Okay, my name's Kimberly Hernandez, and I believe I started doing worship ministry here
Easter two years ago, I think sounds about right.
And the last time I was up here, I read the whole genealogy of Jesus, and so we don't have
as many complicated names today, so that's good.
All right, we're gonna be looking at Jonah 1, which was read last week, but we're gonna
be going into that, so we're gonna be rereading it today.
So today's scripture reading is Jonah 1.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amity.
Get up, go to the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it, because their evil has
come up before me.
Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord's presence.
He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish.
He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord's presence.
But the Lord threw a great wind onto the sea, and such a great storm arose on the sea that
the ship threatened to break apart.
The sailors were afraid, and each cried out to his God.
They threw the ship's cargo into the sea to lighten the load.
Meanwhile, Jonah had gone down to the lowest part of the vessel, and it stretched out and
fallen into a deep sleep.
The captain approached him and said, what are you doing?
Sound asleep, get up, call to your God.
Maybe this God will consider us, and we won't perish.
Come on, the sailors said to each other, let's cast lots.
Then we'll know who is to blame for this trouble we're in.
So they cast lots, and the lot singled out Jonah.
They said to him, tell us who is to blame for this trouble we're in.
What is your business, and where are you from?
What is your country, and what people are you from?
He answered them, I am a Hebrew.
I worship the Lord, the God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land.
Then the men were seized by great fear and said to him, what have you done?
The men knew he was fleeing from the Lord's presence because he had told them.
So they said to him, what should we do to you so that the sea will calm down for us?
For the sea was getting worse and worse.
He answered them, pick me up and throw me into the sea so that it will calm down for
you.
For I know that I'm to blame for this great storm that is against you.
Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they couldn't because the
sea was raging against them more and more.
So they called out to the Lord, please Lord, don't let us perish because of this man's
life and don't charge us with innocent blood.
For you Lord have done just as you pleased.
Then they picked up Jonah and threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging.
The men were seized by great fear of the Lord and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and
made vows.
The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah and Jonah was in the belly of the fish
three days and three nights.
This is God's word.
Thank you Kimberly.
Quite the assignment there.
Kimberly's just a few verses, but it was more than a few.
Last week Nick cracked about how we're going to make it all the way through Jonah.
Well, we'll see.
I'm not entirely sure either.
But today we'll make it through chapter one and that will be good.
And so I've been excited about this week.
I've been excited about studying Jonah and preparing and hopefully the Lord continues
to speak to us through it and finds us where we're at.
Like I said last week, takes Jonah and that story and the narrative of it and turns it
like a mirror back on ourselves so that we too might be exposed along with Jonah.
So we're continuing in the Prodigal Prophet series, which is exploring the book of Jonah.
And Jonah is one of the minor prophets, often times called the 12.
It's minor not because it's young in age or unimportant, but it's minor because it's
shorter and shorter than the majors.
And it's minor because it's got a more narrow focus on what it's talking about.
Although Jonah is an interesting book among the minor prophets, it stands out for sure.
Now last Sunday we laid the groundwork for our time in Jonah and we set the historical
stage.
We took a look at the first three verses of chapter one.
The word of God comes to Jonah, right?
One of Amitya and we discovered that Jonah means dove and his father's name means faithfulness
and he is the furthest from the name that he has been given.
We talked about the fact that the book starts in a way that tips us off that it is a standard
prophetic book like Isaiah or Jeremiah, Haggai or Hosea.
But instead of being a book of pronouncements like many of the other prophets, it's a book
where the prophets speak or they write down what God is saying and what God's perspective
is on it.
That's what a typical prophecy book would be about.
We find that this one instead is about a prophet.
And as we'll see over the course of the story, the prophet's story itself becomes a sort
of prophetic message, a parable about what God is doing and the dangers we face when
we forfeit the grace of God in order to follow our own way.
So much more than that, but at least that.
And so a command, get up, go is how it began.
But it wasn't just a command, it was an invitation to move with God, to speak with God's perspective
on the spiritual condition of the nation of Syria.
