I don't know if you've noticed,
but in the Scriptures, the power and the providence of God to
use both creation, such as we have been contemplating over
the last couple of weeks, how God uses the storms, how He uses
rains, how He uses weather patterns to fulfill His will. But in the Scripture, you will
notice that the God of the Bible uses Virtually everything at
his disposal to accomplish his purposes Now that's important
for us as bible-believing christians because it helps us understand
Why this world exists? It exists for god's glory And
it really does have a very practical purpose for his existence. Have you ever thought about these
anthropomorphical terms, God rides on the wings of the wind,
His footsteps are on the storms, those phrases and terms actually
imply how God intimately works with His creation. Unlike the
pagan notions of God in many countries and in many worldviews,
that God is kind of a far off and he has nothing to do with
his creation. It's kind of operating out of
just mere laws that he has instituted and established. But what the
Bible teaches is that his creation, every bit of it, is at his disposal. for his purpose. So that the
Christian is not free to assume that a natural catastrophe or
an event that we would call a phenomenon because we can't define what
occurred really amounts to the absence of God's power in the
midst of that event. We can't draw that conclusion.
When you read your Bible, we recognize that God has at his
beckoning call everything that he has created. That's not only
the creation in terms of the the power of the wind or the
power of the sun or the power of the rain or the power of the
earth, which we see scattered all through scripture, God using
it as he will. And he will quickly say, I am
the Lord who do all these things so that you must attribute ultimately
the acts of nature, as we would call it, acts of God. But have
you ever thought about how God not only uses his inanimate creation,
but he uses animals. He uses creatures. And he uses
them very often in specific ways, once again, to teach us that
even the animal world is part of God's purpose of redemption
and providence in the life of people. Now, this will cause
you to appreciate the meat you eat here in a moment. when you
think about it as really being inherent and integrated into
the purpose of God for the sustaining of His creation and the glory
of God in the redemption of His people because there is even
in the very meal that you eat every day a redemptive connotation. once you would think it through.
But I'm just calling your attention to that because of the difficulty
and the controversy surrounding chapter two in our account. Do
you recall when Elijah the prophet finally found himself being under
indictment by Jezebel and running for his life and God hiding him
by the brook and feeding him by the ravens? So God directed
the ravens to kill flesh and take flesh and feed his servant. Elijah, do you believe that?
Do you believe God can do that? Do you believe he did do that?
And certainly he did. It's not impossible on a level
of omnipotence, certainly. But strange it would be that
God would use the medium of a bird to sustain the life of his prophet
so that the prophet can say, the Lord provided in the mouth
of a raven But I'm just here laying a foundation for what
we're getting into so that you don't quickly jump off of the
idea that these things can be understood in Scripture as normative,
that God would use creatures to bless His people and to serve
us. It is normative, much more normative than we are consciously
aware of. But do you also remember that
our Lord Jesus Christ, as He made His way into Jerusalem for
the final time, God had prepared, he had prepared an ass and the
foal of an ass upon which Christ was to ride into Jerusalem. Do
you recall that? Elect and chosen and ordained
was an ass and the foal of the ass by a man that God had raised
up to prepare that ass for the God of the universe to sit on
and ride into Jerusalem. What I am saying to you is that
it is not outside of the purview and scope of God to use his natural
creation for his own purposes and his own objectives. You do
remember again in that very prophetic book of Daniel, where Daniel
is under indictment as well for being an honest, excellent servant
of God, but for which the Persians wanted to get rid of Daniel.
So they found a law against him and as God to condemn him and
Darius had to throw him into a lions den and you remember
what God did he so satisfied the stomach of those lions that
he put rest and quiet in their soul and they no longer saw Daniel
as part of the natural food chain that they would have easily consumed
in that moment and I'm simply saying that God uses his creatures
And he does this frequently. The psalmist will talk about
this. The psalm will say in Psalm 102 that God uses everything,
that all animals wait on God, all creatures wait on God. He
opens his hands and he gives them their meat. And then Psalm
119 puts it like this in summation. All are your servants, O Lord. Now see, a sound biblical worldview
can comprehend that. We can see how God would use
creatures to serve his purpose. especially during a time when
we didn't have the kind of technology that we have today. And I don't
know if you noticed also that what God would do from time to
time is when he wants to teach us that we are out of order or
out of the will of God or operating in principles of chaos or operating
out of the Babylonian system, which is rebellion against the
most high God. You know what he'll do? He'll allow animals
to be used to reprove us and correct us. Adam and Eve had
fallen prey to this with the serpent. Do you remember that? Why on earth would two people
of whom we would consider brilliant being created in the image of
God without sin in fellowship with God unbroken fellowship
unmediated fellowship with God having at their accessibility
all sorts of knowledge and understanding and therefore adequacy of comfort
and consolation in their walk with God why would they talk
to a snake because they were out of order they were out of
order and God would use it as an omen to show us how that he
will use creatures to depict how his people can be out of
order, how his creation can be out of order. I'll give you another
example. If you struggle with a talking snake, have you ever
struggled with a talking donkey? Remember in the book of Numbers?
