If I remember correctly, I considered with you Jonah chapter 1 last time we were here. I was here. Now this time Jonah chapter 2. In Jonah 1, we saw that when God's people stray and run from the path that God sets before them and calls them to, the Lord pursues them. And that's the emphasis in Jonah 1, the Lord's pursuit of Jonah. And now in Jonah 2, we see the fruit of that, the Lord bringing Jonah to repentance. Jonah chapter two is the whole of our text. Let's begin reading though with the last verse of chapter one. Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly and said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me. Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas, and the floods compassed me about, all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight, Yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to my soul. The depth closed me round about. The weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains. The earth with her bars was about me forever. Yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came in unto thee into thine holy temple. They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy, but I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay that that I have vowed salvation is of the Lord.' And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land." The prophet Jonah, beloved, was a child of God. He was an elect child of God. But he was, at this point in his life, a rebellious and a very disobedient child of God. And Jonah needed to be brought by God to repentance. At the end of chapter one, there is no evidence yet of Jonah repenting. No evidence yet of Jonah repenting of the sin of refusing to preach to the Ninevites, and no evidence yet of Jonah repenting of the sin of trying to run away from the presence of the Lord. He didn't repent when his sin was exposed to him by the casting of the lot. He simply admitted, yes, I'm at fault here. The storm was sent because of me. He didn't repent either when he was questioned by the sailors concerning who he was and where he was from. And he reported to them that he was an Israelite, he was a Jew, he was a prophet of God, and that he was trying to run away from the presence of the Lord. But he didn't repent and simply spoke at that point, as recorded in chapter one, spoke of God as the God of heaven, did not even refer to him as my God. Nor did he repent when he told the sailors what to do with him. He told them that they should throw him overboard. And basically what he was saying to the sailors at that point was, throw me over into the sea, your lives will be spared, but I will perish. No sign of repentance. But God did not abandon Jonah, this prodigal son. God was at work now in his providence and God was at work now by his Holy Spirit as a merciful God to bring Jonah to repent. Specifically now by what God in His providence caused Jonah to experience first of all in the sea into which he was thrown, and then secondly by what God caused Jonah to experience inside the belly of this great fish. And God humbled him and brought him to repent and brought Jonah back to God. That's what God does. That's what God does for all of us. That's what God does when His people sin and disobey and stray and rebel. The God who preserves them, the God who restores them, From that point of view, what we have in our text is summarized well by the Canons of Dort. Canons of Dort had five and Article 6 and 7. Notice that what is being discussed here in the canons in Articles 6 and 7 is introduced by Articles 4 and 5 when it speaks about how God's people, when they are weak spiritually, fall into enormous sins. And Article 7 says this about that. In the first place, in these falls, He, that is God, preserves them. in the incorruptible seed of regeneration from perishing or from being totally lost. And again, by His Word and Spirit, certainly and effectually renews them to repentance, to a sincere and godly sorrow for their sins, that they may seek and obtain remission in the blood of the mediator, may again experience the favor of a reconciled God, through faith adore His mercies, and henceforward more diligently work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. That's really a summary of what we see God doing in the life of Jonah in our text. God does that not only when his people fall into enormous sins, as they sometimes do, But God works that way in our lives even when we fall into what we might consider more minor sins. He is the God who preserves and the God who restores us to Himself. Consider the Word of God then in Jonah 2 under the theme, Jonah's Prayer from the Fish's Belly. And we'll notice how he was greatly humbled by the Lord. He confessed his greatest need and he gave thanks to Jehovah. First of all, we note, beloved, that our text records the fact that Jonah prayed. That in itself is significant. This is the first time, in spite of everything that Jonah had already faced and everything that God had said to him and his own struggles with what God had commissioned him to do, this is the first time that Jonah prays. He did not pray when God called him to go to Nineveh. He did not pray when he fled and decided to flee from the presence of the Lord. He did not pray when he was caught in the storm and in the raging of the waves of the sea. And he did not pray when he realized that the storm came on account of and because of his sin. Nor did he pray when he was thrown into the sea. That's usually what happens too. When a child of God lives and walks in sin, they stop praying. They stop praying because they know they are far from God. They stop praying because they know they cannot communicate well or freely with God. They realize really that it