The Power and Presence of God

Well, once again, good morning. It's a pleasure to worship with y'all. Please turn in your Bibles to the book of Jonah. That's where we'll be this morning. You've been with us a while, then this is just our next stop on the road through the minor prophets. Now, Jonah is definitely the most famous minor prophet, sometimes so famous that we forget he's a minor prophet.

But this book has a lot to say to us. I told my seven-year-old daughter that I was going to preach over the book of Jonah, and she kind of, you know, gets that look, and she rolls her eyes and says, Dad, I already know that story. And I love the honesty of children.

But I have to admit that a lot of times I approach Jonah with that same attitude. You know, oh, yeah, that's the one with the fish. I know that story. But I want to challenge us, all of us, on this. Do you really know the story of Jonah?

Do you know why the book of Jonah is in the Bible? If I asked you to paraphrase the book of Jonah, maybe you would give a summary kind of like this. God asked a prophet to preach repentance to Nineveh, but instead, Jonah ran away. Ran away from Nineveh.

So God sent a great fish to swallow Jonah as a punishment for running away. But God in his mercy gave Jonah a second chance, so the fish spits Jonah out, and Jonah obeys God and goes to Nineveh. So the lesson is obey God or be eaten. Right? No.

I mean, honestly, it's a good lesson for a kid, right? It's very simple to the point. But the problem with this summary, and you may have identified this, is that just about every detail in that summary is, in fact, incorrect. God sent Jonah to preach judgment, not repentance.

Jonah wasn't running away from Nineveh, he was running away from God. And God sent a great fish as salvation, not as punishment. And the main character of the book of Jonah is not Jonah. It's God. I think because we often read Jonah as a bedtime story, we fall into a couple of perception errors, if I could call them that.

The first is that there's this. Mythos surrounding Jonah, like it's just a good legend. It didn't actually happen. It's not historically viable. And the second is that the bedtime story kind of often misses the point of the book of Jonah. Now, I want to address the historicity problem because it's a big discussion that's out there.

You know, we can't trust the book of Jonah because, I mean, obviously, a man can't survive in the belly of a fish for three days. I mean, that's impossible, right? Well, let me give you some reasons why the book of Jonah is trustworthy and is reliable, and that that's important.

You know, first reason is that we know that Jonah was a real historical person. We, in fact, have a record of Jonah in the book of 2 Kings 14:25. You can write that down as a little cross-reference. I won't read it. But here we see that Jonah is a real prophet that lived in the time of Jeroboam II, the northern kingdom of Israel.

He's a real guy. Nineveh is a real place. We know where it is. We know the leaders of Nineveh. That's the first reason. The second reason is when you read the Hebrew of Jonah, I actually had to do this in my Hebrew class. We read through the entire thing, and there's Nothing in the language or grammar to suggest that this is a parable, that this is something made up just to drive a moral teaching.

One example of this is the very first word in the Hebrew text, which doesn't often get translated in our English text, but the very first word is called a wayaktol or a vayktol. And what it literally translates to is, and it happened. And it happened. The word of the Lord came to Jonah.

And just little clues like that clue us in that the author intended this to be read as history, not as poetry. Number three is that Jesus considered the events of Jonah to have actually happened. In fact, he kind of bases one of his central arguments on the historicity of Jonah.

You can read that in Matthew 12. In fact, we'll take a look at that a little bit later. A fourth reason we can trust Jonah, and frankly this is my favorite reason, is that Jonah is kind of a goofball. He's kind of a failure, a cottonhead ninny muggins.

He's not the hero of the story that I would have written. Legends have heroes, legends have resolution. You read through Jonah and be like, what? What's going on? With this guy. No, I think that's just further evidence that this wasn't made up. The only reason someone would write this down and preserve it is if these events actually took place the way that they said it did.

So, all that to say, the events of Jonah really happened. This is history that we're reading, and that's important because the God of Jonah is still the God that we worship today, one and the same. Which leads me to my second point: is that the book of Jonah is not about Jonah, it's about God.

