Feb. 11, 2018 PM Jonahs Prayer Gods Deliverance by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Jonah’s Prayer in the Belly of the Fish

We continue in the book of Jonah. This afternoon, we'll attend ourselves to the last verse of chapter one. And go, Lord willing, with his blessing through the end of chapter two. Chapter one, verse 17.

And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, I call 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. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me.

Then I said, I am driven away from your sight. Yet I shall look again upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped about my head. At the roots of the mountains, I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.

Yet you brought up my life from the pit, oh Lord, my God. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.

But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I avowed, I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. So Jonah, of course, as we know, on his way away from his assignment in Assyria to go to the capital of that nation, Nineveh, and there proclaim the word of the Lord, was off to Tarshish.

And of course, the storm came, and the only way to stop the storm, Jonah properly, correctly prophesied, was to throw him overboard. And the storm was immediately stilled. And so we have this prayer of Jonah that we will look at this afternoon.

This prayer that it seems came after his near drowning. Now, some preachers, some good men think that he actually did die. I don't take that position here, but he was as good as dead as he went down into the sea.

And from the belly of this fish, the prayer of Jonah rises up to God. He finally communes with God. He finally goes to God in prayer. He is removed now from all hope that he can withdraw from God's presence.

As the psalmist says, where can I go from your presence? If I go into the deeps, there you are. If I go into hell, there you are. There is nowhere to go from God's presence, a lesson, it seems, that Jonah had finally learned.

All remaining self-reliance is abandoned, and at last he does what, of course, we all should do in the first resort. Which is what? Which is to pray to God. To go to God in prayer. God hears his prayer.

God delivers him from the distress that drew it from him, that drew God's presence away from him. And what prayer is it that God hears? When we pray to God, any time we go to God, we go to him in Jesus' name, what is the prayer that God hears?

Isaiah 66 too tells us in pretty simple language, but this is the one to whom I will look, he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word. Now what it takes to bring about this humility and this contrition of spirit is really different for all of us.

We do know that praying in Jesus' name is the way to God. John 16, 23, 24, Jesus says, when you pray to my Father in my name, you will receive what it is you pray for. Praying in Jesus' name meaning praying according to his will meaning praying according to his nature.

In the context of John 15 through 17, in accordance with the will of God revealed in his word. What prayer does God hear? Stumbling, fumbling, halting prayers. He hears prayers from us that we're not even sure what we actually mean, we're just desperate, we just fall down on our face before God and just sort of say, help, understand, relieve.

Come to me. It's Romans 8, 26 and 27 where the apostle Paul writes about the spirit interceding for us, the spirit as it were translating our prayers because he knows the mind of God. And so taking our fumbling, stumbling, halting prayers, our prayers of desperation, and translating them as it were to the will of God so that the answer that we get we know is the right one.

It's God's answer. Those are the kind of prayers he hears. If God heard Jonah's prayer, then that's how Jonah prayed to him. But see here in this testimony of the prophet Jonah, see here that the Lord appoints the lesson that we need to learn and the means by which our instruction will take place.

Because this humility, this contrition of spirit, which finally drove Jonah to his knees in the belly of the fish is what we all need when we go to God. To know who it is that we are approaching, to know what he has done for us in the Lord Jesus Christ.

To know that we are sinners with no merit of our own to go before him except that we stand on the blood of our Savior. And this must bring contrition of spirit, humility of spirit before us. What it takes for us to get there is different for every one of us.

And the Lord appoints that particular lesson that you and I particularly need in that particular circumstance that we learn these lessons, that we would be able to come to God rightly in prayer. James puts it this way.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

The author of the Hebrews tells us that when God chastises by his providentially bringing trials upon us, it proves that we're being treated as his children. It proves that we are really his. And all this is consistent with the prophet Jonah, for whom the Lord appointed a fish to begin this training.

So Jonah goes into this classroom of sorts, because why? Because Jonah said, I need to learn this. I'm going to take a course in how to be humble, how to be contrite, how to make my prayers heard. No, the Lord appointed the fish.

