“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:
An average sperm whale might have a mouth 20 feet long, 15 feet high and 9 feet wide. Let me tell you this is a big animal. In fact, it’s about the biggest mammal on the planet. That explains how the fish or whale could swallow a person. The sperm whale feeds largely on squid. These squid are often larger then people. Whalers have sometimes found an entire squid in the stomach of a dead whale. Let me be even more specific by telling you a story that happened in the late 1800’s. It happened on the ship, Star of the East. In February 1891, this whaling ship spotted a large sperm whale in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands. Two boats were launched, & shortly a harpooner speared the whale. The second boat attempted to get in another harpoon, but the boat was overturned in the process and one man drowned. Another man, James Bartley, disappeared & was assumed drowned. In time the whale was killed and drawn to the side of the ship where it was tied fast & the blubber removed. The following day the stomach was hoisted onto the deck. That’s where James Bartley was. He was in the whale’s stomach, unconscious, but alive. He recovered & did his job again. We serve a God who can do more than just watch from the wings.”
T.S. - You could say that Jonah was having a whale of a time! So let’s read about this amazing event in Jonah chapter 2! Keep in mind that we are to focus on what God was doing inside Jonah rather than what was happening inside the whale and all around Jonah on the outside – this is really what God wants us to focus on and learn from!
Scripture Text: Jonah chapter 2
1From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God. 2He said:
“In my distress I called to the LORD,
and he answered me.
From the depths of the grave I called for help,
and you listened to my cry.
3 You hurled me into the deep,
into the very heart of the seas,
and the currents swirled about me;
all your waves and breakers
swept over me.
4 I said, ‘I have been banished
from your sight;
yet I will look again
toward your holy temple.’
5 The engulfing waters threatened me,
the deep surrounded me;
seaweed was wrapped around my head.
6 To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you brought my life up from the pit,
O LORD my God.
7 “When my life was ebbing away,
I remembered you, LORD,
and my prayer rose to you,
to your holy temple.
8 “Those who cling to worthless idols
forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
9 But I, with a song of thanksgiving,
will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
Salvation comes from the LORD.”
10And the LORD commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.
Jonah is floating in the belly of a whale with sea weed wrapped around his head. He chose to disobey God, he then chose to ignore God’s warnings and he slipped into a state of rebellion toward God and now he finds himself in the belly of a whale – or great fish. He has now become fish food! Rebellion toward God will always get you thrown overboard into the stormy sea of humanity where you will become fish food!
(Jesus) referred on two different occasions to the sign of Jonah the prophet (Mt 12:38-41; Lk 11:29-32; Mt 16:4). He speaks of Jonah’s experience in the belly of the fish as parallel with His own approaching entombment for three days, and cites the repentance of the Ninevites as a rebuke to the unbelieving men of his own generation. Our Lord thus speaks both of the physical miracle of the preservation of Jonah in the body of the fish and of the moral miracle of the repentance of the Ninevites, and without the slightest hint that He regarded the story as an allegory. JOHN RICHARD SAMPEY
Video Illustration: Making choices in life does impact where we end up in life and in death. So we have to follow the cross and make good choices. From sermoncentral.com media store.
T. S. - Choices will always impact our lives either positively or negatively. Good choices will bring success to our life while bad choices will bring us to the point of failure and despair. Jonah made a series of bad decisions – his decision to disobey God cost him dearly but God even in the belly of the whale is seeking to deliver Jonah from himself and his bad choices!
I. Choices in life will always impact the direction we take in life either positively or negatively (Chapters 1 and 2)!
a. Let’s look at Jonah’s choices and the sequence of events from our two chapters:
i. Sequence of events before the whale of a time for Jonah show a sequence of disobedience and rebellion toward God and it has negative impact on Jonah’s life!
1. He first disobeys the call of God and sets his storm in motion.
2. He then runs away from God right into a storm of disobedience.
3. He tries to ignore the storm and his situation by sleeping.
4. His disobedience not only impacts him but others and they wake him out of his denial of sleep.
5. He refuses to pray to God – he is still avoiding talking to God or listening to God’s warnings.
6. He tells the men to throw him overboard so that they are spared. He knows he is responsible and he is their problem. So he says “Just kill me!”
7. They do it only after to trying to solve the problem through human effort and failing so Jonah is cast over and he is swallowed by the great fish.
ii. Sequence of events after his whale of a time experience found in chapter 2.
1. He is swallowed whole by the fish after telling the crew to throw him overboard.
a. He has the attitude of “kill me and put me out of my misery.”
2. He spends 3 days in the fishes belly with sea weed wrapped around his head, with a horrible odor, with darkness engulfing him, with death all around him and amazingly this helps him come to his senses.
