Lessons from Jonah's God

Good morning and blessings to you all. It's good to be here.

A number of years ago, my wife needed to make a run to Chambersburg, and soon after she left, I got a phone call from her, and she said, "You know, if I have the story right, you wouldn't believe what I just witnessed."

So she's heading 81 southbound toward Chambersburg for a couple exits, and here comes a woman driving in the north-southbound lanes driving north. And I'm like, "Well, what happened?" Well, she said, "Nothing really. I mean, the truckers and the traffic were all making a way for her, and she made it. She made it."

The story goes, the next day or so we read up on it, and she got confused. She somehow got the wrong exit ramp or ramp backwards, and she's heading north against all the traffic of 81. Now, if you know anything about 81 and the laws of it, that should never work.

The laws of the traffic of Interstate 81, and you head against it, you're not going to get away with it very long. Fortunately, she got off. I think the cops were called out, and they somehow detoured her off into the medium or whatever. Nobody really was hurt.

But I can almost guarantee you that if we go out on Interstate 81 heading north on the southbound lanes, we're not going to get very far. Somewhere, if we made it to Newville, we might. But I don't think we're going to make it through Harrisburg area.

And the point of this is, when we go against the laws of the traffic of 81, it's going to end up in disaster one way or the other. We might get away with it for a time. And so it is with the laws of God. We get away with it sometimes. Achan got away with it for a short time.

Solomon got away with it for a time. What about Paul when he was kicking against the pricks, and he got away with it for a time? I want you to hold on to that term, for a time. When we look around in the world today, there's many people that are going against the laws of God, and they're getting away with it as it appears, but for a time.

Remember Asaph in the Old Testament? I think about Psalm 73. He was so impressed as he watched the world live. The fatness of pleasure, I think, as he describes it, they're all just sort of doing their own thing, living a very worldly life. And it was so appealing to Asaph. He said, "I almost lost my way." And I think if we're honest this morning, when we watch the wayward live, it looks pretty appealing at times.

It has an affluence on us, an influence, I should say, on our choices. And so it did in Asaph. But you remember how that ended? He said, "When I went into the sanctuary of God, there I saw their end."

It's for a time that we get away with it. I want to look at an Old Testament prophet this morning, familiar prophet Jonah. My wife and I are reading through the minor prophets and come through the book of Jonah, and there's just some things that jumped out, though as so familiar that probably most of us know the story by heart.

Four short chapters.

And we see a prophet here that took his way against the laws of God, and he got away with it for a time. And I know this is, like I say, so familiar to us. I'm just not going to read it.

I'm just going to refer to this at some of the highlights. The title of the message is Lessons from Jonah's God. One might ask, "Well, what's the book of Jonah about?" Well, the children might say, "It's about a big fish that swallowed a man." That's a highlight. It really stands out. It's an unusual supernatural happening that always jumped out at me as a child.

Well, the great fish is only mentioned four times. Or one might say it's about a prodigal prophet mentioned only 18 times in these four chapters. But about God, it's mentioned 38 times. So I would conclude and say that the book of Jonah is more about Jonah's God than about the fish or than about Jonah himself or about the wicked city of Nineveh. And I want to focus this morning at just learning some things from Jonah's God.

So the first thing we notice here is the law of this God, this great God that had a law when he asked Jonah to go to Nineveh. That is a call on his life. And I think Romans somewhere, if I have it right, Paul says it something like this, that the callings and the callings of God are without repentance, or some versions say without are irrevocable. And that is what he's going to learn. He's going to learn when God asks us to do something, it doesn't matter how difficult it is and how much we don't want to do it, when he calls us to do it, we better go for it even if it doesn't make sense, even if it goes against our will, even if there's a cross to bear in it.

Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh and preach a message. That was the bottom line. It's the interesting thing when we think of Jonah's relationship with God. Jonah knew God. He knew God's Word. That comes out in his prayer in the second chapter when he's in that fish's belly. He's crying out to God. In that prayer, he mentions at least he quotes parts of at least 11 passages from the Bible.

So he knew the Bible, and he knew his God. This is what he knows about him.