When Balaam, the false prophet who should have been serving
God as a true prophet, was exercising the false prophet mercantile
ministry of getting wealthy and preaching or prophesying or doing
divinations, he was an absolute false prophet. He didn't know
God in the sense of regeneration and salvation from the man on
the moon. He was simply using his gift in a wrong way for his
own benefit. And do you know that God opened
the mouth of his ass to talk to him? tried to reason with
the man, but the man was already mad. And it is another account
where we see how God is using his animals, the so-called lower
specimen of creatures, lower than man to instruct mankind. I don't know if you remember
the other account. We have them through the scriptures. And I
think it's like second Kings chapter 13, maybe first Kings
13, where this one prophet from Judah, And maybe we'll get into
that as part of our choice cleanings. We preached this several years
ago He was a prophet of judah who was headed to tell the king
that god was going to punish israel again for its disobedience
But he ran across an old man And this old man said come to
my house because I have received a word from the lord for you
sounds familiar And so he sits with the old man in his house
and the old man says an angel told me today And he listened
to the old man's story about an angel supposedly having a
revelation for him to do exactly the opposite of what God had
called that prophet to do. And that prophet was persuaded
by that old crook to do contrary to God's will. And you know what
happened when he left out of that old man's house? He was
rent by a lion. The lion killed him, but the
lion didn't eat him. That was an omen again from God,
a judgment on that prophet because of his rebellion and disobedience
to God. And you know what the lion did? The lion sat right
there guarding both the man and his ass. Wait a minute. Lions eat both men and asses.
So we got a real anomaly here, don't we? Because not only did
he not eat the man, not only did he not eat the ass, he guarded
everyone. He guarded both of them from
everyone. because that man would serve as a sign of being out
of order, out of the will of God, out of the purpose of God. God will use animals like that.
And I say that because we have that case here. Here we have
Jonah, the prophet of God. He's certainly a child of God.
There's no doubt about that, but in his... His one period
of lapse where he is seeking to go against the will of God
against the purpose of God We have Jonah now in this second
chapter actually being accommodated by a whale to execute God's will
against Jonah's will a whale is what we are dealing with in
Jonah chapter Chapter 2 are a large fish in the Hebrew and in the
Greek. It is a very generic term There is no need for looking
for some kind of etymological specificity. It cannot be obtained
but what the Historians would say and scholars would say is
this is probably one of the larger shark fish and they call this
a dogfish Because this type of shark fish would have been large
enough to swallow a man whole complete and whole, complete. And so as we are looking into
chapter two, what I want to make sure that I assuage in your own
conscience is that there is no controversy in the world with
the possibility or the probability of a man being swallowed up by
a fish. We have many, many stories of
men being swallowed up by sharks. fish that are large enough to
take them in and to spit them out. Many. In fact, one set of
theologians spoke about an event that occurred somewhere around
the 18th century. of a group of whalers out seeking whales
and it was in the midst of a storm and one of their men fell overboard
in the storm and this kind of fish of which many theologians
are asserting is what we have in Jonah chapter 2 immediately
swallows up a man complete and whole And they seek to harpoon
him or shoot him. And when they shoot this fish,
he spits the man back up. They bring him on board. And
this is documented and record it that he lived. He survived.
I say this to, again, say that to swallow a man as a fish, to
swallow a man is not the miracle. It's not the wonder. It's not
the issue that's at hand. Many testimonies have been given
concerning that. The miracle has to do with a
man like Jonah being swallowed up by a fish and living inside
that fish for three days and three nights. Because the miracle
is pointing to the redemptive work of Christ for the salvation
of sinners, which is the greatest miracle in the world. So as we
work through this outline today, I want to share with you five
things in Jonah, chapter two, under the title of Jonah, the
rebel praying Jonah, the rebel praying verse one in chapter
two, then Jonah prayed unto the Lord, his God out of the fish,
fish's belly. Two things is going on here.
We have a context and that's the fish's belly. Now we have
the activity or the disposition or the characteristic of the
person who is in the fish's belly, and that's Jonah. And what is
he doing? He's praying. Point number one,
now he prays. Now he prays. See, all of chapter
one, he didn't pray. All during the time he was seeking
a fare to leave Jerusalem or Israel and go opposite direction
of what God wanted him to do, he wasn't praying. He wasn't
praying when he was on the ship and the ship started experiencing
the storm and the tombs that like to have destroyed the ship.
Everybody else was praying, but Jonah wasn't praying. Jonah wasn't
praying when the master of the ship, the sea master, seaman
said, would you pray with us like everybody else that we might
be delivered? Call on your God. We're calling
on our God. Jonah, you call on your God. Jonah didn't call on
his God. As you and I learned last week, he wouldn't call on
his God to have his God do something for him that he knew he wouldn't
do for his God. He wasn't calling on his God.
In his rebellion, he wouldn't call on God, even though God
was like to destroy all those people on the ship. You know,
sometimes when we're in our rebellion, we can be very selfish and not
care about other people. Am I making some sense? Oh, but
he's praying now. So some lessons to be learned
about prayer, at least in the first couple of verses, this
kind of prayer that Jonah is praying is a very common prayer
of which we all prayer, I have under point number one, three
kinds of prayer. First, it's a very selfish prayer.
It's a very selfish prayer, but don't rush from that thought,
ladies and gentlemen. Most of our prayers are selfish.
