As you're being seated, I invite you to take your copies of God's Word and to open with me to the Old Testament book of Jonah, chapter 1, verses 4 through 16. This morning, Jonah 1, 4 through 16. Our sermon is entitled, Fear and Deliverance. as we're continuing to walk verse by verse through this Old Testament prophecy, a minor prophet by the name of Jonah in our sermon series entitled God's Sovereign Grace. We're in Jonah 1, verses 4 through 16. The text reads, But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid. Each cried out to his God, and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, what do you mean you sleeper? Arise, call out to your God. Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not perish. They said to one another, come, let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us. So they cast lots and the lot fell to Jonah. Then they said to him, tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you? And he said to them, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, what is this that you have done? for they knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. Then they said to him, what shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us? For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, pick me up and hurl me into the sea, then the sea will quiet down for you. For I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you. Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Therefore they called out to the Lord, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you. So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord, and they made vows. This is the word of the Lord. Let us hear it and heed it. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord will stand forever. Now, when we look at Jonah chapter one, We see that God is a primary character as the narrative goes along. We could say that the sea serves as a character in this story, certainly. But as far as human characters go, outside of Jonah himself, the only other human characters are these seamen, are these mariners. Now, I personally really like these guys. They're hardworking. They're rugged men, men's men. We don't know a single name of any one of them. And we don't know much about any of them at all, in fact. We're not told. There's only mentioned a captain and his crew. I'm not even sure how many people we're talking about specifically. Almost certainly the ship itself is a Phoenician vessel. The Phoenicians were known as a seafaring people during that time. They had all sorts of ports and trading outposts and shipping lanes across the Mediterranean. Now some of these crew might have been from the surrounding nations of the Mediterranean and just hired on with this group. We see that in the various gods that they seem to be calling out to from their hometown or their homeland. Now little did these men realize when they set out from the port of Joppa on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and they headed west towards Tarsus, which is in Spain, that what was going to happen to them was going to change their lives. Events were going to unfold that would fundamentally transform them and impact them for an eternity. These things happened because sleeping in the hold of the ship that they crewed was a man who was a complete stranger to them. A prophet of the Lord who, unbeknownst to them, was fleeing from the presence of God. Now our story relates how God pursues His servant Jonah, His runaway prophet. Yahweh hurls a great wind upon the sea surrounding the ship. Yet in the midst of this chase across the sea, we find that the Lord has more than just Jonah on His mind, doesn't He? that as he's chasing after Jonah, as he's pursuing Jonah, the Lord desires also to pursue these sailors that are on this ship as well. We might say that the Lord went fishing for a specific fish, but he decided to catch more than that. He decided he wanted more. Even out of the disobedience that Jonah had towards the Lord, God is able to bring something good. God is able to bring beauty from ashes. Where sin abounds, grace super abounds. He is a God who, though sins be many, His mercy is more. Now last week we looked at this same text. verses 4 through 16. And there we said that this isn't really a unit. And this unit needs, this text 4 through 16 really needs to be kept together. We pointed out three features from the passage itself. And I said that we're going to look again this week at the same passage and look at two more features from it. But my goal is really that this not be a part one and a part two. There was a lot here. It's one unit. It's more than one sermon could hold. But I want to keep the two sermons really standing alone. But I wonder if you did miss last week, and just to be helpful to kind of get us into the flow of the text, to briefly review what we looked at last week, the three features. First of all, we emphasize how God's sovereignty characterizes and pervades the entire passage itself. We've noted that just as on the book of Jonah. We've entitled the series, God's Sovereign Grace. So this is not unique just to this passage, but to the