03 | Jonah: Mercy in the Deep (1/2)

Ps. Steven R. Martins, founding pastor at Sevilla Chapel in St. Catharines, walks us through the book of Jonah with an exposition of Jonah 2:1-4.

Transcript

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The Sermon Series on the Book of Jonah by founding pastor Stephen R. Martins is brought to you by Sevilla Chapel.

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Oh, grace and peace to your dear brothers and sisters. If you're visiting us for the first time or you're watching online, welcome to Sevilla Chapel. My name is Stephen Martins, and I have the privilege of serving as part as part of the pastoral staff here at the church. If you've been following with us for the past few weeks, you'll remember that Pastor Lawrence and I have been working through a different series in the Bible, different Bible texts. He's walking us through Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and I am walking us through the book of Jonah in the Old Testament. And this morning we're continuing where we left off in the book of Jonah. We're looking now at Jonah chapter 1, verses 1 to 4. I initially wanted to cover all nine verses of chapter 2 when I first plotted out how this was going to go, considering that the whole chapter consists of Jonah's prayer unto God. But the depth and the richness and the great complexity of this chapter has actually forced me to divide it into two sermons. So this morning is the first part, and the next time I'm here at this pulpit to preach, I'll do the rest of chapter two. But first we're going to do a quick review of what we've covered thus far because it's helpful to know what we've covered, where we are, what's come before, what now comes ahead. At the very beginning of the book, we read that the word of the Lord had come to Jonah, the son of Amitai, and that the word that came to him from the Lord was to go to the great city of Nineveh. And again, being a great city, it was considered one of the wonders of the world at the time. He was to go to the great city of Nineveh to proclaim God's judgment for their many sins. And Nineveh, of course, was not part of God's government people. They were one of God's people's enemies. They were known for the brutality, for their violence, for their bloodshed. And they were one of the central population centers of the Assyrian Empire. So they were already a thorn in the side of the surrounding nations. And they would later be used by God to bring judgment upon his covenant people. As a matter of fact, Assyria would come and confront the reign of King Hezekiah many years afterwards. But before we read this in the progression of Israel's history, Jonah is first commanded to go to Nineveh. And he's commanded to give this word of judgment. And Jonah, knowing the heart of God, knowing that mercy was very likely if somehow, in some way, Nineveh were to unlikely were to suddenly repent, he decided to flee from the presence of the Lord. Had he known, and he had 100% assurety that judgment was in fact going to fall upon the great city and that Nineveh would be no more, he would have gone perhaps with great glee. But he knew in the back of his mind, in the very deep recesses of his heart, that God had already thought about mercy. For why else would he send him to go all the way out of the covenant land into the great enemy of God's people, into their land to proclaim judgment? Now, as we see here, he had received this command from God, and the prophet Jonah, son of Amitai, chose instead to disobey and rebel. And it wasn't really enough for him to just ignore the call of the Lord because he could have simply heard it, decided to do nothing, stayed in the northern kingdom of Israel, and carried on his business as usual. But no, he did something altogether different. He had to flee from God. He decided to flee altogether from God and his presence, or so he thought. And so he goes in the opposite direction from where God had called him to go. So instead of going to Nineveh eastward, he travels westward and boards a merchant ship to Tarshish, being that Phoenician port off the coast of Spain. And what then transpired is what we read in chapter 1, we read that a great tempest arose upon the sea, such as never had been before witnessed by the pagan sailors who were on board. And these were pagan sailors also on their way to Tarshish for the reasons of commerce and trade. And as a result, they pleaded to their gods. They all knelt down, we can imagine, pleading to their gods, whatever gods that may have may have been. And perhaps they were Phoenician, perhaps they were particularly of other nation tribes. We don't know, but we do know that they did not worship the true God of Israel. But they pleaded to their gods, and then they awakened Jonah from his slumber in the belly of the ship and urged that he pray to his God because their prayers are going unanswered. And when they realized that that was really accomplishing nothing, they decided to cast lots to determine who was the culpable one. And for those seasoned sailors to do this, I mean you have to think about it. Yes, these sailors were pagan, they had their own religious beliefs that were contrary to that of the covenant people of Israel. But they realized that this was not an ordinary tempest, and they must not have been as superstitious as we probably might think based on the text. So they knew that something was up with the tempest and something was very off, something was