17 And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
As we have seen on Jonah’s journey so far, he has gone progressively down as he rebelled against the Word of God. Jonah’s physical journey gives us a picture of what sin does.
He went down to Joppa to find the ship headed for Tarshish. He went down into the hold of the ship and slept while the crew was in great danger. When the sailors cast lots to determine who the cause of the great storm was, they eventually threw him overboard into the sea, and he went down into the depths of the sea.
This is what sin and rebellion against God does to us.
Palmer Robertson wrote, “The sinner goes down. He begins the descent by his own acts of folly. He tries to run from the will of God, and he trips on his own dangling shoelaces. It is just a fact. Nothing can be in its right order when you are living in rebellion against the will of God. The circumstances of life will bring you down. Your own inner spirit will bring you down. The hand of the Lord will bring you down.”
Jonah’s original intention was to get away from God, to find a place where he mistakenly thought that the Lord would just leave him alone, but by now he had begun to understand that there was nowhere to hide.
For every action he took, God acted in return. One of the great lessons we’re able to learn from Jonah’s dramatic story is that what seems like bad news is actually good news when it comes to the people of God. Even the discipline He brings into our lives, regardless of how gentle or harsh it may be, is designed to be a blessing to us.
As we know, it is in our nature to be stubborn, and we are slow learners. This is why many Christians will sometimes be taken down into the very depths of despair.
Not everyone was as rebellious as Jonah though. Look at the story of Joseph for example. He ended up in prison for obeying the Lord, but he knew that God was with him - both in the pit his brothers placed him in, and in the Egyptian prison.
The Bible and the history of the church is full of stories of the faithful suffering tremendously while being obedient to the Word of God.
The best example we have is, of course, the descent of Jesus into the darkness of death. Paul wrote in Philippians 2:6-8 that Jesus, “who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” But that was not the end of the story. Paul continues, “Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:9-11)
Jesus descended into the darkness of our world, He went down to the cross, and down into the tomb, but the great hope we have is the victory of the resurrection, and His ascension to glory as He intercedes for us now at the right hand of the Father.
Of course, Jesus did not take the same journey downward as Jonah, because He had no sin of His own, but as He bore our sins, He suffered and died so that we don’t have to, if we repent of our sins and put our faith in His saving work on the cross.
Like Jonah though, each of us who have travelled a similar downward journey due to our sin will find the mercy and grace of God, even in the deepest places. Jonah, despite his sin, remained a child of God, and he discovered the power of the resurrection and the saving grace of God in the most dramatic way.
We are looking at just one verse in the book of Jonah today. Jonah 1:17 introduces us to the most famous detail in this book, as it records for us the great fish that rescued Jonah from the depths of the ocean. Verse 17 says, “The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” Unfortunately though, the ongoing debates and discussions of whether this and Jonah’s subsequent survival was physically possible have detracted from the main character and the real purpose of the book of Jonah - God Himself, and His mercy.
The Christian author Thomas John Carlisle put it so well when he wrote, “I was so obsessed with what was going on inside the whale that I missed seeing the drama going on inside Jonah.” The most important part of verse 17 is the opening statement: “The Lord appointed.” Jonah and the fish or the whale are details, but as with the entire Bible, God is the central character.
However, we do need to spend some time considering this great fish which the Lord appointed, because the authenticity of the story, and whether we are to believe it as fact or fiction, is always the go-to point of discussion for those who try to debunk the truth of Scripture.
It’s the point of attack, so we need to have some answers. In fact, most sceptics, in believing they can prove the story of Jonah is fiction, then say that if the book of Jonah cannot be relied upon as truth, the rest of the Bible and its claims can also be brought into question, and they are quite right.
If just one detail in the Bible, no matter how big or small cannot be trusted, the entire Word of God cannot be trusted. By assuming the Bible is in error about Jonah’s whale or fish, critics claim to be able to undermine the overall authority of Scripture.
The argument, which we’ve all heard before, is that the story of Jonah is a fable. In other words, it is allegorical, and not historical, because it is impossible to believe that a man was swallowed by a fish and survived for three days before being vomited onto the shore. Even the blue whale, the largest sea animal, eats plankton, and is incapable of swallowing something as large as an adult human being.
