David Westerfield

In studying and reading over the story of Jonah in preparation for D-Teams yesterday, it really struck me how amazing it is that God delivers people from wickedness despite the vessel He chooses to use and their weaknesses. In particular, God summoned Jonah, as a prophet, to go and declare to Nineveh they would indeed be destroyed. He disobeyed and then God brought him through trials to bring him to repentance. He repented, but his attitude didn’t totally change. He then went and preached destruction coming upon Nineveh. The people repented though, and God relented of the destruction He was going to bring upon them. God was extremely merciful, and Jonah hated it. He was so angry and bitter. The very initial reason He attempted to run from God was because He knew God was merciful and would show mercy to Nineveh if they repented. And so Jonah basically hated these people and wanted to see them destroyed. But God had different plans that thwarted Jonah’s.

This story is not about Jonah, but about God’s might and power to save, how unbelievably merciful He is. Most importantly, this story points to where God’s mercy and love climaxed; at the cross. There we see the ultimate display of all God’s attributes. In addition to this though, we see that God works to save and deliver people despite the instrument He chooses to use (namely sinners). Jonah was rotten, and had a terrible attitude. And yet despite that, God used him to deliver the people of Nineveh. Jonah was essentially a racist, a hardcore nationalist, and thought he was better than the people of Nineveh because he was in Israelite, one of God’s chosen people. He basically thought they did not deserve God’s mercy, which is true; but neither did Jonah! And that’s the point Jonah did not seem to get.

So how can this story apply to our lives? We see that God’s mercy toward Nineveh did not in any way depend on Jonah’s skills and techniques to convey the message of judgment and mercy. In fact, Jonah withheld all merciful information from them, and yet God still showed mercy! What does God’s mercy depend on? Him alone. So, brothers and sisters in Christ, what does that mean for our witness to unbelievers? It means that when we preach the Gospel, even if we do not have great arguments or clarity of speech (though we should definitely strive for those things), God can still use the few things we say to deliver people from their sin and His wrath through the cross of Christ. We must remember that it is by God’s grace alone that men are saved. Did Nineveh cooperate with God’s grace? Absolutely not. They were pursuing their own sinful ways, on the verge of total destruction, and yet God’s instrument, albeit an imperfect one, sovereignly came by the hand of God, and they turned from their ways. But why did they turn? Why is they turned while other nations refuse, including Israel at many points? God chose to show them mercy by removing their resistance to Him (their stubbornness of heart), in order that they would repent from their sin and believe in Him. And they did repent and God relented. By repenting, it proved their faith in Him to deliver them. And so God showed a Gentile people mercy through Jonah, despite Jonah. God’s mercy depends on Him alone, not on any human willing or running or faith.

How much does this story mirror what was to come though, after Jonah’s time, namely Jesus Christ’s earthly descent, death, resurrection, ascension, and the offering of God’s mercy, the Gospel, to the Gentile world? God’s mercy toward Nineveh was a foreshadowing of the mercy He would show to the nations in Christ. This story is most importantly a pointer to the cross of Christ. How glorious it is that God shows anyone mercy! And how wonderful it is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came and died upon a cross in order to bring about that mercy! And how wonderful it is that God uses weak instruments such as us weak, depraved sinners to deliver His message, in order that the Holy Spirit alone changes people!? What a wonderful God and Savior! So if anyone thinks he’s really something spiritually special when someone is saved by your witness, know that God did not have to use you but could have used someone like Jonah to accomplish His sovereign work, because it’s God’s power that saves, not yours. It is by God’s grace alone anyone is saved, and it is by God’s grace alone that He uses me or you or any sinner to accomplish any of His purposes.