3. He then decides to pray to the Lord for help!
a. This is his first good choice in quite a few days!
4. He then repents for his action of disobedience and rebellion to God.
a. His good choices start the process of deliverance.
5. He promises to fulfill his vow to go preach to God even if it means going to the Ninevites.
a. He thanks the Lord for his goodness and mercy.
6. He reflects on the mercy and the salvation of God from the belly of the whale – he thinks I am sure glad God is merciful and willing to forgive.
7. He then experiences the deliverance of the Lord by being delivered to dry ground and to safety – He is a bit smelly but safe and now willing to do what God has called him to do.
T.S. – Choices in life will impact our life positively or negatively and prayer is always the best choice to choose in the pit of despair.
II. Prayer is always a good choice when faced with your imminent death and in the pit of despair (Jonah 2: 1-7).
a. Jonah comes to his senses in the belly of the whale where life and death meet face to face.
i. It’s amazing how near death experiences and confronting our imminent deaths opens our eyes to the eternal things of God.
ii. Jonah sees things differently from the darkness of the fish’s belly and the possibility of his death.
b. Perspective – oh how it changes when death is knocking at the door! When we are in the midst of a crisis.
i. Jonah shows us that a key spiritual discipline to have in these foxhole moments is the power of prayer!
1. Moore notes from his book The History of Prayer in America One Nation Under God. Of a famous story of a dying soldiers last moments with God prior to his death from pages 312-313. The dying soldier’s last moments were discovered in the pocket of this dead American soldier, a casualty of the North African campaign. “Written in the form of a poem, the prayer was composed in the unvarnished language of a young man scribbling down his thoughts on the battlefield, experiencing a catharsis of monumental proportions when he realized that death might not be far behind:
a. Look, God, I have never spoken to you
And now I want to say, “How do you do?”
And see, God, they told me you did not exist,
And I, like a fool, believed all this.
Last night, from a shell-hole, I saw your sky,
I figured that they told me a lie.
Had I taken time before to see things you had made,
I’d sure have known they weren’t calling a spade a spade.
I wonder, God, if you would shake my poor hand?
Somehow I feel you would understand.
Stranger I had to come to this hellish place
Before I had time to see your face.
Well, I guess, there isn’t much more to say,
But I’m glad, God, that I met you today.
The zero hour will soon be here,
But I’m not afraid to know that you’re near.
The signal has come-I shall have to go,
I like you lots-this I want you to know.
I am sure this will be a horrible fight;
Who knows? I may come to your house tonight,
Though I wasn’t friendly to you before,
I wonder, God, if you’d wait at your door?
Look, I’m shedding tears-me shedding tears!
Oh! I wish I’d known you these long, long years.
Well, I have to go now, dear God. Good-bye,
But now that I’ve met you I’m not scared to die.”
- Prayer is always within reach in the foxhole experiences of life!
2. Story from book The History of Prayer in America One Nation Under God by James P. Moore Jr: On the eve of the battle that preceded the brutal Death march of Bataan. The Reverend William Thomas Cummings, a Catholic Priest, delivered a stirring field sermon. Looking into the faces of the troops, trying to reach them in a meaningful way, uttered one of the most famous wartime lines ever: ‘remember, there are no atheists in foxholes.’ Pressing his men to face their own mortality through prayer, he helped brace many of them for what would be the greatest challenge of their lives…12,000 Americans and 64,000 Filipino troops had little choice but to surrender in April of 1942. With the prisoner –of-war camp some fifty miles away, the Japanese forced all 76,000 men to march the distance on foot, providing little food or water along the way. The chronicles of that march as Japanese troops bound, tortured, and killed Allied forces at will have made for some of the most wrenching stories in modern military history. Only 56 thousand men reached camp; 20,000 soldiers died en route. For those who survived, the ordeal would continue in Japanese prison camps for another 3 ½ years, until General Douglas MacArthur and his troops retook the Philippines…2 out of every three soldiers died….One of the few breaks the Japanese allowed their prisoners was to pray together on occasion and observance of religious ceremonies…Catholics would gather at 5:00 am to attend Mass, while Protestants and Jews held their own prayer services. Clinging to the regular discipline of daily prayer, most soldiers were able to stretch their limits of endurance (Moore, page 312).
c. Jonah is having a foxhole experience right here in the belly of the whale and he knows that he needs to make it right with God before he dies.
i. So he prays from his heart and he lays his heart out to the Lord!
1. We all need to learn to pray in our foxhole moments of life because it will make a difference!
2. He calls to God and amazingly God answers him!
a. Now remember Jonah disobeyed God – rebelled against God-took an attitude with God and God still in His mercy and grace responds to the plea of his disobedient prophet.
