Lot Casters and the Idol-Smashing God

Jonah 1:7-17

Main Idea: God’s threat of death and judgment in the increasing storm turns the sailors from self-efforts at salvation to real conversion, yet God mercifully sends a fish to rescue Jonah, as Jonah reveals Israel’s God as Creator and Judge.

1. I. The Reality of Our Own Idolatry
   1. A. Some learned to stay out of sight at an early age.
   2. B. Others were constantly told that you are the cause of all of your troubles.
   3. C. We all have idols before coming to Christ.
2. II. A Review of the Prophet’s Rebellion
3. III. Revelation: We Will Learn That We Have Real Problems (1:7-10).
4. IV. Repentance: We Now Can Experience Real Conversion (1:11-16).
   1. A. They become aware of their own inability to save themselves.
   2. B. They recognize they will be held accountable for the prophet’s blood.
   3. C. They see that they must do things in a way that pleases God.
5. V. Rescue: We Then Will See the Real Savior (1:17).

The Reality of Our Own Idolatry

Some Learned to Stay Out of Sight at an Early Age

Keeping out of sight when a parent was drunk or angry kept you safe from harm. So you worked hard to avoid upsetting the equilibrium in the home. You thought you were doing what was necessary for the Lord to give your home peace.

Others Were Constantly Told That You Are the Cause of All of Your Troubles

Never mind that we live in a world ravaged and held captive by sin. All you have heard is that you are the reason your health failed, you are the reason someone walked out on a nice person like you, you are the reason you are not married, you are the reason you can’t get ahead in your finances, and you are the reason you have a child just like you! You have been told, “If you would just pray more, if you would go to church, or if you would read your Bible, be nicer to people, and get baptized again (and this time take it seriously), things would turn around for you.” So off you go into prevention defense, fix-it mode, let-me-try-harder-at-everything—from keeping my room clean to listening to the right radio station in the car—so I can get this bad luck, string of misfortune, or God’s anger out of my life. When your response to your life situation is something like that, you reveal that you are worshiping an idol.

We All Have Idols Before We Come to Christ

Some of us hang onto them after coming to Christ. As John Calvin famously said,

[M]an’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. After the Flood there was a sort of rebirth of the world, but not many years passed by before men were fashioning gods according to their pleasure. (Institutes, 1:11.8)

By “idols” I mean the works to which we run rather than running to God alone—works that tire us out and do not change the situation in which we find ourselves, but often make us feel like we are surviving or are in control. We feel this way because we are putting forth a good effort and giving it that ol’ college try. These works, too, give us a false sense of being able to control God’s severity by making Him happy with us.

So we erect our idols: We overachieve, try to be the perfect husband or wife, or the perfect parent or child. We attempt to do more for God, add some holy days of obligation, send a child more gifts to make up for past mistakes, or be the employee who never shows frustration.

As long as we erect idols, we will find ourselves at great odds with God. For the Lord is not looking for us to help Him rescue us out of our predicaments. Rather, God wants to do for us what He did for the lot-throwing idol worshipers on the ship with Jonah: He wants to break down our idols and teach us to rely solely on the grace of God in Christ.

A Review of a Prophet’s Rebellion

In the previous chapter we examined the huge problem of Jonah’s rebellion against God’s command. The Lord commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh in the same way that He has given us the Great Commission. By his rebellion, Jonah has created a problem for himself with God, and he also has created a problem for all of the sailors on the ship headed to Tarshish. Jonah found out the hard way that God will smash our ships and take all the lives around us in order to get us to obey Him. Jonah was beginning to learn that God is Lord—Sovereign Ruler—over our lives and that we are not autonomously determining the course of our lives.

The passage now turns to the sailors. They have been crying out to their false gods and hurling cargo to try to save themselves from this intense tempest. As the storm does not stop with their praying, the Lord has smashed all hopes in their idols and shown their gods to be useless. He is not done yet, for the sailors will continue to set up other idols—other self-effort attempts to find their own salvation.

God will be intentional about smashing their idols even as He is intentional about demolishing our idols. In His great mercy He will intensify this storm and bring the sailors to the brink of death so that three things might happen for them and us.

Revelation: We Will Learn That We Have Real Problems

Jonah 1:7-10

The mariners have been calling on false gods. Now they are going to turn toward Jonah because a lot is going to fall on him. As best we can understand historically, casting lots consisted of tossing rocks of multiple colors (Baldwin, “Jonah,” 2:559).^[4]If a certain color fell toward somebody or if all the colors but one fell toward everybody else, they would say, “Aha! That’s the person whom the gods (or God) has picked for what we’re asking.”