supernatural in all of this occurring. And they came to the conclusion that someone had done something to incur judgment from the divine. Someone had done something to anger the one who controls both the heavens and the sea. And what we read last time was that according to the lots that were cast, and this was like a, if you were to compare it to today's practice, like throwing a pair of dice, Jonah was revealed to be the culprit. Now, this was not by some lucky chance. You know, you might think, oh, well, it just so happened that bad luck fell upon Jonah and he was exposed as the culprit, as the one who had angered God. No, there is no such thing as chance. If you think about it, and if you grapple with it, it's the Lord who determines the outcome of the lots or the dice. Chance is nothing more than man's ignorance of God's providential workings in history. It was not by chance that the lots fell to expose Jonah of his guilt. To illustrate this biblical truth a little bit more, and I touched on this before, but I want to clarify a bit more. When I was in high school many years back, I remember running a raffle as a fundraiser for a Christian student club that I was part of starting up. And it was a public school in Toronto, it was Oakwood Collegiate. And I remember the grand prize for this raffle was a Nintendo Switch. It was the first time it had come out. And so I knew, you know, if we were doing this fundraiser, we want to do an event, a gospel event in the school building on the premises, uh, but we need to fundraise some funds. And if we really want people to support what we're doing, we need to buy we need to buy something that they can really purchase tickets for. And so we we got the Nintendo Switch. And and there were a lot of tickets that were sold. And one of my teachers at the time was an atheist. Uh he was a Chinese math teacher who actually specialized in calculating probabilities, and he taught a course on probability and causality. And I remember taking that course and I enjoyed it. I really don't like math. But that was one particular course I enjoyed, just calculating probabilities with him. And again, as I mentioned, he was an atheist. He told me that he wasn't a Christian, he didn't believe in God, he didn't believe in anything divine. But when he heard about the fundraiser, he said he wanted to support his students, and that was something he was known for. He was known for supporting his students even if he disagrees with their religious beliefs. So he purchased a single raffle ticket. That's all he had in his pocket at the time. Some change, he bought a single raffle ticket. And being, of course, a math teacher that specialized in probability and chance, he calculated the probability of him winning based on over a thousand raffle tickets that have already been sold and more that were still going to be sold uh uh by the end of the month. And he said, Well, I know it's a very highly unlikely I'll win, almost impossible, but I want to support you nonetheless. So here's my my here's the money for one ticket. Now, little did I know, and did we know, that when the time actually came for the draw at the end of the month, he won the grand prize. He won that Nintendo Switch. And I don't I don't I didn't really think much of it at that time. I just thought, oh, well, he won, great. You know, I'm glad he won. I was expecting a student to win, it just happened to be the math teacher. But after a few weeks, he came up to me in the hallway of that school and he said, you know what? Ever since I won that prize, and realizing how unlikely, how improbable it was that I would actually win, I've started to go to a church now. I'm starting to believe that there is a God. I just can't make sense of it. You know, I don't know what he said to himself when he bought that ticket. I don't know if he made some silent prayer asking God to show himself to be true. But what we thought was merely chance turned out to be providence. Well, it was providence that allowed Jonah to be on that ship with pagan sailors. Because when they were forced to cast him overboard in order to save themselves, they prayed unto the true God of Israel and pleaded for mercy. And when they had done so, when they had thrown Jonah overboard, the sea came to a rest. They witnessed the true power and glory of the God of Israel, such that could not be compared with anything they had witnessed before. And the text, if you read the text in chapter one, towards the end, they repented, they pledged vows, they offered a sacrifice unto God. Salvation came to that ship that day. Had Jonah not been there, we might wonder whether they would have ever experienced such a salvation. But it was not by chance that Jonah in his rebellion was on that ship to Tarshish. In spite of Jonah's rebellion, it was God's plan that these events would lead to their salvation. And this is where we last left off. And now follows the second chapter of Jonah. Now, a note first needs to be made concerning the structure of the second chapter from verses one to nine. If you were to examine it very carefully, you would notice that its content, namely Jonah's prayer. You're reading, you say, well, yeah, it's a prayer. But if you look at its structure, it's structured as a psalm of thanksgiving. A psalm of thanksgiving. So you could actually take this and put it with the collection of the psalms. The Hebraic poetic structure has been lost in the English translation, and you would expect that. There are always