3. Why did God respond to Jonah?
a. Because God loved Jonah just like He loved the rebellious Ninevites!
i. John 3:16 reminds us of how great God’s love is!
b. Because Jonah was willing to admit his fault and take responsibility for his sin of disobedience!
c. Because Jonah repented!
T.S. – Jonah returned to God in the belly of the whale after running from Him. He came to his sense in the whale of a time experience and he chose the path of repentance.
III. Repentance is never out of reach with your life as long as you are still breathing.
a. So keep that in mind if you ever find yourself in the belly of a whale, because of your acts of disobedience and rebellion to God.
i. You can pray and then repent for your sinful ways and God will have mercy on your soul!
1. The truth is Foxhole conversions are more common than people think they are.
2. Many run from God and end up in a hole of despair only to turn around and run back into the loving arms of God.
a. Jesus shared the story of the Prodigal Son to reflect that many do this very thing with their Heavenly Father.
i. I have heard countless stories of Prodigal experiences throughout my 20 plus years of ministry.
ii. Repentance is the key to deliverance from the pits of life and it is a good choice to make when you find yourself in a pit.
1. Jonah knows that God is compassionate and merciful so he cries out and repents. Don’t forget he was a prophet of God and he knew God’s nature.
a. Jonah asks for another chance to do it right.
b. So God grants his prayer! Why? Because Jonah’s heart is in the right place and because he admits his sinful mistake.
b. Jonah fails forward right at this moment in his life.
i. His willingness to admit his failure and his willingness to get out and do it right appeals to the heart of God. And God says, “You have a deal Jonah!”
1. How many hear have also hear of the “Let’s make a deal God moments in the foxhole experiences of life?”
c. In Psalm 107:1-43 – The writer mentions 4 types of people going through a crisis of life because of choices and how the Lord helps them to fail forward:
i. Those who wandered into the wastelands (vs. 4)
ii. Those who where prisoners because of their rebellion toward the words of God (vs. 10, 11).
iii. Those who became fools because of rebellious ways and suffered the affliction physically from their sin (17).
iv. Those who were storm tossed on the rough sea of life (23).
1. In each of these 4 cases the people cried out to the Lord in their trouble and God brought them deliverance from their affliction.
2. This Psalm reveals the great love of the Lord.
d. Jonah’s divine moment has come and his act of obedience opens up the mouth of the whale as God directs the great fish to spit him out onto dry ground.
i. Richards notes this about where Jonah ended up:
1. We don’t know where the fish vomited him out, the Bible doesn’t say. It was probably near Joppa, where he had originally sailed from. Should that be the case it meant Jonah ended up right back where he began. I suspect there was a little bit of Divine humor in that. When you disobey God you find yourself working hard, but getting nowhere (from Sermoncentral.com).
2. The truth is many of us discovered that at the point where we chose to run away from God is where God brings us back too to do it right the second time.
Conclusion:
There is a hope that is there in the moment of despair and His name is Jesus. It does not matter
how bad we have failed God because The Scriptures are full of stories of God forgiving people who don’t deserve another chance.
Richard’s notes this from Philip Yancy’s book What’s So Amazing About Grace. We did this book as a Bible Study a few years ago and I agree this is a great book to bring us back to the extent of God’s love and to the prime message of this chapter in Jonah.
Yancy writes,
There is a simple cure for people who doubt God’s love and question God’s grace: to turn to the Bible and examine the kind of people God loves. Jacob, who dared take God on a wrestling match and ever after bore a wound from that struggle, became the eponym for God’s people, the "children of Israel." The Bible tells of a murderer and adulterer who gained a reputation as the greatest king of the Old Testament, a "man after God’s own heart." And of a church being led by a disciple who cursed and swore that he had never known Jesus. And of a missionary being recruited from the ranks of the Christian-torturers. I get mailings from Amnesty International, and as I look at their photos of men and women who have been beaten and cattle-prodded and jabbed and spit on and electrocuted, I ask myself, "What kind of human being could do that to another human being?" Then I read the book of Acts and meet the kind of person who could do such a thing-now an apostle of grace, a servant of Jesus Christ, the greatest missionary history has ever known. If God can love that kind of person, maybe, just maybe, he can love the likes of me. Grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at the table in God’s family.”
This is what is so amazing about the grace and the mercy that Jonah received in the belly of the whale!
So we have listened to a whale of the tale from Jonah chapter 2 – Jonah disobeyed God and ran away from God’s call and then found himself in the belly of a whale. He then runs back into God’s arms for help and forgiveness and God forgave him as he repented of his sin!
