Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Matthew 12:38-42, highlighting Jesus' reference to Jonah as a sign of His own resurrection. He emphasizes that the Pharisees, despite witnessing numerous miracles, demanded further signs, reflecting their unbelief. The sermon calls believers to trust in Jesus rather than seek signs, urging them to recognize the greater revelation of Christ compared to Jonah and Solomon. Ultimately, Pastor Safrit encourages the congregation to desire Jesus above all else, affirming that true fulfillment comes from Him alone.
Welcome and Church Information
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen.
Thank you, choir, for singing. If you have your Bibles, we'll be in Matthew chapter 12 this morning. Matthew chapter 12, verse 38 through 42. And we're going to be looking at the last installment of Jonah.
You may be asking, preacher, why are we looking at Jonah in Matthew? And the reason that is, is because Jesus talks about Jonah. And so in that fact, we're going to look at what Jesus says about Jonah and take it with some instruction for us this morning.
And so Matthew chapter 12 is where we'll be at.
And this will be the last message, unless the Lord tells me to do another one, on Jonah. Jonah this morning. So if you have your Bibles, we'll stand.
Matthew chapter 12, out of reading of God's Word. We'll read 38 through 42. The Bible says,
Then he gives this wonderful command here in the last part here, verse 41 to 42. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at Jonah's preaching. And look, something greater than Jonah is here.
The queen of the south will rise up at the judgment of the generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. And look, something greater than Solomon is here.
Lord, I thank you for this day. I thank you for your blessings. I thank you for what you've done for us. Lord, we are humbled. I'm humbled to even stand this morning and preach. Lord, I pray that you'll give me wisdom, give me guidance as your Word will be delivered.
Help me to get anything out of my mind that I want to say, but ultimately have everything that you want to say this morning. Lord, I love you. In your name we pray. Amen. You can be seated.
I want to start out by asking this question. What is a sign? What is something that is a sign? A sign is something that has significance beyond itself. It's more than just a symbol, although there is a symbol in there.
You were riding down the road and we have traffic signs that say, merge right, merge right, merge right, because there is something going on ahead.
You may have a stop sign at a specific intersection that is telling you to stop, because if you don't, that can be an intersection of a crash or something bad can happen. And a sign is there to help us understand things.
Journey and Direction
It's there to give us direction or point to us or to give something outside of itself or even beyond itself.
When you began to travel on a journey, a couple of years ago, me, or last year, me and Brody drove down with my brothers to the Miami Stadium, Miami Dolphins, and we drove to Florida. It was a 13 or 12-hour drive.
I can't remember exactly how long it was. And as we got closer into Florida, it would say Orlando, or it would say Miami, is so many miles away.
And so as we're going, we're counting down. Birdie, of course, he's asking, Dad, how long? How long is it going to be until we get there? I'm ready to get there.
You know, kids, as we're traveling. And then all of a sudden, we began to see Miami 10 miles away. Miami 5 miles away. It was a sign telling us that we're getting closer to this destination.
But then once we got into Miami, it no longer said you're in Miami. It no longer said Miami negative one miles because you're in here. But everything around in that destination was showing symbols that were in Miami.
It was saying the Miami Heat. It said the Miami Dolphins. It said the Florida Mariners. All these different symbols were inside telling you that you were in this specific place.
When we began to understand what Jesus is saying here when he says that there are going to be some of you that want a sign, that want something, Jesus says that you're wanting some kind of special sign that's going to prove to you that I am the Messiah, that I am God incarnate.
Notice here what the people are saying when they began to ask this question. They said, these group of people, just a couple of verses up.
If you've got your Bibles up, look at verse 22. A demon-possessed man who was blind and unable to speak was brought to him. And he healed him so that the man could both speak and see. And the crowds were astonished and said, could this be the son of David? The crowd said that.
But the Pharisees heard this and they said, this man drives out demons by Beelzebub. He is the ruler of demons.
