Harry Foster
"Salvation is of the Lord" Jonah 2:9
THE true Christian has no problems about the story of Jonah. The Lord Jesus settled those once and for all. It is a noteworthy fact that our Lord, without any systematic teaching on the inspiration of the Bible, made it plain that some of the most disputed passages of the Old Testament are wholly reliable. These include the Creation (Matthew 19:4), the Flood (Matthew 24:37), the prophet Daniel (Matthew 24:15) and this story of Jonah when He authenticated not only the prophet's successful mission to Nineveh, but also his strange experience inside the huge fish (Matthew 12:40-41).
We therefore do not question the facts, but we may well ask why this book is given a place among the prophets since -- unlike the rest -- he has no words of correction or exhortation for us. Clearly it is the story itself which is meant to convey God's message to us, and perhaps that message is best summed up in Jonah's own words, spoken from the depths: "Salvation is of the Lord". His deliverance was so wonderful that Christ chose it as an illustration of His own death and resurrection, and it was so undeserved that the worst of us, in the most hopeless circumstances, can take heart of grace from its message.
I suggest four obvious truths which emerge from this little book:
1. However unlovely a man may be, God still loves him.
One of the simplest items of evidence that this book is inspired is found in the fact that it is not allowed to end with chapter three. What a dramatic climax that would have made! What a success story for God's servant! The first three chapters tell of the prophet's deliverance, his recovered ministry and the mass turning to God of those who heard him preach. If this had been written by human skill, it would have ended on that high note. But it does not do so. We go straight on into chapter four and find the whole chapter devoted to the anticlimax of Jonah's sulky petulance. 'Is this a man of God?', we ask. 'Can a preacher so mightily used by the Spirit of God be such a mean complainer, such an unchristlike character?' The answer is here for us all to see. He can. And since the Bible acts as a mirror, we may have to confess that we see something of the corruption in our own natural hearts as we read this sad disclosure of unexpected depths of meanness and ingratitude in the prophet.
We know that he resisted God's original call to go to Nineveh, but we also know why he did so. A man may perhaps be forgiven for unbelief in such a situation, so if Jonah had argued that the Ninevites were so corrupt that they would not pay any attention to his call to repentance, [35/36] we might have felt some sympathy with him, even though this proved not to be the case. Not that he could be justified in such an assumption, for we are told to despair of no man; but at least his disobedience might be a little more excusable.
Or if he feared for his own life, we would not feel so critical of him, since most of us shrink from activities which expose us to mortal danger. If Jonah had run away from God's will because he was afraid of being martyred, who of us could blame him for that? The reason, however, was quite different from this. He later freely admitted that his reluctance to obey was not due to either of these emotions but simply and solely to the fact that he did not want God to spare the city: "Was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I hasted to flee into Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and full of compassion" (4:2). Grace for me, but condemnation for them!
Quite possibly, as a true patriot, Jonah might have been apprehensive that this heathen power would overthrow the kingdom of Israel. It may be that he presented to God arguments -- and very good arguments -- as to why it would be risky to spare Nineveh and much safer to destroy it. We usually have pious arguments when we try to reason ourselves out of obedience to God's demands on us. The blunt truth was, however, that Jonah was a man of mean and selfish character, a most unlovable type.
We may perhaps attribute better things to him when we read of his advice to the frightened sailors, for this seems unselfish enough, and we are ready to forgive his original reluctance when we find him accepting the second chance of obeying God, setting out on his mission and faithfully delivering his message to the city ripe for judgment. His subsequent outburst, though, confirms our worst fears as to the baseness of his character; he is "exceedingly displeased" (4:1), not because his mission had failed, but because it had succeeded beyond any human expectation. Four times over we are told that he was angry, angry with God, when he saw a mass repentance and a sensational demonstration of the very words he had earlier uttered about himself: "Salvation is of the Lord". How nasty can a man be! Even a believing man!
Jonah forgot the grace that had delivered him and even told God to His face that it would have been better to have left him in the fish: "Therefore now, O Lord, take I beseech thee, my life from me ..." (v.3). We are aghast that any man, above all a most successful preacher, should talk to God like that. We find ourselves in sudden agreement with the last part of his outburst: "it is better for me to die than to live!" Amen, Jonah! We quite agree. You really are not fit to be allowed to cumber God's earth!
