Jonah 1:17–2:10

0:00 Well, good morning again, everybody. Let me invite you to take a Bible and turn over to the book of Jonah. If you want to use one of those red pew Bibles in front of you, you'll be able to find Jonah beginning on page 953. We're going to be looking at all of chapter 2, but also the last verse of chapter 1. I'll explain why that is a little bit later on in the sermon. If you're new to Third Avenue, welcome. We're super glad that you're here with us to open up God's Word this morning. The reason that we do this week in and week out is because we believe that this book right here, the Bible, is the Word of God.

0:35 We understand that every word of it is true, that every word of it is without error, and that every word of it is meant to reveal to us both who God is and who we are before Him. And that includes this 2,700-year-old book of Jonah that we are spending a few weeks in this winter. Jonah, just to give you a slight bit of background if you're not up to speed on it, is the It's one of the 12 minor prophets that are collected at the very end of the Old Testament. We're not exactly sure when it was written. It may have been written by Jonah himself.

1:06 It may have been written down sometime after that. But the events that take place here take place sometime around the year 780 B.C., something like that, 760, 780. So about 2,700, 2,800 years ago. The book tells the story of the prophet Jonah, who was a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel after the Civil War, broke the nation in two. A prophet, Jonah, that's his name, and he received a call from God to go prophesy to the city of Nineveh, which was the capital of the rising Assyrian empire.

1:42 Now, in 760, 780 BC, Assyria wasn't everything that it was gonna be. 50 years later, Assyria was basically gonna be astride the world, ruling everything. And it would be, by that time, renowned for its cruelty and how it handled those that it conquered. It wasn't quite known for all of that yet. But even so, Jonah would have understood even in 760, 780 that Nineveh was an enemy. And maybe even some rumors had started coming out about the cruelty with which they treated their enemies.

2:14 And they certainly would have been pressing on the kingdom of Israel even by this time. Well, you know the story so far. Jonah refused to go even though God had called him to go preach to the city of Nineveh. And so, you know, even though we have no idea so far in the story why he refused to go, it just says that he didn't want to go. And so he hopped a ship and went in exactly the opposite direction from Nineveh, headed to a city called Tarshish, which was, as far as Jonah knew, the end of the world. It was on the far western coast of Spain, and nobody knew about the new world yet at that time.

2:47 And so, therefore, Jonah was going as far as he could possibly go in the opposite direction of where God wanted him to go. What's interesting about it, as I said, is that the story doesn't tell us in the first three chapters why Jonah flees from God. In fact, it's a total mystery because you would think that God telling Jonah to go preach a message of judgment against this wicked city of Nineveh would have been something that Jonah would have jumped at. And yet he doesn't. He flees. And the story doesn't tell us until chapter 4 exactly why that is.

3:18 So Jonah hops a ship. He's going to Tarshish, going to the ends of the earth as he knew it. But once the ship set sail, a storm blew up that threatened to destroy the ship and everybody on board. So the sailors on the ship began to pray to their gods for help. And then finally they decided to cast lots among themselves to see who was the cause of this sort of supernatural storm. They knew that it was not a natural, normal storm. They were praying. The gods didn't respond because the gods didn't exist. And so they decided, okay, we're going to cast lots. And unsurprisingly, the lot falls on Jonah.

3:51 Once this happened, Jonah fessed up, told the sailors what they needed to do in order to save themselves, and that was, throw me into the ocean. And so that's what they did. And immediately, because in fact this was a storm that was blown up by God because of Jonah's sin, once they threw him in the ocean, immediately the storm stopped and the sea became calm, which we saw at the end of chapter 1 last week, convinced them at least of the existence and power of Jonah's God.

4:23 Now, exactly how much faith they had in God, whether they understood that he was the one true God and their own gods were false, or whether they just sacrificed to Yahweh next to their own gods and sort of included him in their polytheistic pantheon, the story just doesn't say. What it does say, though, is that the sailors were moving in a good direction. They had gone from not believing in Yahweh at all to believing at least something about his power in existence. Meanwhile, Jonah was swallowed up by the sea.

4:54 And that's where we left off the story last time. So we're going to be looking today at the whole of chapter 2. So all 10 verses of chapter 2. And also the very last verse of chapter 1. So let's start reading there. I'm going to start reading in chapter 1, verse 17. And we're going to go all the way through chapter 2. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up 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 belly of the fish, saying, I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me.

5:29 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 surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight. Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from the pit. Oh, Lord my God.

6:01 When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord. And my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

6:33 All right, so just incidentally, the Hebrew Bible actually begins chapter 2 at the last verse of 117. So you just need to know that chapter divisions in the Bible came along fairly recently, something like 1100-1200 A.D., so 800-900 years ago. And chapter divisions and verse divisions are not inspired. So even though most of the time there's pretty broad agreement about where to break the text into chapters, occasionally you'll have little differences like here, where the Hebrew Bible actually has verse 17 there as verse 1 of chapter 2.

