Jonah and the Sovereignty of God (Part 2)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the

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Apostle Paul said, "...but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you."

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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. Mike Abendroth here at the helm,

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Israel nine days, then an extension to Jordan. That's February 17th next year. You can still sign up.

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What else here is on my desk? I'll be down in the Pittsburgh area doing a conference.

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Jimmy Carraway, Pillar of Truth Conference. You can probably go to our website to find that, type in Jimmy Carraway, Mike Abendroth, and Mike Abendroth, can't say my own last name,

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David Doran, and that will be fun to do. Also, sitting in my office today, my study, the ladies, and I use it too, there's a

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Kehrig study here for the ladies' study and discipleship. So I have some

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Pete's Coffee and I think I have some Starbucks Sumatra and some other things for the Kehrig. And I got an email this week that said there's all kinds of hidden dangers in Kehrig.

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I think it's John up in Idaho that sent it to me. And I don't prefer it.

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I'd rather have a pour over or I'd rather have French press, but it's better than nothing.

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And it's easy. But here's the problem. Today, when I went over there, I saw by my

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Kehrig machine, a University of Notre Dame mug.

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Now somebody's messing with my mind. Now when I was nine years old, before I knew better,

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I rooted for Notre Dame, the Fighting Irish because on Sundays, I thought they were a pro team.

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Well, I thought they were a pro team every day, but on Sundays, they played a rerun, the best of, condensed into an hour or a half hour on the station in Nebraska on channel three or something.

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Channel three was NBC. And so I thought they were a pro team and I liked them because they were kind of green and yellow.

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I thought it was the Packers. I thought it was a Green Bay Packers playing. But then I didn't really like Notre Dame as I got older and what they did with conferences and all that kind of stuff.

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When I was driving through, what's the name of the city that they are located in South Bend, North Bend.

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We went and I saw a touchdown Jesus and all that. But I root against Notre Dame now because why, what would be the sane reason to root against Notre Dame, the rational reason, the theological reason, oh, you're getting closer because Notre, Nosotros, it means our, right?

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Nos, trying to think of other words, other languages for, for our, a little language will get you a long way until you're standing in the subway, the

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Metro in Paris. Then what Dame, Notre Dame, damsel, our lady, you think

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I could root for a team called Our Lady? I mean, really, I guess if you've been to Notre Dame, your dad went some, one of your favorite players went there or something, or you like Mark Knoll or George Marsden or somebody else employed by Notre Dame.

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I don't know, but just for me, I cannot, I will not,

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I must not root for Notre Dame. Today in All Compromise Radio, we're talking about God's favorite attribute.

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That is his sovereignty. And I've been thinking about it quite a lot lately.

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I probably have overtaught the sovereignty of God in the last 20 years. Not, you know how kids do that?

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They'll say a bunch of things and then wait, pregnant pause, not.

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So I haven't talked about it lately because I was on this mysticism thing, right? The objective certainty of God's word,

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God's word is inerrant. So trust that, don't trust your own errant feelings and thoughts.

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Your heart will deceive you. And since this mysticism is so ripe in evangelicalism and it's low hanging fruit,

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I've been kind of on that. I love to talk about Jesus. And I think if you look at the shows and how many times

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I refer to who Jesus is and what he's done, of course, he's my favorite topic.

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I thought, you know, it's a good time to go through this again, and here's how it all came up. I'm preaching on Sunday mornings now at bbcchurch .org.

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I'm preaching through, just finished Ruth, and now I'm in Jonah, the book of Jonah.

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When people say that around here, I don't even bat an eye, but I say to myself, I meet bat.

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I saw some cool bats last night flying around, that was cool. And so when you turn to Jonah, the book of Jonah, where would that be, by the way, in your

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Bible? Hosea, Joel, Amos, if you can find Obadiah, you can find

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Jonah. It's right after Obadiah, Obadiah, those, I think 21 verses, how many verses?

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I think Hosea has, how many chapters, 14. I'm going to look, but I didn't know Hosea has 14,

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Joel has three, although most people only go to Joel two,

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Amos, I'm guessing nine. Let's see how many, nine, Obadiah, 21 verses, and then we come to the book of Jonah.

