« Out of the Depths-Jonah 2:1-10 | Home | Running Away from the Lord-Jonah 1:1-17 »

Love Beneath the Waves-Jonah 1:1-17

By Larry Kirk | April 24, 2007

A woman named Melanie grew up in a supposedly Christian home. Her dad was a leader in a church, and they went three times a week. But her dad also beat her regularly. He would beat her brother and sister as well. Afterwards he would cry and ask forgiveness. Melanie was torn between hope and fear. As soon as she was eighteen she got out and never looked back. She couldn’t imagine ever opening her heart to any relationship where she could be hurt like that again. She certainly wasn’t going to go back to church, so she ran.

There are many different ways you can run from your problems and from God. You can run from the truth by denying what’s happened to you and how it has affected you. You can run after diversions such as promiscuous sex, or promiscuous shopping, or drugs, or alcohol. You can escape into a life of work and ambition. Like many of us, Melanie ran from God in several of those ways and ended up an angry, alcoholic, single mother of three with a good job but a bitter heart. She eventually hit bottom and came to understand that, if she wanted to survive, she needed to surrender control of her life to God.

That was hard. She had thought of God as a lot like her deeply flawed and abusive father. For her, at first, the idea of trusting Him felt like failure. But when she surrendered her life to God she discovered that He turned out to be different than she’d thought. Now she’s going to church and raising her children and trying to learn how to trust Him and His love one day at a time.

We’re all different, but learning to live the life to which Christ calls us, of relying on God and obeying Him in all the challenges of life, is a difficult journey for any of us. The biblical story of Jonah’s journey can help us with ours because, although his story is a lot more dramatic than most, it isn’t any different at heart.

Toward the end of the book, in Jonah 4:2, Jonah says that before he ran from God he knew that God was “a gracious and compassionate God, and abounding in love.” The problem was he knew that like an answer to a test question. He didn’t know it as a life-giving flame of truth enlightening his heart and guiding his steps.

Jonah 1:1-2 says this story begins when “the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.’” Nineveh was an actual city, but it also stands in the Scriptures as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the world. It was an arrogant, ungodly, dangerous place, and Jonah didn’t want to go. But God had plans, not only for Nineveh but also for Jonah.

Whenever you are faced with a command, a call, from God that you don’t understand or you don’t want to obey, you will either trust Him and obey or you will trust yourself rather than God and obey yourself instead of Him. You either will say: “Lord, I don’t understand, but I will trust Your word and will do Your will,” or you will say, “I want a boat in the other direction.”

Do you know what happens when you start looking for a boat going the other direction? Verse 3: “But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.”

When You Run from God,

There Is Always a Boat Ready to Take You

Here’s the verse that introduces Jonah’s disobedience, and at the center of the verse, as if framed by perfectly balanced references to Jonah’s disobedience, stands the ship that was so conveniently waiting for the man who was running from the Lord.

When you look for an opportunity to get away from God’s will and calling, there is always a way. Lo and behold, there will be a ship just waiting for you and heading the direction that you want to go, away from the pull of God’s word.

If you are not a believer and you don’t want to hear God’s call or come to Him, there will always be plenty of other things to occupy your time and your mind so that you never come to Christ. You can find many ships that will take you in other directions.

A famous British author, philosopher, and critic of Christianity, Aldous Huxley, admitted that in much of his work as philosopher and writer he was basically inventing a system of thought designed to prove there was no valid reason why he personally should not do whatever he wanted to do.

Huxley said, “For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality.” Do you see what he was saying? His philosophy of meaninglessness was an instrument of liberation (a ship to set him free) from a certain system of morality. He explained that the morality he wanted to escape was the morality of the Bible, adding, “We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. There was one admirably simple method of . . . justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever” (Ends and Means pp. 312, 316).

Thus he admitted he wanted to do what he wanted to do, so he found a ship, a set of intellectual arguments, that took him where he wanted to go morally.

If you have trusted Christ but have come to a place where you don’t want to do His will, there will be ships ready to take you where you do want to go. If you want to commit adultery, someone will be willing. If you want to indulge your lust for material things, there will be catalogues and credit cards and whatever else is needed to take you where you want to go. Whatever it is you want to do, you will find the opportunity will present itself.