This is how one knows God is in absolute control of this situation. The writer previously said God hurled the storm on the sea (v. 4). The end of the episode will show God appointed (Hb manah) a fish to get Jonah (v. 17). When they throw their little rocks, the rocks could turn and fall on anybody on this ship, yet they go to the one who is sleeping below deck. That is not chance; it is the Lord manifesting His will and showing His sovereign rule over all things—over Jonah’s life, the sailors’ lives, the storm, the sea, the ship, the lots, and everything else.

When the lot falls on Jonah, they say to him, “Can you please” (you have to imagine the mariners screaming over the storm-force winds as the ship reels like a drunken man) “tell us what is going on here? What in the world have you done to put us in this sort of situation?” The sailors still are hoping for an answer within a realm that they can control—one that will allow them to call on the localized idol of the right country, or the deity over the right occupation, or the right god of another people.

Jonah, however, reveals to them the Lord. Literally, he says, “Yahweh, the God of the heavens, I fear, who made the sea and the dry ground” (Estelle, Salvation through Judgment and Mercy, 50).

Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh and say to them, “The Lord has a word for you.” However, now that God has wrecked everything, coming after Jonah on the sea with typhoon-like winds, Jonah has a word for these sailors. They are just as much in danger before God as the people of Nineveh. It is not that the people of Nineveh are in danger because they are more evil. They are in danger because they do not know Israel’s God and are sinners before Him.

These sailors, who are calling on a pantheon of gods, do not know the one true God any more than do the Ninevites. Jonah reveals that they are in trouble with the God who rules over all—over heaven and everything on earth, and all the land and all the sea. They have real problems.

One of my good friends had an opportunity to speak on the issue of same-sex marriage at a meeting of pastors in his city. In the speech he referred to Romans 1:32, noting that it teaches that those engaged in homosexual behavior “deserve to die.”^[5]Surprisingly, this sparked great controversy, for those listening thought that he was using words that could incite violence against homosexuals. However, they missed two simple facts about the teaching of the first chapter of Romans. First, Romans 1:32 renders homosexuals worthy of death at the hand of God, for sin is what makes one worthy of death before the Holy God. Second, Romans 1:18-32 renders everyone worthy of death before God, not just those practicing homosexuality! Gossips, arrogant people, and those disobedient to parents equally are rendered worthy of death before God (Rom 1:29-31)! The sailors, learning of the seriousness of having the Lord of all come after them, ask, “What is this you have done?” We all, like the sailors, have real problems before the one true God!

Repentance: We Now Can Experience Real Conversion

Jonah 1:11-16

The sailors need a big solution. They know the problem: their idols do not work, and the storm is getting worse by the minute. It makes you wonder why they do not call on the Lord immediately!

You may know people who, with everything falling down around them, refuse to call on the Lord for salvation. They say to you, “I don’t need to go to church” or “You can’t say that your life is better than mine because of your Jesus.” Then they hit the bottle, work harder to avoid going home each evening, or continually cut out people from their lives so they can have a false sense of peace created by an absence of real relationships. What such persons need to do is stop trying to find their own feeble solutions and instead cry out to the Lord for His help.

Jonah tells the sailors how to stop the storm. All they need to do is toss him overboard since he is the guilty one. For Jonah’s part, this still reveals a refusal to repent. He could have confessed to God, “Lord, I have disobeyed Your command to go to Nineveh. Forgive me, and please spare the lives of these men!” Already being in rebellion to God, however, Jonah does not consider anything that would demonstrate a change of heart. On this, Bruckner writes,

Jonah does not seem to be capable of simple repentance. He could have sought forgiveness during the storm (as the Ninevites do later) and committed himself to go to Nineveh. But perhaps he believes that too much “water had passed under his ship” by this time. Perhaps he is not sure that his repentance would bring forgiveness. He prefers to believe (wants to believe?) in a God who only judges and does not forgive. He would rather die in the sea than suggest to the sailors that they turn around and return him to Joppa to complete Yahweh’s call to Nineveh. (Jonah, 47)

Also, Daniel Timmer adds the important observation, “Nowhere in this chapter, or anywhere else in Jonah for that matter, are we told that he repented of his disobedience” (A Gracious and Compassionate God, 71).

Because the seafarers care more about Jonah than he cares about them, they try to row. They are rowing in a storm that required them to hurl their cargo over the ship; their actions are futile. Yet in their minds there must be another solution, even though Jonah clearly proclaimed to them the identity of the Creator. They want a solution without acknowledging the Lord.

The Lord, however, is not going to have that. The sea grows fiercer and fiercer against them. The sailors finally realize they cannot beat the storm—they cannot beat the Lord. So they decide they are going to do what Jonah says. Now watch what happens.

