God's Deliverance, Part 1

If you’ll open your Bibles to Jonah, we are going to look at chapter 2. But before we do, I just want to, as you get there, we talked about “shift” and how God actually allows storms to come into our life, and at times even, we learned, causes storms into our life to shift our focus, shift our life, our mindset, sometimes, our careers, our relationships so that we get the more that He really wants us to have. And as Ryan was teaching, he said, “I want you to write this prayer down.” So I did. “Heavenly Father, would You give me an opportunity to share with someone in some way about You today.”

And so, I wrote names down. And I have prayed for them every single day since week one. And it really is interesting how when you shift and you – and I told God, I was – I’m sorry. It’s not like I have neglected them or I haven’t shared or haven’t done this. But they are not on my heart the way they were on God’s heart.

And so, I have prayed for them every single day and it’s amazing. Stuff started happening. So, the one guy that I really like, he’s around the corner or so. And I have seen him on the golf course and out of the blue, he’s doing this charity event to help some other people, and it’s, I think it’s a little boy that died early and he got to know the family. And he was literally orchestrating this charity event. And it had something to do with golf. And I couldn’t go, but I wanted to contribute. So, because I had been praying for him every day, it was not like, Should I? I just wrote a check and I said, “But I’m not available on that day.”

And so, he calls me and says, “Would you do me a favor?” I said, “Well, sure.” He said, “The woman that lost her son, and all this happened, she’s a woman of faith. And you gave me that book that you wrote on Why I Believe. Do you think you could give her one? Or maybe something different?”

And I thought, Here I have been, for how many years, and out of the blue, or so is my experience, as I prayed for him and God shifted my focus… And then afterward he said, “Hey, since you can’t make that event, how about you and I drive down to that golf course and we’ll spend the day together?”

God allows storms in our lives to shift our focus in our life onto the more that we were made for. And so, in Jonah’s case, what we find is I can really identify, he’s a little hardheaded. And so, we know the story, right? He gets thrown in by the sailors and Jonah, we’ll pick it up in verse 17.

And so, let’s follow it together. So, Jonah runs away from God, and these pagan sailors, they start praying to the one true God and they offer sacrifices. And it’s like, okay, hey, please forgive us, but, you know, one, ready guys? Two, three… And they throw him in. And, of course, Jonah is like: I’m done. “And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish.”

Now, imagine. And we have done enough research and we’ve got two or three sort of historical examples. But let’s go there for just a minute. Okay? It’s a huge animal, whale, great fish, something. Actually, in Hebrew it’s a sea monster. And it’s slimy and it’s dark, and there’s oxygen and you can breathe but I just can’t imagine. And so, he’s sort of drifting down through the water and notice, “God appoints” - His direction, His sovereignty.

What I want you to notice as I read this, listen like someone who has been in this yicky, terrible place and yet realizing, “Hey, I didn’t die.” Listen for this contrast. Jonah says or speaks or prays or cries. And then listen for how the response is, because as we read this, I want you to know that when you blow it and when I blow it and when we feel hopeless and like, you know, we don’t deserve anything, I want you to catch this. “I called out of my distress to the Lord,” and in your Bible you might underline, “He answered me. I cried for help from the depths of Sheol,” that’s a Hebrew from death. I just cried, I mean, I’ve got no hope. “He heard my voice.” He still has a little bit of reframing life, which we all do when we are running from God. “For You cast me into the deep.” Did God cast him into the deep? Or is he in the deep because of decisions that he made?

Hey, I don’t know, have you ever done this? I’ve done this a lot, like, you know sort of what is right to do and you don’t do it. And you turn away from God and He says, “That’s
not a good relationship,” or, “That’s not a good decision,” or, “Those circumstances are dangerous.”

And so, you go ahead and do it, and then you get in a jam and then you do this, “Boy, God, how could You let this happen?” That’s where he’s at. But he’s going to get his perspective in a minute.

