As you're being seated, I invite you to take your copies of God's Word and to open up with me to the Old Testament book of Jonah. Jonah chapter 2, we're going to be in verses 7 through 9 this morning. Our sermon is entitled, The Soul and Sovereign Savior. As we continue to walk, verse by verse, through the prophet of Jonah, In our sermon series, God's Sovereign Grace, we've come to chapter two. We'll begin in verse seven and go down through verse nine. The text reads, when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I avowed, I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. This is the word of God. Let us hear it, let us heed it. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord, it will stand forever. Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote a children's series called The Chronicles of Narnia. And the first book in that series, by which he wrote, was entitled The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. And it told of four brothers and sisters, four children, the Pevensie children, who stumbled through a wardrobe into a magical world called Narnia. that this world was a land that had been cursed by an evil white witch so that it was always winter and never Christmas. And they met these children when they entered the world, a family of talking beavers. And they learned that this land of Narnia had a prophesied savior and that it was rumored that this savior was on the move. And more than that, that the savior had a name and his name was Aslan. And more than that, they learned that Aslan was a lion. And this is their response when they hear that Aslan is a lion. Ooh, said Susan, I thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion. That you will, dearie, and no mistake, said Mrs. Beaver. If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly. Then he isn't safe, said Lucy. Safe, said Mr. Beaver. Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn't safe, but he's good. He's the king, I tell you. Now, what the Pevensey children were just learning about Aslan is similar to what Jonah has thus far learned and experienced in our story. The severity and the goodness of God, the judgment and the mercy of God, the holiness of the Almighty, and yet, his condescension and compassion for us. I want you to see that as we look at the story of Jonah, so far everything, everything that has happened to Jonah, the Lord has done. And the text tells us that. Everything that's happened to Jonah, the Lord has done. That it was the Lord who hurled the storm onto the sea. The ship on which Jonah was sleeping was in that storm at sea that the Lord intentionally hurled because Jonah was there. And that by his own confession, that even though the sailors had tossed him overboard by his suggestion, Jonah has just confessed that it was the Lord who cast Jonah into the sea. So everything that has happened to Jonah, the Lord has done. And yet, as we look at the story, Jonah is to blame for everything that has happened to him. Jonah is the one who has brought these consequences from the Lord on himself by his own disobedience to the Lord. Jonah was the cause of this severe wrath and judgment headed towards death. There's death, death, death being talked about in the passage where he talks about going down to the land whose gates are going to close on him forever. Where he talks about seaweed being wrapped around his head and so on, and so going down into Sheol. place of the dead. And yet we see that the Lord also appoints a giant fish to swallow Jonah. And so the fish is not God's judgment. The fish is God's mercy. The fish is God's salvation. The fish is God rescuing Jonah from death and from hell. And so what we do is we're looking at verse six. Remember that we're breaking in mid-prayer. Jonah's been praying for five verses, six verses now, and he's been praying from where? From inside the belly of the giant fish, praising God for the salvation, for the deliverance, for the mercy that God has given to him, that God has sent to him, that God has rescued him. So we're breaking into a prayer that's being prayed at the bottom of the ocean from the belly of a giant fish. We need to remember that. And yet, as we look at the story of Jonah, the four chapters, this is the happiest part of the story. This is really the happiest part of the entire story. And the point of it is, The point that God is trying to teach Jonah, that God is trying to teach Israel through the story of Jonah, about Nineveh and the rest, is this, and Douglas Stewart sums it up, he says, God's determination to do good can mercifully benefit even those who deserve punishment. God's determination to do good can mercifully benefit even those who deserve punishment. So as we look at verse seven, the first point that I want you to see from verse seven is the long reach of prayer. the long reach of prayer. It says, when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. You see, this is a psalm of thanksgiving, a psalm of deliverance, that Jonah is singing and praising and praying from the midst of the well, and it's in response to a previous prayer. a prayer that he has called out to the Lord in his distress, and the Lord has answered that prayer. And so it was when his life was fainting away, as his soul was slipping into oblivion, as his consciousness was, as he was losing it, as his senses were failing, as the last bits