Running Rebel (Part Four): The Relentless Rundown

Transcript

JROT 21
10/29/2023
Running Rebel (Part Four): The Relentless Rundown
Jonah 1:14-17
Jesse Randolph

We are turning our attention this evening back to the book of Jonah. And by way of quick review the book is off to a bit of a tumultuous start, is it not? It’s interesting. So far what we’ve seen as we’ve gotten off the dock, so to speak, in the first few verses of this book is that Jonah was a prophet of Yahweh and specifically, a prophet to the ten northern tribes of Israel and he’s on the run. Hence the title of the sermon series, “Running Rebel.”

Jonah was told to go to Nineveh, this major city, this pagan city in Assyria, the very nation from whom God was going to send a people ultimately to shake Israel to its senses, by one day defeating them and hauling them away into captivity. And Jonah’s charge here, you’ll recall, was to go preach against the wickedness of the Ninevites, the people of Ninevah. We see that there in Jonah 1:2, God’s command to Jonah, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.” But Jonah didn’t go to Nineveh, did he? No. Instead he left his hometown of Gath-Hepher, he went down to Joppa, a port town, he boarded a ship on its way to Tarshish, a city which was about as far from Nineveh that you could get in these days. Tarshish and Nineveh, by the way, were about as close to each other as Boston and Los Angeles are on our American maps or US maps. And Jonah boarded that ship on the way to Tarshish and after the ship set sail, as we know, the Lord threw, hurled, flung a storm on the sea, and it's actually Jonah 1:4, “The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea.” And that wind then in turn brought about a storm, and then that storm then caused the ship that Jonah was a passenger on to start breaking up as we see in verse 4. And we note that there was cargo on this ship.

This was a cargo ship of some sort. We know that Jonah wasn’t the only person on the ship. We know that the ship had a captain and that the ship had these various sailors who reported to that captain of the ship. And these seafaring men, who we know were pagans of some sort, had surely had seen their share of nasty storms in their career, in their sea-faring voyages. But though they had experience, though they had done this before, this was not their first rodeo, we see them in a state of panic. Verse 5 we see them becoming afraid and it says, “every man cried [out] to his god.” And we see them starting to throw cargo overboard to lighten the load on this ship. And in the case of the captain we see him go down into the hold of the ship, probably to find more cargo to throw overboard and instead he finds Jonah sound asleep, fast sleep, in a deep sleep, in the hold of the ship.

Then in verse 6, we see this pagan sea captain urging Jonah to wake up. It says, “the captain approached him and said, ‘How is it that you are sleeping? Get us, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish.’ ” And then meanwhile, above deck, you’ll recall, there were the sailors who had cast lots to see who might be responsible for bringing this storm to them. We saw at the end of Jonah 1:7, “the lot fell on Jonah.”

And then naturally, the sailors now had some questions about what was going on here, right? This intense storm had suddenly come upon them and they had had to throw their precious cargo overboard. And they had to watch as their profits sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean and then the ship that they were aboard was threatening to break apart. And they knew that there would now be no future voyages on this broken-down vessel. And now their lives are in danger. So they start asking this flurry of questions here in verse 8 which can essentially be boiled down to, who are you, where are you from?

In Jonah 1:9, the prophet answers them, he says, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land.” Well, to this point in the narrative, as we saw last week, Jonah certainly wasn’t acting like he “feared the Lord God” who is in heaven. Jonah, instead was acting more like a petulant preschooler. He was getting what he wanted and only what he wanted. But what the sailors heard was that this man’s “God” was Yahweh. A God they had surely heard of, or at least acquainted with to certain degree. And what they heard from the lips of Jonah was that this man’s God “made the sea,” the very sea from which this violent storm had been born. And what they heard was that this man’s God had “made… the dry land,” the very land they so desperately wanted to get back to.

So then they asked Jonah another series of questions. First in verse 10 they asked, “How could you do this?” Those are literally their words there. “How could you do this?” The sense here is how could you bring this calamity upon us, why would you do such a thing? And then in verse 11, they asked another question. “What should we do to you that the sea may become calm for us?” They were essentially asking here how can we appease this God whom you serve, how do we get these waves to calm down, how do we still the storm?”

Jonah answers them in verse 12, he says, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea.” And as I attempted to answer for all of you last week, or to explain to you all last week (and this was the number one question I was asked after the sermon last Sunday night), this was not, I believe, a humble act of self-sacrifice performed here by Jonah when he says, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea.” It’s not the humble act of self-sacrifice that some commentators make this out to be. This wasn’t Jonah falling on his sword. Or typifying the future, atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Rather, this was yet another example of Jonah doing things Jonah’s way instead of doing things God’s way. Rather than asking the captain of the ship to take him back to Joppa so that he could put his feet back on dry land and hoof it up to Ninevah and do the very thing God had called him to do which was to preach repentance to the Ninevites, Jonah instead asked to be thrown into the sea. In other words, Jonah was expressing here that he would rather die than act in accordance with God’s will. He’d rather die than adhere to God’s commands. He would rather consign himself to the waves than do the will of God. He would rather see the Ninevites, the pagan Ninevites, perish than preach to them.