He did a sign right there in front of them. And you can go back through Matthew and you can see all the miracles that Jesus did in front of these Pharisees. And yet they come to him and they say, will you do us another sign?
Will you do something to prove to me that you are God? And in other words, Jesus was saying, this is the sign. I'm giving you a sign.
The Sign of Jonah
The sign that I gave to you went right past you. And apparently it was not a big enough sign for them to understand. It was not convincing enough sign. They wanted something bigger and they wanted something better than just what Jesus had done. And ultimately, it didn't matter what Jesus did.
They were going to turn it and they were going to say, this man is part of Satan. And so Jesus begins to rebuke them in their heart. And so I want to start out on the back of your notes.
If you want to flip it over and look at it, I'm going to put this graphic up on the screen as well. I came across this graphic this week because I think it's going to help us even moving forward to identify where we're at in our life.
And so we begin to see Jesus is the darker line and Jonah is the lighter line.
Jesus, who's the Christ, Jonah the prophet, he runs to Joppa. He's thrown into the sea and he's inside the fish. Jesus went to the cross and he died in the tomb. And they both were brought back to life or raised back to life. One was put on dry land. One was raised to life. They both appeared to many people.
Jesus appeared to many people. Jonah appeared to many people and he preached.
But Jonah, as we looked at two weeks ago, went and sat out there outside of the city and was angry at God. Where Jesus ascended to heaven and sits at the right hand of God.
And I put that graphic up there and I put it on your notes for a reason. Because I want us to ask ourselves,
when we get to this point where we're raised to new life, when salvation happens and we go before other people, do we begin to get angry at God because God is not who we want him to be?
Or are we ascending to heaven and we placing our mind on the things of God so that we can be seated with God in our life? Oftentimes, we begin to see this and we begin to ask ourselves where we're at. You see, scholars will say this. They'll say Jonah wasn't real.
They'll say that Jonah was just a made-up fairy tale.
I want to start out by saying this, and I said this the very first week. If Jesus is true, and I believe he is, I believe we have an inner and errant, unfallible scripture that is pure and holy. If Jesus is true,
he would not have gave a false or fable to predict his own rising again. But yet he used Jonah as a real event to issue out a real declaration that just as Jonah was thrown out of the belly of the whale, I so will be thrown out of the heart of the earth
and come back to raise to new life so that many people will hear of what I've done.
So with that introduction in place, let's dissect this scripture just for a moment and begin to look at these people and what Christ has said to them. In the first two verses, we see that they trusted signs rather than Christ.
We know that the Jewish people wanted to see signs, and we know that in our day and age, we don't necessarily have those signs. We don't have miracles as they did then because it was a different generation. It was a different era.
Their desire to see a sign expressed in a way, another way of which they hoped to reject him. As you look through Matthew, you see often where Jesus would do something, and the Pharisees would rebuke him. The Pharisees would twist what he did in a way just to reject him.
Jesus as the Ultimate Sign
If Jesus never provided a sign, they would have found some way to speak against him.
And so Jesus thus provided a way to say that he was the sign. He was the one that was coming to redeem all of humanity.
One commentator says it like this. He said, The apparent respect and earnestness of the request that Jesus were to perform a sign were feigned or were just out of their mind because they said, Teacher, we desire from you an empathetic position to see a sign.
And it reminds us of the time when Jesus was on the cross and the soldiers began to mock Jesus. If you really are the Son of God, bring yourself off the cross.
The soldiers were in the same way as these Pharisees here. If you really are the Son of David, perform a sign for us. And they began to mock him in his statement, in their statement.
Had Christ not shown them a sign or not done enough signs, when the miracles would have happened and they would have seen these signs, they would have either spoke out and they would have said that this is more idol worship or they would have spoken direct opposition.
You see, Jesus makes this statement, and I think it's a statement for all of us to understand. He says, Jesus condemned them seeking after a sign, especially when countless signs had already happened before their very eyes.
You see, it's easy for us to overestimate or underestimate the power of miraculous signs to change the heart of the doubters and the spectacles.
