I'll ask you to stand. We're going to read Jonah, chapter 2. If anyone's got a pew Bible, maybe just a shout out to what page it might be on if you're there. I'm reading from the New King James. 829 in the pew Bible. Thank you. So I'll give you a second. It's not a big book. It might be easy to flip through the pages and breeze right past it. Jonah, chapter 2. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the fish's belly. Actually, I'm gonna back up to verse 17, the last verse of chapter two, or chapter one, sorry. So verse 17 of chapter one, now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the fish's belly, and he said, I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction, 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 floods surround me, and your billows and your waves passed over me. Then I said, I have been cast out of your sight, yet I will look again toward your holy temple. The water surrounded me, even to my soul. The deep closed around me. Weeds were wrapped around my head. I went down to the moorings of the mountain. The earth with its bars closed behind me forever. Yet you have brought up my life from the pit. Oh Lord, my God. When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord and my prayer went up to you, into your holy temple. Those who regard worthless idols forsake their own. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, forsake their own mercy. But I will sacrifice to you with the voice of thanksgiving and I will pay what I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord. So the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah up onto dry land. You can be seated. Father, there's much in this chapter here for us to take a look at. We won't be able to get to everything in great detail, but Lord, we can go through this, and Father, I ask that you pull out those parts that you want us to hear. Lord, I pray that I convey this accurately, and Lord, I ask that you would also Teach each one of us through this lesson here in Jesus' name. Amen. We started a study in the book of Jonah last month in August. There's only four chapters in this book, but it's packed with stuff. And as I mentioned already, we can't get to all the depth of everything that's in this chapter here today, but we will talk about it a little bit further next week in Sunday School. I think we need to just do a little bit of review to kind of get us up to speed to where we are in chapter two. So Jonah was a prophet of God in the northern kingdom of Israel. If you remember in 931, the nation of Israel had split into two kingdoms. There were 10 tribes in the north that retained the name Israel, two tribes to the south that were called Judah. That was 931 BC. As we move forward in time here, we're actually kind of going down in the numbers. Jonah would be a prophet here in the northern kingdom around the time of 784 to 774 BC. So roughly 150 years later. We don't know a whole lot about Jonah outside of a mention in 2 Kings chapter 14. But we have this book about Jonah, and it's written in third hand, as though somebody were writing a story about Jonah, but I do believe that Jonah actually is the author of this, speaking in terms of, you know, just writing this in third person. And it's not unusual, even, you know, John, in his gospel, never uses the pronoun I, me, or my. He always talks about or refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it's not unusual to see this. And I believe that Jonah is writing this, obviously for us, but also for the nation of Israel. So as I mentioned, Jonah is taking place here roughly around 784 to 774 BC. And Jonah was called to proclaim judgment against the nation of Assyria, specifically in what would become their capital city, Nineveh. Nineveh became the capital in 705 B.C., but we also are familiar with the Assyrians from the year 722 B.C. If we know our Bible history, well, 722 B.C. is when Assyria came and actually conquered Israel and dispersed them around their empire. Now the Assyrians were known for their cruelty. Not many people like the Assyrians. What they would do is they would come in and they would actually take their enemy and they would impale them and leave them along the roadside as a sign of intimidation. They would also take people, their enemies, and they would just ripped their skin off, and they would leave them out in the hot sun in the desert to bake and fry. So obviously they were not on people's most likable list. Israel in particular, and even more especially, Jonah. Jonah despised the Assyrians. Now, when we think of Jonah, I think what comes to mind is the whale, right? Isn't this the whale story? It's a whale of a story, in fact, isn't it? But it's actually not a whale that we encounter in the book. It's a big fish. In Jonah here, Jesus calls it a big fish, a great fish. But the story is really not about a fish. The story of Jonah here is about a sovereign God who appointed such a fish. He appointed the timing, he appointed the location for this fish to be, and he also appointed this fish for