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Part 2 Saying But to God By Graham Miller

You'll take time, will you, in the next few days to read this little letter, this little prophecy, each day, only 48 verses.
You can do it in a few moments, but you'll find that each day will take you a little longer.
You'll see more there to think about.
I mention again the background that I mentioned on Saturday morning.
Jonah is a real person.
Second, he's an honored servant of God, honored with a notable name, honored with a notable task.
Thirdly, he is a true patriot, and it's his patriotism that gets him into trouble.
He doesn't want to see Israel devastated.
It will be devastated if Nineveh, Assyria, survives.
If he preaches to Assyria, she'll repent, so he won't preach.
And Assyria will be exterminated by the judgment and thunderbolts of God.
Let Assyria perish and Israel remain, is Jonah's motto, I shall not go to Nineveh.
The fourth place, Jonah is a type. He's a type of Christ that's made clear in the New Testament.
He's also a type, I suppose, of Israel.
Finally, I mention that he's a delightfully candid author.
And as you read it, you may find that you need to ask for something of the same candor in the hearing of the Word.
I've enjoyed walking around this delightful site each morning, quite early,
when the morning sun is beginning to warm up the cool air of the night.
And I've noticed the variety of native flowers on the roadside.
There are the little four-petaled star-like flowers that grow in clumps just off the edge of the bitumen.
And I noticed the other purple ones, I don't know the names.
I picked some of what looked like our New Zealand manuka, which I suppose you call tea tree here too.
The centers are green here, they're red in New Zealand,
and I suppose God has the right to make them any color he likes, because he's so diverse in what he does.
Now here's the point. You've got a rich diversity of native flowers up here on the hill,
and you'll find something of the same diversity in the ministry of the Word.
It's not all for you. You may find your help not at all in the exposition of Jonah,
but in the ministry of another of God's servants.
But just remember, the flower that appeals to one botanist or to one wayside walker
doesn't always just meet the need of the other.
And one reason why they get a whole battery of us as speakers at these conventions
is the thought that what one can say may help some folks,
and others will be helped by what another can say.
Now today's message is on the psychology of spiritual defeat.
It's about Jonah, the man who said, but, to God.
It's about sin in the life of the Christian.
It's about the problem of the backslider.
First of all, I ask you to notice that Jonah's defeat began with a difference of opinion with God.
God gave him his word, and Jonah didn't like it.
The word of the Lord came unto Jonah.
You see, God has a sovereign right to command when we are Christians.
This is rooted first in the fact that he is our creator.
Romans 9, verse 20.
Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it?
Why hast thou made me thus?
Secondly, it is rooted in the fact that God, through faith in Christ, is our Father.
And we remember when we say the foot and commandment,
honor thy father and thy mother, that supremely it's speaking of our Father in heaven.
Thirdly, we can't but remember the words of the Lord Jesus.
Ye are my friends.
If ye do whatsoever, I command you.
As the Christian's Lord, Christ claims absolute sovereignty over your entire life.
He has the right to command, and it was in the exercise of that right,
over one of his servants, that the word of the Lord came unto Jonah.
How does it come?
How did it come?
We're not quite sure, and you may not find until this convention
that God has lots of different ways of bringing home his word to your heart and conscience.
The normal way for God to bring his word home to our conscience
is through a sensitive reading of his word, prayed in and prayed over.
Well, first of all then, Jonah's defeat began with a difference of opinion with God
when he heard the word of God from the one who had the sovereign right to command.
The word that God gave him was this, arise, go, cry.
He told him what to do, he told him where to go, and he told him what to say.
And I ask you to notice that this illustrates God's particular plan for each Christian.
God probably relied on him in much the way that Uzziah relied on Isaiah.
He was the official court historian for Uzziah,
and I suppose Jonah was a useful diplomat in Israel in the 8th century BC.
Anyway, he had the consciousness that he was doing a good job, and why send me after Nineveh?
God's plan for Jonah's life was sudden and novel, and he was not inwardly prepared to obey.
God wanted the prophet now to become a missionary, and the task was wholly distasteful to him.
Eighteen months ago, my Baptist colleague in the little town of Papakura, New Zealand,
quietly announced to his deacons that he had offered his services
to the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship for service in India.
