Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish is one of the hidden jewels of Scripture. Most commentators refer to Jonah’s prayer as a psalm. And it’s true that the prayer fits the pattern of other biblical psalms. More than that, Jonah’s psalm draws heavily from particular thoughts and phrases in the Psalter.

But Jonah’s psalm is unique. It is one of the most contextualized prayers in the Bible. Very few of the psalms suggest a specific context. In general the psalms “are composed not for a particular moment, but for all moments.”1 We don’t have to know exactly what was happening to the psalmist in order to be moved by the psalm. But context can help. This prayer is nestled in the center of a gripping historical narrative. It uniquely links a compelling prayer to a clear circumstance. And so it gives one of the most concrete examples of prayer in the midst of the powerful trials believers face. It helps us answer this vital question of all Christian disciples: How can I learn to pray (Luke 11:1), especially when I am in trouble?

The question’s first answer has to do with how Jonah clearly learned to pray.

Pray the Psalms2

Jonah’s prayer shows that he was steeped in the spirituality of the psalms. His initial cry to God and the Lord’s answer is nearly cut and pasted from Psalm 120:1. His drowning in the heart of the sea (Jon. 2:3) harmonizes with Psalm 88:6 (New King James Version): “You have laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the depths.” To describe how God’s waves passed over him he could quote Psalm 42:7. Like David—writing in Psalm 31:22—Jonah felt that he had been cast out of God’s sight. Also, like David, he believed he would again see God’s temple (cf. Jon. 2:4 and Ps. 5:7). David sang of the waters coming up to his neck (Ps. 69:1). Jonah felt the water surround him, even to his soul; the deep closed around him (Jon. 2:5). The rest of Jonah’s psalm contains further proof that the Psalter had been his primary prayer book.

The psalms are so well suited to the challenges of life that Jonah “could not have expressed his thoughts and feelings any better in words of his own.”3 If we think that prayer is more authentic if it isn’t influenced by others we should listen to the historic church. Martin Luther made this remark on the German Psalter: “For indeed the truth is, that everything that a pious heart can desire to ask in prayer, it here finds Psalms and words to match, so aptly and sweetly, that no man—no, nor all the men in the world—shall be able to devise forms of words so good and devout.”4 If you struggle to express yourself in prayer, you too need the psalms. The psalms teach us to pray.5

But we have to use the psalms properly.

It is surprisingly possible to love the psalms, read the psalms, and sing the psalms and not pray like the psalmists. Calvin can say that in the psalms the Holy Spirit has “drawn to life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the . . . emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.”6 But to pray like the psalmists we need to personalize the language that is being modeled for us or the emotions denoted by the words remain outside of us.

We should use the psalms as actual prayers. But following the advice of the Westminster Larger Catechism we should also use the psalms as “pattern[s], according to which we are to make other prayers.”7 The Christian’s calling is to “appropriate” the prayer of the psalms “to such an extent that it becomes his own sacred reading, so that this continual meditation may at last impregnate your soul and form it . . . to its own image.” The worshipper “no longer recites it as the work of the prophet but as though he were himself the author, and as his personal prayer.”8 “A thorough immersion in the Psalms is the primary way that Christians acquire fluency in the personal, intimate, honest, earthy language of prayer and take our place in the great company of our praying ancestors.”9 Fluency is important; prayer is more than learning the right rules or memorizing beautiful phrases. It is the natural language of the heart.

Jonah’s prayer, like the other psalms, is a model prayer. It could be memorized and prayed. But it must be internalized and reproduced. The psalms assure us that God understands our emotions better than we do and that God is more than able to handle the full outpouring of everything we could think and feel.10 They, therefore, give us license to imitate the pathos of the psalms in our own contexts.

So how does this particular psalm teach us to pray?

