From the belly of the fish

Jonah 2:1-9

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, 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.

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.

Then I said, ‘I am driven away

    from your sight;

yet I shall again look

    upon your holy temple.’

The waters closed in over me to take my life;

    the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped about my head

    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.

When my life was fainting away,

    I remembered the Lord,

and my prayer came to you,

    into your holy temple.

Those who pay regard to vain idols

    forsake their hope of steadfast love.

But I with the voice of thanksgiving

    will sacrifice to you;

what I have vowed I will pay.

    Salvation belongs to the Lord!”

This was the prayer of Jonah from the belly of the whale.  It is a prayer of thanksgiving, of rejoicing in the kindness of the Lord.  He had fled from God, disobeyed the command, and eventually tossed into a stormy sea where he sunk to his inevitable death.  From this the Lord saved him by sending a whale to swallow him up, and so Jonah rejoiced.  But this prayer was lifted from the belly of a whale.

I too often sink into despair, waiting for everything to be perfect before I feel I can rejoice or give thanks to the Lord.  Jonah looks ahead to the time when he will see the temple again, but he does not wait until he is in the temple to give thanks.  He prays when the outcome, from a human standpoint, still seems uncertain.  Had I been in the situation, I imagine I would have thought “Wonderful.  I’ve been thrown into the sea, I nearly drowned, and now on top of it I’ve been swallowed by a whale.  What do you have for me next?”  But Jonah sees the Lord’s salvation while his situation is still dark and he gives thanks.

“Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love” the prophet says.  My natural inclination is to turn inward, to examine myself and discover what idols I still cling to.  To be sure, there are some.  But instead of dwelling on this examination, which I am certain will never end, I will look at the promise in this verse.  By turning it around, we come up with the statement “Those who pay regard to the Lord have the hope of steadfast love.”

Steadfast love.  The hope of steadfast love.  What does this mean?  What does it look like?  Well, it looks like when you’re running from God, when you’re disobeying his commands and are sinking into the sea and on the point of death, when you cry out to him he will send a whale to save you.  Some people might read the story of Jonah and think it’s ridiculous because that isn’t how any sort of whale biology works and surely he would have been digested in the time he spent in its belly.  If that’s the case, it just makes the story more impressive to me.  Because that means that God’s love is so steadfast that when Jonah cried out to him, God made up some creature to go and swallow him before he could die.  He is so kind that he will do something absolutely ridiculous to save his child.

This isn’t very surprising if you read the rest of the bible.  God is constantly saving his people in absurd ways.  Parting the Red Sea with a strong wind so that the Israelites can walk through on dry ground, water from the rock, manna that only lasts a day, unless it’s the Sabbath in which case it lasts two days, a storm of quail that fly through at perfect snatching height, looking at a bronze snake to be saved from snake bites, Joshua’s entire campaign, Gideon’s laughably small army, and the list goes on.  Even Jesus’ miracles were sometimes pretty hilarious.  “He put mud on my eyes, and then I could see.”  Really?  Mud?

Of course, the most ridiculous of all was the ultimate saving act.  Jesus, the glorious king, was tortured and shamed and killed.  And then, of course, he rose from the dead.  It isn’t simply idle words when Paul says that the resurrection is foolishness to the Gentiles.  It’s absolutely crazy, but it happened, and that seems to be perfectly consistent with how God always works.

I’ve theorized, typically when talking about the book of Judges, that God is always trying to tell us that he loves us as loudly as he possibly can.  He doesn’t do it in small ways that we can easily pass off as accidents.  Jesus doesn’t go heal Lazarus before he dies, even though he could have just said the word from where he was and Lazarus would have been healed.  He waits until he’s dead and then goes and resurrects him.  Go big or go home.

God is always telling his people “I love you.  This much.”  Even if you shut your eyes, it’s still pretty hard to miss.  Because his salvation is rarely subtle.  If it were subtle, you might think you’d done it yourself or simply had good luck.  What’s the good of that?  That would be the equivalent of sitting down to write your fiancée a wartime love letter, then being satisfied with “Hello, I hope everything’s well.  Sincerely, Your Husband if I make it out of this alive” and figuring that she probably got the point.  But God isn’t satisfied with such half measures.  When he shows his people his love he absolutely gushes, like a seventeen year old would be poet who hasn’t seen his girlfriend for at least twelve hours.

What’s more, his love is steadfast.  He isn’t fickle.  He isn’t capricious or easily offended.  He isn’t surprised by our failings and he doesn’t shun us for messing up.  He saved Jonah, who had outright refused to do what he was told and instead got in a boat headed very far in the opposite direction.  Jonah ran away because he hated those people in Nineveh so much that he wanted them all, man and beast, to die.  Did God write Jonah off and send someone else?  No.  He followed him with a storm and then saved him with a miracle fish that shouldn’t exist.  And I’m worried because I was sarcastic?

We are not in danger of losing God’s love.  He isn’t waiting for us to sin so that he can kick us out of the kingdom.  He hasn’t accepted us simply on a technicality because we happened to believe in Jesus.  He loves us with a steadfast love, and he does it loudly.  He is quick to forgive our sins, because he wants us to be with him.  Jonah was sinking in the water, and we know that means he had a window of about five minutes between being thrown overboard and being saved before he drowned.  When I say quick, understand “the length of time between death closing in and death having closed in”.  He doesn’t give it a couple of weeks to see if we really mean it this time.  He forgives us now and when we mess up again in a couple of weeks, he forgives us then too.  Immediately.

Jonah knew God well enough to know that he was being saved.  He didn’t doubt God’s salvation.  I constantly doubt God’s salvation, which is why the belly of the whale looks so dark.  I don’t have the answer to why I can’t see his salvation when it will be incredibly obvious later.  I don’t know why I always seem to forget that God does love me, and enough to save me miraculously.  But I know that he does.  I know that I can hope in his steadfast love.

Lord Jesus, help me to remember.