Jonah 2

 Jonah 2

1 From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. 2 He said:

“In my distress I called to the Lord,
    and he answered me.
From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,
    and you listened to my cry.
3 You hurled me into the depths,
    into the very heart of the seas,
    and the currents swirled about me;
all your waves and breakers
    swept over me.
4 I said, ‘I have been banished
    from your sight;
yet I will look again
    toward your holy temple.’
5 The engulfing waters threatened me,
    the deep surrounded me;
    seaweed was wrapped around my head.
6 To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
    the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my God,
    brought my life up from the pit.

7 “When my life was ebbing away,
    I remembered you, Lord,
and my prayer rose to you,
    to your holy temple.

8 “Those who cling to worthless idols
    turn away from God’s love for them.
9 But I, with shouts of grateful praise,
    will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
    I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’”

10 And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.

Jonah fled from the presence of Yahveh. And in the fish's belly he cries out to God. 

To flee from God is to deceive oneself. It means that a person considers God as oshibayuschimsa. It's like saying to God, "You usually act correctly but in this instance you have erred. And I know better. And so, I will now run away for some time, and I will return after You have understood that I was right." 

This strategy does not work. 

Compare such an attitude to the words of Christ in Gethsemane, "Not my will but yours be done." 

I see two remarkable things here: Jonah cried out to God at that moment when he was in affliction, i.e., he wound up in what seemed affliction to him. 

For Jonah, it wasn't affliction while he was running from the word of God. Yet really he met his worse affliction precisely by running away. 

It's interesting that Jonah doesn't say, "I cried out to God when I was afraid to obey him." Jonah doesn't say to God, "I believe, help me in my unbelief!" Jonah doesn't say, like Peter, "Lord, though I cannot understand why you tell me this, all the same by your word I will do it." 

No, Jonah didn't say anything. There was no conversation! He simply ran away, like a runner who dashes at the sound of the starting pistol. 

And in all this he did not perceive his flight as an affliction, as spiritual trouble. Instead he perceived his flight as the resolution of a problem. 

In his view, this was the best way for everybody, even for God, which God would understand later. 

But later, Jonah did, finally, cry out to God. Why and when? He cried out when he fell into trouble from which there was no exit. 

And when that moment came, God didn't answer with the words, "Aha, you thought you'd manage everything better without Me, and therefore I will manage everything better without you." 

No. Instead, Jonah says, "I cried out the Lord, and He heard me."

Psalm 103:13-14:

13 As a father has compassion on his children,
    so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
14 for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust.

Isaiah 57:16: 

I will not accuse them forever,
    nor will I always be angry,
for then they would faint away because of me—
    the very people I have created.

From where did Jonah cry out? From the "belly of hell," i.e., from within death itself. Of that Jonah was sure. There was no escape, he was as good as dead. There he was deprived of all possibility to deliver himself. He could pay those sailors enough money so that they would let him board their ship. But the fish had no use for money. 

In that fish Jonah was deprived of every possibility to live, though he was living. He experiences, I would say, the closest thing to death itself without dying. And this speaks to us so powerfully about what Christ meant when He said: 

Matthew 12:40: 

For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

There is He Who, though yet living, experienced something even closer to death than what Jonah experienced. Yes, closer to hell itself. This is Christ on the cross. 

Jonah wound up in the belly of the fish by way of unbelief and disobedience. 

Jesus, God's Son, "wound up" on the cross by way of holiness, love, and supreme obedience. 

God in His condescension met Jonah there in the belly of the fish. Truly, the path of restoration for Jonah began as soon as the fish swallowed him. 

Yet for Christ, going through the agony of scourging and beating, and then the agony of crucifixion itself, this was only the beginning of sorrows; the sorrows compounded beyond our understanding right up to that moment when, like Jonah, Jesus also cried out to God, yet with infinitely different words:  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me?" 

