Salvation Comes from the Lord (Part 2 of 2)

It's hard to imagine that getting tossed into the sea and then being swallowed by a great fish could be an opportunity for good. But on Truth for Life weekend, we're seeing how that's exactly what happened in Jonah's continuing saga. Alistair Begg's teaching from Jonah chapter 2. The emphasis in these verses is not so much upon the predicament of Jonah as it is upon the provision of God. Not so much about what Jonah has done to get himself in this situation as it is upon what God has chosen to do to save his servant in the situation. Jonah ends up on dry land at the end of the chapter, verse 10, and it is clear that he ends up there not because he deserved to but because of God's grace. What we discover is that the extremity facing Jonah was the opportunity for God to show quite clearly what we're told there at the final sentence of verse 9, that salvation comes from the Lord. And there is little doubt that Jonah would have had, in the immediate aftermath of these events, many occasions to rehearse what had happened to him and to repeat again the summary which is contained in verse 2.

People met him, and he said, Where have you been, Jonah? And then immediately followed up with, And why do you smell so bad? I mean, he must have been really fragrant for a significant length of time coming out of this. I'm not a fisherman, but there's something about fish.

Once it gets on you, it's just almost impossible to get rid of the pong. And so here he must have been quite a—and not exactly the person he wanted to sit next to at the local symphony concert. And his friends would have said to him, What in the world has been happening? And then he would have said, In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me, and from the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry. He was in the water, half-drowned, suffocating from the seaweed round his head, and he had cried out to God, he cried out to the very God from whose presence he'd sought to run.

He was then to discover that the psalmist is true. O Lord, you have searched me, and you know me, you know when I sit down and when I stand up. Where can I go from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you're there.

If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. And as he plowed around in the water in this most graphic circumstance, he discovered that God had answered his cry, even as he had fallen from the side of the vessel and down into the depths of the water, and he had cried out for help, and God had listened to his cry. He was discovering in the deep what many of us have discovered when we've tried to run away from God, that you can run but you can't hide. And with one foot, as it were, already in the grave, he had called out to the Lord, and the Lord had listened. Now, we ought not to miss the fact that there is a great encouragement in this, for those of us who today find ourselves in distress, who may find ourselves in the dumps, in the depths, and the reason for it is one word, and the word is disobedience. It may not be known to those who are nearest and dearest to us. We may have managed to hide it from all but God himself, and yet as we sit within the framework of this congregation, we know that the reason we're in the predicament in which we find ourselves is because God has said, Go, and we've said, No, because God said, I want you to do this, and we've said, I'd like to do that, because God said, This is my way, and we said, and I like this way. And the immensity of the wonder of God's dealings is found in the fact that God, in his grace and in his kindness, is determined to complete the work in our lives which he has begun.

Philippians 1.6. And that is why he comes to the young prodigal in the pigsty, and he meets him there. That is why he comes to Jonah in the stomach of the fish, and he meets him there. Both in stinking situations.

Literally. One surrounded by pigs and all that they do, the other engulfed in the very gut of this large fish. And both in the pigsty and in the fish's stomach, God was coming to pluck them, to clean them, and to restore them to his purposes. Loved ones, those of us who have walked any time with Christ know that is the case. And we can be a great help to those who are struggling at the moment by acknowledging that we have been in the pigsty, and that God has come to us in all kinds of amazing ways, and he has arrested us. And in our distress we've called out to the Lord, and he has heard us, and he has answered our prayer.

For us, the Christian life has been a series of new beginnings. It has not all been plain sailing. We have not done everything right every day.

We have not proceeded in the right direction every time. We know ourselves to have been, at least metaphorically, with the seaweed wrapped around our heads and suffocating as a result of our own disobedience. Thank God that he has chosen not to say, Fine, if that's the way you want it, go ahead and drown.

Now, that's the mystery and the wonder and the encouragement of what we find. Look at what he says in verse 3. You hurled me into the deep.

