1 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.”
Jonah chapter 2 contains what has been called one of the Bible’s great prayers, especially when we realise that up until this point there is no record of Jonah praying. Jonah didn’t pray because he did not want to talk with God. Chapter 1:3 says, “Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.”
The whole point of him trying to flee to Tarshish was to get away from God, so he almost certainly would not have prayed for the Lord’s guidance in the middle of his sin and rebellion. Prayer is so important, because Jonah’s story is a good lesson for us. Disobedience leads to prayerlessness, prayerlessness leads to sin, which more often than not can lead to disaster.
So the question we need to ask is, what changed for Jonah? While still on board the ship he ignored the captain when he begged Jonah to pray. But now things have changed, and the reason is that God has brought Jonah low, but He has done so as an act of grace. Jonah is now facing the consequences of his rebellion. He is separated from God, and is now quite alone and destitute.
We might not be on as dramatic a journey away from God as Jonah had, but when we do find ourselves drifting away from God, whether intentionally or not, the destination is the same - a place of darkness. We were created by God, and for God, and any life lived away from Him is a life of darkness and despair.
Psalm 86:15 in the NKJV says, “You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in mercy and truth.” This was the wonderful lesson which Jonah was about to learn. To all intents and purposes, Jonah’s life was at an end in the stomach of the great fish, but because of God’s grace, he finally turned to the Lord in prayer. It’s sad that like Jonah, we often pray as a last resort, but in His grace and mercy, God will still hear those prayers.
Another feature which makes this one of the Bible’s great prayers is not just the fact that Jonah prayed, but also the substance of his prayer. He showed no anger towards God, because Jonah knew that the situation he found himself in was entirely his own fault. He acknowledged that it was God who had brought him into the deep, and only God could rescue him. In verse 3 he prays, “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.”
It was the sailors who physically threw him overboard, and while this was all his own idea, Jonah understood that it was the sovereign hand of God that cast him into the depths of the sea. It was “your waves” and “your billows” that passed over him.
Jonah understood that everything that had happened to him was caused by God, while at the same time he knew that it was his sin which caused it. At no point in his prayer does Jonah express anger or resentment towards God.
He said to the sailors in 1:12, “I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” And he also knew that it was because of his sin that he was dying inside the fish. Jonah has made some very bad decisions so far, and there are more to come, but he showed tremendous spiritual maturity in his prayer by not turning against God, but on himself and his sin instead.
Sometimes it is only when we near our own breaking point that we realise that God, in Jesus Christ, has the answer to our greatest need.
Jonah learned this lesson the hard way. When it finally seemed that all was lost, Jonah confessed his sin. Now he knew that only God could help him, and so he cried out in verse 2, “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress.”
It’s been said before that in our fallen state, when we have somewhere else to turn to instead of prayer, we will choose that option first. So long as we are able to fool ourselves into thinking that we can work things out on our own, we will try anything, but eventually when we do come to our senses and we do turn to God, we find that in His grace and mercy, He comes to us, just like the father in the parable of the prodigal son.
There are times when the very best thing that can happen to us is the very thing we dread the most, because it takes away our self-reliance, it humbles our foolish pride, and reminds us that our only hope is to be found in God. Jonah, just like us at times, was driven to the point of utter despair before he turned to the Lord in prayer, but at least he prayed.
Pride is always a bitter pill to swallow, but it is so necessary for us in our walk with God. 1 Peter 5:5-7 says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time He may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you.”
For Jonah to recognise the futility of his rebellion against God and turn to Him in humility and repentance, he first had to be brought to his knees, just as He does with us.
And because we struggle to willingly humble ourselves before God, He, in His grace and because of His great love for us, will do it for us, if that is what it will take.
We have all made bad decisions which have brought us to our knees before God, but what about those occasions where we find ourselves in a desperate place through no fault of our own? The examples of Job and Joseph often spring to mind. Their struggles were not the results of their own personal sin, yet they suffered tremendously.
The answer is to be found firstly in the absolute sovereignty of God, and also understanding that He is perfect in His holiness, justice and goodness. We must acknowledge that God is the sovereign, saving Lord, and just as Jonah had to learn to bow to God’s sovereign call in his life, we need to do the same. As we grow in grace and in the knowledge of God, we need to learn to bow to God’s sovereign purpose in our circumstances too.
Sometimes God calls us to repent of our sin and rebellion. There are times when we know exactly why everything seems to be unravelling around us, and God calls us to repent of those things, while there are also occasions where we cannot see His purposes. In either situation, God calls us to humility and to rely on His sovereignty and His grace. God is God, and we are not, so we need to surrender to Him as the God of grace.