7:08 That's not all that important to understand. It just can affect sometimes how you read the story, where you break it, whether you connect this verse with these verses or that verse. 17 seems to be a kind of transitional verse anyway, right? I mean, it's moving from the story of Jonah getting thrown into the ocean to Jonah in the whale's belly. And, you know, you've got to have a verse that tells you how he got there. And so that's what 17 is doing. But sometimes that's more important than it is here. And you should just make a note that you don't, in your Bible reading, have to be bound by the chapter divisions. You should think about the ideas and see how they fit together.

7:41 Anyway, most of this chapter is taken up with this song that Jonah sings while he's in the belly of this giant fish. And at first glance, what you've got here, we read it earlier in the service. It's a beautiful song in its own way. And what you've got here at first glance is just a fairly straightforward psalm, essentially, of gratitude to God for saving Jonah from drowning. And there's nothing all that remarkable about it. It's got a pretty typical style of a psalm. It uses Hebrew parallelism, where it'll kind of say the same thing, you know, in parallel. It'll say, you know, I was drowning in the depths of the ocean, down in the heart of the sea, right?

8:15 It's kind of the same thing, but said over and over again in parallel. That's a typical thing in Hebrew poetry. In fact, it even quotes a number of Psalms that Jonah would have been aware of. You can take certain phrases in Jonah 2 and match them up. It's not like they're used everywhere in the Psalms either. You know, it's fairly specific phrases that Jonah sort of grabs from other psalms that we have and uses them in his own. So if you're reading this book for the first time, you see Jonah get thrown into the sea.

8:46 You see him get swallowed up by this fish. And then you get this song. You read chapter 2 and at first glance you just kind of think, oh, that's good. That's nice. God has mercifully saved Jonah from drowning. And now Jonah seems to understand how kind God has been to him. He's grateful to God for doing that. And he seems to have really had a good change of heart now. Jonah seems to have repented. And then you read the rest of the book and you're like, well, hold on. Because Jonah in chapter 3 and chapter 4 doesn't seem very repentant at all.

9:22 In fact, he argues with God all throughout chapter 4. Essentially yelling at God about how God is wrong to grant repentance and salvation, at least for a time, to the Ninevites. He doesn't seem very repentant at all. He doesn't seem to have a deep understanding of what mercy is, even after God has shown it to him. So if you've read the rest of the book, or you read the rest of the book and you think back to this chapter too, you start to think, wait a minute. What's really going on here in this song?

9:55 Because the rest of the book doesn't really show much of a change of heart in Jonah. And yet here in this psalm, he seems overjoyed at what God has done for him and super grateful for it. But then you start to look at it even a little more closely. And you start to see that there are just certain things in this psalm that are deeply ironic, given the circumstances. We'll talk about those later. I'll give those to you a little bit later. But really, what are we supposed to be taking and learning from this song from a guy who sounds so repentant?

10:36 And yet in chapters 3 and 4, it just goes on with the trajectory that he was on before. I mean, is this really just a nice, straightforward song of thanksgiving from a guy who's been saved from drowning? Is that what it is? Or are we supposed to learn something else from it? Something more raw and ironic. Well, that's what we're going to be exploring today. And I think you'll probably see some things here as we study this song that maybe you've not seen before in your reading of it. And in that, I hope you'll also, as we unfold the song and see the ironies in the song, I hope you'll also probably, hopefully, see some things that are true about yourself that you haven't seen before.

11:19 And that's because Jonah, it turns out, I mean, despite the way that children's stories tend to tell it, despite the way you probably read it to your children, Jonah is not some hero of the faith. He never turns out to be a hero of the faith. And the story here is not Jonah disobeyed God, got swallowed by a whale, changed his mind and obeyed God, and lived happily ever after. That's not the story. Far from it. In fact, it's a far more realistic story than that. And there's far more to learn from that story about our own hearts and our own motivations than the simplistic story we often tell about Jonah.

11:57 Today, the main idea, I think, of what we're supposed to learn as we think about and reflect on chapter 2, both kind of as a first reading, but then later on, after you've read the rest of the story, I think the main idea of what we're supposed to learn is this. Again, it's not the main idea of the book. We're going to start getting into that in chapters 3 and 4. But it is, I think, the main idea of chapter 2. Repentance is more than gratitude. Repentance is more than gratitude. So we're going to look at this chapter in two parts.

12:29 First, the first part of it is just thinking about 117. So just that verse all by itself. And then in the second point, we're going to look at the whole of the song in chapter 2. So two points to the sermon. Number one, Jonah's fish. And number two, Jonah's song. Number one, Jonah's fish, and number two, Jonah's song. My prayer this morning as we look at this song is that as we study it, as we look at it, as we delve into it, I pray that you'll be challenged to look at your own life and the way your own heart responds to God's word in your life.