How often am I in my life where I'm tempted to say, God, I need you to provide something in a way of a sign so that I can trust you? How often is it that I say, God, I need you to do something miraculous?
And oftentimes we'll count just normal mishaps in life to say, well, that's a sign from God that I should do this.
When Jesus says this, he said, the sign that I've given to you is that I'm going to be like Jonah. But then he makes this statement that was so overwhelming in our mission trip this week. He said this,
trials and tribulations are going to come upon you. But take heart because I've overcome the world. I've overcome these trials and tribulations.
Take heart because when you trust in me, I am going to be the one that provides for you. And we have to ask ourselves, are we trusting in Jesus or are we trusting in our own self? Are we trusting in what Christ has done for us?
Or are we putting all this stock in ourselves as the Pharisees did?
And Jesus looked at him and said, an evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign.
I hope that that's not our problem this morning. I hope God doesn't look down on us and say, man, I really wish Pleasant Grove would just trust me.
I really wish that Ronda Clingman wouldn't be looking for a sign, but they would just trust in what God's done for them. I really wish that that wouldn't be us this morning, but I fear as Jesus said these to the Pharisees, he would often say that to us as well.
So not only did they trust signs rather than Christ, but he told them of redemption. One verse, verse 40, he says,
for as Jonah was in the belly of the well, even in their, I love the mercy of God here. Even in the skepticalness, even in their, he knew their heart.
He knew that they were asking this in a miss. Even in that, he still gives them truth and grace and mercy.
Comparison of Jonah and Jesus
Just as Jonah was in the belly of the well for three days and three nights, so the son of man will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. He makes this statement. He says, this is a picture for us to understand.
He says that there is a wrath of God that's coming, that the death will not hold him. And after three days of imprisonment, even as Jonah was there, there will be a moment where he is set free. It is a glorious picture of what Jesus did in an unexpected place.
In a place where people were rejecting him, in a place where people were condemning him to death, in a place where Jesus was going to be crucified, the mercy that he showed toward these people is unbearable. We talked about this morning in our Sunday school class about redemption and restoration.
I saw a picture, a friend of mine shared it that I was with in Israel just a couple of weeks ago, and we're coming off of the Mount of Olives and we're coming down to the city where Jesus stopped and he looked over Jerusalem. And they built a little cathedral there.
It's a small cathedral, only holds about 20 or 30 people. And we packed all those pastors in there and we began to sing and worship. And it was the place where Jesus looked out onto the city.
And he saw the people who were going to destroy his body and he began to weep for them. The disciples asked him, Jesus, why are you weeping? Why are you crying?
And he basically makes this statement because they don't know what they're about to do. He wept because of their ignorance. He wept because of what they were going to do.
And in this moment, Jesus in that same humble, redemptive state looks at these Pharisees who were trying to trap him again and again and says, a devil and adulterous generation looks after a sign.
But I'm going to tell you right now that as Jonah was in the belly of the whale, I'm going to be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. You see, Jesus referred to this in a in a mighty way.
And we can go through a theological discussion of was it three little days or three physical days or partial days.
And because of time, I don't have the time to deal with all that. But I'll just say one statement.
A day and a night make a whole day and a portion of a day and a night in the Jewish day also was recognized as a whole day.
And so when Jesus made the statement that he's going to be there three days and three nights, it didn't necessarily mean it was going to be full third 72 hour period. He was including partial days here.
So I don't want us to get hung up on the necessity of the well, well, this doesn't match up in my timeline or or someone else's timeline. Because when that happens, we begin to turn into the Pharisees.
When we begin to debate these little things, we miss the central point that even the Pharisees saw. The Pharisees were told these things and yet they rejected.
We should not miss the central point. They're asking for a sign and he says, I am the sign. I am the one who you're looking for. And today we begin to argue about little things that don't make a hill of beans in the kingdom of God.
