Jonah 2
When we last left our reluctant prophet Jonah, he had been rescued from the seas through the agency of a great fish, and we were told that he was kept there for three days and three nights. This period of being entombed in that sea creature is compared by Christ to His time in an earthly tomb prior to His resurrection. Almost the entirety of the second chapter of Jonah comes to us from inside the fish. There Jonah is praying to the Lord, not so much seeking deliverance from the animal, as we might have thought, but praising God for the deliverance that He has already received.
Jonah does speak in the opening prayer about crying out to the Lord from a “belly,” but it is not the inside of a living creature that he refers to, but the belly of the place of death, called here Sheol. In other words, Jonah is acknowledging that he was effectively a dead man when he was cast out onto the seas. The prayer that he speaks from the belly of the fish refers to his earlier cry of distress in the waters. From there, as a man who was as good as dead, he called out to God, and the Lord heard his cry.
Jonah recounts his desperate situation. He remembers the waves passing over him. He who ran away from God to avoid a mission he despised, now felt as if he had been driven away from God’s sight. Man may wish to run away from God to avoid His commandments, yet he still likes the idea that God would stay close to him to bring about any necessary deliverance in this dangerous world.
Despite the fact that it appeared that all hope was lost, and despite the deadly sentence that Jonah acknowledges, the words that came out of his mouth were words of faith, and an expectation of divine help. He says, “I shall again look upon your holy temple.” What was his hope? Did he expect that he would again be in the
This seems to be the case, as the prophet reflects upon the eternal realities beyond this mortal world. He was about to die. He was going down into the world of the grave, where he would be locked up forever. As his life is fainting away, the Lord heard his prayer. Where was God when He listened to Jonah? The prophet says that the Lord was in His holy temple, and that this man’s prayer went up to Him into that most sacred place. As Jonah’s life was fainting away, God heard his cries in the Lord’s heavenly sanctuary.
Through Jonah’s praise from within the belly of the fish we learn that God heard Jonah’s vow. What this means is that the prophet asked for more mortal life, and promised that if the Lord was pleased to give him more years on this earth, that he would pay what he had vowed to the Lord; that “with the voice of thanksgiving” he would “sacrifice” to God. He does this even from his temporary place of rescue inside a living creature. He says these glorious words of testimony, “Salvation belongs to the Lord!” Then God prevailed upon his servant the fish to release his servant the prophet on an appropriate piece of dry land.
When our Savior was facing the end of His earthly days on a Roman cross, He also cried out to God with the words of a vow. In quoting the opening of Psalm 22, Jesus was not merely pointing to His condition as one who had been forsaken by His father. The Psalm is a song of praise. It includes a faithful expectation of deliverance, and a promised payment of praise yet to come, not only from the suffering Psalmist, but from a people who would be under the authority of this King, some of whom He acknowledged as being yet unborn.
As Jonah was heard in the roaring waves, Christ was heard as He suffered on the cross. As the fish was a place of praise for Jonah, the empty grave has become an astounding fact of evidence for us of the resurrection of our King. But there is something more than this. There is even the victory of the soul over the place of dead bodies. Where was Jesus after the cross and before the resurrection? His body was in the belly of a grave, but His Spirit was in
posted by Pastor Magee @ 12:00 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home