Man Overboard!

Do you think that when you sin, you disobey God or try to run from him?

You're the only one affected? Well think again. Today on Truth for Life weekend we'll get a closer look at the ripple effect of disobedience as we examine Jonah's attempt to outrun his call to preach to the Ninevites. Alistair Begg is teaching from the first chapter in the book of Jonah. We're in verses 4 through 17. If you have sailed and you haven't particularly enjoyed sailing, as when you fly if you do not particularly enjoy flying, as a passenger at the first indication of turbulence or discomfort, one of the things that you tend to do is to look at the eyes of the crew members, to look at the gaze of those who are assisting within the cabin and, if possible, listening on the headphones to get a flavor for what's going on in the cockpit itself. And the one thing that you want to know as a passenger is that as far as the professionals are concerned, everything is a-okay.

Everything is completely under control. Now, verse 5 is clear. It is not that one of the two of the sailors was unsettled by what was going on, but we're told that all the sailors were afraid. Now, the evidence of their fear there in verse 5 is made obvious.

First of all, we're told that they were crying. They were crying out, each to his own God. In the polytheism of the day, these sailors would have had particular gods for particular duties, and they would also have had particular gods for particular locations. And so one of the games that they played, or one of the necessities that they had, was in trying to make sure that they dialed in the right God for the right situation. And if we had gone on board at this particular moment in time, we would have found all of this cacophony of sound as the various sailors were all crying out to the particular deities they could think of, Oh God, whoever you are and wherever you are, please help us here.

This is a dreadful circumstance. At the same time, as they were crying each to his own God, they were casting stuff into the sea. They threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. A ship like this, moving towards a smelting port, would probably be carrying all kinds of stuff. Much of it could not be taken and thrown overboard.

Therefore, anything that could reduce the weight of the ship and raise it in the waves would be something that they would like to do. And so they cried to their God, and they cast the cargo overboard, and then, we're told, at the same time they cast lots to find out who was responsible for the calamity. Now, these lots were originally little stones. They may actually have been created in the shape of dice, but they were used usually in pairs. The little stones were dark on one side and light on the other side. What they would do is they would take the stones and they would throw them the way in which you throw dice, and if they both came up on the dark side, then that was to convey a negative situation and a negative response to their question.

If they both came up on the light side, then clearly it was a positive response. And if one came up light and one came up dark, then basically the word from the deities was, Hold everything, don't do anything at the moment. Now, the interesting thing is that when you read your Bible, you discover a variety of references to this in the Bible.

I can tell you where they are. For example, in Joshua 18, in 1 Chronicles 24, in Leviticus 16, you also have it at the beginning of the Acts in the replacement of Judas. After Pentecost, we read nothing of it in the Bible at all. And the most helpful summary statement that I was able to discover concerning it is in Proverbs 16 33, where Solomon says, The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD. So in other words, we can throw the dice, and we can use that as a basis for deduction, he says, but God, who is sovereign over all things, even controls the roll of the dice.

It's an amazing thought. So they cast the lots. The lots direct them to this particular individual, whom we'll come to in a moment.

And so they conduct an investigation. Verse 8, Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What do you do? Where do you come from?

What is your country? From what people are you? Now, once again, you see, as they thought in geographical terms in relationship to the influence of the deity, if they could find out where this individual was from, then maybe that would give them an indication as to which God they should be calling on so that they're really essentially looking for Jonah's zip code, hoping that they can tie his zip code to a deity that will be able to get them out of this most ferocious and incredible mess. And so they asked him in verse 8, What do you do? And then they asked him in verse 11, What should we do? Hey, what do you do, Jonah?

And can you tell us what we should do? That's their investigation. When he gives his response, which we'll consider in a moment, instead of taking his advice immediately and throwing him overboard, they, not only having conducted an investigation, leave it there, but they row with an even greater determination. Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. Isn't it interesting how kind and considerate pagans can be? I don't mean that facetiously in any way at all.

