As I prepared for this message, I felt anxious to preach it.
And I felt prepared to preach it. But as I stand here to preach
it, I'm feeling entirely inadequate. You know,
once a year, the high priest in Israel went into the most
holy place with the blood of a sacrifice. He went in there
with a censer with a burning incense. And the place was full
of smoke. He was the only one allowed to
go back there, and he only went there once a year. And he never
went in there without blood. And what he saw when he was in
there was seen through smoke, wasn't a clear view. And part
of the reason for that is, is that God's token presence was
there. Bible says he was enthroned between
the cherubim, meaning by that the cherubim that were part of
the Ark of the Covenant. And what the Jews referred to
as the Shekinah glory was there. But such was the glory of God's
even token presence that no man could look directly upon it and
live. It was called the most holy place
or the holy of holies for good reason. But only the high priest
went in there, and you know, he was the only one, and there
was only one high priest at any given time. And he served as high priest
until he died. And then another high priest,
one of the descendants of Aaron, would be installed. So at any
given time in the history of Israel under the old covenant,
there was only one person, one person who knew what really went
on back there in that holy of holies. Now we know that the
high priest going back there into that holy of holies was
an illustration of this. The book of Hebrews tells us.
It's an illustration of our Lord Jesus Christ who offered himself
without spot to God. He went into the most holy place,
not the one made with hands, not the one that was the tabernacle
in the wilderness, or later the one built by Solomon, or the
one, the second temple after the captivity. He didn't go into
one of those. he went into the presence of
God himself, entered into heaven, and there, as our high priest
and our sacrifice, he offered himself without spot to God. And this happened all within
the time frame of his crucifixion there on Mount Calvary. And the
reason I feel, at this present time, so inadequate to preach
what I've prepared for is that I want to talk about that event. And yet it's an event that nobody
but the Lord Jesus Christ really understands. He's the high priest
and he's the only one that's ever gone into the presence of
God and offered himself without spot. I've never done that. I've never been in the presence
of God in that way. I don't know what that's like.
I've never been under the wrath of God. I don't know what that's
like. I've never died. I've never done anything. All
I know about what our Lord did is what this book tells me. And
to be quite honest, as I study this, what this book tells me
is shocking. Just what we read about, not
what we witnessed, because we didn't witness it, but what we
read about in the agony and the suffering of our Lord is more
than this mind can wrap itself around. Now, the Christian religion
is a historical religion. And by that, I don't mean that
it's an especially significant religion. It is. But I'm not
using that in the sense when we talk about this is a historic
event, like when they landed on the moon, they said, this
is a historic event. Well, that's not what I mean
when I say that the gospel, the Christian religion, is an historical
religion. What I mean is that the Christian
religion is founded upon and rooted in some events that happened
in history. It's not just a religion of ideas,
values, ceremonies, organizations, theology, or some specific worldview. I was watching the first of a
series of videos that someone has produced supposedly to give
evidence of the reality of the Lord Jesus Christ and the gospel.
And those things intrigued me. I was watching it and I noticed
something. That the person that they were
interviewing in this first episode acted as though faith was simply
getting a new worldview. Well, I understand, I do realize
this. If you do not believe God, and
then by the grace of God you do believe God, it changes your
worldview. But you can change your worldview
without believing God. You can even come to what might
be called a Christian worldview and still not believe God. The Christian religion is not
about having an appropriate cosmology. Rather, it is a religion firmly
rooted in some things that happened. Something happened within the
framework of space and time, and it had eternal consequences. In fact, the religion of Christ
is so rooted in these historical events that if you can disprove
them, If you can prove they didn't happen, you have utterly undermined
the Christian religion, and you and I may as well close this
book, we may as well sell this building, and go home, and as
the scriptures say, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you
die, and that's the end of it. Seriously. I did watch one movie
that was produced a year or two ago by a fellow. It was called
The Case for Christ. And it was a man who was an investigative
journalist. And he was an atheist by profession. But his wife had made a profession
of faith in Christ. And so he was going to investigate
it. And he was talking to someone
who worked at the same newspaper he did. And he said, if I wanted
to prove or disprove the Christian religion, what should I investigate? And the man gave him a very wise
answer. He says, the whole of Christianity hinges upon the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. If it happened, Christianity
is true in all its parts. If it didn't happen, Christianity
is false in all of its parts. Our Lord Jesus was confronted
by those religious men of His day who were just full of themselves
like religious people have been throughout the ages, like we
were until the Lord God gave us grace to understand what we
really are. But they came to Him and they
said, show us a sign. Can you imagine how frustrating
that must have been to the Lord? I mean, He'd walked on water. He'd fed 5,000. He'd raised a
man from the dead. He'd turn water into wine. He'd
