Turning your Bibles to the passage that we read earlier, Jonah 1-7-2-10, as we pick up where we left off with Jonah asleep in a boat that is in the middle of a storm. And we said about that that it was in many ways emblematic of what is too often characteristic of the people of God. We find our nation in trouble. We find our major institutions the fabric of the nation itself unraveling, face problems that we cannot seem to solve. And then in our personal lives, trouble with our marriages, trouble with our children, trouble with our schools, and the temptation always is to avert our gaze, to just flip on the television, or go to a ball game. We're like Jonah, we're asleep, vainly hopeful that everything is going to work out in the end. And the reality, however, for Jonah, though he is sleeping, is that God has hurled, that's the word in verse 4, like a javelin, he hurled a storm right at Jonah. And in verse 5, the shipmates are crying out because it seems that destruction inevitable given the strength of the storm. And so from there we want to see what other lessons that we have to learn in addition to those that we reviewed last week as the consequence of the storm, that is a consequence of Jonah's sin and then his deliverance, is unfolded in our narrative. So the first point that I want us to recognize is that sin brings a storm, a storm of God's judgments upon those who refuse to hear his call, the call to salvation, the call to discipleship, the call to repentance, the call to vocation, Those judgments are visited upon those who disobey his commands, who refuse to hear his voice. God's judgments bring a storm into our lives. So what the Apostle Paul says in Galatians chapter 6 is that we will reap what we sow. He invokes the law of sowing and reaping, that if you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind. That's the language of Hosea chapter 8 and verse 7. Paul says you sow the flesh, you're going to reap destruction. There's an inevitability about it. You break God's laws, God's laws will in fact break you. So as an example from the Bible, we have David. David sins with Bathsheba. And he seems to get away with it. But she becomes pregnant. So then David must not only commit adultery, he then must attempt at deception by bringing Uriah in from the battlefield. He sleeps at the porch rather than entering into his home. So he arranges for the murder of Uriah. As it were, the hell of God's judgments are unleashed on David. He repents, but then the repercussions, the ramifications for him, for the child that was conceived, for his daughter, for his sons, they're overwhelming. There's a storm that comes into David's life, and it doesn't depart. It continues with him right to the end. fresh power of the storm that was a result of the sin that he committed with Bathsheba. And the lesson that we sought to make last week is that we cannot run from God. God is going to pursue us. When we defy Him, when we disobey Him, there will be consequences. He will not leave us alone. There will be storms. There will be storms for us as a nation, storms in our families, storms in the lives of our children, storms in our businesses. Sin brings a storm. There are consequences and they are unavoidable, they are inevitable. They're built into the very nature of things. Sin brings a storm. Number two, only repentance brings relief. So we pick up the story at verse seven. And they said to one another, come, let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us. So they cast lots. Now what is the casting of lots? Well, our word lottery. That gives you some notion of what we're talking about. It's drawing straws. It's rolling the dice. And it's a sometimes approved method of identifying a course of action that's to be taken. It's a direction or an identification that is to be made. And so in this case, they cast lots. And the lot, we read at the end of verse 7, fell on Jonah. Jonah is the one who was responsible. So verse 8, they began to interrogate him. Then they said to him, tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you? You see the interrogation. They're eager to know what's going on. Why is this happening? And he said to them, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord. That's the divine name. The English, the Anglicized pronunciation would be Jehovah, the God of heaven. In other words, the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who made the sea and the dry land, the God who is the creator of all things, the sovereign God. Then the men were exceedingly afraid and they said to him, what is this that you have done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. So verse 11 then follows. Jonah having confessed his sin and told them what he had done, so he confessed his guilt. And yet Jonah must endure the judgment, the consequence. Then they said to him, what shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us? For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, pick me up and hurl me into the sea, then the sea will quiet down for you. For I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you." In other words, he must endure the judgment, which is the storm of which his sin is the cause. So we see something here of the beginning of the typology of the event. So Jesus invokes that typology. Matthew 12, 38, when he told the scribes and Pharisees that they would not receive any sign except the sign of the prophet Jonah, for Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, this is Matthew 12, 40, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The difference is Jonah is bearing the judgment upon his sin for three days and three nights, and Jesus bears our sin. For Jonah, it's his own guilt. For Jesus, it's our guilt. And so the typology is such that Jonah is, as it were, a foreshadowing of Christ, except in that crucial point that Jonah bears his own sin. But that anticipates and it foreshadows the Savior who would bear our sin and our guilt. There is sin to be born and Jonah must bear it. And so he says to pick me up and hurl me into the sea, verse 12, for I know that because of you this great tempest has come upon you. Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Look, Jonah was not showing compassion toward the people of Nineveh that he was called to go and to preach the warning of God's impending judgment, and yet these pagans, these unbelievers, they are showing compassion toward Jonah and are reluctant to give him up to the storm. It's as it were another rebuke of Jonah. Verse 14, therefore they called out to the Lord, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood. For you, O Lord, and notice they are invoking the divine name, have done as it pleased you. They are no longer calling out to their gods, they were earlier, now they are calling out to the one true and living God. Verse 15, So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Jonah must die that they might live. And so he's hurled into the sea and the sea is calmed as the judgment is satisfied. Verse 16, then the men feared the Lord. These people are converted despite Jonah's disobedience and waywardness and rebelliousness. The men feared the Lord exceedingly and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. It's as though they were converted, is it not? they're now offering sacrifices to Jonah's God despite Jonah's failure. Matthew Henry says quaintly, when sin is the Jonah that raises a storm, we must cast it into the sea. In other words, we all have these Jonah's in our life, And these occasions of sin that have brought the judgment of God or the discipline of God, if you will, we have brought these hardships into our lives, these conflicts into our lives. And what are we to do with those things? Well, like Jonah was cast into the sea, we're to cast those seas, those idols, those lusts, those sins into the sea. We're to drown them, we're to mortify them, we're to crucify them. So our passage just raises that question, what sin has been the occasion of our hardships? What sins have brought storms into our lives? What sin have we committed? What idol have we worshipped? What duty have we neglected? What call have we suppressed? What assignment by God have we refused? That's number two. Number one, sin brings a storm. Number two, only repentance brings relief. Then number three, a rescue comes about only through hardship. Now, if we go back to David again, so David sins, he's confronted by Nathan, he repents of his sin, and God forgives him. Is that the end of the story? No, there are these consequences, aren't there? The child dies. His son Amnon rapes his sister Tamar. His son Absalom kills his brother Amnon. Absalom raises up a rebellion against, a civil war against his own father and is killed in the conflict that results. Then Sheba, likewise, raises a conflict, a civil war against David. There were these consequences. David was forgiven for his sin, but again, the law of sowing and reaping. You've sown the wind, you're going to reap the whirlwind. There will be consequences that will have to be endured. get drunk and drive your car and run into a tree, and as a result you break your neck and you pray for forgiveness for the sin of drunkenness, the neck will remain broken. There will be these consequences. And so the consequences begin. Verse 17, and the Lord appointed a great fish, could be a whale, there's no word for whale in Hebrew, so it's a great A sea animal, probably a mammal, likely to be a whale. Jonah continues to breathe underwater. I would imagine this sea monster is gulping air and it reaches Jonah. Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Now, notice that the fish is a part of the judgment but it's also the means of his rescue. I'm sure there's tremendous insight and wisdom to be gained from that reality. It's part of the judgment. I mean, you can just imagine the terror of this giant sea monster, this great white shark or this huge whale approaching him in the depths of the sea and opening its mouth and swallowing him whole. Had to be absolutely terrifying. and that he is in that confined space for three days and three nights had to be absolutely terrifying. And yet as we see, as we go through chapter two, the fish in fact rescues him from death. He is in the depths of the sea and sees no escape and is at the verge of dying and entering into the grave. when God saves him in this very unconventional way. So I think the right way to see chapter two, verses one to the end, is kind of a retrospective. Jonah is recalling, here's what happened. When I was thrown overboard, chapter two, verse one, then Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God, from the belly of the fish. He prayed to the Lord at some point. What was the point? Well, perhaps at the point at which he was swallowed, but that wasn't until he reached the bottom. So God let him linger, as it were, in the midst of the terrors of the deep. So let's read through. I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol, or the grave, a kind of shadowy understanding of the hereafter that was characteristic of various points in the Old Testament, I cried, and you heard my voice. Four, you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea, and