He told the shipmen when they challenged him, remember he said well, they just wanted to know a little bit who he was and so on. But he said, "I fear this God." So he had a reverential fear and a relationship with the Jehovah God, and he called him the God of creation. So he believed God's Word. He believed the God himself as the Creator God, and there was a relationship with God that was so beautiful. He understood God as a merciful God. That comes out in chapter 4, his testimony in verse 2.

He prayed unto the Lord and said, "I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying when I was yet in my country. Therefore, I fled before unto Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God, a merciful God." That's how he knew him. "And he slowed to anger and of great kindness." Why would a man that knows the Word of God, and he knows God as a patient God, a loving God, a kind God, as Creator God and Jehovah with a relationship, why in the world would a person like that, when he's asked by that God to go to Nineveh, instead he goes and I think if you look at the map, if I understand it correctly, it's about 2,500 miles across the water.

It's like God would ask me to go to New York City, which is what, a couple hundred miles? And I say, "No. I'm going to go to the coasts of California, 2,500 miles the opposite direction." Why would a person do that that loves God, knows God, knows the truth? Well, he tells us why he does it. And I just read it, chapter 4, verse 2.

He didn't like the Ninevites. They were bad people, and God says they were. He says their wickedness was so bad that it was coming up to God, and he said, "I got to do something about this wickedness. I'm going to destroy them." And I think Jonah was saying, "Great. Go ahead and destroy them." If you look at the history back in 2 Kings, they were the enemies of God's people.

The Nineveh, I understand, was the capital city of the Assyrians, which was people that loved blood. They loved murder. They loved whatever. So they were not liked by Jonah and his people. And therefore, Jonah said, "If I go and I preach to them, this great God with great mercy and compassion might just reach down and save his enemies." And he doesn't want that. He wants them destroyed. That's the picture I get.

So he answers that question.

He told the shipmen that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord in chapter 1.

You think Jonah lost faith in God? It's interesting reading the commentaries on this. Some say, "Well, it was a fearful journey, and they were awful people." Yeah, all those are legit reasons probably why he didn't want to go.

It would have been fearful if he was the only man carrying the message to a city as wicked as they were, a huge city, fear and all those practical things that could stand in the way. But I think we have to remember there was a deeper issue that he had.

But I guess what I have to marvel at, and this is some lessons for us, for God's people, as Jonah was a man of God, he knew God. He understood God. He heard his voice.

He heard the command, and he was open and honest when he told the sailors, "I am fleeing from this God." There must have been some things that Jonah forgot about his God when he went and he took the journey toward Tarshish, which was where his goal was.

There was a process to get there. There was a journey to get there. First of all, he had to go to Joppa, the port area, to buy his tickets for Tarshish, costly tickets. And folks, this morning, when we go and we buy the ticket that takes us away from God and into our own destination, so we think, it's the most costly ticket we're ever going to purchase. And it's going to take us where we don't want to go.

There's a journey here. We go to Tarshish. We pull out our wallet or credit card. We pay the fare. The goal is Tarshish. The interesting thing is Jonah never made it to Tarshish. And I'm going to ask the question this morning, "Where is my Tarshish? Where's your Tarshish?" It might look different for all of us. But a lesson we see here, God stood in the way, and he's going to stand in the way for every one of us. When we take our step away from God, James says it this way. It has to do with our own lusts and selfish desires and rejection of the call of God on our life.

And it takes us in a downward spiral. Let no man say when he's tempted, "I'm tempted of God," for God cannot be tempted with evil. "Neither tempteth he any man, but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lusts and enticed.

Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin. And sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." That's what James teaches us very clear. Sin has a beginning and an end, and it always ends in death. There's a law there. Just like 81 North and the southbound lane, it's going to end in disaster. While we get away with it for a time, it's going to end in the same place, James says, always.

We face our Tarshish. When I think of that Tarshish in his case, so go to Nineveh and do the hard thing. "Oh, I just want to get away from that." Tarshish was Jonah's getaway. "Let's just go out here somewhere." I could imagine with him it was Tarshish was that la-la land where there's no responsibility.

Everything is sunny and clear. The weather's just right. And I'm just away from everybody. I'm away from all my responsibilities. And that is where I want to go. We all feel that sometimes, don't we? Jesus faced that in the garden. When he was asked to go to the cross, he prayed and said, "Can this cup go away?"

