah comes now to terms with and remembers the reality that he is in relationship to this God. And again, he's confessing this from the outset. In this desperate condition, verse 1, Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God. Those are the key words, his God. All along, all along Jonah has been a man who's in covenant with the living God. He's just, Jonah's just conveniently forgotten that for a little while. But now he remembers. Jonah knows that, as he said to the sailors, he was a man who feared Yahweh. A believer in the true God of heaven and earth. And he calls this God his God. He's my God. Now, of course, that's exactly what made Jonas fleeing from God so spectacularly stupid and foolish in the first place, but it's also exactly what now begins to restore his hope. I've run from him and he's chased me and he's still my God. You see his thought process here? He knows that in his sin and rebellion he was running from God. He says in verse 4, God's driven him from his sight. But everything that he knows about God from the Word of God reminds Jonah that with God there is hope if you belong to Him always. So long as Jonah was still breathing, which only by God's sovereign grace he was still breathing, so long as he was still breathing, there was still hope for him. Jonah knew from God's Word that God gives grace to sinners. And the very fact that he hadn't breathed his last, that he hadn't drowned yet, that meant that the God who gives grace to sinners hadn't deserted him. And so Jonah, in spite of his sin, in spite of his guilt, in spite of his shame, prayed, called out to God for mercy. Is that what we do? Hopefully? Do we cry out to the God who is our God? Especially in our times of shame? Especially in our times of pain and trouble? Are we confident that whatever's going on, we belong to the God of heaven and earth? And that He's the God who says, I will never leave you or forsake you, Hebrews 13.5. And you know He will never leave you because He says it in His Word, but you also know He will never leave you because of who He is. Is He not the God who is not only all-knowing and all-powerful, but also always present in all places at all times? There is nowhere where God is not, correct? He's omnipresent, so He can't possibly leave you without ceasing to be God. Knowing that, and knowing that He's with you, and knowing that He's yours, and knowing that you're His, is the source of hope, and the reason why we can cry out to Him no matter what's going on. Is that what happens in times of trouble? Even in times where the trouble's been brought on by our own sin and foolishness, are we confident enough in who God is towards us to be able in those times to say with Paul, If God's for me, who can be against me? What possibly could separate me from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus my Lord? Tribulation? Distress? Persecution? Famine? Nakedness? Danger? Sword? No. In all of these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. Because, Paul says, I can say that because I am absolutely sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, or powers, or heights, or depths, or anything else in all of creation will ever be able to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus, my Lord. Amen. Can you say that? God's Word is absolutely clear that His love for His own is an unbreakable love because God is love and God cannot be broken. I have loved you with an everlasting love, God says through Jeremiah. And that love has saved us to the uttermost, Hebrews 7 says. And so in any trial that you face, in any circumstance that you face, all the way up to and beyond being swallowed by a big fish, you can trust this love of God that is yours in Christ Jesus. And you can seek God's mercy no matter what you're going through. Like Calvin says, like a man in the night looks for the sure coming of the dawn, in any darkness in your life you can look for the mercy of God. So, it was remembering and realizing what kind of circumstance he was actually in, and then remembering who he was in relationship to the Almighty and Merciful God. That's what gave Jonah hope to call out to God and assured Jonah that God heard him and that God answered. I called out and He answered me. He's sure of that because of who God is. Now, understand this. I called out to the Lord in my distress, and He answered me. He's sure of that, not because His circumstances have changed yet, right? They haven't. He's still in the belly of the fish. Jonah's circumstances hadn't changed, but Jonah had changed. Right? And that's the true sign of faith in Jonah's heart. And it's the true sign of faith in your heart. It's when we cry out to our God in distress and become so confident of His goodness and faithfulness that we no longer need to be delivered from the trials and the circumstances in order to know that God is answering us. Isn't that what Jonah's saying here? He's not praying and saying, then I got vomited out and then in chapter 3 I said God answered me because He did what I asked for. He's saying even if He doesn't do what I'm asking for, He's answering me. I don't need Him to do exactly what I want in order to be confident that He's answering me and He's good to me. Because to know the love of God that cannot fail. through tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or sword, to know the faithfulness of God that makes us more than conquerors and all those things means not needing those things to change in order to be satisfied or content with Him. Standing guard over our hearts with the peace that surpasses all understanding. Even Jonah in all of his sin and all of his guilt and all of his shame was able to recognize that God was with him. that God was answering him, because even though he's still in the belly of the fish, when he calls out to God, God is kindling repentance and kindling faith in his soul, and that's the evidence that God was answering him, not the circumstances. Just remembering the faithfulness and the goodness and the nearness of God in the trial and clinging to that was the proof that God had heard and answered his cry. The circumstances didn't matter anymore. The ability to praise God in the middle of the circumstances for God's faithfulness and steadfast love in spite of his sin and in the midst of the trial, right? That was the proof that God was answering him and God was with him and God was being good to him. Verse seven, when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you in your holy temple. That's all that Jonah needed, see, in the belly of the fish. Not to be let out of the terrible prison of his circumstances, but to repent of the bondage and the imprisonment of his own unfaithfulness and sin and resentment