certain things that can be lost in translation. Nothing that takes away from the message of the text, but the poetic structure with its characteristics and its resonance, it's one thing that can be diminished when it's translated into a different language. I mean, you take any poem in English, for example, that happens to rhyme and you translate it into Spanish or any other language, and you'll notice that a word-for-word translation will result in the loss of the rhyme. And the same thing happens oftentimes when I'm amongst the Spanish speakers and they say certain sayings and I translate into English and see what they're trying to say, and it just doesn't make any sense, but it's a saying for them. And when I try to translate English sayings to them, and they just don't get it, they scratch their heads. Certain things are lost in translation. But nonetheless, the point remains. The content remains. The meaning of this Psalm of Thanksgiving has not been lost. It's there in the text. Something else needs to be said. The second chapter of Jonah is a prophet's response to God's judgment. The cry of the son of Amitai is focused on his desperate circumstances, the character of his situation. And this is observed in the poetic descriptions of death or nearness to death. The psalm is a moving testament to the heart of Israel's true faith. And here he speaks truer than he actually knows because there's still so much for Jonah to learn concerning the mercy and the love of God, which will become clear to us toward the end of the book. But nonetheless, we see here a testament, a testimony to the heart of Israel's true faith. With that, we can turn to our text. We'll examine each of the first four verses of this psalm, and we'll cover the rest the next time. We're going to begin with verse one. And it says, Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish. Now, I had previously remarked that this was the point in which the caricatures arise. You know, you mentioned the book of Jonah or the story of Jonah to any unbeliever, and they may not even know their Bibles, but they know the caricatures. They know, oh yes, that man who was swallowed by a great fish. This is where it arrives. But at the end of the first chapter, we're told that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish. That's what the text actually reads, depending on the English translation you have, but that's generally the rendering we get, and it's done according to the will of the Lord. And we're told again here at the beginning of chapter two that Jonah was in the belly of that fish. Three days, three nights, he remained alive in the belly of that great fish. And if you remember, I had mentioned that term great fish is really not the strongest, the strongest English rendering of the Hebrew term Dagadol. The text actually refers to a great sea creature, an aquatic creature. It's not an actual fish, it's not a whale, but a great massive sea creature, something truly massive, something to the scale of perhaps of a Leviathan. And the most likely prospect when we looked at the biological realities of ocean fauna and their feeding habits is that this was likely a marine reptile that was large enough to swallow a man whole. While being in the stomach of this daggole, of this sea creature, the prophet Jonah offers up a prayer. It's his psalm of thanksgiving. Now we have no reason to doubt that he is in fact alive. Some have said that perhaps Jonah had died and he was brought back to life after three days, and for this reason Jesus referred to his own death and resurrection as the sign of Jonah, but that's actually not what the text reveals. Firstly, we know that Jonah is physically alive because otherwise he would not have been described in this active function of prayer. He would instead have been described as perhaps having fallen asleep in the dust of the earth, as we see in Daniel chapter 12, verse 2. Or given that he was at sea as having been swallowed up by the abyss of the ocean, as we see in the sea giving up its dead for judgment in Revelation 20, 13. Well, neither form of language is used here to make clear that he's actually experienced any sort of physical death, which leads us to conclude that Jonah was alive throughout this entire encounter to offer up this prayer. Now, the language that is used, as I mentioned, reveals that what he was in fact experiencing was that he was at death's door. In his mind, in the moment that he was thrown into that tempestuous sea, death in his mind was inevitable. It was the reasonable assumption. If you were on a cruise ship and in the middle of a storm and you were to fall overboard and they just totally forget you and keep going, you're thinking in your mind, there's no way I'm gonna live. I'm not gonna survive here a long term. At any point, I'm gonna tire out, I'm gonna sink to the bottom and drown to my death. Well, look at the opening of the prayer in verse 2. I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me, out of the belly of Sheol, I cried, and you heard my voice. If you remember, Jonah was content to resign himself to death by choosing to sleep through the storm. He didn't care that there was a storm, he didn't care that the ship was making all sorts of noises and was at the point of breaking apart, and who knows, there may have been already water seeping in underneath the ship while he was sleeping. He showed no concern for those aboard the ship. He knew what he was doing. He knew that God's judgment