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Colin Smith: When it comes to storms, when it comes to disasters, when it comes to tragedies in life, you have two choices as to what to believe. Either you will believe that God is in control even of these things, or you will end up concluding that he is somehow a helpless or at least passive observer.

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. Colin, we're in a series on Jonah talking about storms today. I think there may be a tendency for some to believe that God is a God who sends blessing when we deserve it, and he is a God who sends storms when we have sin in our life or maybe we're running from him. Is there ever a time where God uses a storm even though I'm walking with him?

Colin Smith: Oh yeah, there's an example of that in the Gospels. The disciples are in the boat with Jesus and they're acting in obedience because he's told them to go the other side of the lake, and a storm comes. So storms come in the middle of obedience. In this story in Jonah, this is a storm that comes in the setting of Jonah's disobedience.

But the thing that strikes me about it, Steve, is that even here, the storm is an expression of God's grace. It's God not letting Jonah go. No storm at sea for Jonah, and he just drifts off out of the will and purpose of God. But God sends a storm because he loves Jonah more than that.

Steve Hiller: As we face storms in our life, I think that can be comforting to recognize that God might be using that storm to draw us back into what he would have us be.

Colin Smith: I think it's important to say there is no event in life in which God is not working for our good. God works in all things for the good of those who love him. That's the great assurance that we have as Christians.

Steve Hiller: If you can, I hope that you'll open your Bible and join us in Jonah chapter 1. We're looking at verses 4 through 16 today as we begin a message, "Refuse God's Provision Through Someone Else." Here's Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Now, I want to take up the story at verse 3 where we're told that Jonah ran away from the Lord and he headed for Tarshish. Someone asked me the question this week, why did he bother going to Tarshish? If he didn't want to go to Nineveh, why didn't he just stay where he was? Well, I think the answer to that is that Jonah was a prophet.

That meant that Jonah received special revelation from God. God spoke to Jonah directly in a way rather like the way he spoke to Moses. So when Jonah refused God's call and disobeyed God's command, he would have known that that would have shut off any further direct revelation from God into Jonah's life. That meant that he could not continue as a prophet.

If he made up his own prophecies without receiving revelation from the Lord, he would be a false prophet. If he stopped prophesying in Gath Hepher, everyone would know that there was something wrong in Jonah's relationship with the Lord, why his ministry had suddenly been turned off.

So the choice that this man faced, I think, was either that he should obey God and go to Nineveh, which he did not want to do, or that he quit being a prophet, start over a new life in some other kind of work in a new place and with a new identity. It seems that that's what Jonah decided he wanted to do. He ran away from the Lord and he headed for Tarshish.

Notice verse 3 tells us that he went down to Joppa. When he got there, here's an amazing thing: he found a ship just sitting in the dock there that was ready to sail for that very port. Here's an interesting thing: if you decide to go to Tarshish, there will always be a boat to get you there. Isn't that amazing?

When a person decides to move away from the Lord, there will always be opportunities to pursue that desire. C.H. Spurgeon told a wonderful story. I love this one. It's about a man who had a violent temper. Spurgeon said there was a pattern with this man's behavior. When he got angry, he would lose his temper. And when he lost his temper, he would pick up something and he would throw it.

Spurgeon said, "What really surprised me about this man was not that he got angry and lost his temper, not even that when he lost his temper he would throw things. What really surprised me," said Spurgeon, "was that whenever he was angry, there was always something there at hand just waiting to be thrown."

Now, Jonah was running from the Lord and there was the very opportunity waiting for him. The boat was there in the port. Never trust circumstances when you are refusing the Word of God. For if you are running from God, there will always be opportunities for your sin and your rebellion to become worse.

Thank God that's not the end of the story. Jonah's sinful heart is taking him away from the Lord, but God, wonderfully in his mercy, is set and determined on bringing Jonah back. At this point in the story, I want you to notice that it's almost as if the focus moves because Jonah now wants to tell us the remarkable story of the ship's crew and how these men, who at the beginning when they launched out on the journey to Tarshish, they knew absolutely nothing about the God of the Bible.

But in the course of this journey, they were wonderfully converted to faith in the God of the Bible and they became truly God-centered believers. A wonderful conversion. I want to suggest that in the story that we're going to look at today of the conversion of the ship's crew, we have one of the clearest pictures of the gospel in all of the Bible.

If you want to know simply, and if you're the kind of person who thinks in pictures, what is the gospel all about? You'll never get it clearer, I think, than right here because the gospel at its heart is about two things. It is about the storm and it is about the sacrifice. It is about the storm of God's judgment and it is about the sacrifice by which we can be saved from that judgment. And these two things are powerfully presented to us right here in this part of the story we've come to today.

So let's look first at the storm, then, beginning at verse 4. The Lord sent a great wind on the sea and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. Now, let's pause there for a moment and think about this. God sent the storm.

Storms don't happen by chance. People talk a lot about Mother Nature as if nature operated by its own independent power. But the Bible never suggests to us that nature operates by its own independent power. The Bible says to us that God sustains all things by his powerful word. That's Hebrews chapter 1 and verse 3.