a purpose, which was to keep Jonah alive in and through his rebellion. So we have a very sovereign God here, but at the same time, We have a picture here of a loving and compassionate God in the book of Jonah. This loving and compassionate God in Jonah's eyes was all about Israel. And only Israel should have been the recipients of God's love and compassion. And that's how the Israelites, that was one of the many failings of the Israelites' theology. All along, God had a plan of salvation. It's called GPS. It's not Global Positioning System, by the way. That's only been around for maybe, you know, since 50 years, something like that, since we've got satellites in space. GPS really stands for God's plan of salvation, and it was from the very beginning of time. Okay? And that plan of salvation includes all mankind. Because when you go to Genesis chapter 12, You have Abraham who springs onto the scene here, and you have many promises given to Abraham, among which, besides becoming a great nation, which we understand to be Israel, the Jews, right? In verse three of Genesis 12, I will bless those who bless you, I will curse him who curses you, and in you, all the families of the earth. will be blessed, shall be blessed. So it's not in you all of the Jews will be blessed, it's in you all the families of the earth because the Savior would come from the loins of Abraham. And obviously what Jesus Christ did in providing salvation to mankind is available to all mankind. You can go to Revelation, I think it was chapter 7 perhaps, where you have these martyrs under the altar, and it's all tribes and all nations. So the plan of salvation was ultimately and originally for all of mankind, not just Israel, as they perceived. So even the Assyrians would have been part of this all nations and all tribes, right? God's plan of salvation. So not surprisingly, it's not very often where you saw a prophet who was, usually a prophet was called to go to the king of Israel or the king of Judah. Very rare would you have seen them go to another nation and speak to their king. But that's what Jonah was called to do, to actually leave Israel and go to another nation with a message from God. So in chapter one, we have, Jonah is called, it says, Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for the wickedness has come up before me. So Jonah arose, but he did not go to Nineveh. Jonah arose and went the opposite direction. But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. Now you've got to come to the Sunday morning studies to kind of get some of these details, but how can you flee from the presence of the Lord? He's everywhere. Psalm 139, David says, where can I go to be out of your presence? So you have a prophet of the Lord who somehow thinks, I'm going to flee God's presence. Well, obviously that's not going to go very well for him. We find out in chapter 4 of Jonah, ultimately Jonah will go to Nineveh and he will proclaim God's message of judgment and the Ninevites will repent. And we get to chapter four, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly and he became angry. Can you imagine? You have a hundred thousand people who were once wicked and outside of the will of God who repent and now are expecting and looking forward to their Savior who saved them, they repented. And the prophet of God who declared that message to him is angry. He says, so he prayed to the Lord and said, ah, Lord, was this not what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish, for I know that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness. Jonah refused to go to Nineveh because he knew that God was merciful and would save them, and he didn't think that they were worthy of hearing the gospel. They were not worthy of God's love and mercy. I asked the question to our class, have you ever gotten to the point where somebody had so angered you that rather than share the gospel, you wrote them off? You don't have to raise your hands, but I'll tell you what, I know I've walked away and not presented the gospel in situations where I should have. And I know better. In the book of Ephesians, we talked about the fact in chapter six, it says that we don't wrestle with flesh and blood. That person that angers us is the one who most needs the gospel. And it's the devil who's blinded them. So we have a tendency to look at somebody and say, that's my enemy. But that's not our enemy. That's someone who needs the gospel. And Jonah had gotten to the point where he would rather rebel against God than bring the gospel to somebody that he did not want to bring it to. And in fact, you continue to go through chapter 1, you find out, so Jonah's sleeping on the boat. Now this whole fleeing from God is a spiraling down. because it says that he goes down to Joppa, he goes down into the bottom of the boat, falls asleep, and then you have a storm that God threw this storm at the sailors. And it was a storm that scared them to the point of they were afraid of dying in this storm. Jonah slept through the whole thing. And The sailors were