It was an invitation to be a first hand witness of God's redeeming mercy and grace.
Command, get up and go.
So Jonah gets up and with urgency and immediacy he runs.
And he runs as far in the opposite direction as is possible in his time and place.
Go and put that chart up again, Nate.
He runs to Tarshish as far away as he can get.
He says, see you later.
I quit.
I will not go to Israel's mortal enemy.
I will not stand before them and deliver your stupid message.
I will not watch as you show mercy to the ones I hate.
My security, my future plans for myself, my reputation with my friends and my neighbors.
Oh my goodness, these are my life.
God you must be trying to end my life.
Or as we are finding, is he inviting him into a true life or a truer life?
So it begins our time today in verse four where it picks up and says, the Lord threw
a great wind onto the sea and such a great storm arose on the sea that the ship threatened
to break apart.
The sailors were afraid and each cried out to his God.
They threw the ship's cargo into the sea to lighten the load.
Meanwhile Jonah had gone down to the lowest part of the vessel and had stretched out and
fallen into a deep sleep.
The Lord called to Jonah and Jonah responded by rebelling and fleeing.
The Lord responded by hurling a great wind which caused a great storm to rise.
A couple things to point out first that throughout this book the name used for God in most of
your translations will be the Lord.
And most translations or many of the modern translations will have all caps, L-O-R-D.
And what that is is the translators using the word Lord to translate the word Yahweh,
Y-H-W-H.
And that is the personal covenant revealed name of God to his people.
This is the covenant name to his covenant people and that's important.
It's important to remember because Jonah is a man of the covenant.
He is called to be God's beacon of truth in the world.
He is called to display the glory of God to the nations through the knowledge and worship
of Yahweh, the Lord.
And being a covenant person meant that you were called to be a blessing to all nations
and that there was good for obedience to God's law and God's word and there was bad for disobedience.
There was good for obedience and bad for disobedience.
And my friends, he chose disobedience and what do we find here?
We find that sin brings storms.
Sin brings storms.
Not every storm is because of sin, but every sin brings storms.
If we violate God's word, we are violating our own design since God built us to know,
serve, and love him.
An Old Testament scholar named Derek Kidner writes this.
He said, sin sets up strains in the structure of life which can only end in breakdown.
Sin sets up strains in the structure of life which can only end in breakdown.
If God created us to live for him, then there is a spiritual giveness to our lives.
A spiritual giveness.
We are spiritual physical beings.
And that means that sin or living for anything other than that, for that which we were made
for, anything else is cutting against the grain of your own design and your own being.
Sin is spiritual suicide.
Jonah's disobedience results in a swift and immediate fury.
The Lord Yahweh hurls a great wind.
What an image.
And that's something that many people will struggle to come to grips with as well.
The Bible is not bashful on this issue.
The storm here was caused by God.
The Lord, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, the maker of the sea and the dry land
has absolute control and sovereignty over all that he has made.
There is nothing beyond his gaze and nothing beyond his reach.
The winds obey his command.
The waters respond to his command.
The ship, the ship even in the language as we translated it, it may become a little obscure,
but the ship itself by the author is given a personality.
In the actual original language, it literally says that the ship thought about breaking
up.
It's like God's coming against us.
He's throwing wind and it's causing waves.
I think what I'll do is I'll let all my nails go and I'll let this, I'll let this mug fall
to the bottom of the ocean.
I'm out of here.
But is this a mad, flying off the handle, short tempered response of a fickle deity?
Anything you might read in the myth of the Greeks and Romans?
No.
This is what one commentator called God's severe mercy.
God's severe mercy.
Could God command the muscles and the body structure of Jonah to move in such a way that
Jonah finds himself in Nineveh and his tongue is moving and he doesn't want it to, but nonetheless
it's moving and preaching a message?
Yes, he could.
Could God command that Jonah would want to go and that his passions and emotions would
reflect that desire?
Yes.
Could God strike Jonah under judgment and just disintegrate him?