So stay there for a moment. It is observed that Jonah is
praying out of the fish's belly, and verse two tells us why, because
of his afflictions. But often we pray for the same
reasons. Have you noticed that you will
quickly call on God in the midst of your trouble, in the midst
of your afflictions? When something is going awry
in your life or threats are occurring in your life, you will quickly
call on God, won't you? And the prayer really, listen,
will be centered around you. And I'm just saying that's what
we do. I would be very much surprised if Jonah had experienced what
he experienced when he was thrown overboard and didn't pray. I
would say, whoa, Jonah is something else. Going through this and
still not praying? See, you and I were really meant
to pray. See, in a man or a woman, we'll pray when several things
are occurring. Watch this. Your life is threatened. You
have no way out. The circumstances are beyond
you, above you, out of your control. You will pray when you find yourself,
watch this, helpless and humbled. Helpless and humbled results
in prayer. Helpless and humble results in
prayer. And so that's where Jonah is right now So it's a very very
selfish prayer, but I will also say it's a very human prayer
very human prayer What I mean by that is that we all do it
when we were looking at Psalm 107 last week the psalmist says
they were tossed to and fro and were at their wits in and then
and then They called on the name of the Lord. Well, that's what
we do as human beings. I I told you this, I'm on the
plane going to some country here or there back years ago when
I would do a lot more ministry around the world. And as soon
as we hit these air pockets, you know how the plane's doing
that? Yeah, everybody's praying. Everybody's
praying. 10 seconds before that, they're
drinking, happy, enjoying themselves. You know the party is on on the
plane, right? As soon as you're sitting there,
pulling out Bibles, we praying, praying. It's human. It's human. But the prayer that Jonah is
praying is divinely wrought. This is a divinely wrought prayer. of which when our prayers are
divinely wrought of God by his providence, moving us into a
straight where he shuts us up to himself, and God will do that
with you, your prayers, whether you know it or not, will carry
a very strong redemptive tone. They will be redemptive in nature.
They will have as their priority spiritual things, spiritual qualities,
spiritual realities, ultimate things that have to do with the
glory of God and your eternal well-being. You know, when you
get to praying really seriously about issues in your life, at
the end of the day, you start negotiating with God like, okay,
Lord, all I want you to do is save me. I mean, you know, I've
been asking for all these things, but now I'm cutting off these
things. I want to get down to a few things. Keep a brother
out of hell. When I say that this prayer is
divinely wrought, however, it is because the prayer that's
taking place in chapter two, verses two through 10 is directly
related to our Lord's atoning work on Calvary Street. And because
of that, the prayer requires us to reflect not only on the
dire straight of Jonah, but how by application it relates to
the dire straight of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is suffering
under the wrath of God for his people. So there are a number
of things in the text of which our soul can be saturated and
contemplate. I won't unpack this fully. You
guys have in your bulletin, the notice that this Friday we will
have our annual Calvary night where we come together and we
focus on a very clear and cross centered message. So we will
go into the heart of the atonement again on Friday night, but I
will touch on some things in our texts that are worth our
consideration. And we have now point number
two in our outline, principle of suffering which points to
the atonement a principle of suffering which points to the
atonement will you notice what verse two and three says before
we expand on this a bit I said I cried by reason of my affliction
unto the Lord and he what heard me out of the belly of hell cried
I see Jonah understood that what he was dealing with was facing
death. Sheol. He was facing his own
mortality, the ending of his life, the transitioning from
this world to the world to come, and Jonah was not ready. He cries
out to God. God heard him. Verse 3. For you
have cast me into the deep. Do you see what Jonah is doing?
Jonah is recognizing that his situation in which he is finding
himself in is actually ordained of God. Let me help you understand
that. In the opening of the verse,
or the closing of chapter 1, the Bible says that God had prepared
a great fish to swallow Jonah up. Do you see that? He had prepared
a great fish. This is what I meant earlier
about how God uses animals. And in the book of Jonah, God
does several things by way of his providence. He sent the storm.
He sent this fish. He's going to send an east wind
in chapter four. He's going to send a worm in
chapter four. And he's ultimately going to
send his prophet. This is the God that sins. Jonah
is going to ultimately go. Jonah is going to ultimately
comply to the will of God, like everything else must ultimately
comply to the will of God. Is that true? See, God, when
he purposes to do something, it's going to be done. He may
let you take the long route there, the scenic view there, the lower
deck there. You get to learn a lot of stuff
on the way, but at the end of the day, God's will is going
to be done. And so in our account, we have
Jonah observing that in God's providence, he has been cast
out. Line one of verse three, for
you have cast me into the deep. Now, when I say a principle of
suffering which points to the atonement, what I mean by that
is, is when Jonah uses the term cast out, cast out, that is a
theological term that underscores a judgment that God has executed,
deeming the person or the people's worth, the people worth excommunication. That's a judgment term. Stay
with me now. The idea of being cast out or
banished or excommunicated or sent away is what God does when
we violate his laws and he removes us from the premise of his blessings. We're learning this in biblical
theology, aren't we, ladies? The three sons that God has had
in this world, two of them are adopted, Adam one, Israel, and
the only begotten son of God, Jesus Christ, And may I say that
all three of them experienced the banishment of God. Did they
not? Adam one experienced being removed
out of the garden, hit the road, Jack, and don't come back no
more. Y'all heard that one, right?
So he hasn't made it back yet. Israel entered into God's second
house called the land of Canaan, of which God gave them household
rules to. they were to abide by the rules if they abide by
the rules they could stay but once they violated God's rules
they had to what go and God removed them and you read these what
we call banishment Psalms in the book of Psalms in several
places where Israel literally says you have banished us you
have cast us out you have abhorred us you have left us off forever
In their experience, they felt what it meant to be abandoned
or rejected or cast out by God. That verb indicates excommunication. It indicates being vomited out.
