A Commentary in Simple English on Jonah |
Chapter 2 So in 2: 1, Jonah prays. He ought to have prayed on the ship. Now at least he prays inside the fish. We can pray to God anywhere. What is more, God hears us! The captain had told Jonah to pray to ‘your god’. Now Jonah prays to his God! Jonah’s ‘distress’ or ‘anguish’ (verse 2) is the fact that he is inside the great fish. The inside of the fish is like a grave or ‘Sheol’. Yet Jonah knows that this is not just an ordinary fish. God has saved Jonah from the sea. We may find that God saves us from one trouble, yet then we seem to be in even worse trouble. God finished His work with Jonah. God will finish our salvation, too. In verse 3 Jonah says that it was not just the sailors who threw him into the sea. The sailors did God’s will. Jonah gives us pictures here to show what happened to him. The waves were not just the sea’s waves. They were God’s waves. Verse 4 shows that Jonah’s thoughts have changed. Once he tried to get away from God to Tarshish. Now he seems to be in a place where even God cannot see him. His faith and hope in God rises up and he hopes to look at the temple of God again. [2.1] Verse 5 and the first half of verse.6. give us more pictures to show what had happened to Jonah. It was not just that Jonah was in the fish or whale. The fish took him down into the deep parts of the sea. Plants grow on the ‘sea bed’ at the bottom of the sea. These plants were all round Jonah. In the second half of verse.6, Jonah’s hope becomes stronger. So far Jonah has gone down and down. Now at last he begins to come up. God brings his life up from the grave. Jonah must have found it hard to breathe, but just as his senses failed him he thought about the LORD, Jehovah, his God. God’s holy temple here means heaven. Jonah prayed from deep in the sea. God heard in heaven. How sad it is that Jonah did not pray when he first heard God’s call to go to Nineveh. Jonah had heard the sailors when they prayed to their false ‘gods’. (1:5). So he thinks about them like that in verse 5. He does not know what happened after they threw him into the sea. He does not know that they had let go of their false ‘gods’. (1:16) So they now enjoy God’s goodness. In verse.9, there is something else which Jonah does not know. Jonah does not know that in his worship of God, he will do just the same as the sailors. We may all learn from this. Jonah had no idea how much good he had done when he spoke to the sailors on the ship, and when he was ready to die in the sea to save them. There are times when we speak in God’s name, and we feel that we have done no good. Sometimes we have done far more good than we shall ever know about. Jonah may even have thought: ‘I am safe here in the great fish. That ship has broken up in the storm by now and the sailors will all be dead’. Jonah did not know how quickly the storm had died down. We need to think about the last words of Jonah’s prayer. ‘Salvation comes from the LORD’, Jehovah. This is the work that we expect God to do. The Lord had saved Jonah. He had saved those sailors too. Jonah should now wish and pray for Nineveh to be saved as well. God also judges and He punishes men. Isaiah calls this God’s strange work (Isa 20:21) God has not spoken to Jonah since 1:1-2. Jonah has spoken to God in prayer. Now God speaks not to Jonah, but to the fish (verse.10). The fish knows what it has to do. The fish obeys God. It is sick on the beach . This must have been at least as nasty as any other part of Jonah’s experience. So Jonah finds himself on dry land again. |
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