4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. 6 So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”
Jonah has now begun his journey to Tarshish. At the end of verse 3 he went down to the Philistine port of Joppa, paid his fare, and was now safely on board the ship.
As they pulled away from shore, Jonah’s plan to run away from God seemed to be working out just fine, but he was soon to learn about the sovereign persistence of God. Vernon McGee wrote in his commentary, “Jonah is on board now; and, as the ship pulls out, I imagine that Jonah stands on the top deck, smiling as the land fades away in the distance. He may be saying to himself, ‘My, what a beautiful journey this is going to be!’ But we will find that this man is not going to have it quite that easy.”
Verse 4 records, “But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.”
Jonah had decided what he was going to do. Having been given a clear call to prophesy to the Ninevites, verse 3 begins by saying, “But Jonah.” However, the next verse begins with, “But the Lord.”
Storms at sea are commonplace, but this particular storm was so violent that it threatened to destroy the ship. We can understand that some of the passengers might’ve been afraid, but the sailors on Jonah’s ship were experienced and hardened, yet we’re told that even they were afraid, so this divine storm sent by God was no ordinary storm. Verse 5 says, “The mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god.”
Here again, we see that whenever human beings come face to face with our own mortality, we instinctively turn to God, whether we believe in Him or not. This instinct makes a mockery of those who claim there is no God. John Calvin wrote, “Hardly any religion appears in the world while God leaves us in an undisturbed condition. Fear constrains us, however unwilling, to come to God.”
The problem is that once the danger passes, many return to their foolish denial of the one, true God. It’s been said before that there are no atheists in foxholes, but once safely out of the foxhole, people soon forget their fervent prayers to the Lord for protection and deliverance, sometimes even going right back to doing the very things which caused all their problems the first time.
As Christians though, our attitude to prayer is to be completely different. Our prayer life shouldn’t be characterised by the occasional panic prayer when we find ourselves in need, but it should grow out of a loving relationship with the God we have come to know and trust.
Verse 5 continues by saying, “They hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them.” Remembering that the purpose of these ships was to take cargo from one port to another, it is likely that they threw a tremendous amount of cargo overboard, but desperate times call for desperate measures. This gives us a picture of how little the things we have really matter when faced with our own mortality, but also, in the actions of the sailors we also see how futile our attempts at solving our own problems can be at times, because we fail to see the real reason for our struggles.
For the sailors on Jonah’s ship, the real cause of their problems was not the weight of their cargo. It wasn’t even the violent storm. Like them, we tend to focus on our circumstances, rather than the root cause. The problem with the ship heading for Tarshish was the sin, currently sleeping in the hold of the ship.
Our problems, both big and small, are caused by the guilt and misery brought about by sin, whether it be our own sin, or the sin of others, and just like the sailors, we are quick to try and solve our own problems first, and when that doesn’t work, we just as quickly turn to God for help, but how often do we deal with the issue of sin?
This is what God has done for us through the sacrifice of His Son. Jesus Christ is the solution to our sin problem, but how easily we forget. We would rather throw cargo overboard in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, than humble ourselves before the holiness of God, confessing that the problem lies deep within us, and that the answer to our problem is Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.
The theologian and author William Banks wrote, “We are casting overboard the ware and cargo, but the storm continues to rage because sin continues to rule in the hearts of those aboard the ship of life. Nothing weighs a man down as heavily as the burden of sin.”
What we see in the actions and desperate prayers of the sailors is a reflection of how the non-believing world foolishly tries to ignore the reality of God. Psalm 19:1-2 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.”
The fingerprints of our creator God are everywhere, and while many insist on ignoring the evidence which stares them in the face every day, when it really matters, they will almost always cry out to the God they have denied. The sailors knew instinctively that a personal divine power was the cause of the great storm. In their spiritual ignorance they didn’t know the one, true God, as verse 5 tells us they cried out to their own gods, but the mere fact that they cried out to a higher power proves that everyone knows that God is real.
Of course, some will argue until they’re blue in the face that there is no God, but all they’re doing is lying to themselves by ignoring what they know to be true.
Paul Washer said recently, “There are no atheists, but liars who deny the existence of God.”
