Would you like to know? Would you like to know when and
how you are going to die? Would you like to know when and
how you are going to die? I'm sure you've thought about
it. I'm sure we all have. There was an occasion in the
Lord's ministry when our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, spoke
to Peter and told him something of the circumstances that would
occur at the time of Peter's own death. The Lord told Peter that he would
die as an old man in the ministry and that he would be taken by
other hands and that he would be carried, his arms outstretched
to places that he wouldn't want to go. The Lord was telling Peter,
we believe, that he would be crucified as his master had been. And Peter might have quietly
reflected upon that. Perhaps he should have done,
perhaps he should have thought to himself, let me just think
about what the Lord has told me here and what this means. Peter was always impetuous. And
as the Lord spoke to him about these things, he found himself
looking around. And he saw John. And he says to Jesus, well, you've
told me about me. What's gonna happen to this man?
And the Lord said to him, what is that to thee? follow thou
me. What is that to thee? What business
of that is yours, Peter? That's nothing to do with you.
John's my servant, and you're my servant. You worry about yourself. You think about yourself. You consider what this means
to you, and you follow me. Now I mention that little incident
because I want to emphasize to us this morning that God's calling
is personal. And we're sitting here this morning
as a congregation, and it's a lovely thing to have congregational
worship, and it's a lovely thing to have the fellowship of the
saints, the gathering of the Lord's people, and for us to
come together and to share in these gospel truths. And the
Lord has so ordained it that he has established churches,
little local fellowships, with their own autonomy, their own
independence, a simple approach to worship. Not the robes, not
the incense, not the formality, not the ceremony, but the simple
gathering of the Lord's people. And it is a wonder and a blessing
that he has so ordained it that we should gather here this morning.
Never let us underestimate the privilege that we have to worship
together. But let us remember also that
the gospel is intimate and personal. And when it is declared, we have
to hear it for ourselves. So I don't want you to be thinking
about the person next to you. I don't want you to be thinking
about somebody else. I don't want you to be thinking,
I hope he's hearing this. I hope she's hearing that. What is that to thee? Follow
thou me. The Lord Jesus' call goes out
into this world through the preaching of the gospel. He has given us
the privilege this morning of hearing that gospel preached.
We are to listen to these things and we are to reflect upon these
things. This is important and this is
his message to you. In a little while, we're going
to reflect upon God's word to Jonah and we're going to observe
Jonah's reaction to God's call and some of the consequences
that flowed from his reaction. But I want us to be careful when
we think about Jonah. not to be critical of him, not
to judge him harshly. Rather, if the Lord permit to
enable us to see something of ourselves in Jonah, and if the
Lord be gracious to us, to teach us some lessons about himself
and ourselves and the ease with which we fail to hear his voice
to us. But first, let me say this. Let
us not despise the word of God. We read in our opening verse
of this little book of Jonah, the word of the Lord came unto
Jonah. Let us not despise the word of
the Lord. The word of the Lord is a blessing
to our souls if he will give us ears to hear it. It is a very
precious thing. when the word of the Lord comes
to an individual. And I believe that it is an increasingly
rare thing for the word of the Lord to come to an individual. I believe we're living in last
days, and I believe that the power of the evil one is pushing
against the preaching of the true gospel and constraining
it and endeavouring to overwhelm it. And it is a rare thing, despite
all of the churches, despite all of the religion, despite
all of the faith, for an individual to hear the word of the Lord. Now you might say, Do not all
who have a Bible have the Word of the Lord? Do not all who go to church hear
the Word of the Lord when it is read, when it is spoken about?
