Hurled by Grace
Rev. Res Spears
Jonah: The Reluctant Prophet • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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In the past few years, as we’ve met mostly in the Fellowship Hall, I haven’t spent a lot of time coming up with catchy sermon titles.
Not many people see the titles, so I don’t see a good reason to spend time and effort coming up with something creative each week.
But when we’re in the sanctuary, where I can use the projector to show sermon slides, I have to ramp up my game a bit, so I try to work out good sermon titles.
And since we’re looking this week at the verse in the Book of Jonah that describes God graciously causing the big fish to vomit Jonah onto dry land, today’s sermon title is “Hurled by Grace.”
See what I did there?
And as I’ve thought about this sermon the past couple of weeks, I decided to lean into all the euphamisms I could find for vomit.
But I’m going to get it all out of my system right up front, as it were. By the time I’m finished, you might wish I’d been gagged, and some of you might be ready to heave me out the door.
But please bear with me, and don’t throw up your hands in disgust. And whatever you do, please don’t toss cookies at me.
I promise not to spend too much time on this silliness and cause you to blow lunch plans. I promise I’m not just spewing worthless words here; there’s a point to all this wRETCHedness.
And I hope that, by the time we’re done, I’ll have shared some fresh insight into this verse, rather than simply regurgitating all my research to you.
My only regrets are that we don’t have anyone named Ralph here today and that there’s nobody named Charles whom I can ask, “Hey, what’s up, Chuck?”
OK, I’m done. So, what do you think we’re going to be talking about this morning?
Right, we’re going to be talking about the series of 12 spiritual growth indicators as found in the Book of Jonah. OK, and we’ll ALSO talk a bit about a barfing fish and how that points to Jesus.
We’ll review the spiritual growth indicators we’ve seen so far, and then we’ll see the one revealed in today’s verse. Then, we’ll take a broader view of Scripture and see that this disgusting image actually reveals something important to us about our Savior, Jesus Christ.
So, hold onto your seats, because this could be a wild ride, and I’d hate for you to get nauseous.
OK, NOW I’m done. Let’s look at today’s focus verse together, Jonah 2:10.
10 Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land.
Before we dive into today’s text, let’s review the spiritual growth indicators we’ve encountered thus far in our study of the Book of Jonah.
You’ll recall that this account of events in the life of Jonah, the reluctant prophet, teaches us — largely through his negative examples — how we can measure the extent to which each of us is growing spiritually. How we’re growing in Christlikeness. How we’re growing in our walk with Jesus.
Following the outline of Mark Yarbrough’s book, Jonah: Beyond the Tale of a Whale (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), we’ve seen that a life that’s growing spiritually:
Is moving toward God’s commands, not away from them, regardless of the difficulty;
Shows a consistency between words and works;
Exhibits a testimony to the non-believing world, not the other way around;
Acknowledges and responds to the Word of God;
And knows and applies the Word of God.
And, just to remind you about Jonah’s story so far, remember that we’ve left him inside the belly of this great fish for the past couple of weeks, even though God left him there for only three days and three nights.
God had called His prophet to go to Nineveh, the great Assyrian city full of brutal pagans who were enemies of Israel. Jonah was to pronounce a message warning of God’s impending judgment upon that people.
But Jonah hated the Ninevites, so he fled the other direction, boarding a ship bound for Tarshish, just as far as he could go in the opposite direction. He says he was fleeing from the presence of God.
But God is in control of everything in this narrative, and so He sends a violent storm that threatens to sink the ship. And everyone aboard — except for Jonah, the disobedient prophet — prays to his god to save them.
But the storm rages on. So, they cast lots, hoping to determine who’s responsible for this great calamity. And God (He’s in control — remember?) causes the lot to fall on Jonah, who STILL isn’t praying.
Finally, Jonah , who’d rather die than be a part of giving the Ninevites a chance to repent, tells the crew the only way they’ll be saved is to throw him overboard into the Mediterranean Sea.
And in his song of praise, which we read last week, it’s clear that he almost DID die. But in His grace and mercy, God had sent a great fish to swallow Jonah, who then spent three days and nights inside the belly of that fish.
And as much as that might seem to US like an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, Jonah recognized that this big fish was God’s gracious provision to save him.
The fish was simply one stop on the way to getting Jonah back on track to obedience.
So, let’s join Jonah once again, back in the belly of this great fish. It’s dark. Probably cramped. There’s no way for Jonah to brace himself when there’s a change of direction. He just has to hold on the best he can. And the smell is the very worst combination of stomach bile and rotting fish guts.
Is there any wonder that we’re talking about vomit today?
But it’s not Jonah who vomits in this verse, although he could hardly be blamed if he did. In this verse, it’s the FISH that vomits. And he does it on God’s command.
Remember that one of the major themes of this book is the sovereignty of God. HE is in control of what happens in this narrative, just as He is STILL in control today.
He’d prepared the fish for the job of rescuing Jonah from drowning. And now He commands the fish to vomit Jonah onto dry land.