And I just want to identify these phrases for you. You hurled me into the deep. Now, the average boy or girl who's here this morning that was present last Sunday morning, their ears are immediately going to perk up at this, and they're going to say, What does he mean, speaking to God in that way and saying, You hurled me into the deep? We were here last Sunday, and we know who hurled him into the deep. It was the sailors who hurled him into the deep. The sailors threw him overboard. Jonah said, I'm running from God, throw me overboard. And so they threw him overboard, and now here he is in the heart of the fish, and he says, You hurled me into the deep.

Now, what is this? Jonah is recognizing that what had taken place was under the determining hand of God. That the sailors, in fulfilling Jonah's instructions, became the instruments of God. In the same way that the brothers in the story of Joseph, as we saw it in the chapters in Genesis, who acted according to their own willful passions, their jealousy and their spite, their desire to be rid of Joseph, they sold him into the hands of the Ishmaelite traders, they banished him off to Egypt, and when they are finally encountering Jonah again in Genesis 45, and they realize with alarm that they are face to face with the brother that they had banished, what does Joseph say to them? He says, It was not you who sent me here, but God.

Now, what did he mean by that? That they somehow or another were automatons? That God was working them the way a person would work a puppet with the strings?

No! They fulfilled their own willful desires, and in the exercise of that, God as the primary cause, was taking this secondary cause and using it to fulfill his ultimate purpose. And the same is true with the sailors. And as he went flying over the side of the boat, thinking to himself, I'm done for now, it was God that threw him off the ship. Not to destroy him, but so that he could continue to use him.

Because it wasn't possible to make use of him while he was buried, silent, underneath the deck, a backslidden nuisance to everybody, not least of all himself. Tempted to say, I love sleeping down here. This is terrific. Now I'm on my own.

Now I can do what I want. And God pursues him in the ocean, throws him over the side, says, Jonah, we've got to talk. And as soon as he has him in the position where he's ready to talk, Jonah says, And I call to the LORD in my distress. But what was he doing under the deck?

Sleeping! When Margaret Cousins wrote that tremendous poem, thirty-eight verses or so, out of the memoirs of Samuel Rutherford, she pens in there this wonderful stanza, With mercy and with judgment, my web of time he wove, And I, or aye, the dews of sorrow, Were lustred by his love. I'll bless the hand that guided, I'll bless the heart that planned, When throned where glory dwelleth in Immanuel's land.

Ill that he blesses is our good, And unblessed good is ill, And all is right that seems most wrong, If it be his sweet will. And he steps back from the event, and he says, You know what? It was you that hurled me into the sea. That's why I was swirling, tumbling, sweeping, being engulfed, being wrapped with the seaweed. That's why I was sinking.

But notice what he says in verse 4. Not only you hurled me into the deep, he says, but I have been banished from your sight. Now, I don't know about you, but this picture of him going down in the water scares me half to death. Swimming is not my 40.

I mean, I can stay afloat, but I'm not about to, you know, try and swim for Catalina Island from the west coast or something like that. And so the idea of this is absolutely horrendous to me. I can almost feel this experience. But I can get scared like this in a swimming pool, so this is no surprise. But do you think that it is this physical thing that really creates the terror for him?

Do you think this is the thing? It isn't. These circumstances and all of their devastating impact are only and ultimately devastating inasmuch as they represent a more terrifying situation, and the terrifying situation is this. I have been banished from your sight. I'm no longer in communion with you. We're not on speaking terms. We're not talking.

Now, let me point out two things. First of all, for those of you who are here today and you do not believe in God, you have not come to lay hold of God's great and precious promises. For me to tell you that the ultimate terror and the ultimate anguish is to be found in the fact that he is banished from the sight of God, you're saying, Well, I'm prepared to take your word for it, but it means nothing to me. I don't see any sense of terror. I don't see any sense of anguish of that.

And you know why? Because you've never known God. Because you have no sense of being in his presence. And since you've never been in his presence, you'd never know what it was like to be out of his presence. Since you've never been drawn into the love that is his in the Lord Jesus Christ, since you've never come to know him on all of his fullness, since you've never trusted in him and rested in him and known what it is for him to love and to care for you and to provide for you, the idea of being banished from his presence is like, Hey, what's the big deal? And in your circumstance, you need to cry out to God, Oh, that I might seek you and that I might find you, when I search for you with all of my heart. Because you're able to take this information this morning and say, He's clearly concerned about it.

