Sermon: Salvation Belongs to the LORD

As we come now to hear from God's word, I invite you to turn in your Bibles to the Book of Jonah, page 774, if you're using the Bible in the pew. If you're using your own Bible, it is right after Amos and the short little book of Obadiah. If you get to Micah or Nahum, gone a little bit too far. Today, we are coming to the third in a five-part series through this book. And before we look at our text for today, Jonah 2,

would you please pray with me, asking for God's help?

Father, with the psalmist, we pray, we entreat your favor with all of our heart. Be gracious to us according to your promise. As we think on your ways, would you turn our feet to your testimonies. Lord, the earth is full of your steadfast love. Would you teach us your statutes? As we look into your word, would you make us wise? Would you grant us life? Would you give us delight in that which you have revealed about yourself?

We ask these things in the powerful name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Listen now as I read Jonah 2, for this is the very word of God. "Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, 'I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight;

yet I shall look again upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of

steadfast love. But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord.' And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land."

Encourage you to keep your Bibles open as we work our way through this passage. We're going to refer back to the text frequently, and don't really want you to pay attention to anything that I say, unless it is in those words that we just read. I want to give you a quick idea of how we are going to explore this chapter this morning. We're going to begin by working our way through the chapter as a whole, verse by verse, to understand what is going on, and then we're

going to conclude by considering three truths that this chapter highlights about God. First, let us look at the passage as a whole. As a reminder of where we are, Jonah is a bit of a surprising character in that he is a prophet of God who is rebellious and disobedient. The story is familiar, I'm sure, to many of you, and you will recall that God told Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and to preach there. Jonah instead boarded a ship in the opposite direction.

And while sailing, the ship encountered a violent storm, which God had sent in response to Jonah's disobedience. And so chapter one ends with the sailors throwing Jonah overboard as a means of their own survival, and God appointing a fish to come and swallow Jonah. So as we come to chapter two, Jonah is inside the belly of this fish, and it is this fairly extraordinary underwater dwelling that is the setting for almost our entire chapter, until the very end

where Jonah is fairly ignobly released back to dry land. Verse one of chapter two tells us that from within the belly of this fish, Jonah prays. In chapter one, the pagan sailors had implored Jonah to cry out to his God in the midst of the storm. We don't have any record of him doing so, but now he prays, and his prayer will occupy most of this chapter. It is a very poetic prayer with an almost psalm-like quality. We'll

look at some of that comparison here in a few minutes. It's unclear whether Jonah composed this song or poem in the belly of the fish, or if it was how he later recounted and summarized what he was praying and what was going on during those three days and three nights. I kind of like picturing him deciding, "I have time. I'm going to write a poem while I'm here." But you can picture it either way. Either way, it is clearly a prayer of

thanksgiving to his God. The content of the prayer begins in verse two, as Jonah retells that he called out to the Lord in the midst of his distress, and that the Lord answered. We don't really have a record of what exactly Jonah's cry to the Lord contained. We don't know if or how much he acknowledged and confessed of his sin and rebellion. We don't know if or how much he asked of God. We don't know if he just simply said, "Help."

But what we do know is that he called out in the midst of his distress. He cried out from the belly of Sheol. Sheol being the place of death. And that as he did so, God heard, and God answered.

Seems clear that in Jonah's mind, the reason that he is in the belly of a fish instead of the belly of death right now is because God heard his cry.

In verse three, Jonah paints a vivid picture of the distress that he was in that caused him to cry out. God had cast him into the deep sea, where he was surrounded by water on every side, even above him as the waves crashed over him. I don't think it takes much imagination for most of us to imagine the distress of such a circumstance as he paints this word picture for us. In verse four, Jonah continues to describe his

distress. This time, rather than focusing on his physical surroundings, he focuses on the spiritual reality of his distress. Not only was he cast into the sea, he was cast away from God. He was driven from the sight of God. Jonah here acknowledges that behind all of the turmoil he is encountering is the fact that his relationship with his creator has been severed. The face of God did not shine upon him in grace and blessing, but he was

driven out of God's presence, out of the sight of God. This is an even greater distress than the physical trial of floundering in the water. This has eternal consequences. So here in verse four, things are bad for Jonah. They're bad physically, and they're bad spiritually.

And it is just at this point, incredibly, that a ray of light shines into Jonah's prayer as he makes his first shift from distress to hope. Yet, things are bad, but this isn't the end of the story. "I am cast into the sea, driven from the sight of God, yet I shall look again upon your holy temple." This idea of sight and seeing. God does not see me now, but I have confidence that I will one day see Him. I will one day look upon Him

again.