praying out to their gods, save us and to no avail. So they called Jonah and said, how dare you sleep, call upon your God too, perhaps he will do something for us. And Jonah's like, well, you know what it is, he doesn't pray by the way, but he does make an admission that, well, I know this is my fault because I'm running from God. And the sailors were even more scared now, more scared of this than they were of the storm before that. And Jonah said, well, if you want this to seize the calm, throw me overboard. Kill me. I'd rather die than repent. Can you believe that? A prophet of God saying, I would rather die Then repent, throw me overboard, and you'll be better for it. I won't do it myself, by the way. You'll have to kill me." So he wasn't too helpful. So that's the point of where Jonah was. The sailors discover it's Jonah. And rather than, you know, they're like, well, I'm not going to be the one to toss him over. That's murder. So they decide to row harder and maybe they can beat the storm. And of course it doesn't work. Man cannot save himself. Man always tries to save himself, but he can't do it. You have a picture here of the very fact that man cannot save himself. So the sailors relent. And it's amazing because they abandoned their gods now. And when you read in chapter one, it says that they prayed to Yahweh. In your Bibles, you'll see capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, which is the name of God. They now pray to God, the God of Israel, Jonah's God. And they say, forgive us for what we're about to do. Don't hold it against us. And they throw Jonah overboard, and the sea stops immediately. That It didn't just slow down over a period of time. It stopped immediately. That startled and scared the sailors even more than the previous two times that it says that they were scared. They feared, even a great fear now is really the translation. So we have Jonah, and the sailors recognize this, and they actually now say that they are going to vow and sacrifice to the Lord and worship Him. So you have Gentile sailors who were converted by a prophet of God who was running away from God because he didn't want Gentiles to be saved. But God has a better plan, doesn't He? So now we pick it up in verse 17. We're kind of up to speed here. So this verb in the King James, New King James, prepared, you could also, I think maybe some translations might have that word appointed, which I think is very accurate. Either one works, but really what it means is that God is the one who did this, okay? So God had appointed a fish, and the fish was there at the location of where the ship was, at the time that Jonah was to be thrown into the sea. And the fish was there for the purpose of actually swallowing Jonah so that he would not drown, so that he would not die, so that he would be preserved. And then that same fish was appointed to bring him to shore and spit him out of his mouth. That is all the acts of a sovereign God who is very active in the affairs of man. He was not going to allow Jonah to completely be rebellious here. He was going to bring him back into his will. Contrary to what you might think by some cartoon depictions here, you have a ship on the stormy sea, and you got Jonah being cast off like this into the wave, and then you got a whale that's sitting there like this, ready to catch him. That's not the way it happened, because when you read chapter 2, you see that Jonah went down, down, down, down, down to the bottom here. It was at that point when the fish was there, right at the time when Jonah probably would have died, that the fish intervened. So God appointed this fish to be there at the right time to accomplish his purposes. And this is going to hold true for the people of Nineveh also, because we have a gracious God who's pursuing Jonah here, a rebellious Jonah. He's pursuing him, And he's going to have his will and his purposes fulfilled. So Jonah, he's going to live, but God is going to, you know, when Pastor brings us the book of Romans, you're going to see that at some point, you know, God says, okay, this is what you desire. This is what you want. I will turn you over to your desires. And God allowed that for Jonah. You know, when you look hard enough for a way out of following God, depending on how hard you look, you'll find it. But that is not meaning that it's justified what you're doing. Perhaps what it means is that God is just allowing it. It's filtering through his fingertips. He's allowing you to have your way so that when you hit rock bottom, you'll come back to him. And that's what happened to Jonah. Jonah's going to hit rock bottom. He's going to go down to the moorings. If you look at Maya's drawing here, he's going to go down to the moorings of the mountain, the roots of where the mountain are, the very bottom of the crust of the earth. But God's going to let him do that. He's going to hit rock bottom. And sometimes that's what it takes for people to turn. So verse 17 says, Well, you know what? It's so funny how our Sunday school and the sermons, regardless of