Poof.
He's going to pick someone else and say, you're going.
Or could God open the heavens and with a trumpet blast make the declaration himself?
Yes.
But something else is afoot.
The Lord, the Lord is intent on showing Jonah us and others something about his character,
something about who he is, that a storm, a ship, and some pagan sailors were perfect
for.
And speaking of sailors, how do they respond to the storm?
So these are seasoned seafaring men and they can tell something is not right from the get-go.
Something is not right about this particular storm.
And they discern right away that there's a spiritual undercurrent to this one.
So they begin crying out to their gods.
They are throwing everything that's not nailed down overboard and they're trying whatever
they can do to save the ship and to save the human cargo.
Here you have sailors who are terrified.
They're terrified, it says.
They have fear over the top fear.
Why?
Because of Jonah's disobedience and his abandonment of his calling.
They're wondering if this is it for them.
Will this be the last time that they saw their loved ones?
Will they end up at the bottom of the ocean?
And you would think Jonah is right there with them, right?
Oh my gosh, what's going on?
Is this it?
But where is he?
He's asleep.
And the text goes to great lengths to tell us he's asleep in the very belly of the ship,
the depths of the ship.
He went down, remember last week he went down?
He went down?
And he's going to go down.
Jonah is experiencing the sleep of sorrow.
And this kind of sorrow is so much deeper than simply an emotion.
The kind of sorrow that comes from loss of purpose, loss of hope, and loss of communion.
It is a physical response to a spiritual condition.
It is the kind of sleep that is the result of being absolutely spent on powerful emotions
like and being drained to the end on things like guilt and anger, anxiety and grief.
Jonah is in the depths of despair, the kind of despair that makes us humans oblivious
to the sufferings of those around us, including the ones that we are actively hurting.
These sailors are scared, and Jonah, the prophet of the Lord Almighty, is in a stupor.
Jonah is thoroughly absorbed by his own problems, and these pagan sailors are working tirelessly,
terrified for the common good.
See we see that upside down narrative going on here.
People aren't acting the way they ought.
Again, Jonah is in the lowest part of the ship, and he's in the deepest of sleep.
So the captain approaches him and says, what are you doing?
What are you doing sound asleep?
Get up!
Call to your God.
Maybe this God will consider us and we won't perish.
Come on, the sailors say, let's cast lots.
That'll tell us who's to blame, right?
And lots were probably a common way for them to do that.
They would have cast lots or they would have, you know, something like dice or they probably
pulled sticks that had their names written on it.
And it pulls the stick of Jonah, the fingers pointing at Jonah.
Let's cast lots.
It goes to Jonah.
Tell us who is to blame for this trouble we're in.
What is your business?
Where are you from?
What is your country?
And what people are you from?
And he answers them, I'm a Hebrew.
I worship the Lord, the God of the heavens who made the sea and the dry land.
This is great.
So finally the captain finds him and says, what are you doing?
Get up and you'll see something familiar there.
Something that sounds very familiar, right?
This is how the whole story started.
Get up!
And it started with God's voice.
It's the same phrase that was used in the beginning where God comes to Jonah and says,
get up, go to Nineveh, but now it's in the mouth of a non-believer.
Now instead of God calling on Jonah, it is the captain calling on Jonah to call on God.
This is quite the call to repentance, isn't it?
God sent his prophet to do what?
Point pagans, point non-believers toward the Lord.
And here a pagan non-believer is pointing the prodigal prophet back to God.
So they cast lots and the sailors ask Jonah a series of questions.
Who are you?
Where are you from?
What are you doing?
Why are we here?
What's going on?
And he answers, I'm a Hebrew.
I worship the Lord.
I hope you see the irony in all those statements.
He says, A, I'm a covenant man of the covenant people.
He says, B, I worship.
And the actual word worship there is fear.
So everyone say it, I fear Yahweh.
I fear the Lord.
Really?
And then he says, God, the God, the Elohim of the up there realm.
That guy.
