InPerspective

Harry Reeder: The lessons of God's grace from the book of Jonah. The first chapter, of course, is looking at the prodigal prophet and the pursuing God. Then the second chapter, we're going to see the praying prophet and the preserving God. The third chapter, we're going to see the preaching prophet and the powerful work of God and the evangelization and work in Nineveh. The fourth chapter, we're going to see the pouting prophet and what God does to teach him.

Guest (Male): Putting life in biblical perspective with Dr. Harry L. Reeder. This is InPerspective, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. God commanded Jonah to go preach to the Ninevites. Jonah ran away, but when he did, the Lord did not throw up his hands in despair. Rather, he sent a mighty storm to get Jonah's attention and compel the disobedient prophet to conform to his sovereign will.

God will go to great lengths to pursue his wayward children and bring us into conformity to his plan and purpose for our lives. Stay with us now as Dr. Reeder takes us to Jonah chapter one and brings us today's teaching, the message entitled "A Prodigal Prophet and a Pursuing God."

Harry Reeder: Our study, this wonderful adventure, life story, history recorded for us with the lessons of God's grace embedded within it, from the book of Jonah. I want to give you two words I want you to keep off to the side there, keep them present as we walk through this first chapter: Fear. Would you remember that word? Fear. I want to talk about it and give some attention to it. Secondly, would you put down another word: Hurl. Hurl.

Your Bible may have that word translated "throw" because you have not yet bought your English Standard Version Bible, but they've done a wonderful job in translation in this first chapter. Just jot down the word "hurl." The Holy Spirit inspiring our author has given us an unbelievable account that has for us these marvelous lessons, and part of the lessons are emphasized in the way that certain words are chosen and certain words are placed in the context of this book.

There are four chapters. The first chapter, of course, is looking at the prodigal prophet and the pursuing God. The second chapter we're going to see the praying prophet and the preserving God. The third chapter we're going to see the preaching prophet and the powerful work of God, evangelization and work in Nineveh. The fourth chapter we're going to see the pouting prophet and what God does to teach him. Our whole study has been cast under this phrase: the reluctant prophet and the redeeming God. Redeeming Jonah, redeeming ministry, redeeming his purposes to reach the nations, and even redeeming sailors and redeeming Nineveh itself.

We're going to work our way through this first chapter. Just so you have this, the book of Jonah is from the Old Testament, a bridge. In Genesis 12, what did God tell Abraham? "In you, I'm going to bless the nations." This is the first time God has—not the first time he's reached Gentiles—but this is the first time he has commanded one of his people to take the message of repentance and the gospel message to a Gentile, these pagan enemies of Israel in Nineveh. It's very germane today for us because that same area houses nations today.

There's enmity there between present-day national Israel and these nations: Iran and Iraq would have been found in these areas. This is where Nineveh was located, and the Assyrian and Babylonian empires would be established that God would use to bring judgment upon his people in the Babylonian captivity and the Assyrian captivities. So this is the bridge where God commands for the first time what he had promised he would do through Abraham. It is interesting that they're actually going back to the area where their father Abraham had come from to preach now to those in Nineveh.

The second thing we learn is the importance of Jonah in the New Testament because Matthew 12 identifies Jonah not only as a historical event but as a type of Christ. As Jonah is sacrificed and in the belly of the whale or the belly of the great fish, actually, the belly of the sea monster that God had appointed, there he is, and in that place, three days and three nights becomes a type of looking at the sacrifice and then the resurrection on the third day of Jesus Christ.

The third thing that we learned is that theologically, this book has got a lot to tell us because you and I can find out a lot about ourselves in Jonah. In fact, I want to build on particularly the matter of how God's sovereignty and the free moral agency of man work together in the power and hand and wisdom of God. Notice I did not say "free will" of man because man's will is not free. Man is a free moral agent. He is free to make choices under the hand of God's sovereign appointment, but our will isn't free. Why? Because we are born as sinners and we are under the bondage of our sin.