Well, in verse 13 we saw at the end of our time together last week, the sailors actually didn’t initially heed Jonah’s requests. They didn’t immediately throw him into the sea. Instead verse 13 says, they “rowed desperately to return to the land.” And, as we saw last time, that verb “rowed” literally means “to dig.” The picture there is they are furiously and frantically digging into the waves with their paddles to get Jonah to dry land. And I noted last time that in doing so they were showing him far greater compassion and far more consideration already in this story, than he was showing to them. Though a part of God’s people, Jonah had brought nothing but calamity upon these sailors and served as a horrible witness for God. But meanwhile, these pagan sailors, who don’t know Yahweh were somehow managing to reflect His character. Exodus 34:6 talks about God being “compassionate and gracious.” They were demonstrating those characteristics, compassion and grace, far more than the prophet of Yahweh himself was.
Well, despite the sailors’ efforts to get Jonah back to dry land, we see in verse 13 here, it says that “they could not.” And why? “for the sea,” it says, “was becoming even stormier against them.”

And that catches us up. And that brings us to the doorstep of our text for this evening where we’ll be finishing up Jonah chapter 1 as we work our way through verses 14-17. I’ll go ahead and read it to you and then we’ll work through it together. God’s Word reads, “Then they called on the Lord and said, ‘We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O Lord, have done as You have pleased.’ So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. Then the men feared the Lord greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.”

Now, there’s a lot going on here. And just in these four verses there are many details that are highly familiar to most of us. Right? It’s in this section of Jonah that we see Jonah being thrown overboard and being swallowed by this “great fish.” These are stories that many, even non-believers, hostile, anti-Christians, people who are biblically illiterate, have at least some degree of familiarity with.

And I have to say that sadly there are a lot of preachers who will get to this portion of Jonah, knowing how well-known it is and knowing how familiar it is and they’ll give their sermon a real clever title like, “Man Overboard.” Or “Jonah Goes For a Swim.” Or something like that as though the sailors’ act of throwing Jonah overboard is the focal point of this narrative when it’s not. Or some preachers will ‘major in the minors’ by stoking and satisfying their congregation’s appetite for Bible trivia by hyper-emphasizing some of the more incidental details of this passage. Was it a fish or was it a whale? What did Jonah look like when he came out of this sea creature? What did he smell like? Was he able to breathe? Was it 72 literal hours or portions of three days that he was in the belly of the fish? And yet others can’t resist the temptation to preach this section of Jonah from a slavishly Christocentric point of view in which they see Jonah as a picture of Christ. And they see the ship as the cross. And they see the sea as the forces of hell. And they see the belly of the fish or the whale as the tomb.

Well, respectfully, those preachers are getting it wrong. The text we’re going to be in tonight isn’t about the fish. The text that we’re going to be in tonight isn’t even about Jonah. Though Jesus would later in the New Testament pull in parts of this account of Jonah to speak of His own death, burial, and resurrection this text isn’t even about our Lord. Rather, this text is about God. And this text is about God’s sovereignty in salvation. Now, I do recognize that we live in a period of limited attention spans. And I do realize we live in a time where people have shockingly low levels of biblical literacy. And I do understand that there are some really interesting features of this text that we all naturally crave answers to. But let’s not over-emphasize what is really not the central purpose and point of this text, i.e., Jonah and the fish. And let’s not under-emphasize what is truly central to in this passage, which is that God was relentlessly running down not only Jonah, but these pagan sailors, and how through this harrowing series of events at sea they apparently came to know Yahweh and trust in Him.

The title of the message this evening is “The Relentless Rundown.” And on a macro level the title is meant to communicate that in this book as a whole, God was unrelenting in His pursuit of His runaway prophet, Jonah, while on a micro level, meaning in the first chapter of this book of Jonah and specifically in the four verses we’ll cover tonight, God was chasing down this group of pagan sailors as He brought them to Himself.

We’ll pick it up again in verse 13. As we get sort of a running start to our passage tonight in verse 14 I want to take us back to verse 13, back to these sailors. It says, “the men rowed desperately to return to land but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them.” So these sailors here, these pagan mariners, again are pictured as digging into the waves with their paddles. They are rowing desperately. Their teeth, you can picture it, are gritted. Their muscles are straining in their efforts to get Jonah, a man who had only caused them trouble up to this point, back to dry land.

And again, note this contrast that’s clearly being presented here. You have Jonah presented as this prophet of God who was unwilling to lift a finger to bring the message of repentance to the people of Nineveh but then you’ve got this group of pagan, idol-worshiping sailors who were willing to put their lives on the line to spare Jonah. There should have been some degree of conviction in this for Jonah as he witnessed what they were doing for him. If he had that degree of conviction we’ll never know. No such sentiments are recorded here. And despite their best efforts we see that the sailors were unable to get back to dry land. And they were unable to get Jonah back to dry land, end of verse 13, “for the sea was becoming even stormier against them.”

