We'll return to the scriptures. Our reading is from the book of Jonah, because it's Jonah that we want to have a look at, or begin to have a look at this evening. I shall try and read a selection of verses. I'll take too much of your prayer time if I try to read the whole of the book, but I want to give you the general pattern. Please just follow. I'm starting chapter 1, verse 1. Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, Go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.' But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa. And he found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners were afraid and cried every man unto his God, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea and to lighten it, all of them. But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship, and he lay and was fast asleep. So the shipmaster came to him and said unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper, arise, call upon thy God? If so, we that God will think upon us that we perish not. And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. Then said they unto him, Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us. What is thine occupation, and whence comest thou? What is thy country, and of what people art thou? And he said unto them, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, that is Jehovah, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land. Then were the men exceedingly afraid, and said unto him, Whyst thou done this? For the men knew that he fled from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. Then said they unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us? For the sea wrought and was tempestuous. And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea. So shall the sea be calm unto you, for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. Nevertheless, the men rode hard to bring it to land, but they could not, for the sea wrought and was tempestuous against them. Therefore they cried unto the Lord, and said, We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood, for thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee. So they took up Jonah and cast him forth into the sea. And the sea ceased from her raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows. Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord, and the Lord his God out of the fish's belly, and said, I cry by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, And he heard me. Out of the belly of hell, cried I, and thou heardest my voice. Now I'm going to jump to verse 10. And the Lord spoke unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land. Chapter three. And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, Go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.' So Jonah rose and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey. And he cried and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God and proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For the word came unto the king of Nineveh and he arose from his throne and he laid his robe from him and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed nor drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto God. Yea, let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce anger that we perish not. God swore their works, that they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them, and he did it not. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. He prayed unto the Lord and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, O Lord, take I beseech thee my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live. Then said the Lord, Doest thou well to be angry? So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a boat, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. And the Lord God prepared a good, and made it come up over Jonah and that it might be a shadow over his head to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the good. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smoked the good that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind, and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the good? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the good for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perish in their light. And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle? So may God add his blessing to that reading of the most holy and infallible word. I'm hoping we recognise some of Jonah's weaknesses. He's not a very good sort of person, is he? He's a bit like us. We should see ourselves in this man. He's a man called of God, he's loved by God, but he's prejudiced and he's biased. He's a man who needed to learn a very important lesson. Now his call in this book was to be a missionary to a foreign land. He's to go to one of the Gentile nations. So he was sent to Nineveh in the land of Assyria. Now at this time, As far as I can make out, Nineveh was not the capital of Assyria as it became later on. That happened in 705 BC. Now this must be somewhere 750, 760 BC. So it became a capital after Jonah's time, I should think. But it means, it explains to us why the place is so big. It wasn't just a city, but it was a city with all its property, all the state, and the whole state is called Nineveh. So it is quite big, with all its land and villages and agricultural land and pastures and everything. It's all Nineveh. And it has about 120,000 people in it. But it didn't represent the whole of Assyria. It was in Assyria, but it's just one of the city-states. But what we know about it is that he was idolatrous, it had a fertility cult, it was full of immorality and violence. And you can see that from chapter 2, verse 8. Now Jonah, when he's sent to Nineveh, objected God's wrong. God can't be right in sending me to this Gentile nation. He's a man, he thinks he knows better than God. Are we a bit like that ourselves sometimes? Now, he's biased. He's biased against non-Jews. He doesn't want for the Gentiles to hear. He's prejudiced about their being warned and repenting and being spared. So he fled from the presence of God. And it went in the opposite direction. If Nineveh was that way, he fled that way. Directly the opposite. and he went to Joppa and he bought a ticket and sped off to Tarshish. Now Tarshish seems to have been a mining colony that traded with the Phoenicians or perhaps it was owned by the Phoenicians. So these sailors probably were Phoenicians and they would be going to Tarshish equipment and whatever and bringing back oars and various things on their journey back. Now Tarshish is west of Gibraltar. So it was as far as you can think of before getting out of the Atlantic. So you can see how far Jonah was trying to get. He really wanted to get away. as far away as he could from Nineveh. But you also notice, in fact, that because the words are rather important. See, it was a retrograde step, it was a downward step. We are told that he went down to Joppa. And after he paid the fare, he went down into the ship. And then he went down to the lowest He's going further and further and further. So this is sort of symbolic, really, of somebody who is, on the one hand, a believer, and yet somebody who seems to be in rebellion against God, seems to know better than God, and sort of wants to do his own thing. Certainly doesn't want to do what God wants him to do. One of the things we see here is the grace of God. The Lord Jesus Christ is full of grace, full of grace and truth. So, here's really an example, you can see the things that you find in the gospel, prefigured in the book of Jonah. You see, God could have just, given up on Jonah or let him go. You could have given him up as Romans chapter 1 and said, go on then, I'll find somebody else. God could have done that, but he doesn't. Such is the grace and mercy of God. God had a work for Jonah. God wasn't gonna give him up. Isn't that good to know? That when we fail God, when we're in rebellion against God, he has got a covenant of care. Praise God. I'm not saying sort of sin as much as you like. God forbid. But the thing is that when we do fall, when temptation is strong, and it must have been very strong for poor old Jonah because of his prejudices. because of the way he was thinking. His thinking was wrong. God wouldn't let him get away. He didn't choose somebody else, he just made sure that Jonah actually fulfilled what he wanted him to do, and to do it willingly. So he sent this untimely storm It wasn't the season of storms, the sailors knew this perfectly well. And so they concluded that this untimely storm meant that some god or gods, because they were pagans of course, was angry with somebody. And that this was the cause, because normally you wouldn't have a storm at this time of the year, it's not the season. Now these were professional sailors, and so they did their utmost to try and get the ship moving in the right direction and so on, but they just couldn't cope. So the thing to do now is to sort of to each one is to pray So they prayed, and as we were reading, they cast out the heavy stuff to lighten the ship so that it wouldn't sink. They wanted to keep it to stay afloat. While they were doing that, the captain obviously goes around inspecting the ship to see what, I suppose, what can be thrown away. Lo and behold, he finds this man sleeping down in the bottom of the lower decks of his ship. And so he wakes him up and sort of, you know, get up there on deck and call upon your God, like everybody else, sort of. Let's hope that your God will listen and stop this storm. It's wonderful how God can use all kinds of things So Jonah went up on deck. Now these pagan sailors knew that the storm was somebody's fault. They were, in their own way of thinking, some god somewhere was angry with somebody, so they needed to find out who, so they cast lots. Casting lots was something that they did in those days. They certainly didn't have any guidance, even the Jews cast lots. It was just used with God. But the thing is, you see, that God chooses and points. It's one of the things with gambling, you know, isn't it? It's a rather blasphemous thing when you gamble. You know, Lord, will you choose who wins the Christmas turkey? which greedy person is going to be able to pick the winning horse and so on. With God there is no such thing as chance. And when you are using lots, this is why a lottery is really not a moral thing. It's not a very spiritual thing. It's a bit blasphemous. But they cast lots and God, who knows everything, and God was in fact deliberately stopping Jonah from going, identifies who is at fault. It's Jonah. And Jonah knows perfectly well, you see, because he's been fleeing from God, he knows perfectly well that it is his fault. There wouldn't be a storm if he hadn't been on that ship. And so as soon as the sailors ask him, well, what are we going to do with you? So obviously he says, get me off the ship. Because once I'm off the ship, God will have no reason to trouble the ship with a storm. Now the sailors, obviously, they had a certain sense of morality. They didn't want to commit murder, because they knew that if they threw him in the sea, he'd drown. Nobody would survive in those conditions. So they did their best as a row to land. But they just couldn't. because God wouldn't let them. The wind blew them the other way. So in the end, the only thing they could do was to pray to God and ask him to spare them and not to hold them guilty for the blood of Jonah because they were now throwing him to his death. Not that they prayed, they just seemed to have trusted By the way, they've realised who Jehovah is, because he's the supreme God. He's the God who made heaven and earth and everything. All pagan religions knew something about the supreme God, but nobody ever bothered with him. He was too holy, too far away, and so they had all these lesser gods and goddesses. They're the ones that they served and worshipped. And when Jonah said he was a servant of the supreme God, they were, if you notice, extremely afraid. And so they asked Jehovah, although they didn't know him, a little bit like the Athenians, I suppose, in a sort of praying to the unknown God. So they prayed to this unknown God that he would spare them. And then when they'd finished their prayer, they'd just throw him overboard. And what the word of God tells us is that as soon as Jonah was out of the ship, the storm ceased. There was no reason why God should have this ship in any storm. It was only because Jonah was there. And so as soon as he's out, the storm stops, which confirmed to these sailors that Jehovah is the true living God. They're extremely afraid and they make vows and they sacrifice to him. And a little bit like Naaman, I think, when he discovered, you remember Naaman, when he was healed, he made a vow that he would never worship any other God. And perhaps this is the sort of thing that the sailors are doing. We're not concentrating on the sailors as such, but they certainly knew