Do not we all have opportunity to hear it over the airwaves
and on the television and our radios as we're driving? Or to
tap a few buttons on our computer and hear any number of sermons
delivered to us? Let us not make the mistake of
considering that religious involvement is the same as spiritual experience. Religious involvement is not
spiritual experience. Paul tells us that a feature
of these last days will be many who have a form of godliness,
but they deny the power thereof. Ever learning, These people, many, he says,
many, ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of
the truth. Another one of the prophets around
the time of Jonah was a man called Amos. And Amos wrote this in
his little prophecy, chapter 8, verse 11. The days come, saith the Lord
God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of
bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the
Lord. And they shall wander from sea
to sea and from the north even to the east, They shall run to
and fro to seek the word of the Lord and shall not find it. Here is a prayer. Lord, grant
us this day a word from thyself and give us ears to hear it. When we turn to Jonah, and we
think about this man, let me make a couple of points in opening. Let us be reminded that Jonah
is one of the Lord's people. Jonah is one of God's elect. He is one for whom Christ died. Now I've used the word elect
there, perhaps you're familiar with that word. Elect means,
or election, means choice. Religion teaches that men choose
to follow after God. Men choose God. Religion inverts
the truth of scripture. because the Bible tells us that
it is God who has a people whom he has chosen for himself. And when we speak about an elect
individual like Jonah, or when we speak about election, we're
talking about God's choice of certain individuals from out
of the totality of mankind that he brings to himself. through the preaching of the
gospel, through the declaration of his word. As it were, a word
comes to them. A call goes out in the preaching
of the gospel and they are constrained, that they are brought, they are
turned. We use the word converted. No man has ever converted himself. Conversion is a work that God
performs in the life of an individual, spiritual conversion. It is God
who takes the initiative, it is God who brings the change,
it is God who draws us to himself. The Bible tells us that God is
a chosen people, that he has set apart for salvation. and to receive the life of the
Lord Jesus Christ in their own dead souls in order to bring
them to life, to new life in the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul calls
that, the Apostle Paul, in his writings, he calls that the election
of grace. because God has chosen some men
and women in order to be gracious to them. Paul says, therefore,
it is the election of grace. It is God's choice to be gracious
to whom he will, while others are not chosen and they remain
in their sin and under condemnation. Paul calls it the election of
grace. Sometimes we call it, when we're speaking together,
free grace. And we call it free grace because
it is bestowed freely. It is given freely. It is given unconditionally.
God doesn't look at an individual and say, well, you're a good
sort. I'll give my grace to you. or you've earned it by all your
efforts and your good works, I'll give my grace to you. No,
free grace is unconditional grace. God's grace, God's election of
grace is unconditional. And praise the Lord it is. Praise
the Lord it is. If it was my works, if it was
my merit, I would be as proud as a peacock and I would strut
around and I would say, well, all that I've got of God's goodness
is because I chose him by my works, by my efforts, by my desires. But now With some understanding
of the election of grace, with some understanding of free grace,
I grasp the fact that I am nothing before a holy God and all that
I have of a spiritual nature is because of his goodness and
mercy towards me. Sometimes we say sovereign grace. Because it is grace that flows
from God's sovereign choice. He is king. He is the almighty
God. And he dispenses his gifts as
it chooses him to do so. Sometimes we say saving grace. free grace, sovereign grace,
saving grace, it's the same thing. It is all ways of describing
the goodness of God towards those whom he has chosen in the Lord
Jesus Christ. But it is grace that comes to
those who are redeemed, who are bought out from under the condemnation
of sin, who are bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ. by his substitution, by his taking
our place, by his carrying our sin upon his own shoulders on
the tree and being set up by God as a lamb to be sacrificed
for the deliverance of his people. The death of the Lord Jesus Christ
has saved the people of God's choice from their sin because
he has taken it himself and from the just condemnation for that
sin because the Lord Jesus Christ has paid the price and carried
it all away. So here's a point by way of introduction
that Jonah is one of God's elect people. and he is a prophet of
God. He is a prophet. He has been
commissioned in the purposes of God to stand between God and
men to stand before the men and women that he is sent to preach
to and declare the word of God. So when the word of God comes
to Jonah, it is a word that he then declares to men and women. Jonah's name signifies gentle
dove. Gentle dove. And that's a characteristic
which is encouraged by the Lord. He says that his people, his
preachers particularly, have to be wise as serpents and gentle
as doves. It's good for us to remember
that. Good for me to remember that. But Jonah also had an angry attitude. And that shows us that the Lord's
people, though they be elect, are also a people who are far
from perfect. We long to be perfect. We long
to be like the Lord Jesus Christ. But the truth is that sin still
resides in our life. that there is an old principle
as well as the new principle of grace that God has placed
within us. As well as giving us faith to
see and understand and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, we
discover that there is still an old man who rises up and rails
against us and causes us conflict and difficulties and trials and
problems in this life. And Jonah knew about that. There's a little verse at the
beginning of chapter four of Jonah. It says this. You smile. It displeased Jonah exceedingly,
and he was very angry. He wasn't just angry. Ho, ho,
ho. He wasn't just angry. He was
very angry. Do you know what displeased him?
God's goodness and grace. What an amazing thing for a man
of God to be very angry at the demonstration of God's grace. Jonah was a man, let me put it
this way, Jonah was a man who in his soul knew strange battles. And perhaps there's something
in that for all of us. We have things happening in our
life that we struggle with. We have questions that arise.
