Okay, Jonah, the book of Jonah,
we're going to read through it. It's not a very long book, it
seems like a lot to read, but I think we need to read it because
the book itself, the writings of it, need to be kept in the
forefront of our mind before we ever begin to think about
what it means. Jonah chapter one, verse one. Now the word
of the Lord. came to Jonah, the son of Amittai,
saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against
it, for their wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah
rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord,
and went down to Joppa, and he found a ship going to Tarshish,
so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it to go with
them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord sent
out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest
in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. Then the
mariners were afraid, and they cried, Every man to his God,
and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea
to lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into
the sides of the ship, and he lay and was fast asleep. So the
shipmaster came to him and said to him, What meanest thou, O
sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God, if
so be that God will think upon us that we perish not. And they
said everyone to his fellow, come on, I mean, sorry, come
and let us cast lots that we may know for whose cause this
evil is upon us. So they cast lots and a lot fell
upon Jonah. Then said they unto him, tell
us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us. What is
thine occupation? And whence comest thou? What
is thy country? And of what people art thou?
So you can see they're trying to find out, they're trying to
connect the cause of the trouble that's upon them to something.
They thought maybe whatever work Jonah did, it was evil, or maybe
the place he came from was evil, or maybe the country, or what
kind of people he came from, one of those things had to be
to blame. 9 And he said to them, I am in
Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, which made
the sea and the dry land. 10 Then were the men exceedingly
afraid, and said to him, Why hast thou done this? for the
men knew that he fled from the presence of the LORD, because
he had told them. Then said they to him, what shall
we do to thee, that the sea may be calm to us? For the sea wrought
and was tempestuous. And he said to them, take me
up and cast me forth into the sea, so shall the sea be calm
to you. For I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon
you. Nevertheless, the men rode hard
to bring it to the land. And they could not, for the sea
wrought and was tempestuous against them. Wherefore they cried unto
the Lord, and said, We beseech Thee, O Lord, we beseech Thee,
let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent
blood, for Thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased Thee. So they
took up Jonah and cast him forth into the sea, and the sea ceased
from her raging. So they were worried that by
casting Jonah in, they were going to bring judgment upon themselves,
but Jonah, a prophet of the Lord, told them this was God's will,
so they did it, and in doing it, they prayed that the Lord
would not hold them guilty. Verse 16, then the men feared
the Lord exceedingly and offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made
vows. Now the Lord had prepared a great
fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the
fish three days and three nights. 2. Then Jonah prayed to the LORD
his God out of the fish's belly, and he said, I cried, by reason
of mine affliction to the LORD. And he heard me out of the belly
of hell, cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hast cast
me into the deep, in the midst of the seas, and the floods compassed
me about. All thy billows and thy waves
passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of
thy sight, yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters
compassed me about, even to the soul. The depth clothed me about,
or clothed me about. The weeds were wrapped about
my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains. The earth with
her bars was about me forever. Yet hast Thou brought up my life
from corruption, O Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came in unto Thee, into
Thine holy temple. They that observe lying vanities
forsake their own mercy, but I will sacrifice to Thee with
a voice of thanksgiving. I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord." And
the Lord spake to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the
dry land. And the word of the Lord, chapter
3, the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the
preaching that I bid thee. So Jonah arose and went unto
Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now, Nineveh was
an exceeding great city of three days journey. That's a big town. And Jonah began to enter into
the city a day's journey, and he cried and said, Yet forty
days in Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed
God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth from the greatest
of them even to the least of them. For the word came unto
the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid
his robe from him, and covered himself with sackcloth, and sat
