Jonah chapter one, and reading
from verse one. And we're going to read the first
six verses. Now the word of the Lord came
unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh,
that great city, and cry against it, for its wickedness is 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 cried every man unto 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 unto him, What meanest thou,
O sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God. If so be that God will think
upon us that we perish not. Amen. May the Lord bless to us
this reading from his word. It is my plan to spend our time
today thinking about these first six verses of the first chapter
of the book of Jonah. However, I'm going to begin at
verse six and I'm going to ask a question. What is required
What is required that God might think upon us that we perish
not? That is, what is required that
he might think upon us with kindness and with mercy and with grace
and with favour? Think upon us in love that we
perish not. As a guilty sinner, as one who
is a rebel against God, as one who has shaken his fist in the
face of God, what do I need for God to look on me with mercy
so that my life, my soul, shall not perish? To perish means to die. The person who asked the question
or who indicated the need in verse 6 was the captain, the
master of this little ship that was about to be broken up due
to the severity of this great tempest which had beset them
on their journey from Joppa to Tarshish. I am sure that the
captain who asked this of Jonah, the master of this little ship,
His anxiety was about drowning when he pleaded with Jonah to
waken up and pray to his God to deliver them out of the storm. He said, pray that we perish
not. These men undoubtedly were tested
sailors. They made their livelihood on
the Mediterranean Sea, carrying goods between Joppa and Tarshish. They knew the sea. They'd sailed
through storms before, but this was different. This time, they
knew that their ship would not withstand this storm. They personally had done their
utmost to save their ship. Perhaps they tried to sail around
the storm, perhaps they rowed against the wind, perhaps they
had endeavoured to minimise the effects of the damage that could
be done. They had thrown their goods overboard,
but now they were left with just their lives and the lives of
the passengers. Now they could do no more than
superstitiously cast their well-being into the lap of the gods, whichever
gods they may be. They cried out, let every man
pray to his God and maybe one of those gods will hear and deliver
us from perishing in the depths of this sea. That was the cry of the ship's
master. But when we think of this, when
we think spiritually, when we think about God and man and sin
and accountability, Let us know that there is another kind of
perishing that is spoken of in scripture, a perishing that means
spiritual ruin, that means separation from God and means punishment
in hell. A man can face death, physical
death, without fear if he knows, if he knows when his body and
soul are separated, his spirit will enter into eternal life
with God. that while his body, whether
that graces the ocean bottom or lies in a grave, he knows
that while his body lies in that place, his soul will know the
blessedness of God's grace. But if he does not know that,
How fearful a prospect death becomes. How fearful a prospect
for to fall into the hands of the living God in judgement and
condemnation without a saviour. It is this perishing that I want
us to think about for a moment or two. This perishing that the
Lord Jesus speaks of in John chapter 10 in verse 28 where
he says, All men and women die. It is appointed to be so. Sooner or later, we all will
leave this physical body. And when we do, what will be
the state of our soul? The perishing that Christ speaks
of is the opposite of glory. It is the opposite of spiritual
life. It is spiritual death, not a
termination of existence, but an eternal separation from God
who is life and an eternal confinement in hell. which is the just punishment
for sin. Our Lord told Nicodemus, whosoever
believeth in God, whosoever believeth in me should not perish but have
eternal life. What do we need then? What do
we need that God will think upon us that we perish not? We need a saviour. We need a
substitute. We need faith in the Lord Jesus
Christ. Christ said, I am the resurrection
and the life. He that believeth in me, though
he were dead, yet shall he live. May God the Lord give us saving
faith in Jesus Christ. Whom to know is life eternal. May the Lord give us saving faith
in Jesus Christ. Whom to know is life eternal. With Christ in the vessel, we
can smile at the storm. With Christ by our side, we can
face whatever this world has to throw at us. With Christ,
we can face death with joy and peace, knowing that to be absent
from the body is to be present with the Lord. Jonah, Jonah was
a prophet of God. He was a believer in God. Jonah was a man of faith. And yet he was a man who struggled
with the ways of God and the purposes of God. And I think
that there is something very genuine and honest about Jonah
and about this little book. It's only four chapters. We're