of Jonah's life were circling the drain, as it were, he remembered the Lord. This is Memorial Day weekend. Here he's remembering the Lord. And it's not just he goes, oh, there is a God and he exists. That's part of it, certainly, that he remembers. But he remembers the power of this God. He remembers his former relationship. with this God. He remembers his service, his vows to this God. He remembers the might and the distinction and the uniqueness of this God in comparison to all the other gods out there. And it's as he's about to die and he has nowhere else to turn, he's at the very end of his rope, there's nothing that his hands can do, quite literally, that he calls out to the Lord, remembers the Lord, he calls out to the Lord, and in his distress, the Lord answers him. Spoke earlier about last week, you know, we spent time wondrously on a beach. and spent time together and part of that vacation was an attempt to get away from that cell phone that is always in my hands at my own you know, doing, you know. And it's harder to put down than you think, isn't it, these things? These are wondrous inventions, but also can be very controlling inventions to our lives, and very intrusive into our lives, and so But I was thinking just as I was trying to leave the thing along and put it down and not look at it and walk away and go to the beach. Also, it's very convenient, isn't it? Just for communication purposes. Hey, bring me a popsicle down at the beach. Hey, if you're coming down, do this, do that. That can go both ways for us, but just some communication. Hey, I'm going for a walk. Hey this, hey that. We've got nine of us, just some communication so that you don't have to go all the way down and all the way back to communicate some of these things. Now remember, these are actually wonderful inventions for communication, aren't they? You remember those commercials that when, I guess, cell phones were just starting to come out, and everybody was getting them, and they didn't have towers everywhere, and this one company had the, can you hear me now, can you hear me now, can you hear me now, sort of, wherever he was testing, can you hear me at this place? Well, I wonder if they tested those things at the bottom of the ocean, you know? I think it's amazing when we consider where Jonah was, what Jonah had done, that when he remembered the Lord and called out to the Lord in his distress, that that prayer came to the Lord in his holy temple. That prayer is as remarkable as a computer that you can keep in your pocket is, that prayer is such a more blessed gift. That the very power of God, the presence of God, is with us in prayer. That in our darkest place, in our darkest moments, the Lord is merely a prayer away. that we cannot get too far, that we cannot get too beyond gone, so to speak, that as his life is fainting away, in his last breath, as he has done evil, you think about the thief on the cross, remember me, Lord. Remember me when you come into your kingdom. And the Lord answered and the Lord gives grace the long reach of prayer to come into the heavenly temple. You would not think that a message could get from the bottom of the ocean inside a well into heaven itself. And yet the Lord heard And the Lord answered. And the Lord delivered. The Lord gave grace. Because the Lord Himself is in the bottom of the ocean as well. And where the Lord is, there is His holy temple. This is a message that Jonah is writing not just about his experience of the grace of God, but he wants Israel to know that too. He wants Israel to know as Israel is fooling around with all sorts of vain idols, as Israel's forsaking the Lord, as Israel is putting her trust in other places besides the living God. that he wants Israel to know is you are not too far gone. But you need to understand that though your life is fainting away and he's telling Israel, your life is fainting away. You may not know it, but your life is fainting away. Call out to the Lord. Remember the Lord. Turn to the Lord. Come back to the Lord. and your prayer will come to him in his holy temple. And he's able to deliver you, he's able to rescue you. Call out to the Lord. Second thing I want you to see here is the empty despair of idolatry. the empty despair of idolatry. He says in verse eight, those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. He's contrasting what he has learned, the experience of grace that he's felt, that these other idols don't offer this kind of grace. You may call out to your God as those sailors did on that ship. They called out to their own gods, but their own gods are not able to answer. They are nothing but vain idols. In fact, the word is these empty nothings. these snares or traps the word for idle is like a snare or a trap they that they they look good there's there's bait there there's lore there but you don't realize that there's a there's a trap to it there's a hook in the thing They offer a lot, promise a lot, and deliver on nothing. In fact, you end up destroying yourself by running after these vain idols. Those who pay regard to these vain idols forsake their hope. What he laments most about that is that the people who are given to this idolatry, they don't get to experience the grace of God. They don't get to know. They forsake all of their hope of God's enduring compassion, His steadfast love, His loving kindness, His grace that we talk