who's up there and back there, they just kind of mesh together because we were talking about three nights, three days, that Jesus the Messiah would die and be buried for three days. Well, obviously three days, three nights, we know applies to Jesus. That's really what comes to mind first when we hear that phrase. And Jesus affirmed this. If you go to Matthew chapter 12, In Matthew chapter 12, if you go to verse 38, So you have to bear in mind that Jesus is always performing miracles, okay, which really, you know, sometimes your translation will call it signs or miracles. It's the same thing. So Jesus had just performed miracles, and then in verse 38, then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, teach we want a sign from you. I just did signs. I've been doing signs my whole ministry. Miracle after miracle after miracle. Oh, but we want a sign. We want a sign on demand that'll prove that you are who you say you are, and then we'll believe. So Jesus said, but he answered and said to them, an evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign. And no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah, a real person. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. And Jesus goes on to say, the men of Nineveh, the men of Nineveh who repented when Jonah brought the message of judgment to them, the men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation of Pharisees and scribes and Sadducees and they will condemn it. So the people of Nineveh will condemn those who are standing right in front of Jesus demanding a sign. Why? How can they condemn it? Because with a lesser prophet there, Jonah, declaring this message, the people of Nineveh repented. But now you have the Son of God standing before you, and yet you seek a sign and you won't repent. The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah. And indeed, a greater Jonah is here. So Jesus affirmed that he would die and be in the belly of the earth, if you will, for three days and three nights. So Jonah was a sign for all of Israel of a foreshadowing of what Jesus would do. He would be in the grave for three days and three nights. There's another parallel message in Luke chapter 11, very similar. In fact, it's the same passage, but it's just recorded by Luke. And there's another account that happens in Matthew chapter 16. And it's funny, because in Matthew chapter 16, that follows obviously Matthew chapter 15, where Jesus fed the 4,000, which is another miracle now. So after performing more miracles, you get to chapter 16 of Matthew. And again, they're asking for a sign. And Jesus is like, you don't get a sign. I've been doing signs. You want a sign? You look at Jonah. Three days, three nights. It's a foreshadowing of what would become of Jesus. If you have a copy of my notes with you, you know, I kind of posed a question here. Do you have anyone in mind or anyone come to mind who's asking for a sign about Jesus? Are people saying, well, if Jesus was here, I would probably, maybe then, you know, I'm sure I would believe, right? Or if Jesus would do something that I ask for right now. In other words, give me a sign. You know, people are saying, give me a sign all the time. We just don't always pick up on it. But now you're gonna be alert to this because when you hear someone say, well, if Jesus was here, or why isn't he doing something about this? You know, we have, he has given us signs already, okay? We need to ask, what are you going to do with that sign? And hopefully each of us can go to Jonah here or Matthew 16 and say, Jesus has already given us a sign. He died for us. And he was raised from the grave three days later. He died as a substitute for us. In Luke chapter 16, that's the passage about Lazarus and the rich man. And, you know, the rich man and Lazarus die, they go to Abraham's bosom, and you have Lazarus on one side with Father Abraham, and the rich man on the other side, and there's a big gulf, and Lazarus is, oh I'm sorry, the rich man is just in torment because he says, you know, give me just a drop, just a drop of water, please, on my scorched tongue. And then he says, Father Abraham, send somebody back from here to my family so that they don't have to follow me here. And of course, the reply back was, they have Moses and the prophets. And if they don't respond to Moses and the prophets, they won't respond to anybody coming back from the dead. So again, we have Moses and the prophets right here in scripture. And all we have to do, most people are very ignorant of the Bible. People have a problem with God and Jesus and the Bible, but they've probably never read the Bible. What we need to do here is bring the scripture to them and say, you have Moses and the prophets, and we'll read to them all these things that Jesus said in scripture here. So people can be aware and made known of Jesus Christ. So in chapter one, we have a prophet of God who would rather die than be in obedience to God's will. And we see that he's sinking down here into great depths. In chapter two, he's going down into the