Salvation Belongs To The Lord

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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So we're in Jonah now, chapter 1, verse 17. And I want to begin our time, I haven't done it in a while, with a bit of a story.

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So we're going to travel back in time to January 13, 1850.

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January 13, 1850, there was a young man, a 15 -year -old boy, who was out walking from his home to church when he was caught in a terrible blizzard, probably comparable to some of the blizzards that we see here in Edmonton.

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And he was walking down the street, down a street called Artillery Street in Colchester, England.

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And because of this raging winter storm, the pummeling snow, and the wind that was bearing down on him and the town, he decided it would be best to turn into a little

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Methodist church to find refuge from the storm. And so when he entered into the building, because it was

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Sunday and the church was gathered for Lord's Day worship, he decided that it would be best for him to just stay put in this church.

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And rather than to go to his own church, he would just participate in this Methodist service.

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And so he sat down amongst all of the Lord's people. And a lay preacher, an untrained

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Methodist preacher, stood up behind the pulpit and he turned in his Bible to Isaiah chapter 45 and verse 22.

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And as he turned there, he read it, where God says to the prophet Isaiah, he says this,

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Isaiah 45, 22, "'Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am

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God and there is no other. Turn to me.'"

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And this was a providential text for this young man because leading up to this storm and this occurrence, he felt that he was in a state of agony over his own sin.

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His conscience was stinging with the guilt of his own sin and shame before a holy

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God. He knew that he was a sinner, that he was at odds with his Creator, but he did not know how to be made right with God.

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And so he felt, as he walked into this Methodist church, that he was a hopeless case. How could he be right with a holy

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God when he was so low and wretched and despisable?

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But as he sat there, this eccentric Methodist preacher preached this text from Isaiah 45, "'Turn to me and be saved.'"

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And maybe what you might expect if you've heard much about the Methodists and maybe the Methodists of old, he pointed at this young man in his seat and he said, "'You, young man, you look miserable.

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Look, look, look to Christ, look to Jesus Christ even now and be saved.'"

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And at that very moment, as that 15 -year -old boy sat in the pew in some obscure church on Artillery Street on the eastern edge of England, the boy saw

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Jesus Christ. Not with his eyes, but he saw Jesus Christ, he said, with his heart.

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That he saw that Jesus Christ, for the first time ever, was the only Savior of the world. That the clouds of confusion rolled back.

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That the darkness of sin and despair was gone. And for the first time in his life, this young man, this boy, knew what it meant to be completely forgiven of his sins.

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And as that young boy, after the church service ended, he went home, he walked through the snow, and he said that it was as if every snowflake reasoned with him and preached to him about the pardon that he had found in Christ.

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Though his sins were as scarlet, though they had burned red like crimson, just a few hours earlier, creation now preached to him and he saw that before God, he had become, just like we were singing in that last song, he had become white as the driven snow.

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As perfect and pristine as each snowflake that fell from the sky.

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Now, does anyone know who that young boy was? Do I have a nod of heads anywhere? That young boy, he later became a household name in England and throughout the world.

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He grew up, and we now know him as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the

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Prince of Preachers. And years later, he wrote, he reflected on that anguish of soul that he experienced when he was just a young man prior to his conversion.

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And he described it this way. Maybe this was to describe some of you in this room.

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He said, I would rather pass through seven years of the most wearisome pain and the most languishing sickness.

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I would rather have pain or sickness than I would ever again want to pass through that terrible discovery of the evil of sin.

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Spurgeon knew what it was like to feel like the chief of sinners, to be the most wretched of men.

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God visited Charles Spurgeon with such conviction of sin that it haunted him at every hour of every day.

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Now, you know that we appreciate Spurgeonisms. I know, at least Steve and I do.

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We often laugh about it. And this is something that really only Spurgeon, I think, would recount. But it's no exaggeration.

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Spurgeon said that he would often go to bed. And he would lay in bed and try to fall asleep.

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But he would lose sleep because it would be as if each of the Ten Commandments would rise up and appear before him in front of God and bear witness and point to Spurgeon and say,

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You have broken me. And as he prepared to go to bed, it felt as if every command of God he had violated.

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And he stood before God condemned. But when God providentially brought that raging blizzard, when it blew so hard that it drove

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Spurgeon into that small Methodist church, Spurgeon said this. He said that he learned for the first time.

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He said, You are a great sinner. But He, that is Christ, is a greater

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Savior. Do not say that you have matched Christ. Do not say that you have overmatched

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Christ. Come, Goliath sinner, the son of David, can conquer you and save you yet.

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And so, in the life of Charles Spurgeon, we find a man who was a great sinner, a chief of sinners, and yet found a greater

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Savior in Jesus Christ. Now, why do I begin with this particular story?