It indicates being removed from the favor of God. And it's quite
interesting because Jonah here is saying that God did it. God
did it. But do you remember in chapter
1 when they came to Jonah and said, Jonah, what shall we do
since you said all this mess is because of you? Jonah said,
throw me overboard. Isn't that interesting? When what you want, you blame
on God when you get what you want? Because he wanted to be
thrown overboard. He gets cast overboard. Now he's
going to blame God for being cast over. Lord, you cast me
out. No, you cast yourself out. And
God simply accommodated your will. Once first true, that will
be the case in judgment. On the last day, when men stand
before God and God banishes them from his eternal blessing forever,
they will be banished according to their own will. Not a person
will perish under the wrath of God or be in hell for all eternity
who did not want to be there. Are you hearing me? Who did not
want to be there. And so when Jonah says, you cast
me out, it's ultimately God's will that's gonna be done in
the supremacy of his omniscience. God's will is gonna be done,
but men's will will also be done. Men who perish will perish because
they will to perish. But there's a glorious redemptive
truth here that needs to be simply captured here before we go. When
Jonah says, throw me overboard, As a great type of Jesus Christ,
what Jonah is teaching us is that not only was it the will
of our heavenly father to excommunicate his son, but it was the will
of the son to be excommunicated. You see, the father and the son
were in agreement with the whole thing. There was never a time
when the Son did not ultimately want to experience the will of
His Father, even if it meant the abhorrent experience of what
our Master said in Psalm 22, verse 1. My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me? In the tension of His humanity,
in the tension of His divinity, our Savior is experiencing the
abhorrence and the wrath and the judgment of His God upon
Him, not for Himself, but for his people. And it was horrible
enough for the son of God to cry out, why have you forsaken
me? It is a term for which you and
I ought to be well advised. I do not want to be forsaken
of God. I do not want God to forsake
me. God, you may do anything you want, but don't forsake me. Don't abandon me to my will and
my lust and my pleasure and my passions. Keep me in the bosom
of your will. Keep me in the bosom of your
will. And yet this is what Jonah had to experience. And this is
ultimately the glory of God in Him removing from His presence
everything that offends. That is a marked part of the
atonement. The atonement of Jesus Christ
is the work of God the Father in dealing with the sins of His
people, which otherwise would have us banished from Him for
all eternity. If God doesn't deal with our
sin, He's got to deal with us. And we've got to go because sin
has got to go Be sure of this god is too holy to continent
sin. He is too holy for sin to remain
in this universe He has one warned us prophetically many times and
then shall the son of man come and all iniquity will be removed
And those who have followed the lord shall shine as stars in
heaven forever. God's gonna clean house one day
God's gonna clean house one day. He's not gonna leave his universe
contaminated with sin He's going to deal with it and we are sure
of that by virtue of the atoning work of Jesus Christ Now the
third thing that I want to call your attention to as well is
the atonement of Jesus Christ Represented in Jonah under just
a couple of points. It's quite amazing first and
foremost that in Matthew chapter 12 verse 40 where our Lord Jesus
Christ verses 43 40 through 48 was explaining to us the historical
facts concerning Jonah being swallowed up by the whale. You
guys remember that as Jonah was in the whale's belly three days
and three nights. So shall the son of man be in
the heart of the earth. He's immediately taking the most
suspicious element of Jonah's story and attaching it to the
most significant element of his calling and purpose. And that's
the redemption of sinners. No atonement, no salvation. No crucifixion and atonement
on the part of the Son of God, no redemption for sinners. No
atoning work on the part of the Son of God, no satisfaction of
divine justice on the part of the Father. The atonement is
the heart of the gospel. And so when we talk about Jonah
being swallowed up by this well, and we are looking at all of
the particulars that are ancillary to it, are relative to it, what
we also want to maintain is a high level of reverence for its redemptive
implications, a high level of reverence. Recall that when Jonah
was thrown overboard, he was thrown overboard as a substitute
for the people on board. He was thrown over as a substitute
for the people. He wasn't just thrown over. He
was thrown over in the stead of the people, in the place of
the people, in the behalf of the people. The people were about
to be destroyed. Every man was calling on their
God with a consciousness and awareness that they are culpable
to the truth of the living God and judgment was hanging over
their heads. That's where you and I are on
a daily basis when we're outside of Christ. Judgment is hanging
over our head. Judgment is hanging over our
head. Only we don't believe it while the storm is not kicking
up. Come on now, tell the truth. But once the storm kicks up,
we come to a clear sense of an awareness that we are vulnerable
before God. As I said last week, I never
meet people who come to me earnestly and sincerely about Christ apart
from a crisis. I've never heard, I haven't had
it happen one time where someone has run to me and said, Pastor,
I want to be saved. I want to be saved. I want to
be saved. How come? Because God's been
so good to me. I want to be saved because I realize
I'm under the wrath of God, that I don't know God, that I'm apart
from God, that God, I can't be sure that God hears me. and that
God loves me, and that God has provided an estate for me. People
only come in the crisis. It's what it takes. A crisis
of heart, a crisis of mind, a crisis of conscience, a crisis. That's what moved those men to
start praying all over the place. And finally, when they resolved
that, well, what Jonah says must work because that's the only
option we have. Isn't that what they said? They
threw him overboard saying, Lord, Do not attribute this man's blood
to us. They did it in a kind of faith
that represented what you and I must do when we abandon ourselves
to the message of the gospel that says Christ is the only
way by which God can deal with your sins and not send you to
hell. So we are shut up to the exclusivity
of the atonement of Jesus Christ as the only escape for our sins. And so we accept it gladly. And in our text, what we understand
is a remarkable truth. Look again at verse 15 of chapter
one, and then we'll consider it in relationship to verse two
and three of chapter two, verse 15. So they took up Jonah and
cast him forth into the sea, and the sea, what? Ceased from
her raging. Then the men feared the Lord
exceedingly and offered sacrifices unto the Lord and made vows.