His Tarshish was to bail out of the responsibility. But we're so thankful that he turned. He said, "Not my will, but your will." And Jesus turned, and he fulfilled the call of his life. And that's why you and I are Christians this morning.

It's because Jesus answered his great call. And we're sitting here, folks, this morning. Every one of us has a call. Do we believe that? We didn't just come into this world to take up space and to pack out Interstate 81 and the grocery stores and go in the midst of the bustling of Christmas shopping and just be a number. Is that why we're here?

I think we have a call. And I just want to make an appeal this morning. When we hear the voice of God, let's answer that call and go with his plan. We'll be much happier in the end. And another thing we want to learn here, if we make Tarshish our goal, we'll never get there.

We just won't. The rich young man that had all these crops, remember he came to Jesus and said, "I have all this stuff, and I'm going to tear my barn down. I'm going to make a bigger barn, and then I'm going to go to Tarshish."

What did Jesus say? "No, you're not. This night, you're going to die." Folks, there's none of us sitting here for the people of God that are ever going to make it to Tarshish. There is no such place for the man and woman of God. We just won't make it there. It's going to end up in a place we don't want to go. Notice the downward spiral of his choice that he made. So he says, "I don't want to go to Nineveh, so I'll go to Joppa. I'll pay the fare. I'll get in a boat." And to hide from God, he went down to Joppa, the Bible says. He went down into the boat. And that wasn't good enough.

He went down into the side of the boat. I don't know. I think it was probably a cargo boat, I'm thinking, or something less than a passenger boat. I don't know. But I'm thinking, what for side was there? Did they have a little cubbyhole there where they threw their tie-down straps in? I don't know. But he went down into a side in the boat, and he made himself a little cubbyhole, and he fell sound asleep.

He got away with it for a time. I can't see how in the world he could have slept so soundly knowing that he was going the opposite direction of the Jehovah God.

But it was only for a time where the goodness of God met him there. And we know the story. God provided a way out.

Keeps talking about going down. And in his prayer, he says he went down. And I think there's a reason that's mentioned, the word down. When we step away from God, our life goes one direction, and it's down. And he talked about the seawaters. He talked about the waves.

And he talked about all of that. He associated that with his God. The shipman didn't really toss him into the waters. It was his God. We see that in his prayers. It was the seaweeds that were wrapping around the neck. They were God's seaweeds.

The waves of the ocean were God's waves. The fish was God's fish. And there, he said it was so miserable there. He talks about going down, verse 6 of chapter 2, "I went down to the bottoms of the mountains.

The earth with her bars was about me forever." I don't know if you can go any farther than that. Now, we were discussing this week. We were talking about the remember the coal miners in Pennsylvania, I think that was a number of years ago, that got trapped underground. Don't know if I have the story. How many were there? Six or eight or something like that? Were there for how many days? Does anybody remember the story?

They made it out, I think, safely. But I try to put myself I'm claustrophobic. I struggle with tight quarters and dark areas. But I try to put myself in that place. And everywhere I reach, there's the bars of the earth. You're trapped. There is no way out of here.

And that's the picture that he gives us here, that he went down as deep as you could go, and then the bars of the earth held him chained tight. And that's where sin will take us. You know what sin is? It's going against God's ways.

It always ends up in disaster.

The next part we want to look at is God's authority.

Remember the shipmen when the storm came up in chapter 1? When the winds blew and the storm got very vicious, they all individually began to cry out to their own gods, "Help!" I don't know what they said. I'm just guessing. I would have said, "Help!" They cried out each to their own God. Well, God, the God of Jonah, is much bigger than any of those gods.

Because when push came to shove and it got to the point where they're going to perish, what did the shipmen do? I love that. They turned to Jehovah God, "Jonah, who's that God? You talked about your God." And all of a sudden, they unitedly began to talk to that God together. The point here is we can cry out to our God. And maybe in America, it's the God of sports. Maybe it's the God of pleasure. Maybe it's the God of vanities.

But in this, we see they talked to a real God that they believed in down deep. I think the Bible says there's a light that lighteth every man. And this just reassures me again. There is no real atheist.

