We're going to read the Bible this morning, and you have a little task to do, and that is to find the reading. It's Jonah chapter 1. We usually give you page numbers. We thought that was just too easy. So if you don't know where Jonah is, there's an index at the beginning. that will tell you where to look. While you're doing that, so I'm looking for activity at this point, while you're doing that, if you would remember to pray for our Spruce Hill team who begin the mission in West Philly today. So be remembering them in your prayers. And if you see anybody who's involved, support them in any way you can. So Jonah chapter one, And I'm not going to ask you to read this. I'm going to do another reading myself. You can listen and keep Jonah open. I'm going to read from 2 Kings chapter 14. And then we'll read Jonah 1. In the 15th year of Amaziah, the son of Joash, king of Judah, Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel, began to reign in Samaria, and he reigned 41 years. and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin. He restored the border of Israel from Lebohamath, as far as the Sea of Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-Hefer. For the Lord saw that the affliction of Israel was very bitter, for there was none left, bond or free, and there was none to help Israel. But the Lord had not said that He would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, and so He saved them by the hand of Jeroboam, the son of Joash." Now we read Jonah 1. Verse 1, now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.' But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord." He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord." Well, let's pray together. Heavenly Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer, for Jesus' sake. Amen. Well, I imagine that you know the story of Jonah. Everybody seems to know it. This morning I went downstairs to talk to the children in the morning service while the service was going on here, and I asked them what they knew about Jonah. A little hand went up, and the correct answer was given. Jonah was the man who was swallowed by a whale. Imagine having that in your resume. What did you do with your life? What great experiences did you have with your life? Oh, I was swallowed by a whale. Well, that's the story we were brought up in. I remember going to Sunday school, and I remember we used to sing about Jonah. Listen to my tale of Jonah and the whale, way down in the middle of the ocean. How did he get there? Whatever did he wear? Way down in the middle of the ocean. We went, way down in the middle of the ocean. Preaching he should be at Nineveh, you see. But he obeyed a very foolish notion, notion. God forgave his sin, salvation entered in. Way down in the middle of the, way down in the middle of the, way down in the middle of the ocean. Anyway, that's what we used to say. So, that's why I don't sing in the choir. The story of Joseph is a whale of a tale. It has stirred up the waters of controversy. There's going to be a lot of that happen, by the way. Some modern scholars, with an almost paranoid fear of anything supernatural, have dismissed the book as being unhistorical. Others, trying to reset the balance, have told many, many stories, sometimes independently authenticated, which you can read in that great source of objective factual information, Facebook, from time to time, of people who were swallowed by a big fish and then survived. But I want you to notice that there is actually no mention of a whale in the story. In fact, the whale in the story of Joseph is a red herring. Anyway, the real reason we take Joseph Jonah seriously, apart from the fact that he's in the Bible and that he was a prophet in Israel, is that our Lord Jesus takes him very seriously when in Matthew 12 he refers to the experience of Jonah as a historical illustration of his own literal, physical resurrection from the dead. Professor H.L. Ellison said on one occasion, apart from the deep-rooted dislike of the modern mind for the miraculous, there is really no valid argument against the historicity of the book. What we notice, though, as we read the book, and you can do this, by the way, very quickly, I think about 10 minutes. Five minutes if you're brilliant, 10 minutes if you're less brilliant, and if you take any longer, don't bother telling anyone. But you can read the book very easily. But the amazing thing about this book is how little about the fish it's really about. In fact, 75% of this book is devoted to not the fish, not even to the great ministry that Jonah had to the city of Nineveh. Nineveh, one of the great cities of the Assyrian Empire. I have in my study back home, I have some pottery that was given to me from The area of Nineveh, Nineveh was such a great city, you can still find to this day pottery and other items dating back to that very period about which we're reading. One of our mission partners gave me some of the pottery from the site of Nineveh. So it's a real place, and there was apparently a great revival took place there that's reported here in the book of Jonah. But the book of Jonah is not about that revival either. Seventy-five percent of the book of Jonah is about the disentangling of the confused self-centered, rebellious life of one of God's choicest servants, a prophet of God, this man Jonah. And that very disproportion is in fact the message of the book. It's quite fundamental. If we could even talk, if we were able to talk, and we're not, of God having problems, because he has none. But if we were able to talk from our human perspective of God having a problem, we would have to say that God's number one problem is not with unchurched people or un-evangelized people. God's number one problem, though he doesn't have problems, but if he had a problem, his number one problem is his own people, his own church, his own people. And his people are regularly being called on to repentance, to changing their minds. Martin Luther said in his 95 thesis, thesis number one, when our Lord and Master said, repent, he