We have principles that we have held dear. Things that we have
founded our whole faith upon. And suddenly something goes awry,
something goes wrong, something twists, something gets bent.
And we discovered that we have questions that we never thought
we would have. We have challenges to face that
we never thought we would have to deal with. We have things
going on in our mind, things going on in our heart, things
going on in our soul that surprise us and shock us. And we have
to fight strange battles. Jonah knew what that was like. Jonah had been used of God. I mentioned already that we really
know very little of this man, except this narrative which we
have in the book, which seems to be autobiographical. He has
written this story. This is his writings. He has
left this to us. But apart from what he has written
in this book, we know next to nothing about him. There's a
couple of references that the Lord makes to him in the New
Testament, which is lovely. I'm so grateful that the Lord
Jesus Christ said that Jonah was a type of himself. And as Jonah was three days and
three nights in the whale's belly, so the Lord Jesus Christ would
be three days and three nights in the depths of the earth. Do
you know why that's so important? Because the very fact that the
Lord said that tells us that this story's true. This isn't
an allegory. This isn't a parable. This isn't
a concoction in order to convey a real lesson. This actually
happened. And the testimony of the Lord
Jesus Christ to this book shows us both its divine inspiration
and the fact that here was a man of God at work fulfilling his
prophetic obligations as he wrote these things down and told us
the story that he had gone through. So this is for our help and understanding. The only other time we know about
Jonah in scripture is in 2 Kings chapter 14 and verse 25. And we're told there that he
prophesied among the 10 tribes of Israel in the days of a wicked
king called Jeroboam. That in the days of that wicked
king, Jeroboam, Jonah spoke faithfully and his words were fulfilled. Those are the words of a true
prophet. Those are the words of a prophet
of God that come true when he speaks them. This book before us is a book
about Jonah and a book about Jonah's God, about the Lord himself. It speaks to us of the wrestlings
of a child of God both with his natural human inclinations, his
selfishness, his self-righteousness, his anger, his pride, and also
of the character of God and the ways of God. I see much of myself
in this man Jonah, as he is revealed to us in this book. And I trust
that I can learn from some of the troubles that he faced and
some of the lessons that he had taught to him by God. Jonah, of course, is also, as
is the whole of Scripture, Jonah is also about the Lord Jesus
Christ. Jonah, we are told, is a type
or a picture of the Lord Jesus. what the Lord Jesus Christ calls
the sign of the prophet Jonas in Matthew chapter 12 and verse
39. And mark this, Jonas' story The
story of the storm and the throwing out overboard, the story of the
fish, the three days, the nights, the repentance of Nineveh the
gourd, and the worm that ate the gourd, all point to the Lord
Jesus Christ. This is all about Christ. such that men and women like
you and like me reading the narrative of Jonah are left without excuse
because the Lord Jesus Christ himself said, a greater than
Jonas is here. A greater than Jonas is amongst
us. We are without excuse. that which
the Lord Jesus Christ has done, His coming from glory as the
Son of God, His perfect life of obedience to the law of God,
making Him evidently eligible to be the sinless, spotless sacrifice,
the perfect one who would represent His people, The fact that he
went to the cross, that he endured the condemnation of God, that
he made propitiation to God for us. The fact that he atoned for
the life of his people by shedding his own precious blood. The fact
that after three days and nights he rose again from the dead and
descended into glory, there ever to reign for eternity as king
over his people. This whole message speaks to
us of the greatness of the Lord Jesus Christ and points to him. We have no excuse. The testimony
is given, the word is before us. God grant us eyes to see
and ears to hear the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ as
it is revealed in these ways. Jonah is also about the spread
of the gospel. I don't know whether you grasped
it in that little reading that we did, but Nineveh was not a
Jewish city. Nineveh was an Assyrian city. It's thought to have been the
greatest city of the ancient world. It was the center of the
Assyrian dynasty, empire. It was a massive place. It took days to walk through
it. And there were millions of people
lived in it. The suggestion at the end of
the Book of Jonah is that there are 600,000 infants living in that city. 600,000 infants that knew neither
their right nor their left hand. Millions of people in that city.
