Read v. 17. Then the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

Chances are, if you were like me, you saw that as the judgment. What a horrible experience to be in the belly of a fish! I remember reading about people who had been swallowed alive and survived, but that's next week. This week, we have the simple statement, "God provided a fish that swallowed Jonah."

It doesn't seem like provision. The impression I had, was the guys heaved Jonah out of the boat and a fish swallowed him. It's almost like throwing a dog biscuit so the dog can catch it. I had thought the fish was just waiting for Jonah. Not so. As we will see in greater detail next week, Jonah was drowning. He was at the bottom of the sea.

The way they were headed with that storm, he was going to be down there with the rest of the ship's crew, but that was not in the Lord's plans. Jonah had become so thoughtless, so selfish, he didn't care if they were to drown with him, but finally he told them what they needed to do. If you recall, they didn't want to throw him over the side. They prayed that they would find mercy from God for doing this to him. But finally came to the conclusion they would have to do throw him into the sea.

Jonah may be a key player here, but the bigger player is our Providing God. The title of the book may be Jonah, but it seems the title of today's sermon might have been better. As we look at how He provided throughout this event, we see His love, and the extent He will take to show it.

I see Him providing for 4 different people or groups. The first and most obvious from our text is Jonah. That one is the most complicated and I'll save that toward the end. The first group then are the sailors. The next would be the Ninevites, and the final set is ourselves.

Let's start with the most obvious in our account, the Ninevites. The Lord calls Jonah to go preach to the Ninevites. This is the capital city of Assyria, this world power. It was a big city and it was filled with souls, souls for whom Christ died.

This was a problem for the Israelites. They were so hung up on the idea that they were God's people, that they didn't think He cared about anyone else. But what did John say as He pointed to Jesus? "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." Sin of the world.

We're back to the time before Abraham was called to be the father of nations. Israel has not yet been called to be His people, to be His ambassadors to the world, and most especially to be the ancestral line of the Messiah. We're back to Noah, when the whole living world believed in the true God, the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Never mind, there were only 8 at the time. All eight of them believed and worshiped the true God. At that time, everyone in the entire world was saved.

Things changed, but not God's desire. He still wanted the entire world to be saved. In fact as He says in Timothy, "God would all to be saved." That's why He died for the whole world. He may have done this, but not all know about it. He wants them to know.

Yet, we also know the Spirit blows where He will. We don't know why some are saved and not others. We don't know why He has brought us into His family through baptism, and not others, but we are not in any position to question Him. Instead we just recognize it as His grace to us.

His smile and His grace was now to be extended to the people of Nineveh. He wanted them to know what He was to do in His Messiah. He wanted them to be spared eternally. So, he calls Jonah to go preach to them.

Jonah is a very interesting choice, but it is in his reluctance that the Lord provides for another set, the sailors. I'm sure you heard this last week, but every indication is that these guys became true believers. I don't know about calling them Christians but like the Ninevites, we could call them Old-Testament Christians.

Christ may not have come, and therefore had not established the Church the way we know it, but the promise of Christ, the Messiah, was what true believers, believed. Just as we look back to the event by which our sins were removed, by which our price was paid, they simply looked forward.

Jonah confessed he was a worshiper of the true God. We don't have too much of what he said, but we know he said more than what the writer of this account gives us. Remember, it said they knew he was running from God because he told them. Yet, we didn't have that information from what Jonah had said. So, apparently he must have told them more. Maybe he even preached to them.

The last prayer we have, is a prayer for forgiveness. They cry out to the God, they have just found is the real one, for mercy. "Forgive us for shedding this innocent man's blood." They feared the Lord and offered Him sacrifices. These are words and actions of faith. The Holy Spirit had smiled on them and had provided for them. The Lord had brought into the middle of a bunch of pagans, a man who was His spokesman. This was his job, and he did what he was called to do, proclaim the Gospel.