Let me explain this. The big fish, right? The one that gets all the attention, just about every illustrated Bible on the face of the planet has a picture of a big fish somewhere in it. The big fish is mentioned four times. Nineveh is mentioned nine times. Jonah, the prophet, the man the book is named after, is mentioned 18 times.

God, God is mentioned 38 times, more than all of the rest combined. Charles Spurgeon said, the life of Jonah cannot be written without God. Take God out of the world. Of the prophet's history, and there is no history left to write. We have to read Jonah with that lens.

We have to know that this is not a story about a big fish. This is not a story about a reluctant prophet. The central insight of the book of Jonah is the nature and the attributes of God. So, how does Jonah teach us about God? Well, you see, there's this prophet, and he is a famous prophet.

He has all the credentials, he went to seminary, he has all the Bible knowledge, he knows the attributes of God back and forth. In fact, he's going to recite the attributes of God back to God later on in chapter 3. But for all that, it becomes very clear very quickly that Jonah does not know God.

So, God uses a storm, a giant fish, and a wicked city to reveal to Jonah who he truly is. And, friends, this is important for us. The attributes of God are not just theological categories, they're not just words on a list, they're real. And because they're real, Jonah's neat little religious life is going to get turned upside down.

So, let me ask you, Emmanuel Baptist. Church, do you know God? Maybe you think you do. After all, Jonah certainly thought that he knew God. But do you live in the reality of his attributes? And it's my prayer that by studying this book, that we will all see God more clearly, but ultimately, that we will live in him more fully.

So, this morning, I want to take a look at two of God's attributes that become clear in chapters 1 and 2: his power and his presence. The power of God and the presence of God. And by the end of this sermon, I want you to know two truths about these attributes.

And not just know them in your head, but be prepared to live these out when you walk out of church today. And these truths are: one, God is greater than the great things in your life. God is greater than the great things in your life. Number two, a God who sees is a God who can save.

Let's go to the word, Jonah chapter one, verse one. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it. For their wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare, went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. And we'll pause there. So the first principle I want you to see in this passage is that God is greater than the great things in your life.

Well, in chapter one of Jonah, he's going to encounter three great things. And I'll give them to you. He's going to encounter a great city, a great storm, and a great fish. All right, kind of random, right? But we're going to take these one by one, starting with the great city.

By the way, that Hebrew word for great, it appears about 14 times. We're talking about something that is vast and big and important. Not the Tony the Tiger. Hey, that's great. But like big, you know, substantial. All right? The first time we see this word is here in verse 2, referring to Nineveh, that great city.

You know, God is going to call Nineveh a great city four times in the book of Jonah. Now, why would God emphasize Nineveh's greatness? Well, let's talk about Nineveh, shall we? You know me, I love a good map. Houston, if you don't mind. Putting that up there. All right, this is roughly the ancient world in the time of Jonah.

And you can see that Nineveh is up there in the green cell. Well, first, there's Israel, you know, down there, then there's Nineveh in the green section. Now, that green section is the Assyrian Empire, which at this time is on the rise. This is the international superpower that is poised to conquer the world.

And we learn a few things about Nineveh. Number one, Nineveh was huge, like literally, geographically, huge. Chapter three in Jonah tells us that it took Jonah a three days' journey just to walk from one side to the other. Chapter four actually gives us the population. Jonah is 120,000 people plus a lot of cows.

And it's interesting that he mentions a lot of cows, but it's big. It's a big, big city. Nineveh is powerful. I mentioned this already, but Nineveh is the capital of Assyria, which is the political and economic capital at this point of the entire world. And Assyria is poised to take over the world.

In fact, Assyria will, in just about 40 years' time from the writing of Jonah, conquer the northern kingdom of Israel. So you can imagine that the political wind. Are already starting to stir at this time. The last thing we know about Nineveh is that Nineveh was wicked. It was very wicked.

