The Sign of the Prophet in the Deep
On this page
Scripture: Jonah 1–2 (with Matthew 12:38–41)
Before this session, read Jonah 1–2: the call and the flight, the storm and the praying sailors, the great fish, and Jonah’s prayer rising up from the deep. Then read Matthew 12:38–41, where the Lord Jesus makes the sign of Jonah the sign of His own death and resurrection. Read Jonah as the real history He treats it as. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what does it mean that a disobedient prophet, swallowed alive and given back after three days and three nights, becomes a sign pointing straight to the empty tomb?
For just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.
(Matthew 12:40)
The Word and the Flight
The book of Jonah begins like every prophetic book, with the word of the LORD coming to the prophet: The LORD said to Jonah son of Amittai, “Go immediately to Nineveh, that large capital city, and announce judgment against its people because their wickedness has come to my attention” (1:1–2). And then it does something no other prophetic book does. The prophet says no. He does not argue, he does not bargain, he does not ask for a sign of his own; he simply gets up and runs the other way. Instead, Jonah immediately headed off to Tarshish to escape from the commission of the LORD (1:3). Nineveh lay far to the east, up the Tigris in the heart of Assyria; Tarshish was the very end of the known world to the west, as far in the opposite direction as a ship could carry him. Told to go east, Jonah books passage to the farthest possible west. It is one of the most deliberate acts of disobedience in all of Scripture, and the whole book turns on the question of why.
We will see the full answer only in the next session, when Jonah finally says it out loud, but the book lets us feel it building from the first. Nineveh was not just any city; it was the capital of Assyria, the cruelest empire of the age, the power that would one day swallow the northern kingdom of Israel and was already a byword for terror. Jonah did not flee because he was afraid of the Assyrians; he fled because he was afraid the LORD might forgive them. He did not want mercy preached to the enemy. He would rather the great city burn, and he ran to the ends of the earth sooner than carry a word that might save it. Hold that in mind, because it is the wound the whole book is probing: a prophet who loved the LORD but could not stomach the breadth of the LORD’s mercy.
And Jonah was no invented figure. The same prophet appears in the history of the kings: Jeroboam the Second restored the border of Israel … in accordance with the word of the LORD God of Israel announced through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher (2 Kings 14:25). Jonah had prophesied the restoration of Israel’s borders: a prophet of national expansion, of the LORD’s favor toward his own people, of good news for Israel at the expense of her neighbors. That is the man the LORD now sends to preach to Assyria. We can almost feel the offense of it. Jonah had made his name announcing that God would bless Israel and beat back her enemies; now he is told to walk into the enemy capital and announce the judgment that might yet move it to repent and be spared. The prophet of Israel-first is commanded to become the missionary of grace to the cruelest power on earth. No wonder he ran. The God who had used him to enlarge Israel would not be confined to Israel, and Jonah could not bear it.
And watch the direction Jonah moves, for the writer is careful to trace it. The NET’s “traveled” and “went aboard” smooth over a verb the Hebrew repeats on purpose: Jonah goes down to Joppa; he finds a ship and goes down into it; and the descent will keep going, down into the hold below deck to sleep, down into the sea, down to the very bottoms of the mountains (2:6), down to the belly of Sheol itself. Sin always runs downhill. The flight from God is never level ground; it is a descent, step by step, into the deep. And notice the phrase repeated twice in a single verse. The NET says Jonah went to escape from the commission of the LORD and to be far away from the LORD (1:3); the Hebrew says both times, literally, “from the presence of the LORD.” A prophet was one who stood in the LORD’s presence to serve Him, and Jonah was running from that service and from that presence at once. He knew better, of course; he would soon confess that the LORD made the sea and the dry land. A man cannot actually flee the presence of the God who fills heaven and earth. But sin is not rational; it runs anyway, as if there were some corner of creation where the eye of God does not reach. There is not. The psalmist knew it (Where can I flee to escape your presence? Psalm 139:7), and Jonah is about to learn it in the hardest possible school.
Reading Jonah as History
Before we go further into the deep with Jonah, we must say plainly how we are reading this book, because Jonah more than any of the Twelve has been treated as a fable: a moral tale, a parable about prejudice, a story whose fish no grown person is expected to believe really swallowed a man. We will not read it that way, and our reason is not stubbornness but the Lord Jesus Himself. When the experts in the law and the Pharisees demanded a sign, He gave them Jonah, and He treated the account as plain history: For just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights (Matthew 12:40). And He went further: The people of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented when Jonah preached to them (12:41). The Lord Jesus speaks of the men of Nineveh as real men who really repented and will really stand up at the last judgment, which they could hardly do if they had never existed. He gives the sign of His own resurrection in the shape of Jonah’s three days in the deep.
That last point deserves to be pressed, for it is where the stakes of reading Jonah as history become plain. The Lord Jesus chose, of all the signs He might have given, this one: a real man, three real days and nights in the deep, a real coming-up alive. His use of Jonah guarantees the truthfulness of the account, because the Son of God does not ground His promised sign in fiction; a man does not stake the announcement of His own resurrection on a fable. To dismiss Jonah as a fable, then, is to challenge Christ’s own authority and reliability. Yet we must say it precisely. The resurrection does not depend on Jonah as though Jonah were its foundation. Easter stands on God’s own act in raising His Son and on the testimony of the apostles who saw Him alive. Jonah is the God-appointed sign and prophetic pattern that Jesus Himself confirms. We hold the history of Jonah because we hold the word of the One who vouched for it, the One who is Himself the Truth.