We will choose what our nature directs us to choose. Our will is in the bondage of sin even though we function as free moral agents. I asked you to put down a couple of words: hurl and the word fear. I want to make a couple of comments about fear before we walk through the text. How many times have you heard sermons on the fear of God? We don't really preach it, do we? We'll give lip service to it. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

I would suggest to you a couple of things that I've just jotted down for you. Here's the first one: no one will ever know the grace of God without the fear of God. No one will ever know the grace of God without the fear of God, and anyone who knows the grace of God will never lose the fear of God. You won't know the grace of God without the fear of God—that I have a holy, majestic God with whom I have to do and how can I, a sinful man, be right with him? It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The grace of God grants you wisdom. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Once you're saved, you don't lose the fear of God. The reverence and awe of your God is, if anything, heightened. A lot of times we seem to think to help people embrace grace, we have to diminish reverence for God. We sing our songs and we write our sermons in which Jesus, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, in our effort to establish intimacy, we sometimes make them smaller than what they are.

The majesty of our intimacy with God is not based upon his smallness but how wonderful his love and grace that this majestic God has deigned and decreed to work in our lives. That is the glory of grace, not in the diminishing of the majesty of God. What God's grace does is it allows us to know the fear of the Lord and the majesty of the Lord even that much more. What does the Apostle Paul say? Work out, Christian, work out—notice he's not saying work for salvation, Jesus did that—but now that you're saved, work out your salvation, for it is God, sovereign God, who is at work in you, both to will and to do in his good pleasure.

Some of you know that I left something out. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to do for his good pleasure. Why the fear and trembling? Because if I don't do my work well, I'll lose my salvation? No, because what I'm working out is telling people something about the God who is working in me. Therefore, I, in the fear of the Lord, with reverence to the Lord, want to live out my life that people would get accurate pictures of his holiness and his grace, his justice and his mercy, his kindness and his righteousness, his transcendence and his immanence.

So now being saved by grace, I don't dismiss the fear of the Lord; on the contrary, it's heightened in my life. The second thing I want to say is this: those who abolish the fear of God from their lives will consign themselves to the fears of men. You will not only be consigned to the fear of death if you don't have a God who is grand enough to conquer it: the fear of sin, the fear of judgment, the fear of death, the fear of men, the fear of people, the fear of what people will say, the fear of the future. We will be phobia-driven by the fears of men if we abolish the fear of God.

But when God alone captures our adoration, worship, and reverence, it is this God who sets me free from the fears and the enslavement of the fears of men. Let's see if that's true in Jonah chapter one. Look at verse one: "Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 'Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.'" Evil has come up. God sovereignly made a choice to send a prophet to preach a message to them. He doesn't have to make that choice. Sodom and Gomorrah, their evil came up, and his judgment came down.

Nineveh, their evil comes up, and now God's grace and mercy has called Jonah to go. Arise and go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. There's the call of God to Jonah. What is Jonah's response to that call? Verse three: "But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish." Where is Nineveh? East of Israel. Where is Tarshish? Due west. It is all the way on the coast of Spain beyond Gibraltar. He is going the absolute opposite direction.

He goes to Joppa. Here's what he does: three things. He pays the fare, he gets on board, and he goes with them to Tarshish. Why? He is fleeing the presence of the Lord. The Lord who called him, he is fleeing and he's willing to pay the fare, get on board the ship with pagan soldiers, and go with the pagans away from the presence of the Lord in the opposite direction. Of course, that's obviously going to stop God, right? No. Then comes that wonderful Bible word: but. But the Lord—what's the Lord do? He hurls, he throws a great wind upon the sea.

There was a mighty tempest on the sea so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid and each cried out to his god. What does that tell you about this ship? That we have mariners or seamen—and this would not be unusual in the Mediterranean—who obviously come from very—this is a metropolitan ship, very much like the metropolitan area of Nineveh. It has many ethnic people, and the reason that we know that is because they have the representation of many gods, and these different groups, these different people from different cultures have different gods.