Oh, that guy who created the sea and the dry land.
And these sailors probably are out of their mind.
They're like, you offended that God?
And then you got in our boat and got on the sea that he created.
His realm is the sea.
His realm is the dry land.
And are you kidding me?
What have you done?
Then the men were, this says, the women and men were seized with a great fear.
And they said, what have you done?
What have you done, covenant man, who fears the Lord, the God of the sea, and the dry
land and who created everything?
What have you done?
And here's something that many of us may not like hearing, but those who are outside of
the faith, those who are nonbelievers have every right, every right to scrutinize us,
to see if our conduct matches our confession.
They have every right to scrutinize us to see if our conduct matches our confession.
The sailors are looking at Jonah, who has the audacity to say that he is a Yahweh fear,
fearer.
Yet his conduct has shown that he has no regard, that he is rebelled, that he has fled from
the presence of God.
And even when the Lord Yahweh, the one he fears, hurls wind at the ship, he sleeps.
What have you done?
Why haven't you used your supposed faith for the common good?
Why doesn't your conduct match your confession?
As Hugh Martin asks, why don't you use the resources of your faith to bear on the sufferings
of others?
Why not?
What good is your confession?
The world has a right to rebuke the church when she will not display love in practical
ways.
The world has a right.
Maybe you've heard it from a family member or a neighbor, those are the worst to hear
it from.
I thought you were a Christian.
Oh, I thought you were a believer.
I thought you fear Yahweh.
I thought you worshiped the Lord.
Why did you cheat that person?
I thought you were a Christian.
Why did you deceive them?
Oh, look at him.
He's the Christian.
Look at the mouth that he has.
Look at the curses that fly out of his mouth and not blessings.
Why did you use your resources on self-fulfillment when there was suffering you could alleviate?
Why?
The covenant man, the God-fearer, the God of the up-there realm who made the seas and
the dry land.
This is my God.
And they say, what have you done?
And it's valid.
And so they turn to Jonah and they say, what should we do then?
Jonah, what do we do?
And he answered them, pick me up and throw me into the sea so that it will calm for you.
For I know that I'm to blame for this great storm that is against you.
Nevertheless the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they couldn't because the
sea was raging against them more and more.
So they called to the Lord, please Lord, don't let us perish.
So they called to the Lord, all caps.
They called to, remember they first said, call on your God, all lowercase.
And now it says, they called to the Lord, all caps.
Yahweh.
They called to the Lord, please don't let us perish because of this man's life.
And don't charge us with innocent blood for you Lord have done just as you please.
There's some debates over whether or not Jonah's idea of throwing him overboard was actually
his ultimate attempt to flee the Lord.
He just throw me down there and he won't find me there.
We will see that he says something to the effect of I would rather die than witness
God's mercy, God showing mercy to a people that he thinks are undeserving.
He's already in this kind of spiritual suicide mode.
And maybe that's at play now as well.
The author doesn't say for sure, but the story sets us up so that we can be skeptical of Jonah
either way.
This guy is sketchy.
Jonah does not use the covenant language of repentance.
As a man who would have been understood the law, he would have used the covenant language
of repentance and he doesn't use that here.
He uses instead language about what is the effect that is having on them.
And there is some hope in this.
So let's look at this for just a second as we kind of come to the end here.
There's some hope in the language he does use because embedded in his response, in his
response of pick me up and throw me into the sea, it will calm down for you for I know
that I'm to blame for this gravestorm against you.
Embedded in his response is this faint outline of a sketch of grace and it begins to appear.
While we don't know his motive, we don't know what Jonah was thinking at the time.
We don't know, we do know that he was willing to do something.
We know that Jonah was willing to do something in order to save the sailors.
That's important to see.
After all of this, he comes to a place where he's willing to do something to save the sailors.
His answer says nothing of God, but it does say throw me in so that it calms down for
you.
The great storm that is against you.
And so what is this sketch of grace that we begin to see in the story of Jonah here at
this moment where he says throw me in and it will go well for you.