The Lord has blessed me so much. I just can’t even begin to consider the ways in which He’s given me such fullness in life. Yes, I have had trials, yes some of them have been constant and overwhelming, humanly speaking. And many ask me during those times, “How do you find joy when all of these things seem to just keep pounding away at you?” Or a fellow believer, to my surprise, will say, “I just don’t see how you do it.” There’s a point here. I don’t do anything! I don’t take credit for any strength of my own in enduring the trial. I have no strength to endure the trial. It’s not by my strength that I’m able to endure and even find joy in the trial itself. It’s only by God’s strength alone, in Christ alone, through the cross, that I can find any joy, that I can obtain any strength at all. I must constantly look to the cross of Christ, where He bore my burden (my burden past, present, and future) and secured my eternal salvation. Enduring through a trial is not something I role up my sleeves and get done like I get computer work done at my job. Instead, God’s strength comes in power by the Holy Spirit, and gives me strength, appropriated through God’s grace alone, made possible through the cross. I obtain no strength on my own, but I only obtain strength through the cross of Christ. The cross is the central point of my entire life, where He not only obtained my salvation and bore my burden (eternally and temporally, right now), but the cross is also where I obtain my sanctification, healing, purification from sin.

So how do I find joy when my world is crumbling, or where does my strength come from? “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Nothing else is good when measured against the goodness of God. Only Christ is good. He is the highest standard, the highest treasure. If I do find joy in some created thing, that only gives temporal enjoyment, does it not point to the transcendent intelligence, wisdom, and pleasure that can be found only in the Creator who spoke that thing into existence, where never-ending satisaction can be found? I find joy in my relationship with Christ alone in the midst of my trials. In my times spent with Christ in Scripture, prayer, and in fellowship with other believer’s, the Holy Spirit comes in great power and upholds me by His omnipotent, mighty hand. I obtain strength from no external or internal force, but only obtain strength in the cross of Christ. Praise God for Jesus Christ, my Rock, my Savior, my Redeemer, the One who holds my head up high!

So many people see there are two ways to go through life: the moral way or the amoral way, the religious way or the pagan way. You are either a pious prude who has no fun and then self-righteously judge others who aren’t like you; or you live it up in debauchery, scoffing at the things religion says. However, Christianity (aside from what many think) is totally different. Catholicism is not any different, but true, God wrought, historic Christianity is totally different.

Religion (moralism) says, “Obey this law, do this good deed, fulfill your moral obligation, and you will obtain, as a result, a good outcome. If you don’t fulfill your moral obligation, you will get a bad outcome, and you must work your way back up with good moral deeds.” This is a very defeating thing for the human soul though because what is it that happens when a person tries with all his might to fulfill the law or his moral obligations? He fails over and over and eventually either gives up or is totally miserable trying over and over again to succeed, of his own strength. This is moralism.

Christianity, however, is totally backward from this thinking. Christianity says, “God demands absolute moral perfection. However, we cannot fulfill the law of God perfectly, and even if we try our hardest, we fall infinitely short of what is required of us. If we break even one law of God over the course of our lives, we have broken the whole law, because even one offense is a trampling on the glory of God. And all of us have broken at least one law over the course of our lives, actually thousands of times over. Therefore, by man’s own efforts and strength, he cannot fulfill the law of God and is therefore hopeless in himself to save himself from his plight in sin. But we already have the outcome in Christ alone! He fulfilled the law of God perfectly, without blemish. He did what we could not, fulfilled the moral obligation we could never live up to. He then offered Himself willingly as a sacrifice of atonement for sin, to turn away the wrath of God. He then died and rose from the grave, ascended into heaven, that anyone who places their faith in His finished work on the cross will be saved.”

So what does this tell us? We are morally unable to fulfill the law of God, but if we believe in Christ’s finished work on the cross, there is now no more need to work on your own strength to do something you’re already unable to do. Once you believe in Him, He then sends you the gift of His Holy Spirit that changes your desires to freely obey Him, and the law then turns from duty to delight. In Christ, because He has fulfilled the law from our side, there is no longer anything more we have to do! In Christ, we are done with trying to please the Father anymore than Christ Himself has pleased Him through His life and then death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. What a lovely Savior and what a great and wonderful God, that He would provide such a wonderful gift of salvation to rescue us from our self-righteous religious works that will only lead us to death!