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I open with this story because I think it perfectly aligns with the theme of our text today in the second chapter of Jonah.

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As we enter this second chapter of Jonah, we see that God, by way of review, had called

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Jonah to go to Israel's enemies to preach a message of repentance for the forgiveness of the

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Ninevites' sins. But he refused. So he got into a boat to sail to the opposite end of the known world.

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And when he did, God hurled a great tempest upon the sea. Last week, we heard from our brother

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Steve that the sailors, these experienced, likely Phoenician sailors, were so desperate that they eventually and reluctantly cast

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Jonah overboard to calm the raging sea. And that God's righteous anger was abated when

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Jonah entered that water. God's wrath was dealt with.

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And today, like Charles Spurgeon in the snowstorm, we're going to find Jonah sinking into despair.

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Jonah spends all of his time in this chapter in the water, or in a creature within the water.

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He had grieved God by his own rebellion. He had transgressed every word that God had spoken to him, and he was near death as he sunk to the bottom of the

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Mediterranean Sea. And yet the story, as we know, doesn't end here. To the contrary, the second chapter of Jonah, we'll see, becomes a psalm of thanksgiving to God, as Jonah cries out to God, and as God saves

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Jonah in the most remarkable fashion. And so today we discover with Jonah the same truth that Spurgeon discovered in the midst of the storm, that we are sinners.

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That Jonah was a great sinner. That we are sinners. But God is a greater

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Savior. And that's what this passage preaches. The main point of this text, as we will see, is that it paints a striking picture of the perilous consequences of sin.

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We're going to be reminded of the exceedingly destructive nature of sin, how sin makes us exceedingly miserable.

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But our text doesn't leave us there. Our text also shows us God's great willingness to save.

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And children, I want you to pay special attention to this. God's great willingness to save.

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And God's sovereign saving ability. That he can rescue any rebellious sinner who turns to him in repentance.

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And so this text, if we rightly understand it, is far more than just a man in a big fish.

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This text is about giving us hope that we are never beyond God's sovereign ability to save.

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So let's turn in our Bibles then to Jonah chapter 1 and verse 17. And what

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I'm going to do, like we have done for the last couple of weeks, it just seemed best in the structure.

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We're going to do an exposition of the text. You'll see that in the insert in your bulletin. And then we're going to draw out four lessons that we learn from this particular text.

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So let's look first at Jonah chapter 1 and verse 17. It says this, And the

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Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

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Now, when people think about Jonah, this is what they picture, right? The blue whale in the water with Jonah in his stomach.

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We don't know for certain if this was a whale, but what we see is this, that it says there that the Lord appointed a great fish.

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We're going to see that word appointed four times in the book of Jonah. This is the first of those four times.

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The remaining times, we're going to see those in chapter 4, verses 6, 7, and 8.

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And that word appointed is the Hebrew word manna. You might recognize it because it has the same root as the word that we read about manna being provided to the nation of Israel in the wilderness.

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And what it means, it means to appoint or to provide or even to predestine.

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And the message that is being conveyed with the use of this word appointed is this, that the repeated use of the word shows that God is sovereign over every circumstance in this book.

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God was sovereign over the command to go to Nineveh. God was sovereign over the storm at sea.

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God is now, we're going to see, sovereign over all of his creation, even the big fish in the ocean that he is going to put at the right place in the right time to save Jonah.

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And we're told that God appointed this great fish to swallow up Jonah. And the meaning of this word, sometimes you'll hear purists, and they say, well, it was definitely a fish.

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It wasn't a whale. And the reality is we actually do not know because the word that is used there simply means sea creature in the generic form.

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And so it could be like Noah likes to watch videos with Goliath groupers, these giant fish that I suppose could swallow up a man.

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It could be a giant fish like that. Some have speculated that it could be a shark. Even others have speculated that it could have been a sperm whale because of their size.

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A sperm whale can swallow a giant squid in one gulp. And so apparently they can swallow a man in one gulp as well.

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But here we see that Jonah was in this great fish, and we're told for three days and three nights.

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Now some liberal scholars, I always like to give you a bit of an approach on the liberal scholar view, some would say that Jonah spent three days and three nights in an inn called the great fish, that it could not possibly make sense that Jonah was in a great fish.

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He had to be in a hotel that was named the great fish. But of course, as our sister nods or shakes her head, it's nonsensical.

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We have every reason to believe based on the words in this text that this was a literal sea creature or giant fish that Jonah went into.

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And kids, you might appreciate this, that there are actually multiple accounts of fishermen or sailors who have spent time inside of whales and big fish in the course of their travels.

