Jonah 2: In the Belly of the "Whale"

Surprised by Grace
Allen Snapp
Grace Community Church
August 11, 2013

In the Belly of a Whale

Intro:

If you remember from last week, Jonah is a book of surprises and those surprises and fantastic, almost unbelievable details are meant to get our attention to see some fantastic, almost unbelievable truths about God and His missional heart. Last week we looked at four surprises that confront us in the first chapter alone:

• God gives a surprising call to go to Nineveh and deliver a message of coming judgment. Many times in the OT did God speak an oracle of judgment against a pagan nation through one of His prophets, but never does He send them to deliver it in person. God’s message to Jonah to go is a surprising message.

• Jonah’s response of running from the Lord is shocking – no other prophet or man of God tries to flee from God!

• There is a surprising role reversal as pagan sailors become God-fearing men and the man of God is indifferent and in rebellious disobedience to God.

• Finally there is a surprising mercy as we discover that God sent a raging storm, not out of anger against His disobedient servant but out of a relentless love. As the sailors throw Jonah into the waters, verse 17 tells us that God had prepared a great (gadol) fish to swallow Jonah. The storm wasn’t meant to destroy Jonah but to intervene in Jonah’s self-destructive course.

This morning let’s pick up in chapter 1:17 and I want to continue the theme of surprise that is woven throughout the book of Jonah with just two points: a surprising prayer, and a surprising detour. Read Jonah 1:17-3:3a

I. A surprising prayer

From a literary point of view, chapter 2 is actually the most surprising chapter in the book and some scholars think that it was added in later or somehow shifted in the story from where it originally was because it just doesn’t seem to fit the flow of the book. It’s a prayer of thanksgiving and yet Jonah is still in the belly of the whale – he doesn’t get delivered until after he prays. It’s not what we would have expected, and yet there’s a reason for this “surprising prayer” being exactly where it is in the story, so let’s take a closer look at it.
To answer the question, why is Jonah praying a prayer of thanksgiving before he is delivered, we need to realize that the short prayer recorded here captures in a few words what was no doubt a lengthy and progressive work of God in Jonah’s heart.

1. Before thanksgiving there was despair

After Jonah was thrown into the roaring seas, he was sure he was going to die for his disobedience and he honestly describes his despair in this prayer. An interesting feature of this prayer is that it is almost entirely a composite of several Psalms and other OT passages. In this prayer Jonah recites from

• Psalm 3, 31, 42, 50, 69, 88, 118, and Psalm 120, as well as Lam 3, 1 Kings 8, 2 Kings 17, 2 Chron. 30, Jer. 2, and Hos. 14.

But this isn’t some half-hearted recital of some scripture verses Jonah learned in Sunday school. Jonah has so filled his mind and heart with God’s word that here in the depths of despair what pours out of his soul are biblical passages of despair and promises of deliverance that have become very real and very personal to Jonah.

In fact, David often wrote about the waters closing over him, deep waters encompassing him and the flood waters sweeping him away as a vivid picture of the kind of despair that can overwhelm a soul – but to our knowledge his life was never actually threatened by waves and floods, Jonah’s was! The flood really did surround him, the waves really did crash over him, seaweed wrapped around his head as he sank deeply into the turbulent waters to the dark and murky depths. David’s psalms take on a whole new meaning as Jonah finds the waves and billows literally crashing down on him.

There is no doubt in Jonah’s mind at that point that he was going to die – God’s rage followed him and was going to drown him in the sea. And as he sinks beneath the waves, his soul sinks in the despair of hopelessness. But to his surprise, before he could drown, he is swallowed whole by a great fish.

Now remember, this prayer came at the end of three days and three nights in the belly of the whale – it didn’t come to him right away. Jonah’s first thought as he slides down the throat of the fish wasn’t “praise God, I’m saved!” I used to live on a sailboat on Long Island and one summer we sailed around Montauk Point, with a large shark swimming by our side for quite a long time, and anchored in Lake Montauk. Now Montauk Point is one of the fishing capitals of the world and there are tons of sharks there, in fact, it was off Montauk Point that Frank Mundus caught a 4500 lb great white shark by harpoon. Lake Montauk is really just an embayment off the point, and is directly connected to the Atlantic ocean. Every day I would jump into the water and swim, and even though I doubt that sharks enter the lake often, if ever, as I swam through this yellowish water, not being able to see more than two or three feet ahead of me, my imagination would work overtime and I’d picture seeing a shark’s head with open mouth suddenly appearing in front of me in the murky water. I never did come face to face with a shark, but if I had, whether the shark swallowed me whole or piece by piece, I’d be pretty convinced that I was going to die. And so was Jonah. At first he probably thought that God wasn’t content to let him drown quickly but instead had a death far more terrifying and drawn out in mind for him. In that dark, miserable, terrifying place, Jonah felt he was in the belly of Sheol (hell) and not only would he die, but not even his body would ever be discovered. He ceased to exist to the world, as far as he was concerned. And it was there in that dark, terrifying place that Jonah hit bottom. And that’s when verse one happened:
I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol (hell) I cried, and you heard my voice.

And this explains why Jonah prays a prayer of thanksgiving before he is delivered from the belly of the whale.