Now as we pick it up in verse 14, it says, “they called on the Lord and said, ‘We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O Lord, have done as you have pleased.” We’ll start with those first few words there. It says, then “They called on the Lord.” You know what we call that? Prayer. Prayer. These pagans prayed. And there’s so much richness and context and irony to what’s being described here when it says, “they called on the Lord.” For starters, they were doing something that Jonah himself hadn’t done yet in this book. Now eventually Jonah would pray to the Lord, we know that from Jonah 2, but up to this point in the narrative, there is no record at all of Jonah having prayed. Instead, the only ones who had done any praying of any sort up to this point were the pagans on the ship! Look back at verse 5. It says, “Then the sailors became afraid and every man cried to his god.” They’re praying out to their gods. Or verse 6, that the captain of the ship approaches Jonah and says, “How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god.” Now of course, up to this point, these are a bunch of pagan prayers to pagan gods that ultimately will accomplish nothing but still the contrast and the irony that’s being presented here is palpable. The pagans on the ship are praying and they’re urging Jonah to pray, but Jonah can’t be bothered to do so, instead Jonah sleeps.

Well, the instincts of these pagan sailors to pray continues on in our text tonight in verse 14 where the text tells us, “Then they called on the Lord.” Now note, this essential difference here: these sailors aren’t praying to their local gods anymore, they’re not praying to their local deities. Instead, they are praying very clearly L-O-R-D here, to Yahweh. And though we look at Jonah’s words in verse 9 where he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land,” and we think when we see that, how disingenuous of Jonah! We tend to overlook the fact of how those words would have been received by these pagan sailors when they first heard them there in verse 9. And the fact that the sailors, as they heard Jonah says that all the way back in verse 9, were zeroing in on one thing when he made that statement. They were zeroing in not on Jonah’s inconsistency. They were zeroing in instead on the nature of the God that Jonah claimed to represent. Jonah’s God was Yahweh. Jonah’s God was the One “who made the sea and the dry land” and that apparently clicked for them. They apparently believed Jonah and they believed that his God was not only the One who had brought this calamity upon them but that his God was indeed the Creator of the sea and the land, the Creator of heaven and earth, the one true God. So they are no longer crying out to their individual gods as we saw back in verse 5. No, now they are crying out to the one true God, the living God, Yahweh. That’s all bundled in with what is said here in verse 14 when it says, “Then they called on the LORD.”

Now, as we read on in this verse we are given the content of their prayer. These are the words which arose from earth to heaven in the middle of this fateful storm. Here’s the prayer, it says, “We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us, for You, O Lord, have done as You [have] pleased.” Now we’ll start just with those words, “we earnestly pray.” You can hear the urgency in those words. These sailors are now beseeching God and they are pleading with God, and they are wrestling with God. They realized very much so that their fate rested in His hands.

And this is where we all once were at one point as unbelievers, were we not? That we were all at this point in our life where we worshiped a variety of different, lower case, gods. Maybe not idols made of wood or stone or metal but idols we had crafted in our hearts, whether it was the idol of a relationship or the idol of comfort or the idol of pleasure. Every one of us, we coddled our idols. We protected our idols. We sought solace in our idols. And while perhaps we never would have put it this way, we were just like these pagan sailors in that we worshiped our idols. But then there was this moment where the light came on. And there was this moment where someone shared the gospel with us and the message of the gospel pierced our hearts and convicted us. And there was this moment where we realized in one of those like palm-to-forehead kind of moments that we’d been chasing after wrong things this entire time. When like Jonah we had been running from God. And that our college professor of world religions had gotten it wrong. And that our family members might have gotten it wrong and that those who have the big platforms in this world, the politicians and the celebrities and the athletes, they got it wrong. And all the great world philosophers, Descartes and Spinoza and Hume and Aristotle and Plato, they got it wrong. And that there really is only one true God. And that there really is only one way to access that God through Jesus Christ. At that point the lights went on, the scales fell off our eyes and like those pagan sailors here in verse 14, we for the first time cried out to God, but now no longer as His enemies but as His sons.

That’s what we see happening here in verse 14. As their prayer here begins here the sailors are now recognizing God for who He is. Yahweh, the faithful covenant-keeping God of Israel, yes, but also the God who made the world and everything in it. And they prayed to Him accordingly. Look at verse 14 again, it says, “We earnestly pray, O Lord,” and then we see a few different aspects to their prayer. First, we see two different petitions. Then we see them articulate at the end of verse 14, one significant theological truth. Look at the rest of verse 14, where we are going to see the content of the prayer laid out this way. It says, “do not let us perish on account of this man’s life,” that’s petition number one. “And do not put innocent blood on us;” that’s petition number two. Then there’s the theological truth, “for You, O Lord, have done as You have pleased.” So two petitions, one theological truth.

Let’s take them in turn. We’ll start with the petitions which begin this way, “do not let us perish on account of this man’s life.” Now, in context, the sailors vocalized those words, again after first trying to row the ship back to land to get Jonah on solid ground, to get him off the boat. But that wasn’t working because, “the sea was becoming [increasingly] even stormier” as it says in verse 13. So apparently now, their decision’s been made. All options have been exercised and Jonah has already given them the solution back in verse 12 when he says, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea.” Now, here in verse 14 the sailors realize that really is their only option left. They are now ready to go ahead and take Jonah’s advice. But before they do so they pray. First, by petitioning God and saying, “do not let us perish on account of this man’s life.” And then the second petition, “and do not put innocent blood on us.” Now those two statements, though separate, they really are intertwined, they really are closely related, the two ideas really stack on top of one another. The idea is don’t let us die on account of taking this man’s life, that is or i.e., don’t hold us responsible, God, for shedding innocent blood.