Yet God loved him. Our heading reminds us that even the most unlovely man of the covenant is loved by our faithful Jehovah. We are therefore not surprised that God did not lose patience with him but took the trouble to remonstrate with this sulky servant of His, trying to teach him a lesson of Godlike compassion. What condescending grace was this! The great God of creation, Maker and Sustainer of the universe, took the trouble to order the sun and an east wind and to prepare a shady bush and a destructive worm, in a patient effort to teach Jonah a spiritual lesson. In that lesson He gave the complaining prophet an indication of His own compassion towards His needy and ignorant creatures. How much Jonah profited from that lesson we are not told. So far as we know his last words on the subject were: "I do well to be angry, even unto death" (v.9). What an unattractive character! Yes, but he was loved. That is miracle of divine grace. Salvation is indeed of the Lord.
2. However distant a man may be from God he can still pray.
We pass over the first chapter and move into the prayer which "Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly" (2:1). This is poetry, so one imagines that it was composed after he was safely back on dry land, but it is clearly his painstaking and elaborate effort to record for us what were his thoughts and words as he found himself "in the belly of hell" (v.2).
Possibly the prophet used poetry as his medium because he felt that anything less would be inadequate to describe the horror and hopelessness of his situation. For the moment we focus on his realisation of how far he now was from God. In his original folly he was trying to get as far away from God as possible, as he himself confessed to the sailors (1:10). For their part they were horrified at his madness. Let us not regard him as an ignorant fellow who [36/37] imagined that Jehovah was a mere tribal god, limited to his own circumscribed territory. Oh no, Jonah's creed was correct enough, as he himself confessed: "I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven which hath made the sea and the dry land" (v.9). Unbelief, however, is the most illogical of mentalities; it induced him to imagine that he could hide from God by travelling as far West as possible. Geographically he never got very far -- God saw to that -- but spiritually he became as remote as a living man can be.
See how he describes his predicament: "Cast out from before thine eyes", "I went down to the bottoms of the mountains, the earth with her bars closed upon me for ever". With the weeds wrapped around his head and with all God's waves and billows passing over him, he made the confession that "they that regard lying vanities forsake their own mercy" (v.8), which he had certainly done. With his life in "the pit" and his soul fainting within him (vv.6-7) he must have felt that no living human being could be farther away from God than he was.
But God is infinitely gracious. He made Jonah aware that he could still pray, even if it was from that most unlikely prayer chamber. And God could still hear, for Jonah reports: "Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice" (v.2). Hope was not altogether extinguished, for he tells us: "I said, I am cast out from before thine eyes; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple" (v.4). Even in those dark depths he was able to remember the Lord and to seek again the mercy which he had so foolishly forsaken when he regarded the lying vanity of his own self-will. "And my prayer came in unto thee" he thankfully exclaimed, "into thy holy temple" (v.7). The subsequent arrival safe on dry land was proof positive that God had answered his prayer but, even before that happened, he appears to have had the inner comfort of knowing that God had not rejected his appeal for mercy.
The message is for us all. In the darkest hour or the most hopeless circumstances, even when the matter has been aggravated by our own folly, we can still look towards the holy home of God in heaven and still be confident that our prayers are accepted there through Jesus Christ and will be answered. It only needed a word: "the Lord spoke to the fish ..." (v.10). That is the one verse in the chapter which is not poetry. It is plain fact. God spoke the word of salvation. And why did He do it? He did it in answer to a sinner's penitent prayer. So whether we are in fact distant from God or whether it is only that we feel remote and downcast, we learn from Jonah's story that our prayer will be accepted and will receive a swift and effective reply. Salvation is of the Lord.
3. However deep a man may be, God can still lift him.
As we have seen, the language used by Jonah was alarmingly desperate. He had gone down into the depths; "the waters compassed me about even to the soul" (v.5). Not only was he in trouble, but the trouble was in him. He was down as low as a man could possibly be. What made it worse was that he knew that he was there by his own fault. It was his sin which had taken him down "to the bottoms of the mountains".
We cannot but marvel that the Lord Jesus deliberately chose this story as an illustration of the depths which He Himself would plumb. As He considered this chapter, He must have been greatly troubled as His holy soul registered the horror of a man who had been cast away from the presence of God because of his sin. In the Gospel passage the Lord identified Himself with the prophet's experience: "as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a sea-monster; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40).