Some sailors are calling on this god, some sailors are calling on that god, and this sailor's calling on that god. So they're calling on their gods and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. Here we are. They are—here comes God, he hurls a wind against the ship. It begins to creak and groan and about to break up. The mariners, this collection and conglomerate of pagan sailors, call upon their various deities. They do two things: they do something very Christian—they pray and they work.

They call out to their gods and then they start hurling cargo overboard. They're doing the right thing. They're praying, they're just not praying to the right God. I'm all for granting room for prayer in courts and schools and everything else, but prayer is not my hope for this world. Jesus is the one we pray to. I won't mention who he is, but a politician called when I was in Charlotte and he said—he was having a town meeting and he was beginning to run for president and it was going to be on CNN and they call me and his office called me and said, "Would you open the town meeting in prayer at Owens Auditorium?"

I said, "Are you sure?" They said, "Yes." I said, "I heard this is going to be on television." They said, "Yes." And I said, "Well, go check with..." and I mentioned his name, "...because if I pray, it's going to be in Jesus' name. I don't do generic prayers. I just don't do that. So if you're just looking for somebody to baptize the moment with prayer, I'm not your guy. But if you want me to pray, then I'll pray." To his credit, he called back and said, "No, we ask you, you pray as God leads you. That's our rights, and you be sure and exercise that."

That's fine, and so I did. I stood to pray that night and I said, "Okay, a lot of people died for us to have the freedom to do this. So let's spend a few moments in prayer. You pray as you want to, then I'm going to pray as God has granted me now the privilege." The reason I don't do generic prayers is I don't think prayer changes anything. I think God changes things through praying people. So they're praying but to the wrong gods that are no gods. And they're working, but they're not doing the right work yet.

They are hurling, they just haven't hurled the right thing yet. They're hurling the cargo, literally the receptacles. They're hurling the receptacles overboard but they haven't got to the right thing to hurl yet. So here we are, they're hurling. Now, what about Jonah? We've got what the Lord does: he hurls a great wind. What do they do? They pray and they hurl things over into the sea. Well, what about Jonah? But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.

This behavior is so bizarre that he in the midst of this storm that the ship's about to break up and everyone's confusion and crying out in these prayers to these pagan deities and throwing things overboard, he's down in the hull of the ship just sleeping. It is so bizarre that the captain hears about it. So he goes down there and he looks at him and he says to him in verse six, "What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, start praying! Arise, call on your God! Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not perish."

He said, "What are you doing here sleeping? Why don't you start praying? You start praying and call on the God that you would call upon and maybe he'll give..." In other words, he's saying—the captain isn't converted yet, he's just trying to cover all the bases. He said, "So call on your God." After that, look at verse seven: "And they said to one another, 'Come, let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.'" So they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. God used a wind, and now God used lots cast by pagans out of superstition.

God takes it, not to give us an argument for lotteries, but to tell us when God wants to put his finger on somebody, he'll put his finger on them. So God takes the lots to put his finger on Jonah. They cast lots, the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, "Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation and where do you come from? What is your country and of what people are you?" Five questions. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Question number one: tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. Why is this happening to us?

Isn't it interesting that even in the midst of paganism, the witness of God, us being made in the image of God, we know that we're accountable? When things like this are happening, the first thing we look is: why is this happening? There must be a reason, a purpose. So they then say, "Why is this happening to us?" Second question: "What is your occupation? What are you doing, sleeper? What is your occupation?" Three: "Where do you come from?" Four: "What is your country?" Five: "And of what people are you?"

Jonah answers them. He gives a twofold answer to their five questions. He's really answering these last couple of questions: "I am a Hebrew." That's not a statement of his submission to the Lord. He's just answering: "I'm from Israel ethnically. I'm a Hebrew." Now, he then tells and confesses his relationship with the Lord: "And I fear the Lord." Then when he says he fears the Lord, he then defines this one whom he fears: "I fear not one of many gods. I fear the Lord who is the God of heaven and the God of heaven who made two things: the sea that you're in and the dry land where you want to get to."