going to spend a little bit of time on it, if the Lord will,
and we're going to think about some of those experiences that
Jonah had and the lessons that he had to learn. But let us note
this from the outset. Jonah is a believer and yet he
wrestled with God. He wrestled within himself and
he wrestled with God. He wrestled with God concerning
his prejudices and his understanding of God's purposes. The Holy Spirit has granted the
church this wonderful little book of Jonah, this amazing account
of a believer's struggle. And I believe he has done so
in order to equip us all with a better understanding of the
gracious nature of our God. and a better understanding of
our own human nature as well. So I've got a couple of points
that I want to draw to your attention. I think there's four, they're
not making them as real sort of independent standalone things,
but I will mention one, two, three, and four as we go through
them. The first is this, that here
we are to encounter, here we meet this man called Jonah. Jonah, the son of Amittai. Now that word, Amittai or Amittai,
it means truth. And the implication of Jonah's
name is that he was a true prophet. That word means truth. He is a child of truth. It may actually mean that he
was the child of a prophet. It's an interesting construction
of words in the original language. It may mean that he is Jonah,
the prophet, the son of a prophet, the son of truth. And Jonah's
prophetic ministry was undertaken in Israel. Now I say Israel to
distinguish that from Judah. Jonah as with all what we call
the minor prophets, was after the time of David. David, as we've learned from
the Young People's Address, brought the kingdoms of Judah and Israel
together. After the death of David, Solomon
reigned for a time over the combined kingdom, and then the kingdom
broke up again. And we find that different of
the minor prophets, ministered in Judah and others ministered
in Israel. So for example, I say minor prophets,
but Isaiah prophesied in Judah, while here we learn that Jonah
prophesied in Israel. we're told in 2 Kings that he
had prophesied accurately regarding the recovery of land from Israel's
enemies during the reign of King Jeroboam. However, Jonah's world changed
and it changed suddenly when he received a word from the Lord. Perhaps it was by vision. He
received a word from the Lord instructing him to travel out
of Israel to another land, the land of the Assyrians, to the
city of Nineveh. a huge, foreign, and notoriously
wicked city in order to declare that God's judgment would fall
upon its population within 40 days. That was the message that
Jonah received from God that he was to execute. That was his task. Now that's
formidable. Let us not doubt in any way but
that that was a huge, we might even say strange and unusual
instruction for Jonah to be given. Nineveh was the capital city
of the Assyrian Empire and it would soon be from this city
that the land of Israel would be overrun. It would be conquered
in the coming years. And what we discover in the opening
verses of this chapter is that Jonah refused. Jonah refused
to comply with God's instruction and instead made his way to the
sea at Joppa which literally was in the opposite direction.
He was told to go east to the city of Nineveh and he instead
went west to the coast to get on a ship in order to take that
ship to Tarshish. We don't know where Tarshish
was. It may be Tarsus, where Paul came from. It may have been
another city entirely. Anywhere in the Mediterranean,
there is lots of speculation as to what that city was. It may even just have been a
general word for taking to the sea and travelling over the ocean,
the Mediterranean Sea. His motivation we are told repeatedly,
was to flee from the presence of the Lord. That was why he
did it. He wanted to flee from the presence
of the Lord. Now, let me just take a moment
to think about this with you. It cannot be that Jonah imagined
that he could in some way outrun God, that God was located in
one little place and he could get away from God by getting
on a ship and travelling to another place. Jonah knew better than
that. He had a better knowledge of
God than to think that he could flee from God's presence in that
way. God is everywhere. Jonah knew
that. God is omnipresent. Jonah knew
that. There is no fleeing from the
sight, from the eye, from the knowledge of God. Jonah, could
we even say more specifically, knew the words of David in Psalm
139 verse 7 where David writes, Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from
thy presence? Jonah knew that he could not
escape from the presence of the Lord in that sense. His intention
seems rather to resign, to resign from being a prophet, to give
up his role of prophet, to abandon his post, to leave the land where
God dwelt with his people, to leave the symbols of God's presence,
the Ark of the Covenant, the Mercy Seat, the Temple and the
role that he had performed on behalf of the people before the
Lord. Now there are many suggestions
given as to why Jonah took this attitude and some people have
suggested he was racist. Some people suggest that he felt
that it would dishonour God. Some people have suggested that
it was out of jealousy for his own people as to why Jonah felt