When the disciples were with the Lord Jesus and, remember, he calmed the storm, the disciples said about Jesus, "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him." So when it comes to storms, when it comes to disasters, when it comes to tragedies in life, you have two choices as to what to believe.

Either you will believe that God is in control even of these things, or you will end up concluding that he is somehow a helpless or at least passive observer. Christians debate how we understand the Bible on these issues and someone might well say, if you're saying that God is sovereign, controlling all things, doesn't that give you a problem if you say that God is sovereign even over storms that wreck ships?

Listen, I would rather live with the problem of a God who is sovereign over all things than live with the problem of a God who is a helpless or passive observer of the worst things that happen in life, wouldn't you? God sends the storm. The storm is God's intervention in Jonah's life.

You may want to think about this a little, but I thank God that God did not leave Jonah to his own free will. Jonah's will was moving right in the wrong direction into a wasted life and, but for the intervention of God, that's where he would have remained.

But God was messing with Jonah's rebellious will to save him from a life wasted in disobedience. Don't you thank God for the way in which his hand has intervened in your life and where would you have been if it was not for his gracious intervention in your life?

At the same time, this God who steps in and messes with all kinds of human affairs, he is stepping in to redeem a ship's crew, to touch the lives of a group of men who know not the first thing about him. Our God is amazing. Even his judgments are filled with his mercy.

If he can use the crucifixion of his own Son to bring the redemption of the world, you can trust him and his wise and loving hand in the darkest storms and the greatest tragedies of your life as well. Our minds will struggle with this, but I want to encourage you to hold tightly to the comfort of knowing that God is sovereign and that though we live in a confusing world, we do not live in a world that operates on random chance.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called "Refuse God's Provision." It's part of a series on Jonah called "How to Avoid a God-Centered Life." If you ever miss a broadcast in the series, come and listen online. Our website is openthebible.org. You can stream the program or download an MP3 for free. You can also listen through the Open the Bible app, which you'll find for free at your App Store.

I have just a moment and I want to let you know about a new podcast from Open the Bible. It's called *Hike Through the Bible*, and Pastor Colin is taking you on a 50-episode journey all the way through the Bible story. It's to help you understand the Bible story better and love Jesus more. If you've not checked it out yet, look for *Hike Through the Bible* wherever you get your podcasts. You can also see the video version on YouTube or connect at our website, openthebible.org/hike. Let's get back to the message. Here's Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Now, remember, at this point, the crew who become the focus of the story, they do not know the God of the Bible. They had their own religion, as of course the vast majority of people in this world, East and West, have some form of religion, but they do not know the God of the Bible.

When they find themselves in a storm, we read verse 5 that all the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. They all had a religion and they did what human beings always do in a time of crisis and trouble: they instinctively invoke their religion and they cried out to their god. They began to pray.

I don't know how many crew would be on the ship, but it says each of them cried out to their own god. That's an awful lot of gods are being asked to help here if each of them is crying out to his own god. For all this crying out to these many gods, there is nothing that is actually happening to make any kind of a difference.

Jonah had gone below deck. You'll see it in verse 6 and he had fallen into a very deep sleep. The captain goes down and calls on him. "Get up," he says to Jonah, "and call on your god because maybe he will take notice of us and we will not perish." He is saying, "Jonah, I don't know how in the world you can be asleep because all of us on the deck, we're all calling on our gods and it's not done any good so far. Why don't you get up, you call on your god, see if he'll do anything to help us?"

The fascinating thing here is that Jonah is silent because he can't pray. How can you pray to a God you are actively disobeying at that very time? It's impossible. Christians running from God are of no use to lost people in a storm.

R.T. Kendall has a wonderful comment in his book on Jonah at this point. He says, "Perhaps one of the most embarrassing things that can ever happen to a backslidden Christian is for an unbeliever to come to you and say, 'I need you to pray for me.'" That's what's happening for Jonah right here, but he's immobilized because of his unresolved conflict with God and his tenacious holding on to his own continuing sin.

Maybe you see yourself in Jonah here. He couldn't pray because he was locked into this unresolved conflict with God. So Jonah is silent and there is no witness aboard this ship. Imagine it: he is the only man on board the ship who knows the living God, the only man who can pray to the Almighty knowing him, and he says nothing. He has nothing to offer because he's immobilized by his own sin.

Thank God the story doesn't end there because again, the God who steps into human lives takes the initiative, and he does this in a very unusual way. God exposed Jonah's sin and he did it in this remarkable way: he used tumbling dice to reveal his rebellious servant's secret.

Look at it right in verse 7. The sailors said to each other, "Come, let us cast lots and find out who is responsible for this calamity." They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. I don't know, actually, whether they used dice or what form of casting lots they would actually have used.

Whatever form it was, the book of Proverbs tells us that God is sovereign even over the outcome of the lot. That's in Proverbs chapter 16. God sovereignly overruled the outcome of the dice or whatever lot was being cast so that Jonah was identified to these men and exposed as the source of the problem.