He made the sea that this boat is in—and of course their big concern was not that the boat was in the sea but the sea was about to get in the boat—and he made the dry land where you would love to be right now. He is the creator of all. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Then the men were exceedingly afraid. Their fears then took hold of them and enslaved them. And they said to him, "What is this that you have done?" for the men knew obviously he'd done a little bit more talking that's not given here.

For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. So now we know that he also explained to them this God he was fleeing from and they said, "It is because of your rebellion from this God that we are now in this situation." So they said to him, "What shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us?" For us to be delivered from this tempest, what do we need to do to you? For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. And he said to them, "Pick me up and hurl me—not the receptacles—hurl me into the sea.

Then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you." It's interesting these pagans had some mercy upon him because they decided not to do this immediately. Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. So they decided to try to answer this their own way, but the Lord kept hurling the sea in a way that they couldn't get to the land.

Therefore they called out to the Lord: "O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you." In other words, they all became Calvinists right then. God, you are sovereign, and not only that, you're holy. So will you deliver us and not let us perish on account of him? So they picked up Jonah and they hurled him into the sea. And the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly.

They were delivered now. Now their fear was not of the storm, not of their demise, not of the tempest. Their fear was of the Lord. Not just any fear—exceedingly they feared him. And they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and they made vows. Let me just give you three takeaways from this text that we've walked our way through. What are some things that we can learn here? The first thing is this: Jonah, remember Matthew 12 says that he's a type.

Here the typology of Jonah goes in three directions. Number one: Jonah is a type of sin. He is a type of sin in that he is showing us what it means to rebel against God, to flee from God, and the consequences that come in that God brings not the judgment of condemnation upon him but the judgment of discipline. For those whom the Lord loves, he disciplines them. All discipline is not enjoyment for the moment. Here, Jonah becomes an example of the Lord dealing with the issue of sin.

Jonah as a type of sin must be removed that the hand of God's judgment would be removed. And so he is hurled out of the boat into the sea. Brothers and sisters, can I ask you a question? Do you and I have sin in our life? Absolutely. Does it have consequences in God's loving discipline upon us? Absolutely. Does the sin itself bring consequences in our life? Absolutely. What do you and I need to do with it? It's called repentance. Hurl it away.

Jesus said our hatred of sin ought to be such that we're willing to cut off right hands and pluck out right eyes rather than offend the Lord with our hand or our eye or our foot. Let me quickly tell you: Jesus is not giving you a roadmap to sanctification—pluck out your eye and cut off your hand. What he is telling you is how much you and I ought to hate sin. We are willing and desirous even to part with right eyes and right hands rather than to keep sin in our life.

Hurl it away. Send it away. Put off the old man. Cast it from us. A lot of us are hurling a lot of things out of our life. What we need to hurl is our sin. Do I have to do that to be saved? No, you do that because you're saved. When you repented of your sin and came to Jesus, you repented of sin generally. Now that you're a Christian, you get the opportunity to grow in grace by repenting of particular sins particularly and hurling them out of our lives.

Secondly, he's not only a type of sin, Jonah becomes a type of Christ for us. In order to deal with our sin and to deliver us from judgment, Jonah points us to Christ who was hurled and sent out of heaven to a cross and to a grave and descended under the judgment of hell for us, that we would not have the tempest of God's judgment but that we would have peace. In the world, you have tribulation. In me, you have peace. Why? I have come and I have overcome the world.

It is Christ who has been hurled to the cross and embraced it and drank the last of that cup of judgment. He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf and then the Father hurled hell upon him and the Father crushed him and the Father poured out his wrath upon our savior that we would be delivered. Thirdly, Jonah is not only a type of sin we need to hurl it out of our life, he's not only a type of Christ who was hurled under the judgment of God at the cross and bore our hell, but thirdly, Jonah is a type of us.