And God says, let's make the central point the central point. As one pastor said, let's keep the main thing the main thing. And if Jesus is the main thing, let's keep him in the center of everything we do. He said, you failed to recognize me.
As we get to this next point, just a moment. The Ninevites recognize God's warning.
The Ninevites recognize the warning of Jonah. The Queen of Sheba recognized God's wisdom in Solomon.
And yet these Pharisees could not look past their religion to see the Messiah standing right there in front of them. Which leads us to the third point. He rebuked them of their unbelief.
Jesus in compassion, he told them they were trusting in things that were wrong. And yet in this moment, he looks at them and he rebukes them of their unbelief. The men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment with this generation.
Greater Judgment for Greater Light
Simply put, Jesus is saying here, there is a greater light that has been given to you. And because there is a greater light, greater judgment will be responsible to you. Both Nineveh and the Queen of the South repented when they saw the lesser light. When they saw Jonah preaching, they repented.
When they saw Solomon, when Queen of Sheba saw Solomon and all his wealth, she saw him and she said, Whatever you're doing, it's got to be great. I'm going to repent. I'm going to worship whatever you're doing. And he said, you generation have seen a greater light.
You have seen something that is greater, that is more indefensible, that is greater than anything you can ever imagine or see or hear. And yet you've rejected it. And because you have rejected it, there are going to be consequences. He said there's going to be judgment upon this generation.
And there are several ways we can look at here of how Jesus was a greater light than Jonah. I'm just going to read a couple of things that I wrote down. Christ, who was preached to the Jews, was infinitely greater than Jonah. In his nature, in his purpose,
in his person, and in his mission, Christ was so much greater than Jonah.
And how often do we look to Jonah and we look at these things that we've looked at over the last couple of days, and we begin to ask ourselves, am I like Jonah? Am I like Jonah and I'm running from God and I'm running from what he wants me to do?
Am I like Jonah when God does something great and I sit back and I just, I'm a critic and I can't get over what God has done because it wasn't what I wanted God to do.
And Christ said, I'm going to come and I'm going to be so much greater than Jonah in my nature.
Oh, his grace and his mercy and his forgiveness that he shows to us in his person, in his ability to love people is greater than anything we'll ever know or see when we begin to love people. And he lays out his mission.
As Christ says, my mission is to preach redemption to all people.
And he commissions us to go out as well to preach the gospel to all people. You see, Jonah preached repentance to Nineveh. The Bible says he spent 40 days preaching this message of repentance. And it said that the entire nation turned. Christ preached to the Jews for three years and they killed him.
Jonah was so much lesser than Jesus. But yet Jesus loved so much more than Jonah did. We saw that graphic.
If you want to flip over it again, just to see it. Jonah went and got angry and cried and rebuked God for what he did. Jesus said, God, whatever your will be done.
God, these people, they're going to kill me. They're going to put me into a form that man will not even be able to recognize that I'm a human being. I'm going to be beat beyond all recognition, as Isaiah says. And yet I'll go to the cross for them.
Yet I'll go and I'll die for their sins so that they can come to know you and love you.
Jonah, when he was given that same command, he ran and went the other way. He ran and went outside the city and said, God, now go ahead and judge them. Go ahead and wipe them off the face of the earth. And Jesus, with his compassion and his love, showed repentance in this area.
And yet we often are like Jonah and not like Jesus. Jonah wrought no miracles. There was no authority in his preaching other than Christ or God told him to go. And Christ wrought miracles every single day.
I often think of, if I could just be a fly on the wall and walk around with where Jesus went for three and a half years.
The Bible says in the end of John that if all of the miracles and all of the things that Christ did, all the wonders that Christ did could be put into a book, the books of the world couldn't contain it.
And to be able to sit there and to know we have just a sliver of what Christ did when he was here on the earth.
And to be able to walk around and to see what Christ did, to see him walking on the water, to see him feeding 5,000, to see someone who was lame from their birth, to be able to walk
again. I'm thinking of a lady in my former church. Her name was Kayla. She wouldn't mind me sharing this. Was born with a degenerative disease. And she's been wheelchair bound. She's my age. She's 35.