entire book as a whole. We witness God's sovereignty in His sending the storm. God is sovereign over nature, the wind and the waves, they obey Him. The winds howl, the seas roar, the lightning flashes, the thunder booms at His command. But the wind and the waves also grow still and quiet and stop equally by the power of God and His voice. God's sovereignty extends not just over all that he has made and all of this nature. It even extends to the very casting of the lots themselves so that God determines that the lots come up to reveal that Jonah is the guilty party. Nothing about our text is coincidence. Nothing about it is random or happenstance. It's under the oversight and the sovereign oversight of the Lord. Second thing that we notice is how there is this repetition throughout the text of the Hebrew word behind the word hurl. That there's this four times a form of the word hurl is mentioned in the passage. The Lord in verse four hurls a great wind upon the sea. God is purposely using the storm as his rod or his instrument of discipline towards the disobedient prophet Jonah, trying to attempt to correct him and bring him to repentance. In verse 5, it is the mariners who are the ones that are doing the hurling. And they're hurling the cargo of the ship overboard to lighten its load so that the ship floats higher in the storm. We argue that this represents our common inability to escape God and His judgment through our man-made schemes. In verse 12, Jonah suggests to the sailors that the only way to get the sea to quiet down for them is for them to pick him up and to hurl him into the sea. And he's still refusing, in this case, to obey God and go to Nineveh. He'd rather die than go back. And then in verse 15, the sailors finally do the very thing that Jonah suggested. They pick Jonah up, they hurl him into the sea, and when they do, the sea becomes still and the waves cease their raging. Jonah was the guy that the Lord was after primarily, so now Jonah has been sacrificed in order to satisfy God's wrath and avert his judgment away from them. The third feature that we saw last week as we looked and talked about was the progressive way that knowledge unfolds. Knowledge of what's happening and who's responsible for its happening plays out. At the very beginning of the story, Jonah is ignorant. He's asleep in the boat. The sailors know what's going on. They know that they're being attacked by this storm. The winds are raging and howling. They're crying out to God. He doesn't know about all the frenzied activity going on above him trying to save them from disaster. But then the lots are cast and the lot falls on Jonah. And that's when the scales of knowledge tip. Then Jonah is the one who knows why all of this is happening. And the sailors are the one who are ignorant. And they're seeking answers from Jonah. Who are you? What's happened? Why is this happening to us? And moreover, they ask him, what should we do about it? They don't know they're asking Jonah. and he admitted to them that he knew that he was responsible for bringing the disaster upon them and that he was the one that they needed to get some critical distance from because he's the man that God sent the storm to get. So now that we've looked at those three features in review, I wanna look at two more. And what that is, as we walk through the text, I want you to see the interplay of fear, which is repeated, the word fear is repeated throughout the text, and then this also prayer, this calling out to God or God. So the interplay of fear and prayer as we work our way through the story. It will help us better understand what God is trying to teach us in the passage. There are four instances in verses four through 16 where the concept of fear is mentioned. The first is found in verse five. We're told there's a mighty tempest on the sea. You and I as readers know that the mighty tempest has been sent as a result of the Lord hurling a great wind upon the sea. The target is the ship that is bound for Tarsus that contains the disobedient prophet Jonah. The tempest is so bad that the ship itself is threatening to break apart. It's then that we're told the mariners were afraid." Now that's a telling statement, isn't it, about the violence of the storm? It's so bad that these experienced seamen are scared for their lives. I mean, we're not talking here about landlubbers. We're not talking about greenhorns. These are men who have been out on the ocean before and have experienced storms before, and they're scared. They understand that this is not their first rodeo. This one's big, it's bad, and they're scared. And being an experienced seaman, they were realistic about the reality of the situation. They appreciated how dangerous this storm really was. Last week we read Psalm 107 to start, and it talks about those that are seafaring people, and it describes them in 26 and 27, that they mounted up to heaven. Think about the waves. They're mounting up to heaven. And they went down to the depths, and their courage melted away in their evil plight. They reeled and staggered like drunken men and were at their wits' end. This is the case with these seamen. They understood that this storm was bad enough that the ship itself might break apart, and if it breaks apart, then they're going down into the sea. And if they go down into the midst of the sea, this far away from land, the outcome looks bleak and survival seems unlikely. So their fear in this case is a fear of death. A fear of perishing. Their fear is a fear that is fundamental to each and every one of us. We're born with this innate fear of death, and this fear enslaves us. We know, furthermore, that we're sinners, that death awakes us, and we know inherently that death is not really natural, but an enemy to us, an enemy that needs to be defeated. The Apostle Paul in Romans tells us that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. He tells us furthermore that the wages of that sin is death, that what we have earned through our sinfulness, our falling short of God's glory is death. We're owed a death. The author to the book of Hebrews reminds us that it is appointed unto man once to die, and then comes the judgment. So because of sin, there is death and judgment. The Bible is clear that we know that there is a God, that we know innately what that God is like, that we know furthermore that we have not lived up to the standards that He has set, the demands that He has made, and that because of our guilt from not living up to these standards, we are deserving of death. We know that too. Now typically, the way that we respond is we suppress that knowledge. We hold it down like a giant spring, not letting it come up. We don't want to think about it. We don't want to dwell on this. We avoid hospitals and funerals and other places where we're forced to think about these sorts of, our own mortality. We don't want to admit it because then we're admitting that we're guilty before a holy God. who will be just to judge us and punish us and from this God there is no escape. Before this God we can make no excuse. So then the author to the Hebrews also tells us that for this very reason is one of the primary reasons why our Savior Jesus Christ has come. In Hebrews 2, 14 and 15, since therefore the children, that's us, since the children share in flesh and blood, Jesus himself likewise partook the same things, flesh and blood, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that's the devil, and also deliver all those who through the fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. So he came to deliver us from this fear of death by dying for us. So then the first instance we have in our passage in Jonah, the first instance of fear is a fear that we see in the Mariner's fear of death. It's caused by the imminent threat of the storm at sea. Now in response to that fear, they do two things. If you look, they do two things. First, they start calling out to their gods. And second, they start lightening the ship's load by tossing the cargo of the ship overboard. This is where the concept of fear starts interacting with prayer, calling out to God. They're afraid of dying. So immediately they each start calling out to his God. This is the old principle that there are no atheists in foxholes, right? It's the old principle that when the plane is going down and going to crash, no one is denying God. Everyone is calling out to God just in case, right? Just let's lift up a prayer. Maybe that'll help. What are they doing? It means that each one called out to his own God. John Mackey explains, although they were polytheists, believing that there were many gods, the heathen often considered themselves to be worshipers of one guardian deity in particular, perhaps the god of their own nation or their birthplace or one to whom they attributed past good fortune. Such a patron deity would be expected to accord special favor to his or her own devotees and would be approached for help in difficult circumstances. So these men believed in the existence of many gods, a variety of gods. They each probably had one god that they were particularly devoted to or favorable towards. So what this is, is the shotgun approach to prayer. Let's all, a bunch of men, lift up a bunch of prayers to a bunch of different gods, and maybe we'll hit one. Maybe one can help us and throw some help down our way, because we're all in this thing together, right? So maybe that will work. If one of them answers with some help, then we won't all die in the storm. And that prayer is very pragmatic, isn't it? That's the kind of praying that's pragmatic, and yet it's ineffective. It's worthless, it doesn't work. Why? Because Yahweh is the true and the living God. He's the only God that there is, and He's the only God that actually sent this storm, and He's a jealous God. We just read about that. Yahweh is not content in just being one among a host of other gods. He takes no pleasure in being added to anyone's pantheon of deities. So sadly, these men are calling out to all the gods of the surrounding nations, but these gods don't exist. They can't assist them in any way. They can provide no deliverance. They cannot hear their prayers. They cannot help the sailors. Prayer to the wrong God is worthless. It may be a