We're going to see this idea of the temple show up again in a couple verses, but as we move into verses five and six, we see that this flash of hope was fairly short-lived. His sight returns to his circumstances and the distress in which he finds himself. The waters are closing in upon him. He is surrounded by the deep. The weeds are entangling themselves around his head. If you have ever gone swimming in a lake, you may have had the experience

of your feet or legs running into the weeds that are coming up from the bottom. It's not usually pleasant. Most of the people I know kind of try to draw their feet up.

Jonah has sunk to the depths, where the weeds are wrapping around his head, entangling him. He has descended to the very roots of the mountains, down to the place where the bars of the prison of death are threatening to close upon him forever.

I want to just make a note here real quick that so far in the Book of Jonah, Jonah's movements have been in a downward direction. In chapter one verse three, he went down to Joppa. Chapter one verse five, he went down into the inner part of the boat and laid down to sleep. And then he was thrown down into the sea, where he has been sinking down lower and lower, and now finds himself descended to the very point of death.

"Yet," in verse six, that little word shows up again and brings with it the glimmer of hope. Yet, at this lowest of lows, again he shifts to hope as he is, for the first time in the book, brought upward. "Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God!" God raises him up out of the pit that he is in, even though he is in there by his own doing. His rebellion has brought him low, but God's steadfast love will raise

him back up. Verse seven continues this hopeful tone. As his life was slipping away, Jonah remembered the Lord, cried out in his distress, and his prayer came to the Lord in His temple. We've already encountered the temple in verse four. Again, here we have this temple imagery, and it is, again, an imagery of being raised upward. The temple in Israel was on the holy hill. It was a place that the people would ascend to, even declaring as they journeyed to the temple in the words of Psalm 121,

"I lift my eyes up. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth." And now Jonah, in the depths of the sea, his prayer from the depths of despair rise up to God's holy temple and come to God himself. And therefore, Jonah has hope.

Before we go on to verses eight through 10, I want to pause for a minute, a couple of minutes. I want to draw your attention to something that shows up in Jonah's prayer, but is perhaps a little bit more subtle. I want to draw your attention to the language of this prayer of Jonah's. Particularly, I want to see how much of Jonah's prayer echoes the Psalms. I already mentioned that Jonah's prayer is structured poetically and can feel

somewhat Psalm-like. I want you to see just how much the language of his prayer actually borrows from the Psalms. I want you to compare some of the verses in Jonah 2 with some of these Psalms. Compare verse two with Psalm 120. "In my distress, I called to the Lord, and he answered me." Or compare verse three with Psalm 42 and 69. "Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

I have come to deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me." Compare verse four to Psalm 31. "I had said in my alarm, 'I am cut off from your sight.' But you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cried to you for help." Or verses two, four, six, and seven as I read Psalm 18. "The cords of death encompassed me; the torrents of destruction assailed me. The cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me. In my distress

I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears." As we move forward, we're going to see verse nine echo Psalm 116. "I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people." As well as Psalm three, the only other place in the scriptures where we see this phrase, "Salvation

belongs to the Lord."

I want you to see that Jonah clearly knew the Psalms. For all of his rebellion and fleeing from God, for all of his complication as a prophet and trying to understand what his relationship with God is, he was not ignorant of God or of God's Word. And when he found himself in trouble, the Word of God is what came pouring out as he prayed in his distress. I want to think about this for just another minute or two. As I was reading through these verses this week, I kept thinking of

Christian in John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." At one point, Christian and his friend Hopeful leave the path they have been told to stay on, and they find themselves locked up in the dungeon of Doubting Castle. There, they spiral into hopelessness, with death seeming like their only way out. And as their life is fainting away, they pray, and suddenly, Christian remembers that he has a key in his bosom, which is called

Promise, and which will unlock any door in Doubting Castle. Bunyan's fictional account mirrors Jonah's real-life experience. For Jonah, as his life was fainting away, he prays, and he remembers the Lord. And at least one of the keys that seems to have helped him to remember the Lord and to escape despair and to turn to hope Was his knowledge of God's word, and specifically of the Psalms.

I want you to just take a minute. Put yourself in Jonah's position, or think of Christian in "Hopeful." You are in distress. You don't know the outcome. The darkness is overwhelming. Death seems like your only way out. Some of you probably don't have to do very much imagining to get there. What do you have with you to help you remember the Lord? Do you have the word of God hidden in your heart? Are you equipping yourself with promises for the day when you

face despair? Would the overflow of your heart help you to remember God, or are you filling your heart and mind with useless things? I fully recognize it is highly unlikely any of you end up for three days in the belly of a fish or in the dungeon of a castle, but you will encounter distress, and you will have to face troubling circumstances that will threaten to overwhelm you, which you will not be able to face in your own strength.