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And I looked at some of the history. There was one man just as recently as last year who was partially swallowed by a humpback whale just off of Massachusetts, although it was just for a short period of time.

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But if we go back to the most sensational story, there was a man named

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James Bartley. Now this is a contested story today, and I readily acknowledge that.

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But history tells us that in the 1800s, there was a man named James Bartley who was an apprentice seaman on the

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South Atlantic Ocean. And in February 1891, newspapers and a number of scientific journals published articles about one of Bartley's experiences at sea.

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He was on a fishing boat in the South Atlantic Sea when he attempted to harpoon an 80 -foot sperm whale.

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And as they were trying to bring the sperm whale in, it crashed on the boat and knocked a number of men out of the boat, and James Bartley was consumed by the sperm whale.

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Now the harpoon was still in the sperm whale, and so they used a winch to draw the sperm whale back up onto another boat, and they cut open the sperm whale, and there inside the sperm whale was

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James Bartley. His skin had been bleached, he lost all of his hair, and he was blind.

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But he had survived. And we're told, at least by history's account, that he spent the next 18 years working as a blind cobbler before he died at the age of 39.

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Some would say that he spent as long as 15 hours inside the whale. Some said that he spent 36 hours in the whale.

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Now I don't know for certain how or how many of those details are true or accurate, except to say that what we do know is that in this text there was a man, a historical man named

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Jonah, just like Daniel who went to the lion's den, just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that went into Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.

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Jonah was cast into the sea, and God ordained that a sea creature would preserve his life by swallowing him whole, where he would spend three days and three nights inside that great creature.

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And we're going to look at some of the significance of those three days and three nights in a little bit.

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But God, who has preserved many of his people's lives through the most unlikely or impossible circumstances, was able to preserve

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Jonah in the stomach of that great fish. It's written in Scripture.

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It is inspired. It's historically accurate. If God can save Daniel, if he can save Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, if he can raise

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Christ from the grave after three days, he can put a man in the belly of a great fish.

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And that's exactly what he did. And then chapter 2 tells us how he responded.

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The entire chapter, chapter 2, is actually a psalm or a prayer of thanksgiving to God.

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And I want you to note this with me. It's really interesting. It's not a psalm or a prayer of thanksgiving that God would rescue him from the great fish, from this great sea creature, but it's a psalm and a prayer of thanksgiving that God had saved

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Jonah through the great fish. It was actually the great fish that was providentially provided, ordained by God, to save Jonah when he went into the water.

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Jonah rightly understood that the great fish was not further punishment from God, but was in fact God's providential rescue plan from death by drowning.

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God ordained that this fish would be in that exact spot in the sea, that it would find him out, that it would swallow him up, that it would spit him out on dry land.

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And if we were to work our way through this psalm, we actually learn something of what happened between the time that Jonah was cast into the sea and the time when he was rescued by means of the great fish.

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That's what chapter 2 is all about, in fact. That at the beginning, at the end, we see Jonah in this great fish, but all of the psalm in chapter 2 is his recounting of what happened before the great fish swallowed him up.

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And so what we're going to do, we're not going to read it again, but I'm just going to work through verse by verse, and we're going to unpack a little bit of this text.

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So verse 2, we're told that Jonah was cast into the sea. And for the first time in the whole account, we see that God, or that Jonah, excuse me, approaches

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God in prayer, that he called out to God in distress. But the one thing we need to note is that it wasn't immediate.

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We're going to find, actually, as we see the psalm unfold, that Jonah held out, even then, to the last possible moment before he cried out to God.

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And so let's look at this together. We see that Jonah, in verse 2, that he cried out from the belly.

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It says, from the belly of Sheol I cried out. Now, in the Old Testament, we often read about Sheol.

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In the New Testament, we hear a lot about hell, sometimes about Hades, but in the

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Old Testament, we hear a great deal about Sheol. And what Sheol was understood by the average

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Old Testament reader, by the Jew in Israel, was this, that Sheol was the place of the dead.

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That's where people went when they died. In some cases, we would see that there's a differentiation between Sheol and Hades, that there was a place for those who were good or understood to not be wicked and immediately deserving of punishment, and then those who were cast into Hades, a place that was worse and for the worst people.

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But Sheol is described in the Old Testament, if we were to survey it really briefly, as being below the surface of the earth.

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Immediately, that idea of the underworld where people went when they died. Lamentations 3 and verse 6 tells us that it was a dark place.

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Job 17 .16 describes those who go down to Sheol as those who descend into the dust.

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Psalm 94 .17 says that Sheol is deafeningly silent.

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That one of the characteristics of Sheol is that there is no sound. You are alone.

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You see nothing, you smell nothing, you taste nothing, you hear nothing. Isaiah 38 tells us that Sheol has gates that keep individuals from leaving.