He was needed in Papakura.
He had built there a strong and stable work in that new Baptist congregation.
He was a man who had his New Zealand Master of Arts and Bachelor of Divinity degrees,
and he had his Oxford Master of Arts degree.
He'd been traveling secretary for the IVF.
He was lecturing in New Testament at the Baptist College in Auckland,
and God suddenly said to him, Ian Kemp, Papakura is not your place for me.
Something like that happened with Jonah.
He may have been lecturing in Semitics at Jeroboam,
the second theological faculty in Samaria, we don't know.
But whatever the circumstances, the task was distasteful.
He said, Lord, I've got lots of work to do and I'll work a lot harder at this.
Please leave me alone.
You just analyze your own reaction to whatever God's going to say to you here.
The third thing about the defeat which began with a difference of opinion with God is this,
that it asserted itself with the word but.
It wasn't a spoken but, it was an acted but.
He suffered from a bad virus called buttitis.
It grows very early in young children.
It thrives when we become adolescents,
and when we become crusty old middle-aged ministers,
we've really learned how to use it effectively in our Kirk sessions, haven't we?
But is not the weapon of the Christian when his commanding officer is speaking to him.
How can two walk together except they be agreed?
And at this point, but Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish.
At this point, Jonah and his Lord have parted company,
and the really serious thing is this, that Jonah doesn't care.
Jonah the prophet, Jonah the servant of the living God, he just couldn't care less.
There is the beginning of the psychology of defeat in Jonah's life, it may be in ours.
Now the second thing to notice in the exposition is this,
that Jonah's disobedience which began with an acted but,
now deepens into a fixed attitude of his whole life.
Simple way to show you the point is that first of all he went wild.
Secondly he went west, and thirdly he went down.
He went wild in a kind of berserk reaction as a backslider.
Here's the terrible reality that having committed ourselves to a course
other than the course God has for us, we hate to change, we're such consistent people.
Oswald Chambers somewhere quotes Emerson that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,
it's emphatically the pattern of the backslider, we hate to weaken.
People know now that we've taken the fags again and we don't want to be the weak type
who go back and say well I've chucked it in again.
We want to stick to our conviction even though it's in the teeth of what we once thought
wasn't much good for us.
So he went wild with a persevering consistent reaction against the will of God.
A prophet in full flight from the purpose of God.
And he was a prophet who knew his psalm book.
He knew the lovely cadence of these words in his psalm book.
O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me, Thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising,
and art acquainted with all my ways.
Thou understandest my thought afar off, Thou compassest my path and my lying down.
He knew, but as a thoroughly consistent Christian backslider, but had mastered him and he didn't
have any inclination to revert to full obedience.
He dropped all the shutters, Godward, and he plunged on.
He went wild and geographically he went west.
Joppa was 35 miles on the sea coast from Jerusalem.
That was the port you remember where the Hiram king of Tyre had shipped his big rafts of
cedar wood for the building of the temple.
It's protected by a low rocky reef behind which small trout can securely anchor.
The other name mentioned here in verse 3 lay just beyond the hills of Hercules, the straits
of Gibraltar, the nave plus ultra of seafaring in the ancient Roman world.
It was a kind of symbol of truly the last possible point of humanity.
He went to the last edge of the earth.
He was going to walk as far as he could out on the planks, turn round, shake his hand
of God and say, find me now if you can.
And he was still a believer.
That efficient self-will urged him to travel.
I remember one of our finest young men in our congregation at home, deeply moved and
brought to Christ, though he was the first in his home to trust him about five years
ago, confiding in me his desire to be a Christian missionary.
He came down one night, he rang up on the phone actually first of all and he said, are
you in?
Let you, Mr. Miller.
He said, could I come down and see you please?
And I said, certainly.
I was prompted to say, what's it about?
But he didn't give me long enough and as he came to the door, I opened the front door
and brought him into my study and he said, well, I suppose, Mr. Miller, you know what
it's about.
And I was going to say, yes, I'm afraid I do.
Some jolly girl in the picture, I suppose you're wanting to be engaged, are you?
But he broke in and said, no.
He said, I want to be a missionary.