something about the living God. But Jonah didn't drown, because God had beforehand prepared. Oh, notice that word. It's going to come often in the book of Jonah. God prepared a great fish. The reason why people think it's a whale is because the Greek translation uses a word that can be translated whale. So the Hebrew says great fish. And the thing is that whatever the creature was, it was some sea creature that God had actually prepared. And it swallowed Jonah whole. And he was there imprisoned or perhaps entombed until the third day. I know it says three days and three nights. And so does the New Testament talk that the Lord Jesus mentioned the Son of Man three days and three nights. Now, the problem is that if people take this, sort of, take the English literally, they're going to get into problems. Because if you work out three days and three nights, Jesus wasn't crucified on Friday, was he? or didn't rise from the dead on the Sunday. But three days and three nights is a Hebraism. The thing is, for the Hebrew, any part of a day counted as a day. So, if Jesus was crucified on the Friday, and he was buried on the Friday before the Saturday began, that is really counted as a day and a night. And then he's there in the tomb on the Saturday. That's another day and a night. But then he rose early on the third day's morning. But in Hebrew, that still is a day and a night. I'm not very sure why, but possibly it's because we've got evening and morning. So it counts in that way. We're following the Romans. and have our day starting at midnight, which is rather odd really. But this means that he was there, he went into the fisher's belly on the first day, he was there for the second day and then he was cast away on the shore on the third day. But inside the to pray, he started seeking a God who he had considered to be wrong and whom he was rebelling against and fleeing from, and he needed God at that time. And so he prayed. Previously, of course, he slept in the storm, probably tired after the journey and pleased and sort of relieved that he was on his way. So he cries unto God in his affliction. But obviously God heard his prayer and forgave him. Forgave the rebellion of his heart and his being self-willed and self-centred. Because in chapter 2, he says, verse 2, I said, I cried by reason of my affliction unto the Lord and he heard me. Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. And then the rest of the prayer's really a prayer of thanks and praise, with a poetic description of things like sort of going down to the belly of the sea, he's going down to Hades, he's wrapped in seaweed and all this sort of stuff. It's quite poetic, so I didn't actually read that, save a bit of time. But she's obviously thanking God for hearing him. And then the Lord, verse 10, chapter 2, verse 10, spoke to the fish. He ordered the fish, and the fish, in fact, got into the shallows and onto the shore and cast Jonah onto the shore. I presume somewhere accessible, somewhere near Joppa or somewhere so that he could actually get on to Nineveh. But Jonah has learned his lesson, or part of it anyway, and so he is now surrendered to the Lord. And this is what grace does. It transforms one. If we are partakers of grace, there's a difference between what we are now and what we were. That is one of the evidences of grace. And Jonah, if you notice, ends his prayer by saying that our salvation is of the Lord. It's not of man. It's not of nature. It's not of righteousness. It's not of any morality or anything else. It's the sovereign work of God. God chooses. God works. And this time God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh without telling him what to proclaim. You can compare chapter 3 verse 1 and 2 with chapter 1 and verse 2 if you like. When he got there God must have told him exactly what to preach and so he went through only a part of Nineveh, he didn't have to go through the whole place, but he preached and he called people, well he didn't actually call them to repentance, he just warned them. Verse 4, chapter 3 verse 4 says, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Great judgement upon them. And the strange and Wonderful thing is, according to verse 5, so the people of Nineveh believed God. These pagans. Well, we've seen the sailors. Something's happened to them. If God is at work, nobody stops the work. And so they proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least. The news would have reached the king, not the emperor of Assyria, but the king of this city state. And he proclaimed this fast and he obviously was frightened of this God. And so he got rid of his robe, wore sackcloth and ordered this fast. Nobody to eat or drink, man or beast. They were really serious about this. And not only did they actually have turned away from their wickedness, from their immorality and their violence. Now this is an amazing reaction. And so God, we see in verse 10, responded. God saw their that they turned from their evil way and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do to them. And he did it not. So in fact, the judgment didn't come. He forgave them, which is really what happens in the gospel. This is gospel grace. Yes, much to Jonah's chagrin. He doesn't want Gentiles... It's a bit like Simon Peter, isn't it? There is, even to this day, a sort of prejudice against Gentiles. God mustn't be merciful to Gentiles. Peter was in Joppa, remember? Oh, Mike Jonah. And he had to have... vision. Three times the Lord gave him a vision in order to persuade him that when the men from Cornelius would come, he should go with them. Even when he arrived at Cornelius' house, he announces, he says, you know that it's not lawful for a Jew to enter into a Gentile's house. But he said, God has told me not to call unclean what he's cleansed. and then he preached the gospel and of course the Holy Spirit came, you know the story, Cornelius, but something similar must have happened in Nineveh. Why? Because Jesus Christ came not into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him should be saved. God does not delight in the death of a sinner, but rather that he turn from his wickedness and live. Time has gone, I think we better leave the rest of Jonah and see what else he had to learn in our next session, if that's okay with you, and we'll see if we can find a little bit more of the Lord Jesus Christ and the gospel in all this as we sort of sum up next time I come. So to God be the glory, and may what I've shared be of some use to you all