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Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the Book of Jonah. I begin in chapter 1 at the verse numbered 17 and then read the entire second chapter of the prophecy. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the

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fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice. For thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood was round about me. All thy waves

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and thy billows passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out from thy presence. How shall I again look upon thy holy temple? The waters closed in over me. The deep was round about me. Weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever. Yet thou didst bring up my life from the pit

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O Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to thee into thy holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to thee what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited

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out Jonah upon the dry land. And may God bless to us this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It has been my observation that most people wear their sackcloth within. That is, the hurts which they have inflicted upon themselves, their profound guilt, their darkest despairs

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about their own morality and ethics. These are the things that most people do not reveal to others. We all want to appear in silks and satins and seersucker, but beneath the smile and the style there is often sackcloth, spiritual sackcloth, which comes from despair. Others may not be able to see it, but we can feel it. And it is such deep hurting that

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I want to speak to today. I want to talk with you who find yourself in the great depths. We learned last week in our study of the first chapter of Jonah that Jonah refused to obey God. But God also refused. He refused to let Jonah get away with his disobedience. He caused a great storm to break upon the ship in which Jonah was seeking to make his escape. And

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the ship was soon in desperate straits so that even the sailors were anxious about what was occurring. Jonah's sin, you see, not only brought him into difficulty, but brought the sailors into difficulty also. And you will remember that we noted last week that sin is contagious. Jonah is confronted by the sailors who ask him what he has done.

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And in that confrontation, he confesses his sin. He repents of it before God. And then he offers himself as a sacrifice to save the sailors. He says, "The storm will not stop. The anger of God will not be brought to peace until you sacrifice me and throw me into the depths." Well, the sailors do not want to do this. And so they try once again to rescue

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the ship, but every effort is frustrated. And so finally, asking God's forgiveness in advance for what they are about to do, they hurl Jonah into the frothing waters, and he sank like a stone. Now in the Old Testament, water is often used as the symbol of death. You think of Noah and the flood, or of Moses standing on the edge of the Red Sea, or Joshua

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at the shores of the Jordan. The sea is, of course, the greatest deep of all the deeps. And death is the most overwhelming event, the deepest deep that any experienced person can know. So as a result of his sin, Jonah goes down into the ultimate depths. I mean by that, Jonah dies. He drowns. He loses his life. Now I know that most have a tendency

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to suggest that Jonah was alive in the belly of the great sea creature, but all of the evidence points otherwise. Look, for example, at the metaphors which Jonah uses to describe his situation. He says, "I am cast into the sea," but he doesn't use the common word for "sea." He uses the word for "void" or "nothingness," which the Hebrews used often to describe the

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state of death. He says, "I am cast out from thy presence," and in Hebrew phraseology, to be cast out from the presence of God is to be caught up in death. Jonah says in verse 5, "The waters closed over me, and the deep was all about me and around me." And it's interesting to notice that in contemporary Jewish literature, the descent into death,

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into sheol, into separation from God, takes the Jew to a place that is surrounded by a raging river, which is called in their terminology the "torrent of destruction." It circles the place where the dead go, and here is Jonah saying, "The deep was all round about me." And then he says, "And the roots of the mountains were against me, and the land whose bars closed

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about me forever." And the land whose bars close is described in Isaiah 38 and Job 38 as sheol, as the place of the dead. And then finally, to emphasize beyond all doubt that he in fact did die when he descended into the waters, we come to the 17th verse of the first chapter, a verse which is probably the best known in all of the prophecy of Jonah.