religious activity, but the religion here is empty. It's completely devoid of any power. And we need to watch this as Christians in our day because a lot of the people that we talk to, even people that maybe look like us and have the same background as us, when we say God and that you need to pray to God, they may hear something completely different and think something completely different than what we're meaning when we say that. They don't have the biblical worldview that we do. That's becoming more and more true. So when we encourage people, they just need to pray to God, that can be very misleading. Because the power is not in the praying, but into the God to whom we pray. And it's more than likely in our pluralistic society, that what we say when we say God, what we mean is not what they hear. So we need to encourage Christianity specifically and not just popular religion. For instance, if I'm speaking to a Hindu person and I need to be careful about merely encouraging that person to call upon Jesus and to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, because they believe in many gods and goddesses, and they're perfectly willing to accept Jesus as another god, to metaphorically take Jesus and put him up on the shelf with all of their other deities that they have trusted in. Jesus, however, will not just be one god among many. To have Jesus, one must forsake all others, and for Jesus, for Jesus is the only name under heaven by which a person can be saved. What's ironic as we look at our passage is that Jonah knows that. Jonah believes that. But when the captain comes to Jonah and wakes him up from his sleep, there is no sign that Jonah prays as the captain suggests that he do. You don't see Jonah calling out to the only God that can do anything. You'll recall that while the crew members are all calling out to their gods, they're busy tossing the ship's cargo into the sea, Jonah's down below deck, and the captain comes up and says, what do you mean, you sleeper? He's asking, how can you be sleeping at a time like this? Don't you know that we're all about to die? The captain specifically says in verse six, arise, call out to your God. Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not perish. Now the captain doesn't know anything about Jonah or the God that Jonah serves. What he knows is that situation they're in is a situation that calls for prayer. to whatever deity. Everyone else is praying. Jonah needs to pray too. Maybe Jonah's God will be the God that can send some help their way. And since they're all in this thing together, maybe Jonah's God can deliver them from their perishing. It's all haunting rebuke, isn't it? When we think about it. Here you have a heathen man coming to the man of God, waking him up and reminding him, he's saying, we're all about to die, will you pray for us? And him refusing to do so. We're all perishing. Will he not pray to God to save their souls? Church, this is a wake up call, not just for Jonah, but for us, isn't it? Something we need to hear. There are people around us that are dying and going to hell. Will we not pray? Will you call on God that he will save them from their perishing? Hear what the captain says again to Jonah. Arise, call out to your God. Now the captain didn't know it, but those words landed a heavy blow on Jonah's soul. because earlier when God's word came to Jonah, some of the same language that the captain is using is the language that God had said. What did God said? Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against her for her wickedness has come against me. Now the captain is saying, arise and call out to your God. In both cases, this repetition of arise and call out, arise and call out is going on. Here is a reminder of God's Word that Jonah's been trying so desperately to avoid. Here's another reminder of his disobedience and his guilt. Even through the unintentional words of this uncircumcised captain, God was reminding Jonah of who he was as a prophet and what he was supposed to be doing. Sinclair Ferguson says, the words must have seemed to Jonah like a haunting echo from the past, exposing once more the guilt of his flight from God. Now God had sent this pagan to arouse him to his duties. If we do not keep short accounts with God in our conscience, it will not be long before our once sensitive spirits will fail to respond to the touch of his hand or the sound of his voice. Yet sadly we see no evidence that Jonah prays, that he calls out to God. He does not seem to heed the call of the captain. All the sailors who do not know God are busy calling out to God who cannot do anything. While Jonah, the only one who knows the God who can do something, refuses to call out to him because he's still running away from him in rebellion. John Mackey says, it wasn't just being roused out of a deep sleep to face a terrific storm that leaves Jonah queasy and befuddled. He who disobeys the Lord has disrupted his fellowship with Him, and his prayer life cannot but be affected. The accusations of his own conscience, which he was suppressing, would have shriveled up any prayer before it could even be uttered. This