"A Whale Of A Time" Jonah Pt 2 Series

“A whale of a time”

Jonah pt 2

Opening Illustration: Jonah’s Interview – from Sermon Central.com media store

Thesis: Disobedience to God leads us into storms of life and for some into a state of rebellion instead of repentance. This state of rebellion gets us thrown into the stormy sea of life to be swallowed by a whale of despair. But the whale experience sometimes opens up our eyes to see clearly and to cause us to cry out to God and to run back to God. This act of repentance sets in motion our deliverance from our own choices of disobedience.

Introduction:

THE MAJOR MESSAGES OF JONAH

The overall message of the book is basically twofold:

1. God’s love and concern is for all people, and anyone who is willing to repent and turn to God can find salvation (Acts 26:19-20; II Peter 3:9).

2. God is a universal God. There is but ONE God, and He alone is to be the God of all people. Jonah preached to a monotheistic people, but the god they worshipped was Nebo. He warned them they must repent and turn to Jehovah, and worship and serve Him only.

3. Obey God and do not rebel is also a prime message of Jonah!

Some of the other great lessons of the book of Jonah are:

• "God’s judgments, even when declared in prophecy, can be averted by genuine repentance." This is a "crucial theological truth relating human repentance to escaping from anticipated judgment" (New Layman’s Bible Commentary).

o "Jeremiah 18:7-8 --- "At one moment I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to uproot, to pull down, or to destroy it; if that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it."

• National sin demands national repentance! Just as this principle applied to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, so also does it apply to the nations of today!

• In Jonah one sees "the forerunner of the universal gospel message" and messenger (Hailey).

• Also, we see the principle that "the most unpromising mission fields are often the most responsive" (The Ryrie Study Bible).

Review of Chapter 1 – Our sermon last week asked the question “Are you running from God?” - Jonah receives a call from God to go preach repentance to the Ninevites. Jonah refuses to do it and runs away from God because he has a pharisaical spirit. He gets on a ship going in the opposite direction of where God told him to go. God sends a storm to intercept the runaway prophet. The storm beats up the ship and impacts the crew they lose their cargo. Jonah’s disobedience impacts innocent people while he tries to sleep through the storm. The crew drags him out of bed and tells him to pray because they are going to die. He avoids praying because he does not want to talk to God. The crew discovers that Jonah is the problem and he is in rebellion toward God. Jonah says solve your problem by throwing me into the sea and then you will make it. They hesitate for a time and then agree so over he goes. The sailors wake a vow to God in other words they get saved and serve God. Jonah ends up in the sea. The crew ends up saved and committed to Jehovah. Then God sends a great fish to swallow Jonah whole to get his attention back onto eternal things. So we now pick up the story of Jonah as he is inside the great fish – or as some believe in the belly of a whale.

Tim Richard’s a contributor to sermoncentral.com said this about our chapter today, “In some ways you might say that this week’s sermon is the exact opposite of what we studied in the first sermon on Jonah. Last week’s title was, "Jonah Running from God," as you have probably noticed, this week’s is, "Jonah Running to God."

Last week I asked the question, “Are you running from God?” in my sermon title and this week I could ask the 2nd question, “Are you willing to run back into the arms of God?”

There are some so-called scholars of the Bible that reject this book as factual and instead they call it an allegory or a mythical book, but Jesus validated the book and we need to as well. The problem centers around the idea that a fish could swallow Jonah but there is a quote which addresses this problem: Quote: "The ability or inability to accept a miracle depends on whether or not one spells his God with a capital ’G’" --- Homer Hailey

Richard’s adds this thought about the supernatural event found in chapter 2 of Jonah: