“A Small God!” – FBC Morning Light (12/11/2023)

Well a good Monday morning to you. Hope you had a wonderful weekend and a good second Sunday of Advent. Probably got to sing some Christmas carols yesterday, I trust. Looking forward to the celebration of our Savior's birth.

The Beginning of Jonah and the Reading Plan

Well today in our Bible reading plan we're starting, we're really winding down our reading through the Bible this year. We're in the book of Jonah, beginning Jonah today, reading Jonah chapters 1 and 2, and then in the New Testament, Revelation chapter 8, I want to focus on a couple things that we see in the first chapter of Jonah.

That story is very well known, don't need to elaborate on it. Everybody who's been in church from the time they were knee-high to a hymnal has heard the story of Jonah and the whale. But what I want to just emphasize, first of all, is just how small a view of God that Jonah had.

Jonah's Small View of God

Now Jonah was the Lord's prophet. The Lord had used him in other places, in other settings, and the Lord came to him in the first, second verse of chapter 1 and says to him, go, arise, go to Nineveh and cry out against it.

The wickedness has come up before me. So this is a very clear command that the Lord has given to Jonah, and Jonah doesn't want to do it. He doesn't want to do it because Nineveh, capital city of the Assyrian Empire, is Israel's enemy.

He doesn't want to spend any time dealing with Israel's enemy, so he has this notion in verse 3 that he's going to go in the opposite direction. Verse 3 says, but Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish, but then this statement, from the presence of the Lord.

So Jonah's idea of who God is and the magnitude of who God is, is very deficient, isn't it? He has seemingly bought into the theology of the culture, theology of the time, that said that gods were territorial, that Israel's God, Jehovah, Yahweh, was limited in his observation, his control, his power, his authority over a particular geographical region, and if only Jonah can get away from that region, then he can get away from the presence of the Lord, that the Lord is not going to pay any attention to him if he gets on a ship and heads out, heads west into the Mediterranean Sea.

Well, that's the farthest thing from the truth and farthest from an accurate perception of God. Later on, of course, we understand that Jonah comes to his senses a bit when he acknowledges that his God is the God who created the heavens and the earth and created the sea, so there he is in the middle of the sea, and still he cannot flee from the presence of God.

That's, of course, an important principle for all of us to learn and understand and live by, that there's nowhere we can go from the presence of the Lord. Everywhere we go, he is there, everywhere. So we need to be sure that we abandon any notion like Jonah had, that God is somehow territorial, that even when I go to work in the morning, he's not there, he's only with me when I'm at church, and that kind of thing.

God's Sovereign Grace in the Great Fish

So that was one thing I wanted to point out. The other is that there's an interesting point where, you know, Jonah...there's a storm that comes up on the sea, Jonah acknowledges that the God he serves is the God who made heaven and earth, the sea, and so forth, and the sailors say, well, what are we going to do to get rid of this storm, to stop this storm?

Jonah says, you got to throw me into the sea. That's the only thing you can do. Well, they reluctantly avoid that as long as they possibly can. They try to get rid of everything else to save the ship, but nothing works.

So finally, they pick Jonah up and they throw him into the sea, and there's this interesting point in verse 17, where the verse says, now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. The verb tense is very important there, isn't it?

The Lord had prepared this great fish. Of course, it's probably been pointed out to you many times that nowhere does the Bible say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't.

The Bible doesn't say that. What it does say is that the Lord prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. Was it a one-off kind, a one-off thing? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. But what I wanted to emphasize is the fact that the Lord, in his omniscience and his sovereign grace, he knew what Jonah would do.

He knew that when he came to Jonah and said, go to Nineveh, that Jonah was going to go the other way. He knew that. He knew that he would get on a ship. He knew he would go out into the sea, to the Mediterranean, and the Lord knew all that ahead of time.

The Lord knew that he was going to send a great storm upon the sea. The Lord knew that the sailors would want to know how to appease the wrath of this God, and the Lord knew that they would pick him up and throw him into the sea.

The Lord knew what Jonah would tell him. This is what you got to do to pacify the wrath of the God who made the sea. You've got to throw me into the sea. I've disobeyed, I've rebelled against him. The Lord knew all of that, and in his omniscient, sovereign grace, he exercised his omnipotence by creating this great fish, or seeing to it that, this great fish that he had prepared was at that place, at that time, so that when Jonah entered the sea, the fish was there, ready to swallow him up.

I say that this is the Lord's sovereign grace, because did Jonah deserve to be preserved from death in the sea? Absolutely not. If he got what he deserved, he would have perished, and he would have been eaten by the sharks.

But God, in his sovereign grace, prepared this great fish to swallow Jonah, and to keep him alive in the belly of that fish for three days and three nights, until Jonah came to this place of humble repentance and submission to the will of God.

What a great God we serve, that he knows ahead of time what we're going to need, when we're going to need it, and in his sovereign grace, his omniscience, and his omnipotence, he provides just what we need.

A Prayer of Thanksgiving and Blessing

Our Father and our God, we thank you for who you are. We thank you that you are far bigger than we, in our imagination, sometimes think. We thank you for your power, for your authority, for your wisdom, and for your grace.

We thank you that we can count on that to provide what we need, even in our times of straying and wandering away. Thank you for who you are, in Jesus' name, Amen. I hope your week gets off to a great start.

Have a good Monday. May the Lord bless you in it.