The Lord appoints the means by which we learn the lessons that we need to learn. The Lord puts us in the classroom. And sometimes we don't enter in quite as voluntarily as we ought, do we? The Lord appointed the fish to swallow up Jonah.

Now again, as I told you earlier, when we started this series, I'm not going to try and figure out what kind of a creature this sea creature actually was, to be big enough to suck Jonah into its gullet.

We're not going to go there. We know from the scripture, and this is narrative, these are facts, this is history, that the Lord did appoint that fish and told that fish, take him in. It's the Lord who will eventually say, class dismissed.

Not, of course, when we've gone up to the teacher's desk, pulled out the grade sheet and marked down what we think we deserve. But when the Lord says, you've learned your lesson. Chapter four, in the second verse, we find that Jonah actually did discuss his assignment with the Lord.

And we'll get there in a little while, not today, as we go through this book. But in chapter four, in verse two, he says, oh Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? It seems that he did have some communion, some discussion, some communication with God when he first got this assignment.

And he said something to him that we're gonna get to later. But along the lines of, Lord, why are you sending me here? Because I know you're merciful. I know you're abounding in forgiveness. I know you'll forgive these people.

And here he says, isn't this what I said, that you wouldn't destroy them? But as I look at that and as we consider that, it really seems to me more of an objection than it is a prayer. More of an objection than a prayer.

It doesn't sound humble or contrite. It might even be that he was saying that while he was looking for the clothes to pack that might be in fashion when he gets to Tarshish. He says, is this not what I said?

And he's saying that to God while the fare and while the schedule for his departure are being researched. And how often do we mix up and don't make the distinction between planning and praying? How often do we put our plans before our prayers?

They're two different things. And so often, I know in my life, it so often happens when I go ahead and push things through and don't stop and talk to a brother or sister. Don't stop to talk to my wife.

Don't stop to pray or read the scripture. Then I pray. And what does my prayer have to be then? Oh Lord, bless this mess. I've made a complete hash out of things. It seems to be Jonah's pattern here that while he's sailing the Lord, while he's communing with the Lord about this assignment, he's packing.

He's on travelocity, looking for the best fare. Hotels he might stay at along the way. Now we can't get those out of order. Even though we often do, I should say we oughtn't get those out of order. Jonah finds himself in a place called Sheol.

From the belly of Sheol, he's going to pray. The form of the word used for fish actually changes a bit here as you go through this. And it's really sort of interesting, but the form of the word, by which I mean the grammatical form changes, not the fish itself, of course, but the gender of the noun that's used.

You see, when it swallowed up Jonah in chapter two and verse one, the word used for the fish was a masculine word. And when it swallowed Jonah, it changes. Not the fish itself, again, not the fish, as though it was transferred from a boy fish to a girl fish, that's not the case.

But it becomes the feminine form of the noun. And this is going to bear on what we have to say later. I want you to have that in mind, that the form of the noun used for the fish changes. What we can note here already is that Jonah is in the womb of Sheol.

He's in the womb of Sheol, that's what the word means. And take a moment, though, before we talk about the importance of that, to talk about Sheol, S-H-E-O-L, with a capital S, a place. Comes up fairly often in the scripture, and the biblical author's concept of it was shaped by the understanding of their particular day.

One scholar, A. W. A. Van Gemeren, he wisely encourages, because of this, that we are cautious in our approach to understanding this place called Sheol. The majority of the uses of that word, that place, is in poetic or wisdom passages.

So we take our cues from the immediate context, from the specific point that that author is trying to make there. For example, Psalm 89, 48 says, what man can live and never see death? Who can deliver his soul from Sheol?

That psalm was written when the people of Judah were in exile in Babylon. They were in Sheol, they were dead, they were as good as dead. The psalm there was a plea to God to hear and to deliver, because only he can hear and deliver.

It was he who sent them into the Sheol of exile. And only he could, and only he did, decree their return from there. It's the place Jacob said he'd go upon his death. There's four references to this place in the book of Genesis, and all four of them are Jacob, which is sort of interesting.

Two of them are Jacob himself, and two of them are Judah, quoting what Jacob said when he's telling Joseph about his father. He said he would go down to Sheol in bereavement, or he's going down with gray hairs into the desert.