would be hypocritical for them to pray. A lack of prayer is often an evidence of unrepentant sin, as it certainly was in Jonah. But God humbled Jonah. And God brought him to his knees and he prays, and he tells us himself in verse 2 how God did this to him. When he says in verse 2, I cried, that is, I prayed by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord. He was brought to his knees and he was brought to the throne of God's grace and mercy in prayer through God bringing an affliction upon him, a great affliction upon him. That affliction was that he was now inside the belly of a great fish. And he now prays to God, as verse one of our text points out, out of or from the belly of the great fish. Jonah was in a very awful place right now. Jonah was under very terrible and unpleasant circumstances now, deep, in a dark hole, suffering severe affliction from the hand of God. He was in the belly of a fish. What an awful, horrible, and terrible place to be. No doubt a place where it was difficult for him to breathe. surrounded by the stench of rotting food, rotting fish, one of the worst stenches there is, gasping for breath, and in complete darkness inside the belly of the fish. in a slimy, slippery, smelly hole down in the depths of the sea. And it wasn't just that, but as Jonas says in this prayer to God, there were other things that he experienced at the hand of God too. Other afflictions that God brought upon him, afflictions that he experienced before he ended up in the belly of the great fish. He points that out in verse three, for thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas, and the floods compassed me about, all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. And then verse five, the waters compassed me about, even to the soul, the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head, I went down to the bottoms of the mountain. When the sailors took Jonah and threw him overboard into the ocean, Jonah is telling us that before he was swallowed by this great fish, he was sinking down into the depths of that sea. the waves engulfed him, the seaweed was wrapped around his head, and he was being dragged down, down, down, into the depths of the ocean, as he says there, to the bottoms of the mountains, all the way down, close to drowning in that ocean, as the seaweed dragged him down as well. And then, as it were, at the last second, God sent that great fish to rescue him, to swallow him, and to save him from drowning. Jonah had been through that as well. And Jonah refers now to where he is in the belly of the fish as the belly of hell, verse Now that can be translated and understood as it is often as a reference to the state of death. And so he would be saying then that he was in the belly of death. He was surrounded by death, as he certainly was. by the dead, decaying carcasses of smaller fish in the belly of that great fish. It's as though he was in a tomb, in a grave, surrounded by corpses. He certainly in the belly of that great fish felt and experienced the power of death around him not only, but the power of death upon him. It was though he was dying a slow death in that grave in the belly of the fish. He was as good as dead. Those things were certainly true for Jonah. But when Jonah says here, and as it is translated in the King James Version, that he was in the belly of hell, that's what he meant. That's how it's translated too in Psalm 16 verse 10, thou wilt not leave my soul in hell. Jonah was not simply in a tomb. Jonah was not simply in a grave surrounded by death. He was not simply in the realm of the dead, but he was in hell. Not literally, of course, in hell, but he was experiencing a little of what the terrors of hell are like. He was in a pit of blackness, a pit of darkness in the depths of the earth. He was pressed in from all sides, and he experienced that and knew that, pressed in from all sides by the judgment of God that was upon him for his sin. And worst of all, his experience inside the belly of that great fish was he was separated from God. separated from the favor of God. He had lost all sense of God's favor and blessing upon him. And he knew, and knew well, that God brought this upon him. He says that in verse 3. For thou hadst cast me into the deep. All thy billows and waves passed over me. I am cast out of thy sight. It wasn't the sailors who put him into this. It wasn't the storms of the ocean and the waves of the sea and the seaweed that wrapped itself around his head that put him into this. It wasn't the great fish that swallowed him that brought him into such a terrible situation, but God did this to him. As he says, I was cast out of the sight of God, and cast out of the sight of God by God himself. The God who is sovereign over the storm, the God who is sovereign over the fish, the God who is sovereign over everything that happened, and the God who brought this terrible affliction upon Jonah, and as it were, pushed Jonah away from himself. God was doing that to humble him, to bring him to his knees before the Lord. Jonah had been proud. He had been proudly rebellious against God and proudly disobedient because in his pride he thought he was wiser than God. wiser than God as concerning whom God ought to say, and wiser than God, therefore, concerning to whom he ought to be sent to preach the gospel. Because he had decided not the Ninevites, but only the Jews. And so God's judgments came upon him. A heavy hand of God came upon him that he deserved from God. God chastening him to bring him low and to bring him to pray this humble prayer to the Lord his God. That's often how God must deal with us his sheep. We are the children of God because of God's electing grace. We are those who, because