I can see that just from his posture, but I don't know why in the world he would be so concerned. The reason is you're a stranger. You see, this word here is a word to the believer. It is a word to the running believer. It is a word to the backslidden believer. It is a word to those of us who are prepared to admit to the power of sin in our lives. It is a word to those of us who understand the trial of having our spirits awakened.

It is a word to those of us who are haunted by the anxiety created by my own disobedience. For you see, hell is to be banished from God forever. That's why Jesus in Luke 11 says, You shouldn't be concerned about those who can kill the body.

That's nothing. Be concerned about the one who can cast you down into hell. And Jonah says, I have been banished from your sight.

And this dreadful sense of separation and isolation will only mean anything to the individual who knows what it is to live in God's presence. If you saw the film The Patriot, the most poignant piece in the whole movie for me is the dissonance between the patriot and his tiniest daughter, and how she clams up and won't speak to him, and how as he gets ready to go off to battle, as she stands away and he kisses his wife goodbye and goes down the line, and still she stands there, and as he turns his horse to go and she comes after her, she goes, Oh, Daddy, what do you want me to say to you? I'll say anything to you.

What do you want me to say? There's not a father in the house says, Oh! Oh, it's that painful!

But I guess the average seventeen-year-old's gone, Oh, man, that's so cheesy! Goodness gracious! This is pathetic! Let's get out of here, you know!

What's that about? But once you've known communion, you understand banishment. And if you or I today are playing the game of two sides of the fence, trying to ride the escalator up and the escalator down, God comes to us in the storm, and the sense of isolation and the sense of separation is an act of just judgment on his behalf, in order that we might realize, This is not where the child of God is supposed to be. This is not what God has for me. Just when he thought he'd been abandoned for good, he swallowed by the fish.

Not a great place to live, but a wonderful place to learn. And there, in this new little bed-and-breakfast accommodation, his affliction becomes a source of good to him, as he realizes that if God had wanted to just deal with him for good and forever, he would have let the seaweed wrap itself a final time around his face, and at the root of the mountains, as he sank, he would be barred in forever. But he has remembered the Lord, verse 7, and he has looked to the Lord, represented in his meeting with his people in his holy temple, and so he says, You herald me into the deep.

I've been banished from your sight. And finally, verse 6b, But you brought my life up from the pit. But you brought my life up.

Who else could bring his life up? He went down to Joppa. He went down below the deck.

He went down into the depths. And here God intervenes divinely. Remember the psalmist? I waited for the LORD my God, and patiently did bear.

This is the metrical psalm at length to me. He did incline my voice and cry to hear. He took me from a miry pit and from the sticky clay, and he set my feet upon a rock, and he established my way. The hymn writer then follows the psalm writer, and he says, I was sinking deep in sin, sinking to rise no more, very deeply stained with sin, far from the peaceful shore. Then the master of the sea heard my despairing cry, and from the waters he lifted me, and now safe am I. How are you gonna get yourself out of your mess? Oh, I'll fix it, you say. I'll get to it.

I got a number of approaches. Well, look at the observation that he then makes in verse 8. Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.

Those amongst his own people in Israel who were tempted to cling to these worthless idols, who were tempted to worship the Baals, if they continued in that direction, then they would have forfeited an awareness of the Lord's gracious help. One of the most tragic things is to see the way in which the contemporary church is tempted to cling to the worthless idols that are offered to us. And we look so pathetic in the world, hiding below the deck, talking to ourselves, being wakened up by the pagans. They're saying to us, Why are you down here? If God is such a great God, why are you running and hiding from him? Don't you have something to say for yourself? And finally thrown into the midst of all of this confusion, then we start to get smart and say, You know, I think there's a number of ways we can get ourselves out of our predicament. There's only one way. I called to the Lord, and he answered me.

So his observation is that. His consecration is there in verse 9. I'm going to sing a song of thanksgiving. I'm going to sacrifice to you, and I'm going to see it through. What I have vowed I will make good.