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In the Old Testament, as God's progressive revelation unfolded, Sheol was understood as the intermediate place where people would go to await the coming judgment.

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And what Jonah tells us here is that he felt himself descending into Sheol.

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It was as if he was as good as dead. He was a helpless rebel waiting to drown and then to be judged by Almighty God.

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And so he sunk deeper and deeper until in verse 4, we see that he felt as if he had been banished from the presence of the

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Lord. He said, I am driven away from your sight. He felt that his iniquities had made a separation between him and God, like we would read in Isaiah 59 .2.

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In verses 5 and 6 of this psalm, we read that Jonah descended to the very bottom of the sea.

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Now where do I get that, the very bottom of the sea? Jonah was not cast into the sea, we would understand, where he immediately floated to the surface.

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I know that when I was a child and my father taught me how to swim, it was a rather graphic experience.

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I'm not sure if I've ever told this story. For most of you, you probably had a lovely childhood where you took swimming lessons and you learned in a pool.

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I remember my dad, one evening he decided I was going to learn how to swim after supper. I'd only ever swam in my life jacket before.

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And so on this particular occasion, I knew what he had planned. And so I ate my dinner as fast as I could. I excused myself from the table and I hid in the bushes.

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We lived on an acreage with four acres and we had a dugout that was about 20 feet deep. And it was stocked with fish and a dock that went out onto the dugout.

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And so I hid in the bushes as my dad looked for me. And he called me and he threatened and eventually

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I took his threat seriously. And so he picked me up. I was maybe Elise's age, maybe a little bit younger than that.

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And he picked me up by my swimming trunks and by my arm. And he walked me to the edge of the dock and he just threw me into the water.

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And by God's grace, I learned that when you fall in the water like that, you tend to float or at least bob up and down if you have the right posture.

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But this is not what happened to Jonah. He did not get thrown overboard and then just bob up and down in the water as we might expect where the great fish then swallowed him at the surface.

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No, verses 5 and 6 say that Jonah was cast into the sea and then he went down.

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He went down into the water. He went down further and further until he found himself entangled in the seaweeds at the base, it says, at the root of the mountains where one sea floor meets the other at the bottom.

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Jonah descended to the very bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. And he felt as if he was enclosed by the very gates of hell.

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Verse 7 tells us that Jonah began to lose consciousness, that he was fainting. He was fading away.

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But at the last moment, when his oxygen levels were all but depleted, Jonah remembered the goodness and the steadfast love of God.

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And in that moment, he prayed to God, well, God could still be found. And in contrast to the deaf, the dumb, the mute, the vain idols of those pagan sailors on that boat that we read about in chapter 1,

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God acted and He brought up Jonah's life from the pit. And He did that by means we know of the great fish.

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He sent the great fish to rescue Jonah. And then verse 9,

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As Jonah sat in the belly of that great sea creature, he did what he should have done at the beginning.

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Interestingly enough, he did what the pagan sailors did. In chapter 1, in verse 16, if you look back there, what did they do?

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It says that the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the

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Lord and made vows. And that's exactly what Jonah did in chapter 9. He said, But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what

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I have vowed I will pay. And so that was likely a promise that when he got out of that great fish, he would make sacrifice to God, and the vow was likely that he would go to Nineveh, and that he would preach that message of repentance to the

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Ninevites. And then in the end of verse 9, 9b, we could say, we find the climax of the whole psalm.

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The climax of the whole psalm reads like this. He says, I will pay. Salvation belongs to the

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Lord. Jonah confesses to God what every saint through history has and will confess, that salvation belongs to the

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Lord. It's neither man nor creature, but God alone who saves.

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It is God alone who set his saving purposes on the Ninevites. It was God alone who had cast

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Jonah into the sea. It was God alone who appointed and foreordained

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Jonah's rescue. Salvation belongs to God, and he alone decides who will be saved, how they will be saved, when they will be saved, where they will be saved, and why they will be saved.

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God alone has the exclusive power to bring about salvation based on his own divine initiative alone.

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And then verse 10, when Jonah recognized all of this, the fish vomited

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Jonah onto dry land, perhaps some speculate near Joppa, where he first set out to go across the

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Mediterranean Sea to Tarshish. As one commentator puts it, and I appreciate the word usage, they said, it was an unconventional and very unceremonious return to land.

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But it was a return to land nonetheless. Jonah had nearly gone to the place of the dead where he would have been judged and rightly condemned for his rebellion against God.

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But at the last possible moment, Jonah cried out to God, and he was saved, spit out on dry land, and put back into God's service.

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What an interesting chapter in the Bible. Now, you might read that, maybe in your own devotional time, in your family worship time, and ask yourself, how does this apply?