In that we, as believers, can become hardened against the Lord's call in our life. There's some of us God's called us to lead small groups, hasn't he? We've gone to Tarshish. God's called us to share the gospel with people, to lost people, but we've gone to Tarshish. Are we saved? Absolutely, we're saved. Jonah is saved. I know Jonah's saved because God's not letting him go. Saved men and women can become disobedient and even callous.

It's right here I want to tell you: praise the Lord for conscience because you're made in the image of God, but your conscience is not your guide. How's Jonah's conscience? Well, he's so hardened against the Lord, he's sleeping while God's bringing judgment. Fast asleep in the hull of a ship. No, our conscience—I know the bumper sticker is nice to put on: "Let your conscience be your guide"—but our conscience can become seared, calloused, and misdirected.

It's God's Word that's our guide. It's the living God that uses his word by his spirit to direct us. We can become just like Jonah. We can not only become disobedient, we can not only become calloused in our disobedience, we can become more enamored with what we want in life rather than what God calls us to do in this life—to worship him, to proclaim the gospel, to love one another, to reach the lost, to be faithful, to stand for Christ against all forms of evil, sin, oppression, injustice, all the -isms.

And to do so in a way that shows the grace and truth of the Lord Jesus—not arrogance, not triumphalism, but walking in the triumph of Christ with compassion and grace and confidence. Yet we so easily can flee to what we want away from the presence of the Lord. Yet Jonah is a type of us to remind us the Lord will not let the wandering sheep go. He will move heaven, seas, storms, lots. He is able to pursue us.

Our conscience is not our guide, God's Word is our guide, God's Spirit is that which guides us and directs us in all of the areas of our life because we, by the grace of God, know the fear of the Lord. If you don't know the fear of the Lord, then all the fears of storms and demise and this world will ultimately control us and enslave us. I try to share this with folks when they say to me, "I just don't know whether I want to surrender to the Lord." Okay, you'd rather surrender to sin?

Because you and I will surrender to something. We'll either surrender to sin and the world or we'll surrender to the Lord. You and I will fear something. We will either fear the Lord by his grace giving us wisdom in reverence and majesty to him or we will fear the things of this world. "I may lose my job. I may lose my house. I may lose this. I may lose that." Certainly, we plan, we're made in the image of God, we live with purpose, we live with cares, but we cast all our cares upon him who is big enough to care for us and who does all things well.

God himself has given you a promise. Romans 8:28: For God causes—can I just fill in a word here?—God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. Can I just fill in a word for Jonah's sake here? For God hurls anything and everything so that all things work together for good—not that all things are good, but that all things, God throws them, God hurls them, God directs them, God causes them, God is engaged and everything stands at his disposal to accomplish his glory in caring for us, his people.

Not only is Jonah a type of sin, of Christ, of us, and it's not our conscience but the Word of God that gives us the fear of the Lord by the grace of God and the Spirit of the Lord, but finally, God is unstoppable and his providence even multiplies beyond our anticipation. Does it surprise you that God is fulfilling Romans 8:28 and going after Jonah? Doesn't surprise me. Does it surprise you that ultimately God wins the day and Jonah gets hurled overboard?

By the way, Jonah hurling is not over yet. God's got a fish. That sea monster isn't prepared to bring judgment upon him but to deliver him and teach him, and he's going to get hurled one more time. So he is hurled overboard, he'll be hurled back on dry land. It doesn't surprise us that God's doing this, but isn't it amazing? One of the reasons that Jonah doesn't want to go is because in his arrogance and self-righteousness, he does not want salvation to go to those Gentiles from which his father Abraham was brought by grace.

What he wants is not preaching of faith and repentance and a call to grace; what he wants is judgment. He wants Sodom and Gomorrah there. That's what he wants, and that's his desire. He doesn't want these pagans from all of these pagan deities to be delivered. So he goes to Tarshish and he gets on a ship and God chases him down. Not only is God going to get him hurled into the sea and hurled on the dry land and he's going to end up preaching and all those pagans that are going to get converted in Nineveh in chapter three, but on the way, pagans got converted on that ship.