healed countless people, the blind, the lame. He'd cast out
demons. And these guys had the sheer
unmitigated gall to say, show us a sign. And you know what
our Lord's answer to them was? It was very simply this. This
wicked and adulterous generation is not going to get any other
sign but the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was
three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish,
so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in the
heart of the earth. And here's the interesting thing. He said that they would receive a sign but
it's not a sign that they would ever witness. That there would be a sign given
to that generation, but that generation wouldn't see it. And
they would have to rely on the testimony of a few people who
did see it. What a rebuke! The Lord in as
much as said, the only sign you will be given is a sign that
you will not be allowed to see. How many people saw the risen
Lord? Not very many. Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter
15 says that he appeared first to the women and then he appeared
to Peter and some of the other apostles and this and that. And
he said, and then 500 brethren at one time. We say 500 is a
lot of people. Well, yeah, but not if you're
comparing them to the population of the world or even the population
of Israel in that day. Not very many people saw the
Lord risen from the dead. You know who else hasn't seen
that? Everybody here. I've never seen the Lord. Have
you? There are people that claim they have, but I know they haven't.
Next time the Lord appears, that's going to be the end of it. End
of everything. We are utterly dependent upon
the testimony of those who saw the risen Lord. Now from our Lord we gain the
true significance of the story of Jonah. Now I imagine every
kid, as they learn Bible stories, this becomes one of their favorites.
I remember as a kid my favorite was David and Goliath. And that
was probably because there was a picture of that. I had one
of those little Bibles that had some pictures in it. And there was a picture
of David and Goliath in there. And that just was a cool story
to a kid. You know how we boys are about fighting and wars and
battles and things like that. But probably the next one was
Jonah. Now, it was my favorite story, or the favorite of many,
right there at the top. Not because we saw in that story
an illustration of Christ in His suffering. It was a great
story to us, because, I mean, a fish swallowed a man, and he
lived inside the fish for three days and three nights, and it
spit him out, and he lived. That's a cool story. Now, when we teach our kids,
that's probably the most they're going to get out of it. And that's
okay for the time being. We train our children, we teach
them the facts of the Scriptures, and do the best we can to give
them the significance of it. But just like with us, it takes
time before they can begin to understand the concepts that
lie behind this. But this story in Jonah is not
an illustration like Jonah pictures us, and we get swallowed up in
troubles and trials, but the Lord brings us through. That's
not what the story is about. The story is about Christ and
him crucified. The story is about one, one person
who endured the wrath of God and survived it. And the result
of that was that a multitude of people were delivered from
the wrath of God. Let's see if we can't find five
or six things here in the story of Jonah which illustrate for
us what our Lord did and what that meant. First of all, and
right out of the gate, we're going to deal with the one that
to me is the most difficult to handle. the most difficult to
accept. But on the cross, the judgment
that fell upon the Lord was considered to be his responsibility. He was responsible for it. Now
let me show you that in the illustration, and then we'll also be looking
at this as it's shown to us in the scriptures. But in Jonah
1, verse 7, and probably everybody here knows the story of Jonah,
how the Lord told him to go to Nineveh and preach, and he didn't
want to do that because he didn't like Nineveh, and he didn't want
the Lord to be merciful to Nineveh. So he took off for Tarshish,
which is exactly the opposite direction. But a storm came up. And it says that the sailors,
they were afraid. They thought they were going
to sink and they wanted to find out whose fault it was. And in verse 7,
it says, then the sailors said to each other, come, let us cast
lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity. They cast
lots and the lot fell on Jonah. Now, this is a mystery. And by that, I mean that it's
something that we may know to be true, but we're not going
to be able to imagine how it could be true. Nor dare we try
to reason upon it as though we actually understand it. We simply
take it as true in the way that the scriptures declare it. In the scriptures, we see two
truths laid side by side And there's no way that we're going
to be able to reconcile these two truths in our mind. First
of all is this, that when Christ died for sins on the tree, on
the cross, he was dying for sins that were not his sins. Peter
puts it this way. He bore our sins in his body
on the tree. You know, I don't have any trouble
understanding that. I mean, I have trouble understanding
why he would do that, that's amazing to me, but I can understand
the concept of the spotless Lord Jesus Christ bearing my sins. Paul put it this way, Christ
died for our sins according to the Scriptures. That makes sense,
we all understand that. Isaiah said this, the Lord has
laid on Him the iniquity of us all. And so we see the Lord Jesus
Christ there as the substitute, standing before God with our
sins upon Him. And therefore, He is bearing
those sins in the presence of God and is enduring the judgment
of God that those sins rightly deserve. And that's exactly what happened. That is the truth. We don't have
any trouble understanding this concept. Now, most people won't
believe it. Very few people want to believe that kind of gospel,
but there's no real difficulty in understanding that concept.
