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Out of the Depths-Jonah 2:1-10

By Larry Kirk | April 24, 2007

Have you noticed how often we use watery words to describe hard times in our lives? “I’m in deep water now, I’m drowning here, I’m overwhelmed, I’m going under for the third time, I’m sinking.” The idea and image of sinking down into the depth of your suffering and your sins and being drowned in a flood of troubles is a familiar one in most cultures and certainly in the Scriptures. When the Bible uses this image, it’s not only telling us the story of something that happened but also evoking a feeling with which we can identify. That’s why the Psalms use these images. Psalm 69:1-2 says: “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me.”

It’s this kind of image that Jonah describes in Jonah 2 as he tells what happened to him and how God helped him. In Jonah 2:2-9 he breaks into poetry, because the words need to touch our hearts. We need to understand that no matter how deep the distress we find ourselves in, no matter how desperate we feel or how hopeless things seem, God’s grace can lift us up if we will call on Him and cling to Him.

Notice the structure in Jonah 2. The outline of what happened is found in just two verses, the first and the last.

2:1: From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God.

2:10: The Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.

Then, beginning in verses 2-9 we have this psalm, or poem. The poem follows the form of a psalm of thanksgiving, which means the opening line tells you what the whole psalm is expressing thanksgiving about.

It’s like someone’s getting up in church to give a testimony about answered prayer. The person says, “I want to thank God for answering a prayer and saving my life.” He will first tell what the crisis was and then what God did for him. At the end there may be a promise, a vow, to show thanks by doing something for the Lord. So the introductory statement tells us exactly what the heart of the psalm is about. Verse 2: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry.”

Everything else in this psalm is designed to impress this truth on our hearts. Why? Because we need to know that, like Jonah . . .

No Matter How Deep Our Distress Is,

We Can Call on God for Help

In verses 3-5 Jonah describes the crisis he faced. He says, “You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.” He recognizes that God is the one who controls the very circumstances that are overwhelming him. He says God hurled him into the deep, and then he says, “All your waves and breakers swept over me.” The waves that threaten him belong to God and are controlled by God.

Verse 4: “I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’” This may express Jonah’s first glimmer of hope that somehow God will be gracious to him. It’s also possible that the Hebrew here is implying a wish or a question: “Will I look again at your holy temple?”

In verse 5, with each statement Jonah wants to make sure that we understand how bad things were:

The engulfing waters threatened me,

the deep surrounded me;

seaweed was wrapped around my head.

Can you imagine the horror? You can’t swim, you are sinking deep underwater, your head tangled in seaweed, your lungs screaming for air. The Bible wants us to identify with Jonah’s distress because God wants us to see the source of Jonah’s only hope. Jonah’s story is certainly his own story, but all of us have to face some deep water in our lives.

Sometimes We Get into Deep Water, and It Is Not Our Fault

Bruce Waltke was one of Bible teacher Chuck Swindoll’s professors when he was a student at Dallas Seminary. Swindoll says that when he was going through a very difficult time in his senior year and wanted some answers to the whys, he went to Dr. Waltke, who said something like this: “Chuck, I’ve come to the place where I believe only in very rare occasions does God tell us why, so I’ve decided to stop asking.” Even if He did explain His actions, we probably wouldn’t understand, because “His ways are not our ways.”

Sometimes the problems are not our fault. We don’t know why the trouble has come, and we just have to call on God for help and trust in His grace and love. But with Jonah, the trouble was his fault. Sometimes it’s the same with us.

Sometimes We Must to Admit That the Reason

We Are in Deep Water Is That We Have Disobeyed God

Not everyone likes the historic creeds and confessions of the faith, but I do. The creeds, those formal statements of faith that have been handed down through the centuries, usually reflect a community of Christians working together to say something that is clear and biblical. The Westminster Confession of Faith contains a great statement about the deep water that Christians can get into. After saying that all who belong to Christ, because of faith in Him, can never be lost, it says this:

Nevertheless, they may, through the temptations of Satan and of the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation, fall into grievous sins; and, for a time, continue therein: whereby they incur God’s displeasure, and grieve His Holy Spirit, come to be deprived of some measure of their graces and comforts, have their hearts hardened, and their consciences wounded, hurt and scandalize others, and bring temporal judgments upon themselves. (Chapter XVII)

That is what happened to Jonah. He hurt others. Remember the sailors who lost all their property and were afraid for their lives? And he brought temporal, earthly judgments on himself. If you find yourself in anything like Jonah’s situation, learn the lesson Jonah learned. When he was sinking down, he looked up. He called out to God and found grace and help.