What happened? They were converted. They had become worshippers of
Jehovah. Watch this. Because what they saw occur was
the result of them submitting to the instruction to throw Jonah
overboard. And once Jonah was thrown overboard,
a great typical picture of the atonement of Jesus Christ, they
experienced the rest that came to the whole ship. The sea calmed
and was utterly still. And it was an evidence of God's
grace in their life that he had shown favor to them. And that's
what it takes for you and I. It takes God and the work of
redemption to bring us to a place where we experience the peace
of God. Now, above the water, these folks are happy. They're
worshiping God that boat is moving in its direction in a very quiet
in a very calm way as Isaiah chapter 32 puts it the work of
righteousness shall be quietness and rest forever The work of
righteousness shall be quietness and rest forever That is the
net effect and benefit of the atonement of Jesus Christ above
board above the water They're happy and everything's at peace
But there's a mystery going on below And it's a mystery of which
you and I cannot enter into experientially. All we can do with that mystery
that's going on below is be taught by God what God did to bring
peace into our life. And that mystery is the atoning
work of Jesus Christ represented in Jonah. Jonah, at this moment,
the last thing he is experiencing is peace. Out of the belly of the whale,
cried I, out of hell, Am I crying because of my affliction? This
here is the straining voice of the Son of God under the weight
of God's wrath on Calvary's tree as he endures the judgment of
God on himself exclusively between the Father and the Son of which
you and I could never ever know. It is a mystery how the God-man
Jesus Christ could bear the wrath of God in our behalf. It is a
mystery of which you and I will never ever fully comprehend.
All we can do with it is receive it as biblical truth and enjoy
the benefits of peace that comes from the atonement of Jesus Christ.
So we have the doctrine of substitution in this portion of scripture
and the blessed fruit of that substitutionary work. But then
we also have in this the doctrine of imputation. We talked about
imputation a couple of weeks ago when we use the metaphor
of the transfer of guilt from the sinner to the sacrifice in
Leviticus chapter one, Leviticus 16. I talked to you about the
mystery of the transfer of guilt. How is it that God can take your
sin and mine off of us and place it on an object of which he is
going to now execute his justice in order to mete out justice
against your sin and not destroy you. That's a mystery. How is
it that your sins can be removed from you and placed on someone
else and God then view you as innocent? That's a mystery. And
yet it's a mystery we embrace because God is teaching us of
the doctrine of both substitution and imputation. Jonah, as a type
of Christ, is bearing the imputation of our sin on him while we enjoy
the peace that comes through the righteousness of Christ being
imputed to us. It's quite interesting. The sailors
are enjoying peace. They're headed to where they're
headed. They have no idea what's going on with Jonah. And in fact,
heretofore, they won't know. What will they know about Jonah?
All they'll know is we threw that brother overboard and we've
been happy ever since. What I'm getting at is that the
way the narrative is set up, remember we talked about this
lady's narrative theology, is designed to help us understand
in the drama of redemption that God does things in a way to cause
you to pause and think about the blessing of why he did it.
They didn't have to go back and hunt Jonah down. They didn't
have to go back and try to find his body as an evidence that
they threw him overboard. All they had to do was live in
the blessed peace and benefits of what Jonah did for them. You
and I are just like that. We live far more out of the blessings
of the atonement than out of a knowledge of the atonement.
far more out of the benefits of Christ's Word than we do out
of an awareness or an understanding of it. Now granted, there are
some things we can learn about the atonement which will give
us a greater appreciation of this wise and omnipotent and
omniscient God. We can learn some things, but
I would grant this. That is far more probable that
you and I are called to merely enjoy the benefits of the atonement
than to deconstruct it and analyze it in all its points as if we
could get far more enjoyment out of knowing what happened
than the benefits that come from it. I remember the analogy of
one of my friends with regards to an individual dying and needing
a blood transfusion. And the person that gave his
blood for the transfusion of this individual who ultimately
lived said that if this individual for whom I have given my blood
that they live would have come to me and said anything other
than I thank you for giving your blood that I might live and said
something like, can you tell me what your blood type was?
I actually need to know all of the intricate elements that went
into your blood type that actually caused me to live. Can you tell
me who your mother and father were? What kind of food did you
eat weeks before you actually gave your blood to me? See what
I'm getting at? There's a kind of danger of an over-analyzing
of the mystery of the atonement. that will fail to produce the
kind of thankfulness that actually comes out of the benefit of it.
And these men did not have to actually prove that Jonah was
thrown overboard. They simply lived out of the
benefits of it. And you and I must do that too. You and I must do
that too. If you're going to be a happy
person in Christ, live out of the benefits of the atonement.
Enjoy the fact that God has now atoned for your sins. The atonement, however, I just
want to say this before we move on to our other point, is a real
suffering. It's a real suffering. What Jonah
experienced typically was a kind of a real suffering. As I said
earlier, it's not a mystery that Jonah was swallowed up by this
shark fish or dog fish as they would have called it. But what
is a mystery is that when he was swallowed up, that the gestation
process did not immediately take hold of Jonah. The gastric acid
in the stomach that's designed to dissolve and decompose and
destroy the flesh that has now become part of the food chain.