The fact of the matter is that some of our non-Christian friends seem to be an awful lot kinder and an awful lot more considerate than those of us who profess to be Christian in our testimony. These dreadful people, who had no understanding of the one true living God, whom Jonah presumably would have wanted to disdain in the same way that he had little time for the conversion of Nineveh, were the very ones who, when he said to him, I'm the problem, get me out of here, they said, Oh, we don't want to do that to him. Let's row like fury now and see if we can't get this thing back to dry land. So they conducted an investigation, verse 8. They rowed with greater determination, verse 13. And then they prayed for their own preservation, verse 14. Realizing what they were going to have to do, they cried out to the Lord, O Lord, please do not let us die for taking this man's life. Because they were very clear, if we throw him overboard, it's done.

And so that's exactly what they did. They conducted an investigation, they rowed with greater determination, they prayed for their own preservation, and then they carried out his execution. Goodbye, Jonah.

Nice knowing you, albeit briefly. Death by drowning. And then the sea was completely calm, causing them to fear the Lord, to offer a sacrifice to the Lord, and to make great vows to the Lord. If fishermen are known for their tall tales and sailors for their seafaring yarns, then this crew, when they got back from this voyage, had a story to top all stories. They couldn't wait to get off the boat to go back to their families and say, You are not going to believe this one. We had a fellow get on board.

We were not sure just where he was from, but you will not believe it when I tell you. Well, that's taking the camera that's turned on the sailors. Let's take the camera that's turned on Jonah, and let's look at it from Jonah's disadvantage point rather than from his vantage point. While all this feverish activity is taking place up on the deck, and when one of the other cameras is carrying that material back to our base camp—all the shouting and praying and chucking of stuff into the sea—we now have another camera that gives us a picture from below deck. And look at where he is, in a deep sleep.

This is a remarkable picture of this individual. What's led to it, we can only assume that he was exhausted after his hurried departure to Joppa. He decided not to stay on deck to watch the process of the departure. He probably didn't really want to engage in conversation with anyone at all, and so he determined that he would go down and find the sleeping quarters, and we followed him down into the sleeping quarters, and there he is, and he is in a sleep that we're told is deep.

He fell into a deep sleep. Now, the captain comes down, and it's interesting that it is the captain. He maybe said to some of the people, Is there anyone else here that we haven't accounted for? And someone said, Well, there was a fellow who got on right at the very beginning.

I haven't seen him since he got on. I think he went down into the sleeping quarters. It's unusual for people to go and do that. Most people are up on deck. They like to see the thing go away.

So he would have been quite unusual. So the captain goes down. We don't know whether he shook him gently by his shoulder, whether he kicked his boots, or whether he just flung him off his bed, or whatever he did to him. But he wakes him up, and he says to him, How can you sleep? How can you sleep through this?

It's an obvious question. Now, of course, Jonah's response would be, Sleep through what? Because when you're asleep, you don't know you're asleep.

And when you're asleep, you don't know what's going on while you're asleep. So he says, How can you sleep through this? And as he begins to come out of this foggy condition, what does he hear?

He hears essentially the same word that had led to his running. Get up! Hadn't that been the word that the whole thing starts out with, that I pointed out to you in the Hebrew is there and has been left out in the NIV? Arise, go to the great city of Nineveh. Get up, go to Nineveh.

And he had decided he wouldn't go to Nineveh, and he had run away, down into the depths of the ships, sound asleep, kicked to awakening by this individual. And now hearing the very same word, I want you to get up, he says, and call on your God. Oh, of all the things he might have said.

Don't say that. I'm not talking to God at the moment. I'm running away from God just now.

Have you ever had that experience on a business trip? Somewhere you shouldn't be, enjoying a moment that you shouldn't enjoy, and some pagan says to you, Do you think you could pray for me? You mean talk to the God that right now I was trying to run away from?

Yeah. And he says, If you manage to get through to your God, maybe we won't perish. We just wonder whether you've got an access code that could perhaps get us an answer to this problem, because frankly, we're all about to go down with the ship. Now, the fact is that he knew when they took out the lots that he was busted. And so he was honest in the answers to their questions.

