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Jonah 2: From the Depths…
August 9, 2015
I. Prayers from the Belly…
The story goes of three ministers who were talking about prayer in general and the appropriate and effective positions for prayer. As they were talking, a telephone repairman was working on the phone system in the background. One minister shared that he felt the key was in the hands. He always held his hands together and pointed them upward as a form of symbolic worship. The second suggested that real prayer was conducted on your knees. The third suggested that they both had it wrong--the only position worth its salt was to pray while stretched out flat on your face. By this time the phone man couldn’t stay out of the conversation any longer. He interjected, "I found that the most powerful prayer I ever made was while I was dangling upside down by my heels from a power pole, suspended forty feet above the ground."
I think that the most powerful prayer that Jonah ever prayed was in the belly of a fish. I remember my prayer just before I crashed my motorcycle into a car. One word. “Jesus!”
Really, isn’t it in our times of desperation, when we are overwhelmed, are at the end of our resources and have all but given up hope, maybe actually given up hope, that our prayers get real?
That Jonah was attempting to flee from God, to avoid God’s call and claim on his life, is just the surface view. Why he was fleeing gets us deeper. What happened to Jonah that this once great prophet and man of God was now avoiding Him? Jonah’s spiritual condition had slowly declined over the years in his hometown of Gath-hepher, he was no longer in tune with God, his heart was far from God’s heart. He had become in effect an idolater, which he names later in his prayer. Our idols will poison our relationship with God.
II. SINKING
We ended last week with the sailors tossing Jonah overboard and the sea quieting. The sailors came to some kind of faith in God through this. They sacrificed to God and made vows before him, it says. Jonah’s death has brought them salvation.
But what of Jonah? I know, the suspense is killing you. “THEN Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish.” Then. The storm didn’t do it- in fact he went to sleep, showing his spiritual lethargy. When the sailors unmasked him by casting of lots he didn’t pray. God finally breaks through to Jonah.
His prayer is recorded in these next 9 verses and they cover two scenes. The first is about Jonah in the water itself, sinking into the depths and except for the grace of God, would have died. The Second part is in the belly of the fish, which is God’s gracious deliverance
We don’t know how long after all of this Jonah sat down with quill and parchment and actually wrote this book of his experiences- or told the story to a scribe. He obviously wasn’t writing it in the belly of the whale. So some time later, he looks back, he reflects, recalls his death and deliverance and the very words of his prayer. Certainly Jonah doesn’t come off very well in this book. He knows that. Yet he makes himself vulnerable and exposes his life: his failure as a prophet, his flight, his repentance, and finally his mission to Nineveh. He is in effect saying to all his readers and especially to Israel, “don’t be like me.”
Jonah is sinking fast, going down for the third time. He says that God cast him into the deep, “…the flood surrounded me, waves passed over me…waters closed over me, seaweed was wrapped around me…down to the roots of the mountains…” Don’t think that this fish was there with its mouth open when the sailors threw Jonah overboard. This fish didn’t come along until Jonah hit the seafloor. Jonah in effect is in hell. There is an old Jewish tradition of hell being that barred prison deep in the sea called the Torrent of Perdition. In Ps. 18:4 for example it says, “The cords of death encompassed me, the torrent of perdition assailed me, the cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me…in my distress I called upon the Lord, to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice and my cry to him reached his ears…” (cf 2 Sam. 22:5).
God could have intervened earlier, but did not. Was this degree of distress necessary to inflict? Apparently. When his life was ebbing away, he remembered the Lord (2:7). Sometimes that is what it takes, isn’t it? Otherwise I can just hear Jonah. He goes overboard and grabs some floating debris. “Wow, that was a close call.” But not now. God needed to break this stronghold of disobedience and rebellion.
Jonah’s prayer of faith is birthed through a three-step process here: Awakening, believing, and repenting. But it was toggled through first sinking.
A. Awakening
Jonah acknowledges that God is the actor here. “YOU hurled me into the deep.” He didn’t blame the sailors. “Your waves and billows passed over me.” Our return to faith-filled prayer must also confess that God is at work in our circumstance. Do we see the hand of God at work?