And it was after that that I remember taking him to one of my art station services in the
front of the council one day and he said, you know, Mr. Miller, I feel I'd like to travel.
I have a feeling I'd like to see places before I become a missionary.
And something in me groaned mutely and I thought, oh, God, do lay hold on this, Jonah.
He saw the call, he heard the call and he saw his Nineveh and now he's being sidetracked.
Some bump has interposed itself and it wasn't long after that and I'd better tell you the
whole gruesome story.
He was driving his butchery firm van around and he doesn't just know what happened.
The van collided with a power pole, he went through the front window and as my first contact
with him a year or two before being when he was in hospital with appendicitis, completely
at my mercy on his back with stitches in himself, the second contact that really counted was
when he was there very much more seriously ill and I said to him, Ken, don't you think
that God might have had to do this in order to ratify that call he gave you to missionary
service?
Well, he's gone the whole way now.
He's finished his PTI training and two years at university and although he never passed
out of high school with school certificate, he was top in the philosophy of stage two
at a target university.
It's because where God calls and we obey, he enables.
But don't start this globe trotting, that's just a bit of bluff.
That's not obedience.
Search your hearts if you've saved up for a world cruise and ask yourself whether you're
not going to Tarshish under another name.
He went wild and he went west and he should have known that there was no place to go to
except where God supervened and supervised because to come back to Jonah's textbook from
his early school training, he had often said to himself in morning prayers up there in
Gathhefer these words, if I ascend up into heaven, thou art there.
If I go down into hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, even there
thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold, and of course it did.
God had forewarned him that no backslider can ultimately rid himself of the Lord whom
he has aligned himself with by faith and obedience, but Jonah, for our benefit, tried it out.
He's not the only one.
He went wild, he went west, and he went down.
And he records here four times that he recognized as he wrote the story up later that it was
a real going down first in his own opinion.
Look at chapter 1, verse 3, he went down to Jeddah.
It was a downgrade all the way, not geographically alone, but morally, spiritually.
Verse 5, the mariners were afraid that Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship.
Chapter 2, verse 6, I went down to the bottoms of the mountains, and he still had his self-rule
when he went down that path.
He couldn't have gone much further, could he?
The weeds of the Mediterranean wrapped round his head, and he still had his clenched fist
and said, God, you can't get down here, you haven't any aqua lung, I've beaten you now,
and I'm going to drown myself and no one will ever find me.
And a backslider can be just as determined as that.
Oh yes, and it mentions in verse 3 that he paid the fare, he paid the fare, because at
the devil's mart are all things so.
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold for a cap and bells our life we pay.
It is only Christ who is given away.
Would you notice in the third main heading that Jonah's disobedience now results in a
moribund conscience.
We're warned in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 12 to 13, take heed, brothers, lest there
be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God as Jonah
did, but exhort one another daily, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness
of sin.
How gradual and imperceptible this hardening was will become more apparent as we look at
the next few points.
The marks of Jonah's moribund conscience, and I've noted down five of them but you may
find some more, more suited to your own particular problem, are these.
First you'll note that there was no prayer in his life when he was a backslider.
Notice that.
Verse 6 tells us that they had to wake him up and get him busy to join them praying,
but it doesn't tell us that he prayed.
They were all praying, this pack of heathen mariners, praying in their own jargon, their
own dialects, praying to their own odd gods, and here the one man of God on the vessel
who should have known how to pray, his lips were sealed with sellotape.
He didn't want to pray, and no backslider does.
Praying is giving in, praying is coming back to God, and the first and enduring reality
of backsliding is that we still get our scripture union notes, we skim through them, and we
don't take time to pray.
He was urged to pray by heathen, but there's not a word of prayer that passed his lips
during the whole time of his backsliding, and he didn't begin to pray until God laid
a mighty hand on him, and he wrote the poem of chapter 2.
Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fisher's belly.
What a place to have to get to before he reminded himself of his need of prayer.
Prayerlessness was the first mark of his backsliding.
The second mark I've noted here was dumbness.
He now traveled as a servant of God incognito.
If he had any tattooing on his arm that said Jehovah's man, he wore long sleeves.