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And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish. We're reminded immediately of that place in the prophecy of Amos chapter 9, where God says, "And though the evil hide at the bottom of the sea, I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them." What's being pointed out here, one of the chief aims of this whole

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prophecy of Jonah is to make clear that those who want to get away from, to deny the will of God, may do so. And in fact, they may do so to the place where they die and are lost eternally, forever separated from him. But that is precisely what happens when they continually refuse God. They are separated as they wish from God, but at an awful cost. Jonah wanted

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to get away from God. That's the reason that he took the ship to Tarshish rather than the ship to Nineveh. He went exactly the opposite direction from the direction in which God wanted him to go. He did not want to hear God's word. He was not interested in God's will. And his desire to separate himself from God led to what? It led to his dying. And

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he is found at the end of that separation, rotting in the belly of some sleeping creature at the bottom of the sea. So the story goes. Now, some hearing me today feel very hopeless. They feel as if they are held by some mysterious creature in the great depths of despair. They feel that they are spiritually dead or that they might as well be. They're separated from

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God. They're swallowed up by their state. They are in their own private hells. I sat down earlier this week and jotted down on a slip of paper some of the individuals who have come to counsel with me across my eight and a half years of ministry in this place. And I would like you to know some of the sins that have been reported to me in

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my office in this building. I have talked with those who are fornicators, liars, gossipers, adulterers, embezzlers, addicts. I have listened to the words of the unforgiving, of those hooked by pornography, of the selfish, of those who are interested only in power and nothing else. I have spoken to those who have confessed the sin of pride. I have spoken

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to racists and to those who violate the confidences of others, thus hurting those people. I have spoken with a child molester. I've talked with the greedy and the vengeful, the cruel, idolaters, bitter people, blasphemous people, people who have robbed God, people who smash the unity of the church, people who apply a standard of judgment to others that they

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never think of applying to themselves. And it's obvious in these conversations that all of these people find themselves in dreadful depths. And what I say to all of them as they sit on the bottom of the sea of their own hell, swallowed up by whatever sin is theirs, what I say to them invariably is, "Be rid of that which separates you from God. Don't

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stay down. Surge for the surface." Of course, they always ask, "How?" And I reply, "Well, beginning starts with beginning." Jonah's victory started with him on his knees. When he was confronted by those sailors while still on board the ship, he confessed his sin, he repented of it, and he even offered his life to save the lives of the sailors. This is

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a genuine repentance. He lifts his prayer of repentance and sorrow for what he has done into the very teeth of the storm. Now, I know that when you turn to the second chapter of Jonah, you find that the chapter begins with a reference to Jonah praying from the belly of the great sea creature. But we know that can't be true, for in the first place, the

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metaphors which he has used indicate clearly that he was dead when he was in that belly. And we also know that the dead cannot pray. I am not standing before you this day advancing any concept of purgatory. Oh, no. Jonah was in his own hell. But what was important was that he had prayed before he went into that hell. You see, it was later that Jonah wrote

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about what had happened to him. And when he writes this second chapter, or when the one to whom he was dictating this story wrote this second chapter, it was all something that had happened in the past. But it's important to notice that the prayer that is described by Jonah as being prayed in the belly of the whale is already described in the past. In

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other words, he describes it as something he did before he got into that belly. He says in the second verse, "I called to the Lord." He says in the second verse again, "I cried out." Those are both references to something that has already happened. He says in verse 4, "I said I am cast out," or in verse 7, "I remembered the Lord." All of these references,

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you see, are to a prayer that is being remembered. Now the dead can remember. Jonah there in the belly of that whale could fully recall his experience of God. We know that the dead remember. Look at the experience of Samuel when he comes up before Saul, or think of Elijah and Moses when they counseled with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. No,

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the dead do recall. That Jonah could do in the belly of the big fish. But he could not pray. Not in that place. For once one is dead, the opportunity for prayer is past. What Jonah is speaking of then, when he's in the belly of the whale, is the prayer he remembers that he prayed before he went down into those deep waters, before he went down into the hell

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of his being separated from God. And the recognition that comes to Jonah is this, that because he repented, because he confessed, because he asked God for forgiveness, when he went down into those waters, and even into the belly of that sea creature, God was with him. He was no longer separated from the divine. God hears the prayers of any who are in need,

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and he moves swiftly to respond to them. If Jonah had waited to pray until he was in the belly of that fish, he would be waiting to pray still, for the dead cannot address God. But you see, he had made his peace with God even before he went down into the water. And that's the reason that he can, in remembering what he prayed then, say, "Deliverance comes