in ashes. And he 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,
take anything. Let them not feed nor drink water,
but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily
unto God. Yea, let them turn everyone from
his evil way and 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? And God saw their works, that
they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil
that he had said that he would do to them. And he did it not. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly. Chapter 4. He was very angry,
and he prayed to 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 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. Therefore now,
O Lord, take I beseech thee my life from me, for it is better
for me to die than to live. And said the Lord, doest thou
well to be angry? So Jonah went out of the city
and sat on the east side of the city and there made him a booth
and sat under it in the shadow till he might see what would
become of the city. A booth is just like a little
tent made of branches. And the Lord prepared a gourd,
and he made it to come up over Jonah that it might be a shadow
over his head to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was
exceeding glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when
the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it
withered. And it came to pass when the sun did arise that God
prepared a vehement east wind, and the sun beat upon the head
of Jonah that he fainted and wished in himself to die. And
he said, it is better for me to die than to live. And God
said to Jonah, doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And
he said, I do well to be angry even to death. Then said the
Lord, thou hast had pity on the gourd. for which thou hast not
labored, neither mayst it grow, which came up in a night, and
perished in a night. And should not I spare Nineveh,
that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand,
which is a hundred and twenty thousand persons, that cannot
discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also
much cattle? and so it is. Now, I want you
to consider the fact that the book of Jonah is a book first
and foremost about Jesus Christ and Him crucified and His grace
to sinners. We know this because in Matthew
chapter 12, Jesus said, as Jonah was three days and three nights
in the belly of the whale, so the Son of Man should be three
days and three nights in the heart of the earth. In other
words, Jonah was a prophet, the snippet of his life we just read
here, was an account recorded by God in scripture to teach
us about Christ's sin-atoning death. And that's really what
is the significance of it. But there's much in it in terms
of detail that helps us to appreciate how God does save and how he
arranged history to show this. So in chapters 1 and 2 of Jonah
we see the substitutionary work of Christ verified by the Lord
Jesus himself. In chapter 1 the mariners were
saved from the raging sea when Jonah was cast into it. And in
chapter 2, Jonah spent three days and three nights in the
belly of the fish or the whale, which the Lord Jesus explained
as a prophecy of his own sinatonic death and justification in his
resurrection. So in chapter 3, we see the mercy
of God to hell-deserving sinners, and in chapter 4, we see that
salvation is out of God's goodness alone, and even a prophet sent
by the Lord is not our Savior, but only Christ. so that out
of God's great goodness we are saved. And so, the overall message
of the book of Jonah is God's sovereign salvation by Jesus
Christ to hell-deserving sinners. And Jonah summarized the entire
book before the Lord told the fish to spit him out when he
said, salvation is of the Lord. That's what the book is about,
salvation that is of the Lord and how he does that. So, think
again. The Book of Jonah is obviously
about a wicked people of the city called Nineveh, which is
an amazingly large city. A city that took three days to
get across. By walking, I suppose by walking. How far can a man walk in a day?
I think I could easily walk ten miles in a day. I probably could
walk 15 or 20 miles. And I don't know how old Jonah
was, but I would expect a day's journey to be somewhere between
10 and 20 miles. Just calculate that. If the city
was three days journey, and it was only 10 miles, I'd be 30
miles across. That's a big city. Massive. That's
huge. Yeah. And in those days, they
didn't have high-rises, so it spread out. And imagine how they
got all the food they needed for that city and everything
else. What they needed to come in, what they needed to go out.
Massive city. It turns out it was the capital
of the country of Assyria. The Assyrians had a capital in
Nineveh, and I'll talk more about that later, but not tonight.
But the book of Jonah is about these people and the Lord said
in verse two that they were a wicked people. And the book of Jonah
is about a disobedient prophet who is Jonah. And it is also
about the one true and only sovereign God who alone can and does save
sinners by Jesus Christ, which he did for the town of Nineveh. The book of Jonah is about God's
rich mercy to sinners in Christ, flowing from his throne, from
his own goodness alone, uncoerced, undeserved, and unimpeded by
all that oppose him, in order to save his people by Jesus Christ. So tonight I'm doing an overview
of the book. So in all of this we see the theme of scripture.
