JONAH: The Way of the Lord
In
The Belly of the Fish
Jonah
1:17-2:10
17And the LORD appointed a
great fish [masculine
noun dag] to swallow Jonah, and Jonah
was in [Hebrew
term meceh for the
“inward parts”, which is a synonym of rehem
meaning “womb”] the belly of the fish [masculine noun dag] three days and three nights.
1Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly
of the fish [feminine
noun dagah],
CLARIFICATION OF MY POSITION: It is
not necessary for you to agree with me, but it is important we all begin with
the same orientation or in the same place.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Chapter Two begins with verse seventeen of
Chapter One. Verse seventeen is
synoptic; it is a one sentence summary of that which is expanded in Chapter
Two. Likewise, Chapter Two is not a verbatim
quote of Jonah’s prayer, but it too is a synopsis of his experience and the
prayer that he prayed after being tossed from the ship.
REVIEW: In Chapter One, Jonah acknowledged
that he was the cause of the storm threatening the ship and its crew (See
1:12.), but his heart was still set against God’s will. The storm sent by God had no affect upon him. In short, he would rather die in the sea than
obey God and go to Nineveh. What
stubbornness! What rebellion! What arrogance! What insolence and disrespect this selfish
little man expresses toward God.
Frankly, we could not find fault
with God if He had let Jonah drown, but mystery of mysteries HE doesn’t.
TRANS: We do not face the threat
of a literal stormy sea or of being swallowed by a great fish, but Jonah’s
experience does offer us a valuable lesson in The Way of the Lord. The great
storm, the deep, and the great fish are crucibles used by God to deal with
Jonah. The events may not be exactly
the same, but the experiences are. We will deal with three of them.
1. The Descent
2. The Distress
3. The Deliverance
4. The Deposit
I. The Descent – What we have in these verses is a summary of Jonah’s experience
in the sea.
PERSONAL NOTE FOR FURTHER
EXPLORATION: Scripture tells us that before
Jesus ascended he first descended into the
lower parts of the earth. (See Ephesians
4:9.) The ascent of Jesus, as described by Paul, has to do with Christ’s
ascension from earth to heaven, where the Victor over death, hell and the grave
forever reigns with His Father. The descent referred to here encompasses
Christ’s incarnation, death, and burial.
The term “lower parts of the earth” do not refer to a specific place, but to the great depth of His
descent. This includes His incarnation,
His crucifixion and His death and subsequent burial. In Matthew 12:40, Jesus declared, “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.”
Jesus’ three days and nights stay in the grave is likened to Jonah’s
stay in the belly of the great fish.
Thus it would be safe to assume that Jonah’s descent to the bottom of
the sea is descriptive of a descent into death, be it physical death, emotional
death, or spiritual death. It may well
be a verbal graphic that describes the unbeliever’s descent into death and
hell, and the death Jesus experiences for the sinner.
Jonah’s experience in the sea can
be divided into two parts. First, there is his surface experience of being on the sea and then there is his submerged
experience of being in the sea.
·
His Surface Experience (on the sea) - “…You have hurled me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas, and the current engulfed me. All Your breakers and billows passed over me” (2:3).
o
It was Encircling. You have hurled
me into the deep, the heart of the seas, and the current engulfed me. Jonah is here swallowed up, not by the great fish, but by the vast
expanse of the sea. No matter which way
he
§
no place to stand,
§
nothing to hold onto
§
nothing to keep him afloat and
§
no way to support himself.
In verse three, he states that his dilemma is God’s doing--“You hurled me into the deep.”
o
It was Extreme. All your breakers and billows passed
over me. God seems to be
using the sea like a weapon. While Jonah
is fighting to keep his nose above water God keeps pouring waves of water over
his bobbing head. Again, he acknowledges
that this is God’s doing when he says, “All YOUR
breakers and billows passed over me.”
·
His Submerged Experience (in the sea)
o
Surrounded - “Water encompassed
me to the point of death [lit., to my throat].
The great deep engulfed me, weeds were wrapped around my head” (2:5). Again, Jonah is not
swallowed up the great fish, but by the sea.
