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Our Prayers are Not In Vain
Intro:
Read Verses: 1:17-2:10
I have never been in the belly of a fish.
I imagine it smells, and it has whatever the giant fish ate recently, decaying.
None of us probably will ever be in that specific predicament.
But what we do find ourselves in sometimes is a place where everything’s gone; stripped away from us and all we are left with is just us and God.
And so we are compelled to focus and reflect on who God is and where we are in relation to Him.
This is what we see with Jonah in verse 1.
Big Idea: God humbles you so you can clearly see His saving work
God Answers Your Calls (vv 1-2)
In Chapter 1, verse 17, we are told that God appointed the fish to swallow Jonah after Jonah was thrown off the boat.This was not to end Jonah’s life, but to save it.
The word appointed is important to the story and more importantly to Jonah’s development.
The prayer is a mixture or at least has similar tones and phrases of a few Psalms.
Verse 2 may be a kind of recap of what Jonah was thinking as he sunk deeper into the Mediterranean Sea after the sailors threw him over the boat.
Jonah thought his life was over.
Here he was sinking into the ocean, going down, getting farther away from God, just like he was doing in chapter 1.
But now it was very real and he thought he was going to be away from God permanently.
Thi is what he says I cried out from Sheol.
Sheol was the place where the dead go.
Some of the translations may say “grave” or “Hell.”
It was thought to be under the earth, so as Jonah sank down, he was essentially getting close to the place literally by both losing oxygen and also as he descended to the sea floor.
This also makes sense, because remember in chapter 1 that as the storm that was controlled by God raged above deck and around Him, Jonah was below deck, dead to the world, snoring away.
But Here in the fish, lower than he was in the boat, he is know very much awake and he cried out either literally or figuratively and o his joy and perhaps surprise, God answers Him.
It is unclear if Jonah saw the gigantic fish coming toward him as he sank, but I imagine at the point it happened he may have thought that “well, that figures,”.
But at least I won’t really drown.
It is hard to tell, But it seems that Jonah gets unique perspective of the fish and realizes that the fish is not a punishment, but.
Salvation, it is the answer to His prayer.
We have talked about rarer before and one term I used is called a misspelled or rocket prayer.
These are the prayers at the last minute that you don't have time for flowery words or long drawn out speeches.
This is the “help me!”
The or prayer.
And Jonah is recognizing that God has answered the prayer.
Jonah was not expecting a fists swallow him as part of his answer to his needs, but he seems to happily take it nonetheless.
In , When Lazarus died Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus but he showed up a few days later.
In fact John tells us in 11:6 that Jesus stayed where he was at two days longer.
When Jesus and the disciples are close toBethany, Martha is so upset that she goes out to meet Jesus on the road.
And you can just see this scene of this woman walking up to Jesus, why she acknowledges later in the chapter as the Son of God and the Messiah in verse 27, chewing Jesus out.
Martha tells him, if you had been here my brother would not have died.
She is saying you did not answer my request Jesus.
You didn’t come when I called you.
Now my brother is dead and it is basically your fault.
Jesus tells her that Lazarus will be resurrected and Martha, applying what she thinks she knows says yes I get it at the last day we will all be resurrected, but that is later and this is now.
But Jesus answers her I am the resurrection and the life.
If you believe in me shall live.
After that He proves this with the miracle of bringing back Lazarus from the dead in front of witnesses.
God saved Jonah with a fish and He answered Martha and Mary with resurrecting their brother.
Both are miracles.
Both are not what anyone expected.
Jonah and Martha recognized who God is but they demonstrated that they do not truly understand what it means when they say that God is sovereign, or You are the Son of God.
We do the same thing.
If you are a Follower of God, we can say things, but it is another thing to accept it and acknowledge that God has indeed answered your prayer, even if it is in a way that is unexpected or unlikely.
TS: God does this because he knows our path, he knows where you are going and he knew what you will need for the journey, and he not only hears you, but he is keeping an eye on you.
God Keeps His Eye On You (vv 3-4)
Jonah goes on to recount his drowning.
He continues to state that God is in control.
He says you cast me into the sea, into the deep, and the current, that you control engulfed or surround me, your waves passed over me.
On one hand Jonah thinks that he had been expelled from his sight, as he slips into the water, but he is acknowledging that God still sees him.
He knows exactly where he is.
How else would he be able to send the fish directly to Jonah to swallow him.
One way to think about this visually is that God has a giant holographic map with the dots representing us and it moves as we move, he knows where we are.
Remember, Jonah just spent the first part of the story trying to run away and even though it seems like he knew better, he was trying to get away from God’s sight.
He thought he could go somewhere God was not and that he could not be found.
Jonah thought he could cut off his ankle monitor and get away.
Jonah expresses that he had been expelled or banished from God’s sight, but he actually knows differently.
In many of the ancient Near east religions, the gods were localized.
So whatever god the people worshipped was confined to a region or a county, but he could not do things outside of that area, but “Jonah was not expressing a belief in the localization of Yahweh to Palestine.
He stood with many other Old Testament prophets in believing in the all-present God of Israel.
Therefore this phrase must be taken as an expression of emotional consternation at being out of the Lord’s favor.
But now Jonah realizes that as we talked about last week, there is nowhere to hide and He is now thankful for that fact.
Because Jonah needed rescuing and God knew exactly where to find him.
With Jonah’s statement of seeing the temple again, Jonah is now planning to return to God and his presence because the temple was the dwelling place of God.
When you are lost, God finds you.
The parallel to lost is dead.
When you were dead, God made you alive.
In , the father in the parable of the prodigal son says, “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”
The parallel of lost is dead.
And Jesus knew what he was saying with the word dead, because he had said earlier, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead” ().
There are living dead just like Paul says in — “even while we were dead in our trespasses and sins, God made us alive.”
The lost are dead.
Spiritually dead.
Unresponsive to God.
Jesus came to seek the lost, to make the dead alive again.
He came on a rescue mission to bring you back from behind enemy lines.
A comical as Hogan's heroes is, it is nothing like the real experiences in the prison camp.
It is horrible.
While we are in the world, we are essentially in a prison where we think we are free.
But when we accept Christ, we truly become free because we get new life through Jesus.
We become a new man or woman when they Holy Spirit Dwells within us.
Jonah needed saving just as much or more than he just needed finding and that is what God does, he saves you.
God Gives You a New Life (vv 5-6)
Most of verse 5 and 6 recount the drowning, he is going down, like he wanted to but now the reality was hitting Jonah.
There are about 10 thousand types of seaweed or algae growing in the oceans and seas.
Although only penetrating to 8-40 meters in most oceans, some are found to depths of 250 m in particularly clear waters which includes the Mediterranean, Caribbean, Brazil.
We don’t know far Jonah went, but Jonah is giving us the picture that he is sinking and getting caught up in this underwater forest.
The roots of the mountains.
Imagine how dirt and rock is under a mountain and how deep the roots of the mountain would be if they had roots.
The bars of the earth are closing like a prison cell door, once they close they cannot or will not be reopened.
All three of these images paint these pictures of isolation from the world of the living and ultimately the isolation from God
But Jonah knows there is good news at then end of verse 6.
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