"There's Something Fishy Going On Here"

Introduction

In his short book On Getting Out of Bed,Alan Noble makes an important point about the gift of God creating and saving us. The world, the devil, and our flesh all value usefulness. “But you have no use value to God. You can’t. There is nothing He needs. ... That’s not why He created you, and it’s not why He continues to sustain your existence in the world. His creation of you was gratuitous, prodigal. He made you because He loves you and for His own pleasure. ... If you live for the World, the Flesh, or the Devil, there is no room for grace, or for God’s gifts” (Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living [Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2023], 99). It can be hard to remember that our salvation is not something we contribute to, but rather is a total gift of God. Let us be grateful for such a gift!

In the show Person of Interest, the character John Reese begins the show as a homeless person. He is found and recruited by Finch to help him save others who are considered irrelevant. It’s an act of salvation, because his despair had eliminated all his sense of humanity; he was not even asking for rescue. Nevertheless, he was rescued, and out of that act, he went on to help many others (created by Jonathan Nolan, on CBS, 2011–16). We didn’t ask God to send Jesus to die for our sins thousands of years ago—that was God’s plan and a gift of grace. #MyFishStory

Big Idea of the Message

Salvation is a gift from God that deserves our daily gratitude.

Application Point

God saves his people, both their physical lives and their spiritual souls. How does this knowledge impact your daily life when it comes to what you want and what you’re grateful for? Jonah disobeyed God for personal reasons, and though God is not obligated to keep and protect us when we step out of his will, God heard, kept, and protected him in a unusual manner. Even when our disobedience places us in precarious positions, God’s grace is evident in how he keeps and protects us. For that we must have the “voice of thanksgiving” for God’s benefits.

Old Man Jonah

The book of Jonah tells the story of a prophet who at first resists the will of God and then obeys God only to be disappointed with the outcome. It’s a good case study in gratitude and thanking through our circumstances. Jonah has a “personal” problem with God’s purpose, and he decides to make a run for it. He buys a ticket, boards a boat to Tarshish in hopes of escaping the presence of the Lord, and thus from his purpose. In the midst of his rest, God “hurled” a great wind that caused the ship to break up. The mariners prayed and tossed valuable cargo overboard so they could lighten the load. They wake Jonah up and ask him to pray, they cast lots and of course they fell to Jonah. He explains who he is and tells them he is fleeing from the presence of the Lord. The longer he stays on the boat, the longer the chaos continued at sea. While some have argued that Jonah’s call for the sailors to throw him overboard indicates his concern for them, this explains at most only part of his behavior. He certainly does understand that the storm indicates divine displeasure at his own disobedience (1:12b) and that the others were in danger of drowning on account of his sin. So, once prompted to do something, he suggests that the sailors throw him into the waves so as to make the sea ‘calm for them’ (1:12a). But what led Jonah to assume that his death would assuage the storm? And why, especially in the light of the later emphasis on Nineveh’s change, does Jonah completely ignore repentance, which can deliver sinners from seemingly certain punishment? Nowhere in this chapter, or anywhere else in Jonah for that matter, are we told that he repented of his disobedience, so his eventful trek to Nineveh should not be taken as irrefutable evidence that he has fully submitted himself to God’s call.

In the light of the conscious avoidance of repentance, we are permitted to explore other possible motives, in particular that his choice to go overboard rather than repent suggests that he would rather die than change course. If this seems presumptive in the light of the meagre data available here in Jonah 1, recall that we will see this same attitude again in Jonah 4, where Jonah’s life becomes meaningless to him if he desires to see Gentiles punished is thwarted. Jonah’s desire to perish by drowning might also suggest that sees divine justice as inevitably bringing immediate punishment, and theodicy that he surely applies to Nineveh (but fears that God does not). In any case Jonah’s confession in 4:2-3 that his attitude toward Nineveh has been consistent from the beginning give us good grounds to doubt that an altruistic motive was uppermost in Jonah’s decision to go overboard. It also suggest that Jonah’s real motives are not yet visible so a “hermeneutic of suspicion” is biblically authorized at this point.

