No Gatekeeping

I’ll start this morning with a long-overdue confession. This one goes back to my high school days, so clearly I’ve been sitting on it for a long time. Really, it’s just surprising that I can still remember things from that long ago.

But here goes: I took advantage of the kindness and grace of my chemistry teacher during my junior year.

Her name was Jean Mauck, and I’m sure some of you knew her, or at least know her daughter. If you DO know her daughter, I’m just going to ask you now to please not tell her how I took advantage of her mother.

I should say right up front that I’m sure Mrs. Mauck was a wonderful teacher. Perhaps she even inspired some of her students to pursue careers in chemistry.

As you can see, I wasn’t one of them. I hated chemistry. Which was kind of surprising, considering how much I’ve always loved science.

But chemistry just never really grabbed my attention. And Mrs. Mauck and I got off on the wrong foot, anyway, when the other kids in my class convinced her on the first day that I was intentionally mispronouncing my name to her.

For at least the first week of classes, she insisted on calling me Res, with a short “e.”

And having started things off on the wrong foot, we just never really connected. But it didn’t take me long to realize that Mrs. Mauck was a wonderfully nice lady. And it was soon after I figured THAT out that I realized I could take advantage of it.

I’m not proud of this — just being transparent with you.

So, Mrs. Mauck lectured, and we read our books and did our homework and carried out some lab experiments. And then, we had our first test.

I wasn’t very good at chemistry, and like I said, I hated it, so I didn’t really put much effort into studying for this test. But I had good grades and wanted to go to college and needed to do well in chemistry. So, something had to give.

And, as we were sitting there, taking that test, it was Mrs. Mauck who wound up giving.

Pretty soon into the test, I came across a problem I couldn’t solve. So, I thought about it for a while, looked up at Mrs. Mauck doing paperwork at her desk, and came to a decision.

I marched up to her desk, with the eyes of the whole class on me, and I said, “Mrs. Mauck, I’m stuck here. I KNOW we went over this material, and I know I’m supposed to do some sort of conversion here, but I can’t figure out how to get started. Can you just help me get started?”

You see, the ONE thing I’d learned in chemistry was that Mrs. Mauck was helpful to a fault. And she didn’t let me down. Right there in front of the room, with the whole class watching, she walked me through the solution to the whole problem.

And I got an A on the test. And then, having had such success the first time, I leaned on her for help on tests for the rest of the semester.

What can I say? I guess I’m just so cute and lovable that folks just want to help me out.

Seriously, though, this may not have been cheating per se, but it was pretty close, and it was certainly wrong, even if I had become something of a legend among my peers.

You see, I’d read — or at least skimmed — the material, but I didn’t know it. I hadn’t internalized it. So, when the test came, I was lost.

This week, as we continue our study of the Book of Jonah, we’re going to see a rare positive example from the reluctant prophet. We’re going to see that he’d read the material, that he’d internalized it, and that when the test came, he was ready.

Which leads us to the fifth of the spiritual growth indicators we’re introduced to in this book: “A life that is growing spiritually knows and applies the word of God.” [Mark Yarbrough, Jonah: Beyond the Tale of a Whale, (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), ???.]

Just so you know, next week I plan to have a handout that lists the spiritual growth indicators we’ve already covered. And I’m going to try to include them in our handouts for the rest of this study. Thank you to whomever suggested this to me.

Now, you’ll recall that two Sundays ago, we left Jonah dog-paddling for his life in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. And last week, we left him in the belly of the great fish God had sent to swallow him.

After a week there, Jonah must be smelling real nice by now. So, breathe deep with me as we take a look at verse 1 through 9 of chapter 2 of the Book of Jonah.

Jonah 2:1–9 NASB95

1 Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish, 2 and he said, “I called out of my distress to the Lord, And He answered me. I cried for help from the depth of Sheol; You heard my voice. 3 “For You had cast me into the deep, Into the heart of the seas, And the current engulfed me. All Your breakers and billows passed over me. 4 “So I said, ‘I have been expelled from Your sight. Nevertheless I will look again toward Your holy temple.’ 5 “Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me, Weeds were wrapped around my head. 6 “I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever, But You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. 7 “While I was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, And my prayer came to You, Into Your holy temple. 8 “Those who regard vain idols Forsake their faithfulness, 9 But I will sacrifice to You With the voice of thanksgiving. That which I have vowed I will pay. Salvation is from the Lord.”

Now, chapter 2 of this book represents a turning point in the story and a turning point for this reluctant and disobedient prophet.

You’ll recall that Jonah had tried to run from God’s calling for him to go to Nineveh to preach a warning message of impending judgment upon that brutal, pagan city, which was filled with enemies of Israel.

And then God sent a great storm that threatened the ship Jonah had hired to take him in the opposite direction from Nineveh.

And God had caused the lot to fall on Jonah when the sailors cast lots to try and figure out who was responsible for their great calamity.

All the men had prayed to their own gods, to no avail. And then the captain had asked Jonah to pray to HIS God. But we have no evidence that he’d done so.

