Sometimes what you think might do you in you, will be the one thing that saves you.
Sometimes the worst possible thing that could happen to you – is exactly what you need.
Sometimes the thing you fear, is the thing that will turn your life around.
We see this with the prophet Jonah. He is thrown off the boat, literally to his death – but what should have killed him, through the hand of the Lord God, saves him instead.
Remember, we saw that Jonah is going to Tarshish instead of Nineveh, the opposite way that God has told him to go, not because he is a big dummy, but because he is a patriot at heart. There was the very real possibility of the nation of Assyria destroying the nation of Israel in the future. The city of Nineveh is the capital of Assyria. If, Jonah ignores God and goes to Tarshish, the nation of Assyria may collapse and the threat to Israel would be gone; but if Jonah goes to Nineveh and the Ninevites repent, the nation of Assyria would stand, and eventually destroy Israel and her people.
So if Jonah goes to Nineveh he assures the destruction of Israel, and if he goes to Tarshish, Nineveh parishes and Israel is saved. So Jonah gets out of town. How can he betray his country?
But what Jonah fears the most, is what eventually will save the people of Israel, for the Babylonians will conquer the Assyrians and eventually conquer Israel, exiling its people to Babylon. As it were, the people of Israel were slowly, but surely being assimilated into the surrounding culture. They were losing their identity, specifically by worshiping the gods of other nations. The exile to Babylon brings the Hebrews together as a community and as a religion, and they are saved. So by saving the people of Nineveh, the people of Israel are saved.
It is counterintuitive, but that is how God works. Much of the advice we are given by self help gurus or even business management gurus flies in the face of what is biblical. They tell us: seek power, here’s how to look out for yourself, here’s how to dominate those around you….Now this isn’t anything new, the world has always emphasized dominance, power, climbing to the top, lording over others and self glorification. But God, God is just the opposite; The values of the kingdom of God are the flip side of what we hold as signs of success:
Matt. 23:11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Matt. 18:4 Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Mark 9:35 Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”
1Cor. 1:27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
Events enter our lives and we say, “this can’t be right”; Circumstances come upon us that, anyway you look at it, can’t be good; This wasn’t the direction I thought I was heading…But God doesn’t necessarily work things out according to what makes sense to us.
So the thing that Jonah fears the most, the salvation of Nineveh, is the thing that will accomplish his greatest mission in his life – the salvation of Israel. And in the same way, as Jonah is thrown off the boat, and swallowed by a great fish – he should be dead, finished, done for, but, what should have done him in – saves him.
I wonder…how many times has God operated in our lives in this way?
So here in Chapter 2 we have the psalm of Jonah. Prophets of Israel were generally people trained in oral composition so writing a psalm wouldn’t be difficult for Jonah. Now Jonah borrows elements we see in other psalms in Scripture, but not exactly, and here we have a very unique psalm which is definitely the work of Jonah. In the psalm he describes his time in the sea and in the fish and his thanksgiving to God.
I want to caution us as we look at this psalm: I think we as Americans skim through this psalm thinking that it is a prayer where Jonah pretty much just turns his life around and God responds by having the fish spit out, whereby he has a second chance. But Jonah doesn’t do that in this psalm. He doesn’t repent. He doesn’t say he is sorry for what he did. He doesn’t change his heart about hating the people of Nineveh, he doesn’t even have respect for the pagan sailors who threw him overboard. In fact he doesn’t promise to go to Nineveh.
See, Jonah is not bribing God and God is not going to bribed. God is not waiting for the magic word, and God is not waiting for Jonah to straighten up himself. I think we’ll see as we go into chapters three and four that Jonah probably might have never straightened up on his own. If God had waited for Jonah to get his life together, He would still be waiting to this day. God is going to make His will be done and while His will is being accomplished, Jonah is going to grow spiritually – whether he likes it, or not.
So, in verse 1 Jonah who has been thrown into the sea and swallowed by a great fish prays to the Lord God – you can bet he is praying hard. And so he prays this psalm from inside the fish.
Let me say a few words about the fish. I think when we read the book of Jonah we quickly go to the image in our minds from the movie Pinocchio where the characters are sitting in a boat in the belly of a whale. And so we think of Jonah sloshing around like Pinocchio. But the Hebrew doesn’t say whale it says “great fish” indicating that is wasn’t a whale, but a large fish. In the Mediterranean Sea inside the stomach of a large shark a whole water buffalo body was found – and in another, a whole human body. So, a human could fit inside a fish whole. Now, the man and the water buffalo were not found alive, but that is the point of the incident – God can make things happen, that shouldn’t, God can turn around circumstances in your life, that shouldn’t be turned around.
