General George S. Patton once said:
I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.
After what we saw in Jonah chapter 1 last week, I think Jonah certainly would have been encouraged by those words. After all, it’s hard to imagine that Jonah could fall any lower.
When God called him to go and preach in Nineveh, he instead chose to follow his own way and he tried to run as far as he could in the other direction. But when he boarded a ship headed to Tarshish, his troubles got even worse and he was eventually thrown into the raging sea. But as we saw last week, God still wasn’t done with Jonah so he provided for Jonah’s salvation from drowning. And He did that in a most unusual way – by sending a great fish to swallow Jonah.
TENSION
Perhaps there are some of you here this morning who feel like you or drowning or even like you have hit rock bottom. And if that is not true in your life right now, I can assure you that there will be a time, or probably multiple times in your life, where that is going to be the case.
And when you hit those bottoms, you are going to rightly feel like there is nothing that you can do on your own in order to bounce back and find success. But the good news is that because of His great love for you, God is there for you and He is both willing and able to help you do that. But in order for Him to be able to do that in your life, he does require your cooperation.
TRUTH
Before we look at chapter 2 of Jonah this morning, I want to take a moment to review a couple important ideas from last week.
First of all, I want to remind you of the two things that I hope to accomplish over our four-week study of the book of Jonah:
1) I want us all to develop a greater appreciation for the love of a God who constantly pursues us even when we run away from Him, and
2) I want us all to develop a deeper love for others, especially for those who might seem far from God or who might be so much different from us.
The second thing I want to remind us of is the main theme for the book that we developed last week:
Because of His relentless love,
God does not give up on us
even when we give up on Him
Last week, we saw how that was true for the pagan sailors on the ship that Jonah boarded. Even though those men previously wanted nothing to do with the Lord, God used His sovereign control over His creation and a few words from a reluctant prophet to bring them to the place where they feared God enough to pray to Him and to worship Him with sacrifices and vows.
This morning, in chapter 2, we’re going to see how God pursues Jonah, even though Jonah has decided to reject Him and to choose His own way rather than God’s way. Even though Jonah has largely given up on God, God has certainly not given up on him.
[Read Jonah 2:1-10]
As I pointed out last week, it’s easy to view the book of Jonah as just a fish story. But as important as the fish is to the story, the story is not primarily about the fish. It’s also easy to think this is a story about a reluctant prophet. But even though the book bears his name, this story is only secondarily about Jonah. At its heart, this is a story about the love of God and how He is willing to pursue even those who are far away from Him and those who have given up on Him because He loves them so very much.
As we look at this prayer of Jonah this morning, we need to remember that this is probably only a snapshot of what Jonah prayed. This prayer is in the form of a Psalm and in fact it borrows heavily from a number of Psalms. But I have a hard time believing that as Jonah was thrown overboard and fighting for his life that his prayers were quite this poetic and eloquent. They were probably more along the lines of “Help me!” And even once Jonah is swallowed by the fish, it’s not like he pulled out a flashlight and a pen and paper and listened to some worship music on his iPod while he was in the belly of a fish and decided to write the lyrics to a song. So what we have here is likely what Jonah wrote later in order to summarize all the things that he prayed while he was inside the fish.
Many, if not most, of the commentators and pastors that I read this week refer to this prayer as Jonah’s prayer of repentance. But I’m not totally convinced that Jonah really did repent here, especially given what we’ll learn in the rest of the book. To me the prayer seems a bit self-centered. Look at all the first-person pronouns – “I” and “me” and “my”. And although Jonah does say that he remembered the Lord and he acknowledged that salvation belongs to the Lord, there really isn’t any kind of admission of his own sin. During the Bible roundtable time this morning, we’re also going to discuss the difference in context between some of the Psalms that Jonah references in his prayer here and the Psalms themselves. And some of those differences also lead me to question whether Jonah is really repentant here.
At best, this is an imperfect prayer. But that is one of the reasons I love this chapter so much, because my prayers are imperfect, too. And my guess is that so are yours. But the good news is that those imperfect prayers are going out to a perfect God who loves us so much that He is gracious and compassionate to hear those prayers and to respond by giving us what we need and not necessarily what we want. So here’s the main idea that I want us to take away from this passage today:
When I deserve Him the least and need Him most
God is there for me.
