Suffering Saints Seek the Savior

seated that Psalm 150 when we put the music together for it we were still using the ESV and and so what we found out when when John MacArthur came out with the LSB and we were looking at things more is that at the end of Psalm 150 it actually says praise Yah instead of Yahweh and so in the English it just says Lord and so you never know which one of those it is if you don't know that. So we're thankful for John MacArthur and his crew and the Legacy Standard Bible, which of course is the Bible I'm now preaching from. So let's dig in.

I'm going to read from Jonah chapter 1, verse 17, down to about verse 7 of chapter 2. And Yahweh appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed to Yahweh his God from the stomach of the fish, and he said, I called out of my distress to Yahweh, and he answered me. I cried for help from the belly of Sheol.

You heard my voice, for you had cast me into the deep. into the heart of the seas, and the current surrounded me. All your breakers and waves passed over me. So I said, I have been driven away from your sight. Nevertheless, I will look again toward your holy temple. Water encompassed me to my very soul. The great deep surrounded me.

Weeds were wrapped around my head. I went down to the base of the mountains, the earth with its bars closed behind me forever. But you have brought up my life from the pit, O Yahweh my God. While my soul was fainting within me, I remembered Yahweh, and my prayer came to you, to your holy temple. It's a reading of God's holy word. This is a kind of a portion of scripture where I feel like we're going to get through a lot of verses at once, which is the opposite of what we did in Jonah 1 at times, because they kind of all go together.

And we could certainly spend a lot of time on some of them. But there's a few themes throughout this. And a couple of things I wanted to point out in this passage to start out was one, that there is a sense here, and we'll see, we saw this, that Jonah went down to Joppa. Jonah went down into the ship, and now Jonah's going down into the sea. And so Jonah's descent is highlighted throughout.

It's down, down, down. And what's neat about it, in his humility, is most people think Jonah probably wrote the book. And so Jonah's very humble, letting us know about his failures. But the belly of the fish becomes, in a sense, a grave for Jonah. He's, for all practical purposes, now he's dead. And some people, I would actually ask you to think this through, if he really died or not even at some point.

But we can talk about that in a minute. But the belly of the fish is like a grave. And that's exactly the imagery that Jesus gives us, when he tells us that Jonah, the sign of Jonah, is the only sign that will be given to this wicked and perverse generation. And that just like Jonah being in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, Jesus would be in the belly of the earth or the grave for three days and three nights before he comes out.

And so when I was reading through this, though, I was asking myself, did Jonah die? I've never heard a preacher say definitively that, well, yes, Jonah actually died and then was brought back to life. I've heard preachers say he certainly was figuratively at least dead and then brought back and spewed onto the shore. But I've never heard anybody really say one way or another.

And I was trying to think about it and figure it out. and I realized that it doesn't say for sure whether he died or not like in in the scripture but it also doesn't say he didn't and one of the things that that hit me was if Jonah lived without ever dying at all it certainly was miraculous and if Jonah died and then was brought back to life it was certainly miraculous so either way whether you will assent that Jonah really died at some point or not. It's just a miracle either way what happened to him with God sustaining him or having raised him up. But for me, when I try to look at things a little bit logically here, and Jonah says things like, the current surrounded me, your breakers and waves passed over me, verse 3.

And then in verse 5, water encompassed me to my very soul. The great deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped around my head. You start to think this sounds pretty, pretty dire. I mean, if you were above water and weeds were wrapped around your head, you could suffocate. But he says this, he says, I went down to the base of the mountains.

And that one there is one of the ones that kind of gets me like, well, he went, he went deep, right? he says the earth with its bars closed behind me forever and he says but you have brought my life from the pit oh yahweh my god and and i And I see that as maybe Jonah went a little further than some of us have thought in the past that maybe he really died and came back to life, just like Jesus. Maybe he really pictured Jesus a little more literally than it's clearly stated. So I wouldn't argue that point with anybody one way or another.

I just find it interesting for people to think that through. certainly if Jonah never died it was a miracle that he survived any of it whatsoever and if Jonah died at some point and then came back to life that's a miracle of God either way but here Jonah is in the belly of the fish and he tells us that he prayed and when Jonah prays I think that there's a lesson for us here because we have we've been looking at Jonah's life and Jonah is a really neat uh Christian guy when we think about it because Jonah is a lot like we are he's very very faithful at times and he says the right things and he does a lot of right things and then Jonah makes the mistakes that frankly we would make too but we have the benefit of reading of Jonah's mistakes. So hopefully some of us avoid them. But Jonah, despite his failures, calls on God in his distress, and he doesn't abandon God completely.

