Seeking for the help of the Lord,
I direct your prayerful attention to the Prophet Jonah, in reading
from our text, verse 2, but it is the last part of verse 2,
Upon My Spirit. The whole verse reads, And he
prayed unto the Lord and said, I pray Thee, O Lord, was not
this my saying? When I was yet in my country,
therefore I fled before unto Tarshish, for I knew that Thou
art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness,
and repentest Thee of the evil. Particularly the last part. of this verse. Really the verse
we've read as our text is the key to the whole of the book
of Jonah. We know that the nation of the
Ninevites, Assyria, Nineveh was the capital, that they were destroyed
in about 600 BC. And this prophecy relates to
some 130, 150 years before that. So they were spared for those
years further from being destroyed. And that then would place where
Jonah really came in history. We know that he is mentioned
in the Days of Jeroboam II, which was a time of great wickedness
with Israel, but they were prospering, so they weren't listening to
the Lord. And we read there of the prophecies
of Jonah. Some think that those prophecies
were made at that time, but they could have been made before then. But what we do know is that because
Jonah was sent to the Ninevites, an ungodly nation, and Jonah
knew what was in our text, that the Lord would not send a man
to a people if he did not mean to send them repentance and to
turn away his wickedness or their wickedness. and his wrath from
them. And so Jonah says that this was
his saying in his own country. This was the reason why when
God told him to go to Nineveh, he ran away and found a ship
going to Tarshish, a long way away, 2,500 miles or so away
down the Mediterranean, away from Nineveh. You know, sometimes you might
take as signs from God that the way we're going is right. Jonah
could have said, well, I found a ship, I have the money, that
it is the right thing to do. But we know it wasn't. He knew
it wasn't. But we could be the same, looking
at things as if they were evidences that we're walking in the right
path. It is the Word of God that tells us what is right and wrong.
Always remember that. Don't be deceived by your own
thoughts as to what path you are walking now is right if it
is contrary to the Word of God. It is not a right path. However
much things you might point, things in your life that are
going right and well. For the Lord sent Dave. What a mercy it was that Jonah
was stopped. What a mercy it was that he was
also preserved from the sea when he was cast into it. What a mercy
it was that God sent him again, and not someone else, and the
Lord blessed his ministry in the way that he did. Well, we
have the account here that when God did bless his ministry, when,
as in the previous chapter, We read that God saw their works,
the works of the Ninevites, how they repented at the preaching
of Jonah, that they turned from their evil way, and God repented
of the evil that he had said he would do unto them, and he
did it not. But Jonah is angry, very angry,
and he's not pleased at what God has done. and he tries to
change God's mind, take away the blessing, destroy them anyway,
but God would not do that. Even the instrument God used
to bring them to repentance, God would not listen to him. God had given him his word, blessed
his word, and he wouldn't take away that blessing, not for Jonah's
anger, It's a great encouragement for any who's been blessed through
a servant of the Lord that afterwards has either fallen away, poured
the word into disrepute, or even has said that the word that he
preached to them, that he preached wrong or was not right. We must always be careful as
the Lord's servants that we don't on one hand preach the word that's
made a blessing and then on the other hand rob the people of
it and take the word away and say well I spoke wrong or I wasn't
really blessed and helped by the Lord and it wounds the people
of God. But here is Jonah in this position
and really The prophecy here in the Book of Jonah leaves him
still angry, and yet we know that he was one of God's children. But may we always remember, anger
resteth in the bosom of fools, and may we be delivered from
that spirit. But Jonah could have done a lot
worse than what he did, because here, though he is angry, he
is still praying to the Lord, and whatever we may feel, whether
we feel angry or discouraged, whatever we may feel, may we
go to the Lord and tell the Lord what we feel and why we feel
it so. Jonah, he prayed, and may that
be true of us, that we are found on praying ground. But what is is the latter part. It's what
Jonah knew. It's what Jonah knew, but it's
also how he acted. And I want to think about it
in this way. Knowing that God is gracious,
how do we act? Jonah knew that God was gracious. We read how He acted, how the
Ninevites acted. But how do we act? So I want
to look at three points. Firstly, how do we know that thou art a gracious God,
and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest
thee of the evil. Jonah says, I knew. How do we
know that same thing that he knew? Secondly, how the Lord can be
a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness,
and repented him of the evil. How can he be that? And then thirdly, how will we
act? How will we act or how are we
acting when we know that thou art a gracious God, and merciful,
slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. So firstly, the question, how
do we know this? How did Jonah know this? There's two ways. One is through in Exodus, Exodus 33 and also
going into 34. This is after the children of
Israel had been brought out of Egypt to Mount Sinai. Moses had gone up the mountain.