Notice too that nowhere in this chapter does Jonah complain. “Wow, the hits just keep on coming! Why is this happening to me?” He knows why and accepts that God’s judgment on him is right and just.
“You hurled me…” Many people view their lives as just a series of random events strung together. They are victims of fate and/or chance. Others view themselves as the masters of their destiny and are the heroes of their own self-created drama. The perspective of the person of God is to see that God works together with all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28).
In his awakening, he has a new and acute sense of his own sin and failure. God’s judgment was just, God did not owe him a long satisfying life.
B. Believing: 2:4
Jonah moves from awakening to believing. He is still under water when he says, “ I have been banished from your sight” (vs. 4). But he also says, “yet I shall look again upon your holy temple.” It is not easy to trust God while drowning. But this is key. It is far easier to trust God once the rescue operation is complete, when you are safely back on shore. It is like that declaration of Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15). Jonah has come back to God, and that is the important thing, whether he lives or dies, he is the Lord’s now ” (Rom. 14:8).
Water so often in scripture carries the meaning of swallowing up and death. This is the image that Paul uses when he speaks of baptism, that in baptism we are swallowed up in death, and then raised out of the water into resurrection of new life in Christ. Jonah is being baptized.
C. Repenting
He was running to a land of idols, of local deities that claimed territories and to a land of many gods.Remember Jonah was attempting to flee to a place where this one Supreme God was not. And he thinks he found it. He is in the Sheol, in the Pit, driven away from God. Yet in the end God is there.
It is there that he renounces idols. In the middle of verse six we see that now the fish has come to deliver him. “Yet you brought up my life from the pit..” He was sure he was going to die, now he is sure he is going to live. Now he faces the issue of idolatry, those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty he says. This is certainly speaking of and to himself. He had forsaken his true loyalty, but now he is back.
As we have suggested, Jonah’s idolatry was his life in Gath, his status as prophet, the future he had envisioned, and certainly his certainty that he hated those evil pagan loathsome Ninevites just like God did. Often our idols are our assumptions that we share the heart and mind of God himself.
By grace Jonah has been saved, and now his faith surges. Grace makes repentance possible. Yes, the fish is a sign of God’s grace but Jonah is now also God’s prisoner. He never asks to be free, or whines, “how long O Lord?” Compared to where he was, the belly of the fish is a good place to be. He has found a secluded place to pray!
II. The Spewing
And this chapter ends with “Then the Lord spoke to the fish and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land. Not to get ahead, but guess what? He happened to get spewed out pretty much back where he started, towards Nineveh.
Sometimes we might think that prayers that come from the depth of despair are not really valid. Or we might think that truly noble prayers should flow from a time when we don’t really need God, when all is well. Those are fine prayers too, but how many of the Psalms basically when boiled down say “God help me!” Perhaps that is where you are at this morning as well, at the bottom entangled in seaweed and drowning. There is no better time than to turn to God, to confess him, to trust him. He may or may not send his rescue fish, but you will be right with God and that is the most important thing of all.
When some of the scribes and Pharisees were looking to take down Jesus, they asked him to show them another sign. His reply was “And evil and adulterous generation asks for a sing, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” And he goes on to say that just like Jonah was three days and nights in the belly, so he would be in the heart of the earth. In other words, the sign he would give would be of his resurrection. Jesus names Jonah as a type that foretold his own death and resurrection. Jesus also said that the Ninevites repented at the message of Jonah (Matt. 12:38ff). Jesus is saying to Israel that if the Ninvevites could repent and believe, then surely Israel could…but they won’t and so their judgment is more severe.
God responds to the prayers of those who run and then repent. He hears the prayers of those in desperation, of those who have found themselves in terrible situations that may have even created by their disobedience and rebellion. Our God though seeks to awaken us, to bring us again to faith and to repentance. Do see that God is the hero and actor in this story and in ours. He appoints a storm, he calms a storm, he allows the sinking and summons the fish, he brings Jonah back to this beginning to start over. God has made Jonah see himself as a Ninevite: an idolater, undeserving, but nevertheless still loved and pursued by God. What will he do now that is religious arrogance is gone? You will be surprised.