Because when we are faced with death, we go to the God that has the authority over the storm and the wind and the waves, and we cry out, and we find help. God came. The God of Jehovah heard them. And it says in chapter 1, "They took up Jonah." All of a sudden, they're united together. There's a coming together. They pray together. The God of Jehovah is one God, "We, the sheep of his pastor." We don't have individual gods in the kingdom of God. It is one God, and his people are united and crying to that one God. But in an independent world where there's gods and people cry to their gods, and they kneel, and they worship, and they chase after, there's many gods.

I like what they express in verses 14 through 16. The sailors say they have a basic theology of God here. In his existence, in his judgment of sin, they acknowledged that there because they're going to be guilty. They knew they were going to be accountable to that God, not their gods, but that God, the Jehovah God. And this is what I find interesting. They asked that God for mercy.

Now, is there any other God, all the gods of this world, that offers mercy? They found mercy with this God. God is much bigger than all their gods. God is bigger than his creation. In this passage, in these four chapters, we see so many things that stand out that are supernatural. First of all, we see the storm. God's bigger than his own creation. He can make a storm even bigger than normal expectations.

And we see the sea and its response to the storm, how vicious it got. And then the fish. He says that in verse 17 of chapter 1, "Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah."

And it says he was in there for three days and nights. Now, you know there's a lot of people that doubt that. They say it's no way possible. The skeptics say impossible. A person could never survive those stomach acids for three days and three nights.

The story goes of an atheist that was resisting God and arguing against Christianity. It came across this woman that was on a street corner somewhere with some children and doing a little Bible lesson or something and telling them Bible stories and so on. This atheist comes along and says, "Huh." He made fun of her chatter and whatever and said, "You really don't believe the Bible, do you?" And she said, "Yes, I do." "Really? You mean you believe the story of Jonah and the fish?" She said, "Yes, I do." "Oh, that could never be true." And then, "How was that? How could that be true?" And she said, "I don't know, but I believe it." She said, "Someday I'll ask Jonah.

When I meet him in heaven, I'll ask Jonah, 'How was that?'" And then his response is in a snarky way, "Well, what if you get to heaven and you find Jonah isn't there?" And then she said, "Well, then you get to ask him."

Get the point? And I believe that is so true. There's two destinations. We can take God's way, or we can take the other way, and it leads to two different places. The woman had the simple trusting faith that if God is big enough to create everything in six days just by speaking the word, then God designed a fish that is big enough to swallow Jonah and keep him preserved for three days and three nights until he said yes to God.

God is way bigger than that. He can do that. We can call it God's fish specifically designed for Jonah. God is bigger than his own message. That sounds confusing, doesn't it? Well, you know that message that he told the second time when he was spit out of the fish, "Jonah is now out there." And what did God do? Persistence. He went right back to Jonah. "All right. Your assignment is still on. You can't walk away from your assignment."

He said, "Go to Nineveh, and you preach to them the message I give to you." And that message, if this is all he said, it's in verse 4. He says, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." That's the most depressing message I've ever heard.

I don't know if that's all he said. I'm suspicious that he said more, but that's all that's recorded here. And with his attitude he had, I don't think Jonah cried that message out very tactfully. Do you think he did?

I could almost, with his attitude against them, "Boah, you guys are going to die. You guys are going to be destroyed in forty days. Yay!" I don't know how it came out, but I don't think it was Jonah's message. It was God's message. But it was more than God's message because what could God do with those few depressing words? "Oh, I'm going to tell you you're going to die." If I would come to your house and I say, "Your house is going to be destroyed. Your family is going to be destroyed in forty days," and that would be the message, you'd go away mad, I think.

But you know what God did with that message? He went right into those few words, and he made himself a big God. And he came to the king of Nineveh. And it says, "From the greatest to the least, every one of those men responded to that message, every one of them." For starting with the king, he took off his robe.

And that means something for a king. Take off his kingly robe, put it aside, and sit in ashes, cover himself with sackcloth. He repented at the message of Jonah. God is bigger than his message. The Bible says that his word - and I think it's talking about his person - is sharper than any two-edged sword. And it has the ability to go down deep in the very inner parts of man and divide things. You see that? God is bigger than his message.

