SPEAKER_00: This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
SPEAKER_01: In a little while, we are going to join together to partake in what Christians call the Lord's Table, often referred to as communion.
SPEAKER_01: That song is a wonderful entry point to begin orienting our hearts and minds to that moment.
SPEAKER_01: Is Jesus going to be your judge or your savior?
SPEAKER_01: We find both of those elements combined in the Old Testament book of Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: If you have your Bible, I encourage you to open it to that point.
SPEAKER_01: If you don't have a Bible, you can use your device or the pew Bible in front of you.
SPEAKER_01: That's on page 774 in the seat back in front of you.
SPEAKER_01: Starting a five-week or so walk through this book that probably in my mind should be more like 10 or 12 weeks.
SPEAKER_01: There is so much richness in the book of Jonah, both in how it is constructed and in its theology.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah has a lot of what we call narrative theology.
SPEAKER_01: It's a story, right?
SPEAKER_01: Some people don't believe that it's true.
SPEAKER_01: That it's just a story made up to represent certain characteristics.
SPEAKER_01: But the Lord Jesus said it was true.
SPEAKER_01: He based his own ministry and life on the account of Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: So it is real.
SPEAKER_01: Its accounts are real, but it's told in a story format that is part story and part art.
SPEAKER_01: I remember a high school English class that I took where we had to read Tale of Two Cities.
SPEAKER_01: You've all heard the beginning of it if you hadn't read the story, right?
SPEAKER_01: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, all at the same time.
SPEAKER_01: That was the first time in my life that I ever really began to understand that authors do things with words.
SPEAKER_01: They take words and they purposely put them together using certain words, certain phrases, certain constructions to be able to communicate their story.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah is written like that.
SPEAKER_01: So he tells us things by how he writes.
SPEAKER_01: But along with that, there is rich detail about God, about Jonah, and even about you and me.
SPEAKER_01: Let's start with perhaps an example that fits all of us.
SPEAKER_01: If you haven't had this situation as an adult, you have had it as a child.
SPEAKER_01: So kids, you will know what I'm talking about because we've all lived this.
SPEAKER_01: So as adults, maybe you've sensed through a sermon or through your own Bible reading, through your own devotional life, something that God is calling you to.
SPEAKER_01: Whether that's maybe a change of life, maybe God is calling you to the mission field or to vocational ministry or to serve in the local church.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's just a call to obedience.
SPEAKER_01: That you've understood something for the first time in Scripture and you sense that God is calling you to obey.
SPEAKER_01: But then you don't.
SPEAKER_01: You find that the more you think about it, obedience is uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_01: And you begin to turn away from obedience towards your own comfort.
SPEAKER_01: So, kids, you know what I'm talking about, right?
SPEAKER_01: Mom and dad will tell you that they want you to do something, and then mom and dad get distracted and they go do something else, and you decide, you know what, I don't want to do what mom and dad want me to do.
SPEAKER_01: I'm just gonna go play.
SPEAKER_01: That's what the book of Jona is like.
SPEAKER_01: Where God says something, and a normal, everyday human being says, Yeah, I'm not gonna do that.
SPEAKER_01: So Jonah is very relatable from the very beginning.
SPEAKER_01: The message that God gives to us is clear enough.
SPEAKER_01: Whatever the message might be, it could be as simple as obeying your parents.
SPEAKER_01: The message is clear, but we simply decide to ignore it.
SPEAKER_01: But somewhere in the back of our minds, there's something that we really can't ignore that just keeps poking at us, poking at our conscience, reminding us of what God has said to be true.
SPEAKER_01: That's what we find at the very beginning of this unusual, fascinating, and deeply convicting book.
SPEAKER_01: Its plot is very simple.