And it was a Gentile city. It was an idolatrous city. It
was a wicked, wicked place. And God says to a Jewish man,
to a Hebrew, I want you to go and preach to the Gentiles. This
is way in the middle of the Old Testament. This is way in the
middle before the Lord Jesus Christ ever came. And so there
is a message in here for us to understand about the preaching
of the gospel and about the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ, the
gospel of Christ, was never intended only to be contained within the
small confines of a particular family or race or nation, but
that it was to be worldwide in its extent. And the gospel was
to go forth into the family of God, worldwide, from every tribe,
from every nation, under heaven. Nineveh, therefore, is a picture
of the apostles' ministry. I think there are two messages,
there's two things that I want to just leave with you as we've
sort of touched upon an introduction to this book of Jonah, and we'll
come back to it again in subsequent weeks as the Lord enables. But
two things I just want to mention from the first couple of verses
here. The first one is this, that God sees and he marks sin. God sees sin. He says in verse
two, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it,
for their wickedness is come up before me. Men and women imagine that their
sins go unnoticed. They hide their sins, they cover
their sins. They engage upon their wickednesses
and they imagine that nobody knows. They keep them in the
dark. They have a little part of their
life and they think to themselves, no one else knows about that. But the testimony of this verse
is this, that God sees sin. Not only so, but he records it. He records the sins that we have
committed. They come up before him. They are like a great pile of
iniquity, a great pile of wrongdoing. And they are seen and known by
God. Furthermore, there is an accountability,
because Jonah was called to go and cry against this city for
the works of iniquity, for the sins that had come up before
God. And that tells us that men and women will give an account
of their sins to God. They will give an account. They
will stand before the holy judge and they will give a reason.
They will give an account. They will confess their sins
before God. The book of Revelation, Revelation
chapter 10 tells us that the judgment books are opened. Records that have been kept. The dead were judged out of those
things which were written in the books according to their
works. Cities are often centres of wickedness. Centres of evil activity. It's just the way that it is.
Men are sinful and when you get two men together it increases
their sinfulness. You put a hundred men together,
or a thousand men together, or a million men together, and the
sin just keeps on growing. It multiplies. And so Nineveh
was the greatest city of the ancient world. Even, they think,
greater than Babylon in its time. And men travel to cities, in
order to experience the anonymity that they can have there, and
the opportunity for their sin that they can have there, and
the encouragement that they find from others gathering with them
in that place for their wickedness. And they try to hide their wickedness
amongst the masses of humanity. But the truth is that sin will
out. And whether it's Nineveh or New
York, whether it's Babylon or Boston or Butte, whether it's
Sodom and Gomorrah or simply Great Falls, Sin will out. You can't hide it from God. It
comes up before him, and he knows the stench of it in his nostrils. Paul says, be not deceived. God
is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap. There is nothing covered that
shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known. Sinner, how dare you stand before
God? How dare you stand before God? What excuse can you possibly
give on that day when you are called to give account? What
reason will you give that day when the judge examines you against
his holy law? When he weighs you and your works
in the balance and finds you wanting? How will you justify
your actions? How will you explain your words? How will you mitigate against
those evil thoughts? How will you stand in that day
if you have no saviour, if you have no redeemer, if you have
no forgiveness, and if you have no friend? We said that Jonah was a believing
man. He was one of God's people. Let us notice briefly how Jonah,
not Noah, Jonah, responded to God's instruction here. God said, arise and go to Nineveh
and Jonah did arise and he went in the opposite direction. He
was told that he had to go east and he went west. He found a ship going to Tarshish
It's not entirely certain where Tarshish was. Some people think
it's just a word for the sea. He was going anywhere as long
as it was in the opposite direction. Or maybe it was Tarsus where
Paul came from in the New Testament. It really didn't matter. It was
anywhere. Jonah wanted to be anywhere.
And we're told he paid the fare and he went down into the boat. It is true that there is a price
to pay in the service of God, and it can be costly. Peter was
told by the Lord Jesus Christ that in his old age he would
be taken, he would be crucified, and he would be slain in that
way. It can be costly to be a servant
of God. There's a price to pay in following
the Lord Jesus Christ. But there's also a price to pay
for disobedience. There's a price to pay for disobedience
too. And don't ever imagine that you'll
get away from paying that price. Jonah was a child of God. He was loved of God. And the
Lord would not let him go too far. We read the chapter, a preparation
has been made, a mechanism, a means has been put in place in order
to recover that man, that prophet. God loved him and he wouldn't
let him go too far. And although Jonah was angry
with God, God wasn't angry with Jonah. There is no anger in God
towards his people. but there is the discipline of
a loving father. Proverbs 3 verse 12 says, for
whom the Lord loveth, he correcteth, even as a father the son in whom
he delighteth. We've never to imagine that because
the correction of God comes into our life that it is a measure
of the fact that he doesn't love us. And notice the steady decline
in Jonah's progress, if I can say it like that. Notice the
steady decline in his progress away from God. From where the Lord spoke to
him, which was perhaps in the temple in Jerusalem, I'm surmising
that from the prayer that he makes in chapter 2, where he
says, I am cast out of thy sight, yet I will look again toward
thy holy temple. So perhaps the Lord spoke to
him in the temple in Jerusalem. Whatever. From wherever it was
he heard the word of the Lord, we are told that he went down
to Joppa. And when he got to Joppa, he
went down to the harbour. You can never go up to a harbour.