We can understand the transfer of our debts to another person,
can't we? We can understand someone paying
our debt for us. And I'll be honest, We don't
have to understand our Lord's suffering, any beyond that, in
order to believe it to the saving of our souls. Yet, in scripture,
we also find this declared, that there is a very real sense in
which the sins that Christ bore in the presence of God were considered
to be his sins. Now this is an astonishing thing
to say, and I want to be careful. Be careful that I'm not misunderstood. That we would ever connect the
spotless Son of God with the concept of sin seems blasphemous
on the very face of it. And for this reason, we feel
it necessary to issue this disclaimer before we go any further. At
no time ever did the Lord Jesus Christ commit sin. Never. Not once. From the time he was conceived
within his mother's womb up to this very present moment, the
man Christ Jesus has never done anything wrong. We can go further
than that. At no time, at no time has the
Lord Jesus Christ ever had a sinful desire, a sinful thought, a sinful
motion or impulse. His nature remained utterly unchanged
from the moment of his conception until right now. The scriptures teach us that
and we do not deny it. But let's read some scripture
about our Lord, His experience on the cross. Now, our Lord Jesus
Himself said that Jonah was a picture of Him. The sign of the prophet
Jonah was about Him. And so let's see what Jonah says.
If we look at chapter 1, verse 12, it says, Of course, the sailors are trying
to figure out what to do to get the storm to calm down. And Jonah
says in verse 12, pick me up and throw me into the sea and
it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that
this great storm has come upon you. Now, we understand that
in the case of Jonah? That was literally true. That
is, Jonah was a sinful man. And his rebellion against the
Lord is what had brought this storm to pass. But our Lord has told us Jonah
is a picture of Himself. And we apply this picture to
our Lord in this way, that while our Lord did no sin, had no sin,
thought no sin, knew no sin, yet so closely were the sins
of His people laid upon Him that they were counted to be His sins. When God saw the Lord Jesus Christ,
He did not deal with the Lord Jesus Christ saying, well, you're
bearing some other people's sins and I'm going to punish them,
punish you for them. God looked upon the Lord Jesus
Christ and saw sin upon him and regarded those sins as his sins
and dealt with him accordingly. Jeremiah, who was known as the
weeping prophet, is another good illustration of our Lord Jesus
Christ and his sufferings. On several occasions, the Bible
talks about where the Lord Jesus Christ wept. And in that, he
was like Jeremiah. And if you would turn to the
first chapter of Jeremiah with me, I want to show you something. Excuse me, the first chapter
of Lamentations, another book written by Jeremiah. We'll begin reading at verse
12. Is it nothing to you, all you
who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering
like my suffering that was inflicted on me, that the Lord brought
on me in the day of His fierce anger? Now, who else can be saying
these words other than our Lord Jesus Christ? Jeremiah never
suffered in such a way that other men did not suffer. Jeremiah
could not say of himself, look, folks, at me and all the suffering
that I'm enduring. Nobody's ever suffered like me.
There have been other people that suffered on the same measure
as Jeremiah did. There's only one to whom these
words can apply. Jeremiah is speaking for our
Lord, hundreds of years before our Lord ever endured these things. But these words belong in the
mouth of the Lord. And in verse 13, we go on to
read this. From on high, he sent fire, sent
it down into my bones. He spread a net for my feet and
turned me back. He made me desolate, faint all
day long. And verse 14 is the clincher.