Throw me in and this will save you from the great storm.
And that sketch of grace is substitution.
Substitution.
Tim Keller said of this moment in Jonah, we have a quote that will go up on the board.
Jonah's pity arouses in him one of the most primordial of human intuitions, namely that
the truest pattern of love is substitutionary.
Jonah is saying I'll fully take the wrath of the waves so you won't have to.
True love meets the need of the loved one, no matter the cost to oneself.
All life changing love is some kind of substitutionary sacrifice.
He goes on, Tim Keller from the book that that quote comes from, he goes on to use the
example of a parent and a child.
And he said children need you to read to them.
And when you're done reading to them you know what they need?
You to read to them.
And when you're done reading to them, you know what they need?
You to read to them.
And it's a lot of reading, right.
And then they also need a whole lot of holding.
And just when you put them down what do they need?
You to hold them.
And then they need you to hold them.
And when your back breaks and you're hunched over they still need you to hold them.
and they need you to talk to them as they get older.
It's what they need.
They actually need this.
In fact, they need you to talk and hold and care and read
and in case you guys didn't know, you need to feed them too.
So feed them ever so often.
And by doing so, by doing so,
you are actually helping their well-being emotionally,
mentally, their intelligence, their ability to develop
as a human being.
They're all massively shaped by the time that they spend,
the time they spend with their parents.
Parents must disrupt their lives for years,
years upon years to invest the time that's necessary
to do good for them.
And if you don't, they will suffer for life.
They will suffer for life.
And so it comes down to them or us.
Them or us, for your parents out there.
Our loss is their gain.
We must decrease so that they increase.
And what Jonah does in this story, in this moment,
after this crazy 17 verse chapter,
is he says, throw me in and it'll be okay for you.
And while we are not going to elaborate from that
some amazing moral character in Jonah,
we are gonna say something is showing through
in this moment.
Jonah takes the role of the scapegoat.
Jonah says, he will sacrifice himself to save them.
And that sketch, I called it a sketch of grace
because that sketch, once fully developed
into a complete picture, will show us
the work of Jesus Christ.
Not for his own sin, but the sin of humankind.
Not thrown overboard of a ship,
but to a wooden Roman cross.
Jesus will take our place.
He will say, save for you, death for me.
I will take upon myself your sins and transgressions.
It's similar and dissimilar.
He is not dying for anything he has done.
And yet he is taking on to himself the sin of humankind
so that he might go and pay for it.
Speaking to the scribes and Pharisees
who had asked Jesus for a sign, a sign of his messiahship.
Jesus replied that the only sign that they would receive
was the sign of Jonah.
It's the only sign and that is a loaded statement.
He goes on to talk about the three days and three nights
in the belly of the fish.
But the way scriptures work is when someone says something
especially something profound from the Old Testament
and the New Testament,
it is immediately to recall in the reader's mind
and the good student of the Bible the whole story.
And Jonah ends up in the belly of the well
because at this point Jonah comes to a place where he says,
put me in, I'll take it.
And again, we are not here to glorify Jonah in his position.
We already see this guy is wackadoodle.
But it's a glimpse, it's a sketch,
a grace to come in Christ.
The sailors here, Jonah, and yet they still try
with all their might and heart to not do it.
Still looking for the good of all on the ship.
And so after trying to know avail, what do they do?
They call out to Yahweh.
They call out and they begin to pray,
please Lord, don't let us perish because of this man's life.
And don't charge us with innocent blood
for you Lord have done just as you pleased.
And they picked up Jonah and they threw him into the sea
and the sea stopped its raging.
The men were seized by great fear of the Lord.
And they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
What began for them as great fear for their lives
results in great fear of the Lord.
Sacrifices of worship, vows of fidelity,
sacrifices of worship, vows of fidelity.
These are the first non-believers to encounter Jonah
on his trip.
And ultimately they encounter Yahweh the Lord.
And their lives are changed.
They experience along with Jonah,
God's severe mercy in the storm.
And they say, the Lord has done just as he pleased.