It is significant that the first thing we are told of Jonah after he is thrown into the waves (1:15) is that Yahweh has already prepared a fish to save him from drowning. As when he impeded Jonah’s flight by hurling a storm onto the sea in 1:4, so again God is a step ahead of Jonah and acts in such a way as to eventually get the reluctant prophet to Nineveh with his message of warning. The verb translated ‘appointed’ or ‘arranged for’ in Jonah 1:17 occurs three other times in Jonah (4:6–8), and always indicates that God is directing affairs so as to both accomplish his own will and teach Jonah something. An important detail of this verb’s use concerns which divine name is made its subject. When ‘Yahweh’ is named as the one doing this (here and in 4:6), the action serves Jonah’s deliverance, while when ‘God’ is used his action is disciplinary or didactic (4:7–8).

While Jonah’s willingness to sacrifice his life in order to save the sailors is laudable, the sailor’s efforts to save him from death are certainly so. For one thing, it is telling that while Jonah is willing to involve the sailors in his death, they recoil from the suggestion and with courage and compassion do all they can to avoid throwing him to his death. But the growing storm renders this effort unsuccessful, and with no other option they then pray for Yahweh not to count them guilty for Jonah’s death. This clearly demonstrates their newfound conviction that he really is the universal Judge of whom Jonah had told them. Their prayer, cast in words that echo Psalm 115:3; 135:6, recognizes Yahweh’s sovereignty over them and the storm. Not only that, but they recognize Yahweh as God before he has shown that he will not hold them guilty for Jonah’s death, and before the storm has abated. Because of the religious transformation is evident before they derive and demonstrable benefit from it, it cannot be motivated by pragmatism or self-preservation. In short, they revere Yahweh for who he is, not for what he can give them.

Thanks to God’s merciful intervention, Jonah escapes drowning and begins a sojourn in the fish. The expression ‘three days and three nights’ attracts readers’ attention due to its use in the NT as a description of Jesus’ time in the grave and the ‘sign’ that the Ninevites and Jesus’ audience both witnessed (Matt. 12:40; 16:4; Luke 11:29–30, 32). We will leave that issue aside for the moment, and ask simply what the phrase would have meant to Jonah’s readers.

He prayed because his life depended on it

Jonah experiences God’s mercy as he sought to end his life, God prepared provision to spare his life in the form of a “great fish” (1:17). Often, people assume they’ve experienced God’s grace first, but it can be argued that people have experienced God’s mercy in their lives. The fish was not a sign of God’s grace because He could have stilled the storm while Jonah was on the boat. Yet, God hurled a wind, rocked the boat, caused Gentile mariners to believe in God, and though Jonah disobeyed, God’s mercy met him in the storm to preserve his life for God’s purpose, to preach repentance to Nineveh. “Disobedience puts us in a bad position, but in position to experience God’s mercy. The storm was not sent to kill Jonah; it was sent to change his mode of transportation. What was sent to “swallow” you is actually what God uses to save your life. God puts us in places of mercy so we can explain to others about God’s grace.”

Jonah’s situation seemingly turned for the worse because while in the belly of the fish, he prayed because his life literally depended on it. The word prayed here is pll (פלל), meaning to make intercession; make a request to God, often with a focus that the request asks or pleads for an intervention in a situation. Before asking “Why did God prepare a fish?” we should consider why Jonah did not stick with his intention to die for his sin. Why does Jonah even pray to be delivered, something tells us he did over and over as he sank beneath the waves? After all, he that God wanted him dead, and he asked the mariners to facilitate the execution of divine justice by throwing him into the sea. It seems that Jonah’s desire to escape what he thought to be God’s sentence of judgment against him betrays a personal penchant for grace when his life is on the line. And Jonah’s own life is very important to him, as his prayer shows. Still, the prayer also shows Jonah to be very thankful for God’s intervention, so key to his survival. To put these disparate pieces together, we have to look closely at what Jonah says and how he says it in the prayer of Jonah 2. Jonah’s descriptive language in chapter two presents a prophet in dire straits because

Daniel C. Timmer, A Gracious and Compassionate God: Mission, Salvation and Spirituality in the Book of Jonah, ed. D. A. Carson, vol. 26, New Studies in Biblical Theology (England; Downers Grove, IL: Apollos; InterVarsity Press, 2011), 81.

Hope kept him going in his distress

While in the belly of the great fish, Jonah hope to look on God’s holy temple kept him in the great fish.

shall look (na-bat) -- think about an object, implying an appropriate, caring response.