Do you hear the deep paradox? The disobedient, unfaithful prophet cries out to God from the place of his punishment, and he says, "I cried out and the Lord heard me." But the sinless Lamb of God, whose obedience brought him to the cross, cries out that his God has forsaken him. 

Which demonstrates the magnificence of God in His grace, care, and condescension toward us. 

...For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.  

The unbridgeable chasm between what Jonah experienced and what Christ experienced is summed up in that Jonah was saved from death, but Christ saved us BY the death from which His Father refused to save him--at least, refused to save Him until the death itself was realized. Oh yes, the Father did save Christ from death in an incomparable way. God didn't destroy the fish in order to save the pitiful prophet. In fact, the prophet was delivered from the fish not in the most tactful, tasteful way. But to save and justify His Son before the whole universe, the Father destroyed death itself. And this is the true explanation of why Christ's sufferings were incomparably greater than even the suffering of Jonah. Christ was paying what Jonah never had to pay. And that price exceeds all our imagination. 

More about this paradox, for Jonah, death inside that fish would indicate the end of all possibilities. Yet he didn't die in that wretched state; he was delivered by grace. 

But for Christ, the wretched, humiliating death was not forestalled or averted. Christ had to drink from the cup, to the very last dregs. That which only threatened Jonah was actually fully inflicted on Jesus. For that was the only way to create new possibility for us all. New possibility, new life, new hope and anticipation, for me, for you, yes, for poor Jonah! 

'...for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust.'

In conclusion, I will say this: we tend to look at Jonah as a pitiful example of the servants of God. When called, he ran away. Even after he, without any joy or alacrity, carried out what God had told him to do (and with remarkable success!), he pouted and resented God's mercy. And yet--think of this--Jonah was counted worthy to be a foreshadowing of Christ Himself. About how many other prophets, by name, did the Lord say that His own mission and calling was like that of that prophet? I can't remember any other except Jonah. Just imagine the unending joy that belongs particularly to this one reluctant prophet, that our gracious, condescending God made him, Jonah, a foreshadowing of the ultimate redemptive feat, when the Son of God would be in the belly of the earth for three days and then rise in glorious triumph over the greatest enemies of Mankind: sin and death. Such is the magnificent, ineffable, transcendent mercy of our God and Savior. 

Walking Away

Have you ever just "walked away"? Sometimes it's okay. I think of three very strange, even surreal instances in my life where I just walked away.

I was going home from work at the Bible college, back when we were in our old building, and I had to cross the road (a very busy avenue) to get to my bus stop on the other side. I caught the green light in time only to get to the middle of the road before it turned red. So I had to wait there, in that little "island" under the traffic light, for the green again. As I was standing there, funnily enough (you'll see why in a moment), I began whimsically reflecting on how, here in this little safe spot under the traffic light between the lanes of busy traffic running this way and that to the sides of me, it was like I was on an island, my protected little island where none of these hurtling piles of metal could touch me. Yes, it was quite funny, in the odd sense, that I happened to have that thought at just that moment, as it seems someone was intent on proving me wrong. Just as that thought flitted through my consciousness I noticed, in the lane I had just crossed, to my left, a car heading in my direction (of course, as all of them were), but this car didn't seem to know very clearly where the lane markings were. It was dusk, not terribly dark yet, but the cars had their lights on, which always makes it seem darker outside by comparison. Watching the oncoming traffic, in the glare of their headlights, it seemed like night. I fixed on this one car that, "if I didn't know better, I'd say was heading straight for me," as I thought at the moment. But of course that was silly. I wasn't standing in a lane. I was standing right in front of the traffic light and its cement base that came up to about thigh-level. There was nowhere further to go in my "lane" than smack into the base of the traffic light (and smack into me!). So of course my eyes must be playing tricks on me. I kept watching the oncoming car, thinking, "Yeah, a person could almost believe that car was heading straight for me....really, if I didn't know better I'd say he was about to plow right into me...you know, this is actually starting to worry me...waitaminnit, if that guy doesn't correct pronto he's GOING to hit me!" And with perhaps a quarter of a second to spare I leaped like a grasshopper out of the car's path (and into the other lane to my right, which God providentially saw to it had no cars coming along at just that second) and skittered over to the opposite sidewalk. In the process of skittering I heard a huge metallic-cement THUD. When I reached the other sidewalk I looked back and there was the car, smashed into the base of the pillar, right where I'd been standing. The car's interior was full of smoke. I stood, waited, watched. In a moment the driver got out, looking fine if annoyed. He checked the front of his car, then went for his phone. Never so much as blinked an eye in my direction. At which point it occurred to me that the best thing now was to walk away. He's fine, this has nothing to do with me at this point, and I'm fine, too, so...I walked away and got on the bus. Thinking, "Hm, well, well, well..." and "Thank you, God!"

