Sermon Tone Analysis
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Luke
Prayer
Jonah
Introduction
Have you ever done anything stupid?
Yeah, me neither.
Have you ever done something or started to do something that you knew that you shouldn’t be doing, but then something stops you?
Maybe it is another person, or some other type of intervention.
That is kinda what is going on with Jonah today in our passage, just way more extreme and terrifying.
Scripture
Our passage this morning is .
If you are able, please stand for the reading of God’s Word.
We do this to show appreciation to God for His Word and in recognition that these words are the most important we can hear today.
says,
“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, and 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.”
And 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 on Jonah.
Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us.
What is your occupation?
And 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 the men 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 rowed 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 made vows.”
Thank you, you may be seated.
Jonah’s story picks up right where we left off last week.
God spoke to Jonah and told him to go preach to the Ninevites Israel’s enemies, and Jonah decided he wasn’t going to do that.
So, Jonah got on a boat going the opposite direction trying to get as far away from God and his calling as he possibly could.
Here is the fascinating thing.
God could have let Jonah go.
God could’ve sent another prophet or had someone else preach to the Ninevites.
God could have turned Jonah over to his desires and let Jonah go to the far reaches of the known world.
Away from Israel.
Away from the priests and the festivals.
Away from proper worship of God.
Jonah certainly would have deserved it.
Jonah was being foolish and rebellious.
But God had other plans.
We should pause for a second and appreciate the fact that God has other plans for us than our own foolish hearts would lead us to.
That is true in the grand scheme of salvation, and it is true for us as believers who wander off into occasional foolishness.
God’s plan for Jonah and Jonah’s plan for Jonah are different.
Spoiler alert: God wins.
Jonah is on the ship and goes down into it to sleep.
And it is a deep, deep sleep.
I don’t think this is the kind of sleep that comes with a clear conscience.
Instead, I think it is likely that Jonah is in more of a depressed sleep.
He has rebelled against God and gone as far away as he possibly can.
Jonah just wants to sleep away his troubles.
To pass into the oblivion of deep sleep.
Now, I want to take a side road here for just a second to explain how ancient near eastern people thought about the sea and gods – lowercase g.
Let’s start with the Hebrew views of the sea.
The Israelites were not a seafaring people.
In their mind, there wasn’t usually much of a reason to go out to sea, after all, God had given them a land, so why go exploring or conquering outside of the Land of Promise?
There was also a general distrust of the seas.
The seas represented chaos and disorder.
When God created land, He made dry land appear out of it.
God brought order from the chaos.
God said to the waters, “Thus far shall you come and no farther.”
The Hebrews simply weren’t crazy about being out on the sea, in the chaos, yet Jonah chose that over Nineveh.
Ancient Near Eastern peoples also had what we would consider strange views of the gods.
This doesn’t so much apply to Jonah as it does to his travelling companions.
They generally would accumulate as many gods as they could, so as to avoid offending any of them.
And each force of nature was its own god.
The heavens are a god.
The sea is a god.
There is a god of storms.
The sun.
The moon.
The stars.
On and on it goes.
This is why when God delivered Israel from bondage in slavery, those plagues were so important.
When God strikes the Nile, he isn’t just striking the water, He is showing that He alone has the power over all things and that the so-called “gods” of Egypt are impotent and really nonexistent.
The god of the Nile couldn’t even stop Yahweh – the God of the slaves – from doing as He willed.
With that in mind, we come back to our story.
Verse 4, but the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea and there was a mighty tempest such that the ship was threatening to break up.
So the sailors enter into a progression of problem solving steps.
They are afraid, so they pray to their individual gods.
Clearly in their minds the sea god was mad at them, but maybe if they prayed to their patron deity, their “hometown god”, he could do something.
But that didn’t work, because the one, true, sovereign God had hurled this storm, and false gods have no power.
So they begin tossing the cargo off the ship to try to lighten the ship to better weather the storm.
In that process, the captain finds Jonah asleep through all of this and wakes him up.
“What do you mean, you sleeper?” pray to your god maybe he will listen since none of our prayers have worked.
Then the sailors decide to cast lots to figure out who this storm is on account of.
Their thinking is basically, “If we can figure out who the gods are mad at, then we might be able to figure out which god or gods we should be praying to, then maybe we can better appease that specific god or gods.”
Of course the lot falls on Jonah and they ask a series of questions all aimed at finding a way to stop the storm by appeasing the god.
Jonah comes clean.
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