He is no longer just encircled by water, he is enveloped or surrounded
by water and unable to breath. Jonah’s
environment is inhospitable and hostile. Where his surface experience made it
hard to breath, his submerged experience made it impossible to breath. On the
surface there was hope that his efforts would make a difference, but once
submerged nothing he did made a difference. The seaweed invalidated his struggle.
o
Separated – “So I said, ‘I have been expelled from Thy sight....’” (2:4). His circumstances
were taking away his options. God had
not banished him, he had chosen to flee from the presence of the Lord. Now, choose as he may he could not longer act
out his choice.
o
Sinking - “I
descended to the roots of the mountains.
The earth with its bars was around me forever” (2:6). Finally, he comes to
rest on the ocean f
TRANS: Please note with me that
Jonah has not yet been swallowed by the great fish. What he has described to this point is his
experience of drowning.
The Distress - “I called out of my distress to the Lord....I cried for help from
the belly of Sheol…” (2:2).
The term “distress” conveys the
idea of intense inner turmoil engendered by the harassment and torment of an
enemy or situation. Jonah’s circumstances
definitely produced mental agony and emotional suffering. He
was being overwhelmed by fear, a sense of helplessness and intense anxiety. He
was struggling to endure the unbearable.
Although exhausted by his circumstances and his struggle, Jonah was
unbroken and resistant. He says in verse
seven, “While I was fainting away [when my life
was ebbing away], I remembered the Lord…” (2:7).
We are so religiously desperate for
heroes and for life to end with “And they all lived happily ever after,” that
we read this story through optimistic glasses that distort and are resistant to
its reality.
Jonah’s mental agony and emotional
suffering isn’t sourced in remorse for his rebellion against the Word of the
Lord. There is not one word of repentance
in his prayer. To the contrary, Chapter
Four will reveal that his heart is unchanged.
No, his distress is the product of his struggle to survive his ordeal
with the sea and the great fish.
The prodigal son had lost everything he brought into the far
country. He had lost…
·
his wealth,
·
his dignity,
·
his family,
·
his home, and
·
his “so called” friends.
Penniless and alone, he continues
his resistant struggle by joining himself to a citizen of that country who sent
him into the field to feed pigs. (See
15:16, 17.) He is about to become a pig
himself when he comes to his senses and remembers that his father’s servants
have it better than he does. Only then does he begin his journey
back home. His reason isn’t remorse for
his sin, but food to eat and a place to sleep.
Hey, before we go pointing fingers
at the prodigal prophet and the prodigal son, we need to remember that we are
more like them than we would like to admit.
Some of us could teach survival tactics to members of the Army’s Special
Forces. We know how to prolong our stay
in the far country. We’ll do whatever we
have to do to keep from allowing the circumstances God hurled us into to change
us.
·
We deny that God would throw us
into the sea, so we rebuke the devil.
·
We blame our problem on our lack of
faith, so we double our efforts at impressing ourselves and God with carnal
attempts at imitating faith.
o
This is not water and I am not
drowning.
o
This is not a problem, it is an
opportunity
·
Like the elder brother, we point
out the failings of others while simultaneously pointing to our years of
faithful service. (See Luke 15:28-30.)
·
Rather than admit our point of
failure, we self-righteously cling to our refusal to smoke or drink or run with
those who do. (See Jonah 2:8, 9.)
No, Jonah isn’t distressed over his
stubborn rebellion; he is agonizing over drowning in the sea and suffocating in
the confinement of the fish’s belly. It wasn’t until he had been in the stomach
of the fish for three days and nights that he broke and called out to the Lord.
Three ministers 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 should be conducted on one’s 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 prayed occurred
while I was dangling upside down by my heels from a power pole, suspended one-hundred
feet above the ground."
Jonah’s prayer was a desperate cry
for “help,” not a confession of sin.
Even so, God heard him.
2:2 – “I called out of my distress to the Lord, and He answered me.”
2:2 – “I cried for help from the depth of Sheol; You heard my voice.”
A lady was complaining to her pastor
that God never heard her prayers. More
specifically, she indicated that God didn’t even listen to her when she
prayed.
After listening to her complaint the
pastor asked her, “Do you know any curse words?”
“I use to curse a blue streak before
I became a Christian,” was her reply.
“Well,” said the pastor, “I want to
you to let go and give God a blue streak cursing, right now!”