about. They've forsaken Yahweh. This isn't again. It's not just a message that Jonah is saying that he has learned but he wants Israel to learn Israel you're going after vain things You're going after empty nothings. You're putting your hope and your love into this emptiness, into this futility. And only the Lord can save. And if you keep running in this direction, there is no hope of grace. There is only despair and destruction down this path. That's what he's trying to tell them. It's emptiness. They cannot save. Those who pay attention, who give their lives over to vain idols, they just set hope aside. They just set steadfast love aside. They have no experience of grace. That cannot save these idols. We'll come back to that in a little bit. But thirdly, I want you to see the faithful promise of Thanksgiving. The faithful promise of Thanksgiving. Verse nine, but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay. I don't know what exactly Jonah has promised the Lord. I don't know when exactly he promised it. He may have made these vows to the Lord when he entered into the prophetic ministry many years before. I don't know what his vows were or even if he made those vows in the bottom of the ocean after he was delivered or what they were. He experienced grace and now he is responding to that grace. And grace that has been experienced needs to be responded. He says, with a voice of thanksgiving. not because he's trying to earn God's favor, not because he's trying to get God's salvation, but because he has been saved, the Lord has shown mercy, the Lord has granted grace, he's thankful, he's grateful. And with this worshipful attitude, this praiseworthiness of the Lord, he says, I'm gonna sacrifice to you. I want to give to you. I want to grant to you, not in order to earn God's favor. He's not worshiping. He's not doing this out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of gratitude. Because the Lord has saved him, he wants to sacrifice. Now, our sacrifices are different. We don't make blood sacrifices anymore, do we? We don't slaughter lambs or goats or bulls or chickens or anything, do we? Not in the sense of making sacrifices to the Lord. We sacrifice praise to the Lord. We sacrifice, make our lives living sacrifices. to the Lord, don't we? We lay down our lives, our allegiance, our loyalty to Christ himself. What I have vowed I will pay. This is the promise of someone who is thankful for the grace they've experienced and they're responding to it. The sailors who were saved by the Lord, who called out eventually to the Lord God, called out to Yahweh, they also made sacrifices and made vows after the salvation had given to them. So Jonah's doing the same thing that those men previously had done. That was after Jonah had been thrown off the ship, so he doesn't know anything about what they ended up doing. when the sea ceased its raging, and they praised Yahweh for what He had done. This, by the way, is almost similar language to Psalm 31 that we read at the beginning of our service. I hate those who pay regard to worthless idols, but I trust in the Lord. All right, lastly, I want you to see the saving power of Yahweh. The saving power of Yahweh. He has promised with the voice of thanksgiving that his sacrifice to the Lord, that he'll pay his vows, and then he just exclaims. Just, he's bursting with praise to God. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Salvation belongs to the Lord. I think that means a few things that I want to talk about. One, I think that it means that Yahweh is the source of salvation. That the Lord is the one who saved, that salvation comes from the Lord. We see this over and over again. Revelation 17, salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. We see it again in Revelation 19, one. I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven crying out, hallelujah, salvation and glory and power belong to our God. Psalm 37, 39, the salvation of the righteous is from the Lord. He is their stronghold in the time of trouble. And Psalm 62 7 on God rest my salvation and my glory, my mighty rock, my refuge is God. So it is God, the triune God who is the source of our salvation. Not 95%, not 99.9%, but 100% of our salvation comes from the living God. He is the source, the sole worker of our salvation. It's not that we cooperate with God in saving ourselves. We don't let God do all of this and we do the last step. We don't take the first step and let God come the rest of the way. We don't pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Salvation comes from God. It belongs to the Lord. And so the Lord is the actor in salvation. This is what theologians call a monergistic work, a one work, rather than a synergistic where we cooperate. with God and His grace. It doesn't just mean that Yahweh is the source of salvation. I think, secondly, it means that Yahweh is the sole Savior, that there's no other Savior besides the Lord. Isaiah says that very thing. Chapter 43, verse 11, I, I am the Lord. Besides me, there is no Savior, he says. in Isaiah 45 in verse 21. He says, declare and present your case. Let them take counsel together. Who told this long ago? Who declared it of old? Was it not I, the Lord? And there is no other God besides me, a righteous God and a Savior. There is none besides me. So you see this contrast where he talks about those who pay regard to