8 “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. 9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
10 And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
Including today, we have 5 more instalments in our series on the book of Jonah, after which we will be taking a detailed look at what are known as the 5 points of Calvinism.
The reason I’m bringing this up now is that today on our journey through Jonah, we come face to face with the second point of Calvinism - unlimited election.
Just very briefly, the 5 points are 1) Total Depravity, 2) Unlimited Election, 3) Limited Atonement, 4) Irresistible Grace, and 5) Perseverance of the Saints. The easiest way to remember these points is by the acrostic taken from the first letter of each: TULIP, but more on this in the weeks to come.
Where does our salvation come from? This is the question we are asking today. As Christians, we know that our salvation depends on what we make of the cross of Christ, but there is a lot more to this than first meets the eye.
As I have said before, we need to know not only what we believe, but why we believe it. Does our salvation come because of what we do for God or because of what God does for us? Do sinners come to God for salvation or does God come to sinners in order to save?
The Bible’s answer to these questions is found in Jonah’s prayer in verse 9. “Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
God is the source of salvation. It is His plan, not ours.
Charles Spurgeon wrote, “No human intellect and no created intelligence assisted God in the planning of salvation. He contrived the way, even as He Himself carried it out.” This is what the Bible teaches. In Ephesians 1:11, Paul writes, “In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will.”
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
Just last week we were reminded of the glory of the cross and the empty tomb. Who else but God could devise a means by which the righteous wrath of God at guilty and corrupt sinners could take place as it should, while at the same time we could be brought back into His presence once more? The way that God has saved us has been called both simply brilliant, and brilliantly simple.
Donald Grey Barnhouse wrote, “He alone could have found the way to declare ungodly men godly and justified. He alone could have taken fallen children of Adam and made it possible for them to sit upon the throne of the universe with Himself. He alone could have taken those who were joined to the harlotry of sin and turned them into the pure bride of Christ.”
Our salvation displays the glory of God’s wisdom, and in particular His grace shown to us, because nothing outside of God caused or led Him to design the plan of our salvation, and no influence outside of His own glorious being caused or led God to save us. As I said on Good Friday, we’d all like to think that there must have been something in us worth saving, but that simply isn’t true.
All the work performed for our salvation is of the Lord and done by the Lord. The Christian message of hope we proclaim is not a list of things we need to do in order to achieve or earn our salvation. Instead, it is the proclamation of what God has already done for us. The word Gospel, by its very definition is a telling or a proclaiming of what God has done.
And we see this right from the start of Jesus’ earthly life. When the angels announced the birth of the Saviour, they proclaimed the good news of what God had done. “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11)
The message of salvation we proclaim is the complete and exclusive work of God. He sent His Son to be born under the law, meaning that by His perfectly sinless life, Jesus could fulfil the law for us, because we failed to do so. God then directed Jesus to the cross, where He offered His life as a sacrifice and shed His own blood for our sins. God then raised Him up from the grave, meaning that Jesus conquered not only sin but even death for us.
That’s the Gospel of Christ that we proclaim, and a key point we must be clear on is that we can do nothing to remedy the problem of human sin. We cannot offer our own sacrifice for sin, because every human being has his or her own sins to pay for and so cannot pay for anyone else’s sins.
Our good works, as wonderful and as sacrificial as they might seem to us, are not good enough, because all our works - both good and bad - are corrupted by the sin that pollutes our very being.
So what we could never do, God has done for us. Salvation belongs to the Lord from beginning to end - from its initiation to its achievement.
The story of Jonah provides a perfect example of God as the source of salvation.
We need to ask the question, what did Jonah do to save himself? The answer is nothing.
The only things Jonah contributed were his unbelief, rebellion, folly, and sin. As Jonathan Edwards put it many years ago, the only thing you contribute to your salvation is the sin which makes it necessary.
When Jonah was thrown into the sea, there was nothing he could do for his own salvation. But God predetermined that Jonah would be saved, so when he finally did arrive in Nineveh to preach God’s message of warning, it was because he was saved by God’s sovereign grace.
