The book of Jonah, the Old Testament prophet, great story. Jonah is a story that we said is of sin and grace. And in just a moment I'll read the first four verses. In fact, the last two weeks we spent on verse 1 and 2. So, we're moving slowly. We're going to pick it up a little bit more today. But when you think about the theme of Jonah, and Jonah fleeing from the presence of the Lord, and then God of course sends a storm, and you know the story that the whale or sea creature swallows Jonah, and then it spits him up on dry land near Nineveh somewhere. We find that there are two big themes that are kind of playing their way out in the book of Jonah. The theme of sin and grace. Sin is somebody running from God. That's what Jonah pictures. And grace is the pursuit of God. And so Jonah runs from the presence of the Lord. That's the first theme we talked about. And when you read the Bible, a lot of us believe that sin is breaking the rules. God set up these cosmic laws and now people have broken these cosmic laws. There are times in Scripture that we see sin put in those legal categories, but most of the time we find a description of sin in these relational categories of running from God, running from a relationship with God. That's why in the book of Genesis chapter 4 where Cain kills Abel, it says that Cain went away from the presence of the Lord. And in the book of Hosea, the prophet's wife, Gomer, runs away, runs out of his arms, into the arms of another. That's a picture of sin, moving away from God. The prodigal son, we're told, when Jesus tells the story, flees to a far-off country. Get the picture there? The prodigal is running from a relationship with the Father. And that's what's happening in Jonah's life. Jonah is running from a relationship with God, and God is going to pursue him. We're going to finish up what it means to run from God and then begin talking about the pursuit of God. Let me just real quickly cover ground just in a minute that we covered the last couple weeks. We're talking about running from God. We're asking and answering three questions. When did Jonah run? Why did Jonah run? And today we're going to talk about where Jonah ran. Now when we talk about when did Jonah run from God, we discovered that God came into Jonah's life and told him to go to Nineveh at a high point in his ministry. Jonah is found in the book of 2 Kings, and we find that he is a prophet among the prophets. He is way up on that prophetic food chain. When you want to hear a word from God, you go find somebody like Jonah. He's a national hero in Israel, and God comes to him and says, go off, go to Nineveh. God is changing the trajectory of Jonah's life, and He's changing it to a very uncomfortable trajectory. And so we just wrestled with this question in the first sermon. Will we still love God even if He changes the trajectory of our lives? Well, we still love God even if He comes at the high point in our business, the high point in our health, the high point in our social standing, and makes our lives uncomfortable because He has a different purpose for us at that point and maybe for other people. Well, I still love God even if He interrupts my life. And then we talked about why Jonah ran. We mention it in chapter 4, we get the reason Jonah ran. Jonah ran not because he was afraid to go to Nineveh, but because he did not want the Ninevites to repent. They are a sworn enemy of Israel. Jonah is a national hero in Israel. The Israelites would love to see the Ninevites under the judgment of God. If Jonah goes and preaches to the Ninevites and they repent, he is going to be the one they hold responsible for God not destroying Nineveh. And so Jonah has to ask and answer this question in his life, not only am I going to love God even if He interrupts my life, but am I willing to follow God even if people around me don't understand necessarily what I'm doing? Am I willing to follow God even if I'm going to lose social standing among my people? These are two questions Jonah's wrestling with. But that brings us to the third question today, where did Jonah run? And we find that answer in our text. Look at verse 1 with me. The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah ran away from the presence of the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa where he found a ship bound for that port. Paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. And the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up." So where did Jonah run? And I think there's a lot more packed into this idea that Jonah ran to Tarshish maybe than meets the eye. We're going to get to this in a minute, but why did Jonah leave it all? Isn't it true that Jonah could have just said, no, I'm not going? He could have stayed right there in Israel. He could have stayed right in that region near Samaria where he was preaching. Jonah, go to Nineveh. Jonah could have said, I'm just not going. I don't feel like going. And he could have gone back to his comfortable house. But instead of that, he feels this need to board a ship and go all the way to Tarshish. Now