If he had anything in his tumsure that told them who he was, he grew along one of these
latest haircuts.
And if there was anything else about him that would have given him away, he'd do all he
could to cover up his tracks.
And the mark of a backslider is that we hate to be recognized in the office as a Christian.
We hate to be known in the soccer team as a Christian.
We're down there, we join in the water skiing, and they say, well, now, look, we need you
for Sunday, and we swallow hard, and we turn up on Sunday too.
We're traveling incognito the moment we walk out of fellowship with God.
We hate to be identified.
Jonah was down in the side of the ship, and he wouldn't come out with the plain facts
that he was God's man.
God had said something about letting his light shine before men, but he dropped the big bucket
of backsliding over.
It was guttering in its socket.
The third mark of his backsliding was his callousness, verses four and five.
Just notice them again.
The Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea
so that the ship was likely to be broken.
Well, you would have thought a backslider would be somewhere up near the lifeboat, wouldn't
you have thought, wanting to get his leg into the lifeboat before they hoisted it down
off to David's, but he wasn't.
A backslider doesn't care whether he's saved or lost anymore.
He's got to the point where intellectually and morally he's reconciled himself to the
fact that consistency has condemned him to hell anyway, and for the present it's a nice
way to go on.
The callousness which spreads over the soul, bent on backsliding, seals it off almost from
the very capacity to come back to God.
And you know people like that.
I've heard wistful parents say, well, our child did take Christ, but she's far away
from the Lord.
She can't be, she can't be.
It's just the thickness of the couse.
God, as we'll see in the next study, will never, never let his gold perish with the
dross.
The fourth mark of his backsliding was his sleep.
Verse 5, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship and he lay and was fast asleep.
If he'd been like some of us, he would have been violently seasick, but it's quite obvious
that although he was a landlubber, and from a later incident it was obvious that he couldn't
swim.
Although Jonah was at these things, he was down there, rocked in the cradle of the deep
because he was saying, now if this old ship goes down, I'm right.
I hope we sink.
I hope we found her.
Sorry for these poor blokes up here pulling on the winch, but it's all right for me.
I'm staying right here.
I'll be posted up missing, presumed lost.
And it sitted the mood of his backsliding.
Now the fifth thing to notice is his fear.
Verse 9, when he was accosted by these heathen mariners, and they told him that he'd better
get up and help to join in the common prayer, this is what he said, I am a Hebrew, and I
fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land.
Then the man were exceedingly afraid and said to him, Why ever have you done this?
Jonah said, I fear God.
What kind of fear of God has a backslider?
There's a fear of God that's clean, the psalmist tells us.
There's a fear of God that's the beginning of wisdom, and we want that fear.
And there's a fear of God that is a revelation of our resentment against the one who will
not let us go, who comes back and worries us into repentance in the midst of our backsliding,
the one who reminds us at our pensive moments that we once covenanted with him, body, soul,
and spirit to be the Lord's, now and forever.
We've built up a resentment, and we hate these people who keep saying, Why don't you come
up to Katoomba?
Look, we'll pay half your fare.
We're going past your place in the car.
We've got a sleeping bag.
You'll be quite all right.
No one will talk to you.
You'll just be able to sit in a backseat.
And besides, the singing is wonderful, and you've got a beautiful voice.
All they say to try and coax us to Katoomba only brings this horrid kind of fear that
isn't the cleansing fear of the scripture.
It's a fear of God.
It's a fear of having to be inconsistent enough to come back to God.
It's a fear of terminating the experience of armed neutrality with the one who loves
us with an everlasting life.
Jonah was quite confident, we understand, from verses 11 to 15, that he could keep one
jump ahead of God.
It was with the deadly drug of consistency that he steadily pressed the sailors now to
sacrifice him.
Nevertheless, the men rode hard to bring the boat to land, but they could not, for the
sea wrought and was tempestuous against them.
Therefore they cried unto the Lord and said, We beseech thee, O God, we beseech thee,
let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood, for thou,
O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee, and they never said a true word.
So they took up Jonah, cast him into the sea, and the sea ceased from her raging.
And as Jonah hit the water and sank through the first shimmering fathom of the Mediterranean,
if you'd been able to see, his lips were sealed, there was a grim satisfaction on his face.
