A Thankful Man and the Fish-Saving God

Jonah 2:1-10

Main Idea: Jonah’s desperate recognition of his need for help from the Lord in the face of death brings about his deliverance, which leads him to declare salvation to be from the Lord and to commit to a thanksgiving sacrifice.

1. I. Thankfulness and Value Judgments
2. II. Thankfulness and the Structure of Jonah’s Prayer
3. III. Thankfulness Helps Us Realize Our Depravity (2:1-7).
4. IV. Thankfulness Helps Us Make Commitments (2:8).
5. V. Thankfulness Helps Us Live Sacrificial Lives (2:9a).
6. VI. Thankfulness Helps Us Proclaim the Message of Salvation (2:9b).

Thankfulness and Value Judgments

There is a value judgment made in every decision—behind everything simple or great. The controversies that we have in the courtrooms and society over some of the most visceral issues that seem like they are only about actions and choices—from the legalization of marijuana, to striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, to the opening or closing of borders to more immigrants—are really about value judgments.

We make value judgments when we purchase a cell phone regarding the sizes of its memory and data packages. We make value judgments in the type of education we provide for our children—whether public or private, the amount we are willing to spend for that sort of education, and how far we are willing to drive in order to educate our children. How we spend the bulk of our free time shows what is most valuable to us. We make value judgments at every turn.

We even make value judgments in the way we treat our aging parents. Just how valuable are Mom and Dad to us? Unfortunately, for some people Mom and Dad are not valuable enough to make sacrifices to our personal schedules and lifestyles, but they are valuable enough to place in a home at the cost of mortgaging that parent’s home.

Believers show how we value our great salvation by the choices we make during the week when we have opportunity to speak of our deliverance. We value salvation highly when we speak of Christ and His gospel with zeal, boldness, and courage.

We also see value judgments in the way we speak about our salvation. In particular, as Jonah 2 portrays, our thankfulness before the Lord measures how we value our salvation.

Thankfulness and the Structure of Jonah’s Prayer

The episode opens with Jonah inside the belly of the fish. He is praying a prayer of thanksgiving for being saved and delivered out of the water. Jonah is offering thanks for his salvation from destruction.

Before examining the prayer, one should consider the order and time of what happened. In the beginning of the chapter it says Jonah “prayed to the Lord his God from inside the fish.”^[7]Then, immediately Jonah begins to recount having prayed to the Lord in the past tense.^[8]Further in the prayer, however, he talks about the content of his prayer as something that has taken place in the past. So, what really is happening in this prayer? Let’s review.

Jonah decided that obeying the Lord was not good enough for him, so he took his chances with God and the storm. Yet he told the pagan sailors that God is “Yahweh, the God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land.” He knows God can reach him on the sea. Rather than repenting for his rebellion, he says, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea” (1:12). Jonah, it seems, was prepared to die.

This prayer, however, reveals that when the sailors throw Jonah into the water, the prophet realizes he really does not want to die. It is convenient for him to be thrown over. When he hits the water, however, he recognizes he is in serious trouble. Jonah is in the middle of the Mediterranean, and he is at the express mercy of God.

In the depths, when he prays to the Lord according to the covenant promises, God has mercy on him and rescues him by means of the fish (cf. 1 Kgs 8:30-31,38,42 and Deut 30:4). In this prayer Jonah will recount his thankfulness to God for having already answered the prayer he uttered in the depth of the sea.^[9]In this prayer Jonah reveals value judgments made by being thankful for salvation.

Thankfulness Helps Us Realize Our Depravity

Jonah 2:1-7

Jonah’s prayer serves as an example of a prayer of thanksgiving from one who recognizes he was desperately dying in his sins. From the belly of the fish, he says,

I called to the Lord in my distress, and He answered me. I cried out for help in the belly of Sheol; You heard my voice. You threw me into the depths, into the heart of the seas, and the current overcame me. (vv. 2-3)

Jonah is not having a great life, imagining with John Lennon “all the people living life in peace” (“Imagine”) and then adding salvation to it as a perk. On the contrary, before the Lord rescues him from the water, Jonah’s life is in great distress and the prophet understands he is going down deeply into the grave. “I was going to the grave forever, God, and You heard me. I understand my situation was very grave.”

Jonah understands that something is taking place inside himself. The term he uses for fish in 1:17 is a masculine term, but he uses feminine terms associated with fish reproduction when he is inside the fish (Bruckner, Jonah, 69–70). Jonah effectively expresses that when he was in great distress, “You, Lord, took me into the belly of the fish, out of the belly of Sheol, and you did it so I could be birthed again because there was no hope for me.” Old Testament scholar Bryan Estelle notes, “Sheol refers to a place of divine punishment, a curse often wished on the ungodly” (Salvation through Judgment and Mercy, 82).

Jonah understands he is hopeless unless God acts so he can be born anew. The Lord takes him from the belly of the grave when He brings the fish. Rather than allowing Jonah to drown, God scoops him up. “He is as good as dead but may be reborn” (Bruckner, Jonah, 70). The fish is an act of God’s great mercy toward Jonah.

Jonah continues in his prayer to say, “You threw me into the depths, into the heart of the seas, and the current overcame me. All Your breakers and Your billows swept over me” (2:3). He grasps that he is not in this situation because the men hurled him over the side of the ship. The men were agents; the Maker of the sea and the dry land cast him into the deep. God’s sovereign hand picked up the rebel and hurled him, effectively saying, “OK, you wanted to run to the water. Here it is! Now what are you going to do?”