   

Pray Honestly

What Stephen King says about writing applies also to prayer: be real or don’t bother. “The key to writing good dialogue is honesty.”11 True, right? No one wants to read a story that seems disingenuous, that is unbelievable, whose characters seem one-dimensional. Likewise, God doesn’t want to hear showy prayers that fail to reveal the real us.

Sincerity is one of the most obvious attributes of Jonah’s prayer. He is honest about his affliction (Jon. 2:1). He admits the justice of God’s discipline (2:3). He reveals his inner conflict between feelings of rejection and hope (2:4). He truly meant what he prayed.

Jonah was finally ready to be honest because God had humbled him. By contrast, impersonal prayers might be signs of a calloused heart. Sin “induces hardness and insensibility of heart. It seals up the heart and lips from God. It tends to produce coldness, artificiality, distance, and estrangement of feeling in the believer towards his Father in heaven. There is a sort of proud shame that dislikes to come to the point; it rather deals in vague generalities.”12 Ambiguous and abstract expressions are traits of dishonest, powerless prayer. Pretention and superficiality mock the reality of prayer as dialogue with the living God. But Jonah was past that. Affliction shatters formality; in the state of humility prayer becomes real.

God disciplines us to break down our façades and induce us to cry out to him with all our hearts (Ps. 62:8). Jesus taught his disciples to pray with “heartfelt longing.”13 It is right for us to make plain to God in prayer that we are sad, scared, angry, regretful, embarrassed, uncertain, or otherwise agitated. We can’t hide the truth from him anyway. Jonah teaches this lesson about prayer: “Come to it any way but lightly.”14 Jonah prayed like a man who knew that he was in real trouble and that God was greater than his problems.

Have we grown accustomed to vague, safe, even artificial prayers? Especially in public prayers are we more concerned to preserve our dignity than to plead for help with what matters most to us? As a guest preacher I once asked the congregation for prayer requests. A small boy raised his hand and said, “My daddy doesn’t have a job.” He wasn’t embarrassed about that fact. He didn’t shy away from vulnerability because of what people might think about his dad’s unemployment. He found himself in a crisis that only God could correct. So he came to prayer honestly.

The psalms teach us the art of honest prayer by helping us redirect complaints. Our complaints are evidence of our weightiest felt needs. Too often we voice our complaints in the wrong direction. We complain to people when we should be telling our problems to God.

But to pray honestly we must have the confidence that God cares about our problems and welcomes our honesty. How can we come to him as “sinners, poor and wretched, weak and wounded, sick and sore” unless Jesus “ready stands to save [us], full of pity, love and power”?15

Pray Confidently

To understand Jonah’s confidence in God it helps to see two prayers in this chapter.

The main prayer is the one which Jonah offered up from the belly of the fish. In that tight place Jonah was hopeful for deliverance. “I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay what I have vowed” (v. 9). Jonah is confident because he knows God’s character. “Salvation is of the Lord” (v. 9). He knows that God is a saving God, that salvation is his business. He also prays with confidence because he is aware that God is acting. He knows that he was not swallowed by the fish accidentally. He doesn’t know his future exactly. But he knows that God is acting on his behalf. We can share Jonah’s confidence in the God who is always working out our salvation (Phil. 2:12–13).

What may not be immediately obvious is that within this prayer, Jonah records what he had previously prayed when he was drowning in the water. He paints the scene wonderfully: the floods had overwhelmed him, God’s waves had passed over him, waters surrounded him (v. 3), the deep closed in about him (v. 5), weeds were wrapped around his head. He felt he was nearing the bottom of the sea (v. 6). Verse 4 tells us about a prayer he offered up while he was sinking: “I have been cast out of Your sight; yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.” As he was drowning, with apparently no possibility of rescue, he declared his assurance that he would again be satisfied by God’s presence. Critics allege that Jonah’s prayer must have been written by someone after the entire ordeal and inserted into the narrative since “it is not easy to see its suitability to the fearful position in which the prophet is supposed to utter it.”16 But that is the point! Jonah had come to believe that God is as able to care for him on solid ground or in the swirling sea. God promises to bless prayers that confidently boast in the Lord (Ps. 34:2). Jonah’s prayer gives us the courage to pray boldly. God heard Jonah’s voice (2:2), answered his cries (2:2), and brought up his life from the pit (2:6).