13:04 So let's look at it. Number one, point number one, looking at verse 117, Jonah's fish. Let's just read it again. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. So, okay, first things first, we should probably just acknowledge that probably a better point title for this point would not be so much Jonah's fish as God's fish. You see that? It's not so much Jonah's fish as it is God's fish.

13:35 Jonah had no ownership of the fish at all. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The fish clearly had ownership of Jonah. It's not Jonah's fish, it's God's fish. In fact, the text is very clear in saying that it was God who appointed, you see that word, the Lord appointed or prepared or set this fish to be right there, right then, to swallow Jonah up and save him from drowning in the ocean. I mean, actually, that word appointed is used several more times in the book to refer to other things that God is sovereign over.

14:08 So in chapter 4, it's said that God appointed the vine which grew up over Jonah. He appointed the worm, which ate the vine. He appointed the east wind, which blew heat onto Jonah. All of those things are said to be appointed by God. And you notice that they're all natural things, right? They all have to do with the created cosmos. So you've got the fish that was created, the vine that was created, the worm and the wind. All of it created. And the whole point seems to be to underline the Lord's sovereignty over all the forces of nature.

14:39 That's what it's doing. It's saying that all the forces of nature, whether it's the storm or the vine or the fish, whatever it is, all of it is under God's sovereignty. Now, just to pause for a second, that is a really important point that we often take for granted, I think. According to the Bible, all the processes of nature are not just the result of physical systems. And they're certainly not random. They are under the sovereign power and control of the God who created them. Now, not all of them, not all the processes of nature, not every storm on the ocean, not every snowstorm in Louisville, Kentucky, not all of them have this very specific identifiable purpose that those do in this story, right?

15:25 And that storm that God blows up on the ocean has a specific purpose. It's aimed at a specific person. Same thing with the fish and the vine and the wind, all of it. It's all very specific. It's all very identifiable. To say that God is sovereign over the processes of nature that we see is not to say that you can look at any particular one and say that's got a particular identifiable purpose. You can't say, you know, it is very particular and very identifiable that that hurricane hit Miami because blank. I know people have tried to do that in the past, but you can't do it.

15:58 What you can say, though, and what you must say, in fact, biblically, is that no hurricane, no volcano, no snowstorm, no nothing in all of creation is outside the power and purposes of God. He's sovereign over all of it and it all comes from his hand. He appoints it for his own good purposes. Now that may not seem all that profound to you. It may not even seem all that important. Fine, God is sovereign over all the processes of nature. But do you know how the Bible uses God's sovereignty over the processes of nature? Do you know what it uses that to teach us, more importantly? It uses God's sovereignty over the processes of nature to teach you his sovereignty over you and your life. That's how the Bible uses it. That's how Job uses it. Those beautiful chapters at the end of Job, where God is asserting to Job his sovereignty over all the things that happen in the cosmos. He's using that to teach Job that he is sovereign over Job.

17:04 And friend, that's how you should understand it too. When you stare out into a storm or when you watch the snow falling from the sky. If you ever find yourself looking at a hurricane or stuck in a hurricane and you look out into it, that's what your mind ought to do. My God is sovereign over this hurricane and he is also sovereign over me and everything that happens in my life. It's meant to humble you and cause you to feel awe. Well, what do we say about this fish in 17?

17:35 Well, the fact is, we know absolutely nothing about this fish. We don't know what kind of fish it was. We don't know how big the fish was. All we know is that a fish came, appointed by God, and it swallowed Jonah. And Jonah was in there for three days, and then it vomited Jonah up on the dry land. That's all we know about the fish. Another thing that we know about the fish is that in all likelihood, it was not a whale. I'm very sorry to blow your childhood images, but it just probably wasn't a whale.

18:06 I mean, ancient people knew about whales. They had seen whales. They knew that whales were mammals, not fish, in fact. And they had words for whales that were very different than the word for fish. And this is clearly the word for fish. You know what the Hebrew word for fish is? dog. I kid you not. Just interesting. On one level, thinking about what this fish is doing, why it's here, all the rest of it.

18:37 On one level, it's a shame that the story of this book has come to be known as Jonah and the whale. Because not only is it not a whale, but the fish, whatever it is, actually plays a very bit part in the story. Have you noticed that? And he's only mentioned three times. It's in 17 where he gets eaten by it. Then in 2 where it's just said that he's in there. And then down in 210 where the fish vomits Jonah out upon dry land. The fish doesn't even get a mention in Jonah's song. The fish is a bit player. And so it's a shame that we've spent so much time trying to figure out the mechanics of what this fish was and exactly how could Jonah survive being swallowed by it. I mean he's a bit player. He's no more important really to the meaning of the story than the vine or the worm or the east wind in chapter 4. I mean the book could just as well have been called Jonah and the worm for all the importance the fish has. So what's

19:40 happened then over the centuries is basically that so much attention has been given to this fish that the main point of Jonah and the thing that the book is trying to teach has been obscured. So you ask the man on the street, even the Christian on the street, what is the point of the book of Jonah? And you get people trying really hard. It's like, okay, what is the point of the story of Jonah? They try really hard to make the fish the main character. And so you end up with very simplistic answers to that question, like, oh, God taught Jonah his lesson. Jonah disobeyed him. God taught him his lesson by making him get swallowed by the fish, which is not the point of the story at all. So don't get distracted by the fish as if it's the main point of the book.