Both Psalm 14 and 53 begin by saying, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
The reason that nature reveals the existence of God is that He created it for this very purpose. The apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:19-20, “What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
The problem is that even though everyone knows instinctively that God exists, many do not know God. “Each cried out to his god,” as Jonah 1:5 tells us. Each sailor cried out to whatever god he thought might help him.
In Acts 17, Paul was visiting the city of Athens, the home of all kinds of idolatry and paganism. He was waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him, and verse 16 says, “Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.”
All the great thinkers and philosophers of the day went to Athens in the 1st century, and it was against this background that Paul spoke to these intellectual elites. “So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: “To the unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him. Yet He is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed His offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed; and of this He has given assurance to all by raising Him from the dead.” (Acts 17:22-31)
The sailors in Jonah’s day were just like the Athenians Paul preached to. They not only built idols to every god they had created in their own minds, but they tried to cover all the bases in case they’d missed one with an idol to “the unknown god.”
This is what the captain of the ship did when he woke Jonah and pleaded with him, “Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.” (Jonah 1:6)
In other words, “We’re desperate here, so maybe you know a god who can help us. We’ve all prayed to our gods, so if you pray to yours, at least one of us might get lucky.”
John Calvin wrote, “They know not whether they will obtain anything by their cries; they repeat their prayers; but they know not whether they pass off into air or really come to God.”
Then, as now, this shows that the multitude of false gods worshipped and trusted are created in our own minds because of man’s wilful ignorance of the one true God. At the heart of idolatry and other false religions and faith systems, is the fact that while men know that God exists, they do not want to know who He is and what He is like, because once they do that, they become answerable to Him.
Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, God says, “You are my witnesses, and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am He. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no saviour.” (Isaiah 43:10-11)
All other religions and idols are a direct and blasphemous violation of the first two Commandments. “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” (Exodus 20:3-6)
Without Jesus Christ and the salvation He and He alone offers us, mankind is lost and all at sea (pun intended).
In nature and deep within ourselves, we all see what is known as God’s general revelation. This means that though the evidence shows there is a God, it does not tell us who He is. This is why God He has given us His special revelation in the Bible, and having revealed Himself through the prophets and apostles, God has given the ultimate revelation of Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ, as Hebrews 1:1-3 teaches us.
“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power.”
Jesus said in John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” and Paul wrote in Colossians 1:15 that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God.”
Biblical Christianity stands quite alone and separate from all other beliefs and faith systems. You’ve probably heard it said before that apart from a few differences here and there, Christianity, Judaism and Islam believe and teach much the same things, but this is just not true. Jesus deals with that false idea directly in John 14:6. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Salvation is in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone.
Jonah knew the one, true God, and this is exactly why God had called him to share this wonderful truth with the people of Nineveh, but he chose instead to disobey and flee to Tarshish instead.
Even now, in the middle of this great storm, he had the opportunity to present the truth of God to the sailors. As we’ll see a bit later, they even asked Jonah in verse 11, “What shall we do?” This was Jonah’s opportunity to call them (and himself, of course) to repentance, but by then he’d wandered so far away from God that his astounding and jaw-dropping solution for the sailors was for them to throw him overboard.
“Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.” (Jonah 1:5)
It was Jonah alone who could tell the sailors what they needed to know, but while the pagans were praying to gods that don’t exist, Jonah was sleeping.
There are two important points we need to consider here.
Firstly, how could Jonah sleep through such a violent storm? Some commentators suggest that the strain and guilt he felt by trying to run away from God had mentally and physically exhausted him. While this may be true, it was his spiritual complacency we should sit up and take notice of.
Gordon Keddie wrote a book about Jonah’s story, with the excellent title, “Preacher on the Run.” In it he wrote, “Jonah’s was the sleep of one who has persuaded himself that he is safe, when in fact he is in grave danger.”
How many have fooled themselves into thinking they are safe in their rebellion against or neglect of God? Life is good - let’s eat, drink and be merry, but a storm is approaching. And it’s not just unbelievers who can have this attitude to life. We even see it in the lives of some Christians, and this is the first thing we need to learn about Jonah sleeping through the storm.
Despite knowing the goodness and mercy of God, many Christians become spiritually complacent. The thinking is something like, “God will forgive me, because that’s what He’s supposed to do.”
Paul deals with this attitude in Romans 6:1-8. “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. We know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him.”
