A Thankful Man and the Fish-Saving God

Before the Lord came to deliver us, our deaths were certain. We were in distress and drowning without hope. Sometimes we start to think that although we were drowning badly, we could have put up enough effort to get out of that drowning situation. Jonah makes very clear that this is not so! We were drowning with certainty and were going down to death forever. There is no way we were going to get out because God was hurling all this on us. Death was going to close over us and take away our lives forever. That is the picture of our lives. There was no swimming out of that position. The only thing Jonah could rest on was to say, “God, I was certain that I was going to die.”

“But You raised my life from the Pit, Lord my God! As my life was fading away, I remembered Yahweh. My prayer came to You, to Your holy temple” (2:6-7). Here is the temple, again at the center. Before Jonah recounts that he knew he would go to the temple, he prays this prayer. As he is at the bottom and near death, the Lord hears his prayer and sends the fish to deliver him.

There is so much of God’s sovereignty and mercy mixed in this prayer. It is clear in Jonah 1:17 that God appoints a fish before Jonah hits the water. God in His sovereignty decrees that some things will be accomplished in concert with prayer. God sends the fish here. God also rules so completely that Jonah prays for what God has already appointed and sent. Jonah is not in charge of his salvation. Instead, the Lord already has acted on his behalf.

“As my life was fading away, I remembered Yahweh. My prayer came to You, to Your holy temple.” It may have been the last breath he took or just something in his mind, yet somehow Jonah prayed, “God, I know You can hear me in the temple.” This really can make us thankful for our salvation.

This passage raises the issue of whether or not we can be so depraved, so rebellious, and so far from God that He cannot save us. Is there anyone too sinful for God? How deep does God’s mercy go? God’s mercy will go down to the sandbars in the ocean for a rebellious prophet who deserved to die.

God will say, “I hear that prayer for mercy, and I will get something down there and save you.” No one is beyond that! It is never too late to repent and turn to the Lord. You have opportunity wherever you are. Do not say to yourself, “You don’t understand what I have done in my life!” You could have fled from God, paid the fare to hop on a ship going opposite the direction that He has sent you, gone to sleep while God was hurling a storm, been apathetic about people perishing, have said, “Just throw me overboard,” and taken your chances between death and God. If you have done something like that, you are right in line with Jonah.

God will hear you even if you have done far worse. All of us have sinned. We’ve come far short of God’s glory, the standard He sets for His righteousness. And God looks down at all of us and says that there is not one of us who is righteous in His sight. All of us deserve eternal death. God says that if you believe on His Son who died on the cross for your sins and was raised again, He will hear because of Christ’s work for us. The Lord will rescue you forever!

Jonah 2:8

Jonah’s thankfulness provokes him to make some commitments before the Lord. Jonah cannot make these commitments until he understands how bad he is. If he had stayed on the boat, he would not have thought about making these vows. But after he sinks down to the bottom and realizes his life is almost taken away, Jonah understands his situation is serious. He responds with some commitments to God.

First, Jonah says that idols do not save. Two important statements serve as bookends. Jonah says, “Those who cling to worthless idols forsake faithful love” (v. 8). Later he says, “Salvation is from the Lord!” (v. 9). To whom would Jonah make these statements?

Jonah has been on a ship with mariners who pray to false gods, so he might have been speaking to them. But they would not have heard him from the belly of the fish. Instead, Jonah probably makes these statements for those who later would read or hear this proclamation. It seems to be a statement to God’s people, the Israelites.

From the exodus out of Egypt through the eighth century BC, Israel’s most prevalent sin was idolatry. Jonah is in effect saying to Israel, “Let me make something very clear to everyone listening. When I was in the seas, there was nothing that wood, stone, gold, or silver could have done. All of the things that we carve out of trees or heat up in pots on a great fire, and then bow down to worship—all of the false gods with whom we commit whoredom—they did not have any significance for me when I neared the end of my life at the bottom of the seas. The only thing that mattered in my ordeal was the Lord, who is known for being merciful.”

When life is stripped of every prop and façade that project our sense of happiness and of every shade that dims our ability to recognize our need to obey the Lord, we then see that the Lord is the most important thing in life. Everything else people seek after—those vain idols you are running after—is worthless.

The New Testament identifies greed and covetousness as idolatry, and there are other types of idols (Col 3:5). Trying to get the perfect body, raising the top academic child, getting rid of stress by substance abuse, or whatever else you give all your efforts—regardless of the quality of life it gives you and regardless of whether God is pleased with you—are all idols and they will not rescue your life when push comes down to shove. As Tim Keller says, “An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure’” (Counterfeit Gods, xviii). Jonah says that if you erect idols as your saviors, you forsake any hope of faithful love.