intended that the entire life of the believer be one of repentance. And you could say that that's true not only for the believer but also for the church. And repentance, like charity, begins at home in the economy of God. The repentance of Nineveh that's reported in chapter 3 has to be preceded by the repentance and obedience of Jonah. Because then and now, as the New Testament says, it is time for judgment to begin in the house of God. And that is still true. That is a principle. A principle that happens in every part of the way in which God deals with His people. is something that God's people long for. In some circles we talk about it, in other circles we don't bother talking about it anymore because we've given up on revival. But revivals are periods when thousands upon thousands of people come into the kingdom of God, swept into the kingdom of God, saved from their ruin by the gospel. And yet revival has to begin in the hearts of God's people. A great man, E.M. Bounds, wrote a number of little booklets, short booklets on prayer that I commend to you. He says in one of those booklets these words, what the church today needs is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but people whom the Holy Spirit can use. The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods, but through people. He does not anoint plans, but people. While the church is looking for better methods, God is looking for better people. In the book of Jonah, we see something of God's ways. with His people. And if you're not one of His people, I invite you to stay with us and see what a scary thing it is to be one of God's people. Well, in these opening verses, we have two lessons, two great things. Although the conversation in verse 2 refers to a great city, actually in these opening verses we have a great commission and a great collision. We have a great commission. Paul Simon, one of the great songwriters of the 60s, had a song called, Slip, Slide and Away. God only knows, God makes his plans, the information's unavailable to the mortal man. Those are one of the words of that song. And that may very well be true. The information is unavailable to the mortal man. But the information, that is the Word of God, is available, the Bible says, to His servants, the prophets. Look at verse 1, the Word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai. This is one of the most common expressions we find in the Old Testament books of the prophets. You will find it used over a hundred times. It actually defines what it meant to be a prophet of God in the scriptures. To be a prophet of God meant to be the recipient of a communication, a word. A word that contains a message. It meant to have clear, fresh light shed on oneself, or on society, or on the nations, or on the church by the living God. It meant that the prophet functioned as Jeremiah describes it, functioned in the presence of God. That is, prophets often were caught up in vision into the heavenly throne room, Jeremiah says. You can see it described for us in Ezekiel chapter 1 and in Isaiah chapter 6. Caught up in vision into the throne room of God, and there they heard the Word of God. They had the Word of God given to them. and their description of what it means for the Word of God to come to a prophet. It's described as a sword that pierced their spirit, or a burden, a weight laid on their shoulders, or a hammer that breaks to pieces their rocky hearts, or a fire that rages in their bones that could be bitter to the taste. But this Word came to them. It was irresistible to them. It forced itself on them. It gripped their minds. It touched their consciences. It impelled their emotions. It laid upon them what the Apostle Paul describes in Corinthians, and what every minister of the gospel, in a sense, experiences. It laid necessity upon these men. The Apostle says there, in the old King James Version, necessity is laid upon me. I cannot avoid this. Like a burden, I have no option. I have no way of avoiding this. God has put a message on my lips. He has put a word in my heart. I must speak this. Woe is me, Paul says. Let the curse of God be upon me if I do not proclaim, if I do not preach the gospel. This is what it was like to be a prophet of God. And in the days of Jonah, days following, just following, perhaps overlapping a little bit with Elijah and Elisha, Jonah belongs to that new group of prophets who emerged out of their ministry in the midst of the moral darkness of northern Israel. You remember after the division between the two southern kingdoms to form Judah and the ten northern kingdoms to form Israel. that happened. You'll remember that Elijah and Elisha, they operated in that northern kingdom. In fact, in the reading that we had from Kings, there's a division right at the very beginning. It was the fifteenth year of Amaziah, the son of Joash, king of Judah, to the south. Jeroboam, the son of Joash, another Joash, king of Israel, in the north began to reign. So you have these two things going on, and in that day the Word came to Jonah, and he is the Word. Up, go. Arise, go. That's the Word of God to this man. Very often in the other prophets. When this phrase is used, it refers to their entire message, their entire book. The word of the Lord came to Isaiah, it came to Zephaniah, Zechariah, and all these other blokes, and it refers to the entire substance of their writing. But you see the difference here. The word of the Lord came to Jonah. The word to Jonah was, arise and go. That's all he was told to do. And I want you to notice that when God's word comes, it comes as a word of command. When it comes to His people, there's no negotiation. When it comes to His people, There's no kind of, you can pick out of these options what you'd like to do. When the Word of God comes to His people, it comes as the Word of the Sovereign Lord, the One who rules. And He speaks to His people in a number of words. Some of them are words of command. We cannot make excuses that God is always unclear about what He wants us to do, since His will is