He'd received the tables of the law of God. Meanwhile, the children
of Israel had persuaded Aaron to make a golden calf and they
worshipped that, idolatry. And they caused the Lord to show
much anger and Moses, so angry, he cast the tables of stone and
broke them at the bottom of the mount. But Moses made intercession
for the children of Israel. He pleaded for them. Instead
of the Lord showing His wrath, destroying them, He showed mercy
to them. Moses wanted the Lord's presence
with them. He was assured of His presence. And as we read, when Moses asked
and said, I beseech thee, show me thy glory. He said, I will
make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the
name of the Lord before thee, and will be gracious to whom
I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show
mercy. Then, who has shown that place
by him, beautiful time, our Lord Jesus Christ, the cleft in the
rock, the hiding place in the rock, will cover thee And then in chapter 34, when
the tables were hewed again, the beautiful type of the Lord
Jesus Christ fulfilling the law, those completed tables in the
ark were like our Lord fulfilling the law, completing it himself
on behalf of his people. But then we have in verse 6,
the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the
Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in
goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity
and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the
guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children
and upon the children's children unto the third and to the fourth
generation. That is one reason why Jonah
knew, and why we know, that the Lord is a gracious and merciful
God, slow to anger and of great kindness and repentantly of the
evil, because the Word of God declares it. God declares it. God sets it forth in the Holy
Word. We are to believe what God has
borne testimony and witness of himself as to what he is. So
that is the first way. The second is that we know by
personal experience. Jonah, he had had a personal
experience of a gracious God. He had run away. He had disobeyed
God. God had sent out the wind. He had been thrown into the sea.
But Jonah did not perish in the sea. God prepared the great fish. Jonah was swallowed by the fish,
preserved for three days, three nights in the whale's belly,
and then vomited up on the dry land. Jonah himself had proved
that the Lord was a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger,
and of great kindness, repentant of the evil. Jonah had proved
it, and we proved it, In Peter we read, if so be thou'st tasted
that the Lord is gracious. The children of Israel knew what
it was personally, not just at that time in the mount, but again
and again in their history, how long suffering the Lord was,
especially at the end before they were carried away into Babylonia's
captivity. Many, many prophets were sent
unto them. Many times they were warned.
Many years went by, and the Lord lengthened out His mercies. And
really the whole continuance of the world, right from Adam's
day to this, it shows forth the long-suffering of the Lord. The
Lord didn't immediately destroy Adam and Eve and the whole of
the human race. He gave the promise of the seed
to the woman that should bruise the serpent's head. Then 1640 years later, when the
world was full of wickedness, great violence, when men had
departed from the Lord in a great way, The Lord said that he would
destroy the world. It repented him that he'd made
man upon the earth. But then we read that Noah found
grace in his sight. The Lord turned away that evil.
Yes, the world was destroyed by water, but Noah, the eighth
person in the ark, they were preserved and kept. all spring from Noah and his
family, all spring from Adam. And we have in the account of
the flood the great mercy among suffering of the Lord. And right
through the history of the world, the reason why the Lord does
not immediately destroy man is because of what we know from
the word here of the nature of the Lord. And it is because He
still has an elect people. He still has a people to save. He still has a people to bestow
sovereignly, as we read in Exodus 33. I will be gracious upon whom
I will be gracious, merciful unto whom I will be merciful.
He still has a people that He will bestow His grace upon. still
has a people that he will be merciful to, still is slow to
anger and longsuffering upon a people, and still of great
kindness. We read at the end of Psalm 107,
who so is wise and will observe these things, even they shall
understand the loving kindness of the Lord. Still the Lord turns
away his wrath Still he shows mercy. Still he gives repentance
and remission of sins. Still he saves a people that
are not deserving of being saved, that have given every reason
why the Lord should destroy them. Still he saves a people, not
for their sake, because of his beloved son. And so, before we pass on from
this point, how much do we really know of the Lord? I read of thee one that hid his
talent in the earth, and when he was asked why, he said, because
I knew thee that thou wast an austere man. that he gathered
where he had not sown. And really the man was saying
he didn't really know the Lord what he was like at all. And
how much do we really know the Lord? If we had to take a sheet of
paper and we were asked to write down How we knew personally of the God that Jonah knew here. What we could testify of his
grace and of his mercy. And we would have to also write
down in that those times in their lives that we live maybe like
David He must have lived some year after he had killed Uriah
with the sword, the children of Ammon, after he had committed
adultery, lived with an outward show of religion, but yet was
far from the Lord. The Lord didn't destroy him all
during that time. And if we were to think of those
things, it may be that we are doing or not doing in our lives,
that are testing the Lord to the utmost, of which He is slow to anger.