People fool themselves and even blame God. They say, “It must be all right with God because He brought this person into my life. He placed this situation right in front of me. If God didn’t want me to do this, why would He make it so easy, so perfect?” Don’t fool yourself. Just because something is in front of you doesn’t mean God provided it. If you are running from Him, you will always find convenient opportunities to sin. That’s why, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” The convenient circumstances that offer opportunities to sin take nothing away from the clear command that calls us to live by God’s words.

Let us remember, when we run from God there is always a boat that is willing to take us wherever we want to go. But do you know what happens if you are God’s child of God and you run from Him?

There Is a Storm That Follows You Wherever You Go

Verse 4 says, “Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up.” The storm that Jonah experienced was a wake-up call from God.

When you have a relationship with Him, that is good. It is what you were made for. But it is a relationship in which God is your Father, and when you won’t listen to His words, He finds other ways to get your attention.

God may not send a storm of rain and wind, but He will surely discipline his children. In 1 Corinthians 11, the apostle Paul is talking to Christians about Communion, the Lord’s Supper. He says the Lord’s Supper should be an occasion to examine your heart and to correct what needs to be corrected. But listen to how he puts it: “But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world (1 Corinthians 11: 31-32). If you look at your life, he says, and discover where you are resisting God or running from Him, and you correct that yourself, then you don’t have to experience God’s judgment. But if you do not correct yourself, you will be judged, disciplined, corrected by the Lord.

If you have received Christ as your Lord and Savior, then He is your Savior and you will not be condemned with the world. But He is also your Lord. For that reason, you will be corrected, disciplined. In that sense, there is a storm that will follow wherever you go. The story in Jonah 1 pictures how that principle worked itself out in Jonah’s life.

Verse 4 says, “Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up.” Verse 5 adds that the sailors were afraid. They threw the cargo overboard to lighten the ship so it would ride higher on the waves.

Sometimes people say, “Look, my choices are my choices, and they affect only my life,” but the truth is that it is almost never like that. Usually our choices affect many other people. These sailors lost their cargo and were in danger of losing their lives because of Jonah’s running from God.

When we run from God, we hurt not only ourselves but others also. Like the woman Melanie, her father’s sins affected her, and her sinful response to his sins was to run from God and that affected her children. If you say, “My choices are my choices, and they have nothing to do with anyone else,” you are saying something that that is totally foreign to the way the Bible tells us to look at our lives. If you say, “I’m not hurting anyone. I just don’t want to answer the call of God. I want to be my own boss and run my own life,” then you are not being who God made you to be and that affects us all. If you are not who God wants you to be, then we, as a community of Christians, cannot be all that God wants us to be.

The Scripture says your choices affect us all, and God’s discipline in your life can also affect us all. If you are running from God, you not only bring your turmoil into your own relationships, family, church, workplace, and community, but you may also bring a storm of discipline that affects many people. That’s the way God has structured the world.

There is no place we can go to escape God’s corrective discipline. In verse 3, the story says Jonah went down to Joppa. You wouldn’t want to make too much of the word down except for the fact that at the end of the verse where it says he went aboard the ship, the Hebrew literally says he went down into the ship. Then in verse 5, where it says he went below deck, the Hebrew uses the same word again, literally saying he went down into the “inner part” or the “lowest part” of the ship. It is the same word that was used of King David in 1 Samuel 24 when he hid himself from Saul in the “innermost parts” of a cave.

In Jonah, Scripture is painting the picture of a man who wants to escape his God-given calling and responsibility, so he goes down, down, down as far as humanly possible. He goes down to the sea, down into the ship, down, down into the deepest part of the ship, and then he goes to sleep. He went as far as he could and then went to sleep. Sometimes we sleep because we are at peace. But sometimes we are so overwhelmed and depressed and in turmoil that we sleep so that we don’t have to cope. Physically and emotionally Jonah tries to get away from God’s voice and God’s call and God’s discipline. But he can’t escape. God, who sends the storm, sends the sailor down into the ship to shake Jonah awake and demand answers.

Jonah can’t escape because God is sovereign. His troubles persist until the issue is resolved. God commands the wind and the sea. God creates the storm and then calms the waters just as suddenly and easily. God controls the casting of the lots and the great fish that shadows the ship, waiting for Jonah. Things keep getting stormier and rougher until we come to this strange scene where the sailors circle Jonah, holding on for dear life as the wind and waves wash over the rolling deck of a ship that seems about to tear apart under their feet. They pepper him with questions: “Who are you? What have you done?”

Those questions force Jonah to face two issues that are essential to true repentance.