SPEAKER_01: God speaks, a prophet runs, and through that the narrator sets up one of the most dramatic stories in all of Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: A dramatic story that becomes a foundational component of the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: It's a story that will have us watching a God who hurls hurricanes from heaven, and who will also take us deep below the surface of the sea to the gates of death, who will walk us through the streets of the most evil city of the ancient world, and finally onto a hillside outside of that city where the prophet sits stewing in the Middle Eastern sun because he's angry that God is who he said he was.
SPEAKER_01: The account begins with three deceptively simple verses.
SPEAKER_01: If you have your Bible, I want you to turn with me there.
SPEAKER_01: And we're going to read just the first three verses this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Three verses.
SPEAKER_01: Beginning in verse one, it says, Now the word of the Lord, that word Lord is in all capital letters, so it refers to the covenant God of Israel, Yahweh or Jehovah.
SPEAKER_01: Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, Get up, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh.
SPEAKER_01: He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish away from the presence of Yahweh.
SPEAKER_01: Three verses, one command, one refusal.
SPEAKER_01: And the rest of the book is about God dealing with a man who decided that he could ignore the unignorable.
SPEAKER_01: Now, before we look at the text, let me tell you what this book is not about.
SPEAKER_01: At least, not primarily.
SPEAKER_01: It is not primarily about a big fish.
SPEAKER_01: The fish appears in one verse and disappears in another.
SPEAKER_01: It's not primarily about Jonah, though he is certainly the most central human figure in the book.
SPEAKER_01: The book of Jonah is about God.
SPEAKER_01: It's about who God is, it's about what God does, and how he cannot be confined by the narrow hearts and imaginations of his people.
SPEAKER_01: Now it's been said throughout history that what comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you.
SPEAKER_01: This short Old Testament book pushes on that point.
SPEAKER_01: It presses on your mind about what you think, it presses on your heart about what you believe, and it combines all of that into a theology that reveals what you think about God.
SPEAKER_01: And your thoughts about God are either shaped by what God has revealed about Himself, or your thoughts are exposed as something that you have invented for your own comfort.
SPEAKER_01: As we begin this study, I want to try to draw you into the narrative the way the original hearers likely would have heard it, as they would have experienced it.
SPEAKER_01: Not as a children's story with flannel graph about a man and a fish, but as a pointed, uncomfortable, beautifully crafted account of God's sovereign grace colliding with human resistance.
SPEAKER_01: And in the end, we're going to see that human resistance is futile when it collides with God's sovereign grace.
SPEAKER_01: How do we see that?
SPEAKER_01: Well, in verse 1, it begins by showing us that Yahweh is a sovereign God who does not ask permission.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 1 opens with what appears, at least in English, to be a very simple statement.
SPEAKER_01: Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amitai.
SPEAKER_01: That sounds simple, but it's very dense in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_01: Dense in a rich way.
SPEAKER_01: The word Jonah means dove.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah is this soft, gentle, flighty dove.
SPEAKER_01: The dove, even before our modern times, has often been associated with the concept of peace.
SPEAKER_01: So Jonah is a symbol of peace, of gentleness, of passivity almost.
SPEAKER_01: And he's the son of Amitai.
SPEAKER_01: Amati is a name that derives from the Hebrew word for truth.
SPEAKER_01: So he is the dove, the son of truth.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps more significant than that, though, is that the verb translated as Caim in our English Standard Version, now the word of the Lord, Cain, is not the kind of word that you would expect from a gentle communication between one person and another.
SPEAKER_01: It's not something that you would use for a gentle or passive knock at the door.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, I've got something to say to you.
SPEAKER_01: Come open the door.
SPEAKER_01: Or that God sends something kind of drifting through somebody's mind that makes them aware of what he's doing.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what's going on here.
SPEAKER_01: The word literally means to happen.
SPEAKER_01: To happen.
SPEAKER_01: The word of the Lord didn't come to Jonah, it happened to Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: It's like an event that he can't escape.
SPEAKER_01: It broke in on him.
SPEAKER_01: It arrived with the weight of a divine initiative that can't be negotiated, can't be softened, and can't be delayed.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, God's word doesn't come to us as a suggestion.