Now the word “innocent” here, by the way, is not meaning or implying that the sailors thought that Jonah was definitely guiltless. It appears they had more of a neutral perspective at this point and, instead, what their worry seems to have been was that they might cast a person into the sea without a fair hearing who could later be proven to be innocent before there was an opportunity for a true finding of guilt or innocence. And what they wanted to do to prevent themselves from later being held accountable by God for the death of a man who could later be determined innocent was plead with Yahweh this way through prayer. And so the sailors say here in their prayer in verse 13, God we aren’t a party to whatever crimes this man committed against You. We really have no basis on which to determine whether he is guilty or innocent.
We can’t make that determination. All we need to do is take action because time is running out and this ship is falling apart, and our only course of action remaining is to throw this man into the sea. So, though pagans and though they didn’t have a copy of the Mosaic Law there on the breakroom on the ship, the Law of God still was etched on their hearts as Romans 2 puts it. And they still valued life as every human being inherently values life. They instinctively recognized the worth of a human life. They didn’t want to take Jonah’s life but in the event that they had to, they pleaded for God’s mercy here for potentially killing a potentially innocent man. They respected God’s power, but they feared His vengeance. They had already seen Yahweh’s power with the storm coming upon them but they wanted to be no part of being a recipient of His punishment.

Now note, the prayers the sailors offered here, these weren’t the frantic, fearful prayers that we saw back in verse 5 where it is says, “the sailors became afraid and every man cried to his god.” No, the prayers that are being offered here now in verse 14 were more tempered, more focused, more controlled and that’s because their prayers were now rooted in the recognition of the sovereignty of God. Look at the end of verse 14 where they acknowledge, “for You, O Lord, have done as You have pleased.” See, the prayers that these sailors prayed earlier in the verse when they said “do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us,” those prayers were tempered by this recognition at the end of the verse, that the Lord God does what He pleases, that Yahweh does what He pleases. And how profound that was for them already to be able to demonstrate at such an early stage of their spiritual development soon after they had “called on the Lord.”

That they were already wrestling with and aware of and cognizant of matters related to God’s sovereignty and providence in the middle of this storm. Now today, sitting here right now as detached readers of a black and white text, those who weren’t actually in the eye of the storm, who didn’t hear with our ears the sounds of the crashing waves and who didn’t smell with our nostrils the smell of the salty spray, we can read this narrative and we can find ourselves thinking, well, of course, God is sovereignly working here. We can read all the way to chapter 4 and know that God was working sovereignly. But to the actual participants in this event, and specifically to these sailors, it was quite profound for them as pagans of all things, to come to this realization. To see that it was God, Jonah 1:4, who had “hurled [this]… wind on the sea,” to see that it was God, Jonah 1:7, who had caused the lots to fall the way they did, to see that it was God who had brought this calamity upon them.

And recognizing all of this, God’s existence, God’s singularity as the one true God, God’s power in bringing about the storm, God’s sovereignty in each of the events leading up to where we are in the narrative so far, it led these sailors to the place that we all should get when we take any time to reflect on the nature and the character of who God is. It should take us to the place where we naturally fall to our knees and pray to that God and worship Him that way. (I know I’ve already quoted him, I’ve probably over-quoted him today. I quoted him one time this morning and I’m going to quote him again, but Jonathan Edwards.) Because these words are so good and so timely and so pertinent to what we’re dealing with here with the sovereignty of God and prayer, as you hear these words from [Jonathan] Edwards, tell me you don’t want to just get on your knees and start praying to this God. He says, “God sees all over this world: every man, woman, and child; every beast on earth, every bird in the air, every fish in the sea. There is not so much as a fly or worm or gnat that is unknown to God. He knows every tree, every leaf, every spire of grass; every drop of rain or dew; every single dust mite in the world. God sees in darkness and underground. A thousand miles underground is not hid from His view. God sees that all men do or say, sees their hearts and thoughts. God knows everything past, even things a thousand years ago. He also knows everything to come, even a thousand years to come. He knows all the men that will be, and all that they will do, or say, or think.”

