Most of life’s conflicts have an outer front and an inner front. The outer front is the storm that people can see, the circumstances that rattle us. The inner front is the hidden storm, the violent movements of the soul. Jonah certainly faced an external conflict. At his own request the sailors, whom he first hoped would help him escape his divine commission, had thrown him into an angry sea. At the end of the first chapter Jonah is literally drowning.

But Jonah’s soul was also agitated. “In the struggle of faith,” says John Calvin, “there are internal conflicts.”1 Jonah sensed, perhaps for the first time, that he was officially not in control of his life. He finally seemed to take seriously the battle for his soul. This conflict is a turning point in Jonah’s life. Don’t expect perfection. Jonah’s behavior in Nineveh is massively disappointing. In the second half of the book it is evident that his heart is still painfully out of tune from God’s. Jonah has only “a small beginning of [the] obedience” God requires of us.2 But, after this crisis, Jonah was ready to go to Nineveh. He was willing to listen to God. He had quit running. Even reluctant obedience is an improvement over brazen rebellion. Like Jacob, Jonah wrestled with God and his life was changed.

By understanding Jonah’s crisis we can learn to grow through life’s storms. The part of the narrative neatly bookended by references to the great fish presents five phases to Jonah’s internal struggle of faith.

Jonah Despaired of His Life

Scripture both states and poetically describes the context of Jonah’s prayer as a drowning scene. When the sailors grabbed Jonah to throw him overboard everyone on the ship believed they were carrying out an execution. Jonah wasn’t being dramatic: the floods truly surrounded him and the waves went over his head (Jon. 2:3). The deep closed around him. The sea was suffocating him (v. 5). Jonah “called out to the Lord” (v. 2, English Standard Version) as a man who was being buried alive under water.

So confident was Jonah of his imminent death that he could say, “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried” (v. 2). Sheol is the realm of the dead. Jonah’s language makes clear that he believed he was leaving this earth: “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever” (v. 6). The pit from which God brought back Jonah’s life “signifies the grave or realm of the dead . . . He was not simply spared from serious risk. He was actually snatched up from the grave, as it were.”3 Jonah’s crisis was a death sentence. In God’s hands it was also a much needed gift. Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Most of the grand truths of God have to be learned by trouble; they must be burned unto us with the hot iron of affliction, otherwise we will not truly receive them . . . We discover many secrets in the caverns of the ocean, which though we had soared to heaven, we never could have known.”4 How can this thought encourage you in your trouble? How is God revealing your weakness to manifest his strength? What pressure is he putting on you to make you cry out to him? Thank God that he puts upon all of his children something like a sentence of death “to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9).

God Forced Jonah to Reflect

All at once Jonah could breathe. Not well, probably. But well enough. Eventually it became clear to Jonah: “The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jon. 1:17). As relieved as he was to be alive, Jonah had entered a time of solitary confinement. God could easily have rescued Jonah less dramatically. He could have placed his chastened prophet back on deck, in the company of a captive audience of crew members, with a stiff breeze blowing the ship back to Joppa. Instead, he was alone in a dark, damp, smelly cell.

What did Jonah do in the fish?

The answer might elude those of us whose minds have been poisoned to fear solitary times of reflection. “Jonah is in the fish thinking, learning,” and probably more psychologically alert than he has ever been.5 Jonah’s predicament in the fish invites us to answer this question: “What do you do when you can’t do anything?” When you are left alone because your social plans fell through? When you are threatened by the potentially paralyzing fear that all your best options have been eliminated? When your conscience is so troubled that everything you do feels wrong? Jonah had been busy doing. Now he had to be. He had to face the stern morning of consequences, alone, in the reflection room God had provided.

What if Jonah had a smartphone while he was in the belly of the fish?

To put it differently, are we even capable of experiencing the kind of thoughtful, undistracted moments that are essential for growth? We are increasingly being warned that are minds are becoming “wrecked by constant distraction . . . unfamiliar with concentration.”6 Psychologically, we fear boredom. So we do what we can to avoid it. But if we are terrified of being bored we will rarely engage in the kind of deep thinking necessary for rich self-knowledge.

Jonah had no choice: God locked him inside the monastery of a great fish, alone in a dark, tight place with just his thoughts. He found that being bored can be life changing. We do have a choice. We need to resist the urge to fritter away with digital distractions potentially life-changing solitary moments. We need to find ways to engage in the historic disciplines of silence, meditation, solitude, and self-examination.

Jonah Faced God’s Anger over His Sin

When Jonah declared to the sailors God’s will—“hurl me into the sea . . . it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you”—he was accepting God’s death penalty against rebels. Let’s be blunt. Jonah wasn’t merely drowning. God was waterboarding his prophet for his disobedience. Jonah acutely perceived that “he was utterly cast away by God.”7 The runaway prophet had accomplished more than he bargained for. He had wanted to flee from God (1:3). Now, as he sank beneath the water reality set in: “I am driven away from your sight” (Jon. 2:4). When Jonah’s soul fainted within him (v. 7) his lungs weren’t merely losing oxygen; his heart was losing hope. His soul fainted within him. Calvin reads the phrase like this: Jonah’s soul recoiled upon him. His anxiety stirred up into an incoherent mess without any hope of rescue.8 His “soul collapsed and fell in upon itself.”9

Jonah was slowly dying, as he felt it, under God’s angry hand. “He was almost sunk down to hell.”10 Jonah wants us to know that he was as good as dead, and not just physically. As he plumbed the depths of the sea he entered a sort of spiritual hell; “he was coming to see something of his own wretched condition and his spiritual bankruptcy.”11 He became terrified to lose God’s smiling face. Only a miracle could save him from drowning. It would take a similar miracle to save him from eternally self-destructing.