laid down in the Bible. And that's true not just for Christian people, it's true for everybody. You may not be a Christian here, do you think this doesn't apply to you? Let me say very clearly to you, what God has said applies to everybody whether they believe it or not, whether they obey it or not, whether they recognize it or not, whether they acknowledge God or not. Every creature is under the authority of God's Word and are expected to believe it and to do it. How much more His people? He has a special claim upon all that He's created, but He has an even more special claim over those whom He has not only created but has redeemed. You were bought with a price. Your life is not your own." It's a word of command, and it's a word of concern. Do you notice this? Get up, arise and go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. Nineveh, one of the chief cities of Assyria, a growing power in the region, the superpower in the region at that time, who will eventually destroy and disperse the entire kingdom of Israel. You can imagine this Word of God coming to this man. He belongs to Israel. He loves Israel. He's in the middle of a very busy preaching ministry. He's been very effective. He had gone with the Word of God against all the sins of Israel, sins that were terrible in God's eyes. Again and again and again, the king who's in power is going to be in power 41 years, and through that whole period, he's going to do that which is evil in the eyes of the Lord. And Jonah goes and he preaches his message, and what does God do? You know what God does? God gives that evil king success, and he retrieves what had been lost by Israel in former battles. He brings Israel back to where it was. And there's a sense of national pride, a sense of wonder. People are going around and they're saying, good old Jonah, you just come here and you preach. And your message is a heavy message, you know, because it's the word of God against all the sins of the land. But we're so glad you came preaching, Jonah, because look at the success of your preaching. God has added back to us what we lost before. He has been adding to our numbers again what had been taken from us. We're so much stronger than we were. That's the context in which the Word of God comes to him, and it's a word of concern about this evil city. It represents the world. It represents that which is outside of the people of God. And it reminds us, as the Bible teaches, that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro upon the face of the earth. There is nothing hidden, for everything is naked and open before the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. Everything that happens comes to the notice of Israel's God. Do you think For one minute that what is going on on the streets of Philadelphia escapes the notice of Israel's God. Do you think for one moment what is going on under Isis's reign in the Middle East is escaping the notice of Israel's God? Do you think the things that are being taught in classrooms, in colleges, in schools, in our country that are inimical to truth and righteousness are escaping the gaze of Israel's God? Go preach to that great city Nineveh. For their evil has come up before me. There's concern, there's command, there's compassion in these words. Long before this, God had entered a special relationship with Israel, a covenant relationship. Nineveh was not only corrupt, but it did not belong to the covenant people of God. And yet, God does two things. He sends His servant to go to them where they are. He tells His servant to warn them of judgment to come. Sometimes prophets cry out against evil, like the unauthorized altars at Bethel we read about. A prophet cried out against them, and those altars collapsed, and they fell. But this message reminds us that God has a claim over every individual in the world. And that the greatest curse that can happen to a nation is that that nation does not know that its sins and that its sins are accumulating and will be held accountable to God. The unkindest thing you can do for someone is to fail to remind them that it's appointed to all of us to die once and after that to face judgment. Well, we too are people under orders. We too have a great commission as Jonah did. A great commission is an expression of God's sovereign will for His church. We must go to the world, we must face men and women, we must warn them of judgment to come, and we must offer them the escape route of the gospel. We should be like Noah in his day, telling the people, preaching to the people of the flood that is coming, the flood of God's wrath. and pointing them to the ark of salvation. As He pointed men to the ark of salvation, we point men and women to the ark of Christ Jesus, who is the only Savior from the coming wrath. Well, here we have God then coming to this man, and there is this great commission. Secondly, there is this great collision. But Jonah, we're told, ran away from the presence of the Lord. He rose to flee, verse three, from the presence of the Lord. Look at the end of verse three. He took a ship to get away from the presence of the Lord. How do we know that? We know that because Jonah wrote the story. That's how we know it. Jonah's telling us what his motivation was. He's giving us a window into his heart at the time. He's telling us what was on his mind. He was trying to get away from the presence of the Lord. I don't know if Jonah was just one of these people that say no, people that just stamp their feet, no. You may have had, you may have a grandchild that does that, or children. We had five of them that did that. In fact, we have now a dog at home, and if you get the dog to do the wrong thing, she kind of goes, woof. It's a no. It's the sideward shift of the head, imperious raising of the face. Woof. No. Maybe that's the kind of person Jonah was when he was growing up. But we know they didn't always say no. He obeyed the Word of God. We read about that in 2 Kings 14. Now, what's going on here? Well, we discover this. Not only does he say no, but he immediately