My sins. have been bound into a yoke by
his hands. They are woven together. They
have come upon my neck, and the Lord has sapped my strength.
He has handed me over to those I cannot withstand. Did you hear
these words of the prophet speaking for Christ? My sins. Can you imagine that? You and
I look at the cross and we say, no, no, my sins. Those were my
sins that put him there. But our Lord bore them. And in
the presence of God, he said, my sins. My sins. Does that do anything to you? You know, it would be one thing
to take the place of a criminal in jail, to say, I love that
person who committed that crime, and I'm going to serve his sentence
for him. It would be another thing altogether
to step inside his cell and say, it was my crime. I did it. He did not just wear our sins
upon him as a cloak. He owned them as his own sins. Now look over at Psalm 40. I'll tell you in a few minutes
why I'm pressing this point a little bit. Maybe a whole lot, I don't
know. We see it as the Lord bearing
our sins. But the Lord called them his
sins. In Psalm chapter 40, we have David. David was another
prominent picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, so much so that
David is, excuse me, the Lord Jesus is called the son of David,
son of David. And in this Psalm, We read in
verse 6, Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears
you have pierced. Burnt offerings and sin offerings
you did not require. Then I said, Here I am. I have
come. It is written about me in the
scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God. Your law is within
my heart. Now in the book of Hebrews, the
writer of the book of Hebrews says those are the words of the
Lord Jesus Christ. I believe it's in chapter 10. It's the Lord Jesus who said,
Sacrifice an offering you did not desire. It's the Lord Jesus
who said, Here I am, I have come. It is written about me in the
scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God. Your law is within
my heart. And you know something? We have no problem with applying
those words to the Lord Jesus Christ. But skip down four verses
now. Verse 12. For troubles without
number surround me. Now, we wouldn't have any trouble
with that. We look at our Lord Jesus on the cross and we see
that, indeed, He's surrounded with troubles. But notice the
next words. My sins have overtaken me, and
I cannot see. They are more than the hairs
of my head, and my heart fails within me. Our Lord owned those sins and said they were his. He did not say, I'm dying for
somebody else. I didn't really do this. He said,
I'm the guilty one. He became before the bar of God. He came into the judgment seat
of God, and he did not say, I'm really innocent, but I'll go
ahead and take the punishment for these sins. He came before
the bar of God's justice, and when he was asked, how do you
plead? He said, I plead guilty. Guilty. These sins are mine. How did that make the Lord feel?
Well, I don't want to go too far on this. Well, I don't want
to go beyond what the Scriptures say. But notice how it's described
here. When it says, my sins have overtaken
me and I cannot see. They're more than the hairs of
my head and my heart fails within me. Have you ever been so overwhelmed
by a sense of your sinfulness that you feel like sin has just
utterly overtaken you? That you're nothing but sin.
That your sins are innumerable. Our translation says, I cannot
see. And that's an accurate translation. The King James says, I cannot
look up. And I think that the King James is getting the sense
there. What he's saying is, is that sin has so pressed me down,
that I do not even have it within me to look up to God. to find
his mercy and to find his goodness. It reminds me of that publican.
Remember the publican who said, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.
It says the publican was there at the temple and he could not
so much as lift his eyes toward heaven. So great was the pressure of
his sin upon him. That's how David felt about his
sin. But when he was speaking about
his own personal sin, he was speaking as a prophet and giving
us a window into the sufferings of the master. I don't know how to explain this,
but I know this. Our Lord didn't just feel the
judgment for my sin. He felt the sin. He didn't just bear the judgment
of my sin. He bore my sin, called it his,
and felt within himself all the wretchedness all the awfulness of being one
accursed by God for sin. He says that his sins were more
than the hairs on his head and that his heart failed within
him. I want you to think of the time
whatever it may have been, when you felt your sin most severely,
when you were able to understand something of what it meant to
be a sinner in the sight of God, and then understand this, our
Lord felt it more. For he felt it not only for your
sin, But for the sins of a multitude, the scripture says that nobody
can number. I have no idea how our Lord endured
these things. I have no way to enter into that. But he did. How can we reconcile this? How
can we reconcile that on the one hand, the sufferings of our
Savior are considered to be our sins laid on Him, and yet we
look at other Scriptures and it speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ
calling them His sin. How is that? Well, note this,
the only one in Scripture who ever said that the sins that
Christ bore belong to Christ, was Christ himself. Nobody else
ever said that. Now it was the prophets speaking
in behalf of Christ, but they spoke in his voice. You and I,
we look at the cross and what do we see? We see a man suffering
for what we did. We see a man stricken of God
and afflicted. It says in the book of Isaiah
that He was marred more than any man, so much that those who
looked upon Him were appalled and turned their face away from
Him. We see that and say, oh, look what my sins did to Him.