And we would do well to imitate this. So if you remember for a moment, Job's wife, I mean, everybody talks about the faith of Job. Job's wife was there with Job the whole time when all the bad stuff happens in the first two chapters. And if you don't remember, you can go read about it. And Job's wife response to everything that happened was the opposite of Job's praising the Lord.

You know, Job says, you know, shall we receive good from the Lord and not evil too? So I'll praise the Lord no matter what. And his wife says, curse God and die. And so there is a sense here that his wife isn't the focus of the book of Job for sure. But I think we ought to learn from these things. I think we ought to be able to see that there is a response in Scripture of people who, when we read it, if Job's wife is in heaven, I guess we don't have regret once we're in heaven.

But there's got to be some sense of, yeah, I wish I hadn't said that. You know what I mean? But Jonah is a prayerful man. And Jonah also is a biblical man. So if you want to put a finger in Psalm 18, we're going to go back and forth a little bit with Psalm 18 and Jonah, because Jonah does something that we need to do more of. And that is actually pray God's word back to him more than we do.

Now, some of you may be experts at that already. And so I apologize if I have offended you. But I, for one, have found that when I read the prayers in Matthew Henry's prayer book that I've been sharing a lot lately, he wrote a book called Method of Prayer or A Way to Pray, I don't remember which one. And it's all prayers, it's like 200 or 300 pages, and all the prayers are just him having reworded scripture into prayers to God.

And when I pray those prayers, I feel like there's more power there than sometimes when I'm just saying what's on my mind. You know, when you're praying God's word back to him and claiming promises that he has given in his word, it feels better and more powerful. And so Jonah prays from a number of places, if you read the Bible enough. But you can see some similarities in Jonah's words to Psalm 18. and I want to draw your attention to that.

This was a psalm written by David and it was about being delivered from his enemies. Certainly you can read this psalm and you can see the Lord Jesus Christ also speaking through David about being delivered from his enemies. But in Jonah's case, in Jonah 2.2, we see Jonah says, I called out of my distress to Yahweh and he answered me. And in Psalm 18, David wrote, In my distress I called upon Yahweh.

He says, I cried to God for help. He heard my voice out of his temple and my cry for help before him came into his ears. Jonah says, In verse 4, Nevertheless, I will look again toward your holy temple. Jonah 2, 4. And then he says in verse seven, I remembered Yahweh and my prayer came to you to your holy temple. There's just this sense and it's kind of a mishmash.

It's not like Jonah. Jonah's prayer is verse two corresponding with with verses in chapter 18. It's kind of back and forth a little bit. But you can see that Jonah was a man that knew the scripture. because the Jonah is easy to pick on, right? I mean, anyone could start a sermon series tomorrow and they could call it Don't Be a Jonah and you could have a lot of pretty good content, right?

Jonah made a lot of mistakes. But you know how many of us, if trapped in the bottom of the sea in the belly of a fish, would immediately begin being able to pray to God and then praying his word back to him that we've evidently memorized because I promise you Jonah didn't have a scroll with him. And if he did, he didn't have light. In Jonah 2.3, Jonah said, The current surrounded me in the second part of it He says All your breakers and waves passed over me You turn back to Psalm 18 verse 4 Eerily similar language.

The cords of death encompassed me and the torrents of vileness terrified me. I feel like it's clear Jonah is quoting Psalm 18. in Psalm 42 you can keep your finger in Psalm 18 not going to spend a lot of time in Psalm 42 but in Psalm 42 verse 7 we have another similarity deep calls to deep at the sound of your waterfalls all your breakers and your waves have rolled over me It's the same language. I think when one person in Scripture refers to Scripture, so like when Jesus says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Most people understand, well, that's a reference to Psalm 22. Jesus is pointing us to a messianic psalm where we get to read about his experience on the cross. and when Jonah I think refers to Psalm 42 and Psalm 18 we can do the same thing so you can go to Psalm 42 and you can read more verses like as the deer pants for the water brooks so my soul pants for you oh God my soul thirsts for God for the living God when shall I come and appear before God my tears have been my food day and night I generally like to think that three days and three nights in the belly of a whale, Jonah's prayer was more than eight verses long. I tend to think maybe Jonah prayed all of Psalm 42.