This is a necessary piece of information in understanding how we were saved, and can drastically affect how we worship our Creator. As many have been taught over the years in the church, the passage of John 3:1-15 has been explained to us to say that once you believe then you will be regenerated in your spirit. Jesus could not be clearer in this teaching though that the reverse is true; you cannot do anything (including believe) until you are regenerated (born again) by the Spirit of God. I also believe this teaching is vitally important for understanding the context of John 3:16. Jesus says in John 15:5, “…Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” Does this mean we cannot eat and drink, or go here or there? Of course not! It is speaking of doing anything right before the eyes of the Lord, such as believing in Him for salvation. Apart from Christ we can do nothing. And how true this is at all of the levels of salvation! From our deadness in sin prior to Christ, to the end of our life on our death-bed. We cannot be pleasing to God without Christ’s initial intervention to change our awful, spiritually dead plight in sin. In John 6:44 He says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” What is this drawing Jesus is speaking of? No one can come to Christ (believe in Christ, love Christ, draw near to Christ) unless the Father draws the person to Himself. Is it just a wooing of the person to Himself or an actual change performed within the person by the Spirit where they are made alive and now desire to come to Him, whereas they did not before? I would advocate it is the latter of the two. This is regeneration.

It couldn’t be any clearer what Jesus is implying when He says in John 3:6-8, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” First of all, Jesus illustrates a point; flesh is born of flesh, but spirit (a regenerated, born again spirit) is born of the Spirit (capital S, meaning the Holy Spirit); your spirit cannot be regenerated by your flesh; this is an impossible proposition (i.e. man does nothing to affect the regeneration of his own soul). The Holy Spirit alone regenerates or bestows grace upon the dead soul so as to make them alive. Man does not cooperate in this grace, in the regeneration of his soul; God the Holy Spirit alone performs this act.

Then to make it even clearer, Jesus uses the illustration of wind blowing about from here to there in relation to a person being born again (having their spirit regenerated by the Spirit). He says, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” What is this illustrating? The Spirit of God is like the wind. We cannot see the Holy Spirit, we do not know where the Spirit comes from or where it is going. It is God’s sovereign choice to do as He pleases and to regenerate whom He pleases. And so in the same way, Jesus says, “So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” God the Holy Spirit goes about to whom He chooses to go, as planned from the foundation of the world. Can we tell the wind where to go or what to do? No, but who commands it? God. So who commands the Spirit where to go? God, because the Spirit is God Himself. The Holy Spirit alone, first comes on a person to release them from the bondage of their sin, from the deadness of their soul, removing their resistance to Himself, unplugging their deaf ears, removing the blinding scales from their eyes (spiritually) and giving them the ability to “see” Christ as Lord and Savior, seeing His beauty and excellence, and thus believing in Him so as to be saved.

So what does this passage illustrate? How is it we were saved? Did our faith produce our regeneration (flesh giving birth to spirit, which Jesus already said was not the case), or did the Holy Spirit’s regeneration produce faith within us that wasn’t there before? Our faith is a gift of God, not something we contribute to our salvation. Does God the Holy Spirit believe for us though? No. We genuinely believe, but it is only because of the initial regeneration of our souls that we are even able to believe, otherwise we would have never believed, because we were dead (unable and unwilling to respond to the call of God) in our natural state. This passage could not be any clearer as to the point of this teaching. We must be born again to do anything spiritual, to “see” (spiritually) the kingdom of God, to even believe in Christ. Regeneration precedes faith. This is why Nicodemus was so shocked by this teaching and gave his answer, “How can these things be?” Why else would he have been so shocked so as to give a response like that? God’s grace is bestowed upon those He pleases to bestow it, not based on anything within the person, but based purely in His perfect, holy, and sovereign counsel that no man knows (Deuteronomy 29:29). “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” Salvation is of the Lord, by Grace Alone, through Faith Alone, in Christ Alone, revealed in Scripture Alone, all for the Glory of God Alone.

Excellent resources pertaining to these things:

John 3:1-10, and the Regeneration of the Spirit – C. Matthew McMahon
Regeneration – C.H. Spurgeon