And that's a real comfort to you preachers, to myself as I'm preaching God's word. I don't even have to be eloquent. I don't even have to be tactful. All I need to do is speak the truth of God's word. And if you're mad and you walk away, it's your problem and God's problem, not mine. If I'm honest and I take the word of God, I think it's good to speak the truth in love, and I think we need to be tactful and careful. But at the same time, we can learn a lesson from this. Jonah, with his bad attitude, with a very depressing, hurtful message, God turned that into a good thing, and they all reprinted and turned to God.

Beautiful. God is bigger than his message.

God is a God of grace and mercy. And I want to pick up where Jonah's testimony says that in verse 4, chapter 2. "The merciful God slowed to anger and of great kindness." That is the character and the nature of Jehovah's God.

What does that mean? We can say God is merciful. God is graceful. And did he say he's how does he word that here? Verse 2, "Thou art gracious, a gracious God and merciful." And then he says, "Of great kindness." We only know how to be kind, but God knows how to be of great kindness.

Kindness has details in it.

We can't hide from God. That's his kindness. The Bible says it's the goodness of God that brings us to repentance. That's a gift of God. And we see that. God was pursuing Jonah. Jonah was running, and God was chasing after him. And that's what he does with us. The Bible says we love him because he first loved us. And another thing that God's kindness does is we can't hide from him. Jonah learned that when he was down in that cubbyhole, sound asleep, he forgot about Psalm 139, I believe, where it says that, "If I take the wings of the morning and I go to the uttermost part of the sea, there I will meet God as well."

I can't get away. He knows my thoughts. He knows my intents. He knows when I sit down and when I rise up. What a great God we serve this morning. He knows the details of our life, and he's so interested that he will not allow us to hide.

I remember years ago we had one of our children - I think it was Jonathan - all of a sudden went lost on the farm there. I mean, he was just a little toddler. And we went on the journey. I mean, where in the world we started hollering and searching out every cubbyhole we could find? And finally, we found him in the strawberry patch. It was strawberry season. He loved those nice red strawberries, and he went in the strawberry patch and was eating strawberries and fell asleep. In the middle of the rows and the strawberries, "I sound asleep." We found him. He couldn't really get away. We were going to pursue him until we found him.

And that's what God does. And that's a gift. That's his kindness and goodness that he will not let us go. He's going to pursue us unto the end. And folks, when we choose to walk away from him and do our own tarshish, we'll never get there. We just won't.

God is so good, and kindness has details. The goodness of God leads men to repentance. That ship - I say that ship - when the storm came up, fear rose in everybody in the ship. And what did they try to do? They rowed hard, the Bible says, to go to land. They were going to go to land. That tells us they probably weren't real far on the journey. If land was close enough for them to get desperate, to row hard to get to land, land was their goal. They wanted to drop this guy off on land because they knew he was the problem.

Well, God said, "No. You're not going to land." And he just made the storm even worse. They never made it to land. But Jonah, God had land in mind for Jonah too. But he first needed to go through repentance. If the sailors would have taken Jonah to land, he would have taken a shortcut around repentance. Repentance is a gift of God. So God took Jonah and put him through the sea and through the storm, through the waves - yeah, down to the ocean bottom, it seems like - with the weeds wrapped around, chained tight, and then finally into the fish's belly.

That was God's way of bringing the gift of repentance to Jonah because that's where it happened. There are no shortcuts to repentance. The Hebrews, I believe it says that, "God chasteneth those," or could we say, "He disciplines those that he loves." But it's only for a time that the discipline lasts, and the end of that is going to be the peaceful fruits, peaceable fruits of righteousness.

Proverbs 15:10 says, "Correction is grievous unto him that forsaketh the way, and he that hateth reproof shall die."

I believe Solomon understood that. So the point I want to insist and stress here this morning, when we know that we take a step in a way that is not God's way and we're in that direction for a bit, every one of us needs to repent to find our way back to God.

That was the first message that John the Baptist had - was a message of repentance. It was the first message that Jesus preached. Wasn't it the first message that Peter preached in Acts 2 or Acts? "Repent you there for." And it's a message for all of us. Repent.

It's the way back to God. And repent means turn. And we see that with these folks, with Jonah and with Nineveh. Talk about that in a bit.