Maybe he prayed more of Psalm 18. That he had these same feelings that he's pointing us to other scriptures that in their broader context, we start to see the types of feelings Jonah would have been having. So back to Jonah 2, 4. he says, I have been driven away from your sight. Nevertheless, I will look again toward your holy temple. Psalm 18, verse 6.

In my distress, I called upon Yahweh and cried to my God for help. He heard my voice out of his temple. And then in Psalm 18, 4, we see that cords of death encompassed me. In Jonah 2, 5, water encompassed me to my very soul, the great deep surrounded me. Jonah, I think the lesson that we, one lesson we get here is we should memorize scripture. We should know scripture.

And we should be able to recall it in our direst moments. That's your only hope. Your difficulties that you face, that's when you're going to need these things. That when life is easy, you actually have the time and energy to work out. You're not going to memorize the Psalms when you're going through the trial. You understand?

It's when life is a little easier that you're going to have time and even energy to do some of those things. Secondly, we're unashamedly Calvinistic in this church, but in this room, I would say, as well. In fact, one of the main people that brought me into understanding that is here today. Praise the Lord. And but yet one of the things people say about Calvinism or the doctrines of grace, that is what is called a straw man, where they say something about it that's not quite true so that they can argue against it. is people will say that Calvinists don't believe that men have responsibility for believing on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Because what will we say? We'll say there's an effectual calling whereby God calls sinners to himself. And no sinner can come to him unless the Father draws him. And all that the Father draws and gives to the Son will eventually come to the Son. And he will no wise cast them out. And so we believe these things.

And so you can easily see how salvation is of the Lord. Salvation is of the Lord. We believe that. That it is God who regenerates and it's God who saves souls. It's God who predestines. It's God who elects.

It's all a work of grace that any of us are ever saved. Yet, the scripture is utterly clear that we must come to him. Now, we know we can't come to him if he doesn't draw us first. But you must personally believe in him. You must personally trust in Christ as your Savior. And at the moment that decision is made, it is actually you making that decision.

Now, a whole lot of things had to happen for you to be able to make that decision. And you had to be granted the faith in the first place. We understand that. But Jonah displays for us this level of faith that even in the belly of the fish, he's seeking God. Now, when he was on the ship, he wasn't seeking God, right? When he got to the sign that said Nineveh this way and Joppa this way, we know that he took the wrong turn.

So he wasn't seeking God's will at that moment. But here's Jonah. And at this point in time, he is seeking God. God affectionately calls and his powerful providence provokes sinners. That's true. But his children come to him willingly.

He makes our souls pant for him like the deer pants for the water. Jonah was called, but him being responsible for coming to God and praying to God is in display here. Next point I want to make from Jonah 4, 2-4. Jonah says in his prayer and I remind you if I was making a comic strip with Bible stuff which is probably inappropriate to do I would probably make a comic strip about Jonah because he one of the funnier characters with his thinking sometimes I'm thinking of comic strips because Wesley was reading Charles Schultz this week.

And Jonah says in chapter two, verse four, I have been driven away from your sight. Nevertheless, I will look again toward your holy temple. There's a lamentation here. Jonah has been driven away from the sight of God. And my question I ask is, isn't that what he wanted? Wasn't that the whole point of the first chapter?

Jonah is going to flee from the presence of God. Jonah's going to flee from the presence of God. He gets on the ship to go to Tarshish. The mariners are there. These guys don't care who God is anyway. They don't care who Jonah is.

And somehow he even lets them know, I'm fleeing the presence of Yahweh. And some people think he told them that even before they cast the lots. It was just part of the conversation. Jonah's whole goal in life was, I want to be out of the sight of God. And then when he gets what he wants, what he finds out is it's not what he really wants. Sometimes it feels like we wish God weren't so near.

And when we feel that type of feeling, what that is, is it's an indicator of your sinfulness that you still have. Some of you are still dead in your sin in this room. Maybe somebody's listening to this and they're still dead in their sin. And so the thought of the presence of God should be utterly terrifying. the fact that you're not fully in his glorious presence right now suffering the punishment of eternal hell is by his mercy and forbearance and so we call people to repent and believe and trust in christ as a savior at this point but if you're a christian and you are regenerated and you still carry this dead flesh around with you that hates you and hates god and loves to sin and yet you have a spirit and a soul that's been changed and regenerated and now you love God and you love the things God loves and you hate the things that God hates and you wake up in the morning and you can say with the Roman seven guy oh why do I do the things that I do right I hate it I hate these things I do and I find myself even if you're not one of these people that's outwardly committing abominations all the time don't you know in your own mind sometimes you hate the thoughts you have And there's some part of you that you're wishing for Christ to come and take you home.