is the prophet who wants to get away from the presence of the Lord. And to approach him in prayer was not possible without repentance. So let's review just a little bit what we've said so far. First we looked at the fear of death that was brought on to the mariners by the storm. Then we saw how that fear provoked in these sailors a bevy of ineffective prayers to false gods. Then we saw how the sinful prophet of the Lord refused to pray to the only God who can actually do anything when he was pleaded with by the captain. They're convinced that they're about to perish. So now let's switch back to this notion of fear. We see it again. The second use of the word fear comes in verse nine. This time, we don't hear it from the or see it in the Mariners, but we hear it from the lips of Jonah. The lot is fallen to Jonah. It appears to the sailors that Jonah is the reason this disaster has befallen them. They hit him with a barrage of questions to explain who he is and what he has done. They implore him in verse eight, tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country of what people are you? And he answers in verse nine saying, I'm a Hebrew and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. This is such a good confession. This is the kind of statement that, given any other context, we might rejoice over it. What might we? I mean, imagine David saying this to Goliath. I'm a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land, and I'm about to deliver your uncircumcised body to him. Or Daniel and his three friends saying this to Nebuchadnezzar, I'm a Hebrew, we're Hebrews, we fear the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea of dry land, we're not gonna bow down to your statue. Or imagine even someone before Congress saying something like, I'm a Christian, I fear the Lord Jesus. He's reigning in heaven, he's the maker of all things, and he's the redeemer of my soul. But then imagine that that same guy who was testifying before Congress has just been caught embezzling millions from his company. Or even that he was just caught having an adulterous affair with a staff member, which is not all that far from what David did, is it? I'm not saying that Jonah's confession is untrue. I'm saying that his confession rings hollow, doesn't it? Because of his actions. It's shallow. You're tempted to say, you fear the Lord? Really, Jonah? Don't you mean fleeing from the Lord? Jonah, you can't even bring yourself to pray to Him right now. You'd rather die at sea than obey this Yahweh. Yet you claim you fear Him? It begs the question, does our behavior match our confession? Do we walk in a manner worthy of the God that we claim to love and the gospel that we proclaim? Does our practice match our preaching? When we bear the name of Christ and then we walk in unrepentant sin, we bring reproach upon Christ and His church. For instance, in our road rage, that and our Christian stickers and bumper stickers on our car don't really go so well together, do they? Our rude and corrupt speech while we're wearing our Christian t-shirts don't quite communicate what we hoped. Our, let's say, our well-known sexual immorality and our daily Bible quotes that we post on social media aren't really the blessing to everyone that we might expect them to be. The point is that as Christians, you and I bear the name of Jesus Christ, that we are his ambassadors, that we represent him either for good or for ill. And Christians, even genuine ones, and I'm including myself here, we have the capacity to do great damage and harm to the cause of Christ with our sin and our acts of hypocrisy. But I want you to think about this in another way. How about Jonah's missionary call? We go back to what God has called Jonah to do. Jonah refuses to go to Nineveh and to call out against the pagan Assyrians, yet here the Lord has him in a situation where he's bearing witness and confessing before a group of pagan sailors. The irony's thick here. God is even sovereign over us when we're resisting His will. Having heard Jonah confess the name of Yahweh, and recognizing Yahweh's jurisdiction over the sea and the dry land, both of which Yahweh has made, and hearing Jonah acknowledge that he was fleeing from the presence of this God, we're told in verse 10, Then the men were exceedingly afraid. This is the third time the notion of fear appears in our passage. Literally, the men feared a great fear. There aboard the very ship on which they are sailing is a man who is running from God. And the God that he serves claims to have made everything. And this God is mad. And he has apparently sent this storm in his fury over his disobedient servant. And they're caught up in this. Daniel Timmer comments, the sailors are aghast when they hear that one among them has attempted to flee from a deity who has sovereignty over sea and land and who as their creator exercises his justice everywhere. They're more scared now than they were earlier. This is not just any storm, this is the storm of the Lord, isn't it? They're not simply fighting against the storm and the raging of the sea, they're fighting against the Almighty. It is sinking