He went down to the harbour. And when he got into the ship,
he went down into the bottom of the ship. He went as far down
as he possibly could. How far down can a believer go? Noah went, Noah, forgive me if
I mix this up. Jonah went as far down as he
could. But God took him even further
down. God took him into the fish's
belly and took him down to the very bottom of the mountains. That's what Jonah says in his
prayer. God would not let him go. He would not allow him to escape
out of his presence, but he allowed him to go deeper even than Jonah
imagined. We read Psalm 139 earlier. It says there, if I take the
wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall
hold me. Do we ask why? Why did Jonah
act this way? What drove him to go from the
presence of God? Well, we don't have to speculate.
People have said he was afraid. He was afraid for his life. He
didn't want to go to Nineveh, a Gentile place in the Syrian
capital. He was afraid. No, no, he wasn't
afraid. Not this man. People have said he was a racist.
He didn't like the idea of these foreigners getting some interest
in the word of God. No, it's not that either. We
don't have to speculate because Jonah himself tells us why he
didn't want to go to Nineveh. And he tells us in chapter 4
verse 2. Just look in your Bibles and see what it says there. Jonah prayed unto the Lord. We had been previously told at
the end of chapter 3 that the Lord repented of the evil that
he had said that he would do unto them and he did it not.
That was the judgment that he had promised to bring upon Nineveh.
And here Jonah prays to the Lord and he says, 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. Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh
because it wronged his sense of justice. He said, these people
are too wicked. These people are too abhorrent.
These people don't deserve the mercy of God. It's not fair that sinful people
obtain grace. It's not right that the mercy
and kindness of God should flow to these people. Not for who
they are, not for the wickedness that they've performed. This
isn't right. Jonah was angry about grace. And he probably felt that his
own reputation as a prophet was at stake as well. Because he
thought, I'm going to go and declaim against this city, and
you know what? God will be merciful to them.
And then all the judgments that I said were going to come and
them won't come and what will I look like? He feared that he would lose
his credibility. His problem was his pride. He
had become self-righteous. He had become self-important. He had lost his sense of gratitude
for the mercy that had been shown to him. And he had forgotten
that he deserved no more than these wicked Ninevites. He thought
he was better than they were. Do we think we're better than
other people? You're not. You're not and I'm
not. And we see them out there and
they're pushing their drugs and we see them up there and they're
doing what they do and they go about and they're living in the
dregs and in the dust and in the dirt of this world. And their
sin is coming up before God like a great pile. But we're no better
than they are. and it's only the grace and the
mercy of God that makes any difference whatsoever. Our Lord Jesus Christ
came into this world to save sinners, not call the righteous,
to save sinners. He came to call sinners to repentance. Paul confessed himself the chief
of sinners. Let us never think better of
ourselves than we are. Let us ever stand on free grace
alone. Remember what we said, it's called
free because it is unconditional. God doesn't look to see how smart
we are, how good we are, how able we are. He gives us out
of his own magnanimity, out of his own graciousness and goodness
to his people. The day we forget our own pit
from which the Lord has raised us is the day that we become
useless to the world in which the Lord still keeps us. The day we think more of our
own reputation than pity the lost souls in their sin is the
day we become useless to the Lord. But thanks be to God, he
will not let us remain useless, but he will recover and he will
restore his people and his prophet, his church. Even if First of all, he's got to take
us into the whale's belly. I began by asking a question.
Have you ever wondered about the day that you'll die and how
you'll die? If you did know that, what difference
would it make to the way that you live? Let's trust the Lord
to show us some lessons from this man's life, that we might
honour him when his word comes to us and understand what it
is to be his representative to a lost and fallen world. Amen. The closing hymn is 141.