once again, Tarshish is the opposite direction of Nineveh. If God called you to go to, for example, Argentina, it would be like fleeing to Nova Scotia. It's exactly in the opposite direction. In the ancient world, when you heard Tarshish, that's modern-day Spain. It's what we know as Spain today. That's as far to the edge of civilization as you could possibly get in the ancient world. So Jonah picks a place to run from God, not just out of the way, but really, really out of the way. What does it mean that Jonah fled to Tarshish? I'll give you at least three thoughts, okay? Number one, it implies that Jonah, when he runs from God, it's because that at least something in his life is off-limits to God. Now think about this for a minute. It's very easy to follow God in the areas where you think God agrees with you. If you feel, for example, if you want to be a good family man and a good husband or a good wife, which God wants you to be, of course, right? It's easy to say, that's God's will for my life and to major on that. If you believe that God wants you to be second baseman for the New York Yankees and you want to be second baseman for the New York Yankees, that's easy to live, right? Well, I'm just doing God's will, after all, you know? It's easy to follow God in the areas where we feel like God agrees with us. It's those pesky little areas where God confronts us and puts us in a different direction. And so in Jonah's life, the question is not, how much of Scripture does Jonah agree with? It's, what is Jonah going to do with those areas that conflict with his worldview? What's he going to do with those areas that are uncomfortable in his life? Jonah agrees with almost everything that God is calling him to do. I mean, for the first part of his life, he would stand up before kings and before all those in Israel and say things like, God is going to expand our borders. And everybody would go, oh, amen. This guy just speaks from the heart, doesn't he? They loved the message of Jonah. But now Jonah is being called to love an unlovely people. He's being called to minister to a very unlovely people. We talked about those Ninevites and what they really believed and did. And so the question is not, how do I respond when God calls me to do something that I already feel it's in my heart to do? But what do I do with that 1%? What do I do with that 2%? What do I do in the areas of my life where I know it's really hard to follow God and it's hard to step out by faith or take a stand? That's the real question. We might put it this way, we are followers of Christ to the extent that we follow Him in the difficult areas of life. And that's the real test of discipleship. Not how much of Scripture do I agree with, not how much am I willing to say that people will applaud, but am I willing to live my life in a way that, under the will of God, that may be uncomfortable and may be difficult at that moment. Now, let me give you an illustration from two Martin Luthers. Martin Luther the Reformer, did you know there were more than one Martin Luther? There's two. One is Martin Luther the Reformer, 15th century, and the other one is Martin Luther King Jr., of course, Civil Rights, 20th century. You know, Martin Luther, way back, several hundreds of years ago, was caught up in a very corrupt church system. It was a church system where you could sin and then pay the priest in order to have him forgive your sin. These were called indulgences and things like that. In fact, you could even get proactive about this. So if you really wanted to sin, you could save your money, right, and pay it off in advance, so you could sin and have already spent it, like going on a cruise or something like that. You already paid the money, you might as well enjoy it. It was a very corrupt system. It was a system that really oppressed the poor and really deepened the pockets of the wealthy people, especially those that were in bed in the hierarchy of the church. Now you have to understand that Martin Luther agreed with a lot of what the church taught, but there were these areas that needed to be confronted in the 15th century. And Martin Luther has a famous quote, it goes like this. He said, If I profess with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition every portion of truth except precisely that little point where the world and the devil are attacking at that moment, I am not confessing Christ. However boldly I may be professing Christianity, where the battle rages, the loyalty of the soldier is proved." Now listen to what Luther says. This is powerful. He says, if I stand up and say that 99 or 98 or 90% that everybody wants to hear, but I fail to take a stance on that uncomfortable 1%, I am not really following God. That's what Martin Luther is saying. He says the true loyalty of the soldier is not proved at the other points in the battlefield, it's proved where that point of attack is. And in Jonah's life, he can stand up and he can speak very loudly on a lot of issues. But his refusal to love the Ninevites, his refusal to go preach the grace of God to them