SPEAKER_01: It comes as an event that we must reckon with.
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh, the Lord, the covenant God of Israel, the one who revealed his personal name to Moses at the burning bush, is the one who initiates what happens with Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah does nothing to receive this word.
SPEAKER_01: He isn't presented as worshiping at the temple, although that may be where he is.
SPEAKER_01: God simply acts.
SPEAKER_01: And God's action becomes the defining reality of Jonah's life from that moment forward.
SPEAKER_01: And that's how it often is with God, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't wait for our readiness.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't time his commands around our convenience.
SPEAKER_01: The word of God happens to people, it lands on them with full force, and when it lands, it changes everything.
SPEAKER_01: Now Jonah was already a prophet.
SPEAKER_01: This didn't make him a prophet.
SPEAKER_01: We find in 2 Kings chapter 14 that Jonah was a prophet to the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Jeroboam II.
SPEAKER_01: And that passage tells us that he had already prophesied, successfully, we might say, about the expansion of Israel's northern border.
SPEAKER_01: During this time period, the northern nation of Israel restored all of the land that Solomon ruled over to the north.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah prophesied that that would happen.
SPEAKER_01: So it's a time of relative prosperity in the land of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah, this prophet, has a substantial track record with God and the people.
SPEAKER_01: He knew what it was like to receive the word of the Lord and to speak it.
SPEAKER_01: He's a son of truth.
SPEAKER_01: He is a son of God's truth.
SPEAKER_01: But as I think we know too well, knowing what God says and obeying what God says are often two different things, aren't they?
SPEAKER_01: They were for Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: That's verse one.
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh is a sovereign God who doesn't ask permission when he acts.
SPEAKER_01: He just acts according to his timetable, his time frame, his purpose, and his intention.
SPEAKER_01: Verse two reminds us that Yahweh is a God whose commands may offend our humanity.
SPEAKER_01: So the word that happened to Jonah is this arise, get up and go.
SPEAKER_01: Go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, because their evil has come up against me or before me, literally in my face.
SPEAKER_01: So two commands are given: get up and go.
SPEAKER_01: Every Jewish person who read those commands in the Old Testament times would hear them as the divine commands to prophets.
SPEAKER_01: Prophets, when they hear from God, are told, get up and go.
SPEAKER_01: Speak God's word.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah has a destination, Nineveh.
SPEAKER_01: He's got a task, call out against it.
SPEAKER_01: He's got a reason because their evil has ascended, has gone up before God.
SPEAKER_01: Now, Nineveh, Nineveh is not your typical city.
SPEAKER_01: It might be comparable in our times to combining something like Las Vegas with New York City or Las Vegas with Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_01: It's the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and it's massive.
SPEAKER_01: Historians and scholars estimate that it may have been the largest city on earth at the time.
SPEAKER_01: But the Assyrians were, by ancient standards, a uniquely brutal kind of people.
SPEAKER_01: So imagine the most heinous brutality that you might hear about in the news today.
SPEAKER_01: And take that up a notch or two, and that gives you the Assyrians.
SPEAKER_01: They did not just conquer nations, they destroyed them systematically, brutally, and publicly.
SPEAKER_01: And they practiced what I think can only be described as a unique kind of cruelty.
SPEAKER_01: Syrians preserved written and visual records of their military campaigns.
SPEAKER_01: And what those records describe are almost too graphic to relay in public on a Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_01: Their own records display graphic and horrendous torture.
SPEAKER_01: Populations deported, cities reduced to rubble, and the whole spectacle documented on stone for people to look at forever.
SPEAKER_01: If you came to Nineveh and you saw the walls around Nineveh, you saw visually, this is the kind of people who live inside this city.
SPEAKER_01: That was the city to which Jonah was sent.
SPEAKER_01: The prophet Nahum describes the city of Nineveh as a city of blood, famous for its violence, for its atrocities, even for its slave trade.