Some of you are in such waters even right now. Prepare for such moments by reading and memorizing and meditating on God's word today, hiding His word and His promises in your heart, that they may help you to remember the Lord when you feel yourself fainting away. Jonah was fading away towards death, and he remembered the Lord, and he remembered the word of the Lord. All right. That ends our pause. We're going to continue now and move on

to verses eight and nine as we continue to work our way through Jonah chapter two. As we come to these verses, Jonah moves away from a focus on his present circumstances to a declaration of truth. He begins by stating that those who pay regard to vain idols, literally the term is they that keep vain lies, they forsake mercy. Those who would look to anything other than God, who would trust in anything other than God, they are giving up the steadfast love of God, and

thus they are abandoning and forsaking hope.

I do not believe that this is primarily a warning or a proclamation against those foreign people who would chase after false gods in Jonah's day, although certainly this would be true of them. They would not have the steadfast love of God or the hope that would accompany that. But I think this particularly has God's people in mind, those who have a claim to the steadfast love of God, but give it up, abandon it, to chase after vain

idols. This is where Jonah had found himself as one of the people of God, who had a claim to the steadfast love of God,

but who had forsaken that and forsaken hope, and he testifies here that it is folly.

He then contrasts such foolishness with where he is at now.

As I've already mentioned, as we go through the book, we'll continue to see that Jonah is a complicated person. He's a complicated prophet. There are still ups and downs ahead of him. There's much debate about how repentant he was or how sincere he was. But it is clear that here there is some change in him. He has seen and can acknowledge the foolishness of his ways. He responds rightly to God with sacrifices of thanksgiving,

with commitment to obedience, and with praise. His response echoes Psalm 116, as we've already seen. It also echoes the sailors' response in chapter one verse 16, where they offer sacrifices and make vows.

We don't know exactly what Jonah promised to God or what his vow was, but from what comes next, it seems that he vowed that he would do what God asked in the future if he was given a chance, and this promise was as a response of gratitude to God. Jonah was thankful. Which again, is a little bit remarkable because as of yet, he was thankful even though he didn't know what the future held. One commentator summarized his situation this way: "Jonah

was not thankful that God had delivered him from the fish because God had not yet delivered him. He was not thankful that God was going to deliver him, because he had no idea what God was going to do. What he was thankful for was that God had turned him from rebellion and had caused him to call on the name of the Lord once again." Jonah was thankful that God had not forsaken him, and it is with this miraculous work in mind that

Jonah expresses his thanksgiving and concludes his prayer with praise by declaring, "Salvation belongs to the Lord." That is, salvation is the right property only of God. It is His domain. There are not many valid claims to access to God. God owns the mountain of salvation. It is His, and it is His alone. In God and God alone is salvation found. Salvation Belongs to the Lord. This is the climax and the final word of Jonah's prayer. His concluding statement,

"Salvation belongs to the Lord."

As we move forward into verse 10, we now have God speaking instead of Jonah. God sends forth his word to the fish, giving a command, and this creature, in contrast to the prophet, obeys. And the chapter concludes with Jonah, having spent three days and three nights inside the fish, being expelled out of the sea and on to dry land.

There are many things that we could discuss from this chapter. There are a number of questions that linger about what exactly Jonah's call of distress contained and how much Jonah was repentant or not. We didn't even begin to look at the logistics of what it would mean for a human being to live inside of a fish for three days. These are fine questions to ask and think about, but I do want us to be careful to not let those things that the word of God is silent

on, or would be reading between the lines, to cause us to miss or to neglect those things which are clearly revealed. So there are a number of things that are very clearly communicated in this chapter. What I want us to do with the rest of our time is I want us to look at three truths about God that Jonah 2 highlights, and I want to consider how each of them should move us to cry out to God as Jonah did. Here are the three truths I want us to quickly

take a look at. One, we cry out to God because He is a God who rules. Two, we cry out to God because He is a God who hears. And three, we cry out to God because He is the God who saves. Because we have already seen the big picture, I think we can explore these truths relatively quickly. God is a God who rules, God is a God who hears, God is a God who saves. First, we cry out to God because He is a God who rules. Jonah 2 is structured in such a way as to make it abundantly

clear who is in control. It's framed on the one side by chapter 1:17, with God appointing a great fish to come and swallow Jonah. It's framed on the other side in verse 10 of chapter 2, with God telling the fish to expel Jonah upon dry land. God tells the fish when to swallow Jonah. God tells the fish when to vomit him back up. In addition, Jonah acknowledges in verse 3 that even though he was the one who told the sailors to throw him over, and even though it was they who did so,

ultimately, the one behind it all was God. He is the one that has cast Jonah into the sea, and Jonah himself testified in chapter 1, "God is the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. And He rules over it, all of it, including the wind and the sea, and even the fish of the sea." This can be a hard thing to wrestle with. If God rules over all things, then when we find ourselves in distress, it means that He is both the one that has brought that distress as well as

the one to whom we must turn in our distress. Therefore, it can be easy to fluctuate, as Jonah did, between faith and fear, as at times we're overwhelmed by our circumstances, and at times, we remember the Lord. But Jonah demonstrates that God's sovereign rule should be a great encouragement.