He's going to Sheol when he thought he had lost his son, Benjamin. It's a place of sorrow, a place of mourning, each time Jacob mentions it. In Psalm 55, 15, it's a place of conscious suffering, not unlike the New Testament idea of hell.

David prays about his enemies this way. He says, let death steal over them. Let them go down to Sheol alive, for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart. And finally, this brief, brief survey.

It's a place from which the righteous are saved. Hosea chapter 13, verse 14, God speaks of it this way. Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from death? O death, where are your plagues?

O Sheol, where is your sting? Compassion is hidden from my eyes. First Corinthians 15, 55, the apostle Paul says much the same thing. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? All that to say, this is where Jonah was.

This is the place from which Jonah prays. From the belly of Sheol, I cried, you heard my voice. Did he have any idea that he was actually within a sea creature? Have you ever wondered about that? Did he know where he was?

Our text doesn't say when he actually realized that he had been in a fish. Now I think it was when he was vomited onto the dry land and he looked back and he saw the fish and he understood what had happened.

He saw his Sheol go back to its own abode away from the living. Now I don't conclude here that Sheol is similar to what is called purgatory. Or that it's a place of consciousness or otherwise. It's safest to understand it the way Jonah did.

As we have it here in Jonah chapter two. Jonah was the place where he experienced a hint of what it would be like if his plan had succeeded. What was his plan? His plan was not just to not do in Assyria, in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, what he had been told to do.

His plan was what? To flee from the presence of God. To flee from God's presence, to hide himself from God. That was his plan. And for him, this Sheol was the place where he gets just the slightest hint of what that might be like should God have granted him that wish.

Should God have allowed him to go to a place where his presence couldn't be. He was fleeing God, God's presence. He was fleeing the duties he had been assigned as if he said, it'd be better for me to be without God in my life than to perform this distasteful chore.

So like I said, Sheol is a bit of a variable concept. What it is depends on who is naming it and why and how. There is in his definition a single kernel to which our interpretation must bow. For Jonah, Sheol was a place of chaos, a place of danger.

The Hebraic idea were the deeps were the place of mystery and chaos and danger. I don't think he thought he was in a fish. All the references to it are from Jonah. He's in the third person, it says Jonah was in the belly.

Jonah prayed from the belly and so forth. He never said, pray from this animal. He never said, I prayed from the fish that I knew at the time I was in. He says, he prayed out of the belly of Sheol. You know, few of us explicitly and self-consciously run from God.

But what else can we call it when we know the good to do and we do it not? When we know that the next thought, the one that is ready to take its turn, that word or action that is knowingly contrary to God's will for us in his word and we allow it to issue forth, is that not a flight away from the presence of God?

And what does a good and a holy and a perfect father then do with us? He appoints and will not speak until he has had his way with us. He appoints a means for us to learn this lesson. And so often this lesson is like it is with Jonah, to get just the slightest flavor of what it might be like if we were allowed to go our own way, if we were allowed to have our will be manifested in our lives.

God appoints and he will not speak back to us until he has had his way with us, until he's advanced us in that good work of molding us into Christ's image. And this is where we are in this sense. This is where we are from the time that he appoints this means to the time that he speaks.

We are in this shield. We are learning perhaps what it might be like if our wishes were given full expression. So down into the depths goes the prophet. By faith he had prophesied that the storm would end when he was put over the Gunnels.

But like Moses, who wasn't allowed to see the promised land, Jonah didn't see the end of the storm. He prophesied it, but he didn't see it. There's a progression in his prayer as he recounts his descent.

In verse three, he's cast into the deep, but he sees the waves pouring over him. So it's as if he's treading water on the surface. In verse five, the waters close in, the deep surrounds him, and the weeds entangle him.

So he's going down, he's going down further. How tall is seaweed? Enough for you to feel it in your feet as you're going down into it without any hope of rising back up. Verse six, he's at the roots of the mountains, the foundations of the continents, really.

The swallowing by this fish occurred about here. When he was about to drown, he was about to expire when the Lord appointed that fish to swallow him. He doesn't know it's a fish. I don't think he even knew that he had been swallowed by anything.