because of the terrible pride in his life shows that he's not serving Christ. That's what Martin Luther is saying. Now, if you fast forward to the 20th century where Martin Luther King Jr. took a stand, frankly, not only against the Western world and slavery, rather civil rights and Jim Crow laws and things, but he also took a stand against a lot of racism in the church. And when Martin Luther King Jr. confronted the racism of his day, he was a Baptist minister, by the way, ordained Baptist, he would say things like this. He would go to the church leaders and he would say, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Well, Martin Luther was saying is this. Are you only following God in the areas that you feel are comfortable? Because it was hard to stand on the side of equality in that day. And so he looked at a church that was riddled with racism in many ways and confronted. And when he confronted the church, He didn't let them slip away, not feeling the sting of this, because they agree with 99% of Scripture. What Martin Luther King, Jr. was saying, yeah, but what are you doing with the equality that God calls us to? How is the Gospel making a difference in your life and in your churches in this specific area? And what Martin Luther King Jr. was saying is you can have all this going for you in your ministry, where you are preaching loud and you think you're proclaiming the gospel, but if you fail to speak up on this one percent, you are not really professing Christ. He's right. Because the churches, many of them are doing the Jonah thing. They were very loud when the people wanted to be loud, but they had a hard time loving people that were maybe different culturally from them. So what does it mean to live by faith? It means am I willing to bring these difficult areas of my life underneath the will of God, not just things where I think God agrees with me. And in our world, just to share a few, am I going to listen to the voice of God about everything except when it comes to my children, my spouse, my family? That's off limits to God. I think in our culture today, to some degree, if you listen to the Western narrative, I'll listen to God about everything, except who I can sleep with. That one is off limits. Am I going to listen to God about everything, except I won't let him tell me how to run my business. I won't let him tell me what to do with my money. These are these small areas that we kind of circle off from God. I once heard somebody say this, they asked a question, they said, what does it mean to live by faith? What does it mean to follow God? And I'll never forget the image that he gave me at that time. He said, it's like standing on one side of a door, you know, you've got a door here and God's on the other side. And you take a blank check and you slip it under the door. And before the check even comes back, God can ask anything of you that He wants. But before that check comes back, you say to yourself, whatever comes back on that paper, I'm going to be willing to do. He said, that's what it means to follow God. That's what discipleship is all about. And then he asked this question. He said, but what would be off limits on that check? What would you say if this comes back under the door with X that deals off? In Jonah's life, that's what happened. Jonah slipped a check under the door and the check came back and it said, go to Nineveh. And Jonah said, that's the one thing I'm not going to do, God. Jonah is not only showing a life that's off limits to God, he's also, notice, he's seeking a community and a culture where God will not in any way confront him. He can't be confronted in his dissatisfaction with God. Now here's what I mean. We open with this question, why did Jonah flee to Tarshish? Why didn't he just stay in Israel? Because that's frankly the easier thing to do. I mean, when you and I are running from God, rarely do we say, well, I'm going all the way to the other side of the world. We usually find other ways to run from God, but we don't do it by physically fleeing all the way to Tarshish. And the short answer is this, Jonah knows that he can't escape from the presence of God. He's a pretty good theologian, he knows that. But what he's doing is he's trying to escape what the old theologians used to call the felt presence of God. He wants to get out of a community that talks about God. He wants to get out of Israel where they make much of the faithfulness of God, at least in theory. where people don't talk about God, there's a spiritual indifference in Tarshish, nobody's going to ask Jonah how his walk with God is going. It's not that just that Jonah is fleeing the presence of the Lord, it's important to notice that Jonah is actually fleeing the community of the Lord. That's the felt presence of God. And this is one of the marks of running from God. We want to get away from a gospel-centered community as far as we can. Anytime you see somebody running from God, you see this always in conjunction. Think back to the story of the prodigal son. The prodigal son could have just said, Father, give me