No matter how far you go, God will still find you.

In this instance, Jonah was intending to go 2,000 miles away from where he should have been.

But God caught up with him because he is everywhere present and sovereign.

Even in our rebellion, even in our stubbornness, there is the providence of God

and this incident of imprisonment in the belly of a fish is that Jonah rediscovered grace.

Many Christians are familiar with the story of Jonah, particularly children who have grown up

in a Christian home. But sometimes, being familiar with a story means we miss its important lessons.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham and thank you for joining us today for renewing your mind.

Although you and I will likely never experience what Jonah did, as we'll hear today from Dr. Derek

Thomas, Jonah's encounter both with the whale and God reminds us of the sweetness of the gospel

and provides many practical helps for Christians today. Let's listen in. Here's Dr. Thomas.

Hello again and this is number four in our series of characters who found themselves

imprisoned and lessons that they learned from that experience of imprisonment.

And in some cases, the imprisonment was ten years in Joseph's case and overnight,

maybe for others like Michael. And of course, you may win some little now if the next person

and the next person chronologically in the Old Testament I've chosen is Jonah.

And it's a metaphorical prison. He was locked in it for three days and of course we were talking about

the whale. Jonah comes about a hundred years or so after the last character, my chia, my chia,

in the reign of Ahab in the northern kingdom of Israel. And we're about almost a hundred years

later under the reign of Jeroboam II, somewhere in the middle of the late 800s and early 700s,

hard to be exactly precise as to when this incident occurred. Well, there's messing up.

And then there's Jonah. Chapter one of Jonah is an indictment on him. And there's no way of

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