Jonah’s prayer is a wonderful lesson to us because in his utter despair he remembered the grace of God. In verse 4 he acknowledged that all was lost, but he still remembered the grace of God. “I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.” We need to learn to do the same. When we cry out to God for mercy, we will be able to echo Jonah’s words in verse 2. “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.”
I mentioned the importance of the substance of Jonah’s prayer as a lesson to us. You might have noticed that Jonah didn’t pray, “Lord, please get me out of this mess.”
Instead, his prayer was a reflection of what he already knew about the nature of God.
William McDonald wrote in his commentary, “There is not one word of petition in Jonah’s prayer. It consists of thanksgiving, contrition and rededication. It is really a Psalm of praise, a doxology.”
Jonah would have known the Psalms almost off by heart, so it is no coincidence that his prayer seems to have been taken straight out of the Psalms, so we need to take a closer look at the significance of his prayer.
In the side notes or footnotes of most Bibles, cross references are listed which show where other verses in the Bible are either directly quoted or referred to. Probably the best-known example is Jesus’ cry while on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Both Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 are cross referenced with Psalm 22:1.
In Jonah’s prayer in chapter 2, he either directly quotes from or refers to Psalms 3, 5, 16, 18, 31, 42, 50, 65, 88, and 120.
The 4th century theologian Athanasius wrote, “I believe that a man can find nothing more glorious than the Psalms, for they embrace the whole life of man, the affections of his mind, and the motions of his soul. To praise and glorify God, he can select a psalm suited to every occasion, and thus will find that they were written for him.”
We are slowly working our way through the Psalms in our Wednesday Bible study, and probably the most valuable lesson we have learned so far is that whatever situation we may find ourselves in at any moment in our lives, from the most wonderful to the most desperate, the Psalms mirror those emotions.
The Psalms teach us about God and about ourselves, about life and death, despair and hope, fear and faith.
It’s a rhetorical question I know, but do you ever struggle to pray? Pray through the Psalms.
Robert Godfrey of Ligonier Ministries wrote a book titled, “Learning to love the Psalms,” and in the introduction he wrote, “The more you dig into the Psalms, the more you discover. Like all great poetry, the Psalms are like a mine with ever new depths to reach and ever more gold to find. They reward abundantly whatever effort we make to know them better. The Psalms teach us how to express our emotions to God in all the circumstances of our lives.”
Jonah did exactly that. He would have been raised knowing the Psalms. He had recited and sung them throughout his life, and now, at the lowest point of his life, moved to prayer, he prayed the Psalms.
Godfrey also wrote that he was once asked to name his favourite book in the Bible. His first thought was that as a Christian, he shouldn’t have a favourite, because they are all equally important, but he soon realised that for him, it was the Psalms, which inspired him to write his book.
John Calvin wrote of the Psalms, “I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, ‘An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul,’ for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.”
So in the Psalms we read of people in all kinds of circumstances including in need and distress who look to God. Almost without exception, every cry and complaint we have ever poured out to God is echoed in the Psalms, where we are also reminded of the answer to those cries - the mercy and grace of God.
The Psalms deal with every human emotion, every human experience, every high and low, all of them in such a way that when we read them carefully, we will find ourselves drawn to faith in God. In Mark 9 Jesus healed a demon possessed boy, and the father of the boy said to Jesus in verse 24, “I believe; help my unbelief!” If that is your prayer, you would do well to turn to the Psalms.
Jonah’s story teaches us so much about turning to God in repentance and appealing to Him for mercy and grace when we need it.
It begins with a challenging command from God, and Jonah’s faith is severely tested by his call to preach in Nineveh. The sin of his hatred of the Ninevites drives him away from God, and he tries to find the answer to his problem in the ship headed for Tarshish. How many Tarshish-bound ships do we turn to when we struggle with the commands of God?
But God was so gracious to Jonah, just as He is with us, because He will use even our darkest moments to draw us to Himself.
The best way to remember and experience God’s grace is to turn to His Word. 1 Peter 1:23 says, “You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God.”
The grace of God that we need is found and experienced through the Word of God.
The theme or substance of Jonah’s prayer is found in the opening statement in verse 2, and in God’s gracious answer to Him. “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.”
Jonah first recognised his true situation, he remembered the relationship he had with the Lord in spite of his rebellion, and so he appealed to God’s grace for sinners like himself.
Jonah, in verses 5 and 6 described the situation he found himself in because of his sin. “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.”
