Jonah 1:17-2:10

Jonah 1:17–2:10 ESV

17 And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. 1 Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, 2 saying, “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. 3 For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. 4 Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.’ 5 The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head 6 at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. 7 When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. 8 Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. 9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord!” 10 And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

So now we come to the runaway Jonah. He had just committed seeming suicide at the hands of the sailors for it was him who said throw me over and it will all be calm. And it happened just as he said. Hmm. I wonder what he thought was in store for him. Perhaps he really did think it would lead to his demise even in calm waters. Or, he thought that God had a plan to bring him back to do that which God had first told him to do. I think that this is more likely. He would reason why would God bother with him at all if there was nothing more for him to do other than to die.

This is the same kind of sentiment we found with Paul, who, whilst waiting the verdict, in a Philippian jail, on whether he would live or die knew that he would live for there was still work for him to do. And Jonah still had work to do. And he knew it.

But, even so, he was in a bad way with God. These verses have been somewhat of a comfort to me as well as a warning:

Psalm 32:8–9 NKJV

8 I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will guide you with My eye. 9 Do not be like the horse or like the mule, Which have no understanding, Which must be harnessed with bit and bridle, Else they will not come near you.

In other words whilst God will teach the way to go we can resist Him and the result of this is a loss of witness. But horses and mules can be brought under control with a strong hand and this is none other than the discipline of God. Remember discipline is not punishment for wrongdoing so much as a way to restore to fellowship and bring back to living a right way, God’s way.

And this is exactly what Jonah was about to experience. I don’t think the hurricane experience fazed him at all. But what was going to do it was something so extraordinary it is the thing we remember most about Jonah…except we most often forget the lesson…which is to do what God tells you to do the first time round.

But first, it is not what happened to Jonah that we should notice first but we should notice the Lord. It is the Lord who is mentioned here as the One who had planned ahead. O, how interesting! Jonah had not caught Him out by surprise, no, not at all. This is because nothing can surprise God for He knows all things before they happen, and knew about all these things well before He created us. Do you find that amazing? Even though He knew what would be the outcome of creating human beings He still created us. He still chose to give us free will. He still decided that the pain would be worth it and it would be worth sending His own Son into the world to save it.

So what was this extraordinary thing that we remember about this story? None other than a fish big enough to swallow Jonah whole. Oftentimes we tell this as a story of a whale but actually we are not told. It was simply a sea creature. And plainly if this one was ever to be caught it would go down in the record books. “It was this big!” Of course, many have spent hours, even years, studying what it was that swallowed Jonah but even this is secondary. What was miraculous was that Jonah was saved!

Miracles are necessarily believed to be a Christian in the first place. If you do not believe in miracles then you are still an unbeliever, still outside of the saving arms of God, still on your way to hell. It is necessary to believe that Jesus died, was buried and was raised again after 3 days. We have to believe in the atonement and reconciliation and in the defeat of sin, death and hell, and in the sending of God’s Spirit to form the Church and inhabit us as temples of God. No faith in these things means that we are not yet Christians. In fact, Scripture makes it clear if these are not believed we are antichrist with a small ‘a’. If God did these miracles then to believe in a sea creature large enough for Jonah to survive 3 days and nights in its belly without succumbing to stomach acids and lack of oxygen means that God truly prepared this creature for such a task. At least it was obedient to the command of God unlike Jonah! And it won’t be the only one in this story of Jonah.

It also means that God who is the same yesterday, today and forever is still the God of miracles in our time, in this place. That’s right. You’d better believe it. In His infinite wisdom He will though, of course, we can never demand such things from God as some try to claim. But let us rejoice when He does! Amen!

Let us remember that in this story Jonah was saved from drowning and not only that, it was so that another people could also be saved from their drowning in sin.

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish for 3 days and 3 nights.

It is here that we will hear what Jesus said of this:

Matthew 12:38–42 NKJV

38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.” 39 But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and indeed a greater than Jonah is here. 42 The queen of the South will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and indeed a greater than Solomon is here.

Matthew 16:1–4 NKJV

1 Then the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and testing Him asked that He would show them a sign from heaven. 2 He answered and said to them, “When it is evening you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red’; 3 and in the morning, ‘It will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ Hypocrites! You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times. 4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” And He left them and departed.

What was the sign of Jonah? He was a sign that Jesus was going to be killed and buried. But also, the earth will, in effect, spit Him out, for it will be commanded to do so.