Would you agree with me that after rejecting God in chapter 1, that Jonah really didn’t deserve God’s presence in his life at all? And would you also agree that, as he began to drown, Jonah needed God like he had never needed Him before? And finally would you also agree that God was there for Jonah, even Jonah probably would have preferred that God had rescued him in some other way?
Let’s put ourselves in Jonah’s shoes for a moment. I know if it were me, I would have much preferred that once I was thrown overboard, that God would have rescued me in some other way.
I mean after all the seas did calm down immediately when Jonah was thrown overboard. Couldn’t the sailors just throw him one of those rings they keep on board or even toss him a nice piece of wood that he could have used to just float to shore? Or instead of a fish, how about sending a turtle – like some of the ones I’ve seen in Hawaii that would be quite big enough for Jonah to have been taken to shore on its back. Or even better, how about a beautiful mermaid? C’mon, admit it, when you’re at rock bottom isn’t that how you want God to rescue you?
But instead, God sends a large fish as an instrument of His grace. And that fish swallows Jonah as he is about to drown and saves him. The account here isn’t totally clear, but it appears that in the prayer that is recorded here, Jonah is thanking God from the very uncomfortable safety of the belly of the well. The prayer recounts how God has already intervened to save Jonah from certain death by having that fish swallow him.
If you do any study at all on this chapter of Jonah, you’re going to find a lot of discussion and argument about whether Jonah actually stayed alive for three days and night inside the fish or whether he died and was then resuscitated by God. To me that’s kind of a silly argument that really doesn’t add to what God has for our lives in this passage, so I’m not going to dwell there. Either way, God had to do something miraculous to save Jonah when he could not save himself. That’s what we really need to understand.
But at the same time, if I want to take advantage of God being there for me when I deserve Him the least and need Him the most, then there are some things that I can learn from this prayer about what I need to do in order to cooperate with what God is doing in my life during those times.
APPLICATION
HOW TO LET GOD BE THERE FOR ME
1. Cry out to God – even if I don’t feel like it (v. 2)
No doubt there are a lot of things that we can criticize Jonah for. But here is one thing he definitely got right.
Our natural human tendency when we’re running from God and doing things our own way is to pray to God less, if at all, rather than to do what we need to and pray to Him more.
Back in chapter 1, we saw that the sailors had exhorted Jonah to call out to his God. But there is nothing in the text to indicate that Jonah actually prayed at that time. I think that he was probably too embarrassed and too afraid to pray, knowing that the storm was a direct result of the fact that he had disobeyed God.
In a minute, I’m going to talk more about this, but Jonah understood that he was in the predicament he was because God was angry with his disobedience. And I’m pretty sure that all of us have been in that position at one time or another in our lives. And perhaps one of the reasons that we’re reluctant to cry out to God when we’re in those situations is because we feel like we really deserve to be in that mess so there is no use praying for God to help us.
But here Jonah prays to the very God who caused him to be fighting for his life in the first place. And that is a powerful reminder that when God disciplines us, His ultimate purpose is to restore our fellowship with Him.
In verse 2, we have a beautiful example of Hebrew poetry. As we’ve talked about before, Hebrew poetry is much different than the poetry we’re familiar with that often uses rhyming words. I like to think of Hebrew poetry as rhyming thoughts, often with two parallel statements that express the same thought with different words.
In the first line of this poem, Jonah called out to God and God answered. And then in the second line, he cries to God and God hears his voice.
One of the overall purposes of the book of Jonah that we haven’t talked about yet was to shame the nation of Israel. The idea that the pagan people of Nineveh would repent when God’s own chosen people would not was meant to help the Israelites understand just how far they had strayed from God. So this first part of Jonah’s prayer is also an encouragement to his own people and to us, that no matter how far we are from God, if we will cry out to Him, He is ready to hear and to answer.
Jewish Nobel Prize writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote this:
Whenever I am in trouble I pray. And since I’m always in trouble, I pray a lot.
2. Look for God’s hand (v. 3)
Jonah is also to be commended here. Notice in verse 3 that even though it was the sailors who had tossed him overboard, Jonah recognized that it was really God who had caused him to be cast into the deep and it was God who was sovereign over the wind and the waves that threatened to kill him.