In other words, God is Creator. He is all-wise. He is omnipotent. He is omniscient. He is omnipresent. And He is worthy of all our praise and our prayers. And the sailors here from thousands of years ago now, were coming to this very realization when they said here at the end of verse 14, “You, O Lord, have done as You have pleased.” These sailors were coming to recognize, as it says in Psalm 115:3, that “our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases.” These sailors were coming to recognize as it says in Psalm 135:6, “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps.” They were coming to realize, as we see in Psalm 107:25 that “He,” meaning God, “spoke and raised up a stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.” And they were coming to the place where they could affirm the question asked in Lamentations 3:37 “Who is there who speaks and it comes to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it?” And so these sailors, they call on the Lord, they pray to the Lord. And not only that, as we’ll see later in verse 16, they offer sacrifices to the Lord and they give vows to the Lord.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because next in verse 15, we have a very memorable incident recorded. Having made their petition to Yahweh, having prayed to Him, having cried out to Him, they now turned to the task that they knew was before them. Look at verse 15, it says, “So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging.” How much time transpired between verses 14 and 15? How many minutes? We don’t know. Did they close in prayer in verse 14, and say “amen” and throw Jonah immediately into the sea? We don’t know.
Could there have been a moment of silence? Some sort of resigned collective sigh as they waited for a sign from heaven above, from Yahweh above, in response to their prayer before they throw him into the sea? We don’t know. The text doesn’t tell us. Instead the text just gives us the outcome. The text tells us that after praying, verse 14, they tossed Jonah, verse 15, into the sea. “So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea.” In other words, Jonah got his wish. Back in verse 12 what did he ask them? “Pick me up and throw me into the sea.” And here, we see that Jonah got what he wanted. He’d rather have water fills his lungs to the point of drowning and death, he’d rather sink to the bottom of the ocean floor if the sharks didn’t get to him first, than be used as an instrument of Yahweh to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh.

And he got his wish. Overboard he went as his body splashed into the Mediterranean Sea. And we don’t have any more details than that. We aren’t told if Jonah was bound or tied up. We don’t know if he was weighted. We don’t know if he did a belly flop. We don’t know how many men it took to throw him in. All we know is what is recorded here. “They picked up Jonah,” they “threw him into the sea.” That word, by the way, “threw,” here in verse 15 is the same word we see back in verse 4 where God is described as throwing the wind on to the sea in the first place.

Now there have been some who have been very eager to find Jesus on every page of the Old Testament. There have been some who have been eager to find Jesus in every cave, in every rock, in every nook and cranny of the Old Testament.And what they do is they take verse 15 right here, and they’ll say that this picture of Jonah being thrown into the sea is Messianic typology. It really is only there to show us what Christ would later go through. In fact, there’s a man, an English Baptist theologian named John Gill, who is currently the theological darling of the modern Reformed Baptist world, the 1689 London Baptist Confession guys, who wrote this of verse 15, he said, “In this,” meaning this tossing into the sea, “Jonah was a type of Christ, who willingly gave himself to suffer and die, that he might appease divine wrath, satisfy justice, and save men; only with this difference,” and pick up if this is a major difference or a minor difference, “Jonah suffered for his own sins, Christ for the sins of others, Jonah to lay a storm he himself had raised by his sins, Christ to lay a storm others had raised by their sins.” Now, that’s admittedly poetic if not a bit dated, but it’s also wrong. If Jonah personified anyone as he was thrown into the sea, getting what he wanted, still running from God, still disobeying God, still doing things his way, he certainly wasn’t personifying Christ. He was personifying us, he was typifying us. Jonah looks nothing like Christ here, the perfect, sinless, spotless Lamb of God who always sought to do the Father’s will. Jonah looks like us whenever we ignore God’s Word whenever we disregard God’s Word, whenever we disobey His commands, whenever we, as it were, run in the opposite direction from what God has commanded us very clearly to do.

Next, we are given this detail at the end of verse 15, “and the sea stopped its raging.” So at some point, apparently soon after Jonah’s body hit the water, the sea became calm, the raging waves turned into this picture of perfect serenity, the tempest was now tempered, the sea “stopped its raging.” Sort of reminds us of that picture in the Gospels in Matthew 8 where Jesus is with His disciples, sleeping on the boat, suddenly this massive storm overtakes them. The disciples rouse Jesus from His sleep. They say, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing,” [verse 25], and He rebukes them for being “men of little faith.” And then in Matthew 8:26 it says, “Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it became perfectly calm.” And we know among other things, that proved among many other evidences, that Jesus is God. Well, something very similar happened in the days of Jonah. This massive storm overtakes this ship and, in this case, on account of Jonah’s sin. And here, when Jonah is finally thrown into the sea, God caused the sea to stop its raging. God brought the storm about in the first place and He brought an end to the storm when He saw fit to do so.

So Jonah is now all wet. He’s in the drink as golfers would say. He’s somewhere in the sea. And from the sailors’ vantage point apparently that was that. They had called on the Lord. They had prayed. They had acted. They had thrown Jonah into the sea. They had even witnessed the sea suddenly become calm as “the sea stopped its raging.” And they had been delivered. The threat to their life was no longer there. This strange Hebrew person was apparently now the victim of the fate he deserved and the fate this sovereign God had destined for him. From the sailors’ vantage point, Jonah was a dead man. He had gone on in the middle of the Mediterranean to meet his Maker and his Judge. I appreciate the colorful commentary Hugh Martin offers on
verse 15. He sort of paints the picture of what this would have looked like. He says, “It is a calm. The clouds have parted. The waves are hushed. The heavens are beautiful and blue. Onward the strange vessel flits, beating her quiet tack; unconscious of her matchless story…”