in just how much danger they really find themselves. Amidst the storm at sea, the presence of the disobedient prophet in their midst is the primary source of the fear that they feel. But that isn't the way it should be, is it? The fear that the sailors feel due to the presence of Jonah is in contrast to the comfort that comes later from the Apostle Paul in a similar story. In Acts chapter 27, Paul has been obedient to the Lord's missionary call. In fact, he's been arrested and in chains for over two years, having been arrested in Jerusalem, kept in Syria. He's used his Roman citizenship to play the card, to appeal his case to appear before Caesar in Rome. And they put Paul on chains under a centurion and a cohort, and they put him on an Alexandrian ship from Egypt that was going to Rome. And he and a whole bunch of other people, nearly 300 folks, are on this ship out at sea when a dangerous storm, the Northeaster, comes out. and they're driven along, just like in our story, the sailors are afraid, they lighten the load, they throw everything overboard. They've gone some 14 days without food. Paul has been trying to encourage them that the Lord's standing by, the Lord is going to save us, the Lord is going to rescue us. The Lord had told him this much. He's gotta stand before Caesar. And so at the end of this two weeks, Paul stands up among them and he preaches and he says, Today is the fourteenth day that you have continued in suspense and without food, having taken nothing. Therefore I urge you to take some food, for it will give you strength. For not a hair is to perish from the head of any of you. And when he had said these things, he took bread and giving thanks to God in the presence of all, he broke it and began to eat. Then they all were encouraged and ate some food themselves. You see, the presence of the obedient and righteous prophet among them, encouraging them with the word of God, praying for them, interceding for them. That is a comfort to them, an encouragement to the people. They're glad to have Paul on board. But in our story, Jonah is the source of the problem. His disobedience brings fear, not comfort. There's no blessing here. In the exceeding fear of the men about Jonah, they didn't know what to do. They didn't know Yahweh. They weren't sure what he might require of them to make the sea grow quiet again. So they asked the only person who might know, and that's Jonah, what should we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us? Jonah says, pick me up, throw me in. They don't. Not at first. First, they each grabbed an oar. They try their best to row back to dry land. They row hard. and they row harder and they are unable to do so. They just grow further and further out to sea. I don't know how far they are from sea. I don't know if they can see the land at all that they're trying, but the point is that they're getting further away and not closer the harder they row. So, it's time now to call out to the Lord. That's what they do. They start praying again. They stop rowing, they start praying again. This time they're praying to the Lord. They're no longer praying to their own gods, they're praying to Yahweh. They know it's Yahweh, the God of Jonah's confession that they're dealing with, so they pray for deliverance from Him. And having run out of viable options, they've decided to heed Jonah's suggestion. They're planning to throw Jonah overboard, but first they need to talk to Yahweh. So they say in verse 14, O Lord, Let us not perish for this man's life. Lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you. They recognize that God is angry at Jonah. They hope not to perish for what he's done. They know that throwing a man overboard is murder if he dies. Their goal in trying to appease God is certainly not to make God madder at them by throwing this guy and murdering him. So they ask God not to hold Jonah's life against them. They don't want to become guilty of shedding innocent blood. They acknowledge God's sovereignty. They plead for their own pardon. They beg to be delivered so that they may not perish. Now this is a remarkable transformation when we consider that just a few moments earlier, they were praying out to their own false gods in worthless effort. Now they're calling out to Yahweh to be saved. of their prayer, Daniel Timmer says, because their religious transformation is evident before they derive any demonstrable benefit from it, it cannot be motivated by pragmatism or self-preservation. In short, they revere Yahweh for who He is, not for what He can give them. The storm is still raging right now for them as they're praying. But after they pray, they toss Jonah overboard and the sea ceased. from its raging. And it's here in the final verse of our text that we find the fourth and final use of the word fear being used. They've prayed to the Lord, calling out to him. They've picked Jonah up. They've hurled him into the sea. The sea has now ceased its raging. The wind has died away. The water is still like glass. The ship has slowly stopped its fierce rocking. And the sailors are more scared now than they have been up to this point. They're