In other words, an attitude of repentance and faith that will not simply mark this moment in his life but will mold his life for the future. Observation, verse 8. Consecration, verse 9. Liberation, verse 10. And the LORD commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah unto dry land. I look forward to hearing the details of that, don't you? Whoa!

Whoa! Do you think anyone helped him, you know, clean up? What did he do? He go looking for those big leaves like you do when you fall in stuff when you're out in the country? Wiping it off, people looking, saying, Isn't that the prophet Jonah down there?

What the dickens is he doing? Someone says, Well, I saw a fish. Spat him up. Yeah, sure, okay, fine, fine. Because when they asked him, they would have said, How did you get here?

And how did you get back? And he would have said, Well, a fish swallowed me and spat me up. They said, Don't be ridiculous. Just don't be so stupid. Isn't that what our friends say to us when we tell them that the way that we got out of our predicament was as a result of the death of a Galilean carpenter on a Roman gibbet two thousand years ago, and that by the shedding of his blood, God poured out his wrath upon sin, and he took the punishment that we deserve, and because he died in our place, we now get vomited up, and we're free to go about and live life.

And our friends say, Don't be ridiculous. And between trying to clean himself up and verse 1 of chapter 3, he must have wondered to himself, Am I all washed up? He knew he was literally washed up, but was he going to be washed up as far as God's servant was concerned?

Has he got someone else in my place? I'm sure I don't deserve to go back to Nineveh now. I'm sure I've been put down to row nine. And then the word of the Lord came to Jonah second time. Some of us may be here this morning with a deep sense of failure and regret. We've done our own running.

We've done our own attempt at hiding. God has come to us in various storms, and he's wakened us up, and he set our feet back there. And the devil comes to us and says, You're finished now.

You're all washed up. And tell him to go to where he belongs, and remind him that God is the God of the second chance, the third chance, the fourth chance, and the fifth chance too. And salvation comes from the Lord, saving me from the penalty of my sin, saving me daily from the power of sin, and saving me one day from the very presence of sin. And Jonah is an unforgettable reminder of this essential truth. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend. That is, Alistair Begg explaining why an understanding of true communion with God is what makes being banished from him all the more terrifying.

Alistair will return shortly to close today's program. We're learning that God pursues us even when we run from him. And if you'd like to re-listen to a message from our series titled, A Study in Jonah, let me remind you all of Alistair's teaching can be downloaded or shared or streamed for free through our mobile app or on our website at truthforlife.org. In Jonah's story and throughout the Bible, God's people are encouraged to call out to God.

We're repeatedly assured he will hear us and answer us. But sometimes in the midst of devastating circumstances, we can feel abandoned or angry or unwilling to seek the Lord. The book we want to recommend to you today is a book called Seasons of Sorrow, The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God. This is a book that tells a true story of author and pastor Tim Chally's unthinkable loss, the sudden death of his 20-year-old son. It's a book about grief, but also a book about hope. As you read Seasons of Sorrow, you'll retrace Tim's experience as a father through the first year following his son's unexpected death. And in the process, and in the process, you'll learn how to grieve with hope.

You can find out more about the book Seasons of Sorrow on the Truth for Life mobile app or on our website at truthforlife.org. Now here is Alistair to close with prayer. Father, out of a multitude of words, we pray that we might hear your voice. I pray particularly for some who are here today. And the idea of being banished from you is of no consideration to them at all, because they have never known a sense of your presence. They remain in the condition described in Ephesians 2, enemies of God, dead in their trespasses and sins.

Why would a dead person ever be concerned about these matters of life? And so we pray that in your mercy you will come and make them alive, that they might hear your truth and that they might respond to it and believe in you. For those of us who have been going our own way, seeking to run and take our own cruises, all away from the direction of your appointing, we pray that in your mercy and in your love you will come and throw us overboard, grant to us such a sense of isolation that we will cry out to you, that we might be known of you afresh, and that you will pick us up and set our feet back on the pathway of your appointing. Hear our prayers and let our cry come unto you. And now unto him the one who is able to keep us from falling, to present us faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. To the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, now and forevermore. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. We're glad you've joined us this weekend. Next weekend we'll see how God can do great things even through a reluctant prophet. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.