of God's grace and love and mercy, belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. The favor and the love of God is always toward us. But this we can know when we live in disobedience to God, then we cannot experience that favor and experience the comfort of belonging to Christ. We do not experience when we live and continue in sin the loving kindness of God toward us. Instead, we experience his great displeasure against us, as Jonah did. I would dare to say, beloved, none of us has faced or faces the extreme judgment and chastisement of God that he brought upon Jonah. but still God does chasten and chastens us as Hebrews 12 points out, in love, whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth. And is that work through that chastisement because he needs to be in order to humble his children and bring those who stray to repentance before him. That's a mercy of God, a great, great mercy of God toward us. God, in humbling Jonah, brought him to see and brought him to admit and to confess. what his greatest need was. You might think that when Jonah was in the belly of the great fish that the greatest need that he had would be to be saved from drowning in the sea. It wasn't. You might think that his greatest need would be to be saved from dying in the belly of that great fish. But it wasn't. It is true that he could very well die there. He knew that, too. And he felt that he could die there, and it seemed to him even that death was imminent for him. that death was very near for him. But his greatest need was not to be saved from death. His greatest fear, therefore, was not simply that he might die, that he might die a physical death by drowning in the ocean or suffocating in the belly of that great fish. That was not his greatest fear. But what Jonah feared and what this prayer expresses as Jonah's realization of his greatest need was this. He feared that he would die under the wrath of God. God was judging him, bringing chastisement upon him. God was bringing Jonah through those chastisements and through that affliction, as he refers to it in verse 2, was bringing him to face the reality of dying. the reality of death for him. And being faced now inside the belly of that great fish with the reality of death, he came face to face as well with the reality of eternity, and the reality through death of facing God as his judge, meeting God his maker, and meeting God the righteous judge of all men. And he knew at this point that he would be facing God as an unforgiven sinner without the favor of God upon him, so that what he expresses especially in this prayer to God is this, I need to be restored to God. That's what I need. I need to be restored to God's favor. I need to be restored to the friendship and the fellowship of God. And if once I have that restored to me, and if once I can experience that again in my life before I die, then it's okay if I die. The text itself indicates that too. What does he say in verse 7? He says, My soul fainted within me. He was troubled in his soul because of the judgments of God that were coming upon him. In verse 3 he speaks about the billows and the waves of God passing over him. And those were not simply and merely the billows and the waves of the ocean. But those were the billows and waves that the waves of the ocean reminded him of and pointed him to, namely the billows and the waves of the wrath of God Almighty that come upon condemned sinners. And he was afraid, as he says in verse 4, of being cast out of the sight of God forever. eternally separated from God. That was his greatest fear. And God used that to bring him to realize how awful it is to be separated from God and to know that his greatest need was to be restored to God, forgiven his sin. What brought Jonah to realize that was that the judgment that God brought upon Jonah was a judgment that fit, that was in harmony with his sin. It's often what God does, brings a judgment upon his people, a chastisement upon his people that really is very closely connected to the sins that they have committed, which helps to bring them to see the sin, to realize the sin. Think of Jonah's sin. Think of that sin as it comes to the fore in Jonah chapter 1. This was Jonah's sin. He wanted to get away from the presence and fellowship of God. That's mentioned three times in chapter 1. He tried to escape from God. He tried to separate himself from God. He tried to get away from any reminder that he might have if he were to stay in the land of Israel of God. He tried to run away from the presence of the Lord. And God said, okay, Jonah, I'll give you what you want. So you can know what it's really like, what it's really like to be away from my presence. And that's what God caused Jonah to experience in the fish's belly, that he was far from God, that he was cast out of God's sight, as he said in verse four. And to bring him to say in the rest of verse four, yet I will look again toward thy holy temple, expressing thereby, I can't bear this. I can't bear this sense and feeling of being separated from God, of the weight of His displeasure upon me for my sin. I want to be, as he says there in verse 4, I want to be again in God's temple, in the place where I can worship God, in the place where I am the closest it possibly is to be near to God, enjoying His fellowship there in the temple, and enjoying the Word that is proclaimed there in the house of God, and enjoying fellowship with God through Christ in the temple. And so God used that judgment to bring Jonah back to himself. God used that judgment to lead Jonah to cry out to God in this time of great affliction and need. God used that judgment to wake Jonah up to his senses and realization of the gravity of the sin that