And even if he could have looked around, which he couldn't have, but even if he could, how would he recognize his location? Imagine if he had a flashlight. Could he have put some light on the subject and looked around and said, oh, I recognize.

This is from biology. I remember these pictures. I'm in the belly of a fish. No, and that's not what he says. I don't think there's any way he could have known it would be dark. What does he say? He says himself that he was in Sheol, a Sheol tailored to his exact need.

From the very womb of Sheol, he prayed. In the very presence of the God from whom he had tried to flee, he prayed. In the belly of the well, this womb of Sheol, it remained true there that the Lord knows those who are his as the apostle Paul tells us.

The Lord knows those who are his. His shipboard companions were probably home by then or at least safely on their way. I think that they kept their vow to sacrifice to the Lord, the Lord who instilled the storm.

And then each one probably went his own way after thanking Yahweh and thanked his own God. We often derive from this that you cannot run from God. That's true enough. You cannot. He may let us blunder along our own self-generated path for a while, but we'll never find a place beyond his knowledge, beyond his reach, beyond his love, beyond his care.

Pastor Eric made that very clear in the preaching from Job this morning. We'll never find a place beyond his reach. And we also take from this that if we have been given a ministry, he will, even under obstinacy, bend us to his will.

That if he says, go and preach on this street corner or go take care of this church, or whatever the case may be, that he is going to have our way with it. And if we go west when we're supposed to have gone east, he's gonna draw us back as he does Jonah eventually.

But I think that's sort of a tenuous conclusion here. And I think we need to be careful with that. The Lord will have his way. But remember that Judah, Judas, excuse me, Judas was replaced. Israel's first king Saul was replaced.

In 1 Samuel we read that Eli and his sons were replaced by Samuel. We read that Moses was still strong, still vital, still healthy when Joshua did what? Took his place. God's determination to have Jonah and no other go to Nineveh shouldn't be taken as normative.

Nor should we when we know what God would have us to do and we wish not to do it, should we think that God will in his providence if he wants me to do this in God's power, in God's might, he's going to put me in the belly of a fish and cause me to go the right direction.

No, we're much safer, we're much better off to take a warning and to do our Christian duty as though we're not entirely sure that God will say to our Sheol, now vomit them back up. That we obey more quickly, that we do as God would have us when we know the good to do.

We spoke about the whale and the form of the noun for the whale being changed from masculine to feminine. The language of Jonah 2 .2, Jonah prayed out of the belly of the fish saying, I called to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me.

Out of the belly of Sheol I cried and you heard my voice. The language in there is of childbirth. The language in there is of the travail a woman goes through when she is giving birth. So when it says the fish vomited Jonah back up, what do we have there?

We have a picture of rebirth. We have the picture of Jonah who was that emblem, that symbol, that living parable as Jesus Christ himself says of Jesus Christ's death and burial and resurrection. And here being vomited back up, he's being birthed.

He's being reborn as it were. A picture of John chapter three. And what Jesus tells Nicodemus, you cannot see the kingdom of God unless you are reborn. You must be born again. You must be rebirthed. As the apostle says to the Corinthians, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

Behold, all things new. The old has gone away. This is the picture we have with Jonah being birthed. This word vomited has this hinge back to this idea of a woman actually giving birth. And here's Jonah after his three days in the belly of Sheol, this belly of the fish being rebirthed, being reborn, being put back.

What it takes to break down our pride, to break down our resistance, to bring us into compliance with God's word is different for all of us. God appointed the means of breaking Jonah's pride and in his wisdom, in God's mercy, he spoke to the fish at the right time.

How long it takes him to get our attention depends entirely on what? On him. Let's not say here that it depends on when we learn the lesson. It depends on what God says to the fish, says to our Sheol, vomit him back up.

I might have said, Lord, you have my attention when the storm began. I mean, I'm terrified of drowning, so when I see the possibility there, okay, I'm on my knees, I'm ready, I've learned it all. I'm riveted on you, Lord, but it's not me who determines when the lesson comes to an end.

It's not me who determines when I've learned what I need to learn. It's God. Jonah ends up in a wonderful and a blessed position where he has recourse only to prayer. He prayed to a God from whom he had no expectation of mercy.