Not even when Jonah was splashing around in the sea after being thrown there to save the ship did he pray. The only time we see any evidence so far that Jonah prays to the God who MADE the sea and SENT the storm is after he’d been swallowed by the great fish.

Better late than never, I guess?

In a way, that’s similar to what I did with Mrs. Mauck. I could’ve sought help from her outside of class. I could’ve gone to her for tutoring. Or I could’ve just listened in class, instead of writing notes to my girlfriend.

But I didn’t. Instead, it was only when I was staring failure straight in the face that I finally went to her for help.

And that’s how it is for a lot of us when it comes to prayer. We’re perfectly content to go on about our lives as if God doesn’t matter — right up until we’re faced with a threatening situation we can’t get ourselves out of.

Jonah knew things were bleak. Indeed, the language of his prayer suggests he was near death when the fish swallowed him. And so, finally, WAY later than we’d expect from a prophet of the Most High God, we hear Jonah pray.

And that’s surprising. But what might be even more surprising is that it’s not a prayer of repentance. It’s not a prayer for deliverance. This is a prayer of thanksgiving.

Jonah recognized that this big fish — smelly and dark as it surely was — had been sent by God to rescue him, to save him. And he was appropriately thankful that God had saved him.

Indeed, the language of this prayer suggests that Jonah believed the fish was just one stop on his way to complete salvation, which is just what happens at the end of this chapter.

So, from the warm and comfy space within the fish’s belly, Jonah says, he “called out of [his] distress to the Lord.” He “cried for help from the depth of Sheol,” which is the name of the place the dead were thought to go in early Jewish thinking.

Notice Jonah’s increasing desperation. First, he called out to the Lord in his distress, perhaps right after he’d been tossed into the sea.

But then, as he sinks further beneath the waves, he realizes his situation’s becoming more and more desperate, and he’s terrified. So now, he CRIES OUT to God from what seems to be the place of death itself.

But there’s something very significant that’s easy to miss in this prayer, as beautiful as it is.

For the most part, these aren’t Jonah’s words. I wish we had time to go through this passage, line-by-line, so I could show you how each verse is taken either verbatim or nearly verbatim from the Psalms.

For today’s purposes, I’ll just show you a couple of examples, and I’ll be happy to share the others with anyone who asks.

Let’s start with the lines in verse 2.

Take a look at Ps 18:4-6.

Psalm 18:4–6 NASB95

4 The cords of death encompassed me, And the torrents of ungodliness terrified me. 5 The cords of Sheol surrounded me; The snares of death confronted me. 6 In my distress I called upon the Lord, And cried to my God for help; He heard my voice out of His temple, And my cry for help before Him came into His ears.

Do you see it there? David says he called upon the Lord in his distress, just as Jonah did. And, like Jonah, David felt near death; he felt as if Sheol, the pit, the place of the dead, had trapped him.

David describes this feeling in language that suggests being bound up by death. Jonah, on the other hand, characteristically describes it as going downward.

Remember that throughout the first two chapters of this book, we’ve seen Jonah describe himself going down, out of the presence of God and away from His will.

He went down from Jerusalem to Joppa, where he went down to catch a ride on the ship. He went down into the cargo hold. And he descends down into the depths of the sea — nearly to Sheol itself — in verse 6 of this chapter.

And he doesn’t stop his downward journey until God sends the fish to rescue him, bringing him UP from the brink of death in verses 6 and 7.

As I said, this is a turning point in the life of Jonah, the Reluctant Prophet. Sadly, though, as we’ll see in the coming weeks, it doesn’t seem as if he made the turn completely.

So, with this introductory statement out of the way, Jonah proceeds to recount his situation. “YOU had cast me into the deep,” he says.

And that’s telling, because Jonah could’ve blamed the sailors who tossed him overboard. But he understood that God had used them as his agents of discipline, much as God intended to use Jonah as His agent of repentance for the Ninevites.

And once again, we hear echoes of the Psalms in this verse. Look at the first two verses of Psalm 69.

Psalm 69:1–2 NASB95

1 Save me, O God, For the waters have threatened my life. 2 I have sunk in deep mire, and there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and a flood overflows me.

It’s almost as if — with all that time to spare in the belly of the fish — Jonah remembers the psalms he’d learned as a boy and then pieces together parts of different ones that seem to correspond to his situation.

Well, it’s not ALMOST like that. It IS that.

Faced with overwhelming circumstances and reminded of God’s grace and mercy through his miraculous rescue from the waters, Jonah searches for the right words to praise God.

And he finds them in the very word of God.

You can hardly pray with more power than when you pray God’s own words back to Him.

When Jesus and the other believers in Israel sang the Psalms, that’s just what they were doing.

But neither they nor Jonah could’ve done this if they hadn’t taken God’s word and internalized it. They studied the text, and they were ready for the test.

And so, we see this week’s spiritual growth indicator: A life that’s growing spiritually knows and applies the word of God.

Now, Jonah continues recounting his situation in verse 4. “So, I said, ‘I have been expelled from your sight.”

Much as Adam and Eve were expelled from the presence of the Lord in the Garden of Eden after sinning against God — much as Cain was expelled from the community of his family after murdering his brother, Abel — Jonah had been expelled from the ship for his sin of disobedience.