In the same passage Christ describes Himself as "a greater than Jonah". The surface meaning of the passage must be at once rejected, for the same could be said of any of the other prophets. They were all greater than Jonah, so that there could be no point in the Lord's claim to be greater than this individual. I conclude, therefore, that what the Lord did mean was that His deliverance from the depth, His resurrection, was greater even than the miracle which happened to Jonah. It certainly was! The Lord Jesus went down into deeper depths than all these verses can describe and, like Jonah, He went down under the load of great sins. Unlike Jonah, though, it was not His own sins which separated Him from the Father, for He was sinless, but He was submerged under the indescribable [37/38] weight of the sin of the world. No wonder He sweat as it were great drops of blood at the grim prospect!
But the Word of God offers comfort, even in the darkest hour, and to the Lord Jesus the story of Jonah spoke of lifting from the depths, of a power which is able to raise a man even from the deepest grave. If the Lord Jesus was greater than Jonah in His sufferings, He was infinitely greater in His experience of God's lifting power. He had to wait the full three days, and He was fully committed to do so, but when God's moment came He was raised by the glory of the Father. And it is He who offers that same power to every believer. Jonah illustrates the fact; the Lord Jesus confirms it and makes it real; that however deep a man may be, God can lift him. Salvation is of the Lord.
We remember that Paul longed to know more of "the power of His resurrection" (Philippians 3:10). This suggests to us that Jonah's story speaks of something more than the first deliverance which comes to the repentant sinner when he first believes -- though it includes that. The unfolding of the Christian life involves ever fresh experiences of fellowship with Christ in His death, experiences which provide God with opportunities of demonstrating in us the might of His resurrection power. By all means let us allow Jonah's story to tell the sinner that salvation is full and free, and by all means let the faulty saint be encouraged to look to God for restoration, but the full message of Jonah to Christians is surely what Paul meant when he claimed: "we are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh" (2 Corinthians 4:11). Every day, however low we may be brought, the Word of God assures us that there is a lifting from the depths for us. Salvation is of the Lord.
4. However much a man may have failed, God can still restore him.
"The word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time ..." (3:1). These simple words have so often been used by the Holy Spirit to console and inspire believers who are conscious of having failed in the matter of obedience. It may be that the apostle Peter derived comfort from them. He certainly is an excellent example of how the Lord can not only forgive our failure but renew our call to service. I would imagine that there are few of us who can claim to have given prompt and immediate response to God's first call to us. Our flight from His will may not have been as blatant as Jonah's but, like him, we have been all too ready to seize on apparent guidance -- a suitable ship, a provision of passage money -- to justify our moving off in the opposite direction from the revealed will of God. Jonah is not such an unusual character after all, but a rather typical specimen of the average believer who has not learned the discipline of prompt obedience.
It may sound romantic, but it is seldom easy to give such obedience. Many centuries later, in this same seaside town of Joppa, the apostle Peter received a call to carry the gospel to those whom he regarded as unsuitable outsiders. He was in a similar predicament to that of Jonah. For a time he argued with Christ, saying: "Not so, Lord" (Acts 10:14). Happily he capitulated to the Lord's sovereignty and went to Caesarea, with results almost as startling as Jonah's mission to Nineveh. But it was not easy, and it was not uncontested, as every obedient servant of Christ discovers.
The special message here, though, is for those who have been running away from the will of God, have regretted it and found forgiveness, and yet are tempted to feel that they are now disqualified from further service. To them Jonah's story brings the heartening message that however much a man may have failed, God still has work for him to do. It may be that, like Jonah, he can be entrusted with the very task he formerly rejected. It often happens like that. Or it may be that the second call has different features. That is God's business.
One amazing truth emerges, though, and this is that somehow God is able to make use of our past failures to further His own purposes. Here is a new factor in what we now do or Him. This is typical of sovereign grace; it not only pardons the failure but incorporates values from it into the new mission. Can anyone doubt that Jonah's ordeal, and quite possibly even his physical appearance occasioned by it, gave powerful re-inforcement to his message? Let us be under no misapprehension. It does matter whether we are obedient or not. It matters to us, for refusal to obey God's will always brings loss. In addition to his harrowing experiences, Jonah forfeited the passage money he had paid [38/39] and may even have lost his luggage. The point is, though, that God did not lose. He gained. He was able to send as a messenger a man so clearly owing everything to grace that the message had an even more powerful impact on its hearers than it may have done otherwise,
These, however, are the secret things of God which belong to Him alone. The clear and simple message which is for us all is that however much we may have failed -- or feel that we have -- God can take us up and use us if we newly commit ourselves to Him.
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