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And it's a crazy book in the sense that it's odd, it's unique, it is idiosyncratic, because we don't have this minor prophet prophesying a lot like we have in the other minor prophets.

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Let's just think of Amos, you know, there's more about his prophecies than about him. But we come to the book of Jonah and it's about Jonah.

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Oh, there's some things that he says, but we have this Northern prophet. Anything good come out of Galilee?

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No prophets ever come out of Galilee. Oh really? Jonah. And so Jonah has these themes that just are marvelous.

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If I want to talk in the street language, it rocks. And you read

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Jonah, if I want to read a story to my kids that's got drama, and then I just,

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I don't embellish it with changing one word, but the way I deliver it with pauses, pregnant pauses, passionate pauses, coffee pausing, and I don't know how to say it really in German, but they have a coffee pause, a coffee break.

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And so I don't know a lot of Deutsch, but when they say that from the pulpit and announce there's a coffee pause,

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I do know that. And when they say chaos, I know that. And when they say, what else?

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You know, for us, Fussball is that game. Well, Fussball means football. And so what do they call

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Fussball football? Answer kicker. So we use the

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German name and they use the English name, kicker. And then it's not,

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I mean, that's how they say it. It's not, you know, kicker and then it's however it is in Deutsch.

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One of my favorite things to do is to listen to S. Lewis Johnson speak German because, you know, the guy was smarter than most and spent time overseas, but he had the

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Southern accent and then he was saying things in German with the Southern accent. From Birmingham, Jonah, the theme that I'm in right now is found verses four to 16, and that is the sovereignty of God.

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Everywhere you look in this chapter, you see God rules over everything. Remember how

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Jonah was told to go to Nineveh? The word of God comes to Jonah, meaning dove, son of Amittai, meaning truth, son of truth, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it for their evil has come up before me.

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But Jonah, and now here in verse three of chapter one, tons of verbs, and they're just cascadingly given.

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So you feel the downward slide with alacrity, with rapidity, is that a word?

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Rapidness. I know alacrity is a word. I think I learned the word alacrity.

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I think it was, who's the sportscaster for a long time?

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George Michael. I know that's a singer, just busting your chops. Al Michaels.

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I think he would say that someone did that with alacrity. So I thought, you know, note to self, dictionary word of the day, alacrity.

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But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa, found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid the fare and went on board to go with them to Tarshish away from the presence of the

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Lord. And he knew that God was omnipresent. He says something to the effect of God's sovereign control in verse nine.

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He knew Psalm 139 and positive. So how can you run from the presence of the Lord? Because the presence of the Lord is a technical term for the duty discharge from the sovereign to the minister for a call, a commission.

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He hears the orders, come before the king, get your orders, and then go do them. He comes before the king, he gets the orders and he says, no,

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I quit. I resign. I'm out of ministry. It's Monday morning and pastors quit on Monday morning.

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By the way, do you remember that this is October and this is pastor appeasement month, appreciation month.

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And by the way, I think you should appreciate your pastor. And if you've got a pastor,

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I want you to try to express your thanks to him. I don't want any emails. I don't want any cards.

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I don't want any Pete's coffee. That's a lie. But seriously, I'm not asking for me. I get plenty of people who say, thank you.

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And in all sincerity, I feel appreciated. Of course, not by everyone, not all the time, but in general, in my life, honestly, before the

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Lord, I know I've gotten so much more than I could ever deserve more than I could possibly ask or think to use the language of Ephesians three.

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It's beyond what I could ask or think. So I want you to encourage other pastors.

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There are some pastors that hardly get any encouragement and regularly I have to talk them off the bridge on the

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Monday mornings. And so those men have helped me as well, but so I'm not asking for it from me.

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That's not the point. That's not my point is not having people who go to Bethlehem Bible church, listen to the show.

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And then I can ask them for things, letters, cards.

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So if you're a Bethlehem Bible church member and you want to encourage your pastor, Pastor Steve, Pastor Harry, Elder Pardeep, Elder Brown, there's those kinds of men.

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So direct your cards and letters to those people. Jonah's on the run and he's on the run from the

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Lord, capital L -O -R -D, all capitals, Yahweh. He's in, he's running from this

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God. And it's fascinating to me because this implies a few things. Here's implication one, the

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Ninevites are accountable to God, their creator. And Jonah as a prophet is accountable to God, his creator and his savior.