would come, and his heart were reigned as hard as stone. But it took being thrown into the sea for his heart to awaken to the reality of his situation and to become painfully aware of how grave his sin was before God. You see, the Lord knows what it takes to wake a man up, and he knew what it would take to rouse Jonah from his slumber of rebellion and to turn him back to himself. As the text reads, Jonah was in distress. The Hebrew Sarah is used here. Its root Hebrew word carries the idea of being tightened and hemmed in and pressed in a narrow place or under hostility or trouble. Jonah must have felt that distress, that deep pressure as he sank further down into the depths with the weight of the waters above him. Have you ever wondered why there are depths where man cannot swim without any assistance? We usually say, well, yeah, it's because of the water pressure, but we don't often understand the science behind it. It's because the farther down you go, the more water mass there is above you. And that mass increases in weight the deeper you descend. So the weight of the water is not something you can just lightly brush off. Jonah was sinking, and he obviously didn't know how to swim. We're talking about a prophet who worked and went about his business in the northern kingdom of Israel on dry land. He wasn't a sailor. What business would he need to know how to swim? And as he sank, he felt the growing pressure of the water. He felt a sense of physical tightening upon his body, a downward press, a feeling of being narrowed in. I mean, spiritually, much the same. His life was being squeezed out of him. He was at death's door. And there, in his distress, he cried out unto the Lord. Notice that Jonah uses the term here of Sheol. For he cried out from the belly of Sheol. Sheol is that place referred to in the Old Testament as the abode of the righteous dead. The Jews in the Old Testament didn't yet have a firm grasp of the intermediate state of the believer. But they knew that there was a place where all the righteous went. God's people would learn much more through the teachings of the New Testament, through the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, a progressive revelation. We know a lot more now than the Jews did in the Old Testament, but even then we're not given a great deal of detail concerning what happens in the intermediate state. If you were to go and use the language of the New Testament, he often uses that phrase that the righteous fall asleep. They enter into a con into a state of conscious rest. And this can be best understood in light of what the Apostle Paul writes in Colossians chapter 3, verses 1 to 4, in which we learn that the believer is hidden with Christ in God until his return. We know it's a conscious rest, we know there is a fellowship there with Christ. We know that it's in the presence of Christ, but even then we're not told a great deal of detail. You know, one might speak today of going to heaven, but that's not really faithful biblical language. That's actually a conceptual synthesis of Platonic thought and Christian theology, which many Christians have simply adopted conventionally without any careful consideration and scrutiny. A more scriptural, faithful expression would be when I fall asleep in Christ, or when I depart and go to be with Christ, as even the Apostle Paul phrased it in Philippians chapter 1, verse 23. To the point, however, Sheol, as it's used here by Jonah, means the place of death. The place of death. Jonah thought that his death in the depths of the sea was guaranteed. And in this state of desperation, when all hope was lost, when he accepted that his mortal life had now come to an end, it is here that the Lord hears his cry. And what do we learn from this passage here? Well, let me tell you, when the repentant cry out unto God, in his bountiful mercy the Lord always hears. The same mercy that he extended to these pagan sailors who were crying out for their lives, who at this point became believers as a result of their faith, is the same mercy extended to Jonah, the son of Amitai. I'm reminded of that popular quote from The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson's live action adaptation of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. There's a scene that's actually not found in the book, but it's in the movie, and it's actually befitting of the spirit of what Tolkien originally wrote, in which Gandalf, this wise and good sage and one of the many Christ figures in the fictional work, says unto the little hobbit, Frodo Baggins, he says, A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to. And that quote, that phrase actually echoes a very fundamental biblical truth. God is never late, nor is he early. God acts precisely when he means to. God is sovereign, and there is none like him. And God was not going to rescue Jonah until this very moment. And so maybe Jonah was thinking, all is lost, I'm dead, this is the end of me. And he cries out unto God, but God is not late to the party. God is coming exactly when he intends to. Look now to verse 3. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me. All your breakers and your waves passed over me. So as we Understand from the text, Jonah recognizes that God had cast him into the deep, into the very heart of the sea. Now, yes, if you really want to be technical about it, it's true that it was the pagan sailors who had done this. They threw him overboard, according to Jonah's instruction, but we need to see beyond the imminent reality and into the transcendent reality. That is to say, beyond the immediate earthly reality and more towards the spiritual, in order to see and understand that it was God who in his divine providence orchestrated everything. God, after all, does all that he pleases. God accomplishes all his holy will, not just part of it, all of it. There's nothing that can deter the will of God. And Jonah here rightly discerns that what he was experiencing was judgment, and that it was judgment that he rightly deserved. At first, aboard the ship, he didn't care, as I'd mentioned. But being aboard the ship and being in the depths of the sea are altogether two different scenarios. You may think, well, I'm angry with God right now, but when you're suddenly in a great state of desperation, you forget about your anger, and you realize I'm in the deep of it now. It's in his desperation, in his moment of hopelessness, that he then laments his rebellion. You understand the language that Jonah uses here. He is engulfed by the sea, and thus the word flood is used here in the ESV, in the English Standard Version. I'm not sure about the other English versions. It conveys the imagery here of the flood of Noah's day, the catastrophic deluge which drowned all of life on the earth except for those aboard the ark. It was judgment for man's sin then, and this was judgment for Jonah's sin now. Notice that this prayer takes place after Jonah was saved, when he was in the belly of the great sea creature. Yet his prayer allows us to retrace his experience. And we're experiencing these events with them according to what he's written. He writes, All your breakers and your waves passed over me. And he says, Your waves, your billows, your breakers, because the sea is the Lord's. Recognize here that he identifies, he's not saying the breakers and the waves in some impersonal sense. He's using it in a very personal sense. Your breakers, your waves. And what he's saying is, this is yours, the sea is yours, the waves are yours, the water is yours, the depths are yours, all that is, and everything that is living in it is the Lord's. I mean, he's the God of the heavens, all the things in the heavens are the Lord's, the planets are the Lord's, the cosmos, everything on dry land. He created all things, and thus all things are his. This is wonderful, divine, prophetic insight. I mean, you might be walking outside with a refreshing breeze past you, and you just might think, oh, that's a very excellent, well, a very refreshing breeze. It's so nice, it feels so great. But if we were to just adopt what Jonah says here, that breeze is the Lord's. Just as much as the rain is the Lord's and the fog is the Lord's, and the air we breathe is the Lord's. What you breathe, what you eat, what you experience in the good of this created world, all of creation is the Lord's. And this is one way in which Jonah is saying, You are God of all. And if we want to use New Testament language, he is Lord of all. How often we forget that. The apples we buy from the market are the Lord's. The grapes or the flowers we grow in our gardens are of the Lord's. The heat of the sun that bears down on us is the Lord's. The snow that falls from the winter sky is the Lord's. Even if you don't like it. Here Jonah is saying, He is God, and all things are his. And all things are at his beck and call. They're subject to his will. And there's no one and nothing who can compete with God. And God, in his righteousness, uses the waves and the breakers and the billows to visit judgment upon Jonah. And he does so because it is right to do so. God has every right to judge sin. And Jonah doesn't contest that. We don't read here in the text. There is no, oh, woe is me, why me? Poor me. And he doesn't say any of that. There's no self-pity here in this psalm. Instead, we see repentance, genuine repentance, a lament, a sorrow of the heart. And we notice this repentance in the expression written verse 4. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall again look upon your holy temple. The expression Jonah uses here of being driven away from the Lord's sight can mean three things. It can mean being removed from the land of the living. He was at death's door. It can mean being removed from fellowship with God and his covenant people. Well, that's going to happen when he dies. And it was already being experienced now. And it can mean being cast aside to where the wicked dwell, not the righteous. Not to say that the Lord had actually done this, but Jonah considered that it would be actually just for God, righteous of God, to do such a thing because Jonah had sinned gravely. This is repentance. This is like Paul saying, I am the worst of sinners. You can compare this to the language employed in Psalm 88. If you want to compare the hymnic or the poetic or psalmic structure, Psalm 88 and verse 4, we read, I am counted among those who go down to the pit. I'm a man who has no strength. It's referring to the grave. Or the following verse, verse 5, like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. And you can also compare that with verses 10 to 12 of Psalm 88. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Again, he's the Psalmist is speaking here of those who have been cut off from the Holy Temple, those who have been cut off from fellowship with God and his people. Verse 12, are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? Here in the depths of the sea, in utter desperation, clutching his throat, we can only imagine as he gasps for air, he looks upon God's holy temple, the temple in Jerusalem. And in truth, the temple in the Old Testament was the physical geographic token or symbol of the Lord's salvation. He looked with a desperate yearning. Obviously, he didn't visually look to the temple, he's drowning in the sea. But this language means that he remembered it. He called it to mind, he yearned for it. Jonah lamented his sin. He lamented being torn away from worshiping God and his temple. And he yearned once again for the presence of God, which he had before sought to flee. This is repentance. This is repentance. And repentance can only come from the heart of a true believer. One whose heart has been touched by the Spirit of God. We might look at this and wonder to ourselves whether we would be capable of forgiving such a servant. And admittedly, we might think, I don't want to forgive such a servant. He was so rebellious and he doesn't decide to have a change of heart until he's finally at death's door. I don't think that should count. Well, thank God that God is not like us. He is a God of mercy, and he has mercy upon his servant as he is merciful with us. There's still so much more of Jonah's prayer to unpack in verses 5 to 9, and so much more for us to gather. We're going to leave our study of the text here for now. But what I want to expound on as we consider this passage is this very matter of repentance and the mercy that follows. This whole chapter speaks of the mercy of God. And it's wonderful when you read Scripture, when it talks about the attributes of God, and when we look at God's righteousness and God's holiness and God's mercy and God's grace, it's really wonderful to consider that there really is not a single living being or creature or anything in all of creation that could ever compare with any of the attributes of God. God is all merciful. And that mercy is most evident in this chapter. And we'll look at it when we look at the second chapter, the second part of this chapter, because that is really what the focus is. But in order for there to be mercy, there needs to be repentance. God, after all, if you think about it, God does not show mercy to the proud. Never in any circumstance in Scripture do we see God showing explicitly in any form mercy to the proud, mercy to the unrepentant. He shows mercy to the repentant, to those who have a broken and contrite spirit, like Jonah here, like David when he wrote that Psalm after he had sinned with Bathsheba and Uriah. God shows mercy to the repentant. And we would do well to familiarize ourselves with what true repentance is. Because we need to make sure that it is a daily and common practice in our lives as believers. You know, it's it must become so common, genuine repentance, it's become a natural occurrence for us. Because for those of us who are in Christ, we're always well aware, or we ought to always be aware, spiritually speaking, that we have nothing really in the bank of righteousness. We're spiritually bankrupt in any every sense of the term, with not a penny of righteousness in the bank. And that's really saying something, assuming that we phased out pennies here in Canada. No, our righteousness is in Christ. All of it, a hundred percent of it. As a result, we know that we are sinners. Like Paul, we can say, I am the most wretched of sinners. And if you know your heart well, under the light of scripture, you will have no problem saying that of yourselves. I will have no problem of saying that of myself. We know that we still sin. We know what is still in the deep recesses of our heart, and this will continue to be so until we go to be with the Lord or He returns. Well, when He returns, then we'll be free from all sin forever in the new heaven, the new earth. But until then, we can't ignore the fact that we still sin. And because we sin, we ought to repent. And if there's anyone amongst us who says, Well, I don't think I've ever sinned today, or I don't think I ever sinned once yesterday, you're lying to yourself. As we touch on repentance, I know that we can sometimes think of those whom we know, whether close to us or not, who might at times be characterized as backsliding Christians. And, you know, and this is generally meant by those who uh have come to faith, and then later they slip, you know, it seems like they're being discipled, they're walking in the way of truth and the way of obedience, they're they're following what scripture teaches, they're connected to the church, and then suddenly they return to the life of sin. And we kind of ask what happened, what's going on? And perhaps, you know, there someone might be in your midst at some point in time who identifies as a backslider. Well, let me explain to you the difference between a true and a false believer. That helps us to understand this concept of a backsliding Christian. A true believer, a true Christian, is always going to repent. Even if it's late. It's part of their new nature in Christ. It's inevitable. They're going to repent. It would be ideal if they could repent immediately, but we have hard hearts and sometimes it takes some time for believers to repent. And the Lord continues to work to soften our hearts just as he works to sanctify us. But a false believer, a false believer, on the other hand, is never going to truly repent. In understanding this distinction, then, a backsliding Christian, that is to say, a self-professing Christian who