the floods surrounded me. When I came home after two years in England as a theology student, I booked a passage, student standby rate, on the Queen Elizabeth II. And as we were journeying across the Atlantic, I went and stood at the back of the ship at night and watching those powerful engines churn up the water and then that illuminated bubbly water then passing off into the darkness. It made a visceral and enduring reaction on me of the terror of the deep, this vast, dark, deep, cold ocean. I think that's something of what Jonah is enduring here as he expresses that he's being cast into the deep. into that darkness, into the heart of the sea, and the flood surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me." Then I said, I am driven away from your sight, and yet I shall look again upon your holy temple. Then he goes back to the narrative. 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, the bottom of the ocean, whose bars, as it were like a prison, closed upon me forever. You see what he's saying? I was at the point of death. I was doomed. I had no way of escape. I was in this prison of the depths of the sea. Yet, the second part of verse six, yet you brought up my life from the pit. Oh Lord, my God, when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. And then he affirms his faith. Those who pay regard to vain idols, forsake their hope of steadfast love, but I with a voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay." Salvation belongs to the Lord. Why did Jonah not drown? Because God saved him. It was most unconventional kind of salvation. Nevertheless, he recognizes this didn't happen by chance. This wasn't some accidental event. It was God who rescued me through this giant fish, this whale, that it swallowed me whole. He saved me and delivered me. And verse 10, and the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited. The last indignity of the disciplining hand of God, as it were, vomited Jonah out. upon the dry land. What I want us to consider is the things that we do to ourselves, think of that personally, the things that we do to ourselves. Because we won't heed the call of God, we won't heed the call of repentance, we won't heed the call of discipleship, the call to faith. No, we go our own way, and in the process, what do we do to ourselves? Think of the people whose homes are shattered because of adultery. The impact that that has on the broken-hearted spouse, the impact that that has upon the children, the things that we do to ourselves by the abuse of drugs and the abuse of alcohol, the things that we do to ourselves because we are dishonest in our business and end up in jail, or ministers who plagiarize their sermons and end up ejected from the ministry. You think of all the heartaches and all of the sadness that we experience in this life that is attributed to our own foolish, hard-hearted, rebellious decisions, and the judgments of God, the storms of God fall upon us because of our own foolishness, the things that we do to ourselves. It's extraordinary. Why Was Jonah in a storm? Because he disobeyed God. Why was Jonah at the verge of death at the bottom of the ocean? Because of his disobedience. Why was Jonah swallowed by a great sea animal? Because of his defiance of the call of God. The things that we do to ourselves. I wonder if you can see it in your own life. Are you able to recognize that the dark places, the deeps to which you or your loved ones have descended because of a self-inflicted wound, because of a storm of your own making, because of foolish defiance? And then consider what we do to ourselves as a nation. That's really where we started out a couple of weeks ago. Jonah's called to Nineveh. Nineveh's a pagan nation. What's he there to do? To warn them of judgment, and in the process, to bring them to repentance. There is this prophetic witness that the people of God have to the nations, and that we have to our own nation. And we are in a nation right now that just thinks of itself as too wise for the Bible. That's really the common opinion. It's certainly elite opinion. Well, the Bible's out of date. The Bible's out of touch. We need to revise Christianity. We need to get it in tune with the times. And so it can no longer be authoritative for us. We're modern people, after all, living in this technological age. And it's a book that came out of antiquity, and it really doesn't have anything to say to us in our problems and in our circumstances. That's really the attitude of, elite opinion in our day, and so the question I think that we would as a people of God want to ask our civilization is, well how has that worked out for you? This abandonment of the Scriptures, this neglect of the Bible or the disagreement with the Bible or defiance of the Word of God, how has that worked out for you as you have turned your back on the God of the Bible? Do we recognize the storm that we are in? Do we recognize that basically all of our national institutions are in jeopardy? There are so many problems that we cannot seem to solve. We are on an unsustainable trajectory right now. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill was warning of what he identified as the gathering storm. But he was a voice crying in the wilderness. And after the Munich Agreement in 1938, which seceded Czechoslovakia to German control, Churchill was, as it were, a lone voice warning, we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. No one else was recognizing the storm clouds of war that were gathering, and he was just seen as a pessimist and negative and depriving the people of the celebration when Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich saying, peace in our time, which, of course, it wasn't. It was just another step toward war, the gathering storm. Think of these things in terms of our culture and the storms that we are in. A majority of our people now mistrust the integrity of our elections. That is the bedrock of our civilization. Our national debt has gone from $8 trillion in 2008 to $33 trillion, $663 billion a year servicing the debt alone. And we can't seem to stop the spending. Currency's been devalued because of inflation, 8% last year. In spite of the fact that we are the most powerful nation in the world, our military impotence was demonstrated by the withdrawal from Afghanistan. We can't seem to control our borders as illegal immigrants flood across into our territory. Widespread mistrust of the local police was evident after George Floyd's death and the call to defund the police. Mistrust of the FBI and the CIA is at an all-time high. 70% of the people don't trust our federal law enforcement agencies. Between them and the local police, absolutely critical to order and safety in our civilization. All of our major institutions have rejected biblical moral norms. That includes the media, the corporations, academia, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the government, the military, the mainline churches. They all are raising rainbow flags. They've all capitulated to the agenda of the sexual revolution. Moral confusion among our young people is unprecedented. Young men are idle, not going to college, or employed in distressing numbers. 40% of 18 to 24-year-olds identify as LGBTQ+. that compares with one-tenth of 1% of those born before 1946, and only 2.5% of baby boomers, those who are currently 59 to 76 years old. Popular culture is crude, vulgar, crass, degrading. Marriage, the most fundamental of all institutions, is collapsing. 40% of all live births in this country are out of wedlock, outside of marriage. 86% of our population believes it is morally acceptable to live together as a couple unmarried. Jesus said, the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah. And behold, something greater than Jonah is here. We have the preaching of Jesus, the greater than Jonah. And so Nineveh will rise up and condemn us. All of this, and just, I mean, not to get political, but the fact that we have a nation of 330 million people and we can't get better presidential candidates than the current and the previous presidents, if that is not a sign of the judgment of God, I don't know what is. All of this, are signs of the judgment of God on our civilization. They are the consequence of sin. And the trajectory that we are on is unsustainable. And so what are we, as the people of God, to do? We are to love our neighbors. And what does that mean? That means we proclaim and model God's law and God's gospel. Law and gospel. That's what our civilization needs. And it's not going to survive without it. because it is on an anti-God trajectory that is accelerating. Now, one of my children once said, Dad, you've been saying that same thing for 20 years. To which I answer, no, I've been saying it for 50 years, and I've been right. The trajectory has continued, not even for just 50, but for 60, or 75, or even 100 years. There is this trajectory and an anti-God direction, and the result is institutions from the family to the government are collapsing. And we are facing problems that we cannot solve. The storm clouds are gathering. And I beg you to see it and to see the responsibility that we have to love our neighbors by providing an alternative and proclaiming that alternative, which is to find forgiveness of sins by repentance and faith in Jesus Christ and submit to His commands. And there is salvation in no one else. There's no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. And that applies to individuals, but it applies to nations as well. How do I know that? Because Jonah goes to Nineveh. To preach God's message. And what's our responsibility in an increasingly anti-God, godless civilization? It is to warn of the judgment of God. It is to call to repentance. It is to plead to be reconciled to God. through the mediation, through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, repent, repent, receive the forgiveness of sin, and submit to his Lordship, and place yourself and your family and your community and your nation under that Lordship, if you would be saved. And otherwise, the judgments will just continue. What the prophets tell us to do is flee from the wrath to come. That's really our message. Jesus delivers us from the wrath of God. The end of 1 Thessalonians chapter one. And that's our message in our generation. Flee from the wrath of God. Flee to the cross of Christ. Surrender to his lordship and authority and sovereignty. that we might be spared the inevitable hardships that come to those who insist on sowing the wind and as a consequence will reap the whirlwind as we pray together. Oh Lord, we pray that there might be a spiritual awakening in our day And Lord, we confess it just seems impossible to us. There isn't an openness. There isn't a receptivity. We don't find there are ears to hear, hearts to receive. And yet, oh Lord, we know from the next chapter, Nineveh repents. Oh, that there might be repentance in our day. that the lordship of Christ might be recognized. Oh, that a mighty revival might sweep over our nation, delivering the multitudes from the whirlwind that is descending upon us. Deliver us from the storm clouds that are gathering. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.