he had committed, so that now he looks to Jehovah, verse 4, and he remembers Jehovah, verse 7, and the mercies of Jehovah toward him in the past. And by the grace and mercy of God and the Spirit's work in his heart, Jonah repented and saw what he needed and what was his greatest need in his affliction. He was brought near to God again and by faith comforted and forgiven. And that's the faith that, by the grace of God, characterizes the believer when God brings us low, sometimes on account of our sin. When God does that, then we may have great fear at such a time just as Jonah did. It may seem to us, as it did to Jonah, that God was far away, that God had abandoned him. But God brings us to see what we really need in those circumstances. no matter what those circumstances are, no matter what that chastisement is, no matter how deep and dark the way is that God brings upon us, to see what our greatest need is in those times, and to see that the greatest need is not to be rescued from the trouble, the affliction, That's what Jonah realized. That wasn't his greatest need, not to be delivered from physical death, but the greatest need that God brings us to realize is we need God. And we need the fellowship of God, and we need to experience once again the favor of God upon us. We need to be restored to God, and that in the way of repentance. for our sin, then we can know and be assured by faith of the favor of God again. And so when the child of God needs to be chastened by the Lord, whether it is for great and terrible sins or for any sin, then like Jonah, we must cry out to God and look to Him and remember Him. Notice those three key verbs that explain what Jonah did. He cried out. He looked. and he remembered Jehovah, praying in faith, believing as the Scripture teaches us that God is a merciful God and ready and willing to forgive in Christ his Son. And finally, beloved, notice that Jonah's prayer was characterized by thanks. Thanks, verse 9. But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord. Jonah gives thanks to God. Joni gives thanks to God, mind you, from the belly of the great fish. He's still in the belly of the fish when he gives that thanks. He doesn't wait until the Lord has led the fish to vomit him out on dry ground to give thanks to God. In fact, he had no idea even that that would happen. He gives thanks to God from the belly of the fish. And it wasn't because he didn't drown that he gives thanks. He doesn't even know that he's not going to die in the belly of the fish. But still he is thankful. and he is thankful for deliverance. He is thankful for salvation because salvation is of the Lord. And he's thankful for deliverance and thankful for salvation because God has delivered him Even though he's still in the belly of the great fish, God has delivered him from that which mattered the most, namely from his sin and the guilt that he had before God and his deserving the judgment of God eternally upon him for his sin. He was thankful. Thankful that God heard his prayer. and thankful that God received and answered his prayer, and thankful that God had sent the Spirit to give him the assurance that salvation, which is of the Lord, was his salvation to have and to experience, saved from the depths of hell. That's what he's thankful for. Thankful that God has saved him from corruption. Thankful God has saved him from eternal corruption, from the fires of hell as the wrath of God upon him that he certainly deserved for his sin. He had salvation from hell. He had salvation from the wrath of God. And therefore, he was able to be thankful while still in the belly of that fish. He had the favor of God upon him again. He experienced that. That's why he could be thankful while still in the belly of the fish. And he expresses thanks, that includes not only words, as he specifies that in verse 9, the voice of thanksgiving, but he expresses a thanks that will be evident in deeds also. I will pay that that I have vowed. Thanks in life. Thankful obedience to God. So the message is that of marvelous, gracious, merciful salvation that is of the Lord. Our salvation is that, and for that we give thanks. Thankful that God has saved us. Thankful that God has humbled us to see and humbles us to see repeatedly again and again in our lives, even day by day and hour by hour that our greatest need is God's merciful pardon. We have received it freely given to us through Christ. God gives us to experience it. He works faith and He works repentance. He humbles us so that we seek the mercy of God. and in the way of repentance experience again his favor and his blessing. Then the child of God can be thankful in the midst of affliction, as was true of Jonah. Thankful because we have salvation, and if we have salvation that is of the Lord, that is of Jehovah, we have all that we need. Then we have God. Then we have Christ. Then we have the fellowship of God, and then we have the favor of God. Is there anything else that matters? May God therefore make us truly thankful that we do have those blessings of His grace. We praise Him because salvation is of the Lord. Amen. Our Father and our God in heaven, we are thankful that Thou hast given us Thy Word, Thou hast given us Christ, and salvation that is of the Lord is ours because of Thy gift of it to us and Thy grace working it in our hearts and lives. Knowing that we have that salvation, that we are right with thee, our God, that thou give unto us peace and comfort in all of life, in all of the afflictions of life as well, knowing that thy favor is upon us and thy will is to bless us in and through all things that we experience and that we have. So bless us by this word and fill us with thanksgiving. In Jesus' name, amen.