SPEAKER_01: The Assyrians were a growing terror to Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Israel is expanding its territory to the north, while the Assyrians, even further north and to the east, are expanding their territory to the south.
SPEAKER_01: There's going to be a conflict.
SPEAKER_01: They're hearing about the atrocities of the Assyrians.
SPEAKER_01: The city is so intensely evil that its sin has ascended before God's face.
SPEAKER_01: And that phrase, that their evil has come up before me, is worth taking a moment to think about.
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever sat around a campfire when the wind comes in and swirls around and it sends the smoke directly into your face?
SPEAKER_01: Feel that.
SPEAKER_01: Your eyes sting, your nose burns.
SPEAKER_01: What do you instinctively do?
SPEAKER_01: You close your eyes and you wince and you kind of turn away, right?
SPEAKER_01: Now exchange the smoke of the campfire for sin.
SPEAKER_01: And exchange your eyes and your nose for the holiness of a holy, holy, holy God.
SPEAKER_01: That's the image.
SPEAKER_01: Nineveh's wickedness had not merely grown or expanded, it had risen up like smoke until it reached the face of the holy God and offended his holiness.
SPEAKER_01: Sin in the presence of an eternally holy God is not a minor thing to be overlooked.
SPEAKER_01: It's an ascending offense.
SPEAKER_01: And Nineveh's sin had reached the very throne of God in heaven.
SPEAKER_01: The natural reaction of human beings is God, do something about it.
SPEAKER_01: Do something.
SPEAKER_01: Don't just sit there, do something.
SPEAKER_01: Yet God does not do what we might anticipate.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't wipe out the city, he doesn't destroy it like Sodom and Gomorrah.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, he sends a messenger, a prophet.
SPEAKER_01: And before judgment falls, there's a call to repentance.
SPEAKER_01: God's holiness is real.
SPEAKER_01: His wrath against sin is genuine.
SPEAKER_01: But never forget that God's mercy is also very real.
SPEAKER_01: The command to go to Nineveh is not merely an act of divine judgment, it's an act of divine patience.
SPEAKER_01: The New Testament calls this out for the church, saying that God is patient with all of us, desiring everyone to come to repentance.
SPEAKER_01: And that is what Jonah could not stomach.
SPEAKER_01: It made him sick to think that God might grant repentance to those people.
SPEAKER_01: So Israel, Abraham's descendants was not chosen for their exclusivity.
SPEAKER_01: They were chosen to be a witness, a light to the nations.
SPEAKER_01: Israel was supposed to be the means through which the knowledge of Yahweh reached the world.
SPEAKER_01: But they kind of developed a theology of privilege without mission.
SPEAKER_01: They sometimes acted like the Gentiles, everybody else was beyond the Reach of God's mercy.
SPEAKER_01: And the worse you were, the more beyond the reach of God's mercy you were.
SPEAKER_01: So the Assyrians would be the worst of the worst of the worst.
SPEAKER_01: And the idea that God, in his offended holiness, would send his prophet to those people with a message that might very well turn them from their destructive ways and grant them the mercy of God was offensive to this prophet.
SPEAKER_01: And friends, if we're honest with ourselves, the application of that is not comfortable.
SPEAKER_01: God's grace has always been wider than we want it to be.
SPEAKER_01: We're generally happy, I hope.
SPEAKER_01: We are generally happy for God to show mercy to people like us.
SPEAKER_01: That's great.
SPEAKER_01: If God is merciful and compassionate and gracious to people like me, that's wonderful.
SPEAKER_01: But what about the people who represent in your mind the moral sewer of our age?
SPEAKER_01: What about the city, the subculture, the group of people whose values strike you as the opposite of everything that God stands for?
SPEAKER_01: What about those people?
SPEAKER_01: We're not talking so much about the murderer on death row that God saves, although that fits.
SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the moral filth that doesn't sit in prison but runs rampant in our society unchecked.
SPEAKER_01: That is an offense to a holy God, an offense to everything that God stands for, and is offensive to you.
SPEAKER_01: What if God sent you to them?
SPEAKER_01: God sent a prophet there.
SPEAKER_01: God's mercy reached there.
SPEAKER_01: So Jonah's problem and our problem is that we sometimes wish that God would just judge somebody instead of being patiently merciful.
SPEAKER_01: That hurts.
SPEAKER_01: That I can sometimes wish that God would just judge instead of being patiently merciful.
SPEAKER_01: That hurts.
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh is a sovereign God who does not ask permission.
SPEAKER_01: And Yahweh is a God whose comments and commands sometimes offend our humanity.
SPEAKER_01: And in that situation, who's right and who's wrong?
SPEAKER_01: Is it our humanity that stands in the right?
SPEAKER_01: Or is it God who stands in the right?
SPEAKER_01: Let's look now at verse three.
SPEAKER_01: At the prophet who runs from an omnipresent God.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from literally the face of Yahweh.
SPEAKER_01: So get that picture, get that image.
SPEAKER_01: What have we already seen is before the face of Yahweh?
SPEAKER_01: Sin, ugliness, filth, rampant terror.
SPEAKER_01: Everything that is opposed to God has arisen to God's face.
SPEAKER_01: And there is Jonah, and God wants Jonah to go to the filth, and Jonah runs from that face of God away.
SPEAKER_01: He goes down to Joppa, he finds a ship going to Tarshish, he pays the fare, he goes down into the boat to go with them to Tarshish away from the face of Yahweh.
SPEAKER_01: Everything changes here on two of the saddest words in all of Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: The two most glorious words in all of Scripture are but God.
SPEAKER_01: But the saddest words are when a human name fills that slot for God.
SPEAKER_01: It's not but God, it's but Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah got up to flee from the presence of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: So God said, get up and go.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 2, arise, go.
SPEAKER_01: So Jonah arose and goes in the opposite direction.
SPEAKER_01: God's given a command, and he just goes completely berserk, off to the other side.
SPEAKER_01: The two commands that open verse 2, get up and go, arise and go, are direct marching orders.
SPEAKER_01: Every Jewish reader would have known that those two prophetic commands are always obeyed.
SPEAKER_01: Prophets get up and go when God orders.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, Jonah takes God's command and reverses it.
SPEAKER_01: He gets up, yes, but he flees.
SPEAKER_01: He goes, yes, to Tarshish.
SPEAKER_01: God said, go northeast.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah went west.
SPEAKER_01: He went to Tarshish, a location in the far western Mediterranean, a place that was in the ancient mind at the edge of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: God said, go toward the problem.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah tried to get the entire width of the known world between himself and where God wanted him to be.
SPEAKER_01: And now notice what our brilliant narrator does.
SPEAKER_01: He begins a pattern that runs through the entire first chapter and is one of the most artful pieces of narrative theology in this book.
SPEAKER_01: The narrator traces Jonah's path from the hilly highlands of Israel down to sea level and even more.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah went down to Joppa.
SPEAKER_01: He went down into the ship.
SPEAKER_01: In the very next verse, he will go down into the inner part of the ship to sleep.
SPEAKER_01: And later in the storm, he will go down to the bottom of the sea.
SPEAKER_01: And even in his prayer from inside the fish, he describes going down to the roots of the mountains.
SPEAKER_01: The narrator makes a theological point about Jonah's descent.
SPEAKER_01: God told Jonah to do what?
SPEAKER_01: Get up and go.
SPEAKER_01: He got up and then went down.
SPEAKER_01: Down.
SPEAKER_01: God's word required an upward kind of obedience.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah fled down, down, down, down.
SPEAKER_01: Every step away from God's calling is a step downward.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah will keep going down until he can go no further.