not scared of dying so much. They're not even scared of Jonah like they were before. They fear the Lord. They fear him with an exceedingly great fear. as is described in Psalm 65, 5 and 8. By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness, O God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas. the one who by his strength established the mountains, being girded with might, who steals the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples, so that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs. You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy. Yahweh had left them with very little doubt that He was real, that He existed, that He was the true God. From that moment on, these sailors would be forever changed. They would be convinced that Yahweh was the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land and that He sovereignly superintended them. What happened was so shocking, they would never forget it. Imagine these sailors arriving back in port in Joppa, an empty ship, but they were alive, and with full hearts, new hearts, with a knowledge of the Lord. I think it's probably not hard to imagine. I don't know, this fear we see produces worship in them. They offer a sacrifice and they make vows. They offer a sacrifice and they make vows. I don't know if they did that on board ship or if they waited till they got back to Joppa, went to a shrine of Yahweh somewhere and they offered this sacrifice and made vows. Usually fire and ships don't go so well together. So they may have waited. But I bet none of them, as one commentator said, said, not me, I'll worship Yahweh some other time. Because they'd seen, they could not doubt. Like the psalmist of number 116, these sailors exclaimed, I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. See from our story the results of Jonah's running. Even in his sin and in his disobedience, the sovereign Lord has borne fruit, hasn't he? Jonah meant it for evil, but the Lord has worked it for good. Jonah's anti-missionary activity, Daniel Timmer says, has ironically resulted in the conversion of non-Israelites. through Jonah's running from God's call to use him to bring mercy to the Ninevites. God has used him anyway to bring mercy to these pagan sailors. Sinclair Ferguson believes that there is a very important lesson here for God's people, especially his ministers. He says, It's a very clear illustration of the principle that the fruitfulness of our lives for God is not itself a guarantee of the closeness of our lives to his will. Beware of mistaking usefulness to God for communion with God. God used Jonah, but it was despite Jonah's disobedience and not because of it. I want to close this sermon with a story that's repeated in the Gospels. It bears a lot of similarities with our story in Jonah, but with some important differences. It tells of a violent storm out on the water that was caught and called experienced boatman by surprise. made them fear. These were fishermen, the disciples of Jesus, crossing the Sea of Galilee. The way the Sea of Galilee is situated in the mountains, storms and winds can rush upon them and create violent storms very quickly. The storm comes up, the winds howling, the waves are breaking over the boat, and the boat is starting to fill up with water. And these fishermen are afraid. And just like in our story, there is one in the boat who is asleep. But this is Jesus, who's not asleep because he's tired from running away from God. He's tired because he spent all day teaching people about the kingdom of God and healing them of various diseases. And he's asleep in the stern of the boat and they wake him and they say to him, save us, Lord, we are perishing. So Jesus stands up, rebukes them for their fear and their little faith, and then turns to the wind and the waves and the sea, and he speaks and rebukes them. And he says, peace, be still. And we're told that there was a great calm upon the sea. And like in our story, the disciples are now struck with a different kind of fear and astonishment. And they explain, what sort of man is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? You see, when they call upon Jesus to save them, they're calling upon the Lord Himself. And the God of Jonah's confession, the Lord of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land was the very one in the boat with the disciples who speaks to the wind and the waves and says, peace, be still. Now let me close by asking you this question. Are you perishing? You may not be a storm and a sea, but you might be just as much under the threat of the judgment of God. Are you perishing? Are you afraid because you realize you're a sinner who is guilty before God and under the threat of His judgment? If that's you, let me very quickly give you some good news. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but instead have everlasting life. would not perish, but have everlasting life. Have you trusted your life to Jesus? Not just Jesus among a host of other gods, but trusted all that you are upon Jesus. Embrace Jesus as your Lord and as your Savior over all else. Let's go to the Lord in prayer.