And a common mistake many Christians make in trying to debate this argument, is that they go down the road of saying that it might have been a very large fish which is now extinct that swallowed Jonah.
Others point to an event in 1891 where a sperm whale was harpooned near the Falkland Islands. A sailor by the name of James Bartley, who had fallen overboard the previous day, was found alive inside the whale’s stomach once they began butchering the whale.
You can find this story on the internet, plus of course, many arguments that the story of James Bartley was just made up. The point is that arguing with the doubters using human logic is an exercise in futility.
At the very heart of the objection to the account of Jonah, is the unwillingness of the doubters to admit the possibility of the miraculous. The first 4 words of the Bible are, “In the beginning God.” Disbelieve that, and you have to disbelieve the rest of the Bible.
Anyone who has ever tried to debate with a non-Christian will know that you cannot properly engage with them when they believe there is no God. The whole premise of the denial of the story of Jonah stems from the denial of the existence of an all-powerful, sovereign, miracle-working God.
It has nothing to do with whether a fish or a whale can swallow a man whole. The sceptics have already decided that God doesn’t exist, and this is the basis of their stand against the Bible. To them, miracles fall outside the bounds of possibility, whether it be the virgin birth, the resurrection of the dead, Jonah’s fish, or any other miracle recorded in Scripture.
The great irony for those who deny the existence of God, who created everything, is that the only alternative they have is miraculous in the extreme. A Christian apologist described the absurdity of evolutionary “science” with a simple mathematical equation: Nothing times nobody equals everything. Deny God, and that’s all you have.
The title of Frank Turek’s book says it all: I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.
So while it is important for us to defend the validity of the story of Jonah, we need to do so Biblically, and it all begins with believing in the God of the Bible who has done, and continues to perform miraculous works.
For the Christian though, of far greater importance than winning or losing a debate over whether a man can be swallowed by a fish and survive for three days, is the meaning of the text, and the first thing we need to see is the clear link between Jonah’s descent into the depths of the sea and the atoning death of Jesus Christ.
In fact, when Jesus was challenged by the Pharisees to prove that He was who He claimed to be by performing miracles for them, He replied by referring directly to Jonah. “Some of the scribes and Pharisees answered Him, saying, ‘Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.’ But He answered them, ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.’” (Matthew 12:38-41)
This was a stinging rebuke to the Pharisees, to whom Jesus made it clear that the faith of the Gentile Ninevites would stand in judgment against them. Also, by speaking about Jonah, Jesus referred to the events we read about in the book of Jonah as historical facts, not as fiction.
And not for the first time, we see in the Bible how water symbolises death. Think of the great flood in Noah’s day, the crossing of the Red Sea under Moses and the Jordan River under Joshua’s leadership. In Scripture, the sea symbolises the power of death to swallow and destroy.
The prophet Isaiah wrote about God’s final judgment, using the imagery of a great sea creature being slain. “In that day the Lord with His hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and He will slay the dragon that is in the sea.” (Isaiah 27:1)
Another interesting point in Jonah 1:17 is the importance of the words that “Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” (Jonah 1:17) This speaks of death. In ancient times, people waited for three days before confirming physical death. There was virtually no chance of someone suddenly reviving after three days, so this was the accepted waiting period, as they didn’t have monitors and modern machines as we do today.
This is why Jesus deliberately waited for four days before raising Lazarus from the dead. After four days, there was no doubt that Lazarus was dead. And of course, it is no coincidence that Jesus was raised on the third day and not sooner. He spent three days in the tomb, proving that He had died and was miraculously raised from the dead.
Our understanding of the significance of Jonah’s story must be shaped by Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 12. “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:39–40)
Jonah’s “death” in the stomach of the fish is a picture of the death and entombment of Jesus, after He died to pay the price of our sins.
What happened to Jonah teaches us at least three things about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Firstly, the end of God’s judgment is death. When Jonah was swallowed by the great fish, this was the climax of his judgment from God. For Jonah, this was the end. We are not told how long he tried to stay afloat after being thrown overboard, but he most certainly would not have heaved a sigh of relief when the fish swallowed him. For Jonah, this was death, not rescue. The fish gives us a picture of hell. It is the place of damnation, and the place of no return.