The Bible teaches that God is long-suffering and forgiving, but the story of Jonah serves as a reminder to us that God’s holiness demands an accounting for sin in unbelievers and it demands the repenting of sins of those who do know Him. Hebrews 12:6 says, “The Lord disciplines the one He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives.”
So we need to guard against spiritual complacency on a personal level.
Secondly, Jonah sleeping through the storm should serve as a warning to the church, and a reminder of our role in the world.
Why were the sailors in such danger? It was not so much as a result of their sins, as it was Jonah’s sin. In our dark and depraved world, we simply cannot afford to be a church which is sleeping on duty. We are called to be salt and light in the world, and we can only do those things effectively when we know not only what we believe, but why we believe it.
Our faith, our work and our witness need to be built on the solid foundation of Biblical truth.
The first sign of trouble in the church is when, just like Jonah, it questions and rejects God’s word. His word came audibly to Jonah, and it comes to us today in the pages of the Bible, and a church which twists the truth of God to suit its own purposes and false doctrines is a church in trouble.
The result is that many Christians, in seeking to be “relevant” in the world now form their worldview based on the current trends of science, academics and culture, instead of standing fast on the solid rock of the word of God as revealed in the Bible.
In Acts 27, Paul boarded a ship as he began a journey to Rome, not to run away from God, but to go and proclaim the Gospel, and when they neared the island of Crete, they ran into such a violent storm that the sailors began throwing not only their cargo, but even their tackle and rigging overboard. Paul though, unlike Jonah, was not sleeping below decks, but was on the deck, sharing the Gospel. The ship eventually ran aground and was destroyed, but everyone on board was saved.
The ships of this world on which we journey through life will also be destroyed, but when the church diligently and faithfully proclaims the Gospel of Christ to those caught up in the storms of life on those ships, souls are saved.
But when the church flees to Tarshish - when it rejects and reinterprets the word of God to suit its own agenda - we end up with a church that is completely ineffective and sleeping on duty because it no longer knows the truth it claims to believe, and the people in the church have become spiritually shipwrecked.
Jonah was caught at sea in a storm, and so was Paul, but there is another account of a storm at sea which teaches us even more about the power of God to save. “When He got into the boat, His disciples followed Him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but He was asleep. And they went and woke Him, saying, ‘Save us, Lord; we are perishing.’ And He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?’ Then He rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marvelled, saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey Him?” (Matthew 8:23-27)
Jesus did what no one else could do. He calmed the storm because of His divine and sovereign power.
This is what He did on the cross for you and for me. He has calmed the storm of God’s wrath at our sin. Jonah’s sin caused Jonah’s storm, and in the same way, it is our sin that deserves the wrath of God, but the good news of the Gospel is that it was for this that Jesus died on the cross, paying the penalty that our sins deserved and achieving for us an eternal peace with God.
The sailors in Jonah 1 prayed to non-existent gods, and those prayers went unheard and unanswered, but for us, battling through the storms of life brought about by our own sin and the sins of others, we know that when we cry out to the one, true God in the name of Jesus Christ, He will hear, and He will save.
It is through faith in the power of the blood of Christ alone that God has brought salvation to us. John 1:12 says, “To all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”
Receive Him, believe in Him, and He will save you. That is God’s eternal promise to you.
If you have already received salvation in Christ, seek His will for you as you steep yourself in the Scriptures. Ask God to build your life and your worldview on the solid foundation of Biblical truth, and He will guide you through the storms which are still to come in this life.
As the church, our call is to be salt and light, and we do this not by sleeping on duty, but as we worship, pray, serve, and witness together in obedience to the Word of God.
Paul encourages us in Ephesians 5, “At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’” (Ephesians 5:8-14)
Homegroup Study Notes
Read Jonah 1:4-6
How has the Lord sent a “violent storm” into your life for the express purpose of drawing you back to Himself?
How do the desperate prayers of the sailors to their own (false) gods reflect the attitudes of many unbelievers in times of great distress?
In which ways do we make futile attempts to try and fix our own problems by throwing our cargo (the material things in life) overboard?
Jonah’s sins of rebellion and disobedience were the cause of the storm which threatened the lives of all on board. How does our sin have a “ripple effect” on the lives of those around us?
Jonah, the one person on board who knew the one, true God (see verse 9), was fast asleep below decks.
What does this teach us about the current state of the church today, and what can we do to prevent ourselves from sleeping on duty?