We are then told that Jonah prayed to the Lord from the belly of the sea creature. This is not surprising. Until now he had refused to pray. Even the sailors had prayed to the Lord whilst Jonah remained silent. But, here in this moment came the time for a desperate prayer for help.

There was a man who became a missionary and regularly he was asked as to why he did so. And he told a story:

Thru the Bible Vol. 29: The Prophets (Jonah/Micah) Why Did Jonah Pray?

When he was a boy, an evangelist came to their church to hold meetings. The first night of the meetings, his dad, who was an officer in the church, made him sit on the front row, and the preacher really made that seat hot for him. He knew the preacher was talking right to him, although the preacher himself didn’t realize it. His dad made him go to the meeting the second night, and he knew that if he went yet another time, he not only would accept Christ as his Savior but would also give his life to enter the ministry. He had a feeling even at that time that that would be his call. So that night after everybody went to bed, he got an extra shirt and his pajamas and ran off to Mississippi. There he got a job in a sawmill. I don’t know if you are acquainted with the old–time sawmill. A man would take a great hook and would roll the logs over onto the carriage which would take the log on down to the big saw. The saw would then rip that log right down through the middle. My friend’s job was to roll the logs onto the carriage.

One afternoon after he had worked there for about two weeks, he ran out of logs. So the foreman got some old logs which had not been run through the saw for one reason or another. There was one log among them that had already been ripped about halfway. For some reason they hadn’t finished it but had pulled it back out. When my friend rolled that particular log over onto the carriage which carried it into the band saw, the place where the log had previously been ripped opened up, and the index finger on his right hand got caught in it. He felt himself being pulled along the carriage toward that big band saw. He began to yell at the top of his voice, but by that time, the other end of the log had hit the saw and was already going through. If you have ever been around a sawmill, you know that that makes a terrible racket—nobody could hear him. He was yelling at the top of his voice, very frightened as he found himself being pulled against his will right into that saw.

It would take only about forty–five seconds for him to get to the saw. His finger was way out in front of him, and the place where the log had been sawed was clamped down tight on it. His finger hit the saw and was cut off. But that released him, and he rolled to the side and was safe. In that forty–five seconds, he had prayed to the Lord. He accepted Christ as his Savior, promised the Lord he would go into the ministry and do His will, and told Him a lot of other things also! My preacher friend used to say that he told the Lord more in that forty–five seconds than he has ever told Him in an hour’s prayer since then.

It is these kinds of times that we pray most effectively. And so it was with Jonah.

In 1972 she (Joan Baez) travelled to Hanoi with a peace delegation and was caught in the middle of an American bombing campaign on the North Vietnamese capital that lasted 12 days. “We spent the whole time in the basement of our hotel,’’ she recalls. “I have never been so afraid in my life. I thought I was going to die. But I learned something – when the flames start coming towards you everyone starts praying, even the atheists and the agnostics, but when the flames start fading away we all go back to the structures and beliefs that we had before.”

The thing is that Jonah had to face death in the belly of the fish. He found he could not escape God in the worst place with seaweed wrapped around his head and all manner of smells assaulting him.

The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 22: Hosea / Joel / Amos / Obadiah / Jonah Running to God in Prayer

God tracks us down and stops us in our runaway path from obedience, then confronts us with what we are doing. He also allows us to go through a time of death of our willfulness. As we pray we are aware of the hopelessness of changing either ourselves or the problem we created. This moment of hopelessness puts us through a death to self and in a good sense we give up. There is nothing we can do. We hit rock-bottom. And when we do, our surrender to God and His mercy is more than words. We cast ourselves into the arms of everlasting Mercy. That is when resurrection to a new beginning can happen.

When Jonah gave up hope of surviving and could sink no lower, God intervened and saved him. “Yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O LORD, my God.” Jonah uses words reminiscent of the familiar language of Psalm 103:4, “Who redeems your life from destruction”

It was now he could begin to hope and faith was rising to the point that after thinking he’d been cast off forever to the very real possibility of being allowed into the presence of God, I will look again towards your holy temple. Salvation is of the Lord.

We have a choice, even as Christians, to go God’s way or ours. If we go ours God does not leave us to our own devices but disciplines us to bring us back to Him as a Father shows His love to His children. It is for our good.

What happened then to Jonah? The huge sea creature spat him out on dry land at the command of God…and guess where he was…back at the beginning. Renewed, repentant and ready to hear.

Benediction

Romans 8:38–39 NKJV

38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Bibliography

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Exported from Logos Bible Software, 20:38 28 October 2018.