my inheritance, and he could have built a house right next to his father's, but he doesn't do that. He wants to get as far off as he can away from the felt presence of God. That's what Jonah is doing. When Jonah flees God, he also wants to flee from the people of God. He doesn't want to hear people talk about the faithfulness of God. He doesn't want a friend coming up to him, putting his arm around him, going, how's your walk with God going? That's too much for Jonah's heart at this moment. So he runs, and he physically runs all the way to Tarshish. Now, how does this look in real life? Well, I can tell you how I've seen it anyway. Sometimes, you know, in a gospel community, you'll find, take a husband and a wife, where maybe one of them gets caught up with somebody else, and it's moving towards some kind of intimacy or some kind of relationship. And when that person knows that this is moving in that direction, and they know this is not God's will for their life, that God wants them to be faithful to their family, you start to see them not only pull away from God, but you'll see them maybe pull away from the people of God. And I can almost tell you exactly what it sounds like. It sounds like this. It sounds like, I don't feel like I'm getting fed anymore. I don't feel like I'm connecting with people. I don't feel like people really love me there. And these are some of the things maybe that we throw out, not because they're really true, though there may be truth to some of them, but because we're afraid that one of our friends is going to walk up and go, how you doing? Can I help you? We don't want to hear about God in those moments. So we flee, not only from the presence of God, but we flee from the felt presence of God, the community of God. We don't want to hear about God. We don't want to hear about His faithfulness. Jonah could have stayed right where he was. But instead, he went to Tarshish. He doesn't just want to get away from God. He wants to get away from any idea of God. And so we try to find a community of spiritual indifference. The last one is this. What does it mean that he flew up to Tarshish? Well, I'll borrow from a couple commentators that put it better than me, and they say this, when we're running from God, we will always find a boat to Tarshish. It's true, isn't it? It's interesting in verse 2, Jonah ran away from the Lord, headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa where he found a ship bound for that port. What a coincidence. Wow, this must be God's will. Maybe God is sympathizing with Jonah a little bit at this moment. That might be going through Jonah's mind. Charles Spurgeon, a great English preacher, you know what he once said? He talked about one of his classmates that he used to get angry and just throw things. Every time the guy got angry, he'd whip something across the room and hit somebody. And Spurgeon said, I wasn't surprised that the guy got angry. I was surprised that every time he got angry, there was something in his hand. And what Spurgeon is saying is the same thing these commentators are saying. Anytime we want to run from God, there's always a way that we can run from God. There's always something where we think maybe God is sympathizing with us at this moment, when in reality, we need to be very careful about that. In other words, when we're bubbling with anger, there is always a weapon nearby to strike someone. Always. There's a reason that Cain struck out at Abel. When we're moved with greed, there is always a friend nearby that we can betray. When we're feeling lonely, there is always a person, maybe the wrong one, to fill that gap. And so whenever we want to run from the Lord, as Jonah does here, there always seems to be a ship that's heading in the direction that we want to go. When we're agitated, isn't it true there's always a family member nearby that we can be agitated with? Jonah runs from God, and he runs in the other direction. That's what sin is. Sin is running from God. But let's turn the corner and let's talk about grace, because we don't want to leave on this wrong note of sin, right? Grace is God pursuing us. It's God chasing us, God loving us enough to pursue us even when we're running away from Him. Now, what does that look like? I'm going to take this in three steps. I think we can get through it today, and we'll pick it up next time. Number one, I want to talk about the storm, then let's talk about Jonah, and then let's talk about the infamous whale, okay? So let's take this in three steps. Number one, notice that God sends a storm. We find that in verse 4. The Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such was the violent storm arose for the ship." Now, you've got to remember that these sailors are professional mariners. They know what they're doing. And they know the difference between your average storm and a storm that is really out of the season and really out of the ordinary. And they recognize this is no ordinary storm. They sail these seas for a living. They're probably Phoenician sailors, by the way. They do this for a living. And