What should we do to make the sea camp for us? He says, You better just pick me up and throw me into the sea, and it will all become calm. And in those moments when they laid hold of him—presumably one or two took his hands, and one or two took his feet in the way that you might do with somebody that you were fooling around in a backyard—I'm not sure that they turned it to music or put it into, you know, an one and a two. No, I think they were pained. I think they were saddened.

I can only imagine the terror that was involved. Look at this man, the prophet of God, the voice piece of God, with a big preaching mission, with clear directions where to go and clear directions what to say, and he decides that he's going to be Mr. No, turns his back on it, makes a run for it, and now finds himself trapped in the hands of these Phoenician crewmen. What did he think about in those moments? Did his whole life rush before him? Did he say to himself, Just for a sense of my own personal satisfaction I would endure this? Well, we know what happened later when he finds himself in the belly of the fish. But I wonder, was he repenting as he went over the side?

Now, finally, let's look at it in terms of what we're told about God and God's hand in these events. First of all, in verse 4, notice, the Lord sent a great wind on the sea. The word that is there for sent is not the usual word for send, but it is actually the word for throw. It is the same word that is used later on for the throwing of the cargo. It is the same word that is used later on for the throwing of Jonah.

So there's a lot of throwing going on. And the first throwing that takes place is the hand of God throwing down upon the ocean this quite furious storm. It is a reminder of what we find permeating the psalmist's work.

Your laws endure to this day, says the psalmist, for all things serve you. And the divine control over the oceans of the universe was one of the constant themes of Israel's praise. When you read the Psalms, you find them again and again praising the fact that God is sovereign over all the affairs of the ebb and flow of the tides. He gathers up the oceans and he puts them in jars. In the same way that you and I may put together a gallon of pink lemonade and know ourselves sovereign over that affair, to God Almighty the oceans of the world are as much under his control as if he was able to simply gather them up and put them in jars.

Now, how different this is, you see, from the pagan mindset in the day of Jonah. For these crewmen regarded the sea as a primeval force that was uncontrollable and at whose mercy everyone lived. I was struck the other evening and flying into Denver, just as an aside, into the lightning and thunderstorms over Denver Airport Thursday night. And when we landed, we sat on the ground for almost two hours before we got to the gate. And there we sat, with all the technology and brilliance of the Denver International Airport completely capitulating to the hand of Almighty God, who turned the lights off and then made the lightning flash across the sky.

And man, in all of his proud boasts, can't even figure out how to bring how to bring a stairwell up to the side of the airplane, you know. From the perspective of God, I thought about it as I looked at it as all. I said, This must be… When I see those little things in my garden, I look at them, I go, What are you? You know, what are you doing like that? Why are you fiddling around like that? Go over there.

Go somewhere else. And I imagine God looked down from heaven and says, Hey, here is the Denver International Airport, you know. Here is all the proud boasting of man.

Here is all their ultimate baggage technology and computer technology. And it is all rendered absolutely patently useless. And then you tune in the jolly weather channel, and some bright-faced lady talks about what Mother Nature has for us tomorrow morning. He gathers the waters of the sea into jars and the deep into storehouses. Psalm 107 25, he spoke and stirred up a tempest that lifted up the waves. God as Creator exercises his rightful lordship over these events. And that, you see, was what made the thing so significant when, in the storm on the Sea of Galilee, with the disciples now all freaked out, saying to Jesus, Lord, don't you care that we perish? And Jesus stands up, and to the winds and the waves and this dramatic storm, he says essentially, That's enough of that. And immediately it is come.

And remember what they said? They looked at one another, and they said, What manner of man is this, That even the winds and the waves obey him? Because they knew that only the sovereign Creator Lord was able to gather up the oceans in jars and bring the storehouses under his control. And Jesus stands up, and he says, I am he. This is the Jesus to whom we commit our lives. This is the Jesus under whose banner we march. This is the Christ who is sovereign over the affairs of our time.

Do we think we can run from such a God? Now, the point is simply this, that Jonah was not engulfed by a chance occurrence. The Lord uses the sea as an instrument of punishment to discipline his reluctant prophet.