The mystery is that Jonah was not swallowed up and consumed
in what would have been the natural process of death for anyone. For three days, he would have
been a mess. The mystery is that God allowed
that fish to so control him and possess him and swallow him up
that he was actually preserved instead of destroyed. The mystery
is that somehow Jonah was allowed to live in an air pocket inside
the belly of this fish for three days, long enough for God to
extract a kind of prayer that teaches the gospel out of his
servant Jonah. I cried by reason of my affliction
and the Lord heard my cry. That's what every believer says. I cried by reason of my affliction
and God heard my cry. That's what we say. God heard
me. God saved me. He delivered me. You talk about a miracle? Praying
to the true and the living God and he hear you? That's a miracle
of grace. It's a miracle of grace. Yet the wrath of God against
Jonah was very clear. Listen to the language. I'm reading
verses four through six. Are you there? Then said I, I
am cast out of your sight, yet I will look again toward your
holy temple. I'll talk about that in a moment. The waters
compassed me about, even to the soul. The depths closed me round
about. The weeds were wrapped about
my head. Do you know what Jonah is describing?
The power of the deep in its capacity to get a hold of a person
and bring them all the way down to the bottom. The suction of
the water, the torrents of the water pulling them down and in
the process being trapped by the weeds, brought to the bottom
of the ocean. Can you imagine that descent?
that descent to the depths of the sea, having no control over
this massive undertow that pulls you down. And then you find yourself
wrapped up in weeds and trapped at the bottom, the text says.
And he was wrapped up by the weeds and bound at the bottom.
In his mind, he said it was like forever. You know what he's describing? Hell. He's describing hell, the
descent into hell. God calls the ultimate hell to
which men and women will be cast into a lake of fire. Jonah is describing the helplessness
of the soul that is now trapped by the jaws and bars of death.
the helplessness of the soul that is trapped by the jaws and
bars. See, you and I can mock death
now while we're breathing, living, standing on top of this terra
firma and acting like we are in control of the world, but
let death get a hold of you. Let it start towing you in. Let
it start bringing you into its mastery. Death is powerful, of
which God has to reckon with it if he's going to save his
people. And death is a thing for which you ought to be afraid
if you don't know God. And death is a thing for which
even we as believers need to be reverential. You don't need
to be haughty about death. You don't need to be arrogant
or pompous about death. Death will get a hold of you
and teach you some lessons. Even if it brings you near death's
door without sucking you in, you'll learn something about
humbling yourself before God. This is what Jonah is doing.
He's learning something about humbling himself before God.
He's trapped! at the bottom. And you and I
cannot determine by this language whether or not Jonah is presently
in the fish. or what God did was to allow
him to be thrown overboard, sucked into the water by this raging
sea, brought to the bottom to experience the descent into hell
of which people will experience, and then down there in his utter
helplessness, not knowing if there was a deliverance coming,
the next thing he knows, swallowed up. by God's cruise ship. Stay with me for a moment. Our brother's in the whale's
belly. It's dark. It stinks. It's a bad place to
be. Horrible in many ways. But it's
like a five-star hotel compared to where he just was. And you
know what it provokes in him? A prayer. A prayer. Listen to what he says. He says,
I went down to the bottom. Verse six of the mountains. The
earth with her bars was about me forever. Watch this. Yet you
brought my life up from corruption. Oh, Lord, my God. See, Jonah
in the midst of his praying and describing what he's going through
is also describing the sovereignty of God in delivering him. I don't
know if you see it sprinkled all through the prayer, but sprinkled
through the prayer is the hand of God, is the hand of God keeping
Jonah. See, Jonah's close to death.
But Jonah's not dead. Jonah is helpless, but Jonah
has all the help in the world. And he's finding himself using
terminology in the midst of utter despair, also using terms like,
I will yet look towards your holy temple. How do you talk
like that? Unless God's sustaining you in
the midst of this kind of descent into uncontrolled territory of
which, if it were a normal, natural situation, you're dead. You're
dead. How do you have hope in the midst
of hopelessness like this unless god is with you? God is with
you in the midst of this. Here's what he says in verse
7 when my soul Fainted within me. Do you see that? It corresponds
to verse 5 the waters compass me about even to the what soul
When jonah is using that terminology what he's talking about is the
impact the impact of that experience on his conscience and on his
mind, that the impact penetrated the whole of his being and took
a hold of him. See, look, you can go through
a trial in the flesh and outward circumstances can be harrowing
and difficult and yet inside you can have inner peace. Your
conscience can be at rest You can have a real sense of stability,
a sense of perspective, a sense of objectivity going through
trouble. Have you ever been like that? As a child of God, it happens
to us frequently. We are in the midst of something
that is bigger than us, more difficult than we can intellectually
figure out. It's a conundrum. It's a challenge.
And we know it has the potential of harming us, but we're still
at peace. That's the grace of God in your
life. At other times, there are trials that come into our life
that are so daunting that our minds are going in 10 different
directions all at once. And we're scared to death because
we don't even know how to think right. Am I telling the truth? So just get a handle on yourself,
buddy. Get a handle. Get a handle, man. Get a handle.
You've got to trust God. This one is tough, but you've
got to trust God. Have you ever been there? You're wondering
if you even believe God. If there is a God. Will God deliver
me out of this? This is huge here. See? But in the midst of Jonah's trial,
we cannot admit and be honest about the text that Jonah was
altogether abandoned by God. And we cannot affirm that Jonah
didn't have a rational prayer that was based all the way through
on hope. Because it was. Because what
we learned last week was that while Jonah is a type of Jesus
Christ, Jonah is not Christ. And when God uses typology in
the script and he uses people as a type, he comes just short
of that person fulfilling the ultimate typology. So what God
would do with Jonah is use Jonah as a type of our Savior's atoning
work. But he'll let you and I know
I had Jonah's back all the time. Are you hearing what I'm saying?