A point often raised in the account of Jonah is that yes, Jonah was saved because God sent the great fish, but Jonah still had to turn to the Lord in faith. It’s the same example of salvation that you often hear: If there are 100 steps between you and God, He has taken the first 99. All He is doing is waiting for you to do is to take that one, final step.
In the late 16th century, the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius’ views on salvation became the basis of what is known today as Arminianism. Arminians and Calvinists, while both under the larger umbrella of Reformed Theology, disagree on a number of points, one of the most important being how each views God’s election in the act of salvation.
Both agree that the plan of salvation and the accomplishment of salvation are initiated by God, but what about the application of salvation to the individual person?
A simpler way to understand this is that Arminians would say in the case of Jonah, “God gave Jonah one last chance by sending the great fish, and Jonah responded to this grace by changing his heart to turn back to the Lord.”
But Jonah’s answer to this in verse 9, “Salvation belongs to the Lord,” applies not only to the offer of salvation but also to the power to receive it.
To say that we must take that final one hundredth step towards God contradicts the Biblical teaching that salvation is exclusively the work of God. We are not partners in the work of salvation. We are recipients of the work of salvation.
The Arminian view is that salvation is of the Lord in its offer, but in terms of its receipt, salvation is of the sinner’s own free will, but that’s not what Jonah says. He says, “Salvation belongs to the Lord.”
When we understand the Bible’s teaching about man’s condition in sin, it makes perfect sense that salvation belongs to God. Jesus said in John 8:34, “Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.” This means that our wills are not free to turn to God, because our nature is caught up and bound in the chains of sinful corruption.
Paul was very clear on this in 1 Corinthians 2:14 when he wrote, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” And in Romans 8:7, “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.”
So not only does the unregenerate sinner not accept God’s Word but also he cannot. Paul reminds us in Ephesians 2:1 that we were dead in our trespasses and sins. Dead men can’t walk. They can’t take that final step towards God.
So the logical conclusion of the Arminian view is that if salvation requires the sinner to choose to receive the Gospel, but man’s will is enslaved to sin and man’s spirit is dead to God, then salvation is impossible.
This is why the Biblical Gospel is such good news. As Jesus said to Peter in Luke 18:27, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” This means that even the receiving of the Gospel and the faith to believe it is a gift from God.
This was a major point of debate in the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholics argued against salvation by grace alone by arguing the point of free will. Martin Luther gave an excellent answer to that debate when he wrote, “Free will, after the fall, exists in name only, for the will is captive and subject to sin. Not that it is nothing, but that it is not free except to do evil. Free will without grace has the power to do nothing but sin. You call the will free, but in fact it is an enslaved will.”
Genesis 6:5 (which was just before the Great Flood in Noah’s day) says, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
You often hear that God has given us a free will. Those who support the idea usually point to Genesis 2 where God commanded Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was before the fall into sin, and as we know, Adam chose badly, and history has shown that ever since then, we don’t really have a free will for the simple reason that we are enslaved by sin. Luther was right: Free will, after the fall, exists in name only.
So we are not saved by our free will, because left to make our own choice, we would never choose God. Instead, we are saved by the power of God at work in us through the effectual call of the Gospel. Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb. Lazarus contributed nothing to his resurrection.
Jesus, through the power of the Gospel, calls sinners in sovereign power, and as the Holy Spirit gives new birth, the sinner believes and is saved. This is why in Ephesians 2:8, Paul described even faith as “the gift of God,” and why Jonah cried out, “Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
If there was ever an accurate picture of man dead in sin, it is Jonah. Jonah, a man of God and a prophet, remember, had hardened his heart to God’s command, deciding to run away from the presence of the Lord. As the storm, a picture of the wrath and judgment of God threatened to sink his ship, he didn’t repent and turn back to the Lord. Instead, he told the sailors to throw him overboard. He admitted himself that he was the reason for the predicament everyone else was in, and being a prophet, he also knew that confession and repentance was all it would take to put a stop to the storm, but he didn’t. And why not? Because being enslaved to sin, Jonah was incapable of reaching out to God. Jonah could not save himself. It was something God had to do for him.