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What can we possibly learn from Jonah's time in the sea and then his time in the great fish?

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I would suggest that we can learn at least four. I'm going to give us four lessons from this psalm in Jonah chapter 2.

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And so we'll briefly look at them together. I anticipated my voice would be going, and it sort of is, so they're briefer points, perhaps unusual, but there are good things to learn here.

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So the first lesson that we learn from this text is this. Jonah's experience, you'll see this in your bulletin insert,

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Jonah's experience demonstrates the destructive and miserable effects of sin.

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Jonah's experience demonstrates the destructive and miserable effects of sin.

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When Jonah, pay attention to this, when Jonah set his heart to disobey

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God, he set off on a course to demonstrate for our good, for all of us, the absolute corrupting misery that comes with willful, presumptuous sin against God.

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Jonah is the personification of the old maxim that sin always over promises and always under delivers.

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He is a living representation of that. For whatever reason, Jonah felt that he would be better, that it would be better, that he would be happier, that he would be more content to disobey rather than to obey

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God's command. Jonah believed that for a time, the wages of sin, instead of being death, would be happiness, or at least justice, as he thought, for the

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Ninevites. But note with me, brother and sister, what was on the other side of Jonah's sin.

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What we see with Jonah in the boat and then in the water and then in the fish is that the same destructive and miserable effects that we always find in the wake of sin were in the wake of Jonah's sin.

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His sin had separated him from God. He no longer felt that he could pray, or even more dangerous, he no longer felt the desire to pray.

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He no longer desired God. He found himself descending into the abyss where the very bars of Sheol would keep him from God forever.

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He descended into a kind of spiritual depression of the gravest degree.

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I would define Jonah's time in Jonah 1 -2 as hopeless, helpless, useless, godless.

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Sin had made him miserable, and he had become the object of God's divine and righteous disapproval.

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Now, beloved saints, I want you to hear this with me. You know all of this already, don't you?

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It's kind of like I'm preaching to the choir. Shane, tell us something that we haven't already heard.

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But I want to point out to you that in fact, you do not yet know this fully.

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That often it is the case, if we're honest with ourselves, we must admit that we continue to believe the foolish lies that sin promises, that sin will somehow bring us happiness, that it will bring us contentment, that it will bring us a sense of purpose, or pleasure, or whatever it is on the other side.

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Since the fall in Genesis 3, Satan has been deceiving people into thinking that sin will make our lives better, not worse.

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Remember, he said, you will have knowledge of good and evil. You will be like God. Surely, you will not die.

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He made promises of knowledge, and of understanding, and of happiness, and of purpose, but at what cost?

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At the cost of death. And regrettably, Satan and his minions have been very successful in this campaign of teaching or reinforcing in our hearts that there is some benefit to be gained from sin.

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Kids, pay attention to this. Sin promises us happiness, but it delivers despair continuously in the long run, doesn't it?

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Sin promises us fulfillment, but it delivers us emptiness. Sin promises us purpose, but delivers futility.

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Sin promises us ease, and delivers a wasted life.

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Sin promises friends, and fame, and popularity, but delivers alienation from God and man.

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Sin promises us the good life, but delivers death every single time.

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I remember when I first started, when I was in training with the Edmonton police, and they sat us down, and one of the things that they said, if you remember the movie

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The Matrix, there was the red pill and the blue pill moment, where they had to decide if they were going to go back to their ignorant existence, or if,

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I can't remember what color the pill was, if they would take the other pill, they would see, in that language, how deep the rabbit hole went, just how dark and depraved things actually were and are.

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And I was reading a book, it's a book actually that we have in our church library, by Charles Leiter, Justification and Regeneration, and he said that if we were to go just last night,

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Saturday night in Edmonton, and have a view of all of the evil and the sin and the wickedness that was committed just in our city last night, we would not be able to sleep for days or weeks, just the depraved consequences of sin.

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And yet, dear saint, you and I, in the old man, still believe that that sin serves some purpose in our lives.

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Some of us in this room, without a doubt, I believe, you believe that the fleeting pleasures of looking at explicit photos and videos online will bring you happiness.

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But in the end, and you know it, every time without fail, that fleeting pleasure gives way to bitterness and shame.

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Some of you in this room believe that if you give your best time and energy to something else or someone else other than God, even for just a short time, your sinful idolatry will be worthwhile in the end.

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But in the end, you will reap only that which vain idols can give, the same thing that it could give those sailors in the boat, nothing at all.

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Some of you in this room believe that the world has more to offer you than the God who made this world.

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You have become friends with this world at the cost of enmity with God, and you will reap the wind rather than an eternal relationship with God himself.