Hell is the ultimate destiny of all who try to flee from God. Jonah was trying to get to a place where he would escape the presence of God, and it was in the stomach of the fish, a place which represented hell, that he bore the judgment and consequences of his sin.
This is what Jesus endured in our place through His death on the cross. Because He died for our sins, we won’t have to suffer the eternal torment of the wrath of God at our sin. He suffered damnation as He bore the wrath of God’s judgment in His substitutionary death for us. This is why He quoted from Psalm 22 when He cried out in Matthew 27:46, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus willingly and voluntarily died the death that we deserve. Cyril of Jerusalem was a 4th century theologian who wrote, “Jonah was cast into the belly of a great fish, but Christ of His own will descended to the abode of the invisible fish of death. He went down of His own will to make death disgorge those it had swallowed up, according to Scripture: ‘I shall deliver them from the power of the nether world, and I shall redeem them from death.’” He quotes there from Hosea 13:14.
Just like Jonah, every sinner has gone down the road of sin that has only one destination: The damnation of death, but in His grace and by His substitutionary death, Jesus died the death we deserve on the cross of Calvary.
Just as Jonah’s “death” in the depths of the sea removed the storm from the sailors, so Jesus’ death removes the wrath of God from our sins.
In his book Preacher on the Run, Gordon Keddie wrote, “By it, Jesus paid the penalty of sin, placated the displeasure of God against the sinner and restored believers to the favour and fellowship of God. Jesus’ death procures a new heart, a new record and a new future of eternal life for all who will trust in Him as their Saviour and Lord. Jesus went through the hell of the earth for the sake of people like us. Jonah’s three days in the fish emphasised that the wages of sin is death and that, if anyone was ever to be forgiven the consequences of his sin, there had to be an atonement sufficient to cover the need. In this sense, Jesus’ death and burial was the ‘sign of Jonah’ for His own generation.”
So the first lesson we learn from Jonah is that the end of God’s judgment is death.
Secondly, to all intents and purposes, the descent into the deep was the end of Jonah, just as Jesus’ death on the cross seemed to be His end, but the resurrection is the answer.
As we saw last week, the sailors were reluctant to throw Jonah overboard, but once they did, that was it. There was no hope for Jonah, just as those who were responsible for the death of Jesus. When He died on the cross, that was it. The religious leaders were finally rid of this troublemaker, once and for all. Or so they thought.
For Jesus, it was not the end. This is why we say with confidence and absolute assurance at the funeral of a Christian that this is not the end for the person who has died. In his commentary on Jonah, Peter Williams wrote, “Just as Jonah was delivered from his watery grave to continue the work of preaching repentance and salvation to the Ninevites, so Christ through His resurrection continued, through the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church, to preach the Gospel of salvation to the whole world.”
The resurrection of Christ, and our subsequent resurrection to glory, is God’s answer to the judgment of death.
Thirdly, in the account of Jonah we learn that the great fish, this symbol of death and hell, was not only a sign of God’s judgment, but a sign of God’s sovereign grace through that judgment and His sovereignty over all things.
Where did the fish come from? The simple answer is that it was God, who in His sovereign and absolute power over His creation, arranged for this fish to be in the right place at the right time.
In verse 17 in the ESV it says that the Lord “appointed” a great fish. The NIV translation says provided, and the NKJV uses the word prepared.
Jonah’s rebellion against God did not catch Him unawares. In eternity past He appointed this particular fish for this specific purpose. As we will see later in Jonah’s story, He also appointed a plant to provide shelter for Jonah, a worm to later destroy that shelter, and a hot wind to further humble Jonah, and all of this within His sovereign will.
Williams again wrote, “Each of these instances was a deliberate act by God to provide for the outworking of His purpose. As the omnipotent God He not only ordains the end, but also provides the means to that end.”
Throughout the Bible there are accounts of God providing and preparing what was required to reveal and set in motion His plan of redemption. He instructed Noah to prepare the ark, which saved him and his family. When Abraham obeyed God by taking his son Isaac up Mount Moriah as an offering, God provided him with a ram to be sacrificed in Isaac’s place.