SPEAKER_01: And it's only there at the darkness at the bottom of the sea that he finally begins to look up.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah is trying to run away from an omnipresent God.
SPEAKER_01: What does that big theological word mean?
SPEAKER_01: God is present everywhere.
SPEAKER_01: Now Jonah's a prophet already.
SPEAKER_01: As a prophet, Jonah has been involved in Israel's worship.
SPEAKER_01: He likely knows God's word.
SPEAKER_01: He likely knows Israel's hymn book.
SPEAKER_01: He knew his Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: And he had surely sung Psalm 139 that says, Where can I go from your presence?
SPEAKER_01: Where can I go from your spirit?
SPEAKER_01: If I go up to the heavens, you're there.
SPEAKER_01: If I make my bed in Sheol, in death, you're there.
SPEAKER_01: What does Jonah think he's doing?
SPEAKER_01: He's gone nuts.
SPEAKER_01: He is fleeing from the face of Yahweh who cannot be escaped.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah knew that we cannot run, outrun God, or find a place where God is not.
SPEAKER_01: So what is Jonah doing?
SPEAKER_01: I think Jonah's resigning.
SPEAKER_01: The phrase from the presence of Yahweh is used in the Old Testament often for the sphere of divine service in the tabernacle, in the temple, and in the sphere of prophetic ministry.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah's not fleeing from God's location, from where God is.
SPEAKER_01: He's abandoning God's commission.
SPEAKER_01: He's handing in his prophetic credentials, as it were, and walking away from this role, from this calling, and headed to a place where no one would know who he is, no one would know his background, nobody would know his history, nobody would know he was a prophet, no one would expect anything from him.
SPEAKER_01: He didn't want to hear from God anymore.
SPEAKER_01: And he even paid for the ticket himself.
SPEAKER_01: He paid the fare.
SPEAKER_01: He was going far away, so the cost couldn't be cheap.
SPEAKER_01: But we need to understand that this is not a moment of confusion.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah bought in.
SPEAKER_01: He was committed.
SPEAKER_01: He was deliberate.
SPEAKER_01: But here's what's convicting about that.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah didn't run because he doubted God's existence.
SPEAKER_01: He didn't run because he doubted God's authority to command.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah didn't run because he questioned the reality of God's service for him.
SPEAKER_01: He didn't run because he lost his faith.
SPEAKER_01: His problem was not unbelief.
SPEAKER_01: He ran because his theology was too small for the God he served.
SPEAKER_01: And because what God was asking of him collided with what Jonah wanted for himself and his people.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah's problem was not unbelief.
SPEAKER_01: His problem was a small, boxed-in, self-serving cultural version of God.
SPEAKER_01: A God that he quietly remade into something manageable and comfortable and thought that he could take care of.
SPEAKER_01: And when the real God broke through that box with a word that shattered every image Jonah had, he chose his own remade version of God and fled.
SPEAKER_01: Now we don't generally run to Tarshish.
SPEAKER_01: When we hear God calling us to obedience, to action, to trust, to faith, we generally don't run to Tarshish.
SPEAKER_01: But there is a way of filling our lives with so many things that we become so full of other things that the word of God never quite has room to settle in in a way that leads to obedience.
SPEAKER_01: The things we fill our lives with end up pushing out God's word.
SPEAKER_01: There's a way of keeping ourselves so occupied, so distracted, so committed to other pursuits that we effectively end up ignoring what God says, even though what he says is unignorable.
SPEAKER_01: The form changes, but the direction is always the same.
SPEAKER_01: When we ignore God, we go down and away and further from the life God intends, and we go down, down, down and down.
SPEAKER_01: That's where this story begins.
SPEAKER_01: But we are reading this story from a New Testament perspective.
SPEAKER_01: We're looking back at history, being able to see the full scope.
SPEAKER_01: And the great mercy of this story is the mercy that will fuel every element of the rest of this book.