That theme is that God is good. In fact, he alone is good. Jesus
said that God alone is good in Matthew 19. When we say that
God is good, we don't want to think about good as something
that God tries to adhere to, but God himself is good, so that
good is who God is. We can't know good unless we
know God. He is nothing but good, and he can do no wrong. His goodness
is seen in all of his works. but nowhere, nowhere more than
in his great love and his rich mercy to the insignificant and
to the ungodly sinful people like I am, not only is He merciful
to people like I am, and not only am I a sinful man, but we,
according to Scripture, did not like to retain God in our knowledge. We served ourselves. We want
to think our own thoughts. We don't want God to be part
of it. And we also preferred our own way and our own honor
and thought that our own righteousness deserved praise from God. Now that is depravity, isn't
it? but that describes me and in fact it describes everyone
which we see in this people of Nineveh. We'll get into that
more detail. What can we learn from this? We can learn the height
of God's solitary goodness. And may we know Jesus Christ,
our God and Father, in His goodness, by His goodness in our salvation.
Now I want to consider in this book, as we just begin studying
this book, the names of these people and places at the outset. Because in Scripture, according
to Proverbs 30, verse 5, every word of God is pure. So these
names and places were not chosen randomly, and they weren't just
named because they happened to be there. God actually had a
purpose in their names. I've got a little book here I
can recommend to you. It's called A Dictionary of Scripture
Proper Names by a man named J. B. Jackson. But it has every
proper name in the Old and New Testament, whether it's city,
whether it's a person, or whether it's an expression, in fact. In fact, they have in this book
I noticed today, this is kind of an aside, you know the word
Sila in the Psalms? You see that over and over in
the Psalms? Well, here it is. It occurs in 2 Kings 14, verse
7, where the people of Judah Yeah, the people of Judah, under
one of their bad kings, attacked and overthrew the Edomites, who
were Esau's children. And 10,000 of the Edomites were
destroyed, and the Edomites were known for trusting in the mountains
they lived in. And so Sela means a crag or a
rock, and it talks about that name of that place in 2 Kings
14.7. But if you understand it in the meaning of the word here,
it just means prominent place or to make prominent, which makes
sense because in the Psalms, you'll see it pause every once
in a while and it'll say sila, which means this should be prominent.
This is important. And that's what we thought it
meant, but I didn't have any evidence for that. But this person
who happens to be able to do that explained it. So anyway,
I'm recommending that book to you. And now let me get to the
names of these people. But first before I do, let me
go on here. The book of Jonah is a prophecy.
Clearly Jonah was a prophet. Jesus said he was. But the message
is by the personal life experiences and the events of the prophet
and the words recorded by God of him and of others, such as
the mariners and the king and the people of Nineveh. So it's
important to see here the pattern that God writes scripture by
men, inspired by the Holy Spirit, about not only their words but
their lives, what happens to them and what they do. So it's
their works and their words. And the reason that's significant
is it means that the words and the works and the things done
to the Lord Jesus Christ help us to explain, help us to understand
the message of the gospel because he himself is that message. So
understand that, that the prophet's words, what happens to him, what
he does, all those things were instructed by God and ordered
by God in order to carry the whole message, so not just his
words. And that's the case with Jonah
here, which is why Jesus made reference to him being in the
fish three days and three nights. So the Book of Jonah helps us
to understand that Jonah is both the writer and he is the historical
character about whom he writes. And what is that but an autobiography,
right? We know what that is. When somebody
writes about themselves and their life, or maybe just a part of
their life, it's called an autobiography. So the Book of Jonah is an autobiography
that prophesies of Christ and him crucified and the salvation
of sinners by the Lord Jesus according to the will of God
who is abundant in his goodness and his truth and in his mercy,
as it says in Exodus 34, verse 6, where the Lord told that to
Moses. Now, Jonah's father, if you look at this in verse 1,
is Amittai. You see that? That's his name,
Amittai. What does Amittai mean? Well,
it means my faithfulness or my truth. Both could be understood
by this name, my faithfulness. And Jonah's name, interestingly
enough, means dove, like a bird, a dove. And his hometown was
a place called Gath Heffer. Well, Gath means wine press and
Heffer means a pit, a pit of shame. And hence the word Gath
Heffer or the town has to do with a wine press of digging
or a pit of shame as it occurs in scripture. Now the city also
that Jonah was told to go to, which was the capital of Assyria,
means offspring of ease or offspring abiding. So you see that these
things take on color in the account because God is using the names
of these people and places in order to help us to help draw
the picture clearly and fully of the message. So let's take
that summary in the next paragraph here on page two of the handout.