begins to take measures to get away as far from the presence of God as he possibly can. Nineveh is east You can imagine him one day, he gets up in the morning. God's come to him, told him to do this. He gets up in the morning, he comes out of his house. He goes down to the bottom of the garden or yard where the yard meets the road. There he's come to the road. Right, he looks eastwards where Nineveh is. He looks down the road. He turns his back. He goes westwards. He goes right down to the coast. He goes to the shipping office. He says to the shipping office, I want you to get me as far away as you can as possible. Let me tell you a little secret. I'm a prophet. I know that one day they're going to discover a great continent. On the other side, there's going to be a city called San Francisco. I'd like to go there. Could I go there?" The person says, you may be a prophet, but we haven't found that yet. The furthest away you can get is to go to Tarshish, which is on the coast of Spain, as far west as it's possible to go in the known world. And that's all there is, Jimmy, Joni, whatever your name is. That's as far as you can go. Well, give me that, give me that ticket. He said, I want to go as far as it's possible to go away from where God wants me to be. That's what he's saying. What's his problem? Is it intellectual? Does he not understand what God has said? I mean, in Matthew 13, Jesus says that there are people who do not know these things until they're revealed to them by his Father. The Word of the Lord came to Jonah. He has had a revelation. He did not need to consult commentaries or dictionaries to work out what that message was. And frankly, if you're a Christian person here today, you don't need to consult commentaries and dictionaries to find out what the Word of God means to you. As someone once said, it's not the bits of God's Word that I don't understand that give me trouble, it's the bits that I do. And I don't think that his problem was emotional, it wasn't that he was afraid. to go to Nineveh, although there's lots of reasons to be afraid to go to Nineveh. I think of the prophet Nahum. In Scotland, we often use the word nay for no. So Nahum is a good name for a bee that's lost its buzz. But anyway, work that out for yourself. In Nahum chapter three, Nahum tells us a bit about Nineveh. Here's what he says about Nineveh. A city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims. The crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses, jolting chariots, charging cavalry, flashing swords, glittering spears, many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses, mistress of sorceries, enslaver of nations. Nahum didn't like Nineveh. It was a bad place. Nobody would have blamed perhaps Jonah if he'd been afraid, but there's not one word in the story to suggest he was afraid. No, Jonah himself tells us that his problem was spiritual. He tells us that himself by underlining, by repeating himself in verse three, twice telling us that he rose to flee. God said, rise and go. He rose and went in the other direction. Why? He was fleeing from the presence of the Lord. There came a point, you see, where God's will and Joseph's, Jonah's will collided. God said to him, this is my purpose and my place for you. And Jonah said, I have other plans. When I worked in Glasgow, when we had a church in Glasgow, a friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, a deacon, sorry, an elder, was a professor of engineering at one of the great universities. Engineers are very interesting people to avoid. No, no, I'm kidding. It's just I've got to attack somebody in the sermon somewhere, and lovingly of course. He often would describe things he was working on, and he'd been involved in a team, an international team actually. that had been working on developing a device which could detect microscopic fault lines. deep within a steel girder. So this was almost like having a scan or whatever you get in a hospital where it looks through you to see what there is going wrong inside you. This device was able to see deep into the steel to discern microscopic fault lines, which if that material was used in some high-rise building could be the difference between life and death. Do you know that the Word of God is an instrument which can detect microscopic fault lines in our soul? It's so able to penetrate consciences that it can identify that point, however faint it may be, that point where the limits of our willingness to obey God or love God or serve God lies. In the book of Hebrews We were reminded that the Word of God is living and active, sharper than a double-edged sword, penetrating even to the dividing of something you cannot divide. The soul and the spirit are the same thing. You cannot divide the soul and the spirit, the joints and the marrow. It judges the thoughts and the attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. And I'm conscious that when we preach the Word of God, the Word of God goes places which we could never have anticipated. It goes to that point in your being where there is hidden from sight a fault line that will mean under certain circumstances of stress, be it temptation, be it suffering, be at loss, you would be inclined to break. This Word of God to Jonah exposed that point. A man who'd lived his life obeying God, a man who'd lived his life serving God, the Word of God exposes it. Do you know very often there is lurking within within us, a smidgen of self-will that is ready at any moment to react against God's Word, just as Jonah did. I wonder whether you're here this morning and you have a controversy with God. Is there some issue in your life or in the news? In your past, is there some issue you have with God? You know, it's quite possible that you conform to all the accepted patterns of behavior, you speak the language of Zion, you're involved in Christian activity, and yet, to harbor within you the hidden citadel of a proud, uncrucified self. I wonder if you know these words. The last enemy to be destroyed in the believer is self. It dies