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Brother or sister, what is the lie that you believe in relation to the besetting sins in your life?

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What kind of promise of happiness or pleasure is it offering that you go back to it again and again?

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Believers, I want to embolden you in your battle for holiness. I want to help you hasten on your sanctification.

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And if you're to do that, you need to make it a point to remember that your happiness in this life is directly correlated to your holiness in this life.

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If I were to give you the mission, Noah, if I were to give you the mission to go out into the world and find the happiest man in the whole wide world, what

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I would know with certainty is that when you found that man, I could take that man here and bring him here and show you a man who has devoted his life, who has made it his great aim to consecrate himself fully to God and to His service.

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Susanna, sister, if you were to go out and look for the woman, the happiest and most fulfilled woman in the world,

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I could tell you with certainty that in that woman I could show you a woman who is the most devoted to God, the most submissive to God and to His word.

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What we need to understand, brother and sister, is that if we are to be happy, happiness comes not with sin and with the fleeting pleasures of sin that are here for a moment and then gone, but happiness comes with Christ -likeness.

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It comes with devotion to God and to His will and to His purposes. Probably the happiest man in the whole world and perhaps the most,

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I want to say embittered, but that's not the word, the most grieved man in the whole world was the

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Lord Jesus Christ. We must make it our aim to be holy.

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Now, unbeliever, if you're an unbeliever in this room, Jonah's issue is your issue.

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The crux of your problem is that you esteem sin more than God.

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You have believed the lie that disregard for God will bring you happiness, that it will bring you lasting joy.

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But this blasphemous thought, when it's wed with unbelief in the person and work of Jesus Christ, takes you further and further away from God and further and further away from true happiness.

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Jesus Christ takes away the sin of the world. But if you're an unbeliever today, you are professing that you do not want

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Christ because He threatens to take away the very thing that you cherish most.

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But I want you to see the foolishness and the misery of sin. Sin, if you are in love with sin today, even if you wouldn't use those words, if you live for sinful and fleeting pleasures today, let me tell you, it is insanity.

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I recently read a story about a man, a pastor in the 1800s.

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His name was Henry White, and he ministered in London, England. And on one particular night, he was in bed, he was about to fall asleep, and he heard a knock at the door, a frantic knock at the door.

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And so he went to the door, and a woman met him there and said that her husband was on his deathbed. He was about to die, and if Henry White could just come and share the gospel with him and pray with him.

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And so Henry White got on his clothing, he went to the woman's house. As he walked up to the woman's house, he noted that it was really a humble home.

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It was the kind of house that a poor person would live in. It wasn't well kept, it was dirty, it was a slum -like house.

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But as he entered in, and he saw this man who appeared to be about 40 years old, laying in bed, he noticed that there was something odd about the house.

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That while it was a very humble house on the outside, on the inside it was full of jewelry, and clothing, and fancy silver dishes on the table.

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And as he started to put it together, he thought to himself, this man must be a thief, that must be his trade.

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And Henry White was exactly right, that this man had been a lifelong thief.

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That had been his vocation. To steal from other people, and to keep it, and to sell it, and to make his living through the thieving from other people.

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So as he kneeled down, he made it his objective that he was going to minister to this man. And so he shared the gospel with him, how

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Christ had died for sinners, and he offered to pray with him. And as he spoke with this 40 year old man, one of the things that he noticed as he got down on his knees, that the man's face lit up as he came to kneel next to him.

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And he looked at where the man's gaze had gone, and the man's gaze had gone to Henry White's pocket watch.

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He had a pocket watch with a gold chain that attached it, and the man was fixed on his pocket watch.

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And Henry White disregarded that, he prayed with the man, he pleaded with him that he would repent and believe in Christ.

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And after he finished praying with this man, he realized as he looked at the man, that the man had died in the midst of his prayer.

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So the man laid there dead. So he thought with his work done, he would leave. He went to get up, and as he got up, he felt resistance on his person.

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And he looked down, and he saw that the man's dead hand was clutched onto the gold chain of his pocket watch.

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And this man, when he had the opportunity to be right with God on his deathbed, saw it more valuable and more worthwhile as his last act in this world, to steal one last piece of jewelry.

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Now one thing we can know almost for certain, is that man has gone to the intermediate place where he will be consigned to hell, because sin is insanity.

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And I know for most of us in this room, we are believers, we need to convey that to people, that your sin is insane.

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And for you, if you're not a believer in this room, you need to understand this, that your sin, just like that man clutching the jewelry, is insanity.

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The second lesson that we learn is this, that Jonah's experience demonstrates how we are to respond when we are under the conviction of sin.

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How we are to respond. Now Jonah is almost completely a negative example of this.