So if we take the names of these people and the places together
with the subject matter of the book, then using Christ's own
words from Matthew chapter 12, we can summarize or we can surmise
the following from those names and places and people and the
message of the book that Jesus gave. The account of the events
and the words of Jonah's life in his autobiography is this.
First, it is the inspired words of the Spirit of God who is like
a dove, remember? Matthew 3, verse 16, the Spirit
of God descended from heaven, didn't he? And he lighted upon
the Lord Jesus Christ. And from that moment forward,
the Lord Jesus had the Spirit of God without measure. He had
him before, actually. But that account there was given
to show that at the outset of Christ's ministry, and what was
the event then? He was baptized by John, right? All the Old Testament prophesied
of what? Jesus Christ is coming. Jesus
Christ and Him crucified. 1 Peter 1, verses 10 and 11 say
that the Spirit of Christ was in the prophets, telling of Christ's
sufferings and the glory that would follow. Jesus Christ crucified,
risen and reigning. That's the subject of Scripture.
So the Old Testament was about Him. And John the Baptist was
the last prophet of that Old Testament. And what did John
do? Well, he pointed to him as the Lamb of God, but then he
baptized him. And what did that baptism signify?
It signified the baptism that he would undergo when, as our
substitute, he endured the wrath of God for us. But at the moment
when he was baptized, what happened? The Spirit of God, like a dove,
descended from heaven and lighted upon him. And then after that,
there was a voice from heaven which said in Matthew 3.17, this
is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. Remember? So the
spirit of God is like a dove and he lighted upon Christ, meaning
that Christ had the spirit without measure, John 3.34. and that
God was well pleased with his son. Identifying him as the son
of God, identifying his work and his mission, everything about
him is well pleasing to God. Never ever said of a man in scripture
but the Lord Jesus Christ. No one but he had the spirit
of God without measure. And so he comes and noticed that
in scripture, what else is said about the dove? Remember the
words of the Lord Jesus? He said, wise as serpents, but
harmless as doves. And if you look up that word
harmless in scripture, you'll find that it has a lot of meaning
to it, but I'll just give you the synopsis here. The word harmless,
if you look it up, it means without mixture, a simple thing, a clear
and pure thing, as well as gentle. So here now, apply that to the
Lord Jesus Christ. He was pure, He was true, he
was without hypocrisy, all of his words were right, and he
did only right. There was no shadow of sin in
him, nothing. So that he was gentle. Remember
Matthew 11, 28, coming to me, all you who labor. and are heavy
laden, I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. And you shall find
rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
Remember those words? So you see here that the description
given of the Lord Jesus Christ is someone who is very, his words
and his ways were very easy to embrace. In James 3.17, it says
this, the wisdom that is from above is first pure, The dove
signifies that. Then peaceable, gentle, easy
to be entreated. In other words, easy to receive
it. It's not like it's an irritant or a heavy load. Full of mercy,
full of good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. Perfect description of the Lord
Jesus Christ, isn't it? That's what the dove signifies.
Coming down on Christ, anointing him to perform the work God gave
him to do, to offer himself to God, and so fulfill the baptism
prophesied in the Old Testament and signified by John, and putting
him under the water, and him coming up again. What did Jonah
experience? The baptism, three days and three
nights. And so all these things tie together.
The dove, Jonah, that's his name means, spoke of Christ. And speaking
of Christ as one whose name meant dove, he's speaking as the spirit
of God pointing us to Christ. That's what the spirit of God
does. Jesus said himself in John 14, he said, he shall testify
of me. He's gonna be the comforter.