I mean, the text tells us this plainly. It's the reason that God calls Jonah to cry out against Nineveh. As an example, archaeological records have turned up that Nineveh housed the temple of Ishtar. Ishtar was the pagan goddess of love, war, and political power. So imagine like the three things that corrupt men the most.

And you have your whole worship system is set up around these three things. You can imagine the things that went on in Nineveh. It's needless to say that Nineveh was philosophically and culturally opposed to everything that Jonah stood for. And yet God calls him, go to that great city, cry out against it.

And I think the reason that that modifier, great, is in there is just to emphasize the weight of that. Nineveh was vast, it was powerful, it was important, and for a Jew like Jonah, Nineveh was terrifying. It was a death sentence to go there and to testify. So I can, on a personal level, I can sympathize with Jonah.

I'm not going there. I'm not going there. Nineveh is too great for a guy like me. What am I going to accomplish other than getting myself killed? So, what are the Ninevehs in your life? Let me just bring it back here for a second. What are the strongholds in your life?

You know, what are the systems, the cities, the organizations that are so vast, so great, so terrifying that you convince yourself that nobody, least of all you, can possibly make a difference? Timothy Keller, who's a pastor in New York City when the planes hit the Twin Towers on 9-11.

It just so happened that Timothy Keller was preaching through the book of Jonah when this happened. And a lot of y'all remember, a lot of y'all remember just the raw emotions of grief and fear and anger and animosity towards the enemy that attacked us. And Tim Keller challenged his church.

You know, in the following weeks, when all those emotions were still fresh, he said, If God told you right now to get up and go to the streets of Baghdad and cry out against them, would you go? Would you go? Maybe let's take it down to our level a little bit.

What about your bosses? What about your teachers? What about the people in your life who maybe push against you a little bit too hard? You know, maybe you have a toxic work culture or work environment where people don't really care about you or the employees, the people at the top, all they want is profit, so they stretch morality to get to the bottom line.

And you see it and you hate it. But these people are in positions of authority. They've got tenure. They've got money. And they have power over you. What if God told you, hey, get up, go to your company's board meeting, crowd against them. Tell them what they're doing wrong.

Tell them their need for repentance. Would you go? Would you go? I think we can relate to Jonah's fear. We have great things in our lives. We have great institutions in our life. The point is not to exhort everyone here to go out and cry against. Your bosses.

No, the point is just to evaluate in yourself: if God calls you, will you go? And if you don't, or if you struggle with that, then ask yourself: do you actually believe that God is greater than those great things in your life, than those great systems, organizations, institutions in your life?

These are our Ninevehs. These are our great cities. But here's the remarkable thing: God cares enough about Nineveh to send a Jonah. God cares about the great things because he's greater. And so the book of Jonah starts by God calling Jonah to be his ambassador. And to be honest, Jonah was smart to run away because it's true.

Nineveh is too great for just one man, but not too great for one God. Maybe God will call you to be his ambassador to the great city in your life, maybe. And if he does, just remember this: God is greater. He will not let you face that city alone.

Let's return to the text, picking up in verse 4. And we'll read all the way through verse 16, so a larger chunk this time. The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea, and there was a great storm on the sea, that the ship was about to break up.

Then the sailors became afraid, and every man cried to his God, and they threw the cargo which was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, laying down, fallen sound asleep. So the captain approached him and said, How is it that you are sleeping?

Get up, call on your God. Perhaps your God will be concerned about us so that we will not perish. Each man said to his mate, Come on, let us cast lots that we may learn on whose account this calamity has struck us. And so they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

Then they said to him, Tell us now, on whose account has this calamity struck us? What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you? And Jonah said to them, I am a Hebrew. I fear the Lord God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

And the men became exceedingly frightened. And they said to him, How could you do this? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. So they said to him, What should we do to you that the sea may become?