The digestive systems of whales consists of an esophagus, a compartmentalized stomach (similar to that of ruminants like cows or hippos) and an intestine. Prey, whether ingested one at a time as in toothed whales or by the thousands as in baleen whales, are not chewed but rather swallowed whole. They then pass into the esophagus, where they are pushed toward the expandable stomach. The esophagus of the blue whale, even if it takes in 2-3 tonnes of krill a day, measures just 15 to 25 cm long when fully extended. The food then reaches the first stomach compartment, the rumen. Pre-digested food is stored there. This compartment breaks down the food by mechanical muscular movements called peristalsis. Everything is then directed toward the main stomach (or cardiac stomach), where glands produce acid and enzymes used to digest the food (hydrochloric acid, pepsin). The journey continues through a narrow channel before finally reaching the last stomach compartment, the pylorus. The latter is characterized by the presence of numerous mucus glands that facilitate intestinal transit. It is the combined actions of these different compartments that notably allow whales to digest the chitin in the exoskeletons of krill and prey swallowed whole.

The digested food continues its journey into the small intestine where nutrient absorption begins. The size of the intestine varies according to the species: it can be 5 to 6 times the length of the animal, which is equivalent to 150 m in the blue whale. As cetaceans have no gall bladder, it is the liver that provides the bile needed for digestion. Cetaceans have the largest livers of all mammals. The sperm whale produces a substance called ambergris which facilitates digestion of squid beaks that can otherwise irritate the bowel. Transit time, from the stomach to the anus, is from 15 to 18 hours.

These points rightly lead Trible to conclude of Jonah that ‘either his memory is faulty or his interpretation skewed’, and in the light of the complex consequences of sin upon a human being’s mind and thought, both are possible (Trible 1994: 167–168). Especially if Jonah’s assumption that God was out to kill him was mistaken (as I suggested in the previous chapter), here Jonah is glossing over any personal responsibility for his brush with death by affirming the agency of everyone but himself.

Having made clear that he holds God responsible for his distress, Jonah goes on to show how completely he is affected by God’s actions: the current ‘surrounds’ him and all God’s breakers and billows ‘pass over’ him. Once again, Jonah associates God very closely with these threats to his life by adding possessive pronouns to them: they are ‘your billows and your waves’ (2:3). Still Jonah seems to equate God’s presence with life, something that the temple and its strict rules for access into God’s presence made abundantly clear to Israelites (even though Jonah hailed from the north). These contrasting threads suggest that Jonah’s views of life and death are quite knotty, and we must not expect easy resolution of this aspect of his world view.

In the midst of this terrifying and oppressive situation, Jonah finds his own behaviour worthy of extended comment. Far from being daunted by God’s apparently careless or dangerous actions, his faith holds firm: ‘regardless, I once again look toward your holy temple’. This is surely not the first time in his life that Jonah has prayed, but in the context of the book we are justified in asking why he has not prayed until now. If God’s commission was puzzling, would obedience in the face of incomplete comprehension not have had Abraham’s example as a precedent (Gen. 12:4)? And once Jonah’s sinful course of behaviour began in earnest, would not a prayer of confession and a request for forgiveness have been fitting, and perhaps even enough to spare those on board from danger?

The fact that Jonah refers to the temple at the end of both descriptions of his ordeal (2:4b, 7b) adds an interesting theological facet to his prayer. So close to Sheol, and so far from God, Jonah’s prayer nonetheless meets with deliverance that extracts him from the jaws of death, even if it does not usher him into the temple straightaway. This same temple, of course, was open to Gentiles (Solomon foresaw that some would come to Jerusalem and pray, 1 Kgs 8:41–43). All the same, the story of Jonah reminds us that the Jerusalem paradigm was not absolute: by showing that the prayers of the sailors and of Jonah alike were heard when they were at the furthest possible remove from that site, so that the God who truly ‘resides’ in Jerusalem in the eighth century BC can still give life and deliverance far beyond Israel’s borders. While that fact stands in tension with the centralized nature of Israel’s worship, it cannot be eliminated simply because inconvenient, and it will eventually allow (theologically speaking) for the expansion of divine presence beyond Jerusalem and even beyond the land of Israel. It also prompts us to reflect on why other Israelites occasionally found themselves far from the temple: while the author of Psalms 42, 43 was driven from it by his enemies, Jonah has none (though his emphasis on God’s role in his dilemma makes us wonder).