Likewise, there is nothing we can do to save ourselves. God has to do it for us.
When Jonah finally came to his senses in the tomb-like belly of the fish, he prayed in verse 7, “When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord.” How do we explain the change in his heart? The answer is in his proclamation in verse 9. “Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
As we’ve seen before, in Matthew 12, Jesus makes a clear connection between His own death and resurrection with Jonah when He said in verses 39 and 40, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
The power we see in both Jonah’s deliverance and Jesus’ death and resurrection is the power of God. The power of man contributes nothing to our salvation. It is only the power of God. And just as it was God’s power that turned Jonah’s heart while entombed in the fish, it is God’s power that turns sinners’ hearts to faith today in the shadow of the cross. The cross of Christ, like Jonah’s great fish, is a sign to the world of the sovereign grace of God. Salvation belongs to the Lord.
An important point to notice is that from the moment when Jonah turned to the Lord in repentance and faith, he was saved. He never asked God to rescue him from inside the great fish, but instead thanked God for the deliverance he already received.
So now we need to ask, who will ensure that our salvation is successfully completed? Having been saved by sovereign grace, do we remain saved by our own efforts or by the same sovereign grace of God?
The answer is obvious. Jonah’s resurrection from the grave of the fish was not the result of his own work. Instead, as verse 10 records, “The Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.”
This is the same principle of Jesus calling dead Lazarus out of his tomb back to life, and Him calling us out of the dark tombs of our sin to resurrection life.
As we will see, Jonah’s response to his miraculous salvation was obedience to God, and the lesson to us is that as Christians saved by the grace and work of God alone, we are not to be inactive in our faith. We now have a responsibility toward the God who saved us.
But again, we are not participants in our salvation. We are recipients, though once saved, we are to be participants in the ongoing work of sharing the good news of the Gospel that saves.
Paul wrote in Colossians 1:21-23, “You, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the Gospel that you heard.”
We must continue in the faith, stable and steadfast. The good news is that even this perseverance, something we will look at in more detail in our upcoming series on the 5 points of Calvinism, is of the Lord, and not ourselves.
The people of God do not persevere in their own power, but in the preserving grace of God. Our perseverance in the faith is the result of God’s ongoing grace in our lives. We have the promise that God will not forsake us, as Paul writes in Philippians 1:6. “I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
Our salvation is achieved by the atoning work of Jesus on the cross, and our perseverance in the faith is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives. Ephesians 1:13-14 says, “In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory.”
As we saw last time, Jonah’s prayer from within the fish was modelled on the psalms, and his climactic statement, “Salvation belongs to the Lord,” is from Psalm 3.
Psalm 3 is one of David’s affliction psalms, written while he was fleeing for his life from his son Absalom. David, like Jonah, was in a desperate situation, unable to save himself, and as we read through Psalm 3, we can see the same desperation, and the same hope.
“O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, ‘There is no salvation for him in God.’ But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. I cried aloud to the Lord, and He answered me from His holy hill. I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around. Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God! For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked. Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be on your people!”
Just as David and Jonah found their only hope in God, so our only hope of deliverance and salvation is to be found through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ and the sovereign grace of God.
Martin Luther wrote, “It is the Lord alone that saves and blesses, and even though the whole mass of all evils should be gathered together in one against a man, still, it is the Lord who saves. Salvation and blessing are in His hands. What then shall I fear? Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
Before we took a break from our series for Easter, we looked at the first 7 verses of Jonah’s prayer in chapter 2. Verses 8 and 9, while part of his prayer, are actually a postscript, which describe some of the lessons Jonah learned, the most important of course, is that salvation belongs to the Lord.
But there are other important lessons for us in verse 8 and the first part of verse 9. “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay.”