By the way, if God exposes your sin, it is because he loves you. The Lord disciplines those he loves, not those he hates. He disciplines his own children whom he loves. He will not allow your unconfessed sin to remain secret forever. He will not allow you to be immobilized, if you are really his child, in terms of usefulness in this world forever. He steps in and what has not been confessed is now exposed.

I think that Jonah must have been relieved at this point. At last, his secret was out. Something similar happened, you remember, to King David where he carried secret sin that was unconfessed in his own life for some time. Then, you remember, the prophet Nathan came and by that means, God exposed this unconfessed sin.

David wrote about the relief that it was to him to finally have this weight off his back and to be able to be open and authentic before God and no longer to live a life of covering up. You can read about it in Psalm 32. Let me just quote these verses to you. He says, "When I was silent, when I was keeping the big secret, here's what it was like: my bones wasted away." For he says to God, "Day and night your hand was heavy upon me and my strength, it was just drained out. It was sapped as in the heat of summer."

"I just felt exhausted living this covered-up kind of a life day after day, week after week. It was like being exhausted on a scorching summer day." Then he puts at the end of that that word that comes in the Psalms—have you ever noticed that word, "Selah"? It just means, "think about that."

He says, "This is what my experience of covering up was like. It was exhausting. Think about that." Then he says, "Then I acknowledged my sin and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, 'I will confess my transgression to the Lord,' and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah. Think about that."

The release, the relief, the freedom that I'm no longer living a secret lie. God's hand is on the tumbling dice because he loves Jonah and he won't allow his ministry to be compromised or his life to be stunted any longer.

When God exposed Jonah's sin, it was the beginning of hope, not only for him but also for the entire crew of the ship. You'll notice in the story that they begin to pepper Jonah with questions. "What do you do? Where do you come from?" and so forth. Jonah tells them, verse 10, that he is running from the Lord.

The crew obviously then want to know, "Well, tell us about the God you are running from, because this is obviously significant." Jonah says, verse 9, "I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land."

Notice how now Jonah is free, now that the sin is confessed and it's all been brought out into the open. Jonah is now in a position where he can be some use and now tells them about the God of the Bible, who is unlike any other gods. He is the God of heaven. He is the God who created the earth. He is the God who rules over the winds and the waves, and even uses tumbling dice to expose his rebellious servant. He is the God who sends storms. He is the God who wrecks ships, and he is the God who saves them too.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called "Refuse God's Provision." Unfortunately, we do have to hit the pause button right there, but we'll continue this teaching next time. Our message is part of a larger series called "How to Avoid a God-Centered Life." Let me ask you a couple of questions. Are you angry with God? Do you ever feel like you're running from him? In this series, we're taking a look at Jonah and how he spent a part of his life running from the God that he professed to serve.

Yet, God knew how to deal with Jonah in his anger and he knows how to deal with us. We don't have to spend our lives running from God. Well, if you ever miss a broadcast in our series, come and listen online at openthebible.org. Open the Bible is listener-supported. That's exactly what it sounds like: we depend on your financial generosity to keep Pastor Colin's teaching available each day. As you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you a copy of Martin Lloyd-Jones's book called *Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures*. Colin, what kind of help can we expect from this book?

Colin Smith: Well, I can only speak from my own experience, which is that I have been greatly helped and encouraged and strengthened by this book on many occasions. That's why it has been for many years for me a kind of go-to book, particularly in times of discouragement. I remember one time in particular where I just felt really tired in what I was doing. I'd lost the sense of motivation. I'd lost the sense of joy. I was carrying on out of a sense of duty.

Lloyd-Jones has a chapter in this book on being weary in well-doing. Paul spoke about times when Christians can just get weary of doing the good things that God has called us to do. I thought, well, that'll be helpful to me. This will be an encouragement and something that'll comfort me a little. Boy, what Lloyd-Jones said in that chapter really hit me between the eyes because he said, "If you are merely serving the Lord out of a sense of duty, if you've lost the sense of the great privilege and joy it is to be a servant of the Lord, you are spitting in the face of Jesus Christ."

I thought, that's me. I'm operating out of a sense of duty and that's the last place in the world that I want to be. You know what? There was something that lifted through that realization and there was a help and there was a relief and a new peace and a new energy that came to me. God used it. That's what I've found in my life, Steve, that God has used Lloyd-Jones's book on multiple occasions. That's why I'm so glad we're able to commend it to others because I think others will have the same experience that the Lord meets with you through the application of Scripture to particular circumstances in which we find ourselves in difficulty.

Steve Hiller: I'm looking forward to reading this book myself, and maybe as you're listening, you're thinking, I can't wait to get a copy of this book. We'd love to send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for your financial support this month. You can give a gift of any amount and we'll send you a copy of *Spiritual Depression* by Martin Lloyd-Jones. You can give online at openthebible.org or when you call 1-877-OPEN-365. That's 1-877-673-6365. For Pastor Colin Smith, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening and I hope you'll join us next time.

This program is a listener-supported production of Open the Bible.

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