Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2504
“And the LORRD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceedingly glad for the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live.” Jonah 4:6-8.
I WANT to lay the stress especially upon these three sentences in my text—
“God prepared a gourd.”
“God prepared a worm.”
“God prepared a vehement east wind.”
The life of Jonah cannot be written without God. Take God out of the Prophet’s history and there is no history to write. This is equally true of each one of us. Apart from God, there is no life, nor thought, nor act, nor career of any man, however lowly or however high. Leave out God and you cannot write the story of anyone’s life. If you attempt it, it will be so ill-written that it shall be clearly perceived that you have tried to make bricks without straw and that you have sought to fashion a potter’s vessel without clay. I believe that in a man’s life the great secret of strength, holiness and righteousness is the acknowledgment of God. When a man has no fear of God before his eyes, there is no wonder that he should run to an excess of meanness and even to an excess of riot! In proportion as the thought of God dominates the mind, we may expect to find a life that shall be true and really worth living. But in proportion as we forgetGod, we shall play the fool. It is the fool who says in his heart, “No God,” and it is the fool who lives and acts as if there were no God!
In Jonah’s life, we meet with God continually. The Lord bade the Prophet go to Nineveh, but instead of going there, he took ship to go to Tarshish. Quick as thought, at the back of that announcement, we read, “But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.” God hurled out the wind as if He had been throwing a thunderbolt after His servant who was seeking to escape from Him—and there was such a terrible storm that the shipmen were compelled to cast Jonah overboard! Then we read, in the 17th verse of the first chapter, “The Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” God began by preparing a storm, but he went on to prepare a fish! We do not know what fish it was and it does not matter—it was one that God made on purpose. And it answered so well that Jonah lived in the fish’s belly for three days and three nights—and then he was landed safely—a better man than when he went into the sea, though none too good even then!
You may have found, dear Friend, that God has prepared a storm in your life. There was a tempest which checked you in your career of sin. You had determined to go to destruction and you had “paid the fare,” but there came a great trial—something or other that stopped your ship and utterly threatened to swallow it up. After that, there came delivering mercy. You who were cast into the sea were, nevertheless, not lost, but saved. What you judged to be your destruction turned out to be for your salvation, for God had from of old prepared the means of saving you—and He sent you such a deliverance that you were compelled to say with Jonah, “Salvation is of the Lord.” Since that time, I should not wonder if you have seen the hand of God in very many amazing ways, possibly in much the same form as Jonah did, not literally, but spiritually. Especially if you have erred as Jonah did, if you have fallen into ill-humors as he did, you have probably had to bear the same kind of discipline and chastisement.
Let it never be forgotten that Jonah was a man of God. I often hear great fault found with him and he richly deserves the condemnation. He was not at all an amiable person but, for all that, he was a man of God. When he was in the very depths of the sea—when he appeared to be cut off from all hope, he prayed as none but a man of God could pray—“Out of the belly of Hell cried I, and You heard my voice.” It takes a real saint to cry out of such a place as Jonah was in—the living tomb of the belly of a fish! He was also a man of faith, otherwise he had not been a man of prayer. And he did believe in his God—it was the result of a mistake that was made by his faith, rather than by his unbelief, that he tried to run away! He had such regard for God’s honor that he could not bear to exercise a ministry which he feared would raise a question about the truthfulness of God and represent Him to be changeable. So far as his idea of God went, he was faithful to it. His fault mainly lay in that imperfect idea of God which had taken possession of his mind.