And he thought God had turned His back on him. But God didn’t turn His back on Adam and Eve. And He didn’t send Cain into the wilderness without protection from those who might wish to avenge the murder of Abel.

But floundering there in the water, sinking into the depths, Jonah had felt utterly alone. He now realized just how dire a thing it is to be separated from the presence of God.

And sine that’s the primary eternal condition for those who wind up in hell for rejecting Jesus, this passage should serve as a warning to all who choose not to follow Him in faith.

As bad as Jonah thought he had it in the depths of the sea, hell will be immeasurably worse.

But even in his despair, Jonah remembered that God is good and that He is gracious. And so, he says, he “looked again toward [God’s] holy temple.”

That’s the place in Jerusalem where the presence of God dwelt among the people of Israel. And this phrase is simply a way of saying that Jonah turned to God and prayed.

He was now in the grip of death, rather in God’s grip, and so, he’d finally turned to God in prayer, which is what he SHOULD have been doing all along.

He’d sunk below the waves and into the depths of the sea, and now he felt as if the earth below would swallow him up.

He was absolutely unable to do anything to save himself. Which is exactly the place where God found each one of us who’ve turned our lives over to Jesus in faith.

Our sins separated us from God, and there’s nothing we could do to bridge the chasm we created. Only He could do that. And He did it through His unique and eternal Son, Jesus.

He came and lived among us as a man — yet without sin. He gave Himself as a sacrifice at the cross — bearing our sins AND the just penalty we owe for them.

And he did all this so that we who follow Him in faith can be forgiven and receive eternal life. And just as Jesus was raised from the dead into a glorified body, we who are His followers will likewise be raised into glory.

And it’s ALL God’s work. None of it is because of anything you or I will ever do.

Jonah was praising God for rescuing him not just from death, but from separation from God. He’d wanted to flee from the presence of God, but now that things had gotten ugly, Jonah was LOOKING for God and thankful for God’s help.

And now, with death seemingly knocking on his door, he remembers the Lord and he prays.

Look, don’t wait for things to get ugly before thinking of God. Take delight in Him today and always. You’ll find not just that life is better WITH Him, but also that the fellowship He’s built with you in the good times makes fellowship with Him in the bad times more natural and more effective.

That’s what wise King Solomon concluded near the end of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Look at verse 1 of chapter 12 in that book.

Ecclesiastes 12:1 NASB95

1 Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, “I have no delight in them”;

Clearly, Jonah didn’t delight in his situation in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. But his fellowship with God — his previous study of the textbook, as it were — had prepared him to trust God even in the face of death itself.

And so, he prayed. His prayer came up before God in His holy temple. Which is just how we, too, can be saved.

Through a humble prayer of repentance for our sins and faith in Jesus. Prayer is the key to salvation for those who are unable to save themselves.

But true faith MUST recognize that allowing anything to take the rightful place of God in one’s heart is idolatry. And in verse 8, we see what may be an acknowledgment by Jonah that his hatred for the Ninevites had displaced God in his heart.

His hatred had become a “vain idol,” an empty vanity or vapor through which he’d forsaken the faithfulness of God.

And so, Jonah now promises to make a sacrifice to God and to pay his vows.

We’re not told what the vow was. But perhaps it was to finally obey God’s calling to Nineveh and do what God had sent him to do. If so, then Jonah’s time in the belly of the fish was well-spent.

Either way, coming to the last line of this prayer — the key sentence in the Book of Jonah — we see an honest and forthright confession of faith by this prophet: Salvation is from the Lord.

The word that’s translated as “salvation” here is Yeshua, which is the Hebrew name for Jesus. So, from a New Testament perspective, Jesus comes from the Lord. He is the one God sent to bring salvation to fallen mankind.

But there’s something Jonah seems to have missed here.

Only God saves, and as the one who saves, God sovereignly chooses whom He will save. Jonah didn’t want the people of Nineveh to be saved, but God did.

It’s ironic that Jonah makes this great statement of faith and yet still seems not to understand that salvation is God’s to do with as He pleases.

But that’s essentially what God had said when He was preparing to pass by Moses in all His glory in Exodus, chapter 33.

Exodus 33:19 NASB95

19 And He said, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.”

So many times, we, like Jonah, try to gatekeep for God. “This person is too far gone to be saved. That person will never turn to Jesus in faith. So-and-so is just too evil; he doesn’t deserve Jesus.”

Well, folks, NONE of us deserves Jesus. NONE of us deserves God’s grace. ALL of us, just like Jonah, deserve hell for our disobedience and faithlessness.

But God is good, and God is gracious, and God loves us!

And thanks be unto Him for that, because in His choosing love, He reached down and blessed us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Let me ask you something to close this morning: From whom have YOU been withholding the message of salvation, the good news of Jesus Christ?

Leet me encourage you this morning to repent of that sin. Let me encourage you to get in the car or pick up the phone and tell someone how much Jesus loves them. Tell them salvation is from the LORD.

THIS is your calling. Don’t be like Jonah.