In some of the other translations the term for “faithful love” reads “mercy” or “steadfast love.” The Hebrew word is chesed. This is God’s loyal covenant love and His faithful mercy by which He rescues people. His mercy comes according to the covenant promise He gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And His mercy comes in spite of the actions of His people. Jonah says that if you go after idols when you are in need of mercy, you have forsaken chesed. There is no way to get mercy to the depths of your desperate life if you call on idols. There is no mercy in idols. There is great mercy in God because “salvation is from the Lord.”

Jonah 2:9a

Jonah commits himself to sacrifice at the temple as an expression of thanksgiving: “But as for me, I will sacrifice to You with a voice of thanksgiving. I will fulfill what I have vowed.” He would have to get the perfect animal—good and without blemish—from a flock, and he would have to sacrifice it to God so as to lose something that is of great value to him. He expresses his thanksgiving to God for saving his life by giving from his bounty.

We do not offer animal sacrifices because there is no temple to which we run; Christ has fulfilled the law of sacrifice (Matt 5:17; Rom 10:4; Heb 10:14,19). We are living sacrifices (Rom 12:1-2). In response to our salvation we produce good works that often cause us to make sacrifices of our time, energy, money, potential promotions, and worldly approval. When we understand how desperate we were before the Lord rescued us from perishing, making a sacrifice to express thanksgiving is not a major deal. (I’m simply glad to be able to move. I could have been at the depths of the grave with the bars of eternal death closed over me!)

So if I am as thankful as Jonah, I am going to run to the temple, find something to sacrifice, and thank the Lord for His mercy in the presence of all. I will proclaim how great He is! I will tell everybody that I am thankful to the Lord God for saving me because surely I was going to die without hope. I will bring my sacrifice because I am glad that I am alive to be able to offer something to the Lord. Jonah makes a sacrifice that grows out of his understanding of the depth of his drowning and the great mercy that God shows to him in his rebellion.

Jonah 2:9b

Growing out of the thankfulness within his heart, Jonah makes a final exclamation: “Salvation is from the Lord!” With that one statement Jonah proclaims the gospel, the very thing that he did not want to do when God called him to go to Nineveh (1:1). Yet there is salvation in no one else.

When you have opportunity to proclaim salvation, you understand how hopeless was your plight and that weeds were pulling you down to a second death; that the bars were going to close over you and destroy you; that you were rightly under God’s wrath; and that only He rescued you apart from your merit. With this understanding, when there is an opportunity to talk about what saves, unashamedly you’ll say, “Salvation is from the Lord!”

Only after Jonah’s proclamation of salvation does it say, “Then the Lord commanded the fish” (v. 10). God speaks to the fish and the fish obeys; the fish does not rebel like Jonah. This is part of the story’s irony. God speaks to the fish and the fish does what the Lord says, vomiting Jonah onto dry land. People have problems with rebellion. Yet the fish obeys immediately and completely. The Lord says, “Go scoop Jonah up,” and the fish gets Jonah. He says, “Spit Jonah out,” and the fish spits out the prophet. It’s that simple.

Jesus says, all of you who want a sign proving My divine authority—I only have one. It is the sign of Jonah: “For as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights” (Matt 12:40). What happened during the three days and three nights? Jonah is under God’s wrath. He deserves it because he is a rebel. Christ was under God’s great wrath on the cross because we are rebels.

Jonah goes down into the depths of the belly of Sheol, going down into the grave forever under the wrath of God. The Lord put him in there. God hurls the sea on him. In the same way God put His very own Son on the cross, and God slayed Him. Isaiah 53:10 says, “Yet the Lord was pleased to crush Him severely.” Christ certainly experienced the full wrath of God—the wrath that should be yours and mine, and the wrath that will belong to anyone who does not put his trust in Christ alone for salvation.

Jonah is going all the way down to the bottom of the sea, and as he goes down he cries out to the Lord from the grave. Three days later, with thanksgiving, Jonah is brought up out of the water. Christ goes to the grave, or as the old catechism says, “He descended into hell.” He did not really physically descend into hell, but the catechisms are trying to say that He took all the wrath of God for us. After three days in the grave, with voices of thanksgiving, God raised Christ from the dead because the grave could not hold Him down. On this basis, the Lord is able to offer mercy to all of us. God’s mercy is so great that He would hurl Christ into the depths of Sheol as One forsaken so that we who are rightly forsaken in our rebellion can be saved.

The second chance that God offers is not just to Jonah. God seeks to save more people than one drowning man to whom He sent a fish. God seeks to save people drowning in sin by sending His Son, Jesus. Anyone who trusts in Jesus will receive mercy like Jonah. We will be birthed again out of distress, born again and given a new life. This is what God provides in Christ, and this is what should make us so thankful for salvation.