they don't expect a storm like this to whip up at this time of year. And yet it whips up, and they realize something is not right here. So they start to pray, and their lives are at risk. This is an incredible storm that God sends that threatens the boat. But here's the key. This is really the grace of God. Because God has a plan for the mariners, and He has a plan for Jonah. The whale is actually going to rescue Jonah by the end of the story. I think we think of this the wrong way. We feel like the mariners threw him overboard and the whale came up and swallowed him. That means God is judging Jonah. But that's really not what happens. If you read chapter 2 carefully, the whale swallows Jonah when? right when he's about to drown and right when he's about to lose consciousness. In the story of Jonah, the whale is not out to get Jonah. In the story, the whale is actually rescuing Jonah. That's God's grace. God sends a rescue at the last minute. God is pursuing Jonah. But just for a moment, let's think about this storm. And the point to appreciate is this. God uses the storms of life to arrest our attention. And that's what the storm is doing here in this passage. God, it says, put the winds out there. And there's actually a word play here. God sent the winds. It literally means to throw, in verse 4. And then notice, God sends the winds, the mariners throw the cargo over. That's the same Hebrew word. Jonah said, throw me in. Then they do throw Jonah in. It's kind of a play on words, and all these things kind of link together. And Jonah understands that though the mariners are the one that ultimately throw him overboard, he says God is the one that is sovereign over this. The Lord is the one that did this in chapter 2. But the point to appreciate here is that God is using this storm in Jonah's life in part to arrest his attention. Now, I think we need to be very careful in speculating about why God is using different storms in people's lives, as if there's only one reason. Most of the time, something happens in the world, and we recognize God is in control of this event or that event, we start to speculate maybe a little bit too far. Do you realize God has a lot of purposes in this storm? His purpose for Jonah is to get him in a different direction. His purpose for the mariners in this storm is to awaken them to the message Jonah is about to share with them. The purpose, for example, for the Ninevites is for Jonah to go so an awakening can be done in Ninevites. A lot of reasons God sends this storm. But in Jonah's case, as he's running from God, God is arresting the attention of Jonah through the storm. Job puts it this way, he says, God delivers the afflicted by their affliction and He opens their ear by adversity. Mostly you know that C.S. Lewis wrote a lot about pain and suffering. I think he's done some of the best work that we could read. And C.S. Lewis has a great quote when he talks about the problem of pain and he says, God whispers in our pleasure, you know this? But He shouts in our pain. It's his megaphone to arouse us from asleep. Isn't that exactly what's going on in Jonah's life? Jonah is spiritually sleeping. He's unconcerned. He's running from God. And a storm comes in. That is God's gracious way of arresting the attention of Jonah. Same thing happens with a prodigal son. A prodigal son goes off into a far country. Remember what happens? Why does a prodigal son come home? You say, well, because he came to his senses. Yeah, but why did he come to his senses? because there was a great famine in the land. And it's the famine that arrests the attention of the prodigal so that he finally runs home. In a minute, we're going to see that Jonah is somewhat awakened in what God is doing in his life, but it all starts by God graciously coming into his life and using this storm to arrest his attention. God will often draw us to himself through storms. Sometimes these are rather difficult. But here's the thing, we're going to see this before the end of the story, is we can trust God in the storms because there is always love beneath the waves. We can trust God with our lives. It's okay when the storm comes. It's okay when you find yourself in the sea and you feel like you're going under. There is love beneath the waves. There is God's grace throughout this process in the life of Jonah. And so God uses these storms to grow us spiritually. Hebrews reminds us, it quotes Proverbs, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. In other words, know it when you see it and do not lose heart. People there in the book of Hebrews are really struggling with storms in their life. And the author says, don't lose heart. God's got a plan in your life in this. He says, when the Lord rebukes you, when the Lord disciplines the one He loves, in other words, it's evidence of His love. When I think about this, Hebrews 12 tells us that when God brings a storm into our lives and He speaks to our hearts that He is bringing out peaceable fruits of righteousness. Isn't that a cool phrase? You want to know what peaceable fruits of righteousness