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from the Lord." Now you say to me, "Well, if he had already repented, and if God had forgiven him, then why did he go down into the water? Why did God have him thrown into the sea?" Well, I think the answer to that is very obvious. We all know that when we sin, the price of that sin works itself out in our lives, whether we have repented or

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not. God's anger is just as meaningful as God's love. His justice, his standing for right, is just as important as his love, his standing for compassion. And that's the reason that you don't find Jonah praying at all that he might be spared being thrown into the waters. He says to the sailors, "Throw me in!" He does not seek to avoid the justice of God.

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And because he has this spirit and repents before it, God comes and accompanies him. The hope of God is in Jonah's heart, even as he drowns in the sea. Suppose you consider for a moment the state of some thief who, during the course of his trial, is converted to Christianity and becomes a radiant believer. Does that affect the decision of the jury?

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No. He is still guilty of stealing. He still must go to jail and pay what he owes to the society for his crime. And just so, Jonah, even though he has been restored to his relationship with God, must pay the price of his disobedience. And so he goes down into the depths. It's important to remember, my friends, that God is always ready to hear us when we're

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ready to talk, as long as that talking is on this side of death. It's interesting. I said a few minutes ago that in the Old Testament, water is often used as the symbol for death. But water is also used there and in the New Testament as the symbol for the Holy Spirit. You remember how at the time of creation, everything is described as being a void, as

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being chaotic and disordered. But then it says, "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The Spirit, you see, can straighten out the chaos of life. Paul carries out this same image in the New Testament when he talks about baptism. He says when we go down into that water, whether actually or symbolically, when we go down into that water,

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we die. We drown insofar as our sin is concerned. And then we are brought up out of that water by the grace of God to a new life. We are born again. The one who lived before is deceased, but the one who is to be is just becoming. Part of God's anger is always his mercy and his love. You can keep this concept in mind by remembering this truth, that in the Hebrew

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of the Old Testament, only two tenses are used, the perfect and the imperfect. Now the perfect refers to an action which is completed. When the Old Testament speaks about death, it talks about something that has already occurred. It is done, over with, it has happened. But when the Old Testament speaks about God, it always speaks of him in the imperfect.

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He is not done and over with. He is part of yesterday, but he is also part of today, and he will be a part of all that is to come. He continues. And what Jonah remembered when he was in the belly of that creature was that the sin that had been his, the guilt which had been his, the shame which had been his, the separation which he had brought upon himself,

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all of these things, as part of his death, would have an end. They had no future. But the love of God which was accompanying him, this is described in the imperfect. This love never ends. The future belongs to God. And repentance is the key to God, and thus to the future. To those of you who are wearing sackcloth, remember that it is only temporary.

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It will pass away. You are not without hope. If you will simply apologize to God, you will discover that the sea creature in this story has no teeth. For God never leaves the genuinely repentant person alone, even when they are in the hell which they have made for themselves in life or the hell they have made for themselves after life. I hear people say on some occasions

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that the prayer in extremis has no validity. A prayer in extremis is a prayer which is offered under extreme circumstances. When one is just about to die, for example, they say that these people throw out some prayer hoping that at the last minute they can pacify God and gain some passport to heaven, and these people say that such a prayer means

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nothing. But the testimony of both of the Testaments is against that, for that's exactly what Jonah did. He repented just before he went down into death, and God heard his prayer, and he rose again to life. And in the New Testament, we have the thief who at the very time of his dying cries out, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom," and

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what promise does he receive? "This day thou shalt be with me in paradise." God takes seriously the cry of anyone under any circumstances. If someone needs help and admits it and admits also that they need help because of that which they have done which was contrary to the will of God, why, the ears of God long to hear that kind of prayer song. So don't

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stay on the bottom. Surge for the surface. Now it's this truth that Christ is putting across in the twelfth chapter of Matthew, in the passage which is our text for today. In this passage, when Jonah is described by Christ as being in the belly of the big fish for three days and three nights, Jesus then goes on to say that he will be in the earth