She's never walked a day in her life. She's been in a wheelchair her entire life.
When she would come to the church for functions and they would be upstairs, a couple of men would get on the wheelchair and carry her wheelchair upstairs. Because we didn't have an elevator there like we're blessed with here. And they would carry her around.
And I would think that if Jesus were to walk in here today and come and say, Kayla, let's go ahead and rise and let's walk.
After 35 years of never walking, never been able to use her legs or to stand up and walk, how much I would look and say, this has got to be God.
This has got to be the king, the ruler of the universe. And yet Jesus did this in his miracles.
And they said, this has to be Satan. This has to be someone sent by Beelzebub. And Jesus said, I love you.
And I'm going to continue showing you miracles. And every day of my life, in every place that I went, and everywhere he went, all kinds of people he loved and he showed compassion to. And Jonah was asked to go to a pagan city. And he said, I'd rather die.
I'd rather be thrown over a boat and be dead than go to that city. And how often again are we like that? Notwithstanding all this, the people of Judea saw all of these things and they could not do what Nineveh did. Nineveh repented. They said, destruction's coming.
You're talking about there's a way of redemption.
I'm going to follow what you're saying. Jesus, the incarnate, came into the world and said, destruction is coming. You're going to die in your sins if you don't trust in me. And all of Judea rejected him, turned from him, and crucified him.
I wonder if Jesus were here today, would we do the same thing? Would the church look at Jesus and say, you're not the Jesus that I thought.
You don't look like him in the pictures that I've seen. You don't smell like him. You don't act like him. We don't want you. We want something different.
And so therefore, we're going to execute you so that maybe Jesus will come that we won't. You see, I shared with the mission team when Logan tried to kill me one day, we went up to the top of a mountain. There's a thousand steps all the way up to the top of it.
So we got up really early. We walked all the way to the top. We got to the top. There's a cross up there. He asked me, is the ground level for the cross? I said, absolutely not because I about died.
But we got up there and he said, do you have a word, a testimony in your heart? And I said, walking up this mountain reminded me of when Jesus was in Nazareth.
Went to his hometown. He went to his own people where he was born and raised. The people that knew him, they knew that this was Joseph's son, the carpenter. This was Mary's son.
And he preached in the church in the synagogue where he would have been raised. And he read and said, I am the one that's coming to redeem the world. And they looked at him and they said, no, no, you're not.
We're going to kill you. And they chased him up to the top of the Mount of Precipice.
And he stood on the edge of the mountain and he overlooked the place where he grew up at, the place where he spent all of his time to the left is Mount Gilboa, where the Mount of Transfiguration, the Mount of Sinai, all these massive mountains that we read about in the Old Testament.
He's surrounded by all these things. The Battle of Armageddon's over to your left if you're looking out of it. And he's standing there and he's looking at the people.
And they said, this is the day you're going to die because we don't want to accept what you just said. And they went to throw him off the mountain and Jesus looked at him and said, today's not my day. And he looked at him and he said,
Jesus, the I Am
I may not be the Jesus that you want, but I'm the Jesus you need. And he passed through them and he shook his shoes off and he cursed those people. Because they rejected who he was.
And I often think in our modern church, if Jesus were to walk in, would we do the same thing? His own people did. The Pharisees who knew Scripture so well,
you could begin, you could open up your Old Testament and begin reading. And singers including Asaph and the descendants and you would stop in Nehemiah chapter 7 verse 44 and they would be able to pick up the gate included and they would be able to read all the descendants. We can't do that.
We don't know our Old Testament like that. We don't know our Bible like that. And yet in this moment, they knew the Old Testament, they knew what Jesus was reading and they said, we don't want to have anything to do with you.