the way he did. It's all just speculation. What
we do know is that Jonah gives us his own explanation and that
is given in chapter 4 verse 2 where Jonah says, 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. So what Jonah tells us is that
although he had been told to go to Nineveh and say that it
would be destroyed for its wickedness within 40 days, he knew that
God wouldn't do it. He knew, he reckoned that the
threatened judgment wouldn't actually take place and therefore
he didn't want to be involved. And I think that here we learn
one of the principal messages of the book and that is the spiritual
education of Jonah. prophet that he was, believer
that he was, there still was room in Jonah's life for spiritual
growth. There still was a need for spiritual
growth and understanding in this man's soul. And that is a truth
of faith. We who are believers will go
on learning and growing in our spiritual understanding all the
days of our lives. Now I'm not saying that we're
growing in holiness. I'm not saying that we're growing in
sanctification. That is not my point. When I
speak about growing, I mean that we grow in grace and in a knowledge
of the Lord. We grow in our spiritual understanding
all the days of our lives. And perhaps I might say as well,
given the circumstances in our own little fellowship at the
moment, perhaps especially, as we approach the end of our lives
and have to deal with the humbling trials of old age and infirmity
and the decay of these bodies. It's then that we discover more
about our own willfulness and I trust more about the Lord's
mercy by our experiences. And as with Jonah, the lessons
will not be easy to bear, but they will be a blessing to
us and a blessing to the church around us nevertheless. Here's
a second point I want to draw your attention to. There's a
lesson here concerning God's sovereignty. It's a little matter
for us who believe in the sovereignty of God to discover that the Lord
controls the weather. I think we've grasped that point. However, Let us hear the lesson
just the same. Does the weather ever make you
decide to do one thing and not another? We've learned a little
bit in our few moments at the beginning of the service about
the cold, snowy weather that is besetting a number of our
congregation today. Well, does the weather ever make
you decide to do one thing and not another? Absolutely it does,
all the time. And I say, so much then for the
free will of man. When the Lord can manage our
decision-making process, with a few drops of rain or with the
dropping of the temperature or indeed the rising of the temperature
in another part of the country. Our God is in control of this
world and he is in control of its outcomes. And whether we're
thinking of nature or whether we're thinking about the will
of man, God is in control. And we haven't even got to the
part where the sailors agree to throw Jonah overboard and
the Lord prepares a great fish to swallow him up. We're coming
to that. But here, the decision-making
process of these men was conditioned by the fact that the sea roared
at the Lord's instigation. and it ceased from roaring. It
was becalmed at his command. And meanwhile, every action and
the decisions made by the men in the boat was directed and
moulded by the wind and the waves. The truth is that men and women
insist on free will. from sheer pride. And I say that
free will preachers are the worst. They insist on man's objective
freedom to choose to have faith or not. And then, from their
pulpits, they manipulate and influence and coax and cajole
their hearers with music and atmosphere and emotion and threats
and bribes. We preach an altogether different
gospel and we preach an altogether different God. The Bible says,
the Lord shall make a man willing in the day of his power. And
the Lord can make a man willing to do what God's will is by the
very climate of where that person lives. But here's the thing,
salvation is a much greater work than merely causing men to do
God's will. Regeneration and conversion is
such a work of creation, such a work of immense power, that
God the Holy Spirit himself is necessary to save a soul. Such is the power required that
only God the Holy Spirit can bring a dead sinner to experience
new life in Christ, to save a soul. If it was just a matter of getting
people to do something, to act in one way or another, the Lord
has a variety of means at his disposal But in order to bring a man or
a woman to Christ, it takes God the Holy Spirit to do the work
in the soul. Here's my third little lesson.
In verse five, we learn that these mariners were afraid for
their lives. They were afraid for their lives.
And in an effort to lighten the ship, they threw all their cargo
overboard. Jonah writes that they threw
all the cargo overboard. Tim, I suggest to you it's Jonah
that's writing this account. This is his book. It's about
him and he's the writer. There's no reason to doubt otherwise.
I wonder how Jonah knew that they'd thrown all the cargo overboard
when he was asleep down below in the side of the ship. Well,
I suspect that he saw the fear in their faces and he saw the
empty hold when he was awakened and he knew what had happened.