The Lord pursues Jonah with His wrath. The prophet is in distress and in the belly of Sheol because God did this to him. These are the Creator’s waves that are passing over Jonah. God placed His wrath on Jonah and made his situation desperate because Jonah is sinful. Jonah acknowledges he is under the very wrath of God! Often it is difficult for us to visualize our loving, good, and kind Lord as one full of this much fury. Yet this rebellious servant experiences the loving discipline of a Father who does not wish for His children to err or stray (Heb 12:5-11; cf. Prov 3:11-12; see also 1 Pet 4:17-18).

Jonah understands that God is coming after him. Yet Jonah is able to say, “I’ve been banished from Your sight.” He is desperate but understands that he will be able to look back again on God’s temple. How does Jonah come to think something like this?

Temples cannot contain the sovereign God, as Paul proclaimed to the polytheistic Athenians (Acts 17:24). Unless the Lord condescends to allow Himself to be contained—as He did in dwelling in the tabernacle and temple, in the Incarnation of Christ, and in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in believers—the possibility of a temple containing God would be less than the probability of squeezing an elephant into a micro-syringe. There is no temple that can contain the One who is infinite.

Eventually Solomon built God’s temple as the Lord, in love for His people, drew near to them. When Solomon dedicated the temple, he said words like, “God, if Your people stray from You and go off to a foreign land in their sins, if they turn back to Your temple and cry out for You, please hear them from Your temple and rescue them from wherever they are.”^[10]Receiving mercy upon repentance is part of the structure of God’s presence among His people.

Jonah fully understands that he is in very serious distress, but he also knows that he has a faithful, covenant-keeping God. If anyone turns back from his sins to God, He will hear him, even if that person is drowning in the sea. Jonah gives great thanks because he understands he is going down and is under God’s wrath and is driven from God’s sight. But when Jonah repents, he knows God will hear him in His temple. That’s why Jonah prays this great prayer of thanksgiving.

In verses 5-6 Jonah goes back to what was happening in the water: “The waters engulfed me up to the neck; the watery depths overcame me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. I sank to the foundations of the mountains; the earth with its prison bars closed behind me forever!” The fish does not show up as soon as Jonah hits the water. In cartoon versions of this scene a huge fish opens its mouth and Jonah jumps right in with an Olympic diver’s precision. That is not true to what happens here. Instead, Jonah hits the water and the Lord allows him to sink awhile so that he might grasp the seriousness of the consequences of his choices.

When you listen to the stories of how saints came to know Christ as Savior, it seems that many people were near rock bottom in their lives when they cried out to the Lord. Someone once asked me why this is so. It is because before we hit rock bottom, we think we can handle being thrown into the sea. Once we actually hit the rough waters and start drowning—once all of the things that masked how bad life is are gone—then we are at a place where we must cry out to God or perish! God does this to us so that we will stop lying to ourselves about what is going on in our lives.

Jonah is going to a place where the water closes over him to take his life. “The deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains” (ESV). He says he “went down to the land whose bars closed behind me forever” (ESV). He is going down as far as he can go.

The ancient concept of Sheol was that when you went down to the grave you couldn’t escape because bars actually closed over you. In fact, there is a play on words here because “bar” in Hebrew has a double meaning just like it does in English. In both Hebrew and English it can refer to bars that close over you, and it can refer to sandbars at the bottom of the sea. Jonah gives thanks because he understands his death is certain and there is no escape from it.

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!

Thankfulness Helps Us Make Commitments

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.”

Thankfulness Helps Us Live Sacrificial Lives

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.

Thankfulness Helps Us Proclaim the Message of Salvation

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.

Reflect and Discuss

1. Based on your use of your free time, what do you value in life? What value do spiritual disciplines and service within your congregation have to you?
2. Consider again the structure of Jonah’s two prayers within Jonah 2. What is the relationship between the prayer in the depths and the prayer within the fish? How does each contribute to the other?
3. 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). What are some things in life from which you might be drawing an inordinate amount of self-worth, personal value, or even a sense of security?
4. What are some ways in which people can mask totally depraved lives and fool themselves about their own ability to handle life apart from God’s help? What are some dreadful things the Lord uses to awaken people to the truth about the desperation of their situations and their need for Him?
5. “Often it is difficult for us to visualize our loving, good, and kind Lord as one full of this much fury! Yet this rebellious servant experiences the loving discipline of a Father who does not wish for His children to err or stray.” How does this statement compare with your view of your heavenly Father? Share a time when you have looked at a difficulty in life as a sovereign act of loving, Fatherly discipline.
6. Why can Jonah expect to see the Lord in His temple after such great disobedience? How does this reveal the majesty of God and the glory of Christ?
7. How does Jonah compare to Christ in this chapter? What might this comparison reveal about how we should read the storyline of Scripture?
8. How has your own thanksgiving for your salvation led to greater proclamation of the gospel to unbelievers? What might this say about the value you place on being rescued from sin? What might this also reveal about your understanding of your true situation prior to your salvation?
9. There are many people in the world worshiping false gods, even erecting physical objects as idols of worship. What might Jonah 2 be saying about how we should proclaim the gospel to such people? What is the message we must commend, and what are messages we must tell them to reject?
10. Do you think it is right for the gospel message to be so exclusive? In light of the work of Christ, what makes exclusivity—“Salvation is from the Lord”—just and holy? How does Romans explain the justice of God in the salvation of people (Rom 3:21-26)?