20:20 or even the thing we should be focusing on. And yet, we have to focus on it for just a few minutes because there are a few things to say about it. For one thing, for better or worse, verse 17 is without a doubt the most famous verse in the book of Jonah. It just is. If you tell people to quote from memory one verse from the book of Jonah, they're probably going to say something about the fish swallowing Jonah. In fact, I think it's probably fair to say that this verse, 117, is probably cited more often than any other in the entire Bible, maybe, as being the reason that people say they can't believe the Bible.

21:03 You ever run into a conversation like that? You talk to somebody, no, I'm an atheist, I don't believe the Bible, I think it's all fanciful, and you say, well, what do you think is fanciful? 90% of the time, they'll go for it, well, that guy got swallowed by the fish. I mean, what is that? People don't get swallowed by the fish. I mean, it's interesting to me that that's kind of where people go. They don't go for the real big miracles, right? Like Jesus rising from the dead. That would create too much of a conversation. But Jonah and the fish is just very easy to sort of backhand and knock away and say, that just couldn't have happened.

21:36 Which, at first glance, again, is a pretty reasonable position. I mean, if you think about this in a context that doesn't have you sitting in a pew at church, This is an insane story. A guy disobeys God, God sends a fish to swallow him, he survives it, and ends up being spit up on shore with a new lease on life. It's an insane story. And you have to ask, who on earth believes that that kind of thing could actually happen?

22:11 In fact, throughout all the centuries, people have made all kinds of attempts to explain this away. So there's one guy in particular who says that probably what we're talking about here is not a fish fish. So it's not an animal that actually swallowed Jonah. Probably what happened is that Jonah just floated up on shore. And once he got to shore, he found an inn, a hotel whose name was The Fish. And he spent three days and three nights recuperating in the belly of The Fish. The guy is serious.

22:43 But I want you to notice something about this whole thing. I want you to notice just how understated the story of the fish is. And the author just says it, right? There's no embellishment. There's no detail. There's no drama. It doesn't in any way sort of heighten the drama of the story. It's not even, if you think about it, really strictly necessary to the story. You ever notice that? the fish swallowing Jonah is not strictly necessary to the story.

23:19 He could have just washed up on shore. He could have just grabbed a hold of a piece of driftwood, washed up on shore, and sung exactly the same song that he sings right here in chapter 2. The fish is unnecessary to the story. So if it didn't happen, historically, really, Why would the author stick it in there? Why would you make up something so fanciful, so crazy, that generations of people would call you a liar when all you had to do was just let him wash up on a piece of driftwood?

24:00 It's unnecessary, and the author just says it. Why make it up if it didn't really happen? I mean, even deeper than that, right? The whole thing really does come down to what we were saying before, doesn't it? And if God really is sovereign over all the processes of nature, if he really is the God of the universe who can do things like, for example, split the Red Sea in half or cause the walls of Jericho to fall down, then why is this fish so singularly offensive? I mean, technically, if you start to think about it, the fish swallowing Jonah doesn't even really count as a miracle, right?

24:38 There's no laws of nature broken here. There's nothing happening here that's all that amazing. It's not a miracle. This is just God ensuring that this right-sized fish was at the right place at the right time to do something that, though it sounds a little wild, is far from impossible. It's not even a miracle. So the real challenge here isn't whether the fish story is so fanciful that it's just outside the pale of reasonable belief. That's not the question. No, the question is whether you even allow for the possibility of God's sovereignty at all.

25:15 Do you believe at all in a God who could bring a big fish to a certain place at a certain time to do a certain thing? Or do you not? See, I think what's betrayed in the whole, I can't believe the Bible because I cannot believe that the fish swallowed Jonah. I think what's betrayed in that kind of thing is not so much the fancifulness of the fish. It's the disbelief in a God who could do such a thing in the first place. And what that does then, if you can reject that God on the basis of the fish, it protects you and defends you from having to ask the much bigger and deeper and harder question, not could God send a fish to swallow a man, but could God bring a man back from the dead?

26:03 Oh, see, that's the harder question. The question of Christianity, the thing that's going to flag you as a believer in God or an unbeliever in God is not what you think about the fish. Ultimately, what's going to flag you as a believer or an unbeliever is if you say Jesus got up from the dead or not. Even Jesus, when he talks about this story, points to the logic of that. The really important thing is that Jonah, at least figuratively in the belly of the fish was dead and then he was alive.