Calm for us. For the sea was becoming increasingly stormy. And Jonah said, Pick me up, throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me, this great storm has come upon you. However, the men rode desperately to return to land, but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them.

Then they called to the Lord and said, We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man's life, and do not put innocent blood on us. For you, O Lord, have done as you have pleased. So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging.

Then the men feared the Lord greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. Oh, I love this passage. I love the sailors. But here in verse 4, we encounter the second great thing in Jonah's life, a great storm. Right? And we see very clearly, very early, who is in charge of the storm?

The Lord. The Lord hurled the storm. He is greater than the storm. You know, it's such a simple truth. It's embarrassing how often we get this wrong, myself included. I think. One of the most fascinating features of the book of Jonah is the contrast between the sailors and Jonah.

Specifically, the contrast in how they respond to the storm. The one hand, you have these pagan sailors who know that the storm is unordinary, they know it's supernatural, and they are terrified. You know, they're scared out of their mind, so they're doing everything they can to try and throw cargo overboard and row out of the storm.

But nothing is working. And then you have Jonah, you know, prophet of Yahweh, who knows that the Lord is in charge of the storm, made heaven and earth. He knows that the right thing to do is to cry out to God, and where do we find him? Asleep.

Asleep below deck. You know, it doesn't take me standing up here to tell you that God will occasionally hurl storms into your life, into my life, trials, hardships, sufferings, Christians as well as non-Christians. Sometimes these storms are intended as warnings, you know, to warn us of wrongdoing, to get us to wake up and turn around, literally, in Jonah's case.

But sometimes, a storm is meant for our testing and our perseverance to make us more like Christ, to build us up. I know Bill preached an excellent sermon on that last week, and you really should check that out. But here's my point: in every case, no matter the reason for the storm, in every single case, the storm is under the power and under the jurisdiction of our Lord, the God of storms, the maker of the sea and the dry land.

God is in control. So now, the critical question is: when God inevitably sends a storm, are you a sailor or are you a Jonah? How will you respond? I think sometimes we can react to these great storms, like the sailors, by just busying ourselves, throwing things overboard, rowing against the waves.

We might call this the self-help model, right? You know, simplify, restructure. You know, you have the power of positive thinking. You know, these things that we tell ourselves, like, we can just get rid of enough bad stuff to make the storm stop. You see how silly that is?

That's not how storms work. A storm doesn't care how many things you throw overboard. No way. A solution like that fails to take into account the God of the storm, right? But then there are others of us who react more like Jonah. You know, when the storm hits, we freeze, we lock up, we retreat, we hide.

You know, sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically. You don't show up. And we know that God is in charge of this storm, but we are too ashamed, too confused, too frightened, or frankly too stubborn to cry out to Him. And so we resign ourselves. We fall asleep. We become despondent, apathetic to everything and everyone around us.

By the way, I'm saying we a lot here because this is what the Lord has been showing me. So I'm a lot more like Jonah than I want to admit. I'm way more like Jonah than I am a sailor. And these past four weeks have really shown me just how far my flesh is.

You know, I told you about my daughter and the NICU, and, you know, it's a storm. It's not smooth sailing. And you would think, right, you know, all right, John, you've been to seminary, you're up there preaching, you would think. That my prayer life would be thriving, right?

That I'd be pressing in, drawing strength and drawing power from the presence and the promises of God, that I would be leading my family to trust in God through the storm. After all, I know that God is powerful, I know that He is sovereign. I can write papers on why God allows us to suffer.

But these past four weeks have been revealing I found myself withdrawing from the Lord. I found myself asleep under the deck. I'm slow to pray. I'm slow to find time in the word. This is the part of my flesh that says, you know what, John, it's better to be numb to the storm than to face the storm.

And I think a lot of you might be like that, too. That part of our flesh needs to be thrown overboard. So, how do we face the storm? Well, we start by evaluating our fears. All right, that's step one. It's okay to be afraid. Let me just put it that way, simply.