His objection to preaching to the Assyrians, we must note, said nothing about their violence, about their infamous and their rightly feared cruelty. What was his objection? His objection was God is merciful.

God is slow to anger. God abounds in loving kindness that he would withhold from destroying them. But imagine how it would be if God disowned us every time we sinned. Think, how would we survive if every disobedience caused God to remove us from his presence, or we from his?

Jonah got a taste of what it would be like to flee, to be free from God's presence. There's another thing he got a taste of. He got a taste of the very loving kindness and patience and mercy and forgiveness of God.

He got the storehouses of heaven opened wide and poured out into him in blessings. From the bottom of a fish swimming at the bottom of the sea, he saw that he was right about God, that God does abound in loving kindness, that God does abound in forgiveness and mercy and all these wonderful things that Jonah said, this is the reason I don't wanna go.

Jonah makes a prayer at the end, a vow, excuse me, a vow at the end of his prayer. Says, but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord.

Well, we know the sailors made vows also. Is there no difference between them? There is a difference. There is a difference and it's there at the start in verse two that Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God.

And here we, in a sense, make full circle. Who does Jonah pray to? The Lord, his God. His rush to Joppa could not remove him from his duty to God. His retreat to Tarshish failed to transport him away from God's presence.

His descent into the deep couldn't outreach the Lord's mighty arm. That he hadn't fled God's presence. He hadn't removed himself from God's love. Oh, that God will put him back on track to do his duty.

We will get to that. And again, we can't take that as the usual and guaranteed working of God because so many men have been replaced for refusing to do what they were sent to do. But Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God.

And that's the difference between him and the sailors who also took vows. The sailors took their vows, probably made their sacrifices to Yahweh, and then probably went off and continued to worship their own gods.

So this is a difference between them. And it's key, not just to Jonah, but to all of life. God owned Jonah. God knew who was his. God didn't abandon his child. Thank God he sent Jonah along his way and put him back on track.

Jonah could not remove himself from the presence of God. I won't read it again because Pastor Eric read it during his sermon this morning. But Paul asked, what shall remove us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus?

And then with all those descriptive things, basically the answer is nothing. Jesus said he is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Jonah's a great example of that. That from the belly of Sheol, later he found out it was a fish, but from there, from Sheol, from this place where he got this bare hint what it would be like if God granted his wish.

He was still the Lord his God. He's the Lord our God. Even when we find ourselves in these desperate straits, when we've taken ourselves away from the immediate presence of God, or so we think, when we disobey God and we're going down these wrong paths, do you know Christ Jesus?

Do you know by repentance for sin, by faith in Christ and his work on the cross, which we will celebrate and remember again in a few moments, do you know God by faith in this son, this Jesus? Then there's no way you can ultimately remove yourself from his presence or from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, that is our love.

Because it says in John 17, Jesus prays that, that the love that God the Father has for him is the love that God the Father has for those who are in him by faith. Many lessons we can take from the book of Jonah and from this prayer.

I would have us to come away with this one. Brethren, whatever God has to do to bring us back into line with what he would have of us, to bring us back into his path for us to be conformed in the image of Christ, God will do.

However hard it is for us, God will have his way. However long we have to stay in the belly of Sheol, in this womb of Sheol, as I said, it's up to God. But know that it is God who is a just and a good and a living God.

And even in the midst of that, we can still pray as did Jonah to the Lord our God, because we come to him in Jesus' name. Let me just close with a quick quote from Charles Spurge and then we'll return to song and the Lord's table.

God has only to speak and even sea monsters obey him. I know not how he spoke to the fish. I do not know how to talk to a fish, but God does. And as the Lord could speak to that fish, he can speak to any sinner here.

However far you may have gone from all that is good, he who spoke to that great fish and made it disgorge the prophet Jonah can speak to you. And then you will give up your sins as the whale gave up Jonah.

God grant that it may be so this very hour. That is the prayer of an ancient mariner. May it be ours as far as it is suited to our circumstances and may we be brought by God's grace to cry with Jonah, salvation is of the Lord, amen.