I guess my point with this is Pharaoh in the Old Testament, when God said, "Let my people go," he said no. And God took him through grievous times, the plagues, terrible plagues. And finally, Pharaoh said, "Go."

Jacob wrestled with God all night long and walked away a crippled man. On the other hand, we have Samuel that said, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." We do ourselves a favor when we are like Samuel. We have an ear that's open, like Jesus said in John 10, "My sheep hear my voice."

The purpose of that calling in John 10 is they will go in and out and find pasture, and he will bless them. When we kick against and we take our own way, the road of repentance is a difficult road many times. It was for Jonah, and it will be for you and me when we insist and we insist on our own way. The farther we go in our own way, the longer the journey is going to be back to correction.

The gift of kindness - God is a kind God. Jonah says that in verse 2.

Our great plan of redemption, according to Titus 3, is born out of the great kindness. He describes our condition before God, and he says, "But when the kindness and the love of Christ came."

We see how God was kind to the seamen when they united their voice together and they cried out to Jehovah God. He responded to that cry. That's kindness.

When Jonah was in that belly of the fish and he cried out to God, God was kind to him. I find it very interesting that that old fish just ejected him right out onto dry land. Have you ever been at an ocean where it's water and then dry? If I would have been God or if I was in control of the fish with my human nature, I would have probably had mercy on Jonah. But I think I would have had that big fish come about 100 feet close to shore and say, "Okay, Jonah deserves to climb out on muddy rocks and find his way out to dry land. He deserves some of that, doesn't he?"

But God's kindness took Jonah out of the fish's belly onto dry land. Get the picture. That fish must have been big enough. Is there a little canal that's built into dry land? I don't know how that was, but I just think that stands out that that is extra. God wouldn't have had to do that. He could have said, "Jonah's going to swim out to dry land. He's going to get a little bit tired before he gets to. He deserves a little bit of that."

What about when Jonah in chapter 4 - so he did the preaching - Nineveh repented, and then he began to pout. He just had a bad attitude. I don't know what in the world was going on. So he goes over to, I think, the east side of this big city, and he builds himself a little booth. And it says the purpose of that is to make a little shade for him because the sun apparently was very hot. And he's sitting there just watching with a bad attitude what's going to happen with this wicked people, probably hoping they wouldn't repent. I don't know. But he had a bad attitude, and here comes God along again, the kindness of God. "Your little old booth here."

And he takes it away, and he puts this miraculous plant called a guard or a gourd, I guess. I don't know what that looks like. It must have been a huge thing, and it served the same purpose as Jonah's homemade little booth. It was to cast a shadow sitting in the shade there.

In his grief, that's extra. God wouldn't have needed to do that for Jonah. He had his own little booth for shade. How many times does God do that for us? And it specifically mentions his, in his grief, he took this plant and overshadowed, gave him a nice comfortable little place in his grief.

This summer, one day, I was traveling in North Carolina with a trailer load of equipment. In the heat of the summer, my gooseneck trailer tire blew out. Oh, dear. And it was a busy interstate. Where did I pull off? And before I ever got pulled off completely, the second one blew out.

Now I'm sitting along a busy highway in the heat of the sun with two flat tires. Now I had my jack along. I had my tools along to take off the tire wheel. But I had one major problem. The sandy soil of North Carolina shoulder of a highway was too soft and mushy for my jack. Every time I almost had to thing high enough to take the wheel off, that old jack foot just went right down in the soft sandy soil and sunk, so I could hardly pull it back up. This happened over and over, and I had nothing. I had checked the trailer. I checked the toolbox. I had no block along to put under the foot of the jack.

I'm like, "Oh, I was stressed out. I was in a grief, but it was a different kind of grief than Jonah had." You know what God did for me that was extra? When I checked my truck and trailer and every toolbox I had, and I found nothing, said, "All I need is a little block that has a foot that's this wide, this to put under the jack and a turn into the ditch," and there it was. Under the grass, there was a block. If I would have ordered you to make me a block, it wouldn't have been that nice.