It is okay to fear. Just make sure that your fear is properly placed. Here's what I mean by that. Imagine. That I am being chased by a grizzly bear. You know, it's coming for me. But instead of running, I decide to walk because I'm scared that if I run, I'm going to get a blister on my foot.

Right? You know, that's an example of misplaced fear. I should be scared of the greater thing, which is the grizzly bear that's bearing down on me, right? Misplaced fear. Now, Jonah, he had a misplaced fear about Nineveh, right? He was scared of Nineveh. And Nineveh was a scary place.

But if he had feared God more than he feared Nineveh, we'd have a very, very different story on our hands. That's what misplaced fear. We ascribe greatness or what we believe to be great based on our fears. The greater something is, the more deserving it is of our fear.

We'll put it that way. In contrast, you have these soldiers, these sailors. And they're a great example of properly placed fear. As you read through the chapter, just notice this progression. In verse 5, the sailors are afraid of the storm, right? It's a great storm. They're terrified. But then you get to verse 10.

And Jonah tells them who he is and who his God is. And then they become exceedingly afraid, right? Even more afraid. When they encounter the God of the storm. That's correct. They recognize that God is greater than the storm. But then you get to the end of this passage.

They throw Jonah overboard, and the sea becomes calm. So, what would you expect? Their fear goes away? No, no. You read in verse 16, it says, They fear the Lord greatly. That's after the storm has stopped. They are still fearing the Lord greatly. They feared the storm, but they feared greatly the God of the storm.

And that reverence lingered after the storm had ended. So, friends, do you truly believe that God is greater than the great storm in your life? And here's how you know. What do your fears tell you? Right? And maybe you're not going through a storm right now, and that's great.

I don't wish that upon you, but odds are very good that God will send you one. And perhaps the reason He is sending you one is to test what you really fear. And so, friends, pay attention to your fears. Pay attention. That's how we start by evaluating our fears, but we don't end there.

You know, praise the Lord. That would be terrible if we ended with fear. Second step, after we are evaluating our fears, we recognize, we come to the realization of the power of God. We recognize that all the destructive power of the universe is under the thumb of God.

And in that moment, when we understand that fully, we can start to have hope. And only when we understand that fully can we have hope. You know why? Because a God who's powerful enough to bring the storm is powerful enough to calm the storm. Only the God who is powerful enough to bring the storm is powerful enough to calm the storm.

There is no other way. When we acknowledge that God is greater than the storms in our life, we have the power to move from fear into faith. Just look at the sailors. By the way, the sailors started out as pagans. They were crying out to pagan gods, trying to appease them, to get the storm to go away.

That's where they started. You see, in verse 5, they fear the storm. In verse 10, they learn about the true God, Yahweh, and they start to fear the God of the storm. In verse 14, they call out to this God of the storm, begging him for mercy. In verse 15, they obey the God of the storm by throwing Jonah overboard.

And then by verse 16, these pagan sailors are worshiping the true God, Yahweh. That's how you move from fear to faith. You know, sometimes God sends us storms to show us just that he's greater than the storm, that we might call out to him, that we might worship him.

Oh, please, don't do what I did. Don't be a Jonah. Don't retreat from God in the storm. Press into God. Don't shut him out. He is greater than the storm, and he will provide what you need, just like he's going to do for Jonah. Let's read verse 17.

The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. We've arrived at the last of the three great things. This time, it's a great fish, right? Was it a fish? Was it a whale? We're not going to go there.

The point is that it was great. It was big. It was this big, you know. It was a fish. Who appointed the great fish? Well, also, not a trick question. It says it right here in the text. The Lord appointed this great fish. Think of the amount of.

Implications, right? You have this abnormally large fish that just happened to be in the right place at the right time, that just happened to have the right size and biology for a human to survive in its digestive track. Is there any other explanation than that the hand of God is at work?