But what had Jonah deserved for His sin of disobedience, for trying to flee from the presence of God? He’d deserved death. After all, the wages of sin is death.
But God is gracious and merciful. As one popular song puts it, He’s the God of second chances. And so, He gives Jonah a second chance to obey His calling.
But the fact is that God could have removed Jonah from the belly of that fish and placed him on dry land in any number of ways. So, why does He command the fish to vomit him up?
Remember that Jonah wasn’t the only one God was teaching through these events. When the prophet shared his story with the unfaithful people of Israel, THEY were to learn many of the same lessons the prophet had learned.
And this word, “vomit,” would have taken their minds right back to the Book of Leviticus.
Now, Leviticus is part of what’s called the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible.
Moses wrote these books to remind the people who were about to enter the Promised Land that God is good and that God is faithful.
He also wanted to encourage them to put their trust in Him and Him alone as they marched across the Jordan River and into the unknown.
He was sending them into the land of Canaan to bring His judgment upon a people whose brutal and terrible sins seemed to have had no end.
And He was sending them to establish a nation whose holiness and faith would serve to attract others to HIM.
But the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Jonah’s home country, had fallen into the same sins as the Canaanites before them.
They were oppressing the weak, just as the Canaanites had done. They were worshiping the same false gods as the Canaanites had. And they were sacrificing their children to those false gods, just as the Canaanites had done before them.
And God used prophets like Jonah to warn the people of Israel that He would not withhold His judgment against them forever.
And He’d warned them about all of this back in the Book of Leviticus. Look at verses 24-28 of chapter 18.
24 ‘Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled.
25 ‘For the land has become defiled, therefore I have brought its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants.
26 ‘But as for you, you are to keep My statutes and My judgments and shall not do any of these abominations, neither the native, nor the alien who sojourns among you
27 (for the men of the land who have been before you have done all these abominations, and the land has become defiled);
28 so that the land will not spew you out, should you defile it, as it has spewed out the nation which has been before you.
Now, the word that’s translated as “spewed out” in these verses is the same one that’s translated as “vomited” back in Jonah 2:10. And it means just that: vomited.
Just as God had caused the violent and pagan Canaanites to be vomited out of Canaan because of their sins, He warns here that He’d cause the land to vomit up the people of Israel if they failed to follow Him in faithful obedience.
And that’s just what they’d done. When the united nation of Israel had split into two competing nations, the Northern Kingdom had almost immediately turned to idolatry.
They incorporated the worship of Baal into their worship of the One True God, Yahweh. And even their worship of Yahweh had been perverted by their desire to do it on their own terms, instead of on God’s terms.
For those of you who are reading through the Bible in a year with me on the Procrastinator’s Bible Plan, we’ll be in the books of 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles in the coming weeks. What you’ll see there is a long account of the kings in both Israel and Judah.
And though you’ll see the occasional good king in Judah — in other words, a king who loved and worshiped the Lord and encouraged the nation to do likewise — there’s not one good king mentioned from the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
All of them turned from the Lord, and the bad examples they set encouraged their people to turn from God, as well.
They’d been unfaithful to Him. So, He was calling them, through the prophet Jonah, to repent for their unfaithfulness.
And the warning was a stark one: If they didn’t repent and turn to God, He would command the land to vomit them up, to spew them out. Which is just what happened to the Northern Kingdom a little less than a hundred years after Jonah wrote this book.
But Jonah would have to learn the lesson himself before he could teach it to his people. And so, instead of some miraculous and gentle escape from the belly of the great fish, we see it spewing Jonah out onto the dry land.
Maybe this was God’s way of saying, “Jonah, you said some really nice things in your song of praise. I really like how you’ve used My own words in your prayer. But didn’t you forget something?”
What HAD Jonah forgotten? Repentance. And maybe he didn’t forget to repent. Maybe he simply didn’t WANT to repent.
Which brings us to this week’s spiritual growth indicator from the Book of Jonah: “A life that’s growing spiritually confesses sin, not pious words of religiosity.” [Mark Yarbrough, Jonah: Beyond the Tale of a Whale, (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), 97.]
Think back to Jonah’s prayer from last week. If you have your Bibles open to the Book of Jonah, scan through his words in verses 2 through 8.
It’s a beautiful prayer. Jonah says all the right things about God. He’s good, He’s merciful, He’s gracious, and salvation comes from Him.
But Jonah had significant unconfessed sin in his life. He needed to confess that sin — to repent from it and turn to God in faithful obedience. But we don’t see any suggestion in his prayer — or in the whole book, for that matter — that he did so.
And so, God had made nasty, lukewarm fish vomit into an object lesson about lukewarm faith.
Lukewarm faith is faith that acknowledges who God is without being changed by that understanding, changed by a personal relationship with Him.
Remember that Jonah had been trying to flee from the presence of God. He knew who God is, and he was grudgingly willing to share that information with the sailors aboard his ship.