And we're right when we say that. That's our perspective on it.
But our Lord, as He went through that experience, went through
it, owning those sins as his own, experiencing the guilt of
them and enduring the punishment of them. I stand amazed that the Lord
would bother to do anything for me. I'm more amazed that the
Lord would bear the punishment of my sins, and I am utterly flabbergasted
that he would call those sins his and own them as his before
God the judge. When the Lord bore our sins as
his own, he truly and completely died. I've said this before,
but I'll repeat it. The Lord Jesus Christ is the
only person who has ever truly and completely died. Everybody
else is just dying. You say, wait a minute, there
are people who die, we go out and bury them. Well, their bodies died.
But they go on. And those who die under the judgment
of God, who die under the wrath of God, they spend eternity dying
and they never get it done. Jesus Christ is the only one
that died. Notice how this is described in Jonah chapter 2. He says in the last part of verse
2, from the depths of the grave I call for help and you listen
to my cry. You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart
of the seas, and the current swirled about me. All your waves
and breakers swept over me. I said, I have been banished
from your sight. Do those words sound familiar?
Did not our Lord cry out from the cross, my God, my God, why
have you forsaken me? Here is the darling Son of God,
as the old timers used to refer to Him. Here's the spotless Lamb
of God, and yet now He's been cast out of the presence of God. Banished. He says in verse 5, The engulfing
waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me, seaweed was wrapped
around my head, 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." But what is he saying? I got
sent down into the pit. I went to the very depths of
death. He did not just taste death,
he did not just sample it. He did not take a sip of it,
but He drank the cup dry. Everything that it means to die.
Everything that God meant when He said to Adam, in the day that
you eat of it, dying you shall die. Everything that meant. Our
Lord experienced it. Of course, because He experienced
it, His people never will. Our Lord's suffering fulfilled
the vow he made as Savior of God's elect. Look at verse 9.
But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I
have vowed I will make good. Today's preachers want folks
to make a vow. We're always getting folks to
vow stuff. And you know why that is? Because they know that folks
who have not truly been regenerated by the Spirit of God, you've
got to bind them up with promises. And the interesting thing is,
these TV preachers, every time they tell you to make a vow,
somehow or another that vow involves sending them money. Well, our
Lord Jesus made a vow. Before the world began, God the
Son made a vow to His Father. And here he fulfills it. Here he completes it. Our Lord
said it is finished. The word means perfected, done,
accomplished. He fulfilled his vow. You know
something, a lot of folks have made vows to God. Jesus Christ
is the only one who ever actually fulfilled a vow to God. And how
did he do it? By offering himself as a sacrifice. And here, this blows me away. But I, with a song of thanksgiving,
will sacrifice to you. Oh, think of that, brethren.
Our Lord goes to the cross. He goes to the cross to bear
things unspeakable. To bear things we cannot understand.
And he gives thanks to God for the privilege of doing it. That's illustrated in the Lord's
table. It says that he took the bread and when he had given thanks,
he broke it. He knew exactly who that bread
represented. He knew what the breaking of
the bread represented. And yet he gave thanks. He was not simply willing to
take our sins upon himself, call them his sins and suffer for
them. He gave thanks to his father
for the privilege. I ask you, is there anyone like
the Lord? Have you ever known anyone come even close to that? Most people think I'm kind of
a nice guy, but I'm going to tell you right now, I'm not going
to pay your debts, I'm not going to serve your sins, and I'm certainly
not going to call your sins mine. And if I ever did, I never would
give thanks to God for the privilege of it. Our Lord did all those
things. No wonder the book of Revelation
records those words that were the refrain of our opening song,
to him that has loved us and washed us from sin, to him be
the glory forever. So be it. In the face of Jesus Christ,
there is not one person in all the universe who has a right
to boast in anything. No one comes even close. No one
is even on the same field as him when it comes to this work
of grace and mercy in behalf of others. We celebrate people
when they do what we call good works, and I guess that's legitimate. But friends, what are our good
works compared to these wonderful, glorious good works of the Lord
Jesus Christ when He suffered as a sinner in the place of those
His suffering made righteous? What else can I say? I don't
know. I'll just move on. I'm almost done. Our Lord's suffering
was a work of God's salvation. The last part of verse 9, chapter
2, salvation comes from the Lord. There are a lot of people today
going to church. There are folks going to church today who don't
go any other time during the year except maybe Christmas.
