This was the sermon I planned to preach this morning (Oct 30, 2016). It is not terrible, but it had two things wrong with it. It is too similar to what I preached on Oct 23rd, and it is not what I really wanted to do. So, I scrapped it at the last minute.
To understand the way the sailors of Jonah
chapter 1 related to God, we need to look at the New Testament, the Gospel of Luke,
chapter 5. There, Jesus is already
extremely popular, but has not yet called together his 12 disciples. He is preaching by the shore. After his sermon, he see Simon Peter, and
Jesus tells him to put his fishing nets out in the deep water. Peter responds that he has not caught
anything all night. Peter probably wants
add, ‘Why are you, a carpenter, telling me, a fisherman, how to fish?” What he actually says is “If you say so,
Jesus, I will let down the nets.”
The
catch is so massive, the nets began break and two others have to help him and
they fill two boats with fish. Awestruck, Peter throws himself at Jesus’
feet and, groveling, says, “Go way from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” The holiness of Jesus shined a light on his
own condition. Peter could see who Jesus
was and who he, himself, was. He shakes
with fear. Jesus gently raises him to
his feet and says, “Fear not.”
This
phrase comes up throughout scripture. When
an angel appeared to Daniel, the angel had to tell Daniel, “Do not be afraid”
(10:19). He had to say this because
Daniel was very, very much afraid in the presence of this Heavenly being. The angel who told Mary she would be the
mother of Jesus began by saying, “Do not be afraid, Mary” (Luke 1:30). In the book of Revelation, the resurrected
Christ himself appears to John of Patmos and when John sees him, in awestruck
terror he falls to the ground, the life scared out of him. Jesus raises John saying, “Do not be
afraid.” And in Luke 5, Jesus tells a
terrified Peter he need not fear.
Fear
is appropriate and inevitable. God’s
holiness magnifies the corruption sin has inflicted on humanity. We were created “good,” made in God’s
image. Sin reduces to less than the
vision God had in creating us. In
creation, we reflected God’s glory. Tainted by sin, we fall short of God’s
glory.
Yet
Jonah was dishonest with himself when it came to appropriate fear of the
Lord. Seeing God, we know that running
from God is impossible. Jonah saw God with greater clarity than we do. He was a prophet called to a specific mission. His sense of God was particularly sharp. Yet, he who knew how futile running would be
ran!
Why
he ran is a matter of debate. He was
told to prophesy against Nineveh. God
did not say a word about saving Nineveh.
Jonah was sent with a judgment prophecy.
Later, Jonah will claim that he knew God was going to relent from
punishing the city (4:2), but that comes after the fact. That’s like picking the winner after the game
has been in played. In chapter 1, when
God tells him to go in verses 1-2 and in verse 3, he goes in the opposite
direction, we are not told why. What’s
obvious is the absurdity of it. He knows
God. He knows there is nowhere one can
run from God. Yet he runs from God.
God
is holy and we are profane because of sin.
We were created to be holy, but every day, we make choices to rebel
against our creator, and the accumulation of sin mocks the God of the
universe. We should fear God, but in a
way that compels toward reverence. Our
fear should lead to worship, not retreat.
This
is not like the fear one might have of an abusive parent or of a bully or a
dictator. If you have been a victim of
abuse or molestation, that is a different kind of pain and a different kind of
fear. That fear is a fear of evil, an
evil born in the heart of the one doing the abusing. God is not like abuser, the molester, the
rapist, the bully. God is who we run to
in order to get away from the abuser.
I
throw in this caveat because fear has in many cases been a destroyer of
faith. A lot of broken people won’t come
to church, and more importantly, don’t think to turn to God for help because
the people who taught them about God are the same people who abused them. Pastors have been guilty of every form of
abuse and it is awful. When my title is
“Fear out of Faith,” I do not mean the type of fear related to abuse. When people have been abused, we who make up
the body of Christ have to give them grace and mercy and we do this with enormous
patience and gentleness. We have to be the community in which they are safe
from fear. God is graceful and merciful,
patient and inviting and gentle.
God
is scary where holiness shines a light which reveals our sinfulness and our
smallness. Peter saw that miraculous catch
of fish and wanted no part of it. But, he
didn’t run away. His mouth said, “Go
away from me Lord.” But his body said
something else. His body was at Jesus’ feet,
clinging to Jesus’ knees. Jesus met him
at that point of internal conflict.
