Jonah 2
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, 2 saying,
“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
3 For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
4 Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
5 The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
6 at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
7 When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
8 Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
10 And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
Last week we began with the question: have you ever known that the Lord was calling you to do something, but you didn’t do it? And today another question, have you ever told God something you didn’t actually mean because you thought it was what he might want to hear?
Jonah chapter two has to be one of the most psychoanalyzed texts in all of Scripture, and Jonah himself one of the more psychoanalyzed characters. We want to understand him, but we honestly don’t have a whole lot to go on. I think we impose on Jonah a great deal of internal motivations or convictions or impulses that are not necessarily explicitly stated. But, we get some clues. In fact, many of us may be somewhat confused about this story. For one Jonah 2 draws strange comparisons to things as varied as Adam and Eve, King David, and even Jesus. But, that doesn’t mean that we can’t come away with an understanding.
I think some of our confusion comes from the fact that Jonah’s tale has been co-opted by modern Christian culture and relegated to the status of children’s story for some reason. In the children’s story version the Lord calls Jonah to go to Nineveh. He refuses and instead tries to run away from the Lord, but God sends punishment in the form of a giant fish who swallowed Jonah. In the belly of the fish, Jonah realizes the error of his ways and repents. From there he does exactly what the Lord wants, and the city of Nineveh is saved. The end.
But, notice, when you tell the story in that way, it’s not only overly simplistic and not really faithful to the text, but also God is presented as this supreme being who is simply going to punish or, in a sense, imprison people until they do what he wants. But, is that really what’s happening here?
Let’s consider what we know thus far about Jonah.
First, we looked at 2 Kings 14, which is the only other place in the Old Testament where we hear directly of Jonah. So, we know that Jonah is a prophet of the Lord living during the era of the Divided Kingdom. He lives in the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of Jeroboam II. So, here’s what that means:
- At that time the tribes of Israel were split into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom where Jonah is and the southern kingdom of Judah. Both kingdoms struggle to worship and follow God, but the northern kingdom especially has bought into paganism. This began with the very first king, coincidently called Jeroboam I, who set up pagan altars throughout the land because he would not allow the people to go down into Judah to worship at Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.
- We also know from 2 Kings 14, that despite the fact that King Jeroboam didn’t follow the Lord and is called an evil king, Jonah had actually prophesied blessing over him by declaring that Jeroboam would retake territory that had once belonged to Israel. And, he did this and extended the borders of Israel back to what they had been during the time of David.
None of that maybe seems all that remarkable. Jonah was a prophet. We said that prophets come declaring the word of the Lord and normally that means either a word of blessing, warning or curse. What’s interesting though, is that there are several prophets who prophecy concerning Jeroboam II including Amos and Obadiah. But, Jonah is the only one who prophesies favorably. Which I think should cause us to look at him speculatively. Also, thus far in the book of Jonah, we have evidence that Jonah hears the voice of the Lord, but no evidence that Jonah fears the Lord. In the Scriptures, that phrase “the fear of the Lord” is used to describe a state of awe-filled, submission to God. It isn’t simply a state of awe or wonder at the glory of God, there must also be submission. And, Jesus is the perfect example of what the fear of the Lord looks like. A messianic prophecy in Isaiah 11 tells us:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
2 And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
Jonah, however, only claims fear of the Lord, he doesn’t demonstrate it. In Jonah 1:9, he tells the pagan sailors who want to know who he is and why this storm has come upon them at sea:
“I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”
But, there is no submission. Jonah’s seemingly talking out of both sides of his mouth. You can’t say you fear the Lord while running away from the Lord. As a side note, when Jonah says he fears the Lord, he uses the exact same form of the Hebrew word “yare’ ” that Adam uses in the garden when he says in Genesis 3: “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” And, while there is no explicit allusion to the garden here…isn’t the exact same thing happening? Adam and Eve know the Lord, they hear the Lord and yet they have refused to submit to him. Also, the result is the same: their lack of submission to God leads them to try to physically hide from the Lord. Or put it another way, their lack of fear leads to fear. Their lack of awe-filled, submission to God leads only to a terror of God.