Now as we turn on to, move on to, verse 16 we come upon another fascinating turn in the story. Jonah’s in the sea, the sailors are on the ship. And with Jonah temporarily out of the picture the spotlight of the narrative now turns back to the crew of the ship. We’ve already seen these sailors call out to God and pray to God back in verse 14. Now look at what is described in verse 16, it says, “Then the men,” referring to the sailors still, “feared the Lord greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” Now this isn’t the first time that the sailors’ fear is mentioned here in Jonah. We saw back in verse 10 where after Jonah revealed himself to be a Hebrew, verse 10, it says, “Then the men,” these are the same men, “became extremely frightened.” But there we saw their fear was anchored in what Jonah’s God, the One “who made the sea and [the One who made] “the dry land,” could do to them, the punitive measures He could bring. Now, though, in verse 16 we are told that these “men feared the Lord greatly.”
They are now living in reverential awe of the Lord. They were now fearing Him the way His own people, Israelites, Hebrews, people like Jonah were called to fear Him. The people of Israel had been given this very instruction to fear Yahweh. You can write down Deuteronomy 10:12. It says, “Now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require from you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” Or Deuteronomy 10:20 just a few verses down says, “You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve Him and cling to Him, and you shall swear by His name.” We know from Proverbs 1:7 and of course, it’s “The fear of the LORD [that] is the beginning of knowledge.”

These sailors now feared the Lord. Though pagan in origin they now feared the God of Israel. The book of Jonah is nothing if it’s not a book of contrasts. Back in verse 9 we saw Jonah who was of Israel, who was a Hebrew, identifying himself as a God-fearer, “I’m a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land,” but whose stubborn and sinful and rebellious ways showed that he actually had no fear. And now here in verse 16 you have these sailors, not of Israel, rather pagans, who earlier were crying out to their gods, whose fear was anchored earlier in the damage that the storm might cause them or their precious ship or their lives -- now they’re the ones calling out to Yahweh and praying to Yahweh and acknowledging the sovereignty of Yahweh. And as it says here very clearly in verse 16, fearing Yahweh and not just fearing Him, but fearing Him “greatly.”

And not only did these sailors fear Yahweh though, it says they worshiped Him. Look at the end of verse 16, it says, then “they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” Now, some, i.e., liberal scholars, the guys I have to engage with all week to get out the gold for the messages, they object to what’s described here as being historically inaccurate and factually problematic because what they’ll point to, they’ll note, is that there is no mention of any animals on the ship and there’s no mention of any altar on the ship. Like no kidding! Why would a pagan ship have an altar to the God of Israel? But who ever said that the sacrifice happened on the ship? Is that there in the text? No. By verse 16 the scene has shifted. In verse 15 obviously the sailors are still on the sea, they had to be on the sea to throw Jonah into the sea. But there’s no time marker connecting that to what is described next in verse 16. And all that means is that the vows that are mentioned here in verse 16 could have happened later once the sailors were back on dry land, once they could have put together some sort of makeshift altar. Who knows what it looked like, we don’t know. But it could have happened in a much different setting at a later time and happened just the way it’s described here.

All we have to work with is what the text tells us and what the text teaches us, which is that sailors “offered a sacrifice to the Lord.” This would have been an animal sacrifice of some sort, of the details of which we’re not given. And then we are told that the sailors “made vows.” Now, sacrifices, vows, in Jonah’s day these were considered a normal response to any recipient of Yahweh’s grace and Yahweh’s favor. For cross-references, you can jot down Psalm 50:14-15 which says, “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and pay your vows to the Most High; call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you, and you will honor Me.” Or you can also write down Psalm 116:17-18 which says, “To You I shall offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and call upon the name of the Lord. I shall pay my vows to the Lord.” In fact, right here in the book of Jonah if you just go to the end of chapter 2 verse 9, you’ll see that the making of sacrifices and vows is exactly what Jonah does later in the story. Jonah 2:9, he says, “But I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving. That which I have vowed I will pay. Salvation is from the Lord.”

Especially when coupled with the words in the first part of verse 16 where it says “Then the men feared the Lord greatly” it is safe to say that what’s being described here was no empty show of piety or religiosity put on by these sailors. Rather, these actions, these offering of sacrifices, these making of vows, they appear to be the fruit of genuine conversion to faith in the God of Israel. These weren’t empty expressions of religious sentimentality. Rather, these were expressions of grateful worship. I appreciate how John Calvin comments on this aspect of the sailors’ response. He says, “When, therefore, the sailors vowed a vow to God, they renounced their own idols… Now then they made their vows to the only true God; for they knew that their lives were in His hand.” I really think that’s right. They feared God. And they were now vowing to honor Him and follow Him and Him alone.

Now in addition to their sacrifices, in addition to their vows, there’s perhaps no stronger piece of evidence, I think of their genuine conversion, the genuine conversion of these sailors, than the timing of their actions here in verse 16. You know, any unbeliever can put on a temporary show of believing in God or fearing the Lord, going through all sorts of religious motions to get themselves out of a tough situation. That’s the whole idea of the foxhole conversion. Right? The wartime soldier who pledges to God as the bullets are whizzing over his head, that he will eventually, if he gets back to the states, start going to church and start reading his Bible and start saying his prayers, only to have it not happen when he survives and gets back to the states. The foxhole conversion, it’s like what Martin Luther described. A part of Martin Luther’s whole story, is back in 1505 when he was still a Roman Catholic, and he was still studying law, he gets caught up in this massive summertime storm and he cries out to St. Anne, who was the patron saint of his family, that he will leave the law and go into ministry, in that case it was the monastery, if she would just spare his life in the storm. So she actually… you know, God actually spared him from the storm and Luther fulfills his promise and goes on to leave the law, go on to the monastery. But it’s another example of in the middle of a trial, in the middle of difficulty. crying out to something or someone to relieve you from the thick of the battle or the eye of the storm.