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for three days and three nights, but that as Jonah rose, so he will rise. Actually, of course, Jesus was only in the earth for two nights, the night of Good Friday and Saturday. He arose early on Easter Sunday morning. But that's not the point. The point is that both of these go down into the depths. Jonah goes down because of his sin. Christ goes down

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not because of any sin of his, because he was perfect in every way, but he goes down in order to carry with him the prayers of repentance of all those who sincerely want to be one with God. Jonah rises because of his prayer of repentance, and true believers are lifted up because of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. There is no prophecy in the

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Old Testament which speaks more clearly of Jesus than the one which is before us today. The hell, the separation, the despair of Jonah because of his sin takes him to the depths. But Christ, who has no sin of his own, takes upon himself the sin of humankind, and remember the Bible says, "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God." He takes all of

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that down. He dies in the place of those who ought to die because of their sin. And if they repent, as Jonah did, then Christ brings to these people the presence and the peace and the power of God. God applies his love to those who were before Jonah all the way back to the beginning of time, to those who have lived since Jonah, and he applies that

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love in terms of the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who in his death paid for the sins of all those who had come before him, including Jonah, all those who were living then, and all those who live until this very day, and that includes all of us. He died once for all. And when we repent, we lay claim to his death, and our oneness with God is

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restored and we are lifted out of hell. We are, to use the figure in the story, vomited out of death onto the shore of a new life. The great miracle of Jonah, you see, is not what most people talk about, the big fish. The great miracle of Jonah is that God is with us even when we are in our own hells, even with us in death. He will lift us as

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he lifted Jonah, and he will lift us as he lifted Jonah, because he lifted up his son. These things authenticate the fact that no one needs to stay down. Repentance is that by which we search to the surface, and God waits to catch us as we come hurtling to the top. In a very real sense, repentance is faith's most powerful tool. Contrary to what the movie

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of a good number of years ago said, love means never having to say you're sorry. Religion is having to say you are sorry. You are sorry to God. Jonah's descent and our descent and Jonah's forgiveness and resurrection and our forgiveness and our ultimate resurrection will be ours if repentance is ours, just as Jonah repented. A lot of people think of repentance

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as a negative word, as a hard word, as a demanding word, but in point of fact, repentance is very positive. It is a grand advance. It is a magnificent promise. It is an invitation into the light which is accepted. There is a story which comes out of several centuries ago of a poor Christian man who

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lived in a kingdom ruled by an atheistic monarch. But even though the king was an atheist, he respected the sacrifices of this Christian, and so he said to him on one occasion, "I wonder and I honor at what you have given up for your faith." And the old Christian replied, "Oh no, I honor you, sire, for you have given up much more than I. I have

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given up guilt. I have given up self-crucifixion. I have given up the fear of death. But you, my lord, you, my king, have made a greater sacrifice, for you in your unbelief have given up peace and forgiveness and joy. You have given up nothing less than life and life eternal." So may I say to all those of you who feel that you are in hell, remember Jonah. Remember

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that sin does have a watery end, but that that watery end can be avoided and changed into a magnificent sunrise if we repent. So when you remember Jonah, remember also Jesus, who by taking upon himself our sin, makes repentance our opportunity. Take it from one who knows. Don't stay down. Search for the surface. Let us pray. Oh God, we humbly ask

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that thou will send thy spirit into the hearts of all of those who are unrepentant and lead them to see in the story of Jonah that which will lead them to their knees. And having been repentant, may they be flooded with the joy of their reunion with thee. And may they, rather than being in the gullet of some deep sea creature, be transformed into eagles.

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And may they rise up with wings like eagles, flying higher and higher until that day when they are united forever with you and with those whom they have loved and lost a while. We pray our prayer in the one Jesus, who by his rising gave us all the chance to search for the surface. Amen.

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Amen. [END PLAYBACK] [BLANK_AUDIO]