I think that's the point. It's supposed to be impossible. Why? Because we serve a God of impossible things who bends the very laws of nature for our salvation, just like he does for Jonah. If God can summon the king of the depths to do his bidding, like a master whistling for his dog, is he not sovereign over the great things in your life?

I want to address this misconception about the fish that I referenced earlier. There are many who view the fish as Jonah's punishment. But let's examine that, all right? What should have been Jonah's punishment for disobedience? What is the punishment for disobedience for any of us, for all of us?

Death. Death. A just punishment for Jonah would be for God to let him drown in the sea, never to be heard of again. But instead, God appoints a great fish. To swallow up Jonah, to preserve his life. Now, the fish is not punishment. The fish is salvation. It's salvation.

And Jonah recognizes this from the belly of the fish. He cries out, salvation is of the Lord because God is greater than the great fish. God appointed the great fish. I think, you know, we just spent a whole lot of time talking about a great storm, and God is greater than the great storms, and that's true, and that's good, but it's easy to get the impression that God is just greater than the bad things in your life.

But I love this great fish because it shows us that God isn't just mighty to destroy, he's also mighty to save. And this is crucial as we examine God's attributes, as we examine his power. It's one thing to talk about the power of God, even to believe in the power of God.

At the end of the day, what's that going to do for you? Having a powerful God. Big whoop. He might have all the power in the world, but if he doesn't see you, if he doesn't know you, if he doesn't love you, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how powerful God is.

No, having a God of a great storm is not enough unless he's also the God of the great fish. We don't just need God's power to be true in our lives, we need his love. We need his mercy. God's love for Jonah was so great, his power was so great that God literally bends the laws of nature to save this man from drowning.

Does this remind you of another time that happened? And perhaps when God bends the laws of nature to save you from your punishment, Jesus, in Matthew 12, 40, he's chatting with the Pharisees, right? The Pharisees are demanding a sign. You know, if you're the Messiah, give us a sign.

And this is the only sign that Jesus gives them. He says, for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. That's the sign of the resurrection.

What the Pharisees failed to understand, and also Jonah fails to understand, is that God's power to save, God's love, does not extend just to the Jews, right? And if you're a Christian here today, then Christ's bodily death and resurrection, that's your great fish moment. That's the moment, the time when God, out of his great mercy and compassion and power, resurrected the dead for you.

An undeserving sinner. So, believe me, when I say that God is greater than the great things in your life, I'm not just talking about him having power over the storms, over the Ninevehs, over the bad things. No, he is the Lord of creation, he's the father of lights.

In him and through him, all things work together, and he holds them together, he's working them together for your good and the good of those who are called according to his purpose. That is a God who is mighty, but a God who loves you. And he proved that.

He proved that by resurrecting his son from the dead. You know, this is the story of Jonah in a nutshell. This book is chock full of undeserving sinners. Jonah, the Ninevites, the sailors. None of them deserve to survive, and yet all of them do. How can this be?

Because God is mighty. He's mighty to save. Do you believe that? Do you believe that God is great enough to save you? Jesus told the Pharisees, someone great. Greater than Jonah is here. And I think the Pharisees knew their Hebrew Bibles. They knew the story of Jonah. They knew all the great things that Jonah was up against.

Jesus says, I'm greater. I hope you can see the difference between knowing God's power and living in that reality. You know, Jonah came face to face with a lot of great things, and trust me, you will too. But our God, your God, is greater than the great things in your life, and he loves you.

I have a note that says to stop if after 11:40. It's 11:41, so I'm going to honor that and stop here. But we will return to Jonah next week. I hope you can join us. We'll continue talking about the attributes of God and what they mean for our lives.

Let's pray. Father, you are good, you are merciful, you are powerful. Oh God, help me to understand that. Help that truth sink down from my head to my heart, to my heart. Feet that it would point me in the right direction. It would inform everything I do and say and think.

I am quick to run. I'm quick to sleep. But God, I can face the great things in my life with the knowledge that you are greater. Help us all to love you more dearly. In Jesus' name, amen.