And it's not just because your elbow and your knees are starting to hurt more and more. It's because you really would like to be free from the presence of sin. That's a good Christian attitude to have. But Jonah feels very far from God at this point because God has a way of not abandoning his children, But he has a way of letting his children drift away to experience some of the results of their own choices and their own desires that they might seek him.

Calvin says, hence, Jonah thought that he was wholly, W-H-O-L-L-Y, wholly alienated from God. Now, were any to object and say then that his faith must have been extinct, the obvious answer is that in the struggle of faith there are internal conflicts. Calvin says one thought is suggested and then another of an opposite character meets it. There would indeed be no trial of our faith except there were such internal conflicts. for when with appeased minds we can feel assured that God is propitious to us, what is the trial of faith?

So Calvin's saying, faith isn't very much when everything's going your way. And I think we all have seen that, especially in the United States, where everything's been pretty easy for the church for a long time. There was an old saying, I probably won't quote it exactly, But somebody said to a Chinese pastor once, I guess, isn't it so hard to do church in China because of the persecution?

And apparently his response was, well, it's actually really nice because we know who the Christians are. Unlike the United States. But so he says, when God's propitious to us, what is the trial of faith? But when the flesh tells us that God is opposed to us and that there is no more hope of pardon, faith at length sets up its shield and repels this onset of temptation and entertains hope of pardon.

Whenever God for a time appears implacable, then faith indeed is tried. So here's Jonah. He's really, really committed an abomination. He's he's an appointed prophet of God. Calvin thinks Jonah would have already been a successful and accomplished prophet, a very faithful man to this point to have even been given such a task. And now he's completely failed.

He failed in front of the mariners. And now he's in the bottom of the sea, he's in the belly of a fish. She has no idea why. And if you're Jonah for a moment, there has to be some part of you that wonders, well, maybe this is it. Maybe I'm on my way to hell. And yet his faith grabs a hold of God and God's promises that it's God's mercy that will save you.

And it's God's mercy that would save Jonah. Now, this is a miracle. you There's a few miracles in Jonah. The storm's a miracle, Jonah living in the belly of the fish is a miracle, the plant and the worm are miracles later. And yet, I read one commentator that said, nobody argues about the other miracles, it's just this one they don't like. The one that's the picture of Jesus Christ dying and raising again, that's the one that people argue, well, it couldn't have happened.

And people come up with all sorts of ideas, right? Like, oh, well, there's this fish called the dogfish. And I read all this stuff. And it was just such a waste of time. Like, who cares if there's a fish that we could prove scientifically was big enough to swallow a man and had enough room inside to hold him? I mean, if you want to argue about Pinocchio, you could.

God could pick any fish he wanted to put Jonah in. And he could preserve Jonah's life through it. The whole thing's a miracle. Now, I'm not saying you don't try to figure things out. I appreciate the work of the Ark Encounter people, and they've shown how the Ark could hold animals, you know. But even with the Ark, I mean, God could do whatever he wanted.

But in Jonah's case, he was sustained by a miracle. But not only is this a miracle, which miracles are for our edification, so that your faith will be built up. I mean, miracles are also for the judgment of the wicked. It's also a type. in 1 Corinthians 15 4 we're going to look at a couple passages now to remind us but this is a very important event in history Paul says for I delivered to you in verse 3 1 Corinthians 15 3 for I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received that Christ died for our sins he says according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.

And we've quoted that and we believe it and we say it. And yet if you go up to the average Christian and say, tell me where in the scriptures it said this was going to happen. I don't know who can tell you. Because there isn't a verse in the Old Testament that says, oh, by the way, my Messiah is going to die, be buried three days and raise again. It's not the way it's ever phrased.

But Jesus said that the wicked and perverse generation that was demanding a sign from him to prove that he was deity and to prove he was the Messiah would not be given a sign except for the sign of Jonah And what was the sign of Jonah Other than one man dying to save the rest of the other to abate the wrath of God that was going on at the time So that that one man would then die. The wrath of God's abated. And then that man is brought back from the belly of the earth.