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He's definitely far from a perfect example. His repentance is the epitome of a deathbed confession.

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But what I want us to see is this, that as Jonah sunk down into the depths of the sea, as the seaweed was coming up around him, as he began to grow faint, he called out to God.

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And what happened, but that God was there to answer him. Jonah didn't call out to God until he was at the very bottom of the sea, when it was his last possible opportunity.

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But it was better late than never. And Jonah shows us this, that if you're in this room, and I've just told you that sin is insanity, and you know that you are in fact living in sin, and that if you continue you will die in that sin.

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Jonah shows us that as long as there is still breath in your lungs, as long as you are still alive, even if you are at the root of the mountains, and it feels as if the gates of Sheol are closing around you, as long as you are alive there is still time to repent.

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That is to turn from your sin and turn to God. We see here that God takes great pleasure in saving those who are lost.

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That He takes great pleasure in rescuing those, and healing those who are sin sick.

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God takes great pleasure to give eternal life to those who do not deserve it, but yet come to Him on His terms by repentance and faith.

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In fact, it magnifies God's grace to display His perfect patience to those who count themselves to be the chief of sinners.

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Paul wrote to his young protege Timothy in 1 Timothy 1 .16, he said this, but I received mercy for this reason.

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For what reason did Paul, the persecutor of Christians, receive mercy? He says this, that in me as the foremost, as the chief, as the first among sinners,

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Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life.

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Jonah is an example of Christ's perfect patience towards sinners. Just as Paul was a perfect example of Christ's patience towards sinners.

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And as long as you have the conviction of sin, and you still have life in your body, you have an opportunity to repent.

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I'm going to add something here because, again, I know I'm talking mostly to believers, but brother and sister, this gives us the opportunity, this ought to embolden us when we are sharing the gospel with our unbelieving friends and family and neighbors.

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That until they are dead, it is not too late that we can bring the gospel to them to the very end.

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That we should not cease to pray for them. That we should not cease to preach the gospel to them. That even when we go out onto White Avenue, as we do, and it feels almost completely hopeless, with people cursing

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God and refusing to listen to us, as long as the Lord gives life to people on White Avenue and around this city and around this world, we must go to them and say, repent, be reconciled to God, believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. And if you're here in this room and you're a sinner, and you have not repented, now is the time for repentance.

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Today is the day of salvation. Do not be discouraged that you are a sinner. In fact, because you are a sinner, you qualify for God's salvation.

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We've talked a lot about George Whitefield. You've heard me mention George Whitefield many times before. We know that he was one of the most famous open air preachers, probably the most famous open air preacher in the history of the

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Christian faith, since perhaps Paul at the Areopagus. And one of the things that most people do not know is that George Whitefield had a brother who was not a

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Christian, who had been raised in the same way that George Whitefield had, but who fell away from God.

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And one day, George Whitefield's brother was in a position to hear his brother preach in the open air and to hear him preach the gospel.

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And as he listened to his brother expound upon the holiness of God, that God is holy, holy, holy, and that Christ died to reconcile sinners to that holy

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God, his conscience was cut to the quick. He was so immensely bothered that he lost his appetite.

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After hearing his own brother preach, he could not eat or drink, and he just went around for days grumbling and crying.

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He would say to himself, I am a lost man. I am a lost man. He knew that he was a sinner.

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And he was going about doing this until one day, a dignified woman that he knew well came to him, and she heard him, and she said,

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What did you just say? What did you just groan? And he said, I am a lost man.

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And she said to her, Yes, you are, and I'm glad of it. And George Whitefield's brother thought,

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What kind of response is that, that you are glad that I am a lost man? And then she explained herself to him.

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She said, I am glad of it because it is written, and she quoted from Matthew 18 .11,

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The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost.

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If you are lost, then you qualify for Christ's salvation. And immediately that man was struck,

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Whitefield's brother, and with tears rolling down his cheek, he said, What precious

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Scripture! And how is it that it comes with such force to me?

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O Madam, O Madam, I bless God for that. Then He will save me. If I am a lost man, and Christ Jesus came in the world to save sinners, to save lost men like me, then

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I trust my soul in His hands, and He has forgiven me. And He will forgive you, whether you have never believed in Christ, or you have been living in unrepentant sin now.

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Come to Him. He came to save sinners like you and I. The third lesson that we see is this, that Jonah's experience demonstrates the willingness and the sovereign saving power of God.

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Jonah's experience demonstrates the willingness, God's willingness and God's sovereign power to save.

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The climax of this text is in verse 9. Salvation belongs to the

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Lord. That is the theme of this text. That it is God's great desire to save those whom

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He will. That it was God's great desire to appoint, to foreordain that fish to be in the right place to save Jonah at the right time.

