Jonah and the Storm

Jonah 1:4-16

If you will take your Bibles and turn with me to Jonah chapter 1, we are continuing our study through this short and familiar book. We will be looking at verses four through sixteen, however I’m going to read all of the Chapter for context and to refresh the story in our minds this morning.

-read Chapter 1:1-16 and pray-

When I started dating again in 2020, the best question I was ever asked on a fist date was “If you were on the run from the feds where would you go and how would you get away?” Now, that seems like a very red flag question, but the woman I was having dinner with was fascinated by true crime documentaries and fugitive stories, and she wanted to test my ideas of family, friends, and resourcefulness, and honestly it was a very fun question to pick through. There’s something about the scenario that’s fascinating but frightening. There’s something about being hunted and running immediately brings these intense feelings of fear and weakness, knowing that there is someone out there who will go to whatever lengths necessary to find you and catch you.

What we will see this morning in our text is that our unrepentant sin draws us away from God, and though we flee from Him, He goes to extraordinary lengths to graciously bring us back to Himself.

We should see first the impact of sin. This passage contains repetition to draw our focus to key ideas. The author is forcing the perspective to see the reality of where sin has brought Jonah. Notice, God’s command to him in verse 2 Jonah 1:2 ““Arise, go up to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”” God calls Jonah to get up, immediately and Go to Nineveh. But Jonah disobeys and instead flees the opposite direction. But we should see the word play here. It’s not just fleeing to Tarshish. He goes down to Joppa, he goes down into the ship, to get there, away from the presence of the Lord. This isn’t just description for the sake of word fill or to give us topographic information. Rather what we see is that sin and disobedience drags us down and pulls away from proper fellowship with God. We typically do not view our sins as an attempt to flee from God But as Calvin says, “all flee away from the presence of God, who do not willingly obey his commandments

What we see is that our sin, and especially the unrepentance from that sin, is our willful rebellion toward our King. When we walk in unrepentance we declare that the great and glorious Judge of all has not rendered a proper judgement. It is to declare that we know more than God. Calvin continues his quote, “not that they can depart farther from him, but they seek, as far as they can, to confine God within narrow limits, and to exempt themselves from being subject to his power.” Jonah flees, yes as we said last month, because He doesn’t believe Nineveh deserves grace, but also because he believes that by running the Lord will no longer have power over him. This is the fruit of unrepentance. It distorts our view of Him. Even as Christians it hinders our sanctification, it impedes our joyful walk with Christ.

So we must stop here and ask ourselves what sins do we cling on to? What are those areas that when we are confronted with our sin, we reject it and say “No I’m right! God doesn’t get to to rule over this. God doesn’t get to speak to this. He doesn’t get to be King on this issue”? Because it is that sin, it is that unwillingness to repent that will destroy us.

Unrepentence always pulls us down, and it convinces us, like it did Jonah, that we can flee from God.

Because the Lord will not be outran. He is not done with Nineveh or Jonah. God is not limited to the land of Judah and chases after Jonah. God will not allow Jonah to make it to Tarshish unimpeded and literally throws a great wind into the sea and great storm overcomes the sailors. I am not an avid boater or fisher, but in prep I read many accounts of the relative calm that experienced sailors will have when the skies grow dark and the waves get choppy. But this is not just a slight rain or even a heavy thunderstorm. There was a night a few months ago where tornadoes were moving across the state and I’m normally not nervous about storms. But I started watching the weather channel and noticed that they started talking about this massive twisting cell that was moving towards our town. And as the skies grew darker, and the lightning started to strike around us, I went to watch it closely to protect Lindsay and the dogs and just that alone began to cause me to panic a little. The storm here in our text isn’t just threatening. It is raging, thrashing, tossing, and violent. The author here uses the phrase “the ship threatened to break up.” It’s going to be split in two at any moment and the sailors are panicking. The wind is howling and whipping around them. The waters are crashing onto the boat and tossing them across the deck. The waves are thrashing the boat and these men, these strong, salty, rugged, masculine, tobacco spitting, beer drinking, tattoo sporting sailors are terrified. The raging storm of the Lord has come to them and they cannot bear it.

So they do what seems like a smart thing to do, and try to do whatever it takes to save themselves. They fearfully cry out to their pagan gods hoping that perhaps one of them will intervene on their behalf. They seek to find their hope and security in their own means. They put their trust in their own personal idols in an attempt to find peace. When that doesn’t work they give up their livelihoods, the good that they’re carrying to lighten the ship and get themselves back to shore. They are ultimately hoping that their weak saviors and their efforts can save them from the Lord’s judgement. And this is when we recall from our previous sermon that this book is first written to the people of Israel. At this time the people of the Northern Kingdom have abandoned the worship of God and exchanged it for the worship of the false gods of their Gentile neighbors. They have put their hope and their security not in God’s grace and mercy but in foreign gods and even in their efforts. It is an indictment on their spiritual infidelity and their placing their hope in weak saviors. And this indictment should cause us to pause and reflect on ourselves. We too should hear the warning and consider, when are pressed- where do we find our hope and security? Is it in our jobs? Our families? Our portfolios? Do we place them in our standing before others? When the winds howl and the waves crash, if we were really honest- what do we cry out to?

We must also ask ourselves how we handle our sin? Do we, like the sailors, rely in our own efforts? Do we hope that if we can just do enough we can make up for it? If we just give up enough cargo into the sea, then the Lord will give us peace? Because the way of effort will never bring peace to our heart. There isn’t enough works, not enough law keeping to bring us to safe shores of the soul. Rather relying on our own efforts doesn’t lighten the load of our sin.

But the greatest danger we see is to not even deal with our sin. Sin has very real consequences. It impacts not only ourselves but those around us. Jonah’s sin has put these men in danger, even to the point of death. And what is Jonah’s attitude. He doesn’t care. It is rather to become numb to them. It is to brush off our sin and the work of the Spirit and to be at peace with it. I am not sure there is a more dangerous place for us, to feel nothing in regards to our sin. In the middle of the storm Jonah, drowning in his apathy towards his sin, has continued his downward spiral. As the storm is raging and the lives of these Gentile sailors are fearing for their lives, Jonah is asleep, and so is His conscience. He is so at peace with his disobedience, that he snores in the face of the tempest pounding the ship.

Sometimes, the way that God deals with unrepentant sin is to put us in situations where we are left with no other option but repentance. Jonah flees to sea and so God sends this storm to confront him with his sin. We see this even in our lives when we too face trials and seasons of hardship. This is an area of difficulty for us because we often face these moments of suffering or hardship and we often times try to discern what God is doing in these moments. Now not every instance of hardship or suffering is God confronting us with our sin. Sometimes pain comes as a natural part of life and as James tells us isn’t because of sin. As you know, I was married up until March of 2019 until my first wife died. I don’t believe that was the fatherly discipline of the Lord for unrepentant sin. Not every period of pain is discipline, but God is working together everything for our good. But we also see in Hebrews 12 the Lord does discipline those He loves, sometimes in ways that He uses to wake us up from our apathy and towards His mercy, even in ways that we wouldn’t expect.

The captain of the ship comes down and sees Jonah sound asleep and is rightly astounded. He shakes the fugitive prophet awake and says, “Get up! Cry out to your God” Here is a great irony in the story. The prophet of God, the one tasked with the declaration of the judgement and mercy of God is being called to repentance by a pagan sailor.