You may remember a couple of weeks ago I said that isn’t it funny how we have such a difficult time with a person surviving in a fish for three days – but we have no problem with an even greater miracle, Jesus Christ being raised from the dead – why is that? By definition a miracle is something that goes against the laws of nature.
We need to note that Jonah’s prayer does not determine the rescue, and it certainly isn’t Jonah’s heart that determines the rescue. God has sent the fish as an act of mercy and grace. God hears Jonah’s prayer, but God alone determines the outcome.
In verses 3-5 we see Jonah recalling his plunge into the stormy sea: “ 3 You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. “ He’s going down. In verse 5 he speak of seaweed wrapped around his head – which literally means that he cannot even struggle to stay afloat – “I have been banished from your sight”
As a kid I lived near a series of seven open gravel pits connected by a creek. Many of these pits had filled with water and were now abandoned. A friend and I thought it would be a great summer adventure to ride a raft down the creek through these old pits, we were warned that it was dangerous and to forget about it. Well, we went anyway. Everything started off great, it was a wonderful easy float down the creek, there were no rapids, there was no fast water – what was the big deal? Well the big deal came when we came to the gravel pits. The creek spit us into the first pit and we coasted to a stop almost dead center – and we were stuck, floating on top of a thick mound of water plants. We couldn’t row, through the stuff and we couldn’t get out and swim, the thick plants would just tangle up around us, like they tangle around Jonah.
We spent the next hour pulling ourselves ashore, by pulling on the weeds like a rope, that was what we were warned about. Because of the high cliffs around the pits we couldn’t abandon our trip, so we had six more pits to go through. What a long day!
Jonah in verses 3-5 is a man who is acknowledging not only that he is no longer in control, but that he is as good as dead. Now realizing that you are not in control is not the same as repentance. It is just realizing that you are not in control. But this kind of imitation repentance is common today, we see it in the media for example, when a politician has been caught in a scandal: “There was a misunderstanding, things were taken out of context, people were hurt….” There is an acknowledgement, but never a repentance. Jonah acknowledges the tough spot he is in, but he does not repent.
Still God sends the fish.
In verse 6, when he says that he sank to the roots of the mountain, it is a Hebrew way of saying, “I am in the place of the dead”. When Jonah speaks about being brought up from the pit he means that he is brought back from death.
At this point in Jonah’s recollection, he is now in the fish, about verse 6, he is sinking in the water before that.
Now in verse 7, Jonah says that he remembered the Lord and his prayer rose to him, and Jonah is now starting to sound like he is getting it, starting to understand, but in verse 8 he takes a swipe at the pagan sailors and the people of Nineveh saying, “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.” He still is imagining that because he is a Hebrew God will save him – But God saved the sailors, as we saw last week, who were not Hebrews, and God will save the people of Nineveh.
We like to imagine that Jonah has figured it out, but his hate still blinds him to the mercy of God, even when he is in the middle of the mercy of God.
And in verse 8, Jonah even promises to make good on a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God….but he says nothing about being obedient to him. He is not vowing to complete what he has been told to do, he is vowing to complete a visit to the temple; 9 “But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from the LORD.”
Well, God listens, but will have none of this – and Jonah is spit out on the land. Note that he still has at least 500 miles to walk as he is beached in the Mediterranean sea. We imagine that he is spit out right in front of Nineveh, but he is not, Jonah is back to square one.
Earlier when I spoke about Jonah being in the fish and how we tend to think of Pinocchio, here in the Hebrew, the image given is of Jonah being in a womb, in a very tightly enclosed area, held tight, and in a sense, being born again with a second chance when he is vomited on the beach.
We need to know that Jonah is exhausted, traumatized, smelly, and bleached white. His experience took a toll on him.
God will allow difficult events and circumstances to come our way. We will be scarred, we will have great pain, we may face things that are impossible. But, yet, God is a God of the miraculous. He will use even the worst events to bring us to a better place.
The hope we see in Jonah is that he didn’t do what he knew he should do….and God still saved him. You do not have to have it all together. You do not have to get things together yourself, and then come to God. You do not have to clean yourself up, and then come to God.
You just come to God.
I think, as Americans, we tend to think that we have to have it all together before we come to God – but God – He acts in ways we do not expect. So like Jonah, we ay be facing something that, for all intents and purposes, looks like we are done for….and though it is hard for me to say this, it might be exactly what God is using to bring you through – A time that will be difficult, tough, but through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is willing and able, you will be brought through.