So let's consider this language a little bit before we wrap it
up. In Jonah chapter two, Jonah describes what I call in verse
seven, and the second to our last point, the objects, plural,
of Christ's atonement. This is quite remarkable because
if we were to just stay focused on Jonah in chapter 2, we could
investigate the psychological and the spiritual and emotional
dynamics that went on in his life and maybe derive some application
to ourselves. But I want you to remember that
as a type, as a type of Christ, Jonah's suffering was not about
him. It was about two people. Are
you ready? It was about his father. The atonement of Jesus Christ,
really at the end of the day, the suffering of Christ on Calvary
Street is for the glory of his father. It's for the glory of
his father. There are things that those of
us who have come to know Christ come to know about God the father
only through the atonement. It is the atoning work of Jesus
Christ that teaches us something about the love of God for us.
The atonement will show us who the father is in his holiness,
in his righteousness, in his justice. but also in his wisdom
and in his power and in his capacity to maintain the dignity of his
holy and just character while at the same time punishing sin,
saving you and I at the expense of the sufferings of his son.
That's designed to cause you to bow down and worship God.
See, the atoning work of Jesus Christ is designed for you and
I to peer into the holiness of God. So what Jonah says is this,
and there are two objects here that are very clear of which
the suffering of Jonah is affirming, or the atonement of Christ is
affirming in Jonah. First is the glory of his father, the
glory of his father. And then secondly, the church
of the living God. Now mark what Jonah says over
in verse 4. When Jonah describes his descent
into the deep, And it's power like the grave to suck him in. The term to be swallowed up is
a term that runs through the scriptures frequently describing
hell. You guys know that, right? Hell
will swallow you up. Do you remember in the days of
Israel's excursion through the wilderness when Korah, Dathan,
and Abiram rose up against Moses and argued against Moses? You
take too much on yourself. And Moses bowed down and worshiped
and backed away. And God says, let me deal with
this. God says now if these men die the natural death that all
men die. I'm not in this But if I do a
strange thing, you can know I was the one who did it You remember
what God did in number chapter 16 around verse 32. He opened
the earth Swallowed up Dathan Abiram all that crew that rebelled
against Moses and Aaron and their family and their goods alive
The earth opened up swallowed them up a lot. That's hell getting
a hold of the rebel and exercising absolute power and mastery over
them. This is what Jonah is experiencing.
This is what our master experienced. The power of his own wrath against
himself as he stood as a barrier between his father's holiness
and our sinfulness. What kind of love is this? But
now notice what Jonah says. Watch what Jonah says in verse
four. After he said all the billows and your waves passed over me
Which is something that the psalm says a few times verse 4 says
then I said I am cast out of your sight That was his experience
right but watch this yet. I will look again Toward your
what holy temple? Hear this brother sinking sinking
sinking while looking to jerusalem while looking to the temple.
What is he saying when he uses that expression? Are you ready?
He's saying this. I know that somehow in this process
God is going to work it out that I stand before him again. That
I stand before him as his servant. That I stand before him as his
son. That I stand before him as his redeemed, as his elect,
as his people. That somehow God's going to bring
me out of this and I'm going to be able to worship God through
this. What is he doing? He's glorifying the scheme of
redemption that is infallible on the part of God. Watch this. This, by way of messianic tonation,
is referring to Jesus Christ's own confidence that once his
Father has fulfilled the task of pouring out the wrath of God
on the Son of God, the Son of God will see his Father face
to face. You recall when Jesus would walk through the midst
of the cities with his disciples, he said, listen, the son of man
must suffer many things, be abused and maligned and ridiculed and
ultimately put to death, right? But then he would go on to say,
and on the third day, When he rises again, how is he talking? He's talking in the context of
faith, knowing that the work of redemption would accomplish
his return again to his father. That's what Jonah is doing here.
Jonah is saying, I know that somehow I'm going to get out
of this. This will be to your glory. This will be to the glory
of our father. Listen to it again. Verse seven.
When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord. I remembered
the Lord. Isn't that a powerful grace in the midst of your trials
when you are fainting through your trials? You know how hard
it is sometimes to remember God Have you ever been through a
situation where your trials were so intense that you forgot how
to pray? That not a single Bible verse
came to mind that gave you any comfort Lord give a brother one
verse and Have you ever been through that kind of difficulty?
Well, you know, you can't even remember a basic Bible verse.
You're so frazzled. So frazzled and yet what Jonah
is saying is very clear, very clear. God is sustaining Jonah's
faith so that Jonah says, watch this, and my prayer, when I remembered
the Lord, my prayer came in unto thee in your holy temple. In
other words, here's what Jonah is saying, while I'm sinking
under the wrath of God, God's still on his throne. He's on
his throne in Jerusalem. He's on his throne in the temple.
He's on his throne in the Holy of Holies. God hasn't moved.
The world's not out of control just because I'm in trouble.
God's still ruling. And he knew where to pray. Now,
then prayer then is an expression of what? Faith. Is it? It's an expression of faith.