“Into the heart of the sea, and the current engulfed me.” Imagine him, he’s floating down. “All Your breakers and billows passed over me. So,” he’s thinking, I’m going to respond. “So, I said, ‘I have been expelled from Your sight.’” He’s in this moment. “You said to do this, this is what I did, I’m in actual willful, shaking my fist rebellion. So, I have been expelled from Your sight.”

“Nevertheless,” circle that word in your Bible. “Nevertheless, I will look again toward the holy Temple.” And the Hebrew mindset at that time, that’s where you prayed. That would be God’s presence. He goes, “I am out of Your sight, I don’t deserve anything, but nevertheless, I’m going to look again.” So, you know, it’s like, I’m going down, I know I’m going to die. But I’m going to shoot up a prayer. “The waters encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me.” You getting these verbs? Encompassed, engulfed, billows pass over me, the weeds wrapped around my head. It’s pretty graphic.

“I descended to the roots of the mountains.” In other words, he has actually hit the bottom, not only of the sea, but of his life. “The earth with its bars around me forever.” This is: I am done. And he understands: I am done because of my choices and my rebellion and what I have done.

And then, here’s another big contrast. You might circle this, because the first big one was, “Nevertheless,” I know I don’t deserve it. And this is, “But You have brought my life from the pit, O Yahweh, my God. While I was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to You, into Your holy Temple.”

And then I love it, he goes, “Those who regard vain idols forsake their faithfulness,” and he is incriminating himself. His vain idol was: My will, my way, my perspective. And now
he’s got palms up, inside of a dark, smelly, slimy environment.

And he says, “But I will sacrifice to You with a voice of thanksgiving. That which I have vowed,” going to Nineveh, “I will pay.”

And then here’s the great line that you just put a squiggly line under it, put a box around it, “Salvation is from the Lord.” It’s this great moment. In the context here, he’s not looking at – when we say “salvation” we think justification.

I turned from my sin, I prayed to receive Christ, but the word “salvation” literally means to be delivered, to be delivered out of something. And so, the author here is letting us know Jonah is delivered out of this. But it’s thematic. The Ninevites are going to be delivered. The sailors were delivered. Salvation comes from God and God alone. It’s one of the great themes of the book. “Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land.”

Put a circle around vomited. It’s a really key word and we are going to come back to it. And, by the way, when you think “vomited” – I read a guy, he’s a scholar. And he did all this word study on vomit. And he said, “Puke, regurgitate,” think of the smell, think of…

He said, “Vomit means vomit.” And he said, “It’s a unique word used in the Old Testament.” There are a handful of times where God talks about what He vomits and why. And we will get there in a minute. But I just don’t want you to miss that.

What is the big idea? In other words, Jonah, we just heard his prayer, right? “I’m running away from God, a storm comes, I get thrown in the ocean, I’m beyond hope, I cry out for help.” Here’s the big idea: “God delivers us from storms to reveal His mercy and to position us to fulfill the more that we are made for.

And the context from chapter 1 and chapter 4 is this: Jonah’s disobedience and despair were birthed out of fear that God’s agenda might be different than his desires. Right? Wasn’t that it? I mean, he was afraid, like, “I don’t want to go to Nineveh.” Why? We learn in chapter 4 as it opens up, he says to God, “See?” You’re going to learn a little bit later. Ryan, I don’t want to get the cat out of the bag. But a little pre-tell here, he actually will go, he will actually preach, and the most wicked people that we have any record of in ancient history are the Ninevites.

It’s so evil, it makes stuff that Hitler did look like child’s play. It’s so inhumane; so wicked. And God forgives them and Jonah goes, “The reason I fled, because I understood,” he’s got good theology. “You’re this merciful God. No matter where people are at, if they ever repent, if they ever genuinely turn, if they ever ask, see I knew You would do this.”

And so, it’s very – he’s logical. Jonah’s logic is God is merciful, therefore I’m not going to go to Nineveh.