26:37 And Jesus says that's what you get from me too. The question of do you believe that after I have died on the cross I'm going to get up from the dead. The question of Christianity is not the fish. It's the resurrection. It's the empty tomb. See Christianity doesn't require you to make a leap of faith. People talk about a leap of faith all the time. What they mean by a leap of faith is that there's some gap that you have to bridge with just this bare faith, right?

27:09 That you have to believe things that are inherently unbelievable. That's not what Christianity does. Christianity asks you to size things up, whether it's the fish or the empty tomb. It asks you to look at it and decide, do I actually believe that this thing happened? Do I believe that Jesus was dead in the tomb until the third day and then he got up from the dead? Or do I not believe it? That's not a leap of faith. All the evidence is there for you to look at. If you just take the time to do it. What it does require you to do, though, is open your mind and your eyes to realities that go beyond your limited experience.

27:48 Here's another question about this, Fish. Why does God save Jonah like this? Why does God decide to save Jonah like this? I'm not asking why God saves Jonah, right? That's another question that has another answer. And it's about grace and mercy and God's purposes and all the rest. But that's not what I'm asking right now. I'm not asking why does God save Jonah. I'm asking why does he save Jonah like this? I mean, there must have been some purpose in it, right? Like we said, he could have saved Jonah by appointing instead of a fish a piece of driftwood for him to hold on to.

28:22 Or like we said, just have him wash up on shore. The story could have gone on just like that. Jonah could have been grateful for being saved by washing up on shore. So what could possibly be God's purpose in having Jonah be saved by a fish in particular? Well, it's not entirely clear. But it probably has to do again with God's desire to show Jonah in no uncertain terms his sovereignty over all of this. See, we've noted several times before as we've studied the Old Testament that in the ancient mind, the sea was a place of chaos and evil and death.

28:58 It was completely uncontrollable and more likely than not to kill you if you found yourself off in it. So already in sending this storm and instilling it, God has shown these sailors and probably Jonah too that he was sovereign over that chaos. That the death and evil and chaotic nature of the sea was not really untamable and that God's hand was in fact on it. But he wanted to make that point to Jonah as well. And a piece of driftwood or a washing up on shore wouldn't have made that point near as well as this fish, this dweller in the abode of chaos being appointed by God to be right there right then to save Jonah from drowning.

29:40 I mean, the fact is, you can read the rest of the story. We will, in fact, together read the rest of the story. Jonah never, ever seems to get the deeper and finer points of what God is doing in this book. He just never seems to get it. There's never a point where on the deeper, finer things that God's trying to teach him, he goes, oh, yes, I get it now, God. No, he ends the book angry and not understanding those things. He never understands grace or mercy or forgiveness. He never understands God's purposes in that realm. He never understands God's heart for the nations like Nineveh that are not Israelite.

30:15 But if there's one thing that got through to him, if there's one thing he understood deep down in his heart, it's that God sent that fish. He got that. And he was grateful to God for doing that. Again, that might seem like a simple thing. But really, it's an important question to ask yourself. How aware are you of that fact in the day-to-day of your own life?

30:46 As things happen to you, as coincidences happen, as you have meetings with people that you weren't expecting, when you get stopped at a red light and you're mad about it and yet something comes barreling through that would have killed you had you gone through it. How aware are you of God's sovereignty in the daily events of your life? When something good happens to you, when something that you weren't expected happens to you, is your natural tendency to just go, wow, that's cool.

31:16 I mean, what good luck I just had right there. Or are you pretty quick to thank God for doing that? And really, do a kind of audit of yourself. Like watch yourself for the next week. Be especially aware of how you respond to things that just happen in your life. Do you have a tendency to ignore God's hand in that or is your heart open to the reality that God has done it? What about when it's unexpected bad things?

31:48 Do you just kind of curse your luck, get angry? Or do you recognize that God is sovereign even over that thing? And then here's the important part. Look for ways then to submit to his will and learn from him. And those are really good impulses to encourage in your heart, right? You can walk through life and have things happen to you, both good and bad, and you can chalk it up to luck, and you can chalk it up to circumstance and coincidence, and you can strut through life like that.

32:20 But you're not going to learn very much. You're not going to go very deep with it. Or you can let the events of your life affect your heart and let your heart swell up with gratitude to God for the good things. And submission to him in the bad. If Jonah got nothing else, he at least understood that. We can make fun of Jonah all we want to for not understanding. But I think it's a really good question whether we have gotten that as deeply as even Jonah did.

32:55 That's the point of Jonah's fish. Here's number two. Jonah's song. Jonah's song. So starting in verse 1 of chapter 2, the narrative that's been unfolding throughout chapter 1, which is unusual if you remember from Minor Prophets, it's usually all about the message, not here. It's the story of Jonah. That story, that narrative gets interrupted by the song that Jonah either sang or composed in the belly of the fish. 117 there says that he was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, which of course he wouldn't have known at the time, right?