walks in rebellion and sin, or who has sinned and refuses to uh uh repent for it, is either suffering a temporary identity crisis, because they're not behaving as they truly are as children of God, or they're not Christian at all. And if that happens to be any of us, maybe we examine ourselves carefully and humble ourselves before God. And that is actually the mark of a truly repentant heart. We've seen this since the beginning of this chapter. Humility. Humility. I have said that God does not show mercy to the proud, He does show mercy to the humble, to the repentant. There can be no repentance when there is pride. A false believer is filled with pride and will never be able to repent. A true believer has been humbled by the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and will repent. There can only be humility where there is repentance. The two go hand in hand. I have never seen, whether in scripture or in life, of a proud repentant heart. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't exist. It's a contradiction. Do we then have humble hearts? Are we sacrificing on a daily basis our pride? Are there areas in our lives where we can think, I think I'm thinking things way too highly of myself here? I think I'm starting to boast of myself over here. Let's humble ourselves before we commit a grave sin. May we humble ourselves before God? Are we continually repentant for our sin, knowing that God shows grace and mercy upon those who have broken and contrite spirits? I want you to understand, I'm not saying that you're supposed to go throughout the day like mourning and weeping because you're a terrible sinner. There's uh the pause this this uh this area of despair, of depression, of just complete, total sorrow. We're not talking about that. We're talking about a holy, repentant sorrow in which you are you have a broken heart, a broken spirit over your own sin, but you are filled with joy because the righteousness of Christ has been applied to you and the grace of God has been showered upon you. So you really have no reason to go around each and every day moping over your sin like your Martin Luther before he discovered justification by faith. That is what it means to have a broken and contrite spirit. There is no such thing as an unrepentant Christian. Either sin offends us or it does not at all. And if it doesn't, beware the false gospel that you've bought into that's led to your insensitivity to sin and fear greatly the judgment of God. Run to Jesus, die to your sin, crucify it, put it to death, and be hidden with Christ in God, who gives you life now, and whose death on the cross has ensured that even when you die, you will not be dead, but asleep in Christ, in conscious rest in the presence of the Son of God. For Christ is your life. Yes, there's some mystery to that, but that's what makes it all the more glorious. And that's what makes the gospel all the more glorious. In closing, I have this to say. In Jonah chapter 1, we do well to say, don't be a Jonah. Because Jonah was being a rebel. He was being, well, you can come up with all sorts of other terms. But here in Jonah 2, we actually ought to be like Jonah. And while there are at times and there will be times as we work through this book that we feel repugnance concerning Jonah's character, we should bear in mind the words of Eugene H. Peterson, who wrote, We find in Jonah a companion in our ineptness. Uh-oh, that means that he's not altogether unique. He here is someone on our level. Indeed, when you look upon Jonah and you're quite repugnant about it, remember there's a little bit of Jonah in all of us. May we be humble, repent, and find all that we need in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, our God. Let us pray. Lord, Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word. We thank you for we learned the great depths and riches of your truths and your glory and your power and your majesty. And here in this verse, Lord, we see great your great sovereignty, your great mercy bestowed upon a sinner. And Lord, no matter what we might think of Jonah and how we might react to him, we see ourselves in him, a sinner in need of grace. At times proud, at times thinking that we can escape your will and do as we please and do what we want, thinking that we can just turn a blind eye and just keep going on. But Lord, there is no running from you, and there is no running from your will. There is no running from your law. We've broken your law, Lord. We've sinned before you, and there are many ways in which we continue to sin, at times through negligence, at times without thought. But Lord, we know that you are a God of mercy. And that as we humble our hearts and repent before you, your grace is always available to us. And as your word says, your mercies are new every morning. Lord, may we experience your mercy. May we experience your grace day by day. May we walk, Lord, always conscious of what we do and what we say. And every time we sin, may we be quick to repent and to make things right. For you, a God of righteousness and holiness, and you have set us apart for your purposes. Lord, here you save Jonah so he may proclaim a word that will lead to salvation. Lord, you have saved us, and you have commanded us to go out and proclaim a word that leads to salvation. The gospel of your Son Jesus Christ. Father, we pray for your blessing. We pray for your spirit. In your name, we pray, Lord Jesus Christ.

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