Right there, Jesus called him to be a disciple. Peter wanted to be as far from Jesus as
possible and as close to him as he could get; he wanted both at the same time.
Jonah,
possessing much greater knowledge of God than Peter, much more experience in
his relationship with God, only wanted the first part of the equation. He just wanted to bail out, to flee, to get
away from God. His fear led him to
abandon his own faith and to accept a gross self-deception. Many believers today want to know God and
then to disavow God when knowing God has implications for our lives. Would-be disciples settle for the same self-deception
that tugged at Jonah as he fled God.
People
convince themselves that it is enough to check off “Christian” on the census,
to tell others “I am Baptist,” to go to church 3 or 4 times a year, and to
memorize the Lord’s Prayer. That’s
sufficient to be right with God and that’s all they want. They don’t want to actually know God. This hands-off approach to faith requires
almost nothing, it has no impact on the person’s life at all, and it produces
someone who has no sense of what God is about in the world. That individual might be a church
member. However, that individual has no
relationship with God.
That
person with the noncommittal faith deep down knows he or she is living a lie,
but it feels easy to keep living it. It
feels scary to open ourselves up completely so that the depths of our hearts
are fully exposed before the living God.
That’s terrifying because when we do that, we are inviting God to step
in and begin changing us from the inside.
In
the book of Jonah, we see God willing to do that, step into the lives of
people, even for non-Jews. The sailors
on the boat where not Israelites. They
believed in God – or in gods – but, they did not know God. The storm at sea confirmed something they
already believed. The world is much
bigger than them, and it was beyond their ability, even as able bodied
mariners, to control it. The mariners’ response to all loss of
control was to run to God. When Jonah
told them his god was the creator of land and sea, those sailors believed
without hesitation. And their fear increased. They believed God would sink their ship
because of Jonah and they would go down with. When Jonah told them the solution
was to throw him into the sea, their fear increased more. They hesitated. They tried rowing (it hadn’t worked before,
and it didn’t work now). Then, they
prayed, and threw Jonah into the sea.
The waves stopped battering the ship, the wind died down, and rain
stopped. The storm was over. And, like Peter trembling at the miraculous
fish catch they feared God even more.
In
verse 12, Jonah tells the sailors, “I worship the Lord, the God of
heaven.” The actual Hebrew word is not
“worship.” It is “fear.” Jonah literally
says, “I fear the Lord, the God of heaven.”[i] The book of Jonah displays real faith
that comes out of genuine fear of the magnificent holiness of God. Jonah speaks this fear but betrays himself by
running, and ends up swallowed by the fish and the sea. The sailors live what Jonah says. Their fear leads to worship.
After
chapter 1, we don’t hear from the sailors again in the story, but by the end of
Jonah, we are left to wonder. What did
their lives look like after they became God-fearing worshipers? They made it to Tarshish. As each sailor, got off that boat, how was
his life different after his encounter with the living God.
How
about our lives? One of the cornerstones
of the way we try to live as a body of believers is the encounter. We pray that when we gather, people will meet
God in this place, this gathering of believers.
In that meeting with God, when holiness exposes us at our worst, will
fear drive us to our knees in confession and worship? Or will fear make us runaway and pretend that
God is far off somewhere, mostly uninterested in our lives? We at HillSong try to set conditions so that
you will meet God here and stay with Him.
Meet God and be made new in the process.
God
controls how He will reveal himself.
When he does, we decide if we will run away, or if stripped down, we
will kneel at the cross and receive forgiveness and grace and new life. I don’t
know what you’ve been through today. I
don’t know the pains stabbing at your heart.
I don’t know your brokenness.
I
pray this morning, you’ll open your eyes and mind and heart wide enough to see
God. When you see God, I urge you step
into the fear. Like Peter, even though
you want to say “away from me Lord,” I pray you will step to God. Step to the cross and let the Lord hang your
sins on it. Let the Lord wash you and
bring you up from the waters clean, refreshed, renewed, and alive. The sailors in Jonah 1 help me see the new
possibilities of life that come when we step to God. I pray you will see that too and that you
will step toward God right now.
AMEN
[i] E.
Achtemeier (1996), New International
Bible Commentary: Minor Prophets I, Paternoster Press (Peabody, MA), p.262