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He said that it was

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God who saved him from the pit. He said in verse 6,

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Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. When I was fainting away,

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I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you in your holy temple.

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Now, in this church, we are happily, we happily, we confidently affirm

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God's sovereignty over salvation. We're going to preach next week on the doctrines of grace.

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We would affirm that no man can come to Christ unless the Father draws that man. And we also, as part of that, heartily affirm that everyone who comes to Christ will find that God is ready and willing, that He has already moved in that individual, moved heaven and earth to save them.

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And we see that beautifully put together in passages like John chapter 6 and verse 37.

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Such a reassuring verse. It says, All that the Father gives me will come to me.

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Everyone that the Father draws to Jesus Christ will come to Him by faith. And He says this, the second part of that,

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And whoever comes to me I will never cast out. Anyone who comes to God today on his terms,

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God will never cast out. In 1 Timothy 2, Paul says,

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It is good and is pleasing the sight of God our Savior who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

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Peter said, The Lord is not slow in fulfilling His promises, as some count slowness, but is patient to you, not willing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

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It is God's great desire and it is God's great will and His saving ability,

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His saving purposes to save sinners. The Puritan Thomas Fuller, he once said that,

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He that falls into a sin is a man. And he that grieves at that sin is a saint.

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He said that, He that boasts in that sin is a devil. And he finished it there.

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Those who fall into sin, those who grieve at sin, those who boast in sin. But two centuries later, an

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English pastor was reading this and commented on it further. His name was William Marsh and he said,

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He added perhaps the most important line in that quote. He said this, Only one more thing.

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He that falls into sin is a man. He that grieves at it is a saint. He that boasts in it is a devil. But he that forgives it is

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God. That is God's will. It's to see that His people would be forgiven of their sins.

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Jonah's story demonstrates the saving, sovereign, long -suffering grace of Christ.

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Dear brother and sister, that grace is for us if we believe in Him. That there is no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus.

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That it is as if we have never sinned ever once before. That in Christ we come with His perfect righteousness.

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Salvation belongs to the Lord. And then lastly, we see that Jonah's experience foreshadows the atoning death and resurrection of Christ.

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Jonah was in the belly of that fish for three days and three nights. And for most of us, for all of us who have

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New Testaments, those details shouldn't be lost on us.

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That he was in the belly for three days and three nights. We can actually say with confidence, with the confidence of Scripture and the very words of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, that Jonah is meant. And this time in that whale, in that great fish, in that sea creature, was meant to point us to Christ.

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In the study of typology, we look at all of the different areas in the Old Testament that are types or foreshadows that point to the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And Jonah, by the admission of Scripture, is a type of Christ.

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In Matthew chapter 12 and verse 40, we read this. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the

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Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. When we read about Jonah spending three days and three nights in the fish as the means of his own salvation, it must, it ought to, it needs to remind us and point us to Christ who would spend three days and three nights in the earth, in a borrowed tomb, not for his own salvation, but for our salvation.

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That time in the fish isn't solely a descriptor of Jonah's experience, but it's a descriptor of Christ's experience, that he went into the earth, that he died on the cross, that he was buried, that he was in that buried tomb for our sin, for our rebellion, for the salvation of every one of his elect, for the wretched sin of every man, woman, and child in this room who calls upon the

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Lord Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. And so when we read this text, we should see the consequences of sin.

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We should see that we ought to repent. We should see that God is a saving God, that salvation belongs to Him, that it is

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His will to save. We should see that this text is about Jesus Christ, ultimately.

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And perhaps if you're here and you've come here, and maybe now or maybe at the beginning of the service,

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I'm not sure, you feel like you are Jonah, or maybe you feel like you've been

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Charles Spurgeon, this person living in unrepentant sin. You've been running from God or at best, offering half -hearted obedience to God.

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This is your favorable time to repent. Perhaps the Lord has brought you here today and you're discouraged because of some sin in your life, because of rebellion in your life, because you are not right with God today.

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And what I will do is I'll echo the words of that eccentric Methodist preacher on Artillery Street, Isaiah 45, 22.

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Turn to God and be saved. All the ends of the earth.

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For God says, I am God and there is no other. Salvation belongs to the

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Lord and He is pleased to save all. If you are here and you're not right with Him, He is pleased to save you from sin.

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But you must come to Him. Charles Spurgeon, I'll finish with a quote from him, he says this, he says,

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When a man or woman believes in Christ, and if you're a Christian in this room, this describes you, he is at that moment in God's sight as though he had never sinned in all his life.

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This is the most wonderful thing about the gospel. He does not take away part of our sin.

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Not in part, but the whole of it. He does not remove it partially or for a little time, but He removes our sin from us forever.