Sermon Tone Analysis

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.