And maybe we are deceiving ourselves and saying, well, the Lord hasn't
judged me, He hasn't destroyed me. But the Word says that Because
sentence is not executed against an evil work, in the heart of
man is fully set in them to do evil. It may be with the Linovites
that they continued on in the path of evil for many, many years,
but now it comes a reckoning time, and God in mercy gives
them repentance. But what would we have to write
about ourselves about our own lives. How would we give account
of the Last Judgment Day? What do we know personally of
the graciousness of the Lord? What do we know of what Jonah
knew? For I knew. Well, I want to look then, secondly,
and how the Lord can be a gracious God. We read in the Gospels, our Lord
setting forth of how that Jonah was a type, a sign, that is Jonah In the heart of the earth, in
the whale's belly, we read in Matthew chapter 12, we read from
the Word. The Lord said to the Pharisees
when they asked a sign of Him, He answered and said unto them,
An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there
shall no sign be given to it but the sign of the prophet Jonas.
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly,
so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the
heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise
in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it because
they repented at the preaching of Jonas. And behold, a greater
than Jonas is here." the mariners had come back and
they had said that there was a prophet on their ship that
was going to preach to the Ninevites but that they'd thrown him into
the sea. The sea had ceased from its raging
but that the prophet had perished. And then suddenly the prophet
appears and he's preaching in their midst It must have been,
in a way, a fearful sight or thing for the Ninevites. But
this was going to be repeated the same when our Lord Jesus
Christ came. The Jews, they thought that they
had cast the Lord out. They destroyed Him. They crucified
Him. They killed Him. They buried
Him. They slew Him. And they thought,
well, what then will become? of all what he had prophesied
and said and preached. In a similar way, it was when
Joseph's brothers threw him into the pit, and then they sold him,
and then they said, we'll see what we all become of his dreams. And yet the very thing that they'd
done was a means of bringing about those dreams and saving
their lives alive, and the very thing that the Jews had done
to our Lord Jesus Christ, Peter explains, at the Day of Pentecost. He was delivered by the determined
counsel and full knowledge of God, and ye have taken and by
wicked hands crucified and slain. They'd done that. But what a thing, when we know
that when the Lord rose from the dead, He only appeared to
His disciples, He didn't appear to the people. But after Pentecost
and when the Holy Spirit was given, the miracles that the
disciples did in the name of Jesus were greater than those
that our Lord did in His lifetime. Those things that were done through
the apostles, thousands were brought to belief Thousands were
converted, turned from idolatry to the true living God. The dead
were raised, the sick were healed, the maimed were healed, made
whole. And the Jews could see this. They could see the difference
that had been wrought. They heard the preaching with
power. It was like the difference between
Elijah and Elisha. A double spirit rested upon Elisha,
and it was because Elijah had said, if thou seest when I am
taken from thee, then it shall be so. And Elisha saw him taken
up, and a double spirit, you can count Psalm 8, miracles the
Delighter did, and 16, the Delighter did. When our Lord was taken
up into heaven, the disciples saw Him, and the Spirit. The Lord said, I will pray the
Father who will give you another comforter, tarry at Jerusalem
until ye be endued with power from on high. the Apostles. In these days of
the preaching of the Gospel, it is through the power of the
Holy Spirit. And it is a preaching of the
cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the Apostle determined not
to know anything among men, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It is through our Lord's coming
to this world being a man made under the law and being born
of the woman, that he fulfilled the law and made it honourable,
his perfect life and obedience, his righteousness, a righteousness
to be imputed and to be given to his people, to those that
believe. And then he suffered in their
place, he laid down his life to take it again, the commandment
that he had received of his father. The debt is paid. We read in
Exodus that the Lord will not pass by iniquity. It must be
punished. Sin must be punished, either
in the sinner or in the substitute, either in Christ or in us. It cannot be passed away with
nothing. And so it is But we must, when
we look at a text like this, and that the Lord is gracious,
merciful, slow to anger, great kindness, repentancy of the evil,
there is a reason, there is how the Lord can do this. He is a
holy God, a righteous God. He cannot look upon iniquity
without utter abhorrence. He hates sin. He must punish
sin. He must deal with sin. He can't
just pass away. He can't just show grace to a
person and mercy to a person that they don't deserve and it
not be paid for. It is paid for. It's paid for
at Calvary. Jonah knew the coming of our
Lord. He knew the blessings the same