What does this say about those in distant lands who seem to have never heard the Gospel? Does the Triune God have a way of getting the Gospel to them? What do you think? Who ever would have dreamed these pagan sailors would ever hear the Gospel? Did they wake up the morning they were hired, thinking today I'm going to hear about a god who loves me? But Voila! Look what happened. The Holy Spirit, like the wind, blew where we never would have expected, and assuming none of them fell away from the faith, an unlikely ship full of sailors are now in eternal glory with the Creator of the heavens and earth.

And now Jonah Himself. The Lord provides a fish. This wasn't judgment. This was rescue. The Lord has been in the rescuing business for Jonah ever since we are introduced to him in the first verse of the first chapter. Jonah may have been a prophet, a pastor, but he apparently had drifted. He did not want to preach to the Ninevites because he did not love the people for whom Christ died.

He probably preached fiery sermons against the Ninevites, but seemed to know nothing about Grace. He apparently didn't even know it in his own life. He probably had a cushy position, a prophet and an advisor to King Jeroboam, and life seemed pretty good. That is, until the Lord showed up and wanted Jonah to do the last thing on earth he wanted to do, preach the Gospel to the Ninevites. Jonah had done what Paul warns against, preached the Gospel to others, but didn't listen to it himself, thereby disqualifying himself for the prize.

So the Lord provides for Jonah to discover this about himself. He send him the call. Will Jonah recognize his spiritual state by getting this call? No. Then he send a storm. Will Jonah recognize his spiritual state by God chasing him down with this storm? No. What will it take?

The call and the storm were God's statements to Jonah to wake up. "Wake up and see where you are standing, Jonah. You are in spiritual danger. You are complacent in your sin, even though you are going through the motions of preaching." He provided these for the sake of Jonah's soul.

This is the message we are hearing this Lenten season. Lent is the time for us to hear the Holy Spirit say, "Are you also complacent in your sin? Are you making excuses for sin you know is sin? Am I providing this series this year, so you can wake up and see you need the grace I have given you more desperately than you had realized?"

If so, don't make the mistake Jonah did. God provided the wake up call, but it seemed Jonah would not wake up. It got to the point that Jonah was thrown overboard, and now it looked like the Ninevites were not going to hear the Gospel, unless God intervened. Therefore, the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah and save his life.

And now we come to ourselves. He has provided for us. We have been seeing this throughout the sermon. We have seen He has provided salvation for us, and only through His grace. Just as the Ninevites and the pagan sailors had been shown grace so that the Gospel was brought to them and they were brought to faith, so has that happened for us. Our providing God provided for us.

We see our providing God providing the message of the Law to break our hard-heartedness. He did this to Jonah, chasing him down with an unwelcome call and then a storm. He pokes and prods us with an uncomfortable message that we have sin we would rather not confess. He provides the words to get us to see what we are doing.

But He provides something even greater. He takes no delight in seeing us squirm. He doesn't want to see us hang our heads and confess our sins and leave us at that.

No, He wants to provide for us the living Gospel message. He wants us to enjoy what it brings. Therefore, in the life of Jonah we are given a tremendous gift. We are given the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days, so will the Son of Man for three days and three nights be in the heart of the earth. We are shown that the death of Jesus, was a victorious one. We are shown that it wasn't the case of something going horribly wrong; that Jesus should never have died. No, we are shown from the Old Testament, that Jesus was going to rise from the dead. We are told before it has happened, that Jesus' death would be the sufficient price for us.

It's not just a wish or warm thought, "God loves you," but you are shown God loves you by what He does to His Son. Nor is this just a demonstration of how much He loves you, and little more than that. This is the very way by which He can love you. Through the victorious death of His Son, shown in the death and resurrection of Jonah--to be explained next week--you have been given eternal life. Through the sure and certain sign of Jonah, given to you by Jesus, you can know you are forgiven. This way, if you are holding out on a sin, holding on to a sin, protecting it with all you've got, you can know forgiveness has already been won for it. For the Lord who has provided this message so you can confess your sin, has also provided His Son so that you can be forgiven for it.

AMEN