deep. Verse three, for you cast me into the deep. I thought the sailors, wasn't it the sailors who threw him overboard in chapter one? Uh-uh, Jonah says, I know better. You, Lord, are punishing, you're judging me, okay? You are the one who cast me over into the deep. Jonah continues to go down, go through chapter one and highlight or circle in your Bible the words down. You see it in verse three, you see it in verse five. And then we continue to see how he goes into the deep, another word for down, okay? Verse five, the deep closed around me. Verse six, I went down, the end of verse six, and he's down into the pit. Jonah's spiral away from God just continues to get worse and worse and worse, spiraling downward. So the first part of his prayer, by the way, if you recognize how this reads, Jonah had to be very familiar with the Psalms because much of his prayer is just what David and the other psalmists would do and cry out in distress knowing, knowing that God saves and God will save them. So Jonah's prayer here is very much like what you read in all of the Psalms. The first part of this prayer, okay, so he says, I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction. He prayed to the Lord, I'm sorry, verse one, he prayed to the Lord first in the fish's belly. And what we have after this in the first several verses is Jonah recounting when he went overboard, all the way down. Okay, so he's in the fish, praying, and what you read after that was, here's my descent down, prior to the fish rescuing me, basically. So in verse four, we see that Jonah admits, he says, or verse three, that it was God who cast him into the deep. We get to verse 4 and we see that God had casted him, or he said, I've been cast out of your sight. Not really out of God's sight, but what this would be better understood perhaps is he was like out of God's blessing, if you will, obviously. Well, he's outside of God's will. He has been, and it was a willful departure from God's will. So he says, I've been cast out of your sight. In fact, I think that's, we read that in Psalm 51 when David repented. He said, don't cast me out of your sight. But here, Jonah says, I've been cast out of your sight. He said, the flood surrounded me. He says, your billows and your ways. It's not just the sea doing this to me. It's not Mother Earth. It's not Mother Nature, okay? This is God doing this to Jonah. And Jonah's like, I know this is because of my sin. He says, it's because of me. And this is your doing. So he says, verse five, I've been cast out of your sight, your blessing. And then, you know, again, this is Jonah's cry here as he is descending in the water. And look what he says in verse five. The water surrounded me even to my soul. In other words, to the point of death. Okay? So he's surrounded by the waters to the point of death. He says, the deep closed around me, weeds were wrapped around my head. He's at the bottom of the sea here. And he says, The earth with its bars closed behind me forever. It's like he's imprisoned here in the deep, like there's no escape from this pit that he's in. If you go back up to verse 4, He says, I've been cast out of your sight. And amazingly, he says, yet I will look again towards your holy temple. And look what he says in verse seven. When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord. So he's almost at the point of death, passed out. I don't know if he's got a lung full of seawater and it's gonna get pumped out while he's in the fish. I don't know, but he's at the point of death. A better translation here, when New King James says, when my soul fainted, NASB, ESV, and other translations will say that while I was at the point of fainting. So he hadn't lost all his life here, okay? He was at the point of fainting. But he continues in verse seven, my prayer went up to you into your holy temple. In verse 9, he says, I will sacrifice to you. You take these phrases together where he talks about, yet I will look again toward your holy temple. And he says, I will make sacrifices. Jonah believes, it's amazing. It's amazing how this man has turned because as he's descending, all of a sudden, this stark, he wanted to die. And now the stark reality of death is there. And he's like, I'm not liking this. And he remembered the Lord. And he prays. And he says, I will look upon your temple again. That's a physical viewing of God's temple because he says later in chapter, in verse nine, that I will pay my vows and sacrifice to you. He believes that he will be rescued and that he will again be in Jerusalem and he will go to the temple and make a sacrifice. Jonah's come a long way here. He says, I went down, in verse 6, I went down to the moorings of the mountain. I'm at the bottom, rock bottom. You don't get any deeper, darker than this. This is a very accurate depiction here, by the way, of salvation. I know I've mentioned this before. But when you see pictures of God like this, with his hand out to somebody who's drowning, and the person who's in the water is reaching up and grabbing God's