look like? We're going to look at that when you get to chapter 2 of Jonah and he prays from the belly of the whale. But anytime I hear that phrase, I think about the Old Testament prophet Amos. Amos had a profession, it's a profession that nobody has today, it's called a fig picker. How'd you like that for a profession? What do you do for a living? I'm a picker of figs, you know? But it wasn't like you just pick them and throw them in a basket. What they would do in Palestine, they'd walk around while the figs are still on the tree, and there's a kind of fig that will not ripen unless it's struck. And so what they would do is they'd take a little stick and they'd kind of traumatize the fruit a little bit. Some of them would have a little knife and they'd kind of poke into it. And once that fig has just a little bit of trauma, it begins to really ripen and really grow. Something like that is happening in Jonah's life. Jonah is running from God. God sends this storm into his life, and it's very uncomfortable for the moment. But by the time you get to chapter 2, it is bringing on these peaceable fruits of righteousness. And many times God does the same things in our lives. He allows these storms to come into our lives. They arrest our attention. We feel very uncomfortable in a storm, very confused in a storm, but there is love beneath the waves. The second thing we want to see is not just a storm, but Jonah. Look at verse 11. We're not going to talk about the mariners this week, but down the road. Then they, the mariners, said, What shall we do to thee, that the sea may be calm? The sea was wrought, it was tempestuous, it was kicking up. And Jonah said, take me, cast me into the sea and the sea shall be calm. I know that for my sake the great storm has come upon you. Let me ask you a question. How do you know when God is really beginning to awaken you spiritually? What are some of the first signs of God bringing some kind of awakening in your life? And I'll ask it even this way. How do you know when you're seeking God in the storm? And the answer might be this from Jonah. There is a sense in which we are willing to place ourselves into the hands of God. And that's what Jonah does here. The storm comes, and Jonah finally gets to the point where he says, all right, I'm going to put myself into the hands of God, and he's going to realize there is love beneath the waves. He doesn't know yet there's love beneath the waves, but he's at least willing to put himself into the hands of the Father. Again, when you think about that parallel with the prodigal son in Luke 15, the son runs off into a far country, and then it says this, the famine came, he came to his senses, remember this? But then do you remember what happens? He says, I will arise and go to my father, and I will say, Father, I'm not even coming back as a son, I'm coming back as a hired hand. You know what the son's doing at that point? He has no demands on the Father. He's not saying, I'll respond if you remove the storm. I'll respond if you give me a second inheritance. He is putting himself in the hands of the Father that he knows he can trust. Jonah knows. He knows he can submit to this terrible season of his life to God. I can put myself in God's hand because there is love beneath the waves. The prodigal has that same sense here. He's willing to own what's happened in his life up to this point. I love what Jesus says. in the book of Matthew where he talks about, you're willing to lose your life to find it. You know what this verse is? Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whosoever loses their life for my sake shall find it. You know what I love about this verse besides every word? I do this a lot. This is my favorite verse. This is my favorite passage. Here's my favorite verse today. Whosoever will finds their life. If you circle that word life, you guys probably know there are a lot of Greek words for life. The Greeks had at least three. They had bios where we get the word biology. One of the Greek words was Zoe. You know the English, we call it, like, that girl's name is Zoe? That's actually a Greek word for life. For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, and whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting... Zoe, life. That's eternal life. But the word that Jesus uses here is actually the word sukse. It's where we get the English word soul or psychology. It's a different word. So when Jesus says, whosoever will lose their life, he's not just talking about your physical life, although that could be the case. It was with Jonah, right? He's talking about your dreams. He's talking about what your soul desires. your ambitions. Are you willing to give those to me? Are you willing to put me ahead of your hopes, ahead of your dreams? Are you willing to put me as first place in your life? If you're willing to lose your life that way, you're going to find it in me." And Jonah gets to the point where he's willing to do that, at least here in verse 11, the beginning of some kind of awakening in Jonah's life. God, I'm willing to trust