Jonah has to own his identity as a worshiper of God. Jonah was willing to run from God, but he isn’t willing to say, “I don’t believe in God. I don’t have a God.” In verse 9, he answers, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.” The storm and the sailors were both gifts of grace that made Jonah face himself and admit, ironic as it seemed, on the deck of the ship in the midst of the storm, that in spite of his running from God he believed in God and worshiped God. An essential part of repentance is remembering who you are.

If you are not a believer, that means remember God is your creator and you need the grace He offers through faith in Christ. If you are a Christian and you’ve run from God, it means remember that God is not only your creator but also your Savior and your Lord. It means acknowledging who He is and who you are in relationship to Him. You need to repent and be restored.

Jonah has to own his responsibility for sinning against God. In verse 12, he says, “Throw me into the sea . . . and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.” True repentance doesn’t rationalize or make excuses; it takes responsibility. Jonah’s repentance was far from perfect, but he made a start when he said, “I know that it is my fault.”

Sometimes we think we can sail through life without clearly and cleanly taking a stand or admitting our faults. But God creates situations that force clear choices. Whether it is in daily struggles or in some huge crisis, if we continue to run from God and deny our faults, instead of coming clean and returning to Him, we poison and darken our own hearts. We endanger ourselves and others, and, as Jonah will say at the end of chapter 2, we “miss the grace that could be ours.” God doesn’t always send a dramatic, immediate, physical storm when we run from Him. But He does promise that we will reap what we have sown. There will be some kind of storm in the sense that He will discipline us.

When you run from God there is always a boat to take you and a storm that follows you. But there is something else also.

There Is Love Beneath the Waves

That Will Not Let You Go

Notice verses 15 -17. “Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him. But the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.”

God’s love is revealed in the strangest ways. But it really is love. Jonah doesn’t know this yet, but that great fish is the means by which he will be saved from drowning and delivered to dry land. In chapter 2, Jonah prays from inside the fish. The last words of his prayer (2:9) are “Salvation comes from the Lord.” That’s the message of the Bible in a sentence: “Salvation comes from the Lord.” God wants to save our lives in every sense of the word. In this life He wants to restore us, and for eternity redeem us.

Every time we have Communion, the Lord’s Supper, we are reminded that salvation comes from the Lord. We are given the bread that represents the body of Christ and the cup that represents His blood and are reminded that the same God who sent Jonah to the Ninevites to reveal His love sent Jesus into this world to take on our humanity, with a real body and real blood, to reveal His love. He came to die for our sins and rise again so that we might experience salvation through faith in Him. The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate demonstration of how far the sovereign love of God is willing to go to reconcile and redeem lost people.

If you have never received that love that is at the center of the Bible’s story, receive it. Quit running. Open your heart. Turn to Christ. Trust in Him. If you have received God’s love through faith in Christ, understand this: God’s love is a love that will not let you go. When you are in the midst of a storm you don’t know how God will bring salvation. You might not like His method if He revealed it to you. But you can know that no matter what the cause or the severity of the storms you face, if you belong to Him there is a love beneath the waves that will never let you go.

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). If Christ is your Lord and Savior, nothing will ever separate you from His love.

When we surrender to God’s love and begin learning to trust in Him, it is like a coming to our senses. It’s like the calming of a storm and the experience of a surprising salvation.

A great old hymn is titled “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.” The first verse says:

O Love that will not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee;

I give thee back the life I owe,

That in thine ocean depths its flow,

May richer, fuller be.

I want to acknowledge that through out this series of messages I drew freely from several sources. First the book, Salvation Through Judgment And Mercy: The Gospel According to Jonah (Gospel According to the Old Testament) by Bryan D. Estelle (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing) This is one installment of the very helpful series The Gospel According To the Old Testament D.A. Carson says that “one of the most urgent needs of the church is to grasp how the many parts of the Bible fit together to make one story-line that culminates in Jesus Christ…(and) this series of books goes a long way to meeting that need”. Sinclair Ferguson was quoted as saying “at last a series on the Old Testament designed to provide reliable exposition, biblical theology, and a focus on Christ”. O Palmer Robertson’s little book on Jonah, Jonah: A Study In Compassion, published by Banner of Truth, also proved especially helpful. While preaching this series I also listened to sermons on Jonah by Dr. Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll. Their sermons often suggested helpful ideas which were adapted to fit my approach and my congregation’s needs. Both of their sermon series are available through their web sites at www.redeemer.com and www.marshill.org respectively.

Topics: Jonah |

Comments