Second, Jonah’s desire is for God’s justice for the Ninevites. Right? It’s like, “God, I don’t want to go preach truth. What if they respond?” And Jonah also knows he’s got a prophecy in the back of his mind that about thirty years later that the Lord is going to bring about judgment to Israel.

And so, he’s like us, he thinks it through. Now, let’s see, if I don’t go and they don’t repent, that’s the group that is supposed to come later, which they did in 722 B.C. This is written about 760 B.C. And so, Jonah is really logical. It really makes sense to him. God has this plan, but I know better. My desires, my purposes, my outcomes are better.

And so, Jonah’s action reveal tribalism over lordship. See, at the end of the day, Jonah says, “The Israelites – my people, my group – are more important than God’s agenda, because I know better.” Anybody seeing any of this in our life in the last couple years? I think the ugliness I have seen inside the Church probably breaks my heart as much or more than anything I have ever seen. And it’s tribalism. And it can be nationalism, but I mean, inside the Church. There are people that don’t talk to each other anymore.

They have said things and done things, and I mean, it has been unbelievable. And instead of Jesus; instead of: What’s God’s plan? We may have all kind of differences, but what is God’s big agenda and isn’t our lordship to Him and what He wants us to do – so wouldn’t we treat one another with respect and humility and understanding? And say, “I wonder, maybe there’s a bigger thing than our deal, our tribe?” “Well, we are this group. We think, we think this is the only way to do it.” “Well, we gave to this group.” “Well, we gave to that group.” Tribalism, tribalism, tribalism. Our group, our way, our age, old or young, our ethnicity, our program, our view of Scripture – all these little tribes saying, “We know best,” that was Jonah’s sin.

Jonah’s deliverance was birthed in His faith that God is merciful, even to those who willfully reject Him. Notice I put some verses from His prayer. Jonah’s near-death experience, what? He’s in distress. Jonah’s prayers and cries for help. He gets deliverance. Jonah’s response is this psalm of thanksgiving.

What I want you to know, and this is so critical for us, Jonah has good theology, doesn’t he? He believes the truth. God is merciful. Since God is merciful, I don’t want to do what He tells me to do, because I hate those people.

My job has me doing a lot of travel around the world. Just before the pandemic I was in China seven times. And we do training of pastors, especially in rural areas.
And then maybe three times in the Middle East in that season.

And one of the biggest takeaways I got from being with those people is their view of suffering and God’s big picture instead of our own. I’ll never forget a pastor, he was a house church pastor in China. And I had a chance to eat with him and we were getting to know one another, and he talked about his – he was on sort of a traveling evangelistic campaign somewhere throughout China and the church met in his home and they moved things around.

And the authorities came, the wife said, “No, no, no, no. I’m the pastor, I’m the only one.” And the people left and they beat her to a pulp for two or three days. And he came back, found his wife, and was telling this story and in my gut, in my tribalism, it was, “I’ll tell you what, someone ever did that to my wife, Theresa, I’ll tell you what, I mean, right? And I’m thinking that and then he leans over with his eyes watery and says, “Can you imagine that God would ever count us worthy to suffer for Him like that?” And I was, I mean, I was too embarrassed to say anything. I thought, I had a lot of thoughts in my mind, but that one never came to my mind. Do you see his perspective? Eternity. His perspective? God’s agenda. His perspective? Of course, we are going to suffer in a fallen world where there are sinful people who do wicked things. And God will use them, we have – he sounded like the early apostles.

In one of the trainings there in the Middle East, one of the groups that had come had done some other training. And the leader of it was telling me, “They said, ‘Thank you for this training. We don’t have much access to good teaching. Before we go back to our country, would you teach us to die well? Would you teach us to die well?’” Do you get it? It’s not my agenda, it’s not my country, it’s not my group, it’s not my young, it’s not my old – it’s: What does God want? Shift! What does God want for my life? Shift away from my culture, my desires, my: This is the way it has got to be. This is what is happening in this passage.