Maybe he saw all the boxes floating in the sea roundabout. But there
comes a time in life when our money and our goods and our property
mean nothing. These mariners cried every man
unto his God and this is a telling statement. They did not go quietly
into the night. They feared death as they should
have done because they were approaching it without a saviour. in the
midst of the sea, in the midst of a storm, they drew upon the
scant hope that they had in their idols of wood and stone, their
superstitious charms, their votive offerings. Let me ask you, friend, friend,
how will it be for you? What hope has a dying man outside
of Christ? It isn't enough to hope that
your religion will see you safely out of this world. The question
is, will it see you safely into the next? The master of the ship
did everything that was within his power. Our works will never
save us, no matter what we do. He even woke the sleeping Hebrew. What did he care? In these last
few minutes of his life, what did he care if Jonah slept down
in the bottom of the ship? But he woke him in order to have
him pray to his God. It was all they had left. And
I think there's an irony here. God called Jonah. to go and convict
idolatrous men of their sin in Nineveh and Jonah refused. And now God sends an idolatrous
man to convict Jonah of his sin. God will not be without a witness. He can make a preacher out of
an ignorant idolater. And he did so on this occasion
as far as Jonah was concerned. The cry of the mariner is a valid
wake-up call to all who sleep in Zion. What meanest thou, O
sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God. And each of us today can take
that as an appropriate and timely admonition from the Lord. It
was certainly timely to Jonah. That little boat was about to
be overwhelmed by the tempestuous storm. But it is timely for all
the Lord's people. What meanest thou, O sleeper?
Arise, call upon thy God. The Christian life is an active
life. Yes, we rest in Christ, but we're
active. We're active in worship, we're
active in witness, we're active in service. Our works are not
works of commendation to God but they are works of gratitude
and they are works that bring us into conformity to Christ. If we become sluggish, if we
become self-contented, if we become complacent in our Christian
life and walk, is it not appropriate that the Lord sends someone to
shake us and rouse us? And this brings me back to my
final thought. This is my final thought and
it brings me back to my opening comment. That ship's captain, that master mariner,
he said to Jonah, call upon thy God. He pleaded, he was terrified,
he pleaded with Jonah, call upon thy God, if so be that God will
think upon us that we perish not. How wonderful it would be
for us today if there were men and women like this poor mariner
who pleaded with us to intercede for them with God. or who like
the jailer in Philippi cried to Paul and Silas, what must
I do to be saved? Wouldn't it be wonderful if there
were men and women, boys and girls around about us today who
said, pray to us for God that we perish not. What must I do
to be saved? Where are the sinners who are
anxious for their souls? Where are the sinners who are
anxious for their souls? Let me tell you what I think
about that. I think that they're still out there. I think that
there's still a drift. on the ocean of this world's
aimlessness. I think that the Lord still has
his lost sheep to call. I'm mixing my metaphors here.
But I think he still has drowning men to save. And I think the
gospel is still the message of salvation. With the preached word, the method
of communication. I think the Lord Jesus Christ
is still able to save and will save and he will use little fellowships
and congregations like this to send the message to the ends
of the earth and to arrest his people in ways that we never
thought possible even just a few years ago. There are still men and women,
boys and girls, whom the Lord is convicting of sin and bringing
to repentance. There are still those who are
afraid to die and enter eternity without a saviour. There are
still those to whom the gospel comes in power to the saving
of their souls. And the very fact that we are
here today, the very fact that we are doing this today, confirms
that fact. I feel sure if there were no
more men and women to be called, if the church was complete, then
the Lord would at once take us all home to glory. What then do we have to say to
a concerned sinner? What prayer can we make to God
that God might think upon us that we perish not? How do we
intercede for those who need a saviour, those sheep who are
still lost? We can ask the Lord to open the
eyes of the spiritually blind that they might see Jesus. We
can ask him to open the ears of the deaf that they might hear
the words of eternal life and see in the Saviour one worthy
to be trusted, one who is able to save our souls from hell. But in truth, there is but one
prayer that we'll do, and that is that our God will be merciful
and gracious, and look upon us all under the cleansing blood
of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, and see us under
the robe of his perfect righteousness, a righteousness that he alone
can supply. Only then will God think upon
us that we perish not. Let that be our prayer then for
all whom the Lord lays upon our heart. And may we yet be blessed
to encounter those whom the Lord is pleased to call his own. Amen.