33:28 He may not have even known he was in the belly of a fish. All he knew is that I'm not dead, right? And it's really dark in here. That's all he knew. He didn't know that he was in there for three days and three nights. That's inspiration. That's him figuring it out afterwards based on asking questions, you know, of people that he met. Something like that. But he would not have known it at the time. But apparently, the three days in the fish were a time, it turns out, of reflection and thinking for Jonah. That's what he did in there. He reflected and he thought.

34:00 which some people find unbelievable. I mean, I don't find it unbelievable. If you're in the belly of a big enough fish, and you're dry and you're alive unexpectedly, my guess is you would probably spend some time reflecting. And people say, well, this is so beautiful, and it's so put together, and, you know, it's got so much rhythm and structure and parallelism, and there's no way he wrote this thing in the belly of the fish. You do realize he had three days and three nights sitting in the belly of a fish. And you do realize that if you tried really, really hard, it would take you probably 20 or 30 minutes to memorize this entire song.

34:35 He was fully capable of composing this psalm in the belly of the fish. It's just not that hard. Anyway, whether he composed this song while he was in there or whether the thoughts were, you know, less put together and he wrote it down in this poetic style later, we don't know about that. But either way, he certainly seems to have been thinking while he was in the belly of the fish. There are new thoughts that are exploding in Jonah's mind, right? This is a fireworks display of insight that's happening in Jonah's mind. And we see it in this song. This song runs from 2-2 all the way down through 2-9.

35:09 And as you read it the first time, it's just this wonderful, simple, evocative song of thanksgiving to God for saving Jonah from drowning. And that's what it is. Structurally, it's really easy to see what's going on. So in 2 through 6, Jonah uses several just, I think, amazingly descriptive phrases to tell the story of how his life almost ended in the ocean. In fact, as you read it, you can sort of feel what it would have been like to be rolling in the currents of the ocean. You can feel that in his word. I mean, look at verse 3.

35:42 You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me. All your waves and billows passed over me. And then look at five. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. And then I love the evocativeness of these phrases right here. Weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. And then you can feel, I mean, the roots of the mountains, right? That's at the bottom of the ocean, right? So his experience is that I'm not just on the surface of the water getting battered by the waves.

36:16 That happens at first in verse three. And then he starts to sink, right? And his head gets covered in weeds. And he goes down to what he calls the roots of the mountains at the bottom of the ocean. And then look what he said. I went down to the country whose bars closed upon me forever. It's so evocative, right? You can like feel the bubbles and the currents. And then you can almost hear the bars of death as the gates of Sheol close on him. He thinks he's dead.

36:49 It's just incredibly evocative. Then in the next phrase, in the second part of 6, you get this moment of salvation. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever, and yet you brought up my life from the pit. Do you see that little phrase there? It's fascinating. You brought up my life from the pit. It's not that you saved my life from the pit, or you plucked my life from the pit, or you took my life from the pit. None of that. It's a very particular phrase, you brought up, raised my life from the pit.

37:25 Why those words? Well, we've noted a couple of times that throughout this story so far, Jonah's trajectory so far has been nothing but down, down, down. He goes down to the city of Joppa. He goes down into the ship. Then he goes down further into the hold of the ship. Then he goes down into the water, and then down to the roots of the mountains, and down to death, and you brought up my life from the pit.

37:56 Just like that. There are all kinds of places in the Bible where that happens. And the phrase there, yet, you brought up my life from the pit. Christian, do you know that your entire story is one gigantic and yet from God? That's your whole biography as a Christian. And the Bible is full of it. You find these stories all over both testaments of the Bible where somebody is just rebelling and sinning and going down, down, down, and it's just this thunderous judgment that's coming against them.

38:29 And you're thinking, this guy is toast. And then just out of nowhere will come this, and yet, or nevertheless, or but God, Where God just arrests the whole thing and turns it around. It's the whole story of Jonah. Down, down, down, down. And yet, God brought me up. That's what it is to be a Christian. You don't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

39:01 You don't figure it out for yourself. You cry out from the depths. You recognize that you're dying and dead in your trespasses and sins. And then God acts to save you. When God does save you, it often feels like that. Your life's headed downhill. You're in rebellion against him. You're running from him, and God just stops it. He just arrests you. He just stops your fall. There are a whole lot of people sitting right here in this room who, if you asked them, would say, yeah, that's exactly how it feels.

39:36 I was on my way to hell, and yet God stopped me. Maybe you haven't experienced that yet. Maybe it still feels to you like you're falling. Like you're still on your way to hell. Friend, today, today right here, right now can be the day when that stops and God brings you up. What you need to do is recognize that you're falling.

40:08 Recognize that you're dead in your trespasses and sins. And turn to Jesus Christ in faith. And say, Lord, I can't stop this fall. I'm going all the way down to the roots of the mountains if you don't save me. But I'm crying out to you to do so. And friend, if you'll do that, if you'll put your faith in him and repent of your sins, he'll save you. He'll bring your life up from the pit. Just like he did, Jonah. So God saves him there in 6. No mention of the fish. You brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God.

