Jonah 2: How Do You Know God Loves You?
This sermon was preached on May 19th, 2024.
How do you know that God loves you? Don’t answer it too quickly. How do you know?
Some people answer that question by saying: “I remember when I was saved. The moment—I prayed a prayer and accepted Jesus into my heart. I can tell you where I was, when it was. I know I’m loved by God because I remember when I made that decision.”
Other people might say something like: “I don’t know that God loves me. I try really hard. I’m not perfect, but I think God sees my heart that I really mean to be a good person. Maybe one day I’ll know that God loves me, but we’ll have to wait and see how it all shakes out.”
Still other people will say something like “I know God loves me because a priest told me that if I did these 3 things and said this prayer the right number of times, that God would then love me.” Or—I know because someone who has authority told me.
This morning we’re jumping back into the story of Jonah and finding him in a unique place—inside a huge fish. A place where Jonah prays a prayer that many people have read over the years as a beautiful example of prayer. But there’s a whole lot more going on here than that. And I think we’ll find as we explore this passage that God is actually leading us to know how to answer this question I have asked: How do you know that God loves you?
17 Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. 1 From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. 2 He said:
“In my distress I called to the Lord,
and he answered me.
From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,
and you listened to my cry.
3 You hurled me into the depths,
into the very heart of the seas,
and the currents swirled about me;
all your waves and breakers
swept over me.
4 I said, ‘I have been banished
from your sight;
yet I will look again
toward your holy temple.’
5 The engulfing waters threatened me,
the deep surrounded me;
seaweed was wrapped around my head.
6 To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my God,
brought my life up from the pit.
7 “When my life was ebbing away,
I remembered you, Lord,
and my prayer rose to you,
to your holy temple.
8 “Those who cling to worthless idols
turn away from God’s love for them.
9 But I, with shouts of grateful praise,
will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’”
10 And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.
Unexpected Salvation
Jonah was called by God to go to a people he despised. So Jonah flees the opposite direction. It leads to chaos, God causing a storm to stop the ship that Jonah has gotten on, because God will not be thwarted in his purpose to show his grace to the people of Nineveh. Yet even in the face of a storm that threatens a lot of people, Jonah still refuses to turn to God and tells the others people on the ship to throw him overboard, and they do.
Think of the terror. I don't know if you’ve ever been in the middle of a lake or far out from shore in the ocean. It can be terrifying. There’s a whole horror movie about that came out in 2003 called Open Water. It’s one of the scariest things I can think of.
Jonah is no where near land. There’s really no hope, to go overboard in the middle of the sea is certain death. It means drowning, which is what is pictured for us in v3-5. “The current swirled about me, all your waves and breakers swept over me…the engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded; seaweed was wrapped around my head.” It’s a visceral, vivid description. We can almost feel it.
But that’s not all. He sank down. He speaks in drastic, poetic terms. In v6 he sank “to the roots of the mountains…the earth barred me in forever.” He is essentially describing himself as dead. He had fled from the God of life and found chaos and darkness, his life ebbing away. And this seems to be exactly what he wanted.
Jonah has decided that he’d rather die with his prejudice than live submitting his desires and imagination for God to transform. God has called him to go to people Jonah despises, and he knows what it means: God, who abounds in grace, is intent to bring his grace to the people of Nineveh. Jonah doesn't like it—he wants one kind of grace for him and people like him. But the only kind of grace that exists is grace that is shown to people who don't deserve it. Which is exactly what Jonah experiences next: an unexpected grace in the form of a great fish sent to swallow him, to miraculously save him from death.
Scripture never describes the scene here as a whale swallowing Jonah. There has been much time and research to try and guess what kind of fish it could have been, but Scripture doesn’t tell us. All it says was that the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and it presents it as a unique, supernatural event. For all we know, it could have been a great fish called into existence for just this moment. But that’s not the point of the passage. The point is that when Jonah reached the outcome of his silliness and senselessness, he found not judgment, but an unexpected salvation.
I think it occurs not just for God to show off. I think it prepares Jonah to discover a bigger unexpected salvation—that the pathway of life that God has for him is to go to his most hated enemies, to be the announcer of God’s judgment against their wickedness so they can turn to God and find mercy. Jonah finds the unexpected thing that life for him is intimately tied up with life for those he’d most like to see disappear and suffer. Jonah lives out what we pray every week in the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Grace finds him, so that he will be the instrument of grace for others.
God’s grace doesn’t just find us individually. It finds us, and binds us together with other people that we might not have been bound up with other wise. It breaks up the walls of hostility that exist between people to open in front of us a better way, where we revel in the grace that has found us and revel in the grace that has found others, and in the possibilities of God’s grace flooding our world with life.