And I'm not gonna leave you alone. I will come to you. So when the
spirit of the Lord comes, it's the Lord Jesus coming by his
spirit. All these things are said of him. What is the spirit
of God called in scripture? the spirit of truth, because
he's pure. There's no shadow of darkness
in him. He's called the spirit of grace,
because that's what sinners need, and that's what removes our burden.
And he's called the spirit of light and life. So many things
are spoken of him, and we welcome that spirit, don't we? We welcome
the Spirit of God because he tells us of Christ as needy sinners.
So that's the first thing, and the first bullet there, the inspired
words of the Spirit of God, who is like a dove. And secondly,
God raised up a sinful man, Jonah, out of what? The Pit of Shame. That's the name where he lived.
The place where he lived was called Gath Heifer. And it meant,
his hometown meant a wine press, and heifer meant a pit or shame.
And so Jonah, a sinner, was raised up out of this place, Gath Heifer,
in order to show that God raises up sinners and gives them his
word, pointing men to Christ. Right? And so he raised him up
to be a preacher. Christ sent him, as it says in
1 Peter 1, I mentioned, verse 10 and 11. And notice in verse
1 of Jonah 1, it says, Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah. Christ sent him, and who is the
word of the Lord? It's the Lord Jesus Christ. He's
the one who came to Jonah in telling him what to do here.
Jonah was the son of my faithfulness, or the son of truth, and the
truth is in Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life,
and therefore the only and all-sufficient Savior. The book of Jonah is
about the way God saves all of his people. This book describes
how God saves us. And so it describes each one
of us and the way God saved us in our own personal case. It
becomes our own personal testimony. As it says in Revelation 12 verse
11, they overcame Satan by the blood of the Lamb and by the
word of their testimony. This is how God saves us, through
Christ. So it is also concerning Christ
and him crucified, risen and exalted. Notice in this first
chapter here, what was it that happened? Jonah was cast overboard
into the raging sea by the mariners so that the sea would be calm
to the mariners. That's substitution, isn't it?
So it's concerning Christ and Him crucified. And it also displays
a sovereign God of heaven, displays the mercy of the sovereign God
of heaven. In chapter one, in verse nine, he said, I am in
a Hebrew. I fear the Lord, the God of heaven. Then the Lord alone is good in
all of His ways because we know that it was God's will that sent
Jonah to Nineveh. These people were wicked. Why
did God send Jonah there? Not just to tell them, you're
wicked and I'm going to destroy you, but to actually save them.
So it was the Lord and His goodness that He sent Jonah there. And
then, also, though the wickedness of Nineveh offended God and offended
the rule of his throne of justice and mercy, nevertheless, he sent
his prophet to tell of his son, who would come and offer himself
to God for us, we who were perishing and under the just wrath of God,
like the storm was upon the mariners. All right. And then in chapter
two of Jonah, as we're going on through these names here and
connecting them together with its story, Christ was thus crucified,
he died, and he was buried, but he rose again, and all that is
seen in Jonah being three days and three nights in the whale's
belly, or the fish's belly, in chapter two. But notice this. After Jonah was spit out, having
risen again from the dead, the Lord Jesus Christ sent his preacher
to those for whom he died, with the message that Christ gave
him to preach. So having risen from the dead,
what happened? The Lord sent Jonah to Nineveh
to preach the gospel. What happened when Jesus ascended
to heaven? He sent his disciples to preach the gospel. Peter said
in Acts 5.31, God has exalted him to be a prince and a savior
for to give repentance to Israel and the remission of sins. So
we see that this is fulfilled here too. After Jonah was spit
out by the whale, he immediately got up and went to Nineveh. He
did what the Lord Jesus Christ sent him to do. And then notice
also, by the preaching of Christ with the Holy Spirit sent down
from heaven to attend and make that word effective, as it says
in many places of scripture, and I've only given two there,
1 Peter 1.11 and Acts 10.44, those to whom Christ sends his
preacher, who were the Ninevites in this case, though they justly
were under the condemnation of God for their wickedness, they
nevertheless heard by God's grace and by His grace, according to
Jonah 3, verse 5, they believed God and they turned to God by
that faith they had in Him, which would have to ultimately be in
the Lord Jesus Christ. Jonah's message is told first
to the Mariners by his confession. Now, notice this, notice this.