He Remembered God

remember (zakar) -- to recall information or events, with a focus on responding in an appropriate manner

thanksgiving (todah) -- to speak words of personal praise

At the point of dying, he remembered God saved him and in spite of the most difficult seasons of his life, he remembered the Lord as a euphemism for Adonai, the name of the one true God, with a focus on sure existence and His relationship to his covenant persons and people Ex. 3:15

Exodus 3:15 ESV

God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.

At this lowest of all possible points, however, God breaks in. Jonah has sunk, but Yahweh brings his life up from the pit, from the very jaws of death. Jonah’s worst fear (at least until 3:10) has been averted, and he has only God to thank for it. This he does, but is surprisingly brief, and this is the only explicit mention of Yahweh’s deliverance in the whole book. If we note that this lone description of Yahweh’s rescue is sandwiched in the middle of the second description of his ordeal, and that it is followed by yet another reminder that Jonah’s prayer had a role in this deliverance in verse 7, our suspicion that Jonah’s perspective is warped is reinforced. The one praying for deliverance is more prominent in Jonah’s prayer than God the deliverer.

Jonah’s recollection of his actions while under the waves concludes with his recall of Yahweh at the very moment that his consciousness is slipping away. While this may mean that he waited until the last minute to pray, drowning is not a terribly drawn-out process, so the emphasis probably falls on his heroic, apparently unbreakable, attachment to Yahweh even as death lays hold of him.

Jonah ends his prayer with a flattering comparison of himself with idol worshippers. The same phrase appears in Psalm 31:7, where it also refers to those who worship idols and where the author also contrasts himself and his trust in Yahweh with them. Since the heathen sailors are prominent in the prior context and the Ninevites in the subsequent context, it is difficult to see how those who ‘forsake the covenant faithfulness which would otherwise be theirs’ could refer to Israelites.24 That being so, Jonah sees himself as a faithful worshipper who enjoys Yahweh’s covenant faithfulness (essentially the same thing as Yahweh himself in the light of Ps. 144:2), while those who worship false gods have no hope of experiencing this divine response.

Considered abstractly, the theology of Jonah’s prayer is orthodox. But when seen in the context of the book, a very different picture emerges. Jonah has assumed that his relationship with God is healthy while that of the (idol-worshipping) sailors is non-existent, while the narrator has shown that the truth is almost the opposite. Fretheim (1977: 103) notes this contrast in a striking way when he says that Jonah’s desire to prevent Nineveh’s deliverance caused him to flee from God ‘for the idolatry of a particular belief … by seeking to limit God’, while the Gentile sailors have abandoned their gods and put their trust in Yahweh! This invective against Gentiles, therefore, condemns Jonah with delicious irony while reminding us that God has in fact delivered the Gentile sailors in more senses than one. The irony only increases when Jonah promises that he will sacrifice to Yahweh with a thankful voice and pay his vows, the very same two actions that have already demonstrated the sailors’ reverence for Yahweh in 1:16.

Jonah’s last words from inside the fish are, we know from the surrounding narrative, even more true than Jonah knew, since he was ignorant of the sailors’ deliverance. Psalm 50, which was already drawn upon in Jonah 1 because of its distinction between true and false Israelites, is a particularly interesting text to read alongside Jonah 2 as well, since its treatment of God’s justice makes it relevant to Jonah’s deliverance. When God comes to deliver his people through judgment, only those who have a genuine relationship with him (Ps. 50:5) will survive (these are known as his ‘faithful ones’). At first we might be inclined to apply this to Jonah, since he falls under God’s judgment only to escape at the last minute. But while this may be a fair description of God’s preliminary punishment of Jonah’s sin, the outlook of the psalm is much more ominous for Israelites who ‘talk the talk but don’t walk the walk’ (50:16–20). Psalm 50 recognizes the propriety of vows and sacrifices provided that the worshipper’s life is likewise in accord with God’s revealed will; but that is something we cannot yet attribute to Jonah.

Deliverance by the God of Israel will become more prominent in Jonah 3, when it is extended to Nineveh. In that case, however, we see Jonah approach this same reality of God’s deliverance from a radically different angle, one that brings upon him a divine rebuke and gives us much food for thought.