Remember Daniel? When Daniel knew and the law was signed and
the law of the Medes and Purge cannot change. Daniel went home
directly, opened his door, his windows, pointed straight at
Jerusalem and started praying out loud so that everybody could
know you're not changing who I worship, when I worship, and
how I worship just because you're going to throw me into the pit
because I worship. What was he doing? He was expressing
confidence and hope in the God of glory that was seated in Jerusalem. Now let's make an application
to ourselves as we shut this down. What Jonah is doing in
praying towards Jerusalem really is pointing towards what Christ
is accomplishing by his death at Calvary in the body of Jesus
Christ. See, while the Jews saw Jerusalem
as their identity, While the Jew or the Hebrew saw the temple
as that basic place of God's covenant, purpose, and establishment
in their life, for us as New Testament Christians, we don't
look to a physical location. We're not bound by geography. We're not committed to land rights. For us, the temple of the living
God is the church of Jesus Christ. It's the body of believers and
that I might say is the way Christ spoke when he says Kill this
body or destroy this temple in John chapter 3 and I will raise
it up in three days Remember that he wasn't referring merely
to himself He was but not to himself merely of whom was he
referring. He was referring to every believer
in Christ See the atonement of Jesus Christ would not only put
away our sins It would not only satisfy the wrath of God, it
would not only reconcile us to the Father in a judicial and
a level of justice, but it would also be the grounds upon which
after the resurrection occurred, every member of the body would
be raised up. When Jonah says, I will look
again towards your holy temple, you know what he was doing? He
was prophesying the resurrection. He was prophesying not only his
own resurrection, but the resurrection of every believer that's in Jesus
Christ Jonah was declaring that God by this act would ultimately
Accomplish his eternal purpose the objects of Christ atonement
is the glory of the father and the church of the living God
our final point Our final point verses 4 8 and 9 will underscore
this as well. He shall see his seed. It's almost
saying the same thing. I shall see his seed this comes
out of Isaiah 53 verse 11 if you'll go there notice what Isaiah
says with regards to the atonement of Jesus Christ and once again
the confidence that comes with that atonement the atonement
of Jesus Christ was the will of God our Heavenly Father and
the work of the atonement was infallible not only in Our Lord's
constructing it in his eternal wisdom and not only in the fulfillment
of it in Jesus Christ, but it's fulfillment in the life of his
people as well. God will infallibly bring to
pass as the ultimate aim of the atonement, the salvation of all
his people. It is therefore imperative that
you and I never separate the cross work of Jesus Christ from
your own experience of grace. And we ought never to separate
the crosswork of Jesus Christ from the eternal blessings that
come for those of us who trust him. Eternity in the presence
of our blessed God is a direct result of the crosswork of Jesus
Christ. You guys understand that? Listen
to what he says in Isaiah 53 verse 11. Here's what he says.
He shall see of the travail of his soul. Who is the he here?
The father. He shall see of the travail of
his soul." Who is the his? Who is the his? Christ! And he
shall be what? as one of those judicial terms,
and it means that God's wrath would be satisfied, he would
experience the propitiation that only Christ could offer with
regards to the appeasement of the sins that were committed
against the holy and just God. Now watch this, and by his knowledge,
that's Christ's knowledge or experience, shall my righteous
servant do what? Justify many, for he shall bear
their iniquities. When the scripture says, and
he shall see, he shall see, His travail. God is affirming the
success of Jesus Christ's atonement. And again it says it over in
verse 10, Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He hath put
him to grief. When you shall make his soul
an offering for sin, he shall see his seed. He's speaking of
the resurrection ladies and gentlemen. and he shall prolong his days. He's speaking of the resurrection.
And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. That
in essence is what Jonah is saying. And I can sum it up in two verses
as well. The first is in Isaiah, Isaiah's
writings, Isaiah chapter 26, verse 19, where Isaiah under
inspiration of the spirit says this, your dead body, shall live
together with my dead body, shall you live. That's a messianic
statement that's used concerning Christ. Thy dead men shall live
together with my dead body. What is he talking about? The
union of Christ with his elect. The suffering of his elect with
Christ on Calvary's tree. They're being buried with Christ
when Christ was buried. And they're being raised together
with Christ when he was raised from the dead. Look at it. They
shall rise together with my dead body, shall they arise. It's
a promise of future hope. It's a promise of resurrection
hope. Awake and seeing ye that dwell in the dust, for thy dew
is as the dew of the herb and the earth shall, here it is,
cast out its dead. Now I can stop right here with
an application. The man or the woman that comes to trust Jesus
Christ as Savior is the man or the woman who experiences the
resurrection of their soul only because Christ has risen from
the dead. The man or the woman that trusts
Christ as their Savior experiences the justifying work of Jesus
Christ on Calvary Street and therefore the imputation of God's
righteousness which makes you accepted in the presence of God
for all eternity only because Christ is righteous. The man
or the woman that's trusting the death, burial, and resurrection
of Jesus Christ has the promise of eternal life in the presence
of God for all eternity, only because you are brought into
union with Jesus Christ by the counsel and foreknowledge of
God Almighty before the world began and by the accomplishment
of Christ's work on Calvary's tree and by the work of the Spirit
of God. Bringing to bear on your conscience
in mind now watch this now because he lives you shall live also
This is the joyful message of the resurrection that we talk
about every Sunday It's the message that not only did Christ rise
again from the dead, but everyone for whom Christ died Has risen
in him and are seated in heavenly places in him and one day this
old body which is deteriorating being swallowed up by death decomposing
right now. We kind of feel like we're the
whale in the whole world. One day, the whole of our body
shall look towards Jerusalem, towards glory, where our God
is, where our savior is, where our master is, and where he is,
we shall be also for those who trust him. Amen. Amen.