When Jonah tells the Mariners who he is, notice in verse 9
of chapter 1, see how this goes. He says, I am a Hebrew. What
does that mean? I'm God's. I'm God's people.
I'm one of his. And then he says, and I fear
the Lord. Don't we? And he says also, he goes on
to tell them, not only did he fear the Lord, but in verse 10,
they said that he had told them that he was disobedient to the
Lord. So look at the points here. I am the Lord's, I fear the Lord,
I'm a sinner, but salvation is of the Lord." This is the message
of the preacher, isn't it? God is good. I'm His. I fear
Him, because He's taught me. And that fear of Him led not
just to my woe and despair, even though I'm a sinner, but He also
showed me that salvation is of the Lord. So you see the confession
of Jonah? That's our confession, isn't it? I am the Lord's, I
fear the Lord, I'm a sinner, but salvation is of the Lord.
And so the message is told again, the message of Christ and Him
crucified is told again when He told the mariners that by
the will of God they should cast Him into the raging sea, which
signifies God's wrath against them, and that the sea might
be calm to them, which is peace with God by the blood of Christ,
isn't it? How do we have peace with God? How is the sea of God's
judgment made calm to us, but by the blood of Christ? And so
this is a clear picture of the substitutionary, sin-atoning,
curse-bearing death of our Lord Jesus Christ. So what should
we do? Well, we should revel in it.
Dear believing sinner, revel in this. Praise God for it. Bow
down before Him and worship His Son for it and the Father by
Him. So I mentioned this Jonah's confession.
He is Christ. I belong to the Lord Jesus Christ.
I fear the Lord. I sin against Him, but salvation
is of the Lord. What a confession. This is my
confession and I know it's yours if you believe on Him. Now, in
the light of the rest of scripture, Jonah's message emphasizes the
great judgment of God of His wrath against us for our sins.
That's the first thing. Go to Nineveh, preach against
it, in 40 days God's going to overthrow the city. That was
the message. But it doesn't end there, does it? And thank God
it doesn't end there. It's also the message of this
great grace of God that is in Christ alone, which we see in
the preview in chapter 1, when Jonah was cast overboard by the
mariners, and in chapter 2, when he suffered under the wrath of
God and prayed faithfully, trusting God in his mercy, and he was
delivered, which the Lord Jesus Christ was for us. So hopefully
we can see all that, the great grace that God has given us here.
First of all, Jonah would say this in his confession, he saved
me. Isn't that true? He saved me. He saved every believer the same
way. Because why? Well, what happened to Jonah?
He went down into the sea. He was swallowed by the fish.
He was in the fish three days and three nights. How were we
saved? Well, according to Galatians 2, verse 19, I, through the law,
am dead to the law. I'm crucified with Christ. Right? We were crucified with the Lord
Jesus Christ. How were we delivered from the
wrath of God? We had to go through the wrath we deserved, but we
didn't do it in our own person. We did it in our Savior. And
yet it was counted to us. It was in Christ. We actually did it. So we were
crucified with him. And then what else does it say
in Galatians 2.20? Nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me. And the life that I now live
in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me." So this same Jesus, according
to Jonah's account here, sent him to the Ninevites with the
Holy Spirit of God sent down from heaven. And though he was
a sinner, like they were, he spoke to them of certain judgment.