40:40 And then in 7 through 9, you have this kind of wrap-up where Jonah's celebrating first that God heard his prayer. That's what you get in 7. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. And the idea is, you heard me, right? Like he says at the beginning of the song, you heard me and you saved me. And then in verse 8, he talks about those who put their faith in idols, those who pay regard to vain idols, forsake any hope they might have had of steadfast love. That's what that means. And he says in nine, but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, I am going to sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay.

41:14 Salvation belongs to the Lord. So, just a nice, somewhat remarkable in its own way, I would say, prayer of thanksgiving this is, right? And that's what it is. Jonah was about to drown. He was about to be lost to Sheol in the depths of the ocean. The bars of the land were about to close on him forever. And God saved him in spite of himself. Why shouldn't Jonah celebrate that and be grateful for it?

41:44 Well, he should. He should celebrate that. He should be grateful for it. When you and I read this psalm to one another this morning in the antiphonal scripture reading, I hope what you could see there is some analogy between Jonah's experience here of being saved from death and you being saved from your death and your trespasses and sins. I hope you could kind of see your biography in that story. That's what Jonah does here. He gives thanksgiving to God for saving his life. And yet, there are some nagging questions here too, aren't there?

42:22 So, Jonah's obviously really glad that God saved his life. He's grateful for that. He praises God for that. But where in this psalm is the acknowledgement here that he was in this predicament in the first place because of his own disobedience? And Jonah obviously knew the psalms, right? He knew all of them. You get portions of the psalms, you know, all over chapter 2 here in his psalms.

42:55 He knew it. where's where's the part where he echoes David and saying things like oh lord you have searched me and known me you know the disobedience of my heart or against you and you only have I sinned washed me and make me clean from my sin other psalms say that kind of thing and Jonah would have been aware of that, but you don't get anything like that here. In fact, Jonah seems to be aware that he's been saved from water, but not so much from sin. I mean, even look at some of the phrasing in this thing.

43:40 Verse 4, for instance. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight. Jonah, you do realize that you didn't get driven away. You fled. You ran from God's presence. Why are you putting this in the passive voice? Where's the part where Jonah determines in his heart to right the wrong, to obey God with a full heart and go to Nineveh?

44:20 Where's the part where he says, you know, at the end, for instance, and now, O Lord, I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay. I will go to Nineveh. Nowhere. It's not there. In fact, most people have noticed as you read the psalm that if Jonah has any destination in mind of where he's going to go when he gets out of the belly of the fish, it is not Nineveh. It's the temple. He's very happy to go to the temple. Not much mention of Nineveh.

44:57 I mean, those questions get even more acute if you've read the rest of the book. Because Jonah, for the rest of the book, very much does not seem to be acting out of a heart of true repentance. He goes and preaches, yes, but we're going to see next week. It's a very crimped message that Jonah gives to the people of Nineveh. And then when the people of Nineveh actually do repent, someone once said that Jonah's got to be the most successful preacher in the entire history of the world because he preaches four words and the entire city repents. But Jonah is furious because he doesn't want God to show them mercy.

45:33 I mean, think about the irony in that. It's just cutting. Think about what that means. Jonah is overjoyed when God shows him mercy. But he's angry when God shows that same mercy to somebody else. That's not exactly the kind of thing that leads you to think, yes, this is a true, heartfelt song of repentance. And look at the end of verse 9. salvation belongs to the Lord.

46:05 It's this reverberating affirmation that Jonah gives there. Salvation belongs to the Lord. That phrase is used several times in the Bible, and it's a theological affirmation, right? It does a couple of things. For one thing, it says that the Lord, Yahweh, is the only one. He is the one and the only one who can truly save, right? But it also means, when this phrase is used, it also means that he is sovereign over salvation. It's not just that he's got it and he's the only one who can give it.

46:37 It is that he is sovereign over who he gives it to. In fact, when God reveals his name to Moses, one of the things he says is that I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. It's up to him who he saves. It doesn't have to be just an Israelite. It doesn't have to be a Levite. God can give salvation to anybody that he wants to because salvation belongs to him. In other places, in the prophets, you'll have these amazing prophecies of like Egyptians and Assyrians and Babylonians being brought into the city of Jerusalem and being saved.

47:11 And in several places, that'll be backed up with this affirmation. Salvation belongs to the Lord. And he's decided to save people other than Israelites. I mean, does Jonah get that? Does he understand? I mean, right now, in the euphoria of his own life being saved from drowning, he's declaring salvation belongs to the Lord. Yes. But the deeper meaning of that, that God saves who he will, that he has mercy on whom he has mercy and compassion on whom he has compassion, is completely lost to Jonah by chapter 4.

47:50 He's angry when God saves. So there are nagging questions just brought up by the text itself and certainly by the rest of the story. And those nagging questions are just underscored big time when you get to verse 10. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. Now, some English translations have tried in various ways to soften this.