worthless idols, vain idols. They forsake their hope of steadfast love because salvation belongs to the Lord. These other gods cannot save. He goes on to say in Hosea 13.4, I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt. You know no god but me, and besides me there is no savior. Jeremiah 3.23, truly the hills are a delusion. The orgies on the mountains, truly in the Lord our God is the salvation of Israel. Seems like a pretty prominent theme throughout the entire Bible. And what is especially clear as we read those verses about there being no Savior outside of Yahweh, no Savior outside of the Lord, that we come to the New Testament and we see Jesus saves. We see that the Savior is Jesus. That there is one Mediator between God and man. That there is one God and one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. that there is no other name under heaven by which men can be saved except by Jesus Christ. Then we see that Jesus himself said, I am the way, and I am the truth, and I am the life, and no one comes to the Father except by me. He is the sole Savior. Salvation belongs to the Lord means that salvation belongs to Jesus. Imagine Jonah in the bottom of the ocean there, or even that belly of that fish, and him saying, Allah, save me. Or him turning to some vain idol and calling out to it. Crying out to any God that you can think of in all the earth. None could save except Yahweh. None could rescue him. except Yahweh. All the other ones are vanity. All the other ones are nothings. Call out to Jesus Christ. Don't try other things. Call out to Jesus Christ and be saved. Lastly, what I think that this salvation belongs to the Lord means is that Yahweh is the sovereign Savior. When we see that salvation belongs to the Lord, that salvation is His to do with. His to dole out. Romans 9 15 tells us that back in Exodus chapter 33 in verse 19, that the Lord, he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. Douglas Stewart said, Jonah cannot decide whom Yahweh ought to save or not. Salvation is Yahweh's to offer. He has offered it to Jonah, who has gladly accepted it with all of his heart. Moreover, he is free to offer it to Nineveh. That's what Jonah is going to be complaining about, isn't it? God, how could you save these Ninevites? They're horrible people. How could you do it? Does he not realize that he is the one who said salvation belongs to the Lord? It's his to do with. Now on the back of our bulletin, we have five solas, five lessons that have come to us from the Protestant Reformation in their protesting the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church They are, that we are saved. We are saved in accordance with scripture alone, sola scriptura. That we are saved by faith alone. That we are saved in Christ alone. That we are saved by grace alone. And we are saved soli deo gloria, to the glory of God alone. Now those five solas, all they are, are simply an exposition of the phrase salvation belongs to the Lord. It's really all they are. It's just an explanation that salvation belongs to God. That God is the one who's working it. God is the one who does it. That God is the one who gets the glory for it. God is the one who gets praise for it and credit for it. that salvation by faith alone and not faith plus works, faith in cooperation with God. Faith is a reception of what God has done. Faith is a container. It catches the blessings of God, the salvation of God. And so it's trust, wholehearted trust and allegiance. And because it is this trust, it is receiving to all who did receive Him. who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. that Christ is the one who has worked our salvation. From beginning to the end, it is Christ himself who has earned everything. It's not Christ plus your circumcision. It's not Christ plus your good works. It's not Christ plus anything. As soon as you add a plus to Christ, you've neglected grace and you've neglected salvation. There's no good news there. Christ is the sole basis and foundation of our salvation. Everything rests on what He's done. And so if you're looking at your life and you're like, I don't know if I'm going to make it to heaven because I'm not being very good. I hadn't done very much. I remember some things in my life that I've done. Well, let me tell you. Your salvation rests solely upon Christ and your trust in Christ. It's not if you're good enough, it's is Christ good enough to save you. And then it's by grace. So it's undeserved. It's unmerited. Jonah knew that. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Here he is, that everything he's done, he's gotten to the bottom of the ocean because of the consequences of his own sin. And yet the Lord rescued him. The Lord has saved him. He understands this now. The Lord deserves all the praise and all the glory and all the credit for this. Soli Deo gloria. It's the glory of God alone. Our boast is in the Lord, right? Not in ourselves. Our boast is in the Lord for salvation. All those five solas are, and that may be, you know, Latin may be beyond your what you, you know, think about or want to know. You may not want to hear about those sorts of things. All I'm saying is, it's just an exposition of basically that passage, that salvation belongs to the Lord. That's what they were saying. And that's what we're saying as well. Salvation belongs to God. Let's go to the Lord in prayer.