You. That brings us to our last point. There's the storm, there's Jonah, and what are we to make of this whale? First of all, I want you to know that the word whale here is just sea creature. We're not really sure what it is. Some people speculate it's a whale, others think it's maybe God supernaturally just created some kind of sea creature. But if you look at the language, no matter how we understand this huge fish, it says this, now the Lord prepared a huge fish to swallow Jonah. I think it's important that we point out that the author of Jonah knew this was a miracle. Sometimes we like to point to some of those cool things that might have happened, you know? Like, I don't know, there's a story, it was a James Bartley, who people say he fell off a boat and a whale swallowed him and he lived in a whale for 20 hours or something like that and still lived, you know? A couple of years ago, we read about somebody that was in the wheel well of an Air France plane, and their body temperature dropped to something like 79 degrees, which is, of course, they should have died, but they lived. We kind of point to these things, but I think that misses the point here. The point is, this is a miracle. God provided the sea creature. Whatever is happening in this story, the author expects us to understand that a miracle is taking place. There is no natural explanation for this. By the way, I think a lot of us have a feeling that back then, way back then, people believed that you could live in the belly of a fish for three days. You don't really believe people in the ancient world believe that, do you? Yeah, back then they believed that people lived in fish. Nobody believed it back then just like nobody believes it now. That's the point of the story. God prepared this. This has got to be a miracle by God or the story just doesn't go forward. The same with the resurrection. In a minute we'll see the story of Jonah. Jesus actually applies to his own resurrected body. as he was in the belly of the fish for three days, I will be in the belly of the earth." Again, we have a feeling that, well, way back in the first century, people believed that dead people got up and walked. Nobody believed that in the first century any more than they believe it now. The story of Jesus is not that some people rise from the dead and Jesus happened to be one of them. It's that nobody rises from the dead and Jesus did. That's why the resurrection is so powerful. Again, back to the story of Jonah. The story here is not, well, some people can live in the belly of a whale, and Jonah is one of them. Oh no, nobody's ever done this, and Jonah happened to. That's how we know it's a miracle from God. Now, let's do a possible reconstruction. And here's how we know that we can trust the love of God, the same way the Ninevites knew that they could trust the love of God. A little reconstruction might look like this. So in Jonah chapter 1, at the end of the passage, 16 and 17, the Lord sends a fish that swallows Jonah. And then if you fast-forward to the end of chapter 2, which is the passage that Ben read, the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited Jonah out on dry land. Now here's what's important to appreciate. Back in the ancient world, they had all kinds of pagan gods. You're familiar with this. Probably the most common one in this region were the Phoenicians and the Philistines. The sea people made much of a god named Dagon, or Dagon. Dagon is a fish god. And when we see carvings in Nineveh, ancient Nineveh, in that area, when they describe Dagon, they describe him in a couple of different ways. Some have him as kind of a merman-type looking creature. Others have a human with fish coming out, or maybe the human coming out of the fish. And so the idea of fish in this area is actually they worship this kind of fish god. And so one commentator says this, what better heralding as a divinely sent messenger to Nineveh could Jonah have been than to be thrown out of the mouth of a great fish in the presence of witnesses on the coast of Phoenicia where the fish god was the favorite object of worship. Such an incident would have aroused the nature of the Oriental observers. so that a multitude would be ready to follow the seemingly new avatar of the fish god, proclaiming the story that is uprising from the sea. And so what the author is saying there is you have to picture this from the person that's actually hearing the story of Jonah. God uses this whale probably in part because they worship these creatures from the sea. And when Jonah comes up out of the shore and is vomited out of the mouth of this whale, there are people watching this and they are watching what's going on. That's why Jonah probably gets so much credibility in Nineveh. He gets an audience before the king. And people are starting to talk about how this man came from the sea and now he's preaching to us this message of sin and grace. Because when you read the story in chapter 3, you immediately think to yourself, how is it that Jonah preaching the whole city turned to God? But when you understand