That’s not what we see actually happening here in Jonah. Actually not at all. At what point in the narrative are these sailors described as fearing “the Lord greatly”? At what point did they offer that “sacrifice to the Lord”? At what point do they make vows to the Lord? It was after the storm was over. It was after the storm had passed, after they had been delivered, after the point that they could have conceivably gone on their merry way and back to their old pagan ways of living but they didn’t. It was later when it cost them to follow Yahweh.

Now in the meantime, Jonah’s all wet. He’s out there somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean. He’s been given this assignment to preach against the wickedness in Nineveh but conversion instead has come to these pagan sailors on the ship. Notwithstanding Jonah’s disobedience and notwithstanding Jonah’s pathetic witness to them, God was relentless in running down these crewmen. He got His men. They came to fear Him, hardened mariners now dedicated servants of Yahweh.

By the way, and with apologies to those of you who really want me to dive deep into this book about it being about a fish or Jonah getting thrown into the sea and all those sorts of details, with my old apologies on that score, that verse that we just went through, verse 16, is really the pinnacle of chapter 1. That really is the highlight of chapter 1. The fact that God saw fit to bring a group of pagan sailors to the place where they would fear Him and, not only that, offer sacrifices to Him and, not only that, make vows to Him to renounce their old ways and now follow Him -- the fact that God appears to have brought about salvation, notwithstanding His own prophet’s stubborn rebellion, is really the pinprick of light which pops through a chapter that is otherwise written in these very dark tones. As Hugh Martin so eloquently observed in his commentary on Jonah, he says, ‘Beneath the surface, while he [God] holds the storm in His left hand, with His right hand [He] has prepared a deliverance.”

And with that, we turn from what I believe is the highlight of this chapter, chapter 1 verse 16, with salvation coming to these pagan sailors, to what the world believes is the highlight of Jonah chapter 1 and, indeed, the whole book of Jonah, which is that Jonah was swallowed by a fish. Take a look at verse 17, it says, “And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.” Of all the passages in the Bible that have raised questions among unbelievers and skeptics about the Bible’s truthfulness and its veracity, this verse sits at the very top of that list. I can’t tell you how many articles and books and sermon transcripts I’ve read from apparently embarrassed or sheepish Christians who tried to sidestep what this text plainly teaches to make it fit with modern notions of what a fish can or cannot do. I’ve seen the argument made, I kid you not, that what really happened is that Jonah was rescued by ship whose name was the Fish, you know, the SS Minnow or The Fish, right? It wasn’t a literal fish, you know, with gills and scales and the like. It was a boat named “The Fish” that picked him up. They’re so embarrassed by the text that that’s the argument they make. Even worse I’ve seen, and the argument made that that Jonah actually swam to dry land and stayed at an inn called “The Fish,” where he recuperated for three days and three nights. I mean, how much faith do you have to have to believe that? I’ve seen articles, like that which was published in the Princeton Theological Journal in 1927 about a man named James Bartley who went missing from a whaling ship in the Falkland Islands in the late 1890s and he was later found, Bartley was, alive, unconscious, and bleached having been in the stomach of a whale for maybe a day or two later. And the idea is from the Princeton Theological Journal, if Bartley could have survived being in the belly of a whale for a few days, Jonah could have, too.

But what’s the common denominator behind all these apologetic efforts to prove the truthfulness of the account given to us in the book of Jonah? The common denominator is this: a simple refusal to take God at His Word. What does the text of verse 17 say? “The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah.” What does that mean? It means, “The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah.” It doesn’t mean Jonah was rescued by another ship.
It doesn’t mean that Jonah stayed in an inn called the Fish. It doesn’t even, I think, refer to a whale. You know one common theory is that it might have been a sperm whale that swallowed Jonah. But the Hebrew word here is dag, d-a-g. I know that’s funny, a fish is a dag, a dag is a fish, but it means ‘fish.’ So we don’t need some article from the Princeton Theological Review to help us believe that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and then he survived. All we need is the record of Scripture. And without apology and interestingly without detailed explanation the Scripture simply states that “the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah.” The question we should be asking ourselves, as we read this text, as we read Jonah, is not could there possibly be a fish that was big enough to swallow Jonah? Instead the question we should be asking is, is there a God big enough to create such a fish, to command such a fish, to accomplish His purposes? In other words, if God is who the Bible says He is, the fish part is easy.

Well, God is who He says He is. And God’s Word says He “appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah” so that’s where we leave it. Not with the field of marine biology but rather with the level of biblical inerrancy. The Scripture says it. We believe it. We praise the Lord for His creative power and His wisdom. And we move on.