hard. It will make any concessions if allowed to live. An uncrucified self will permit the believer to do anything, give anything, sacrifice anything, suffer anything, go anywhere, gain any reputation, afflict soul and body to any degree so long as it is allowed to live. It is content to live in a hovel, in a garret, in a slum, in faraway heathendom. so long as it is spared. How many a missionary has left here with all the applause of the church, as it were, going out to serve the Lord in some remote place. They've gone there in obedience to their sense of a calling, and they've gone there with the blessing of the church, and they've gone there to find that the fault line in their soul has gone there with them. That's the way it is. And you know in the New Testament we discover that the very essence of the Christian gospel is directed to dealing with this very thing. When Paul is writing to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 5, he says about the cross, Christ died for all, that those who live should no longer, no longer live for themselves. For themselves. I wonder whether The one reason that God has brought us to this part of the Bible over this summer series is that you are running from God. Perhaps not geographically, though I've known people who've done that. Perhaps it's not obvious to those around you, perhaps it's not even obvious to you, but you're running away nonetheless from His deepest Word and His fullest will for your life. And if you are, you're cheating yourself of life's greatest treasure. You're running from your truest destiny in any way. You know perfectly well that you can never run away from God. I was sitting on the balcony of our hotel in Hawaii while I was there working. I remind you. reflecting on, I think it was the first of my talks that I was to give, maybe the second. And I was reflecting on the fact that God is almost always, always, wherever God is, You know, He's not over there, He is always right here. In His fullness, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are always there, fully present and fully in act, right there. And I was thinking as I sat there feeling the breeze. It was the breeze that actually made me think about it. The warmth of the breeze. Very gentle warmth. It was a... I was working, of course, but I think either just feeling the breeze and thinking, you know, wherever we go in the world, wherever we are in the world, wherever my kids are, whether in New Jersey or London or Scotland or whatever, whether you're sitting there in Honolulu or you're sitting in Taiwan, or you're sitting in Pakistan, or you're sitting in South Africa, or in Europe, or in Britain, which is different from Europe, I underscore, or here, wherever you are, wherever you are, just as the breeze is there wherever you are, so Almighty God is there. In His fullness, He is there, fully alert. Fully observant, fully seeing, where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go to the heavens, You're there. If I make my bed in the depths, You're there. If I rise from the wings of dawn and settle in the far side of the sea, even there Your hand is with me. Let me finish with a story. During the Second World War, many North American soldiers came over to Britain on their way to mainland Europe to fight. Many came to Glasgow, and a large number of those who came were Christians. And they found their way to the tent hall. The tent hall is named after a tent that was used by the famous American evangelist D.L. Moody when he came to have meetings which my paternal grandmother attended, actually, in Glasgow back in, I think, about 1895, I think. And my family, my mother's family, worshipped in the tent hall. And like many families, they entertained the troops to their home. I remember my mother telling me about these American, tall. I used to say to her, Mom, you're describing these Americans, tall, good looking, bronzed. Should you really be doing that? Anyway, she used to tell me about these. My mother was only about 14, of course. At the time, she was probably impressed with these Americans who came to their home and told their story. And one of the boys told this story. He'd been brought up in the Midwest. He had a mother who was a Christian. He'd rebelled. He saw getting away to war as an opportunity to get away from the restraints of home. He found himself out somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic in a great storm. He was from the Midwest. He'd never been in a boat. Now he finds himself in the middle of a North Atlantic storm, and he's terrified. Before he left, his mother had given him a small little Bible. He put it among his stuff. And there in the middle of the storm, he fished out the Bible and found that there was a marker in it that his mother had left. He opened it to the marker, and there in Psalm 139, he read these words, "'Even if I take the wings of the morning and go to the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will guide me." He couldn't believe it. Because as he'd been boarding that ship in Montreal, he had noticed as he walked up the gangplank into the ship, the name of the boat. It was called the Wings of the Morning. And it was that that brought this young man back to God. And so when he went to Glasgow, he found a church to go to. Jonah did not get on a boat called the Wings of the Morning, but nonetheless, he could not get away from God. Maybe you're here in church today, and maybe God has put this date in your calendar, this place on your itinerary, this moment on your timeline. so that you, whether you've been a Christian and you've been running away from God, whether you have been spending your lifetime avoiding being a Christian, have been brought to this moment to hear the Word of God to you. Well, what should you do? Come home. Come home. Come back. Turn around and find that He is waiting not to scold you. but to receive you. Our Heavenly Father, we pray that you would grant your Holy Spirit to draw those who are wandering back to you, we pray in Jesus' strong name. Amen.