as all the Old Testament saints did. of the promised coming of
the Messiah, the seed of the woman, is only one way of salvation. There is only one way of knowing
the grace of God, and that is in the face of the Lord Jesus
Christ. The signature of the Apostle
Paul, and that which we close our services with, is the grace
of our Lord Jesus of the Holy Spirit, and it is
highlighted, that grace of our Lord. We know the grace of our
Lord, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became
poor, that ye, through his poverty, might be made rich. If we are
truly brought to know the blessings that flow from Calvary, we will
be led to and those who are led to Calvary will want to show
that forth in the ordinances of the Lord's House in baptism
and in the Lord's Supper that both highlight this second point
and that is how the Lord can be what He is. Every blessing flows to us He is the source of every blessing,
of all grace, of all mercy, of every blessing. But I want to
then look thirdly at how will we act. If we know this, if we
truly know it, how do we act? And there are five different
ways I want to said before us this morning, how do we act? If we know that thou art a gracious
God, the Lord is a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger, and
of great kindness and repentance thee of the evil. Do we act like Jonah? Are we reluctant? to tell our
enemies and be a means of grace to them as Jonah was. There's really two reasons why
Jonah fled. One was that the Ninevites of
Syria was the ancient enemy of the people of God. And they were going to be the
ones that carried away the children of Israel, the ten tribes, and
the thought that God would pass by His people and bless those
that are enemies, that thought, it kept Jonah back. It's why
he didn't want to go and preach to them. It is a real note You
know, the Jews, they viewed the Gentiles as being outside of
the kingdom. They were. God had said, you
only have I known of all nations upon the face of the earth. But
it was always determined and beautiful in the prophecies in
Isaiah that the Lord would bring in the Gentiles and bless them. And it is a great note that it
was from that Jonah fled from the face of the Lord and would
not go to the Gentiles to Nineveh, that Peter was when Cornelius
sent for him to go and preach to the Gentiles, which was to
be the first time like the day of Pentecost in the house of
Cornelius. And Peter, through a vision of
the Lord, was made willing ready to go, so that when he was asked,
instead of fleeing, he went. And I've often seen the great
significance of the difference. Each one, they went down to the
same place. They're both a chopper. Jonah
runs away. Peter, he goes, they're Gentiles. And afterwards, the other apostles,
held him to account why he went into the Gentiles, and he was
able to rehearse the matter from the beginning, and then they
could see it was the Lord's hand. But there's a lesson to us here,
because it's repeated again and again. We have it in the parable
of the prodigal son. We have the one that is saved
and shown mercy and love by the Father, is the one that spent
all his father's substance in riotous living. And you know
the eldest son, he said, I've never done anything to offend
thee. I was always good, I was always at home. He was angry,
he would not go in. The thought that his brother
should have mercy and should have blessing and show grace, it was just, it made him angry.
and how many times it is, that those that always attend to the
church, those who've always done rites, it's a great blessing
to be brought up under the sound of the truth. But those that
are brought up like that, they trust in that, and then they
have something to say. When God brings one who has gone
out into the world and done many wrong things, open things, sinful
things, He calls them by their grace, turns their heart, brings
them into the fold, blesses them. They're not happy about it. And
others, they won't bring the Word, they won't give a Bible
to someone. They say they're pastored, they'll
never believe, they won't receive it. They're not worth telling
the Gospel to. I hope we're not like that. If we know the Lord is what He
is in our text, that we be willing to bring that Gospel and to bring
the Word to any, to the enemies of Christ, the enemies of the
Church of God, to those who are hostile, that we might speak
to them and not run away like Jonah did. The other reason,
of course, was that Jonah may well have thought, here I am,
I'm going to be a prophet, I am going to say that in 40 days
this city is going to be destroyed, and in 40 days it is not, and
they will turn round and say, some prophet you are, your word
hasn't come to pass. And it was only by faith that
the Ninevites would have realised that if they had not have repented,
they would have been destroyed. And so for that again, it would
have been a much easier thing for Jonah to say, What a good
prophet I am. I prophesied Nineveh's destruction,
and lo and behold, they are destroyed. Because, of course, the sign
of a prophet was that his word did come to pass. And yet the
Lord, in this way, he uses Jonah as a sign, a sign to the generation
when our Lord was to come. So then how do we act? Let us
not act like Jonah and hold back the word of God from those we
think are not worthy of it, or even our enemies. But secondly,
are we ignoring God's grace and trusting in our own works? Paul