New Testament Christians have even more reason to pray with confidence. Jonah knew less than we do that God meets all our needs in Christ (Phil. 4:19). God “did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32). Paul’s point, tersely stated: “God is for us” (v. 31). God is biased toward us. He is infinitely more favorably disposed toward his children than even the best human father (Luke 11:11). In the context of prayer Jesus says, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more” will your heavenly Father answer your prayers? (Luke 11:13). What is Paul’s takeaway for confident prayer? It is inconceivable that God will not now with Christ “freely give us all things” (Rom. 8:32).

Jonah knew less than we do that the Spirit has been poured out to help God’s children pray. The Spirit gives us confidence to believe that God is for us so that we might approach his throne of grace with boldness (Heb. 4:16). He also enables us to pray always “in the Spirit” (Eph. 6:18); the Spirit helps us pray. More than that, he offers prayers in our stead when we can’t find words to pray, when we might not know we are praying (Rom. 8:26–27). Be encouraged: “Many of us pray far more than we think we are praying.”17

If you are in Christ, you can see in Jonah a faint reflection of how God is working salvation inside and outside of you even during times of trouble. Because of this work you can pray honestly and confidently, knowing that in Christ, the answer to prayers according to God’s will are always yes (2 Cor. 1:20).

Questions

1. Why is Jonah’s prayer a hidden jewel of Scripture?

2. Why are psalms essential to the praying Christian?

3. How can we gain fluency in psalm-like prayer?

4. Show evidence of Jonah’s honesty in prayer. Is this hard for you?

5. How are prayer and complaining both similar and dissimilar?

6. Why can we pray with confidence precisely when we are in trouble?

7. How could it be that “many of us pray far more than we think we are praying”?

1. Douglas Stuart, Hosea—Jonah, Word Biblical Commentary 31, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glen W. Barker (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 471

2. For a brief encouragement on why Christians should pray the Psalms see Christopher Ash, “7 Reasons You Should Pray the Psalms,” August 27, 2018, The Gospel Coalition, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/7-reasons-pray-the-psalms/.

3. Carl Friedrich Keil, The Twelve Major Prophets, vol. 1, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 399.

4. https://www.cprf.co.uk/quotes/martinlutherpsalter.htm#.Xa817ehKgdV.

5. On the way that the Psalms teach us to pray see Daniel R. Hyde, “Continuing in Prayer,” in Faithful and Fruitful: Essays for Elders and Deacons (Middleville, MI: Reformed Fellowship, Inc., 2019), 49–64. For a simple and reliable guide to praying through the Psalms see Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (New York: Viking, 2015).

6. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989), xxxvii.

7.Westminster Larger Catechism, Q/A 187. The catechism’s advice regards the Lord’s Prayer, but the parallels between the Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms suggest that the point of the advice applies also to the Psalms.

8. Quoted in Joel Beeke and Anthony Selvaggio, eds., Sing a New Song: Recovering Psalm Singing for the Twenty-first Century (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), 4.

9. Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 156.

10. He is only a fool who vents all his feelings to mortals. A wise man knows he needs to hold nothing from God (cf. Prov. 29:11).

11. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2010), 185.

12. Hugh Martin, The Prophet Jonah: His Character and Mission to Nineveh (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1958), 199.

13. Heidelberg Catechism, Q/A 116.

14. King, On Writing, 106.

15. Joseph Hart, “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy,” in Trinity Psalter Hymnal (Willow Grove, PA: Trinity Psalter Hymnal Joint Venture, 2018), 439.

16. James Hastings, The Greater Men and Women of the Bible, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1938), 434.

17. Peterson, Practice Resurrection, 74.

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