Another time I was in an airport, can't remember which at the moment (ah, all the airports I've loved and left), waiting for the long flight over the Atlantic, returning to Ukraine. In the gate area a really weird disturbance commenced. A man was angry at his (I presume) wife and he was pursuing her around the waiting area, punching her whenever he could. Naturally this got everybody's attention. I noticed they were speaking Russian. So I strategically said, in Russian, "Let's call the police." That worked. The guy glared at me in shock and then ran off into the terminal. As there were no personnel yet at our gate a bunch of us went to the next gate and started telling a young man there what was going on. He prissily spluttered something ridiculous about "Why didn't you come tell us about this before?", to which I said, "It just happened and we're telling you NOW!" At that point the conversation was terminated by a ferocious scream right into the back of my neck. I swung around and it was that guy, with a maniacal rage in his face. Our eyes made an instant, intense contact, his face contorted in terror, he let out a chilling shriek and fell to the floor in convulsions. Yes, yes, I know what some of you are going to say, and perhaps what you'll say I ought to have done. Well, I can't say whether that would have been "the ticket" or not at just that moment. But what I did instead was...walk away. I saw a bunch of other people trying to control this guy, realized there was nothing else for me to do here, and quietly walked away. I did some browsing in the shops. A few minutes later I noticed that supercilious young man from the gate racing through the terminal spluttering, "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod." When I returned to my gate area a man there passed a comment that that guy was suffering mental problems. I replied, "Mental problems or whatever, all I knew was, I don't want THAT on OUR flight over the Atlantic." So, mission accomplished.

The other time I walked away was, in its own way, too, kind of surreal. And it was also in an airport. I was seated at one of those benches not right in the gate area but along the walls of the concourse. This was in Vienna. I had just dropped something, a coin maybe, and was kneeling down to pick it up, probably looking a bit like the absent-minded professor type, when I happened to glance up and instantly made direct eye-contact with a young lady heading my way. That kind of eye contact, you know, that says, "I just saw you seeing me seeing you." It's almost mystical how much info can be transmitted in that fleeting moment. In that contact I registered a gleam of cunningness and triumph, accompanied by a subtle self-satisfied smirk, that seemed to say, "You're my pigeon." The effect was only enhanced by her very cat-like eyes. At which point I inwardly replied, "Got that wrong, girl." Sure enough, she sat down right next to me, on a bench that could only accommodate two, "as if" she were just taking a rest...uncomfortably close to a total stranger when there were plenty of other places to sit. Right. Yeah. Okay, what's the game going to be? She sat and looked away from me, weirdly staring off into the distance, as if looking for somebody. As for me, I was gathering my things. And then she slowly turned her face towards me, as if slowly unveiling a work of art, to reveal a single tear coursing down her cheek. "Ah ha, check. You needed those 30 seconds to work up the tear. Well, I'm not interested in how this plot develops further, young lady." And, undramatically and drily, I got up and walked away.

There are times when you are beholden neither to Man nor God to see something through, when you are free to opt out, when the best thing for you to do is...something other than "this."