this little part, that Jonah is not just going to Nineveh with a message from God, he's going to Nineveh with a message from God out of the mouth of a sea creature, that's where the credibility comes. And so the point to appreciate is this. The resurrection of Jonah from the sea was the evidence for his message. It was something that gave the Ninevites, they understood a miracle had taken place. And why is that important to us? Because the same thing is true of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. How do we know that God pursued us in Christ? It's through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And Jesus says these words, just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish, so the Son of Man is three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. As certainly as the Ninevites knew that some miracle had taken place with the resurrection of Jonah, we today, we know that God is pursuing us and that He has pursued us in Christ because He was in the belly of the earth three days and three nights. The resurrection of Jesus is our reason to believe in the grace of God, just as the resurrection of Jonah is the reason the Ninevites put credibility in His message. There's love beneath the waves. And God is pursuing the Nevites. He pursued Jonah. And God is pursuing us at the cross. I'll close with a story I've been thinking about this week. George Matheson, who wrote one of the hymns we have in our hymnal, he's a 19th century Scottish minister. And Matheson came to a point in his life where there was a lot of pain and a lot of suffering. And it actually climaxed on the night that his sister got married. Let me explain why. Matheson was engaged to be married to a woman he really loved many years before this. And he discovered he was losing his eyesight. And when the doctor told him, you're going to gradually lose your eyesight to the point where you can't read and you can't write and you're not going to be able to see, his fiancée left him. She didn't want to go through life with somebody that couldn't see. Tragic story. Not to be outdone, Matheson had a dream. You know what Matheson wanted to do? He wanted to write. Academically write for the Church of Scotland. He wanted to interact with some of the academia and write some textbooks and things like that. And he actually did that. He put out at least two. But there were so many mistakes in the textbook that the criticism came so hard he couldn't publish anymore. And most people say because he couldn't see the page well, he'd read things that weren't really there, and he'd try to speculate and make them up. So his life was almost an absolute shambles, and that's when his sister really came into his life. His sister became his eyes, and she would read to him, and she would explain that it says this, and it's written this way, and that allowed him to process the material. And Matheson went on to be a great preacher in Scotland. It was said that he would have churches up to 1,500 people, which in our day and age is not so massive, but back in Scotland 200 years ago, this is huge. And it was all because his sister gave herself in this way to be his eyes and to read for him. And here she is about to get married and she's going to exit his life. And he's wondering about, what's my future? What's going to happen to me? He felt this low moment in his life, like he was going down, down, down, down. And he thought about the spiral that was going on in his heart and how his heart was running from God at that moment. But then something recalled the grace of God in his life. And in that moment, he picked up a pen and he wrote a hymn. In our hymnal, it's actually 374. It's this, "'O love that will not let me go.'" Listen to it. Isn't this Jonah? "'O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee. I give thee back the life I owe, that thine ocean depth, its flow, may richer, fuller be. O light that followest all my way, I yield my flickering torch to thee. My heart restores its borrowed ray, that the sunshine's blaze its day may brighter, fairer be. O joy that seeketh me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee. I trace the rainbow through the rain, and feel the promises not in vain, that mourn shall tenderness be." And then he turns to the cross. You notice every stanza? It's God pursuing him. O cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee. I lay in dust, life, glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red, life-shell, endless bee. That's the pursuit of God. You know, maybe in your life right now, you're feeling yourself pull away from God. You find yourself running from God. That may even be accompanied by pulling away from people that love you dearly, that love God. And I just leave you with that last thought. It's the pursuit of God. O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee. Why not turn back to Him? Why not cling to His grace? Why not turn to Christ and see that He was raised from the dead as that great evidence that He loves you and He's pursuing you. Let's close with prayer, friends.