Have you had this experience? Forget about the specifics. The details and severity of your story don’t have to mesh with Jonah’s. But like both Timothy and Paul you must come to know yourself as a hell-deserving sinner. If you’ve always assumed that you deserve God’s kindness it may be a sign that you are trusting in your sense of deserving and not in Christ.

Jonah “Remembered the Lord”

For the first time in this book we hear someone cry out not to a god, or even to the true God, but to “my God” (2:6). Jonah “came to himself ” (Luke 15:17). By faith he realized that how things were was not how they had to be. He was a guilty sinner. He had messed up his life. But even from that far country, in that tight place, Jonah saw God as the rewarder of those who diligently seek him (Heb. 11:6). He would again look toward God’s temple (Jon. 2:4). Faith allowed him to hope. “He believed. He did not perceive.” He looked through his circumstances to God’s promises. Faith is not oblivious to despair. How could he escape feeling despair, squeezed as he was into the belly of the fish? But by faith “you outlive you live down—your despair.”12 God moved Jonah to declare that “salvation belongs to the Lord” (v. 9).

Have you? Faith is a hopeful surrender to the God of power and grace.

God Gave Jonah New Life

“The Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon dry land” (2:10). A man who had, by all appearances, drowned to death was alive again. As in creation God spoke and life sprang from non-life. Jonah foreshadows the experience of every converted sinner.

He also foreshadows the experience of the Savior of every converted sinner. Is there a closer thematic scriptural parallel than the Gospel writers’ descriptions of the cross and the resurrection? The creed teaches us to confess: Jesus “descended into hell.” But the theme of Christ’s descent was played out a millennium earlier. Jonah went down to Joppa (1:3), down into the ship (1:3), and down to the bottom of the sea (2:6). Jonah descended into “the belly of hell” (2:2, King James Version). This terrible phrase summarizes Jesus’ whole state of humiliation; down, down, down, into hell he went. He suffered “unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul, on the cross but also earlier.”13 In his descent into hell Christ was truly “under the power of death.”14 In his soul Jesus tasted the pain of hell.15 In his death Jesus felt “in himself the anger and severe judgment of God, even as if he had been in the extreme torments of hell, and, therefore, cried with a loud voice, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46).”16 One sixteenth-century Reformed confession says that in his descent Christ underwent “with the multitude in the nether regions, the horror of eternal death as if hand in hand with them.”17

But Christ wasn’t held down by death. Instead “He battled with the power of hell, to break and destroy it.”18 Because Christ suffered as the innocent one, hell had no proper hold on him; he had to be released! Calvin reminds us that the Father was never angry with Jesus. “For how could he have been indignant against his Son whom he loved so much, and in whom he was so well pleased?”19 Christ felt God’s anger because of how truly he took our sins upon him. But even on the cross the Father was pleased with his Son. From eternity past the Holy Trinity covenanted to redeem the elect through the humility and exaltation of the Son. As Jesus sunk into hell God’s rescue plan was accomplished (John 19:28). Christ could truly say “It is finished.” God’s justice has been satisfied. Sin’s curse has been cancelled. The believer’s righteousness has been perfected. Could the Father be any prouder? Because of Christ’s innocence he would endure the cross and take up again the glory of the Godhead. Christ emerged from the grave the victor over sin and Satan!

When Jonah stepped out of the fish he symbolized new life coming out of death. Imagine the sun breaking through the clouds of an unnaturally terrible storm. More important, God’s face is shining. The optimistic reader will even anticipate that things are not quite as hopeless for Nineveh as the first verse of this book suggested. Life can come from death. God is the author of resurrection stories. Those who believe in him are delivered from spiritual death (John 11:25–26) and anticipate the resurrection of the body. Jonah helps us anticipate that day when God will say the word and the domains of death will give up their dead (Rev. 20:13).

What can you do with this? You can love the Lord because of his deep love for you. You can start walking with God according to his will. You can begin to pay the vow that you made when you entrusted your life to God’s care. You can prepare for God to ask hard things from you. You can know that God never asks anything from you apart from the risen and reigning Christ who energizes your life.

 

1. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets,vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1989), 79.

2. Heidelberg Catechism Q/A 114.

3. Douglas Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, Word Biblical Commentary 31, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glen W. Barker (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 477.

4. Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Sermons, vol. 3: Salvation of the Lord (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House 1987), 194.

5. Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, 473.

6. Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 159.

7. Calvin, Commentaries, 79.

8. Calvin, Commentaries, 84.

9. Hugh Martin, The Prophet Jonah: His Character and Mission to Nineveh (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1958), 196.

10. Calvin, Commentaries, 85.

11. Sinclair Ferguson, Man Overboard: The Story of Jonah (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2015), 35.

12. Martin, Prophet Jonah, 190–91.

13. Heidelberg Catechism, Q/A 44.

14. Westminster Larger Catechism, Q/A 50.

15. Emden Examination of Faith, The Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in English Translation, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), 47–48.

16. Confession of Congregation of Geneva, Reformed Confessions, 2:98.

18. Waldensian Confession of Mérindol (1543), The Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in English Translation, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), 453.

19. Calvin’s Catechism (1545), Reformed Confessions, 1:478.

20. Calvin’s Catechism (1537), Reformed Confessions, 1:370.

William Boekestein is the pastor of Immanuel Fellowship Reformed Church in Kalamazoo, MI.