It was the right size. The thickness was just right enough to fit under the jack. Then I went to the shoulder and said, "Well, are there a bunch of these? Is this coincidence?" "No. The ditch is clean. The highway crew did a good job. They had it all cleaned up. There was this one block that was designed for me." And I said, "Thank you, God. That was extra. You wouldn't have needed to do that. I should have walked to the next exit, or I should have walked a half a mile for this. It was 20 feet from where the flat tire was, right where I stopped. And it did the job. Put it under the jack.

Worked great. Lifted up. Get my wheels changed." I could write a book of incidents very similar to that in life when life is heavy and there's grief and God is extra kind. He just does this little thing. He did this for the sailors.

They were out there. When they cried out to Jehovah God and they did respond to him, what did he do? The storm ceased. That was extra. I didn't know storms stop on an ocean. I mean, they keep blowing, sort of. But I get the picture. There was a calmness there. It was so evident that the sailors noticed.

It went away. That was extra. That's God's kindness in so many ways. In closing here, I just want to look at verses 9 through 11 of chapter 4 and think a little bit about God's compassion and mercy. Jonah's God had a big heart, and his heart he did an object lesson here for Jonah with that plant that we talked about. And if you know the story, the thing grew up in one night, and in a day's time, he had a worm - again, a worm that was extraordinary and was created for a purpose - to come and chew off the stalk.

And then there was an extra hot sunshine, an extra wind blowing from the east. And in a day's time, he took down that big plant. And then Jonah's there, again, just pouting and saying, "I want to die. It's better for me to die. This is terrible. I'm in the heat." And he even fainted and the wind and all the complaints, I guess. And then God explains to him, "This is a little lesson for you.

You feel so bad about this plant that grew in a night and was taken down in a day. And this city Nineveh has a people." Is it how many? It talks about verse 11. "Should I not spare Nineveh, that great city wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?" That is, how many is that, Edsel?

It says six score thousand. 120,000. Well, I think the city was a lot bigger than that. I think there were more by other so scholars are saying they believe he's referring to little children that I don't know. What age are your children when they learn what ages are our children when they learn the right hand from the left? About three-ish? Depends how we train them and teach them, maybe. But let's say there's 120,000 children, just assuming that's what God means by this term. We don't know for sure.

So that means how many people overall? I just want to see the heartbeat of our great God. His heart is beating not only for the little children, but it's beating for the Gentiles. His heart is beating for all nations of the world. That is very clearly designed here and taught here, that his heart is not only beating for Jonah, who was a Jew, but it's beating for all nations. And the mystery of the gospel in the New Testament that Paul teaches so clearly in Ephesians chapter 2, that it was those that were far away and those that were near that God loved them, and he provided a safe place for them called the church. But they all came through the same door.

It's the door of repentance. It's the door of obedience. It's the door of the cross of Jesus Christ.

That's truth number one in these closing verses. Truth number two that we see right here in these passages is this great mercy and grace and pity that we talked about has limited access. Now, it gets a little scary when we start using those terms.

Limited access. And we see that in Scripture. Paul says in Romans chapter 5 that by faith we have access into this grace, or we could add there pity and mercy and the compassion of God. It is we have access only to that. We see that in three groups of people in this account. We see it with the shipmen. It was when they unitedly cried out to this God, he opened up a door of pity and compassion, and they responded to that. We see when Jonah was in the whale in the belly of this fish, he cried out, and it was when he said, "Thou art the God," that he said in how did he say that?

In the end of his prayer. Verse 9, "I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord." That's his faith statement that I think Romans 5 is referring to. That is his faith statement. And as soon as he made that statement, that fish just brought him up on the dry land. The truth is that way for us. It is by faith, if we make a strong statement with our mouth and our life, that is when we open up this access to God's pity, mercy, grace, salvation.

What about Nineveh? 3:10. Let's read that verse yet in closing. 3:10, it says, "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way."

And the challenge I want to leave for us today, at the beginning of a new year, let's learn how to turn towards God. We see when the minute I don't know if it was the minute, but when they did that, great things happened.

And when we do that and we learn to do that in our daily walk with God, whenever we come to a crossroad, even if it's a difficult choice, when we choose to walk with God and we turn his way, great things will happen. And when we turn our way, we'll never get to Tarshish anyway. May God bless us. Any thoughts before we pray?