speaks of this in Romans 10, of those ignorant of God's righteousness
and going about to establish themselves. But what of us in
our churches in this gospel day? and maybe professing that we
know that the Lord is a gracious God, a merciful slow to anger,
and a great kindness, rebendously of the evil. But it may be that
we are looking upon our lives and saying, I'm too evil to be
saved. I'm too wicked to be saved. As
if, well, if we were a bit better, if we were not so sinful, then
we could be saved. too wicked for that. And in that
way, we are undermining and saying, well, God may be merciful, but
He can't be merciful to me. And He may be gracious, but not
to me. And on the other hand, we can
be just ignoring this and trusting in our good works, not seeing
our wickedness, not confessing that, and actually saying, well,
Yes, we may do some things wrong, but that's balanced by all our
good works, our charity, and the things that we do good, and
how we've been used, maybe in the service of God, and that
balances up where our hearts are not right, our secret life
before God is not right, and we're not really evidencing a
renewed heart. So, are we ignoring God's grace? Do we day by day plead for His
grace, plead for His mercy? Are we like the publican, God
be merciful to me a sinner? Are we seeking from Him that
repentance and the remission of sins? The third thing, how
will we act? Are we sinning that grace might
abound? Are we walking in Romans 6 after
The Apostle Paul had established that we're saved by grace and
justified, not by our works, but by our faith in Christ. Are we just sinning? Are we saying,
well, it doesn't matter if I do this or that, I won't take too
much notice of my heart or my life or what I'm doing. I know
that my works will not stand up before God, but God is gracious
and is merciful. And he would just pass over these
things. Is that how we are acting when
we know the grace of God? Paul spoke very solemnly, searching
in Romans 6 of that. How can we that are dead to sin
live any longer therein? How can we add sin to sin? How
can we sin knowing that what sins we sin, they are they which
are laid? upon the Lord Jesus Christ. Then
in the fourth way, are we doing what the Ninevites did, repenting? What an example to us. What a
profound effect it had upon them. On the king, write down, laid
his robe from him, covered him with sackcloth, sat in ashes,
caused it to be proclaimed and published throughout Nineveh
by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, let neither
man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not
feed nor drink water. And let man and beast be covered
with sackcloth and cry mightily unto God. Yea, let them turn
every one from his evil way, from the violence that is in
their hands. Who can tell if God will turn
and repent? and turn away from his fierce
anger that we perish not. What a picture, two things, that
crying unto the Lord and the re-repentance, the two that are
going together. In John 1, if we confess our
sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Dear friends, if we know what
Jonah knew, Then may we do what the Ninevites did, that we might
truly be a people that show every evidence of repentance. Repentance
is a true token of the forgiveness of sin. Willing to turn away,
willing to cease from sin. And those sins are forgiven us. We cannot be forgiven sins that
we are unwilling to part with, that we are nourishing, keeping
as our own, and really asking the Lord, forgive me all my sins,
but not this one. We will not be forgiven that
sin. We are not willing to forsake. And we must remember, of course,
our own wicked heart, It does cleave to sin. It doesn't want
to part with sin. It cleaves to it, and sometimes
we must confess that before the Lord. Say, Lord, I would that
I'd be free from that sin, but I fear the love to it. My old
nature loves it. Deliver me from it. Make me hate
it. And we be honest before God,
not trying to deceive Him and deceive ourselves. And the fifth
thing, how will we act? Are we walking in the love of
God, hating sin, fleeing from it, but rejoicing in His mercy
and in His grace alone? Really, there's the song of the
redeemed here, like our first hymn that we sung, of the grace
of God, the mercy of God, is what the people of God rejoice
in, is what they are happy in, and what their hope is in all
their sins, in all that they are, that the Lord is what He
is. Really it is our only hope that
the Lord does not change, that He is this merciful God, that
where He does change is turning away His hand of wrath. when he is pleased to give us
that repentance and godly sorrow for sin. If we feel the wrath
of God upon us at this time, if we feel his hiding face, if
we feel his hand against us, may we not despair, not give
up, but remember what Jonah knew and what we trust we know ourselves
and have proved before and that we seek unto Him for these blessings
in our text. Seek again of His grace, His
mercy. Seek again of His great kindness
to bring us back and to bring us into the bond of the covenant
and under that love of God, let love be shed abroad in our hearts
by the Holy Ghost. How will we act? How do we act
if we know what Jonah knows? There must be some response.
There must be some way we're walking in those ways that we've
set before you here. May we be of those that search
and try our ways. I knew that Thou art a gracious
God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and