So, make no mistake, Jonah is no faithful servant of the Lord. Tim Mackie calls the story of Jonah: “A subversive story of a rebellious prophet who hates God for loving his enemies.”
So, we go from the graphic novel-esq action of chapter one to chapter two and suddenly it is as if we find ourselves in the Psalms. We have a complete shift of genre here. Suddenly, we’re reading Hebrew poetry. And, the question we want to ask is, what is happening here? In other words, now that Jonah finds himself inside a fish, what’s going on in his heart? And, what we find is that there is a lot going on in this prayer that is questionable.
- This appears to be a prayer of Thanksgiving: It even appears on the surface that Jonah is grateful to God. He says:
“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
And
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
And
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
So, Jonah, who only a short time before was basically suicidal, telling the sailors to throw him overboard because he would seemingly rather die than do what God has called him to do, now seems grateful to not be dead? Very strange.
Theologian David Shrock pulls out a number of inconsistencies here:
- Jonah never mentions sin or wrongdoing
- He gives thanksgiving to God but never actually confesses anything.
- Jonah also basically blames God for “driving him away” as if God’s call is to blame for Jonah’s actions and not Jonah’s disobedience. He blames him for “casting him into the deep” even though Jonah told the sailors to do that. God’s not the one to blame here…Jonah is.
Notice that Jonah uses all of this David-type language. He is alluding to the psalms, but hopefully he doesn’t see himself as a David-figure….because he is certainly no man after God’s own heart.
Also notice that God has intervened here to spare Jonah’s life. In this sense the fish is not so much punishment as much as it is salvation. God is giving Jonah chance after chance. The question is: has Jonah actually repented or has Jonah just relented?
There are one of two ways that you can look at what happens after Jonah prays this prayer: 1. Jonah says the magic words of repentance and God unlocks the prison of the fish to let Jonah out. or 2. As Tim Mackie puts it, Jonah’s words are such distasteful baloney that it causes the fish to comedically vomit Jonah up on the shore. Like, get this guy out of me. And, the rest of the book of Jonah stresses that this is perhaps the more true reading. Because there are no indications that Jonah repented, only that he relented. In chapter three he will preach a half-hearted message and all of Nineveh will listen and repent. Chapter four then is all about Jonah’s anger at what God has done, that he has saved these people. So, if you read chapter two as Jonah having some massive change of heart, the evidence is simply not there.
So, two takeaways for us today.
- God wants your heart, but God doesn’t need your heart. Jonah is largely a story of God’s sovereignty in the face of a man who is trying to assert his own sovereignty. But, in the equation of God and Jonah, only one of them is actually sovereign. And, notice this, Jonah’s hardships primarily come not from the fact that God has punished him so much as they come from Jonah’s own poor decisions. Just like Adam and Eve, when you jettison a true fear of the Lord, like honest awe-filled submission, then you are choosing the way of death over the way of life. That’s why Proverbs calls the fear of the Lord the beginning of wisdom. The path of the wise is submission to God. The path of the fool is submission to the flesh or to sin.
- You aren’t fooling God. While Jonah says with his mouth that he fears the Lord, that is in complete contrast to the fact that he is behaving in a manner that says that he doesn’t understand God at all. To think that you could physically run away from God or hide things from God is to say that you don’t actually know who he is or you are just completely deluded. The Scriptures are clear, whatever you think you are hiding from other people, you are not hiding from him. 1 Samuel 16: man only sees the outside appearance, but the Lord sees the heart. While we might speculate about Jonah’s motivations, God knows exactly what is going on in his heart. And, he knows exactly what is going on in your heart as well. You aren’t fooling him. You can fool another person into believing that you love them, but you cannot fool God into believing you love him. It doesn’t matter what you say or pray. He’s not looking at your words or your actions. Those are all external. He is looking at your heart.
Next week Jonah will begrudgingly make his way to Nineveh where he will preach an 8 word message, “yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown,” and the people will amazingly repent…and he is furious.