The woman gasped and replied, “Why,
I can’t do that.”
“Why not,” asked the pastor.
“Well,” said the woman, “God…”
The pastor smiled and turned the
sentence the woman had been unable to complete into a question, “God would hear
you? Why is it you believe God won’t
hear your prayers, but He’ll hear you cursing?”
The Deliverance
The Means of Deliverance. the word prepared
in 1:17 is a translation of the verb mana. It communicates the idea of being appointed or ordained. Twice in Daniel (Dan 1:5, 10) and four times in Jonah
(Jonah 1:17; Jonah 4:6-8), inanimate things such as Daniel's food, Jonah's
fish, the gourd, worm, and hot wind are under the control of God. The issue would seem to be one of appointed
responsibility given to an existing creature, rather than the formation of a
non-existent creature. God commanded or
gave the great fish the responsibility of delivering Jonah from the great deep.
The great fish was God’s means of delivering Jonah.
This presents us with a new question, which is, at what time or when did
God assign the great fish to swallow Jonah?
The Moment of Deliverance. What we have in verses 3-6 of Chapter Two is
a description of Jonah’s drowning experience.
He is not in the belly of the great fish, but in the sea.
NOTE: In 2:3, he is swallowed up by the
current, not the great fish. Again, in
2:5, he is swallowed up by the great deep, not the great fish.
It is my belief that Jonah was not
swallowed up by the great fish until he reached the great depths of the great
deep. The moment of his deliverance occurred in the later part of the
space found between the comma and the
gone in the statement, “going, going,
going, gone.” In other words, he was delivered at the very last micro
moment. When he had gone as far as he
could go without being totally gone, in that moment God sent the great fish to
his rescue. This was the moment of his
deliverance from the sea and the beginning of his deliverance from himself.
The Method of Deliverance. It was during his three days and nights in
the belly of the great fish that Jonah prayed to the Lord. According to Jesus, the belly of the whale is
a symbol of burial. (See Mt. 12:40.) Jonah called it the belly of Sheol or the womb of
hell. It was in the place which is
symbolic of burial that Jonah “remembered the Lord” (7), and “called out…to the Lord,” and “cried for help.”
NOTE: The terminology used by Jonah
demands attention. In 1:17, the Hebrew
noun for fish, dag, is masculine, but in 1:1, it is feminine (dagah). In 2:3, the term “distress” is a word often used to communicate the idea of the “travail” of childbirth, and the word
“depth” is the Hebrew term beten, which
is translated both womb and belly.
The word picture portrayed is that of gestation, travail and
birthing. Jonah is carried about in the
belly of the whale like a baby in its mother’s womb waiting to be birthed,
which brings us to our fourth and final point, The Deposit.
IV. The Deposit – “Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the
dry land” (10).
While still in the belly of hell,
Jonah not only prayed but praised God for sparing his life, “…Thou hast brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God” (6). In addition to this
he acknowledged that “deliverance is from the Lord” (9). The “Then” of verse
10 seems connected to the “Then” of verse one—“Then Jonah prayed…Then the Lord
commanded.”
It’s amazing that everything from
winds and fish instantly obey His commands, everything that is but the
creatures He died to save.
The man birthed on the beach is not
the same man that we first met in Chapter One.
The man deposited on the beach is ready to do God’s will even though he
still disagrees with God’s plan. Now,
instead of being a rebellious prophet, he is a reluctant prophet.
In Chapter Three, the word of the
Lord will come to Jonah a second time.
This time, instead of going to Tarshish, Jonah will arise and go to
Nineveh and cry against it.
CONCLUSION
Obedience doesn’t require us to
agree with God’s will. Obedience means
that we comply with His will; we do it whether we find it acceptable or not. Jonah never comes into agree with God’s
desire to save the people of Nineveh, but he does comply with God’s will for
him to go to Nineveh.
Rebellion against God will end in
descent and distress. Reluctance will
rob us of joy; the joy of doing God’s will with God’s motive. Jesus’ “if possible” and “nevertheless”
implies reluctance, but it also declares whole hearted compliance. Jesus endured the shame of the cross for the
joy that set before Him. Joy is the
product of doing God’s will without regret.