hand, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way because man cannot save himself. Ephesians says you were dead. You don't have the ability to raise your hand and grab onto God. It's all God going down to the deeps, the rock bottom of the ocean and grabbing onto you and drawing you out of the pit. Yet you have brought up my life from the pit, in verse six he says. This is what salvation looks like, all the work of God. Okay? There's a lot in your notes. I'm not going to be able to cover all of it, but you can certainly read through it and come back again, like I said, next Sunday to Sunday school, and we're going to go a little bit deeper into some more of this. So in verse 8, Jonah says, So those who are going after idols, are forsaking the mercy that God has available for all mankind. Okay? Now, obviously, you know, we talked about the fact that in chapter one, the sailors came to faith in God because they vowed and sacrificed. I believe they sacrificed right on the ship there. I don't think they waited to get to shore. It was a merchant ship, it wasn't a cruise ship. I think they had grains, I'm sure they had metals, I'm sure they probably had even cattle and whatnot. I believe that they made a sacrifice right there on the ship. But they came to faith, okay? They forsook their gods and prayed to Yahweh and sacrificed to Yahweh in worship. And Jonah says here, Those who regard worthless idols forsake their own mercy. So mercy from God is available to those who don't worship other idols. So who is Jonah saying this to? He doesn't know about the sailors. In fact, not at this point, at least. He doesn't know that the sailors had repented. Why is Jonah talking about these idols and those who forsake God, His mercy, because they worship other idols? I think I think that this is a message for, obviously for all of us, but for Israel. Because Israel, from the time of its inception, was an idolatrous nation. Yes, they had the law of God, and God was the king up until the time that they said, we want a man king, right? But Israel had a whole history of idolatry. And I believe that Jonah is telling the nation of Israel here, You need to forsake your idols, because they don't save you. And in fact, look at the end of verse 9. He says, salvation is what? Is of the Lord. Salvation is of the Lord. So, I see two points here in that statement, salvation is of the Lord. Number one is what we already talked about, the fact that man cannot save himself. Okay, salvation is of the Lord, meaning the Lord does all of the saving, every aspect of it. But I think in light of Jonah and his rebellion here, I think that we can see another point here that we need to perhaps discuss, is the fact that Salvation is of the Lord's choosing. It's not yours. You don't get to determine who gets to hear the gospel and who doesn't. I think every person that we encounter, whether we say nothing and just pass by them, or have just a simple conversation, or if somebody is really, really rubbing you the wrong way, That's not for us to determine whether or not they get to hear the gospel. We need to come to terms with the fact that they need to hear the gospel. It is not up to us to withhold that from people. So I see two things in that statement here. Salvation is of the Lord. Romans 9, verse 14, God says, I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I have compassion. All the salvation is all the Lord's doing and choosing, okay? And we need to make sure that we bring that message of salvation to every person that we encounter. And if you just stop and think and look at all the opportunities we have where God brings people into our circle, I think that we would all admit that we lose enormous amounts of opportunity. And I'm included in that list. But those opportunities are there and we just need to look for them and see them and latch onto them. Like I said, we're gonna talk about this a little bit further, and perhaps maybe this might even come up in our Sunday morning discussion, but I had Pierre read Psalm 51 for a reason. When you read David's confession, He talks about his sin, he talks about his iniquity, his transgressions, all three are the words that describe our sin nature and our rebellious nature. But even in Psalm 32, when you read David's Psalm 32, which is essentially about the same thing, Bathsheba, he says, my bones hurt within me because of my sin. I do struggle with Jonah a little bit. Okay, I'll admit this. I don't struggle with the fact that a fish could swallow somebody. I believe it. First of all, God told us and he, you know, Jesus affirmed it, I believe all, you know, that there is a fish that is large enough to swallow a man. In fact, there are known instances where people have been swallowed by either a large fish or a whale of some sort, and they've even been in there for up to two to three days. And in fact, one account went as far as to describe the graphic appearance of the man who came out of this fish after three days where his skin was just all eaten by the acid in the fish's belly. So probably not a very