It’s important to remember once again that not all suffering and difficulty in our lives is a result of God’s discipline for something we have done wrong. Sometimes we suffer just because we live in a world that is full of sinners and subject to the chaos that sin wreaks on God’s creation. Sometimes we suffer just so God can show His glory in some way.
But when we know that we have disobeyed God, either by choosing our own way, like Jonah did, or by delaying our obedience like we talked about last week, then we need to consider the possibility that God is using those difficulties to discipline us. And we ought to be thankful when God does that because, as we see in Hebrews 12, God only disciplines those who are His own children. And that discipline, though it might be painful at the time, is actually evidence of His relentless love for us.
So when I get in that position, one of the things I need to pray to God is that He would allow me to discern where He is working in my life so that I make sure I learn the lessons He is trying to leach me.
3. Look to God for my hope (v. 4)
In verse 4 we learn that the thing that sustained Jonah while he struggled for his life in the water was the fact that he still had hope that God would rescue him. It’s hard to know for sure, but I certainly get the sense here that Jonah realized that he might very well die there in the sea, but that he had hope in the fact that if that happened he would one day be in God’s presence again.
When we find ourselves in trouble, our natural tendency is to try to find hope in many other people and things before we finally turn to God. But ultimately no other person, no material possession, no alcohol or drug, is going to give us any hope. Only God can provide that.
4. Let God finish the process (vv. 5-6)
We see here that God did not rescue Jonah until the very last moment. It was not until the seaweed was wrapped around his head and pulling him under that God finally sent the fish. Jonah had to endure the physical struggle and his fear before God rescued him.
In verse 6, we see that Jonah is still going down, just like we saw consistently in chapter 1, until he thought his life was over. But then, just before he dies, God intervenes and brings Jonah up and rescues him.
As I mentioned earlier that doesn’t seem fair to us. Why couldn’t God have saved Jonah earlier or at least done it in a more humane way? But God knew exactly what Jonah needed in that situation. And because God loved Jonah and wanted to bring him to a place of repentance and restoration, God disciplined as He thought best, which is always better than what we think is best.
Sometimes, God has a multi-step plan that is designed to bring us to the place where He wants us to be and to do the work He wants to do in our lives. Sometimes we end up trying to skip entire steps in that plan by removing ourselves from the situation that God wants us to be in or by otherwise short circuiting the process. And while that might be more comfortable in the short run, it becomes more painful in the long run when God has to teach us the same lesson in an even more painful way.
Sometimes, often out of our love and compassion, we facilitate the short circuiting of that process in the lives of others. We are prone to help others avoid the consequences of their own sins, which God is trying to use as a teaching tool, by bailing them out or enabling them.
So far, Jonah has given us some good examples to follow. But these next two principles are just the opposite. They are things that Jonah did in his prayer that we don’t want to do.
5. Don’t wait for problems to pray (v. 7)
It was not until his life was slipping away and he had no other option that Jonah finally remembered God and prayed. He hadn’t prayed when God came to him and told him to go to Nineveh. He hadn’t prayed during the storm while he was on the ship.
We tend to be a lot like Jonah don’t we? Far too often we tend to see prayer as a last resort instead of a first response. When things are going well in our lives, we often fail to remain consistent with our prayer lives and only resort to prayer when there are problems that we want God to help us with.
As I was working on the message this week, God used this passage to revel to me that I’ve been doing that in my own life. For the past few weeks, I haven’t really been facing any huge problems in my life so my prayer life hasn’t been as consistent as it was for a while. So for me, the one things I’m going to take away from this message is that I need to get back to praying more consistently.
6. Don’t compare (v. 8)
We’re going to see this played out more in the last half of the book, but we get a clue here of the reason that Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh in the first place. He is obviously referring to non-Jews here, like the sailors on the ship and the people of Nineveh. And Jonah had concluded that because of their worship of idols, they had forfeited their right to experience God’s love.
In essence what Jonah is saying to God is that he is better and more deserving of God’s love that these Gentiles. But God is about to teach Jonah an important lesson about His love for even those who are far off from Him and who have rejected Him in the past.
We all have a natural tendency to have the same kind of arrogance that Jonah had here. We can always find someone else who is a worse sinner that we are and use that to justify or excuse our own sin. But until we humble ourselves and acknowledge our own sin, we are incapable taking the last step…
7. Accept God’s salvation (v. 9)
Again, we must give Jonah credit here. He recognized that once the sailors had thrown him into the raging sea, there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself. He was 100% dependent on God to save him. And so he proclaimed that “Salvation belongs to the Lord.”