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Very, very similar to Acts 1730, the times of ignorance, God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge, verse 31 says, the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed.

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And of this, he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

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People are accountable to God. If you're listening today and you're not a Christian, you're accountable to God. You might not think you believe in God, but he believes in you.

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No, that wouldn't be the right way to say it. But he knows of you and he believes you exist.

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He knows you exist. It's not a faith thing for God. What are we going to do?

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How are we going to be changed if we can't change ourselves? I think of Moses writing to Israel, oh, that they had such a heart as this always to fear me,

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Moses is writing the words of the Lord, and to keep all my commandments that it might go well with them and their descendants forever.

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There's only one hope for amending our life as Warfield would use the word.

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It's going to have to come from the Lord and here in God's mercy and kindness, he sends out Jonah to preach that the remedy isn't in Nineveh.

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It's not in Nineveh's system of Ishtar, Ishtar, Dagon, any of the other false gods.

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There's no help in Nineveh. There's nothing there to help.

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And they could look and see and search and try to find and they'd never find a bumper sticker that says

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I found it because the solution is not there. It's not in the heart of man. It's not in the religious system.

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Where is salvation found? And it is found from above.

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It is found in the Lord. Salvation is from the Lord and the only way to know about it is not looking at the stars and figuring things out.

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The gospel in the stars. It's not going to our inner person. It's not trying to be good. It's not trying to obey the laws that the government has set up.

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Salvation is outside of us and it comes to us through gospel preaching, through preaching of another, through proclamation.

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And the remedy has got to be told. That's why Jonah had a message.

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He wasn't the message. Let's think about that for a second with the Chris and Keri Shook book, Be The Message.

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I think that's the title. Yeah, I'm tired of sermons. You've heard me do the show. Excuse me.

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The good news is I'm off the steroids. The bad news is the lungs aren't quite back to normal, but that's all right.

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We'll get there. As Baxter lay dying, they asked him, how are you? He said, almost well. Excuse me.

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I don't have a cough button. We can't afford it. We either had to pick the wretched radio link or the cough button.

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So what are we going to do? So what's the point? God has to send the

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Savior. And if Jonah is the message, what an awful message. This is awful.

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Shouldn't Jonah, the book of Jonah, help us so much in saying, you know, we desire so much that our friends and relatives have their sins forgiven and go to heaven and don't bust hell wide open.

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But if I'm the message, I've sinned against those people and I've fallen short and I haven't done all the things that I should and, you know, all these things.

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And if it depends on me, then who would be saved? That's the point. And Jonah is the disobedient wrong way prophet.

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He's going the wrong way. He doesn't want to do the right thing. Go up over there into Iraq, past the Euphrates, close to the

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Tigris in a little place called Nineveh, third prominent city in that area in the Assyrian empire and go up that way.

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No, I'm going to go the opposite way over by Gibraltar to Spain. That's where I want to go.

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I'm going to go to Tarshish. You know, it's like he's smoking hashish on his way to Tarshish.

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This is the wrong thing. And what if Jonah has to be the message? Be the message. That's fail.

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I want to put a big, you know, my fingers up to my forehead. I have to make sure it's the right way. You know, people do the loser sign, but then they make the

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L the wrong way. It is so bad. God saved wicked people.

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Yes. And he sends his messenger to go proclaim a message.

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And Jonah couldn't get out of the thing fast enough. And I don't want Assyria. I don't want

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Nineveh to repent because they'll be stronger. If they do, they'll be healthier.

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If they do, and a healthy, strong Assyrian nation has a strong army and God will use them to judge us.

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So judgment will be less. If God is judging the Assyrians for their own sins.

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What happens? Yeah. God just says, all right. No problem. You know, another day, another, another story.

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Yeah. No, God's going to initiate something. God's sending the storm.

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Everything in this talks about the sovereignty of God. You're not going to ignore God. You're not going to push him aside.

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You're not going to flick him off your desk until another day. He's going to do something.

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And there is a series of actions that now begin with verse four. But Yahweh hurled a great wind upon the sea.