particularly pleasant sight, but it's possible. So I don't struggle with any of that. Many people will say that Jonah died. I personally don't believe that he died. I think he wanted to die, but God kept him alive. I don't struggle with that. what I do struggle with, and a lot of people are gonna be on either side of the camp here. Some people say that Jonah was not repentant. And I fall into that category here. Some people say that he was very repentant. I see that Jonah admitted that things had happened because he sinned, but I don't see the nature of what David went through and confessed in Jonah. Now, I might be wrong in this, because obviously God saved him and preserved him, and still, still, even in all that Jonah did, who had run away from God, thinking that he would never be seen by God, God would leave him alone, have to leave him alone, because you can't see me, right? In fact, he wanted to die rather than do God's will. I don't see the repentance here in Jonah, especially when you go through the rest of the story and come to chapter four where God saved the Ninevites and Jonah is angry that God did that. So I still see something in Jonah that really kind of bothers me here. I don't have the answer for it. I question whether or not he was repentant, but the Lord used him. And I will probably struggle with this one here for a little while, you know, but it's okay to wrestle with things. But at the very least, I think that when we have a confession, and confession leads to repentance. So confession is you're admitting something. But then, like David, you have to have this extreme sorrow. I mean, it was to the point where he couldn't function physically because his body was wracked with what he had done. But God used Jonah here. Jonah did repay his vow here. I'm assuming that that vow was that, I will do your service, Lord, and I will go to Nineveh. Okay, so Jonah did do that, so he became obedient. And I like that. So Jonah aligned with God's purposes, and he did go there. And it's amazing because now the Lord spoke to the fish and had vomited Jonah on dry land. What a term, vomit. Anytime you see that word vomit or spit up in the Bible, it's gonna be derogatory, okay? And I know some of you are going through the book of Revelation and the seventh church, Laodicea. The one that was lukewarm, Jesus says, I spit you out, I vomit you out of my mouth. Okay, so as one last reprimand to Jonah, he was vomited out of the mouth, but on dry land. We don't know where. I could presume maybe back at Joppa where he started. And now he would have to go back, make the truck up to Assyria. But, it's amazing. It's amazing. You know what? Why is it only man who has a problem with God's will? The sea obeyed God. When he hurled the storm out there, the fish arrived at the same point, right on time, at the right location, and was used by God at the right time, just before Jonah died. And when God commanded the fish, swallow him, the fish did so. Obedient. And when God said, okay, spit them out, the fish did it. Again, we have obedience. Why is it only man that has a problem following God's will? We have a sin nature, but God has a cure for it. So salvation is of the Lord. It is all God's work, all God's doing. And this is how God allowed Jonah. He gave him enough rope so that Jonah would go as far as he possibly could go. And we see that God allowed it. Yet he was disciplining. You know, isn't that what Hebrews says? That God disciplines those whom he loves? Okay? So Jonah obviously must be very loved because he was very disciplined. Okay? But at the same time, that word discipline, you can put in there in parentheses, sanctified, because Jonah learned a lesson. And that's what God does in his disciplining of us. Okay? So there's a lot of takeaways, but I would camp on the salvation is of the Lord for right now, because we need to know that salvation is all God's doing, but we need to make sure that we don't withhold that gospel message from anybody, because even your worst enemy is probably the person who most needs the gospel, and probably needs to hear it from you. or me. Let's close in prayer. Father, there's a lot of takeaway in Jonah. How can somebody who starts off in your will become so hardened? What does it take to harden a man's heart who has tasted your mercy and your grace? And yet, Father, you are faithful, and you've pursued him, and you pursue each one of us too. Father, you have saved us, and you have saved us and left us here for a purpose, and that is to declare your gospel to people, to the world who needs to hear it. Father, we might not be called to go to Afghanistan or Syria, but Lord, we have people right here in St. Charles and Elgin and South Elgin, Lord, people at our workplaces who need to hear the gospel. Father, let us not be so hardened that we would withhold it from them. And I pray that we who have all these answers, because we have been made alive, who were once dead, just like they were. Father, help us to make sure that we proclaim your glory to them. In Jesus' name, amen.