I don’t know about you, but when life is going well, my prayer life often slips because there’s no tragedy or difficult circumstance forcing me to rely on my Father. On the other hand, prayer has always been the easiest when times are the hardest because that’s when I realize just how acutely I need the Lord. Jonah found himself in the hardest of hard times—he was trapped in the belly of a fish. Certainly, it was time to pray!

Verses 4–6 record the first part of Jonah’s prayer. Here he models how to cry out to the Lord at our darkest moments—even if our own decisions caused the calamity. The most encouraging part of this prayer is Jonah’s opening, where he declares that the Lord heard his cries: “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” (v. 2). What a joy that God heard Jonah’s cry and responded to him. And what joy that God hears our cries even “from deep in the realm of the dead” (v. 2)! In this sudden reversal, Jonah must have been relieved that he could not hide from God!

In verse 3 Jonah acknowledges God’s power and sovereignty—it was God who “hurled [Jonah] into the depths.” And in verse 4 Jonah expresses his trust that he would be rescued from the fish’s belly: “I will look again toward your holy temple.” Despite the gravity of Jonah’s situation, and even though he alone caused it, he knew the Lord would deliver him. In verse 6 he declares that “you, LORD my God, brought my life up from the pit.”

Donate to Today in the Word: https://give.todayintheword.org/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin called human nature “a perpetual factory of idols.” We are always looking for something or someone to worship, and it is all too rare that we acknowledge what Jonah says at the end of his prayer from inside the fish: “Salvation comes from the LORD” (v. 9).

But before Jonah comes to this bold declaration, he recounts that “when my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, LORD” (v. 7). In contrast to praying to the Lord, Jonah declared that “those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them” (v. 8). Not many of us would consider ourselves the same sort of idolaters as the pagan sailors who repented and turned to the Lord in Jonah 1. After all, we might not bow down in worship to physical idols. But as John Calvin reminds us, we are constantly producing one idol after another. Perhaps that idol is wealth or work, alcohol or food—anything that we look to in order to fulfill us, to satisfy us, to save us.

Jonah, in his darkest hour, reminds us that “salvation comes from the LORD” (v. 9). The word in Hebrew for salvation is yeshua. We see this name for Jesus in Matthew chapter 1 when an angel of the Lord appears to Joseph to assuage his fears about Mary. The angel says, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). This name, Jesus, is the English translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Jonah uses: Yeshua. Not only is Jonah’s salvation from the Lord, salvation for all of us is from the Lord, because Jesus lived a sinless life and died a substitutionary death on a Roman cross for our sins. What a gift!

Donate to Today in the Word: https://give.todayintheword.org/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lot of people struggle with this part of Jonah’s story. How could a man live in the belly of a “huge fish” (v. 17) for “three days and three nights” (2:1)? Preposterous! But when I hear that, I shrug my shoulders and say, “Jesus is God in the flesh, and He lived a sinless life, died for my sins, and was raised to life on the third day!” Now that is preposterous! The God-man dying for the likes of you and me? The perfect Son of God willingly giving His life so we might once again draw near to the Lord? That’s wild—and it’s absolutely true!

In 1:17–2:1 we read that Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, and there he prayed to the Lord. We’ll read his actual prayer over the next few days, but first let’s focus on an exchange Jesus had with the Pharisees (read Matthew 12:38–42). The Pharisees demanded to see a miraculous sign from Jesus, something that would definitively prove that He was who He said He was—the Messiah and Son of God (v. 38). Jesus responded that the only sign they would get was “the sign of the prophet Jonah” (v. 39). Jesus continued, “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” (v. 40). Then Jesus told the Pharisees that the Ninevites would condemn the Pharisees because “they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here” (v. 41). Jesus, of course, was talking about Himself! Jesus is greater than the reluctant Jonah, and if the Ninevites believed Jonah, then surely the Pharisees (and we today!) should believe Jesus’ message of repentance and trust in God.

Donate to Today in the Word: https://give.todayintheword.org/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.