When you are in deep water, even if it is your own fault, don’t think that you cannot call on God.

Psalm 107:17-21 says: “Some became fools through their rebellious ways and suffered affliction because of their iniquities. They loathed all food and drew near the gates of death. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress. He sent forth his word and healed them; he rescued them from the grave. Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men.”

When we’re in trouble and it’s our own fault, and we get overwhelmed and desperate and call on God, does He say, “I’m sorry, if it wasn’t your fault or if you had asked for help a little earlier I could have helped, but it is too late now. You are in so deep not even I can lift you up again”? No, look at Jonah 2:6. “To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever.” He uses this poetic image of the roots of the mountains and the bars of the earth to say he was as deep as he could get, beyond escape. But notice the two little words that come next: “But you.”

Those two tiny words capture the heart of Christian faith. Jonah says: “I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But You brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God.” That word “but” tells us that there is no logical or causal connection between the before and the after. The doctrine of grace teaches us that God delivers us in spite of our circumstances and in spite of our sins. He delivers us not because of what is in our lives but because of what is in His heart. Because of that we can know that . . .

When We Call on God for Help He Gives Us Grace

Look at verses 7-8: “When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple. Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.” Jonah is saying, “I had sinned against You, Lord, I was proud and stubborn. I hardened my heart and went my own way. Because of my sin and Your judgment, I was as far away from You as is humanly possible, my life was leaking out and leaving me. But at that deepest possible point of sin and lostness, with very little life left, slipping into unconsciousness, I remembered You, Lord, and released a prayer.”

That prayer, like the last bubble slipping out of the lips of a drowning man, rose up, all the way up, not only to the surface of the deep, but beyond, all the way up to the heart of God in His holy temple. God’s response was grace. Do you know what God gives when He gives you grace?

When God Gives You Grace, He Gives You

Loyalty and Love That You Do Not Deserve

That’s what grace means. The Hebrew word translated “grace” is hesed, which means loyal love given by an unobligated giver to an undeserving person. It is the same word Jonah uses at the end of the book when he says in Jonah 4:2, “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.”

Grace does not mean that God gives us exactly what we want. It does mean that He gives us a loyal love that we do not deserve. In order to understand grace, you have to see how deep your need is and how great God’s love is.

When it comes to grace, there are three kinds of people in the world and in the church.

Some people never understand grace because they never understand how deep their needs are. They think they are capable of running their own lives. They also think they deserve God’s love and protection as they go their own way. They say, “I think I’ve done pretty well. I don’t think I’m asking God for anything that I don’t have coming to me.”

Apparently this was how Jonah felt. He didn’t mind being a prophet and doing what God asked him to do as long as he agreed with God on whether it made sense and seemed right. But if, instead of doing what God says, you do only those things that make sense and seem right to you, then you aren’t obeying God at all. You are showing that you want to be your own God. You want to rule your own life. You want to make your own decisions. That, from the time of the great thud in the Garden, has been the very root and heart of all sin.

We are not God. We are not as smart as God, we are not as big as God, we are not as good as God. We are called to love God and obey Him. When we refuse to do that, we are being silly, and we are being sinful. We’re like a man I heard about who was praying. He stood, opened his eyes, looked up to heaven, and said, “Hey, up there, can You hear me? Hey, God, if You can really hear me, tell me what You want me to do with my life?”

A voice from above thundered a reply. “I want you to help the needy and give your life for the cause of Christ!”

Faced with a challenge he didn’t really want, the man said, “Actually, God, I was just checking to see if You were there.”

We may think we are more righteous than we are. We run from God’s authority. We go our own way, committed to our plans instead of submitting to God’s will. We do not obey Him. All of that is sin. And the Bible says that what Jonah experienced in judgment is a picture of what sin deserves.

• “distress” (verse 2)

• “the depths of the grave,” literally sheol, the place of the dead (also verse 2)

• “banishment from God’s sight” (verse 4)

If you want to know how serious your sins really are, look at what the Bible says they deserve. And if you want to know what they deserve, look at the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He went down into the depths of human suffering and the experience of God’s judgment to pay for our sins. Our need of forgiveness and grace is so deep that Christ had to experience the depths of hell in His suffering for us on the cross.