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He hurled a great wind upon the sea. There was a mighty tempest on the sea so that the ship threatened to break up.

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And what's going to happen? Who's in charge? Is this some kind of concurrence of natural elements?

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There's a great wind, a mighty tempest in the ships threatening to break up.

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The word hurled means to cause a wind to burst forth. It's like when Saul hurls the javelin at David and now

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God on the pitcher's mound, as it were, hurls this storm with the bullseye, with the target being

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Jonah. Great wind. Psalm 104, he makes winds his messengers, flaming fire his ministers.

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Psalm 24, the earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it. For he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the water.

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And it's so bad. The ship is threatening to break up. Now, when you read threatened to break up, determined to split apart, it's personification language.

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It's like the ship is a person and the person is bound, determined to obey.

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The ship's going to obey, but who isn't? The ship's determined to break up, but who's determined not to obey

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God? Jonah, of course. Lewis Johnson says, how would you like to have a father who didn't care whether you obeyed him or not?

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Look around in the 20th century. There are many of them. There are thousands. There are millions of fathers who do not care about their children.

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They do not care whether they obey or not. And then when their children become little demons, they look around and say,

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I wonder why? I wonder why? Well, God is going to make sure

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Jonah does the right thing. Verse 5 in Jonah says, then the mariners were afraid. Okay, these salts, sea salts, that's what the word sailor means or mariner.

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These old salts, you know, I don't watch it very often, but I've seen it before.

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It seems like every time Kim and I are out of town, we're at a hotel. We turn on the cable TV with alacrity because we don't have cable

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TV at home. So we're like, okay, what's on? Oh yeah. 900 channels and not one good shows on. So we ended up watching the deadliest catch.

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Now I would be afraid if I was on one of those ships, but I would be more afraid if the captain was afraid.

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You know, the ship's rocking around water slushing over breaking, blah, blah, blah. Captain doesn't mind.

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This is just old hat to him. But when the captain's afraid, when the old, you know, sea salts are afraid, then watch out.

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It's bad. They each cried out to his God. They hurled the cargo that was in the ship that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them.

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But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had laid down. It was fast asleep.

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You crawl out, you crawl out, you call out to your God. I'll call out to my God. Let's just call out to St.

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Christopher, the, the, the saint, the patron saint of travel. Is that right? I think so.

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Spirit to sanctu domino domino. Now, what do we do?

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Throw out the cargo, throw out the tackle, throw out the utensils, throw everything over.

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It's kind of vague. Just throw everything out. You got some things, throw it over.

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They, they have no idea what's going on. They just think it's a bad storm, but they're going to get an idea here pretty soon.

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And their theology is this. They hit it right once in a while, like here. There's a somebody in the ships, a sinner.

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And that's why we're getting judged. And Jonah is running, but he can't hide.

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Oh, for right now, Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had laying down and was fast asleep.

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Verse five, talk about a surprise.

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Now you already know the story. If you're, you know, Christian, you grew up in a church, he's sleeping.

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He's in a corner. This isn't like it's a big cruise ship. These are smaller ships and he's down below deck.

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And I guess all the rocking back and forth made him go to sleep.

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Deep sleep, hypnotic sleep. I like this one man wrote, he's as dead to the world as he was to God.

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A captain came and said to him, what do you mean you sleep or arise? Call it to your God. Perhaps the God will give us a, give a thought to us that we may not perish.

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Call on your God. Arise, get up. Does that sound familiar to you at all?

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Arise, get up. You're sleeping, arise, get up. Hey, get going. You got something to do.

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Arise, get up. Wake up, you sleepy head. Rise and shine.

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Give God the glory, glory, rise and shine. What do you mean you sleep or arise?

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Call out. Doesn't that sound familiar to chapter one, verse two, arise, go to Nineveh and call out.

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What's going on? Well, my name is Mike Avendroth. That was a fast paced 24 minutes.

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So you're going to have to come back. Same bad time, same bad channel. Next week. And we're going to talk more about the sovereignty of God as we see

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God sovereign over wind. He's sovereign over everything. He's sovereign over you. He's sovereign over your family.

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He's sovereign over your finances. He's sovereign over your life and your death. And he's a good father who's sovereign.

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Aren't you glad? No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Avendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church. Firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.