48:27 So some English translations will say that the fish spit Jonah onto dry land, just, you know, like that. Or that it cast him up onto dry land, which is like a metaphorical, you know, just sort of washed out way of saying it. But that Hebrew word right there, vomited, has every single bit of the grossness that the ESV uses here. Probably even more grossness than you think of when you or I say the word vomit. What it says here is right. The fish vomited him onto the shore.

49:00 It puked him up. It wretched and it heaved and it then erupted him onto the land in a flood of rank, stinking fish juice. which might just be telling us something, mightn't it? I mean, if you get down to verse 9, salvation belongs to the Lord, and you're having a sweet moment there at verse 9, oh, Jonah's heart has changed.

49:36 Then, friend, the puke of verse 10 comes as quite a surprise to you. It's as if even the fish knew this song was not all Jonah was wanting it to be. so what's the point well i mean you read the book it's hard it's difficult i think it's impossible to make jonah a hero in this book it's hard to say that jonah had a true change of heart here especially given how the rest of the story goes but i do wonder do we do we have to like tag him and say that he was being hypocritical to the core here that this song is it's just a bunch of hooey nothing at all had changed in him jonah didn't learn anything from the fish and maybe even the song is making fun of him.

50:20 Maybe it's satire of what's really going on in his heart. I don't think we have to do that. I mean, to me, it looks like what was going on here is that Jonah genuinely learned some things in the belly of the fish. He was genuinely grateful to God for saving his life, and he brought a whole bunch of good theological truth to bear in thanking God for saving his life. But that's as far as he went. He was really glad to have good stuff happen to him but that's as far as it went.

50:51 And friends, that's not enough. That's not repentance. Repentance is more than just gratitude for good stuff. Because Jonah didn't just need God to save his life. He needed God to change his heart. And sadly, that's the part that's left in question even at the very end of the book. I mean, friends, the same thing is true for us. And we need to be careful not to be fooled by our gratitude for good things, like Jonah was, into thinking that that's repentance.

51:27 It's just not enough. It's just not enough, spiritually speaking, for you to say that you are grateful to God for some good things that he's done for you. You hear me there? It is not enough for you to just be grateful to God for some good things that he has done for you. And in my experience, talking with Christians, talking with people who claim to be Christians through the years, I think that's a real temptation. Get into a conversation with some people and you say, oh, are you a Christian?

51:59 Are you a believer in Christ? And they'll tell you a story. But it'll be about how God saved their life through cancer, a surgery, some bad thing. I'm a believer in God. He saved me from cancer. I'm a believer in God. He gave me this business that I have here and all these resources that I've got now. Those are all a gift from God, and I recognize that, and I'm grateful to him. Yeah, I'm a believer. Look at this wonderful family that God has given me, kids and grandkids.

52:30 The Lord has been so good to me. How can I not believe in him? Well, okay, fair enough. But if that's what you're saying, then you're really no different from Jonah. You're grateful to God for some good things that he's done for you, but that's as far as it's gone. Look, at the end of the day, it is easy to be grateful to God for saving your life or doing some nice things for you.

53:03 But Jonah needed something deeper, and so do you. Jonah needed his heart changed. He needed to recognize his sin and disobedience to God. He needed to understand that that sin and rebellion deserved death and was killing him. He needed to repent of that and put his faith in God to save him. And friends, so do you. So do you. You don't need God to just give you some good things. You don't need God to just give you some money or give you some kids or give you a family.

53:36 It's not what you need. You're in worse shape than Jonah ever was. Because the Bible says you're not just floating around with seaweed around your head with just enough breath to call out to God one more time. The Bible says you're dead at the bottom of the ocean. You're dead in your trespasses and sins. You need God to bring you to life. So friend, if any of this is resonating with you, if your heart is moving in any way toward what I'm saying and toward Jesus, if you're thinking, man, that makes sense, that sounds like me, And I'm starting to see what these Christians are talking about when they talk about Jesus dying to save us from our sins.

54:17 If your heart is starting to move in that direction, go with it. Say, Jesus, yeah, I believe in you. I believe in you. I'm trusting in you to save me. I am a Christian. And then someday you're going to look back on that moment when your heart was moving and you're going to say, you know what had happened right there? The reason my heart started moving is because God had already brought it to life. Friend, you're in a way worse spot. If you're not a believer in Christ, you're in a way worse spot right now than Jonah was.

54:49 Because you're dead at the bottom of the ocean. But you know what? If you'll put your faith in Christ, if you'll repent of your sins, you can be in a way better spot than he was even at the end of the book. Do that. Let's pray. Our Lord God, we thank you that you are the God of salvation. We thank you that you save sinners. I thank you that salvation belongs to you and that you give it to whom you will give it. Our Lord God, we pray that you would take these lessons that we're learning from Jonah and put them deep into our hearts so that we might be made more like Jesus and be pulled more in line with your heart and your purposes.

55:29 We pray all of this in the name of Jesus, our Savior and our Redeemer. Amen.