1. Thankfulness rises in Jonah in that dark and miserable place because it’s in that place that hope begins to rise in Jonah

At some point over that period of three days and nights, a light bulb finally went off for Jonah and he realized: this isn’t God’s way of killing me; this is God’s way of saving me! Jonah lifts a prayer of thanksgiving for his deliverance because he knew that God had saved him by the great fish, and that meant that God would save him from the great fish.
So there is faith and hope in this prayer, as captured in the first and last words of this prayer: I called out to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me…Salvation belongs to the Lord!

An example to us when we are in a dark place of despair

Jonah’s story gives us an example to learn from when we are in a dark place of despair. Maybe, like Jonah, we’re there because of our own willful disobedience to God. Maybe we’re there because of foolish decisions that we made. Maybe it’s the sin of others that has delivered us there. And maybe just the course of life has brought us there. Whatever the case may be, when we find ourselves in a dark and miserable place, we can trust that God is sovereignly in control of all our circumstances.

God caused the storm. God caused the sailors to cast Jonah overboard. They didn’t know it – they prayed that God wouldn’t hold it against them, but in verse 3 Jonah acknowledges the higher truth that ultimately it wasn’t the sailors hands that cast Jonah overboard: God cast Jonah into the deep. God prepared this great fish and sent it at just the right time and place to swallow Jonah whole. All of this wasn’t God’s relentless anger against Jonah, it was His relentless love for Jonah – God was intervening in Jonah’s self-destructive flight.

There is no circumstance that you will face that is out of God’s control. That doesn’t mean that no matter what we do, we are in God’s will. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences for disobeying God - Jonah was really out of God’s will, and there were serious consequences – there can be serious consequences for disobeying God in our lives too.

But God, in His mercy, will often cause the paths we choose to lead us to a place where we don’t want to be but has been hand-crafted for our good. You might be in that place right now. At first all you see is how bad it is, how dark and cold and miserable and lonely it is.
But God’s purpose for bringing us to this dark place is to bring our hearts to a new place with him. His purpose is to strip our hearts of every false thing we find security in, and every false path we think leads to life, and every false idea we think is truth, a place where we are disgusted with our own efforts to control our lives and our hearts turn to Christ in simple and desperate surrender. A place where we cry out to the Lord in our distress. And that’s a good place and the Lord always hears those prayers – always. I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me…

I. A surprising detour –vs. 10

And after Jonah realizes (in verse 9) that salvation belongs to the Lord, God brings his salvation to a climax.

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon dry land.
We will see in chapter 3 that the same surprising message comes to Jonah from the Lord.

God didn’t give Jonah a new destination; he gave him a surprising detour.
I have grown increasingly dependent on my iPhone google maps to get me places. You know how it goes, you put the address of a destination into it and it tells you how to get there. But if you get off the recommended route, it will recalculate a new route to get you to your destination. Sometimes I feel like I detect a little annoyance in Siri’s voice when I get off the route she mapped out for me, but that could just be my imagination.

Jonah fled the will of God and by doing so, took himself off of God’s path for his life and put himself on a path of his own choosing, but God didn’t allow Jonah to run headlong to his own destruction, instead He recalculated a new route to get Jonah where He intended him to be all along. But I love the description of how Jonah arrived at the end of the detour: he was vomited out of the belly of the fish. Ever see a cat wretching up a fur ball? How would you like to be that fur ball, moving up through it’s throat a little at a time until finally you are projectiled out with stomach juices and slime all over you. How humiliating for Jonah as the fish is wretching him up with fish juice all over him. Fish don’t smell great from the outside – pretty sure it doesn’t get any better on the inside.

God has a path for our lives – it’s called obedience – and it leads to life. Because of sin, we are born with an inward guidance system that rejects God’s path and the only paths left are the paths of death. That’s why Proverbs 14:12 says:

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. Prov. 14:12

Thankfully when a person comes to faith in Jesus Christ, God enters a new destination for that soul: the kingdom of God. And for the child of God, even when we choose to leave God’s path and chart out our own path, God doesn’t abandon us to our own path, He recalculates a new route and we end up on what is often a messy and miserable detour, but God uses it to do the needed work in our hearts. It’s messy, but it’s redemptive.
If your life has gotten real messy lately, it’s possible that you’re on the wrong path. If the scenery around you seems dark and cold and lonely and your heart is tempted to despair, it could be that you have left the Lord’s path and chosen your own path in some way. You are reaping what you have sown, you are arriving at the destination that you have chosen. Turn to the Lord. Ask the Lord to forgive you and return you to His path for your life. Getting back to God’s path for your life may be messy and humiliating, but its good. It’s where you’re meant to be and the Lord will recalculate a route that leads you to joy and fruitfulness for His kingdom again.

If you are not a Christian, or you’re not sure if you are, very simply to be a Christian means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. As disciples of Jesus we are following his path for our lives, trusting in his blood shed on the cross to cleanse us of our sin and trusting that as he was resurrected, so one day we will be resurrected to new life too. Jesus said that “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except by me.” There is no other path that leads to eternal life. If you have never done so before, I want to ask you to consider giving your life to Jesus this morning and putting your trust completely in him to save you.

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