They Become Aware of Their Own Inability to Save Themselves

They understand they are under God’s fierce judgment and so they say, “Please, Yahweh.” They are not calling on their gods anymore. They now call on the God Jonah has revealed: “Please, Yahweh, don’t let us perish because of this man’s life, and don’t charge us with innocent blood! For You, Yahweh, have done just as You pleased” (1:14).

They Recognize They Will Be Held Accountable for the Prophet’s Blood

And they want God to free them from that guilt. They recognize that “[the Lord] judges human actions by retribution on wrongdoing and that he can be appealed to for justice” (Baldwin, “Jonah,” 2:562). This is God’s prerogative and responsibility as sovereign Ruler over the hearts of all people. He will bring all souls into judgment for their sins. Even as Paul exhorts Timothy to preach the word of God faithfully, he reminds him that God “is going to judge the living and the dead” (2 Tim 4:1).

They See That They Must Do Things in a Way That Pleases God

“You have done just as You pleased” (Jonah 1:14). What God wants them to do is stop calling on false gods, stop looking for a solution with lots, stop rowing, and throw Jonah into the sea. When they do this, the storm stops in an instant! In an instant the Lord’s wrath is gone from being over them—the moment they stop putting forth effort and instead rely on God’s solution. This is the difference between works and faith. These men experience real conversion. Their testimony is the same as that of the Thessalonians: “You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath” (1 Thess 1:9-10).

A less careful reading of Jonah might allow one to suggest that Jonah’s story supports universalistic or pluralistic concepts of salvation. That is, it might seem that the sailors and the Ninevites experience salvation apart from the disclosure of Israel’s God as the only Savior. Or it might appear that these Gentiles were saved without calling on the name of the Lord. Quite the contrary, however, the narrative demonstrates an exclusivistic position, showing that salvation outside of the Lord is impossible for both the sailors and the Ninevites.^[6]No other god comes to their rescue, and neither does their hope of salvation remain in their gods once Jonah speaks.

Instead of a pluralistic option for salvation, the sailors receive revelation that the Lord is the absolute ruler, and that His wrath is on the ship in the storm. They hear that they need a substitute to die—in their case, Jonah—so that they don’t have to die for their idolatry of self-effort. They trust the word of the prophet and cry out to the Lord for mercy on their guilt for killing the prophet. They place their faith in the death of the prophet to stop God’s wrath, and their faith produces corresponding actions of fear. This is real conversion. If the Lord did not smash the idols of their self-efforts, they would not have seen the only true solution and they would not have experienced conversion.

Everything that looks like conversion is not conversion. Real conversion means that when someone hears that a substitute is needed, he or she cries out to the Lord for salvation by means of God’s substitute, and then accomplishes works demonstrating the conversion after the confession. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 testified that he trusted God’s promise in Genesis 15 (Jas 2:21-24). Similarly, Simon Magus’s “belief” in Acts 8 was not conversion, even though he came forward with the Samaritans who placed their faith in Christ.

Real conversion does not end with the day of belief. If someone calls on the Lord in salvation, he cannot reach back, subsequently, and grab his self-help idols when he is in trouble or life becomes rough. He cannot then attempt to appease God by more faithful church attendance, increased obedience to parents, more frequent reading of the Bible, or increasing sacrifices of his time and money. The moment you think that doing such things makes God move in your favor, you are grasping an idol, polishing it, holding it up to the Lord, and saying, “See God, look at me. I am doing everything right. You are going to act now to stop my storm, right?” However, if you think God is moved by such efforts, you are not talking to the God through whom “we have all received grace after grace from His fullness” (John 1:16). You are talking to your idol-manufactured concept of a god. Real conversion starts with grace and knows that grace will lead us home. This grace comes from Jesus Christ alone.

Rescue: We Then Will See the Real Savior

Jonah 1:17

This verse is troubling for some people. How in the world can a fish swallow a man and that man stay in the belly of a fish three days and three nights? Well, let me make very clear that the issue is not the fish or the improbability of this account. In the scientific age we have become thrown off from the point of this story and started saying, “Something miraculous like this is not possible.” Of course it’s not possible—it’s a miracle! Miracles by definition are outside the normal course of nature.

Consider, however, that there might have existed a now-extinct whale that could swallow a man. In a pre-scientific age a whale would not have been identified as a mammal. Those who saw it might have identified it as a fish, even if it were in fact a whale.

“But nobody could survive in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. That’s just scientifically impossible, so we can’t believe that,” someone might say. However, keep in mind what is going on in this story. If Jonah is right about the Lord—that He is the Creator of the heavens and of the seas, and the dry land, and thus Ruler over all—certainly the Lord could speak to whatever creature He wants to and assign it to swallow Jonah. The passage actually indicates that the Lord already “had appointed” a fish to come and get Jonah before the sailors had thrown Jonah off the ship. Because the Lord is sovereign, He knew exactly when and where Jonah would hit that water.