toward God for telling him to do something that he didn't want to do. Jonah needed to remember the Lord, who is sovereign, who is good, who is faithful in everything that he does, even when it's uncomfortable for us. And so coming out of that recognition of God's faithfulness to him as his God, the third thing Jonah does is he appeals to this grace of God that God freely gives to sinners who don't deserve it. So he's not just confident in God's faithfulness and mercy in a general way, he's focusing specifically on the fact that the true God is the God who saves, and not just people who are worthy of being saved. He saves people like you and me and Jonah, who are unworthy, who have set ourselves against him. He saves his enemies, not the righteous sinners Jesus came to call and save, right? And that's the great contrast that's highlighted by what Jonah says in verse 4. I am driven from your sight, yet I shall look upon you in your holy temple. Why? He was driven from God's sight because of his sin. So, was he sure that he would look upon the dwelling of God in the temple again because Now that he's repented of sin, he's going to pursue righteousness in a way that is enough to earn the privilege of being in God's presence again? Not a chance. Not a chance. Not now that he's facing death and Sheol in the belly of the fish. No, Jonah is confident of God's presence in spite of his sin and unworthiness because God is the God of unconditional love and graciousness. You remember what grace means, right? It means getting blessings from God that you do not deserve. And that's what Jonah's confident in. In the place of the belly of the fish, because of his sin, Jonah's thinking about the temple, the place of the presence of God, because that's the place where God pours out mercy and grace. The temple was the place where God ordained sacrifices to be made as a way of restoring sinners and reconciling them to himself. That's what Jonah's thinking about. That's what Jonah wants more than anything. He wants reconciliation with God by way of God's mercy and by way of God's grace. And he wants that more by far than he wants relief from his present physical circumstances. If anyone does sin, John assures us in 1 John 2, we have an advocate with the Father. Jesus Christ, the righteous, He is the propitiation for our sins. He is the one whose sacrifice appeased God's wrath for our sin and turned God's divine wrath away forever. Not based on anything we can do, just based on grace. And so, back in Romans 8, right, if God is for us, who can be against us? And if you're in a trial or a hard circumstance of your life, you can appeal to this grace of God and say, he who did not spare his only begotten son, but gave him up for us, how will he not also with Christ graciously give me all things? Not just relief from my circumstances, but everlasting salvation, peace with him, eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth, Forever. So all of this means that whatever trials we're facing, whatever's going on, no matter how hard the circumstances are, whether they're because of consequences of your sin or not, the cross where Jesus died is all the proof that we need of God's indomitable and holy and unfailing love for us. And it's proof that nothing can ever separate us from that love or from our God, because He's our God. And in who He is and in His love, He's always with us. In His love, He's always with us. Not in His anger, not in His wrath, which has all been turned away by Christ. In His love, no matter where we are and what we're going through, He's always with us in love, using the pain for His glory and for our good. All of this. Jonah's realization of the reality of his situation, and of the reality of his relationship to his God, and of the reality that this true God gives grace to sinners like him. All of this is what then gives way in verse nine to this final ultimate expression of praise in Jonah's heart, this pinnacle of the mountain that his soul has been scaling by God's grace. He's now come to the summit and he just cries out, truly, salvation belongs to the Lord. Not just salvation from the circumstances, see? Now Jonah's come to realize that God orchestrated the circumstances sovereignly and faithfully for his good, for Jonah's good. God has sent Jonah here for Jonah's good, not to destroy Jonah, but for his good. He sent him into the deep darkness of the belly of the great fish, not to destroy him, but to save him by bringing him to repentance and growing faith. Not, God doesn't want to save you from discomfort and unpleasantness only. He cares, and you can cast those cares on Him, and He answers prayer, and He's very kind and merciful in all kinds of ways. But ultimately, what God wants, and what God often gives the hard circumstances for in the first place, is to save us from sin and from foolishness and self-reliance and from the idolatry of heart by which we trust in and anchor our hope to the things of this world rather than to God himself. That's the residue of self-reliant pride and heart idolatry that remains in all of us. It's the same as Jonah. So today, let's look at our own lives. Do we recognize God's saving and sanctifying purposes at work when we ponder the providences of our lives? Are we able to recognize that in relationship to this God of grace, he's not punishing us, he's not destroying us, he's restoring us from our fleshly, sinful, self-reliant foolishness and pride and stubbornness, and he's training us to turn to him. for the grace and the mercy that we need. Amen? Let's stop there for today and pray together. And then we're going to sing praises to Him again on page 16. And then we're going to come to the table and we're going to see and we're going to feel and taste the things that God has given us to signify the ultimate outpouring of His grace for us in Jesus Christ. So let's pray as we prepare to praise God and receive grace from Him. Our God and our Father, how grateful again we are for Your Word and to know that You are for us. And since You are for us, nothing can stand against us. And that even in the trials of our lives, You are using those things and not wasting the pain in order to teach us to trust You and rely on You. And so Father, we ask, would You help us to become more and more people of prayer? to become more and more people whose minds and hearts are saturated by Your Word, so that when the squeezing afflictions lay hold of us, it is the truth of Your Word that pours out of us, even as it did in Jonah's life in the belly of that fish. Father, glorify Yourself in us as You continue to sanctify us and transform us into the image of Jesus Himself. This we pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Amen.