We want our own Jesus. We want our own God. And Jesus began to say,
a greater than Solomon is here. He used this term Solomon because this was the son of David, their favorite king. The king that the city is still named after to this day, the city of David. And Solomon's son,
the greatest of all kings that lived as far as wealth and prosperity. And he uses this title, the son of David. And he said, I am much greater than the son of David. I am greater than the son of David, which was Solomon. I am greater than him.
And he went on to say, you may be impressed with the greatness of David. You may be impressed with the greatness of Solomon, where the queen of Sheba came to him and all of the Israelites began to worship him. And he said that I am greater than all of those things.
And yet Jesus in this audaciously huge statement said, I am that I am.
And if only you'll trust in me, you will be able to be spared from this judgment. As Terry comes and begins to play our invitation, I want to conclude with just a couple of thoughts. Jesus made this statement. You're not watching what Jonah did. He said, this isn't Solomon you're listening to,
but there's one that's greater than Solomon that's here. There's one that's greater than Jonah was here. They would have known that Jonah had experienced the greatest revival in all the Old Testament. That Jonah would have seen, as I said a couple of weeks ago, around 600,000 people come to know Jesus,
return from their ways, and to turn from what they had done in Israel and in Nineveh, and turned and repented. And Jesus is saying here, do you hear the implication?
Do you hear that? It's not Jonah that's here speaking to you. It's Jesus. It's the I am.
And he asked this question, who are you going to listen to? I don't know where we're at today. I don't know where we're thinking that we're at today. Maybe you're here and you're saying,
Pastor James, I'm looking for a sign. I'm looking for something huge that God's going to do in my life. And I want to reiterate what Jesus said, evil and adulterous generation demands a sign.
Just trust in who's here for you. Last night as I was doing some final study and prep, this song came to my mind that Terry's playing, Give Me Jesus.
It's an old song that was written in the 1850s, and we don't sing it today. It's not even, I don't even think it's in our white hymn book. It may be, but I don't know if it is.
But it's an old song that goes like this, in the morning when I rise, in the morning when I rise, in the morning when I rise, give me Jesus. And the chorus says this, it's simple, give me Jesus, give me Jesus. You can have all this world, just give me Jesus.
Second verse, when I'm alone, when I'm alone, when I'm alone, give me Jesus. The third verse, it's a comfort to all of us, when I come to die,
and when I come to die, oh, when I come to die, give me Jesus. Think of this chorus again, give me Jesus,
give me Jesus. If this would be our prayer this morning, church, give me Jesus. You can have all the world, you can have all my possessions, you can have all my belongings, just give me Jesus.
You see, in my prayer, in my heart, you can have all the rest of what I have, you can have everything that I have, as long as I have Jesus, I have enough.
Jesus is Enough
Jesus is enough. Jesus is more than enough than what we need. Jesus is more than enough than what we have, and if you have him, church, you have it all.
You have everything that you ever need in life, as long as we have Jesus. But I'm here to say, if you don't have Jesus, you don't have anything. You don't have life, you don't have life after this life,
and this morning, I pray that we'll ask ourselves, we'll do a deep heart dive and say,
am I more like these Pharisees, that are looking at Jesus, and maybe in my heart, I'm a skeptic, and I'm saying, can this really be the son of God?
Or are we sitting here and saying, God, I want all of you. I want everything that you can give me, because everything that I have is worthless, as is a filthy rags,
as the psalmist says. I just want Jesus. God, I pray that you'll help us this morning. Lord, help me to want you more than I want anything else. Help me to want you
more than I've ever wanted you before in my life. Lord, strip me of all of my own possessions, and humble me so I can say, God, I just need you. I often think that we don't get to that point. Lord, help us to get there.
Maybe this is just my prayer this morning. I don't know,
but I pray that you'll help us to draw closer to you every day of our life. And when I rise in the morning, my prayer will be, give me Jesus.
When I go to sleep at night, my prayer will be, God, I need you. When I'm all alone, and I'm struggling in my sin, when I'm struggling in my heartache, I will say, God, I just need you.
Lord, help that to be our prayer this morning. In your name we pray. Amen.
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