We don’t understand grace until we see how deep our need for grace is. Face your need for grace. Some people never understand grace because they never understand how deep their needs are.

But there is a second kind of person who doesn’t understand.

Some people never understand grace because they do not understand how big God’s love is. Some people see their sins very clearly. And that is painful. But they don’t understand how big God is and how willing God’s love is. Some people see their sins clearly, but they are afraid that they have run a little too far from God to ever see His grace again. They have sunk down so far now that they feel there is no hope for grace to reach them and ever lift them up again. They don’t believe God’s grace is big enough and strong enough and free enough to deal with the mess they’ve made and the mess they’ve become.

But it is. It doesn’t matter how deep your sin and guilt sink you. God’s grace can find you there and lift you up and out.

A third kind of person is the one who sees at the same time both the depth of his need and the height of God’s grace and love. That is what happened to Jonah. He saw at the same time how deep his need was and how high and big and powerful is God’s grace.

Some people see how bad their sins are and how deep their need is, but that doesn’t change them because they don’t see the height of God’s grace. Other people see the greatness of God’s grace, but that doesn’t light a fire in their hearts either, because they’ve never felt how deep their need for that grace is. But when, like Jonah, you are brought to the place where you see both, then the depth of your need and the greatness of His grace come together in your heart like two chemicals. They set off a reaction resulting in life and light and strength and clarity and devotion.

Jonah says something very interesting in verse 7: “When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple.” In the days of Jonah, the temple was the one place where you saw at the same time both the depth of your need for grace and the greatness of God’s grace that was offered. The temple symbolized the truth that no one could go into God’s presence and worship Him without bringing a sacrifice, a blameless lamb to symbolically die the death the one who brought it deserved. Some people today say that’s terrible. That’s primitive. No. God was giving humanity an important lesson in how serious our sins are and how they separate us from Him.

But at the same time those sacrifices were symbols of how great God’s grace is, because the temple was a visible expression of God’s desire to live in relationship with us. The sacrifices were a promise that one day God would provide, in the gift of His Son, the one true sacrifice that could pay for all our sins so that He could lift us out of the depths and into His love forever.

Jonah could find grace in the depth of his distress because God would provide a sacrifice to pay for his sin.

Do you understand that, like Jonah sinking into the sea because of his own sins, you have no claim on God at all except for grace? Do you also understand just as clearly and deeply that, because of Jesus Christ, God is able to continually, freely, and completely, give you not what you deserve or have earned but His grace?

God Wants Us to Know His Grace, and He Wants You,

Because of His Grace, to Trust in Him

Look at verses 8-9: “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from the Lord.” Jonah isn’t condemning the pagans here. He is saying, “When we run from God, we turn our own desires and fears into idols, and as long as we cling to those idols that compete with God for our trust, we forfeit the grace that could be ours.”

That’s why God works in our lives, as he worked in Jonah’s life, to teach us not to cling to false gods.

There is a species of bird in which the mother does everything she can to get her growing babies out of the nest. When it time for them to fly, she tries to push them out. On occasion, if a bird will not go, the mother actually begins to pick the nest apart. Piece by piece she dismantles it until the bird is sitting on thin air and has to learn to fly. And it does. It learns to fly. What God was doing with Jonah was something like that. God was teaching Jonah a lesson that Jonah did not want to learn. God has to do that with us sometimes.

Steve Brown puts it like this:

God lets us get into bad places to bring us to a deeper repentance. You say, “That’s horrible” No, it’s not. It’s good. Because a life of repentance, agreeing with God and agreeing that His love is real and His way is best, that’s the place where you receive the reality of his love and receive the restoration only he can give. (Jonah 2 )

If you are close to Him today, stay close. Live in His grace and because of His grace do the things He calls you to do. If you are far from God, come to Him. Experience the grace He pictures in the story of Jonah and provides through the love of Christ.

If you are in distress, call on Him. Cling to him. No matter how deep you’ve sunk, He can lift you up. And He will if you turn to Him and call on Him. Your prayers of faith will reach Him. Even if the trouble you are in is your own fault, turn back to Him, and He will give you grace and lift you up.

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 |

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