But he wasn’t willing to be close enough to God for his hard heart regarding the Ninevites to be CHANGED by that understanding.
Now, perhaps you can see where I’m going with this. I said earlier that I was going to tell you how this verse from the Book of Jonah points us to Jesus.
It’s no coincidence that Jesus uses this same word — vomit — in the letter to the church at Laodicea that He dictated to the Apostle John inn the Book of Revelation.
Let’s look at that passage together. It begins in verse 14 of Revelation, chapter 3.
14 “To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God, says this:
15 ‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot.
16 ‘So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.
The word that’s translated as “spit” in the NASB is actually the Greek word for vomit, and this is the only place in the New Testament where it appears.
The church at Laodicea had become lukewarm in its faith. The people there believed in Jesus. They knew they’d been saved from the just penalty for their sins by the atoning sacrifice and supernatural resurrection of Jesus three days later.
They probably even understood the connection between Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish and Jesus’ three days in the tomb.
And they were satisfied to rest in their salvation. As Jesus puts it in the following verses, they‘d become rich through the gift of salvation.
But simply resting in the riches of salvation isn’t the calling of we who follow Jesus in faith. We’re called to let our works — our deeds — proclaim the living faith that’s within us.
Indeed, the people of the church at Laodicea seem almost smug in Jesus’ description of them. “I am rich and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing.” That’s how Jesus describes their attitude.
They were content to sit on their salvation and simply wait for Jesus to return.
And that’s much the same as Jonah’s attitude. He’d been saved through faith in the promises of God, and he was perfectly satisfied to keep those promises for himself.
In his mind, if there was anybody who should hear about God’s goodness and grace, it surely wasn’t the Ninevites.
So, God had the whale spit him out — vomit him out — as an act of discipline and teaching.
And in the midst of this letter to the Laodicean church, after warning them that their smug, lukewarm and uncaring faith would cause Him to spit them out, Jesus makes the connection to both discipline and repentance. Look at verse 19.
19 ‘Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent.
Make no mistake: This letter was addressed to a group of believers. They’d TURNED to Jesus in true faith. But they weren’t following Him.
They’d simply sat down where He’d found them, content to keep the blessing of salvation for themselves, just like Jonah.
James, the half-brother of Jesus wrote that faith without works is dead faith. And dead faith — lukewarm faith — produces nothing.
But WE are called to abide in Jesus, to abide as branches bearing fruit because of our relationship with Him, the true vine onto which we’ve been grafted.
Have you been content with your own salvation, just sitting there waiting for Jesus to come back and take you to heaven? Have you been content to rest in the promise of eternal life in Christ but unwilling to sit in His presence in THIS life?
Have you accepted the riches of His inheritance while still chasing after the tattered rags the lost world says will bring you happiness?
If so, let me encourage you this morning — before we begin the service of the Lord’s Supper in a few minutes — to repent.
Just as God called the people of Israel to repent. Just as He called Jonah to repent. Just as Jesus called the church at Laodicea to repent.
In a few moments, our musicians will lead us in singing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” I’m going to ask Diana to be ready to hit “play” again at the end of the song, so there may be an instrumental version that follows our singing.
During the singing or the instrumental, I’d like to encourage you to be in prayer about your own faith. Is it lukewarm? Have you been content to just sit and wait for Jesus to return or are you bursting to tell others about Him? Are YOUR works consistent with your words?
Are you, like the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, mixing your love for this world and its false promises into your love for Jesus?
I’d like you to think of the steps to this platform as an altar this morning. You can pray at your seats, but if you’d like to come to the altar to pray, I’d love to come and pray WITH you.
Let’s not be lukewarm Christians. Let’s NOT be like Jonah.
Now, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. This observance is important to the fellowship of the church. It brings us together in a unique way and reminds us that we belong to one another in Christ Jesus.
It reminds us of the love He has for us and the love we’re called to have for one another.
Jesus commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him, as a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him, and as a way of reminding us what He did for us.
The Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests entirely on the sacrifice He made for us and in our place at the cross. It reminds us that our life is in Him.
And the fact that we share bread from one loaf reminds us that we are, together, the one body of Christ. It reminds us that we’re called to unity of faith, unity of purpose, and unity of love.
It reminds us that, just as He gave up the glory He had in heaven, we who’ve followed Him in faith are called to give up any claims we might think we have to our own lives as we follow Him.
Finally, it reminds us that, as we’ve been given the testimony of the Holy Spirit within us, we are to share OUR testimony of salvation by grace through faith. We’re not to be lukewarm Christians, but people who are on fire for the Lord.
If you’re a baptized believer walking in obedience to Christ, I’d like to invite you to join us today as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.
Now, this sacred meal dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.
The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today. But the significance was the same as it is today.
Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.
Let us pray.
26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”
As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.
“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”
Let us pray.
27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you;
28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.
Take and drink.
“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
Maranatha! Lord, come!
Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.
Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”