We actually don’t move on just yet because I’m not quite done, because nested within verse 17 here is a very important word, a very important verb that I want to make sure that we don’t miss. It’s that word “appointed.” “The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah.” It’s a word that can be also translated “prepared” or “assigned” or “commanded” and it actually appears five different times in this short little four chapter book, which is significant. In fact, let’s take a real quick run through the five different instances of that word “appointed.” It’s also translated “commanded” I believe in one of the places. We have the one here in verse 17, “And the Lord appointed a great fish.” And then look at verse 10 of chapter 2, “Then the Lord commanded the fish,” same word. If you drop down to Jonah 4:6, the next are right in a row here, “the Lord God appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head.” Verse 7, “But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered.” Verse 8, “When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, then the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die.” Going back to the sailor’s prayer in Jonah 1:14 from tonight, the Lord truly does as He pleases. He truly does bring about what He’s appointed to bring about whether it’s the wind or a worm or a fish.

Again, the central thread that’s woven throughout this narrative, the central theme, I hope I’ve been clear tonight is that it’s not Jonah, it’s not the fish. We don’t get to the original intent of what’s being communicated here by asking what type of fish this was and what was the temperature inside this fish’s stomach and what did it smell like inside the belly of this fish and what color Jonah was when he was eventually vomited up onto dry land. No, we get to the main purpose of this text by noting that it says something to us about God, specifically, God’s sovereignty. His sovereignty in ultimately bringing these pagan sailors to this place where they now feared Him. His sovereignty in appointing this fish now to swallow Jonah, not to destroy him, not to kill him, not even as an act of judgment against him, but instead to preserve him and to rescue him because God was not, as we’re going to see later as we work our way through Jonah, done with him. He still had more to do with this running rebel to carry out His sovereignly decreed plans.

As we turn to the end of verse 17 we are given one more detail where it says that “Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.” And that’s really a Hebraic way of underscoring, like when we hear the phrase ‘forty days and forty nights,’ that Jonah really was in the stomach of the fish for three days. And we also know as we get into the New Testament we see that there was a Jewish mentality about how to think of days and how to count days. That this could mean, it doesn’t have to mean 72 hours, but it could mean parts of three days, meaning a 24-hour period and then parts of two other days. Again though, is that where we’re going to be doing our devotions in? Is that where we’re going to be praising God for? That aspect of the revelation? That’s not the point of the text. But I’ll give it to you nonetheless. It’s a three day stay, meaning parts of three days most likely.

Here’s the real point, take home point, ‘84th Street driving home’ or ‘cupcake eating’ point right after the message. Do you believe it? Do you believe that Jonah was in the stomach of a great fish for three days and for three nights? Do you believe it even though you would certainly get laughed out of any faculty meeting at UNL if you made this the point that you’re going to stand on that I believe this account. Do you believe it even though you’d get looked at, if you walked into several churches in our town here, you might be looked at like you have two heads if you said, I believe what’s recorded here in Jonah 1:17, that a full-sized man was swallowed by a great fish. Do you believe it? I believe it because it’s right here in God’s Word. I believe it because we worship a God who is true and trustworthy and can be taken at His Word. I believe it because that’s exactly what God said happened. Verse 17, “And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the great fish three days and three nights.” It does not take a brilliant Hebrew scholar to figure out what’s happening there. And I believe it because my Savior, my Master, my Lord, my God, the Lord Jesus Christ believed it.

Turn with me if you would to Matthew 12 as we close. Let’s note how our Lord handles this text. Matthew 12 and we’ll start in verse 38, it says, “Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him, ‘Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.’ But He answered and said to them, ‘An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment, and will condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.’ ” Jesus didn’t think the fish was the name of another boat. Jesus didn’t think the fish was the name of an inn that Jonah stayed in for three days and three nights. Jesus interpreted the words here of Jonah literally and then tied those words to His own ministry there in Judea.

And that’s actually where I’m going to land the plane tonight with the words from our Lord here in Matthew 12 because actually next Sunday night what I’d like to do is work through this passage, Matthew 12:38-41 as sort of an addendum to our study of the Book of Jonah. What I want to do is take up a study, a one-night study, of how to look at types and shadows and the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, using this as our launching point so that we can come to a place where we can rightly think about these matters, avoid pitfalls and landmines and rightly handle the word of truth.

Let’s pray. God thank You again for our time together in the Word. Thank You for this study of Jonah that we’ve embarked on so far. Thank You for the richness of this book, the themes that just jump off the page, the truthfulness of the book, the accuracy of the book, and the lessons that are timeless in the book. Thank You for what we’ve learned tonight even about Your sovereignty. Thank You for helping us remember Your sovereignty in salvation. Certainly if we have trusted in Jesus Christ that ought to be something that we come back to all the time praising You and worshiping You, that You would see fit to save wretches like us, unworthy rebels, just like Jonah. God thank You that because of Jesus Christ, because of Your plan to send Him into the world, because of His atoning death on the cross, because of His victory at Calvary, we have the ability to have a right relationship with You. We can have our sins forgiven, the debt record wiped away. We can have eternal life secured and we can look forward to being in glory with You. God, I pray that this lesson and I pray that these series of lessons through Jonah would not be taken as mere historical artifacts but rather that these are Your words, Your timeless words, they are profitable for our instruction, for our training, for our growth in Christ. God, I pray that You would strengthen us for the week ahead. Help us to honor our Savior, Master, and God, the Lord Jesus, in all we do. It’s in His name we pray, amen.