Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1813
“Then I said, I am cast out of Your sight; yet I will look again toward Your holy Temple.” Jonah 2:4.
WHAT a complex creature is man! Those who fancy that they can fully describe him, do not understand him. He is a riddle and a contradiction. As says Ralph Erskine—
“I’m in my own and others’ eyes A labyrinth of mysteries.”
Here, for instance, is a confession from David. “So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before You. Nevertheless I am continually with You: You have held me by my right hand” (Psa. 73:22, 23). Paul says, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 7:24, 25). He is strengthened with all might by the Spirit of God in the inner man and yet he is weakness itself! In the text before us, Jonah appears to be in a despairing condition—“I am cast out of Your sight,” but still he has hope, for he resolves, “Yet I will look again toward Your holy Temple.” Everything seems lost and yet, as long as a man can look to God, nothing is lost! God cannot see him, so he thinks, yet he talks about looking towards God—this is amazing, is it not? It is as if he said, “I am cast out of Your sight and yet You are the Object of my sight.”
I do not know of a more gloomy sentence that human lips can speak than this—“I am cast out of Your sight.” I do not know of a more hopeful resolution that the human heart can determine upon than this—“Yet I will look again toward Your holy Temple.” Oh, untried and inexperienced Brothers and Sisters, be not at all disconcerted when you cannot comprehend yourself! On the contrary, take it as one of the evidences that there is a Divine life within you when you become a mystery to yourself! If, like a schoolboy, you can draw your own likeness on a slate with a piece of pencil and can say, “This is all myself,” why, then you will be rubbed out and your image will be forgotten! But an immortal and divinely-inhabited spirit which is to survive sun, moon and stars is not so readily sketched. While you are brother to the worm and akin to corruption, you are, nevertheless, nearly related to Him that sits on the Eternal Throne! Vast regions of wonder-land lie between your condition, as the abject prey of Death, and your portion as an heir of God by Christ Jesus. Manhood is a great deep. I set it not side by side with the fathomless abyss of Godhead, but I know of nothing else which surpasses it.
Our text, next, leads me to observe that faith in the child of God, whatever may be his circumstances, still comes to the front. Here is Jonah in such a wretched condition that he says, “I am cast out of Your sight.” And yet, despite this, he declares, “Yet I will look again toward your holy temple.” The huge Atlantic wave comes rolling on—it sweeps not only over the feet and breast of Faith, but it rises far above her head—and, for the moment, Faith seems to be drowned. Wait an instant and with her face ruddy from the wave and her locks streaming from the flood, Faith lifts up her head again and cries, “Yet I will look again toward Your holy Temple.” Write Faith’s motto—INVICTA—she always rides forth upon the white horse, conquering and to conquer! Faith is the child of the Omnipotent and shares in His Omnipotence! She is born of the Eternal and she possesses His immortality!
You may crush and grind her, but every fragment lives. You may cast her into the fire, but she cannot be burned, neither can the smell of fire pass upon her! You may hurl her into the great deeps but she is bound to rise again. Faith has eyes that were made to drink in the sunlight and, so long as God is a Sun, there will be eyes of faith to rejoice in Him! If we have faith, there is that in us which overcomes the world, baffles Satan, conquers sin, rules life and abolishes death. All things are possible to him that believes. Faith triumphs in every place, notwithstanding that her life is one of contin-
ued trial. Sense is broken like a potter’s vessel and reason is frail as a spider’s web, but Faith abides and grows—and reigns in the power of the Most High!
Please observe, for it may be for the comfort of some here present, that Jonah was in a position altogether unique and yet his faith stood him in good stead. You have read of Joseph in the dungeon, but his imprisonment was nothing compared with the entombment of Jonah in the belly of a fish! You have read of Job on a dunghill in utter misery—it is a sorry plight—but there are many Jobs in one Jonah if we reckon by present misery and distress! To lie as a living man in a living sculpture was horrible. Jonah, no doubt, suffered from those inconveniences which, apart from miracle, would have ended his life right speedily. A dark, stifling, pestilential cell would have been preferable to the stomach of a shark, or whatever great fish it may have been which had swallowed him. The amazing thing is that he was aware of his position and knew when the monster dived to the sea bottom, when it passed through a meadow of seaweed, when it neared some great mountain and when, again, it rose to the surface! This makes the miracle all the more striking, for one is apt to imagine that the man must have lain dormant, or at least, must, in a measure, have been unconscious while in such singular hiding. His position was such as never mortal man had known before or since.