That is true for all of us here this morning as well. And that truth is crucial for every one of us in two ways.
First, it is true when it comes to our relationship to God. The Bible teaches us that we are all like Jonah – sinners who have rejected God and chosen to do things our way. And it really doesn’t matter whether we’ve done that just once in our lives or if that is a consistent lifestyle because even one sin separates us from God and makes us spiritually dead. As Paul writes in Romans “the wages of sin are death” (Romans 6:23). And as we’ve talked about before, a dead person is incapable of bringing himself or herself back to life. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that through His sinless life, His death on the cross and His resurrection, Jesus has made it possible for God to bring us back to life spiritually. So right after Paul wrote that the wages of sin are death, he also wrote “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”. But like with any gift, that gift does not become ours until we actually accept it from God. And the way that we accept that gift is by putting our faith in Jesus and what He has done for us and giving up control of our life to Him. And if you’ve never done that before, we encourage you to do that today.
But since I’m confident that most of you here today have already done that, I want to address the other way that we need to accept God’s salvation. Whenever we find ourselves in a difficult place, either because God is trying to get our attention or just because we live in a world that has been polluted by sin, we have a choice. We can either try to handle that situation on our own, or we can cry out to God and let Him go through that situation with us. And I can tell you from both personal experience and from what I see in the Bible that we’ll be a lot better off if we do that on the front end rather than doing like Jonah and waiting until we’ve exhausted all our other resources.
So if you’re going through some difficulty or trial in your life right now, we invite you to turn that over to God today.
INSPIRATION
When I deserve Him the least and need Him most
God is there for me.
In a group like the one gathered here this morning, there are undoubtedly some of you who really need God’s presence in your life right now. And maybe you feel like you can’t cry out to Him because of something that you’ve done to reject Him, either now or in the past. Or maybe you feel like you can’t accept the salvation He is offering to you, whatever form that might take, because you’re unworthy of that.
The truth is that all of us here this morning are unworthy of God’s salvation. But the good news is that because of what Jesus has done on our behalf, God offers it to us anyway. Not only is He willing to listen to you when you cry out to Him, He delights in those kinds of prayers and He delights in being there for us even when we deserve Him the least and need Him the most.
ACTION
So as we close this morning, we’re going to give you an opportunity to respond to what we’ve learned this morning. I don’t know exactly what God has put on your heart his morning, but I am going to make a couple of suggestions that you might consider with the hope that you will either find one of them appropriate for you or that God will use them to lead you to the decision He wants you to make today.
1. If you have never received salvation from your sins by putting your faith in Jesus, will you do that today? Perhaps you don’t fully understand what that means, and if that’s the case, we’d love to talk to you some more about how you can do that.
2. If you’ve rebelled against God in some way and you’ve been reluctant to cry out to Him, will you do that today? Will you acknowledge your sin and confess that to God and ask Him to give you wisdom as you go through whatever trials that He may have brought into your life to get your attention?
3. If you know someone else who is going through a tough time in his or her life, will you lift that person before God this morning? In those situations, we often pray for God to remove the person from that difficultly – to heal the cancer, or to provide more money, or to fix a relationship. And sometimes that is appropriate. But this morning here is what I want to encourage you to pray for that person. Pray that they will cry out to God. Pray that God will go through that difficulty with them and give them wisdom to discern what He wants them to learn. Pray that God will remove them from that situation only in His time frame.
[Pray]
Discussion questions for the Bible Roundtable
1. Do you think that Jonah really repented in his prayer? Why or why not?
2. Jonah referred to the following Psalms in his prayer: 3:4, 120:1, 118:5, 88:6-7, 42:7, 31:22, 69:1, 31:6, 50:14, 3:8.
• What does Jonah’s use of those Psalms tell us about his grasp of God’s Word?
• What is different about the context of Psalms and the situations they address that is different than Jonah’s situation? Why is the significance of those differences?
3. Why do you think we tend to pray less, if at all, when we know e have disobeyed God? Why do we actually need to pray more in those situations?
4. In this situation, God allowed Jonah to go through much tribulation before He finally rescued him? What are some other Biblical examples where God does the same thing? Why do you think God operates like that?