This is what sin does. By the grace of God, we pray that we won’t have to go through what Jonah did, but we, like Jonah, often feel that we are separated from God. That was what Jonah wanted, but now that he experienced it in a very dramatic way, he was utterly miserable. As St Augustine put it many years ago, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
The whole point of Jonah’s flight from God was to get away from Him, and that was the worse place for him to be. In John 6, the teachings of Jesus challenged many people, as we read from verse 66. “After this many of His disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him. So Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Do you want to go away as well?’ Simon Peter answered Him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.’” (John 6:66-69)
Jonah knew that he was separated from God because of His sin of rebellion against the Word of God. He also knew that it was because of this sin that God had brought him as low as he was, but what he knew about God reminded him that there was hope for him. God’s promise of grace remained despite Jonah’s sin. He had deserted God, but the very fact that he was still alive showed that God had not completely deserted him. We have the same hope, and Paul puts it so well at the end of Romans 8.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35, 37-39)
God said to His people through the prophet Jeremiah, “I have loved you with an everlasting love,” (Jeremiah 31:3), and in the following chapter, “I will not turn away from doing good to them.”
God does not promise us an easy passage through life, but it is when we are in those times of deep despair that we, like Jonah, can turn to Him in repentance and faith.
Jonah’s prayer teaches us about God’s grace for sinners, and there is a key phrase in verse 4. “I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.”
Why did Jonah specifically mention the temple? The context is important. Jonah lived in Old Testament times, and the temple was the place where the Ark of the Covenant, the symbol of the presence of God was kept.
It was at the temple where the sacrifices were performed by the priests. It was for the very purpose of the sacrifices that the temple was built. It was there where the blood of sacrificial animals was shed as a symbol of God’s forgiveness of sin. Jonah remembered that God had ordered sacrifices as a way of restoring sinners to Himself. The temple was where Jonah knew he would be restored to God because of the blood of the sacrifices.
For us, the temple is no longer necessary, but the sacrifice it pointed to is. Jonah’s prayer is a model for our own prayer of salvation. What Jonah looked to in faith was fulfilled in the atoning death of Jesus Christ.
In our despair, and in the depths of our separation from God because of our sin, we are reminded by the Cross of Calvary of the great hope we have. Regardless of how far your sin has driven you from God, you need to know the mercy and grace He offers you because of what Christ has done for you.
Look to the cross as a reminder of His great love for you. John wrote in 1 John 2:1-2, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” And Paul wrote in Romans 8:31-32, “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?”
Whatever trials and suffering we experience in this life, whether they be the direct result of our personal sin or not, we look to the cross of Christ as proof of the love of God. Not only that, but it is only when we view life through the lens of the cross that we are able to make sense of both our joys and suffering.
Jonah finally realised the danger he was in due to his sin, but he remembered the saving grace and mercy of God. We will take a closer look at the final 2 verses of his prayer when we continue our series after Easter, but we can’t end today without noticing Jonah’s victorious cry which has strengthened the hearts and faith of Christians throughout the ages in verse 9: “Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
It is only God who can save, and Jonah finally realised this wonderful truth, and his life was changed. He now knew that God sent him into the deep darkness, into the great fish, not to destroy him but to save him.
Have you seen and understood God’s saving purposes in your life? God’s intention is not to destroy you in your suffering. Romans 8:16-17 says, “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs - heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him.”
We need to come to the same point that Jonah did. He finally learned that even in his darkest moment, God was saving him. He is saving you. He is restoring us from sinful rebellion, from foolish self-reliance, from ignorant pride, and from our unbelieving stubbornness, so that we can learn to turn to Him for the grace we need.
Jonah’s prayer should be our prayer. The opening and closing sentences in verses 2 and 9 say it perfectly: “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and He answered me. Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
We have the benefit of living on this side of the cross. Jesus Christ is our salvation. When the angel explained the meaning of the name to Joseph he said, “You are to give Him the name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21).
While we can see our own story of rebellion in the life of Jonah, the main point of the book of Jonah, and indeed the whole Bible, is that God the Son took on human flesh, bore our sins on the cross, and was raised for our justification. That is the great hope we have.
Like Jonah, we have all tried to flee from God in our sin and rebellion, but grace and forgiveness is found in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. God Himself has provided the way into eternal life through the death of His Son.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read Jonah 2:1-7
This is the first recorded prayer in the book of Jonah. What was it that caused him to finally turn to God in prayer, and what are we able to learn from this?
Jonah’s prayer has been called one of the great prayers in the Bible, and instead of crying out and asking the Lord to save him, he quotes almost exclusively from the Psalms. Why is this?
What do the Psalms teach us about prayer?
Like Jonah, we have also avoided seeking the Lord in prayer due to our circumstances and even our personal sin. What have you learned from these times of spiritual dryness, and how did God sustain you through them?
Discuss the significance of Jonah referring to the temple in verses 4 and 7.
What does this teach us about the Cross of Calvary?