The KJV translates verse 8, “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.”
When Jonah turned to God in his utter despair, he understood the futility and vanity of worldly idols. When Jonah was reduced to nothing, hovering on the brink of death, the things of the world were unmasked and he saw them for what they really are.
Idolatry is such a dangerous thing. Anything which distracts us from devotion to God and the joy of our salvation so easily become vain idols, which is why we need to seek the Lord through prayer and in His Word.
Vernon McGee wrote in his commentary, “This is another of the great principles in Scripture. Vanity is emptiness. Jonah is speaking here of those who observe that which is empty, that which is vain, that which is just a dream and is not going to come to pass. He calls them vain, and they forsake the only mercy they can receive.”
Jonah rebelled against the authority of God, and it did not go well for him, but God, in His sovereign grace, reached out and saved him. Remember that the reason for the mess he made of his life in the first place was his hatred for the citizens of Nineveh, but there was a remarkable change in Jonah as he said in verse 8. “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.”
The whole point of Jonah’s rebellion against God’s command was his revulsion at the idea of preaching to the pagan Gentiles. But now he laments over them, knowing that in their idolatry they “forsake their hope of steadfast love.”
This is such a vital lesson for us. What is it going to take for us to see the lost and their desperate situation outside of salvation in Christ?
We are saved exclusively by the wonderful grace of God. Paul reminds us in Romans 5:8 that “God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” When we remember that, our hearts should be stirred to pray for the lost, and preach and witness the Gospel to them, because without Christ they are forsaking their hope of steadfast love.
Finally, in verse 9 Jonah puts into words how a heart which is yielded to God should respond to Him. “I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay.” This was the hard lesson Jonah had to learn.
God then spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah onto dry land. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary makes a good point: “Unlike Jonah, the fish responded promptly, as soon as it knew God’s will, and did not need any express command.”
Another interesting detail is that while Jonah would not have known it at the time, his words were almost identical to the sailors after the storm stopped. “The men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” (Jonah 1:16)
This is how both Jew and Gentile - every redeemed sinner - should respond to the saving grace of God, by turning away from the idols we have allowed into our lives, and responding to the commands of God out of love for and obedience to Him.
And what about you? How have you responded to the grace God offers you through His Son?
You can do nothing to remove the debt of your sin. It is only by receiving the gift of grace offered to you by God through the atoning death of Christ that you can be saved.
Gordon Keddie, in his book Preacher on the Run, writes, “You must enter into a covenant of faith with the Lord, surrendering the rule of your life into His sovereign control. Jonah shows that the sovereignty of God is more than a doctrine to affirm; it is also a commitment to be kept. Perhaps some of us, like Jonah, will need to renew our commitment to the Lord. Such a commitment will find expression not merely in our hearts or with our mouths, but also with our hands. In the end, there is only one evidence of a personal, saving relationship to the Lord - and that is the keeping of His commandments.”
If Christ has saved you, you belong to Him. Since salvation belongs to the Lord, those who are saved belong to Him, too.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read Jonah 2:8-10
Discuss the significance of Jonah’s proclamation at the end of verse 9.
The Reformed view is that God saves us completely, and our salvation depends entirely upon Him.
Discuss the major flaw in the theory of God taking 99 of the 100 steps towards us, while we need to take the final step. (See 1 Corinthians 2:14, Romans 8:7 and Ephesians 2:1)
What about our “free will?”
What, if any role, does our free will play in our salvation?
Discuss this quote from Martin Luther: “Free will, after the fall, exists in name only. It is not free except to do evil. You call the will free, but in fact it is an enslaved will.”
The reason for Jonah’s predicament was his rebellion against God’s command to preach to the hated Ninevites.
Discuss Jonah’s change of heart in verse 8, and how we should regard those who are still captive to their sin and outside of salvation in Jesus.
Sunday’s Hymns:
How Great Is Our God
Trust And Obey
Salvation Belongs To Our God
Beautiful One