He didn't try to swim, and those who watched from the side of the vessel watched as the
waters congealed over him in a flat calm, and they said, This God is some God, this
God, this God is the God.
Deeper and deeper he sank through the green into the dark, murky waters.
He felt the weeds wrapped round him, the great jagged rocks at the bottom of the sea he
tells us, stared at him like the bars of Hades, and he continued a backslider still.
Jonah would not repeat, and he was not rescued by the foe, because he had changed his mind.
He didn't change his mind until God first overtook him in his backsliding.
If we'd had a paper calling of what he was thinking and saying, as he went down through
the waters of the Mediterranean that sunny day, it would have been a Hebrew version of
Henley's Invictus.
Out of the night that covers me, dark as the pit from pole to pole, I thank the gods there
be for my unconquerable soul.
Under the rod of circumstance I have not cringed or cried aloud.
Beneath the blood-gings of fate my head is bloody but unbound.
And that's how Jonah thought he'd taken the last irrevocable step to baulk the sovereign
love of God.
Do you know that God intervened?
Verse 14 will tell you that, I'm sorry, a little lower down.
Now 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.
Let me say this regarding God's intervention, that in the far country of the soul God is
able to act in a sovereign, overwhelming way to compass the woeful error, the bursar consistency
of every backslider's soul.
Before these heathen thoilers hurled Jonah overboard, they bowed their heads in what
must have been one of the strangest prayers that was ever prayed by men who became believers
just a few minutes later.
They no longer prayed every man to his own God.
They were now converts to the true God, converted through the dumb, callous backslider or by
God's dealings with him.
You realize that you can still be a soul winner while you're a backslider, don't you?
You realize you can still be quite a good Sunday school superintendent while you're
a Jonah, don't you?
And I realize that the older I become as a minister of the word, the greater is the menace
of backsliding within myself.
I've found it this year, the pressure of the parish, the preparation for the Lord's day
in preaching, first more and more until the tail end of the week, ten o'clock on Saturday
night after the Christian and death, and you're working on your message for Sunday morning.
Sunday morning early and you're working on your message for Sunday evening.
And you know in your own soul you're condemned by this circumstance.
You know you're not giving God or your people what they desire and what they require, and
you don't know how you can handle it until you get a ring on the phone from one of your
Parisians.
He's a farmer, lives ten miles out of a parish in the country.
He said, is that you, Grandpa, that I've been feeling the need of prayer?
I'm coming in on Sunday morning at seven o'clock, would you please with me?
And I needed the time for preparation.
And that's the way God dealt with this backslider.
I found him ringing me up and saying, it's got to be from seven to eight every Sunday
morning.
He thought I was helping him.
I've tried to tell him that he helped me.
Thou, O Lord, hath done as it please thee.
The violent storm, the lottery, the guilty prophet's own admission, all told these
sailors that God, a sovereign God, was in some mysterious way master of this whole terrible
situation.
They never saw the fish.
They never saw what came to Jonah after the first bubbles told them that he was going
down and down and down.
They put up Jewry rig.
They got back to port.
They went and saw the shipping company.
They fixed up the insurance arrangements.
They put a notice in the jumper morning herald, missing, presumed lost.
And that was the end of Jonah so far as human observation was concerned.
When I say this, you are never entitled to say he died impenitent.
Never, never.
They never saw Jonah again, and yet he was reclaimed.
Do you know that at the very moment when this drama was being executed on the Mediterranean,
there was a fellow prophet of Jonah's who was saying these words,
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
How shall I deliver thee, Israel?
Mine heart is turned within me.
My repentings are kindled together.
I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger.
I will not return to destroy Ephraim.
For I am God and not man, the holy one in the midst of thee.
I will heal their backsliding.
I will love them freely, for mine anger is turned away.
He shall be as the Jew unto Israel, and he shall be that to you
when you return by the sovereign outreach of his grace.
I grant to us, O gracious God,
that we may have no moonlit views of thy sovereignty,
thy power, and thy love,
but may submit ourselves to the gracious exercise of thy spirit this day,
proving that thou art able to bring us all
back from the tarshish of our woeful disobedience
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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