In Acts chapter 8 there is the wonderful story of the Ethiopian eunuch who was reading from the book of Isaiah, so God appointed Philip to go and speak to him. “The Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over and join this chariot.’ So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ And he said, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this: ‘Like a sheep He was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so He opens not His mouth. In His humiliation justice was denied Him. Who can describe His generation? For His life is taken away from the earth.’ And the eunuch said to Philip, ‘About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’ Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, ‘See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptised?’ And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptised him. And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.” (Acts 8:29-39) All of this, including the waters of baptism were appointed and provided for this man as he came to saving faith in Jesus Christ.
The stories of Jonah, Noah, Abraham and the Ethiopian eunuch are just four examples of how God provides what is needed to fulfil His divine purposes.
In the cross of Christ, we see the same thing. Remember, Jesus’ atoning death at Calvary was not plan B because plan A failed so miserably in the Garden of Eden.
In eternity past God provided a Saviour for us. He prepared for the Messiah to come through the prophecies of the Old Testament and the ministry of John the Baptist. God sovereignly appointed that His Son would be betrayed by Judas and delivered by the Jews into the hands of the Gentiles, and that together, these representatives of the whole world would crucify Him.
On the Day of Pentecost, when God brought 3000 sinners to salvation through the preaching of Peter, Peter made it very clear in Acts 2:23 that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.”
And of course, in accordance with Old Testament prophecies and the words of Jesus Himself, God appointed that Jesus would rise from the dead on the third day, in resurrection power, just as Jonah would eventually go to Nineveh as proof of God’s sovereign, forgiving, and life-giving grace for all who will repent and believe.
Despite Jonah’s rebellion and sin, the purposes of God were fulfilled. His purpose was to bring the Ninevites to repentance and faith, and He did this out of mercy for them and also to reveal His glory.
Even the rebellion of Jonah, in the most mysterious way, fulfilled the sovereign will of God. The Ninevites were a wicked and rebellious people, and in a very real sense, God appointed and prepared that Jonah would first join them in their rebellion, and he would experience the kind of death about which he would eventually warn them.
Jonah’s dramatic rescue and “resurrection” would be an object lesson to the people of Nineveh of the resurrection life that God offers to those who turn to Him in faith.
As Paul wrote in Romans 8:28, “For those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
Jonah’s disobedience and rebellion provides us with a picture of our own journey to faith. We all fail, just as he did, yet God still brings the lost to faith through the witness of redeemed sinners like you and me.
We don’t have it all together, which makes the glory of the Gospel even more glorious. We are rebellious sinners who have been treated with grace we do not deserve. We have been redeemed from the condemnation we do deserve by the sovereign grace of God through the atoning death of Jesus Christ. This is what gives the Christian message its authenticity. If God can save Jonah, the sailors on his ship, the Ninevites and people like you and me, He can save anyone whom He sovereignly chooses.
If you are saved, if you have been redeemed by the saving power of the blood of Jesus Christ, your Biblical mandate is to share that message with the lost.
If, on the other hand, you are not saved, you need to know that Jonah’s story gives you a vivid picture of your own inevitable end because of your rebellion against a holy God. Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.”
But there is good news. Through faith in Jesus Christ, who died to conquer sin and death, the judgment you deserve has been taken by Him, but you have to see your need of a Saviour, repent of your sin, and turn to Jesus Christ. He will save you if you ask Him to.
And once He has saved you, He will never let you go. John MacArthur said at a pastors’ conference just a couple of days ago, “The greatest proof that God will keep us, is the price He paid to get us.”
Homegroup Study Notes
Read Jonah 1:17
This verse has become the focus and debating point of the entire story of Jonah, and is almost always the “go to” verse of those who deny the truth of the Bible.
Is it a good or bad idea to engage in debates over whether there ever has been or is a fish or whale large enough to swallow a man whole?
How would you engage with those who doubt the truth of this story?
What is the real reason behind the arguments against the authenticity of the story of Jonah and the fish?
Read Matthew 12:38-41
How does this passage help us to see the real purpose for the inclusion of Jonah’s story in the pages of the Bible?
What other examples can you think of where difficult passages in the Old Testament become a lot clearer when viewed through the lens of the New Testament?