And this ironic, upside down call is shows us two things. First that God does not discipline us for pleasure or poke at us for amusement. He does not bully us or discipline us without us being aware of what the sin is. But also, His desire in His discipline is not so much punishment as it is a call for repentance and restoration. Notice that the captain uses a command almost identical to God’s in verse 2. Arise and cry out to your God. Jonah has gone down, down, down in his unrepentance, in his sin, and is apathetic to it, and yet God in His mercy and in His grace, through the means of a captain calls out to him, “Wake up Jonah! Get up and cry out to God for mercy.” This call is also for us this morning. As we stumble, and we walk in our sin and in our unrepentance, God calls out to us in love and mercy to seek Him. God’s use of discipline towards us isn’t a means to harm us, but to restore us. God comes after unrepentant Jonah because God loves him. And God calls us, when we’re confronted with our sin to cry out to Him because he desires to spare us, and that we will not perish.

But Jonah doesn’t pray. He doesn’t repent. The sailors finally decide that everything else has failed, and so they decide to let fate decide and cast lots and figure out who’s to blame. And as God guides it, the lot falls to Jonah. So they begin to interrogate Him trying to figure out what He knows.

Jonah’s answers them that He is a Hebrew, and that He fears the Lord. And this is the issue. He is a worshipper of the Hebrew God, and their gods haven’t done anything to help, they are on the sea and thier gods don’t seem to have jurisdiction over this fugitive prophet. But Jonah adds, “Who made the sea and the dry land” In other words- He’s made it all. He’s God over everything. And this sends the sailors into an even greater panic. Because they knows Jonah has fled from the Lord because He told them, but they now see that the Lord is God above all the rest. That despite their best efforts, their veteran skills, and their sacrifices from the cargo hold, there is nothing they can do to appease the Lord but to cry out to Him. To seek His mercy and forgiveness, and to throw Jonah into the sea. you can see that thier on the end of their rope. First they cry out to their gods, but at the very end they cry out to the Lord. They have come to realize the extraordinary lengths that God will go to bring Jonah back to Himself.

And here’s the good news of the Gospel for us this morning. God has gone to extraordinary lengths to bring us back as well. When we flee from God, when we walk in unrepentance, when we are apathetic in our sin, God pour out His grace and mercy on us to draw us back to Him. Not because we have earned it, not because we have kept his commandments, but because of His covenant love. When we like the sailors trust in our own weak gods or our own goodness to cover our sins, God goes to the most extraordinary, powerful display of His grace and shows us Christ, our true and better prophet.

Here’s where we see that. Jonah gets asked, what can we do so that the sea is calm? And he offers himself as a scapegoat for them. He offers to die in their place for their safety. This is one of the few times Jonah seems to get it right and here is the beginning of Him being a type or a shadow of the work of Christ. In the same way that Jonah getting hurled into the sea seemingly to his death, will bring the pagan sailors peace and life. And it shows us a glimpse of the work of Christ on our behalf. god has put forward His son in our place on the cross and Christ has by His death brought us freedom and forgiveness. Because Christ was treated like a guilty fugitive in our place, you, by faith have the peace and of God, your sins are forgiven, and you are able to freely call out to Him for grace and forgiveness and eternal life.

so then what is the proper response to this grace offered to us? When we see the great lengths that God goes, what should we do?

First we call out to Him and respond with faith and seek his mercy. We repent of our sins and rest upon Christ who is offered to us today freely. We trust in His covenant promises that those who call upon the Lord are truly forgiven. In Psalm 107 is a sister passage to this. Hear the promise of God to those who cry out to Him for mercy.

Some went down to the sea in ships,

doing business on the great waters;

24  they saw the deeds of the LORD,

his wondrous works in the deep.

25  For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,

which lifted up the waves of the sea.

26  They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths;

their courage melted away in their evil plight;

27  they reeled and staggered like drunken men

and were at their wits’ end.

28  Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,

and he delivered them from their distress.

29  He made the storm be still,

and the waves of the sea were hushed.

30  Then they were glad that the waters were quiet,

and he brought them to their desired haven

Second we honor and worship Him. Just as the sailors fear God and made vows, we shouyld praise and glorify God with our thoughts words and deeds for bringing us back to Himself.