because of God's wrath, and yet the great grace of God that is
in Christ alone. Therefore, don't be proud. Humble
yourself." That's the message here, like the publican did in
Luke chapter 18, but not like the Pharisee, because he didn't
humble himself. Okay? Does that make sense? This
is the gospel, and this is the context. Now, I want you to think
about this for a minute here, too, as I was preparing for the
Bible study after I wrote all this. How many people have you
met who don't know anything about the book of Jonah? Almost everyone
has heard about Jonah, haven't they? Jonah, yeah, he's the guy
that was swallowed by the whale. Yeah, there's a big story in
the Bible. This guy supposedly swallowed
by a whale. That's about as much as they can tell you about it,
but almost everyone has heard about Jonah. But why? Why have
we heard? Why do we remember Jonah so easily? Well, because it's such a fantastic
story. It's just way beyond anything
that we could ever imagine, that a man could be swallowed, that
all this would happen. He would run from God. God would
catch up to him through the storm. They would throw him into the
sea. The people that threw him into the sea would be delivered
from the judgment. But he himself would go down
into the water, get swallowed by this whale, and be in the
belly of that whale three days and three nights. He would pray
from the whale's belly. The Lord would have the tell
the whale to spit him out on the dry land. Amazing story,
isn't it? But what's more amazing? You
can't think of many things except the truth that it points to,
you see. What's more amazing than Jonah's
going down into the fish's belly for three days and three nights
and being spit out and then going and preaching to Nineveh and
a city so huge that there were 120,000 people who didn't know
their left hand from their right, probably children, infants. It
must have been a massive city of a million people, who knows
how many, millions of people. the Assyrian capital. And yet,
what's more great than that? That it's a son of God. against
whom we sinned, not only went and sent a preacher, but he himself
went into the grave. He himself was crucified at our
hands, like the mariners threw Jonah into the sea, crucified
by our wickedness. We had to take our place with
the murderers of Christ, and it was his substitutionary willing
death in obedience to God that is our justification. And the
gospel is preached to us because he not only went into the grave
and rose again, having accomplished our redemption and obtained it,
but he went to heaven and sent his preachers to preach the message
of his gospel." And even though the preacher Jonah was disobedient,
Christ prevailed. Aren't you glad? It's amazing.
It's an amazing thing. Jonah was a prophet before the
prophet Isaiah. And you know that because if
you go back to 2 Kings 14.25 where it talks about Jonah prophesying,
it was a time in history that preceded the prophet Isaiah by
at least 50 years. But notice, what was the reason
why Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh? Well, in chapter four
it says, it displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was very angry
and he prayed to the Lord and he said, he said, O Lord, was
not this my saying when I was yet in my own country, my country? Therefore I fled before Tartarshish.
For I knew, what? That thou art a gracious God
and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness and repentant
thee of the evil. God said he's going to do it.
He didn't reveal his whole will, did he? He just said, I'm going
to destroy this city. The rest of the story, Jonah
knew. He's going to send me there. These people are going to believe,
and they're going to turn from their wicked ways. God's going
to, he's not going to visit them with his judgment that he said
he would, but he's going to be gracious to them. So Jonah knew
that God would be gracious to these Assyrians that were the
enemies of Israel. And yet, he also knew that God's
prophets had preached to Israel for how many hundreds of years,
and most of them didn't believe. And so you see here envy and
the pride of the prophet, because he knew God would be gracious
to these wicked Gentiles, but he didn't consider himself to
be like them, and he was concerned that his own people would be
cast out and God would save the Gentiles. But that's exactly
what God would do, isn't it, in history? And so he was reluctant
to do that, and he ran from the presence of the Lord, knowing
God is gracious. And yet the king of Nineveh,
by the same knowledge that God gave to him, He knew that the
God they offended was the only one who could forgive them because
their sins were only against him. And so he said, who can
tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce
anger that we perish not? That's the message of Jonah.
The mariners didn't know. What do we do? They started praying
to their idols. They started throwing stuff off
the ship. They tried to make the ship rise above the storm.
That's the works of men. That's the self-righteous pride
of men. And the Ninevites were just like that. They descended
from this man named Nimrod, who actually was the father of all
the Assyrians. So the same story is repeated. And yet God's mercy there prevails
and saves his people. The summary of the book, Salvation
is of the Lord, shows that not only was Jonah saved, in the
death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, but so are all of
we, and not only we, but the Assyrian Gentiles as well, all
those the Lord sent Jonah to preach to, because Christ rose
from the dead. And so that, in a nutshell, is
the summary of this book.