SPEAKER_01: And it's the mercy that you already know, and that is expressed very clearly in Psalm 23, verse 6.
SPEAKER_01: That verse often is translated, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
SPEAKER_01: But the Hebrew verb is much stronger than that.
SPEAKER_01: It means to pursue, to chase down.
SPEAKER_01: It's the image of a hunter chasing after prey.
SPEAKER_01: God's goodness and mercy do not merely trail behind us.
SPEAKER_01: God isn't like a hunter tracking prey very slowly and carefully and cautiously because he knows where we are.
SPEAKER_01: He knows how far down we've gone.
SPEAKER_01: He knows how far we've sailed.
SPEAKER_01: He knows exactly what to do and where to go and how quickly, and he chases, he pursues.
SPEAKER_01: Goodness and mercy chase God's sheep down.
SPEAKER_01: They do not give up.
SPEAKER_01: And the man who thought that he could go down far enough to escape God will discover over the next three chapters that God's mercy is faster than his flight.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah will learn that human resistance to God's sovereign grace is futile.
SPEAKER_01: Three verses.
SPEAKER_01: One God, one commission, one refusal.
SPEAKER_01: And already the book is convicting.
SPEAKER_01: It's convicting because it challenges our view of God.
SPEAKER_01: It forces us to ask whether the God we believe in is the God who actually is, or the God that we're trying to confine, to make smaller and more manageable so that we can live in our own comfort.
SPEAKER_01: It's convicting because it challenges our response to God's word.
SPEAKER_01: It forces us to ask whether we treat Scripture as an event that happens to us, that lays claim on our lives, or merely as background noise that we can turn down to a more comfortable volume.
SPEAKER_01: And it challenges our willingness to be God's vessels for purposes that stretch beyond what we can imagine, and that challenge our preferences, our comfort levels, our natural sympathies towards certain people or people groups.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, Jonah wasn't running in ignorance.
SPEAKER_01: He was willfully avoiding what he already knew.
SPEAKER_01: God's word happened to him.
SPEAKER_01: He understood a prophet's commission.
SPEAKER_01: He knew that prophets get up and go.
SPEAKER_01: You may be in a version of that moment right now.
SPEAKER_01: The word has come to you through scripture, through prayer, through the patient work of God's Spirit in your conscience.
SPEAKER_01: And you know what God says.
SPEAKER_01: You've heard it.
SPEAKER_01: You hear it echoing.
SPEAKER_01: The question is whether you will arise and go or whether you will buy a ticket to get you away from God's voice.
SPEAKER_01: But my friend, know that you cannot outrun God's goodness and mercy.
SPEAKER_01: He will chase you down.
SPEAKER_01: The good news of this book is that God does not abandon his people when they run.
SPEAKER_01: He pursues.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, that pursuit might come with discipline, but it will also come with restoration.
SPEAKER_01: But that process is rarely painless.
SPEAKER_01: And Jonah's story is an invitation really to spare yourself that going down, down, down by simply turning right now in the direction that God has called you.
SPEAKER_01: And first and foremost, that direction is to hear the word of God and to respond in obedience.
SPEAKER_01: May we be people who do that.
SPEAKER_01: Would you pray with me?
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Open our hearts to receive your word.
SPEAKER_01: To not shut it off and to put it in a file cabinet in the back of our minds and lock the door so that it doesn't come out.
SPEAKER_01: But to be convicted by it.
SPEAKER_01: May your spirit do a work of conviction in us to make us more into the image of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Cause us to hear your word and to know that you are a merciful God who chases us down to save us.
SPEAKER_01: In reality, to rescue us from ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Cause us to turn to you even now.
SPEAKER_01: As our judge, who judges our sin, but who does it in a saving way by judging our sin in Jesus Christ, who becomes the Lord of our salvation.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus, direct our hearts now and our minds to you, from Jonah to you.
SPEAKER_01: For your praise and your glory.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.
SPEAKER_00: Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.