Selective Prayers
Jonah finds unexpected grace and in what had to be the dark, stinky, humid and disgusting belly of that fish he prays a prayer. And it’s beautiful in a lot of ways. It sounds like a Psalm. The poetic language. The thanking God for salvation. The speaking of Jonah’s intention to worship God at the temple, which was in Jerusalem. That sounds so…religious and devout.
The outward beauty of this prayer disguises a heart that is still resistant to God’s calling to him, and if we read between the lines we can see it. Jonah has received this unexpected salvation, and prays a prayer of gratitude—but he still doesn’t want to go to Nineveh. Notice that no where in this prayer does he reference any of that at all. In fact, he’s trying to tell God what he’s going to do—he’s going to “shout grateful praise.” He's going to offer sacrifices. He’s going to make a vow to do that.
But this is not what God had called Jonah to do. He didn't say “Jonah, arise and sing me some songs. Jonah, do some sacrifices for me.” God had called him to go to his enemies.
Jonah’s words sound good, they sound devout, but Jonah’s prayer was selective. He still was trying to control what his relationship with God would be. “Yes, God I’d love to shout praise and do a few sacrifices.” Jonah’s prayer was selective and still full of resistance to what God was calling him to. It’s why the chapter ends by telling us that after this seemingly beautiful prayer “the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah.”
The picture isn’t “Jonah’s prayer was so great that God had to reward him. Or the prayer was so earnest and heartfelt that God forgave him” It was that this prayer was so repulsive that the fish spewed him from his mouth. Jonah will learn it more as the story goes alone, that his hope isn’t that his prayer and religion is so pure and great that God is happy with him. No, in truth all the beautiful words Jonah may have are repulsive if they’re considered on their own. But Jonah learns what we all have to know, our relationship with God isn’t started or maintained by us jumping through a bunch of religious hoops or being able to craft beautiful prayers.
His hope is that God is faithful, that God’s grace will wrestle with his people to find them and free them. By grace. Grace that will find us unexpectedly, grace that will lift us up from death but not leave us standing still. Grace that will forgive and then transform so that we can be the bringers of the light of God's grace into the darkness of our world.
Grace means that we get what we don’t deserve. That we get kindness and love shown to us even though in truth we deserve to spewed out and left to our own consequences. As the stories continues, this is made more and more clear to Jonah—that he is silly and senseless, as his name means, but kept by what? God’s faithfulness.
Jesus and the Depth of God’s Love
In the gospel of Matthew we see a scene where Jesus is being questioned by some religious leaders. They demand a ‘sign’ from Jesus. “Perform for us!” Mind you, Jesus had already shown himself many times to be exactly who He is: the Son of God.
This wasn't a question asked to really have Jesus answer. Which is why Jesus responds by telling them that no sign will be given to them except “the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Jesus was referring to his resurrection from the dead. For he knows what is coming. The resistance that he has faced will not stop, but will increase. And these leaders that are mocking and challenging him will eventually reject him, and combine with power with the political authorities to stop Jesus and all He is about.
But this great act of injustice will not be the end. And Jesus, though without sin himself, will be put to death as a criminal, God will vindicate Him from the grave. And this will be the great sign, not just for those who were alive during the resurrection, but the great sign for us today that Jesus is who he says he is, that God’s intentions to save his people will happen.
Back to my question from the beginning of the sermon. How do you know that God loves you?It’s not because you can remember the moment you first trusted in Jesus. That’s you trusting in your memory. What if you forget? What if you have the time or date wrong? What if you develop dementia and lose your access to that memory?
No, that’s not faith in Jesus. That’s faith in our own faith and that doesn’t work.
Your hope isn't that one day you will do enough good works to feel like he does love you. Your hope isn’t your good intentions or your performance. Toss out the resume you want to look to and the rap sheet that you are afraid of.
And your hope is not because some priest or holy man or woman has told you a few things to do and that cleans the slate. And I mean this—not just for us in the ‘small sins.’ Remember, there isn’t one kind of grace for people who deserve it and another kind for those who are really sinners. The only people who receive God's grace are the unrighteous, just like the only cup that can be filled up is an empty one.
Today you can know that you are loved by God by looking at the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to the “sign of Jonah” that he spoke of—his resurrection from the dead. Our great hope is that King Jesus was raised from the dead victorious, and that the death he faced unjustly became the place where God judged our sin by Jesus taking on our sin. And our hope is that he dragged our sin into his grave, where it remains—it’s power to condemn us and to domineer us is put to death, and those sins will never rise up to condemn us again.
This is the sign for us, the cause for our greatest joy and hope. Jesus is risen, and that means that death and sin cannot have the final word for us. Trust in him. Place your faith in him and rest and receive Him as he’s offered to us in the gospel.
How do you know God loves you? Because of Jesus. Because of what’s he done, not because of what you’ve done. Don’t trust in your memory. Don't trust in your good works (and don't despair because of your bad ones). Don’t trust in some religious authority. Trust in Jesus. His hand is strong enough to carry you, and his grace, like water, runs to the deepest part.