Out of Jonah's disobedience, because he didn't want pagans converted, even more pagans got converted. Isn't that just like God drawing straight lines with crooked sticks? Taking what we would prefer, ashes, and turning them into roses. I believe the company of these sailors got converted. Look what it said: they called out to the Lord, "O Lord, deliver us, let us not perish for this man's life. Lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you."

A, they acknowledged the sovereignty of God. B, they obeyed. Picked up Jonah, hurled him into the sea just like we're supposed to hurl our sins away from us. Three, the sea ceased its raging. Then the men did what? They feared the Lord. These are the same men who were paralyzed by fear in the storm; now they fear the Lord. That's another word for worship and reverence. And they didn't just do it to check off the box; they did it exceedingly. They offered sacrifices.

I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service of worship. They gave sacrifices. The word sacrifice there is the word from the Old Testament that points to what we would call a thank offering. This tells me if they're bringing thank offerings to the Lord, this is a statement that is taking something that has taken place over a period of time and reducing it into a simple statement. They feared the Lord, they hurled Jonah into the sea, the sea calmed, and then what did they do? They worshiped the Lord, and by the time they get to dry land, they were ready to continue that worship to bring thank offerings to him.

It didn't stop there: they made commitments, vows to him. To him who had delivered them, to him who had saved them, to him who had redeemed them. This wasn't a momentary act to God like they would any other deity; this is transforming and it's lasting and it's showing up with God-centered worship that's taking place. And out of this, God has saved more pagans and now more worshipers are giving praise to him through a fleeing prophet whom God pursues.

I know how you think, it's just like me. "Okay, God, the way I'm going to get a lot of people saved is I will flee your call to share the gospel with people and that way a lot of other people will get saved." I know that's the way you and I work. No, this is simply making the point: God will have his way even when we think we are standing in his way. But how much more glorious, how much more joyful, instead of fleeing the presence of the Lord is to walk with the Lord and to serve the Lord and to delight in what delights him. Those who are lost saved delights him.

The Lord takes no delight in the death of the wicked. Therefore turn ye: why will you die? I know that even we who are saved by grace, I know within us is a constant inclination to turn away. That's why I love the fact that God refuses to quit working on us and in us. I love Psalm 110:3: "O Lord, thy people will volunteer freely in the day of your power." What is it that allows us to volunteer freely for the Lord? The power of God at work in us by his grace. Oh, praise his name, who freed us that we might not flee his presence but volunteer freely. "Lord, here we are. Send us."

Father, thank you for the time we could be together in your word. Thank you so much for this act of history that you have recorded for us from which we can learn that salvation, even as Jonah is about to pray from the belly of a great fish, salvation is of the Lord. And Father, you will not only pursue those whom you've saved like Jonah, and through us you will use us to see many converted: pagan sailors, Ninevites. And Father, we will stand in reverence to you in the day of your great power upon us. Do your work and thank you for teaching us. Here we are, Lord, purchased by Christ. Keep us ready to serve Christ. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Guest (Male): You are listening to InPerspective, featuring the teaching of Dr. Harry L. Reeder. For additional teaching by Dr. Reeder, visit inperspective.org. Dr. Reeder's impact reached far beyond the pulpit. Our Bible teacher was a prolific author and articulate spokesman for the Reformed faith around the world. Audio and print material from Dr. Reeder's events, broadcast, and writing ministry are available at reformedresources.org. That's reformedresources.org. Thanks in advance for both your financial support as well as your prayer support, both of which enable us to continue to bring you Dr. Reeder's insightful Bible teaching. To make a gift, call us at 1-800-488-1888, visit inperspective.org, or write 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Join us again next time as we turn back to the scriptures to put life in biblical perspective.