What would happen if Jonah had simply been left to the laws of nature? You go overboard in the middle of the sea, in the middle of a violent storm, you die. The waves don't make choices. They don't decide one way or the other.

But the God who rules intervened. And so Jonah displays what God declared in 2 Samuel 24.

David had sinned against God. He was given a choice of punishments: three years of famine, three months of military defeat, or three days of God bringing pestilence on the land. And David chooses rightly, and God acknowledges the rightness of David's choice when David chooses the third option and declares, "I am in great distress. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercy is great, but let me not fall into the hands of man."

When we consider that God rules over all things, we recognize that Jonah did not fall into the hands of man or of chance or of natural law. He fell into the hands of the Lord, and that was a mercy. So we cry out to God because He is a God who rules. He is the one who can act. He is the one who can do something about the circumstances or the distress in which we find ourselves. Second, we cry out to God because He is a God who

hears. Jonah cried out to God, and God answered. Jonah's prayer reached the very temple of God. To some of us, this might seem self-evident. This is just what God does. He always listens to His people when they cry out to Him. I want to not brush by too quickly, and I want to think about it here for a minute. Jonah had run away from God's direct command. He had disobeyed God. He had fled from God. He had put the lives of others at risk.

He had shown that he would rather die than obey God, and now he finds himself in trouble because of his own doing, and so he cries out to God, even though it seems that he was unwilling to do that in chapter 1.

What would your response be if Jonah had come to you for help? Has he lost his chance? Has he made his bed, and now he has to sleep in it? It would be hard to blame God if that was His response, but remarkably and mercifully, when Jonah finally does cry out in his distress, when he calls out to God, God hears, and God answers. Jonah's life was fainting away. He was sinking to death, and in desperation, he called out, and God heard from His throne in the temple, and

God responded.

Some of you may feel that you or maybe someone you know are too far gone. You don't dare to cry out to God. You know He wouldn't listen to the likes of you. Maybe you feel that you need to get your life on track before you reach out to God, that God would hear and answer Jonah, who had no reason to hope or expect such a response ought to be an encouragement to you to cry out to God. Your sin or rebellion is not too great.

God heard Jonah, not because of who Jonah was, but because of who God is, and the same is true for you. God is a God who hears. Cry out to Him in your distress. Just a quick side note here. You don't have to wait until you've tried everything and you're in the depths of despair. You don't have to wait until you're out of all other options, and you're at the end of your rope. As the hymn writer reminds us, "O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless

pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer." Jonah prayed, and God responded. We cry out to God in any and all circumstances because He is a God who hears. Finally, we cry out to God because He is the God who saves. A God who rules but doesn't care is no comfort. A God who hears and cares but has no power is no help. But the God who rules and the God who hears when His people cry out to Him, such a God is the God who can

save. Salvation belongs to the Lord.

As I mentioned, I think this statement is the climax and the theme of Jonah 2. You could argue that it is the theme of the whole Book of Jonah, and I think you could even argue that it is the theme of the whole of scripture. Salvation belongs to the Lord. False idols cannot save. The schemes of man cannot save. Nothing and no one except for God, and God alone, can save. Here in the Book of Jonah, He saved the sailors in chapter 1.

He will save the people and the cows of Nineveh in chapter 3. Here in chapter 2, as well in chapter 4, we see God's saving work in the life of his rebellious prophet. In his three days in the belly of the fish, God saved Jonah's life, and He saved Jonah from separation and rebellion against God. And through His saving of Jonah, God was pointing, as we have seen in the New Testament, to the perfect salvation that was to

come through His Son, Jesus. In Matthew, we are told that Jesus is given the name Jesus because He will save His people from their sins. In the Book of Acts, the Apostle Paul proclaims that there is salvation in no one else besides Jesus, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. Salvation belongs to this Lord, who, just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish, He was in the ground.

Salvation belongs to the Lord who was crucified, died, and was buried, and who on the third day was raised victorious over sin and death. Everyone who calls upon the name of this Lord will be saved. We have rebelled against God. We have run from God, and yet there is hope. God Himself has provided the way of salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. God is the God who saves. Cry out to Him. Turn to Him for the first time, for the thousandth time.

God rules, God hears, and God saves. Cry out to this God as Jonah did. Would you pray with me now, please?

Father, we do cry out to you now and ask that you would hear our prayer. You are our only hope in life and in death. We plead with you, Father, that you would draw us near to yourself, that you would help us to know more and more what it means that salvation belongs to the Lord. Would you fix our eyes and fix our hearts on you, and would you sustain and strengthen us through many waters? Would you bring us to the day of Christ, where we would stand blameless

before you, seeing you face to face? We ask these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.