They show up and they think by showing up on these notable holidays
that God is especially impressed with them, they've done a little
something. And then you got people that are more engaged in that
and they're very regular church goers. They go every time the
church door is open. And folks think that they're
very interested in God. And I'm not saying that, I mean
there are some that are. But there are a lot of people
Right now, in church, trying to earn their way to heaven.
They are trying to collect their own salvation. They are going
to church in the hope that the very act of going to church,
somehow or another, puts them in a good standing with God,
and God's going to let their sins go by the board. Friends,
salvation, from the very beginning of it until the absolute fulfillment
of it, when we are made to be like Jesus in the presence of
God, Faultless before the throne and full of joy, every particle
of it is the work of God and nobody else. God's a soloist. He sings no
duets. He has never joined a choir.
His song is His song alone. You and I, we get swept up in
it. His salvation is something that
comes upon us. We participate in it in the sense
that it grabs us, but we never participate in the
doing of it. We no more participate in our
salvation than the drowned man participates in his own rescue. People say, well, God wants to
save everybody, but you've got to let him. Well, then nobody's
going to be saved. Let me tell you that. If God's
got to wait on us to cooperate, it ain't going to happen. Salvations
of the Lord. Now Jonah at this point, as he's
picturing the Lord Jesus, he has endured everything that divine
justice can do against the sins that he bore. And what is the
result? Verse 10. And the Lord commanded
the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land. He did not ask the fish to let
him out. He did not tell Jonah, you can
walk out anytime you want. You know, our Lord was submissive
to God in every respect. I know he was God, but he's also
submissive to God. He says to his father, into your
hands I commit my spirit. And he did. And he came out of the grave when
the father told the grave to spit him out. And why? All the work was done. That fish couldn't hold Jonah
anymore. Jonah didn't belong in a fish anymore. And God commanded
the fish And the fish did what he was commanded and spit him
out. And that morning of the first
day of the week, which we celebrate at this time of the year, the
command of God came forth to that tomb and said, spit him
out, spit him out. Just as the fish vomited Jonah
on the dry land, signifying that he was no longer part of judgment. The seas represented the judgment.
Our Lord came out into a world, a new creation which he had made,
in which there is no judgment, it's just dry land. He came out a new man. He was the same man, but he's
a new man. He went into death bearing sin. He came out with
no sin, but bringing salvation. He went into death as a criminal
in the kingdom of God. He comes out as the glorious,
righteous king of God's kingdom. He was sped out on dry land,
and then lastly, The death, burial, and resurrection of Christ sent
the gospel to the Gentiles. What happened after this? Jonah, wherever it was that fish
bit him out, he walked at least several hundred miles to get
to Nineveh. The city, huge, huge. The city which at that very time
was under the judgment of God was as non-Jewish a city as you
can imagine because they were set in their minds in destroying
Israel. So they represent Gentiles as
much as you can possibly think. of the distinction between Jews
and Gentiles, and Jonah was not sent to Jerusalem to declare
the message of God's salvation through the death, burial, and
resurrection of Christ. He was sent to Nineveh to call those
Gentiles to repentance. And he went there, and he called
them, and they repented. And the judgment that had been
pronounced upon Nineveh was averted. But you know why? Because the judgment that had
been pronounced on Nineveh was endured by Jonah in the belly
of the fish. And he did not go announcing
the possibility that judgment would not fall
upon Nineveh. He went calling them to repentance,
and they repented. But the judgment had already
been accomplished. No sign is going to be given
to a wicked and adulterous generation but this one. The suffering,
the dying, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And all we do, week by week here,
is do the best we can to preach that sign. And it gets to some Ninevites.
God brings some Ninevites in, and they hear, and they repent,
and they discover that the judgment which would have fallen on them
fell on somebody else instead. And that's the gospel.