That's what happened to Jesus. And that's what happened to Jonah. And so Jonah is the scripture that Jesus fulfills. There's more scriptures, too. If you read through the Old Testament, there's more and more scriptures that you'll see that predict that things are going to happen to the Messiah. That things are going to happen to God's suffering servant one day.

That when you read them on the surface, they're not always really clear what it could be meaning. The Ethiopian eunuch, when he was reading about Jesus in the book of Isaiah, he asked Philip, well, was this about the writer or is this about someone else? And Philip explains to him that Isaiah 53 is in fact about Jesus Christ. In Luke 24, I just want to remind you of this.

Jesus says in verse 45, there's a lot more than he says here. Well, 44. Now he said to them, day. I'd argue that Jonah's rising again on the third day from at the very least a figurative death is in fact at least one of the things Jesus is pointing to. In Psalm 16 verse 10 Peter quotes this psalm in his sermon chapter 2 of Acts and he He applies it to Jesus Christ.

He says in verse 10, Psalm 16, For you will not forsake my soul to Sheol or to the place of the dead. You will not give your Holy One over to see corruption It is predicted that the Holy One would not be abandoned by God in the place of the dead Now, I would not read that verse in and of itself and think, oh, well, that's an obvious reference to resurrection. But now with New Testament glasses, we can kind of understand that, I think.

So Jonah's miraculous descent into the bottom of the sea. not only, I think, is a type of Christ, and I think Jesus Christ makes that clear, but Jonah also is, he's a type of the church, or maybe a type of us, or maybe he's just an example for us, depending on how you want to use some of these ideas. But what I mean to say is that Jonah's response ought to be our response. So now Jonah was suffering for his own sin.

Jesus wasn't suffering for his own sin. But sometimes we suffer. sometimes because of our own sin and poor choices. Sometimes we suffer because of other people. Sometimes we are more like Christ than, you know, we're really not like him in a lot of ways because he's holy and he was perfect. But sometimes we're the innocent one and somebody else in our life is committing sin or we'll say even abominations or atrocities. and they're doing something that's so horrible that there's great suffering that comes upon us.

That happens. Everybody in here, at least over the age of 12, I think, can probably think of a time it's happened to them. And maybe there's been times you've been the bad guy. But rather than the storms of difficulties and the trials that we're experiencing being seen as evidence of God's judgment or abandonment, Authentic faith will grab a hold of these things as evidence of both his love and his promise of ultimate deliverance.

So the concern that you have as a pastor for people who are Christian is, I want them to persevere to the end. Now, I know you're going to persevere to the end if God truly saves you. I get that. But part of what we encourage people with is assurance. and one of the greatest killers of assurance are trials in your life people experience difficulties and then they say well i just stopped believing in god after this happened my my kid died of cancer my husband cheated on me There story after story that we have heard over the centuries of people who had the same faith as us, they will say.

And then some event occurred that suddenly changed that faith from believing that God is good and God is righteous altogether and he's sovereignly always doing the right things toward his elect and for his own glory. And suddenly that faith changed to, nah, that's not the God for me anymore because something happened that that person disagreed with. Authentic faith, though, will grab a hold of the difficulties in your life and rather than see them as the abandonment of God or the lack of God's love toward you, but it will help you to see that it's part of how he's promised to show that he loves you.

Trials are designed by God to draw his children closer to him while driving the wicked away from him. Suffering is like an amplifying steroid that softens a soft heart and further hardens a hard heart. So think about for a second, when you squeeze fruit, you get the juice that's inside it, right? If I squeeze a lemon, what am I getting? Lemon juice. Whatever's inside is what's coming out.

When God squeezes a person through trials, what comes out of their mouth and what their behavior is like is indicative of what's inside them. Trials test our faith, but unlike the wicked, our faith is tried in a purifying way. Suffering removes from us the dross and impurity that clings so closely to us. Tribulations, toils, dangers, and snares show us how we are still dependent upon worldly comfort for our contentment.

They show us how we trust in our own strength for our sanctification and how created things continue to be the source of our joy. God is the only one who can truly give us comfort, joy, and spiritual strength. So praise him and thank him that he will not let us endure long without truly knowing this ourselves experientially. and I exhort you to seek him while he still may be found.

The temple veil has been rent. We have access through the spotless blood of the lamb. Amen. I'm going to open the room up for the men to pray.