God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea, and he rides upon the storm. So the Lord, verse 4, sent a great wind on the sea. And verse 17, the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah. He did not leave his servant to the fate that seemed to have overtaken him. He provided the means of rescue. In fact, this picture of the providence of God is very powerfully here in these few verses.

In chapter 4 particularly, we'll see it when we come to 6, 7, and 8. The Lord provided a vine. The Lord provided a worm. The Lord provided a scorching east wind. We do not go out tomorrow to be cast about on the sea of chance or buffeted by blind impersonal forces.

He is the God who determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. And he creates a punishment for Jonah that comes as close to the experience of dying without actual death. It is here, of course, that many skeptics get off the whole boat.

Oh, three days and three nights in a great big fish. That's a total impossibility, they say. Nothing like this could ever happen, therefore it didn't happen. Now, I don't think there's any great service in trying to find contemporary illustrations that are striking in this respect as a means, as it were, of justifying the text of Scripture.

The text of Scripture stands alone before which we will bow. But I was interested to read an article from the Associated Press, and some of you may have seen it. When the Air France Flight 71 from Papit Friends Polynesia in the South Pacific arrived in Los Angeles at 7.48 p.m. at the terminal gate, a maintenance worker spotted a blanket hanging from a wheel well on the 747-400 aircraft and notified authorities when he found a man—a six-foot, 180-pound man, virtually frozen, survived the subzero temperatures at 38,000 feet at 600 miles an hour for eight hours. When they got him down out of there, his crows were threadbare, he was covered in all kinds of grease, and his core body temperature was seventy-nine degrees. That's when they got him into the UCLA Medical Center. We don't know of any other person whose body temperature dropped this low who has survived.

Anything below 85 degrees is usually fatal, said the doctor. Well, this actually happened. Let's face it, most of us don't even understand how a stereo works. Why would we be fighting with God over these things? And I say to you again, Jesus was quite prepared to use this and to draw out the parallel with his own death, which involved the punishment for sin and also, after that, a resurrection to come.

Not that the contemporaries of Jonah were able to see this messianic foreshadowing, but they did see this. Rebellion against God is wrong. Death is the appropriate penalty. God is able to rescue from death, and grace and salvation are capable of offsetting even the most atrocious sins.

Closing observations. One, none of us lives to himself. You can't run away and disobey God and do it all on your own.

You'll take other people with you. Two, may it not be that Jonah below deck, silenced by his disobedience, is a picture of the contemporary church in our society. Down below the deck, totally asleep to the cries up top, totally unaware of all of the angst and the agony of those who are buffeted by the storm. With a loss of identity such that people have to come and say, Who are you? And with a loss of authority such that they come and say, What do you have to say about this? And the striking thing about it is, as I say, when you're asleep, you don't know you're asleep. When you do one of those afternoon sleeps when you weren't supposed to, you're waking up, you always say the same dumb thing, don't you? About, I've been asleep for long. You remember what Jesus said, using the picture of his return?

Just when the owner of the house comes back, make sure you're not asleep. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend. That is Alistair Beggs showing us Jonah's rebellion from three key perspectives, the sailors, Jonas, and gods. On Truth for Life, we often invite you to open your Bible.

And there's a simple reason for that. Our mission is straightforward, to teach God's Word without reading into it or taking away from it. This is teaching grounded in Scripture that you can trust to be true. You may be new to studying the Bible on your own, or maybe you've been at it for a while and you've developed your own intuitive approach. In either case, we want to recommend to you a book titled Knowable Word, Helping Ordinary People Learn to Study the Bible. This is a practical guide that lays out a specific three-step approach for reading and understanding Scripture in a way that will enhance your independent study. You can find out more about the book Knowable Word on the Truth for Life mobile app or on our website at truthforlife.org.

I'm Bob Lapine. As today's message wrapped up, we left Jonah in the belly of a great big fish. And that could feel like the end of the story, like Jonah somehow managed to hide from God. But next weekend, we'll learn how God used the fish's belly as a prayer room. The Bible teaching of Alistair Beggs is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.