Having absolute knowledge and power in the universe, the Lord could appoint or raise up or create any sea creature He willed to swallow up Jonah! He could create an animal that allowed for a person to remain alive inside it. Or he could keep a person alive inside an existing animal. If the story had said that the Lord sent a shrimp to swallow Jonah, I would believe it. You could argue with me repeatedly that there is no way a shrimp could eat a man or that a man could stay inside of a shrimp for three days. If Scripture had said, “The Lord raised up a shrimp and it swallowed Jonah,” it would be true. God is the sovereign Creator. He could create a shrimp way bigger than “jumbo” that could swallow a man whole.

Nevertheless, the issue is not whether the miracle could happen; the issue is, “What is going on with the fish and the three days and the three nights?” In the Gospels Jesus said these words: “For as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights” (Matt 12:40), and “No sign will be given to [an evil and adulterous generation] except the sign of Jonah” (Matt 16:4). So the question must be, “How, in fact, is Jonah a ‘sign’? What does he signify?”

Bruckner notes, “Jonah and Jesus can be compared favorably in many ways.” He says,

Jesus did perfectly what Jonah also (if temporarily) accomplished: both were from Galilee; Jonah struggled with his call to preach, Jesus struggled to do the will of the Father (in the desert, at Gethsemane); both preached God’s message of judgment and reconciliation to the marginalized and to sinners; both chose death forsaken by others; both bore and removed the consequences of sin from others; both caused the storm to cease after sleeping through it (Jonah through repentance, Jesus through his divinity); Jonah entered the jaws of the fish, Jesus entered the jaws of the grave; both were kept for three days; both were raised up again by the Father; Jonah’s obedience in preaching led to the conversion of a great city, and Jesus’ obedience led to the conversion of many cultures of the world. (Jonah, 63)

In addition to Bruckner’s typology of Jonah and Jesus, I propose that there is another comparison between the story of Jonah and the work of Christ: the solution to the sailors’ dilemma is found in putting the prophet to death. The Lord pours out His wrath on the prophet as he dies to and for the sailors but is found to be alive to and for God.

You do not need to work to get rid of the wrath of God or His discipline. If you try to rely on work, all you will do is die in the waters of the storm around you. Your only hope lies in a fountain—one that is “filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins!” (Cowper, “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”). Sinners hurl themselves into that blood so they can lose all their guilty stains.

Converted sinners don’t stop there—they don’t start putting in self-effort to please God or to turn God’s kind hand of discipline away. Instead, they keep going in the grace with which they began, in effect saying, “Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood shall never lose its power till all the ransomed church of God be saved, to sin no more” (Cowper, “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”). It is then that we will meet our idol-smashing God face to face.

Reflect and Discuss

1. What are some things that occur in childhood that, wrongly, lead us to believe that we must become the masters of our own destinies or that we must save ourselves?
2. What are some early experiences—familial, social, educational, religious—that have shaped your ambitions and drives, and how do they affect your walk with Christ?
3. In what sense might some of your experiences have created “idols,” as defined above? What could you gain in your relationships—parent-­child, work, sibling, and schoolmates—if you exchanged idols of self-effort, self-protection, and/or self-preservation for trust in the mercy of God?
4. How does God reveal His sovereign control of all of the lives on the ship via the lots? How might a better understanding of God’s sovereignty in all things fuel a great passion to be obedient to what seem to be His hardest truths for us to follow?
5. When Jonah reveals that he worships the Lord, how is he being both sincere and hypocritical? In terms of what Christians believe and practice concerning the Great Commission, how might it be possible for a believer or a congregation to be both sincere and hypocritical in following the Lord?
6. How does this episode demonstrate that being tolerant of other’s religious beliefs does not mean that believers must accept religiously plural roads to salvation?
7. What acts in the story demonstrate a process of real conversion on the part of the sailors? Is it unreasonable for churches to expect believers to demonstrate evidence of conversion? Do you think the sailors’ experience agrees with what the New Testament teaches about conversion?
8. On what basis should one reading Jonah’s account believe the miraculous account of the fish swallowing Jonah? Why is this miraculous account important to the gospel story?
9. What are some ways in which Jonah’s account resembles the account of Christ? What might the resemblance say about the plan of God for all mankind? What might the resemblance say about the character of Scripture?
10. In light of God’s heart for these polytheistic sailors and untold billions of lost people in the world, and in light of God’s mercy toward Jonah and us, what actions should characterize a believer’s or a church’s heart for the lost? Do you think your financial planning, leisure schedule, and prayer life are more reflective of Jonah’s heart or the Lord’s heart?