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Oct 19, 2024 06:00am

A Storm Sent to Save

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We often think of God as being the one who calms the storms, and rightly so. We do not usually think of God as being the one who sends storms into our lives.

Our normal reaction is to think storms are bad. We don’t like pain, discomfort, anguish, tears, or anything that seems frightening or difficult. Our natural tendency is to avoid those types of things and do anything we can to get out of a hard situation. But there are times when God uses storms in our lives to get our attention.

Like Jonah.

Jonah was living in disobedience to God. He was told to preach a message of warning and repentance to the Ninevites, but instead, he ran in the opposite direction. He was running away from God.

So God sent a storm.

Jonah was asleep on a boat trying to flee the opposite direction of Nineveh when God sent the storm. Even with all the turbulence in his life from the storm, he continued to ignore God and slept. God sent the captain of the boat to wake him up.

Most of us know the rest of the story—that the sailors threw Jonah into the sea to try and appease the gods and stop the storm; that Jonah was swallowed up by a great fish appointed by God and spent three days and three nights in its belly before he cried out to God and was vomited out onto dry land; that God gave Jonah a second chance to preach His message to Nineveh, and that this time, Jonah obeyed.

But we need to stop and consider something. God was merciful to Jonah by sending the storm, by sending the captain to rouse him from sleep, and even by having him thrown overboard. How could something that nearly led to Jonah’s death be merciful? Because God loved Jonah too much to let him persist in his sin.

And God loves us that much, too.

When we are living in disobedience to God, we are like Jonah—we want to get as far away from God as possible. Darkness and light do not mix. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. When we are living in the darkness of our sin, we will hide from the light. We like our sin; we don’t want to give it up, even if outwardly we would denounce the types of behaviors we try to hide in our own lives. Or we feel too ashamed to come to God; we think we’ve messed up too badly this time and can’t show our face to him.

Sometimes we need a storm to wake us up and bring us back.

If Jonah had easy sailing, he would have continued on his way, ignoring God and living in disobedience. Maybe his life would have been storm-free, but its end would have led to death—not just physically, but spiritually for all eternity. He needed a wake-up call. And God was merciful enough to give him one.

Pastor and author Alistair Begg says:
“God comes to us again and again in our disobedience, unwilling to let us wallow in our sin. Even if we put our fingers in our ears and pretend not to hear Him, and even if we flat-out refuse to obey, God pursues His wandering children. He loves us so much that He doesn’t want to leave us to our own devices. In our sin, we cannot outrun the mercy of God, the one who will never leave us or forsake us.”

In fact, He loves us so much that He gave His only Son to die in our place.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

In God’s mercy, He uses storms and painful circumstances in our lives, not to punish us but to get our attention so He can lovingly restore us into a right relationship with Him. Jonah could not outrun or out-sin God’s mercy, and neither can we. Although the storms in our lives may seem unpleasant and undesirable at the time, they are actually a gift of God’s good grace to us because He loves us. And in that love, He will never let us go farther than His mercy can reach.