So we read Jonah as history, on the authority of the One who is Himself the Truth. But we must say something equally important about where the weight of the book lies, for there is a way of defending Jonah that loses the point in the very act of winning the argument. Many a sermon on Jonah spends all its strength on the fish (on whether a great fish could swallow a man, whether a man could survive three days inside one, what species it might have been) and never arrives at the gospel at all. That is to strain at the mechanics and miss the message. The miracle of the fish is not the point; it is the means. The point is the sign: that a man went down into the deep, as good as dead, and was brought up alive after three days and three nights, and that this is a picture, appointed by God centuries in advance, of the real death, burial, and resurrection of His Son. We will affirm the history without apology, and then we will leave the fish where Scripture leaves it, as the strange instrument of a far greater wonder, and follow the sign all the way to the empty tomb.
The Storm and the Sleeping Prophet
Jonah may flee the presence of the LORD, but the LORD does not let him go. But the LORD hurled a powerful wind on the sea. Such a violent tempest arose on the sea that the ship threatened to break up! (1:4). We should notice at once that the storm is a mercy. It looks like wrath, and it terrifies the sailors, but its purpose is to stop a fleeing prophet before he runs himself clean out of the will of God. The LORD will not let Jonah have his disobedience cheaply; He loves him too much for that. This is the pursuing grace we met in Hosea, the God who hedges the runaway’s road with thorns; here He hedges it with a hurricane. The storm is the hound of heaven on Jonah’s trail.
And then the irony that runs all through this book begins, and it is a stinging one. The pagan sailors, men who worship false gods and have never heard the word of the LORD, behave better than the prophet. Each cries out to his own god; they fling the cargo overboard to lighten the ship; they do everything desperate and devout that frightened men can do. And where is the prophet of the true God? Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold below deck, had lain down, and was sound asleep (1:5). While pagans pray, the prophet sleeps. The captain has to come and wake him with a rebuke that ought to have burned: What are you doing asleep? Get up! Cry out to your god! Perhaps your god might take notice of us so that we might not die! (1:6). A heathen captain preaches to a runaway prophet, telling him to pray. The man who knew the LORD was asleep in the storm; the men who did not know Him were crying out to their gods.
The sailors cast lots to find who is to blame, and Jonah was singled out (1:7), and under their questioning he makes his confession, and it is a magnificent and damning one all at once. I am a Hebrew! And I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land (1:9). Where the NET says “worship,” the Hebrew says “fear”: I fear the LORD. Every word is true, and every word convicts him. He fears the LORD, the God of heaven, the Maker of the very sea now trying to kill them, and he is at this moment running from that God across the Maker’s own ocean. He confesses a theology that condemns his own conduct. It is possible, Jonah shows us, to hold an entirely orthodox faith and to be living in flat rebellion against it; to recite the creed correctly while fleeing the God of the creed. The sailors, hearing it, became even more afraid (they understood the danger better than the prophet did) and said to him, What have you done? (1:10).
We should not pass too quickly over the casting of the lots, for there is a quiet theology in it. The frightened sailors resorted to lots, the ancient equivalent of drawing straws, to find who was to blame, a method that looks to us like pure chance; and the lot fell, unerringly, on Jonah. But Scripture does not believe in chance. The dice are thrown into the lap, but their every decision is from the LORD (Proverbs 16:33). The same God who sent the wind and appointed the fish governed the falling of the dice on that heaving deck, so that the guilty man was found out. Jonah had fled to the ends of the earth to escape the presence of the LORD, and discovered that the LORD was waiting for him even in the sailors’ lots. There is no random corner of the universe where a man may hide from God. Even the throw of the dice is in His hand, and it found Jonah out.
Cast into the Deep
What follows is the heart of the first chapter, and it is unexpectedly tender. Jonah tells the sailors the only thing that will save them: Pick me up and throw me into the sea to make the sea quiet down, because I know it’s my fault you are in this severe storm (1:12). He knows the storm is his fault and that his death is the price of their lives. And here the pagan sailors do something remarkable: they do not want to do it. Instead, they tried to row back to land, but they were not able to do so because the storm kept growing worse and worse (1:13). These rough Gentile seamen strain at the oars to save the life of the very man whose disobedience has doomed them, more reluctant to shed his blood than he had been to obey his God. Only when the sea grows wilder do they give up, and even then they pray first, to the LORD, Jonah’s God: Oh, please, LORD, don’t let us die on account of this man! Don’t hold us guilty of shedding innocent blood (1:14). Then they throw him over, and the sea stopped raging (1:15).
It is worth dwelling a moment on the strange decency of that scene before we draw out its meaning. The man who would not lift a finger to save Nineveh now offers his own life to save a boatful of strangers: throw me into the sea, he says, because I know it’s my fault you are in this severe storm (1:12). For one honest moment the runaway tells the truth and accepts the cost of his own sin. And the pagans, for their part, refuse to take him at his word until they have rowed themselves to exhaustion trying to save him, and even then they pray first that they not be charged with innocent blood. There is more tenderness toward life in these rough idolaters than in the prophet who wished a city of thousands would burn. The LORD is quietly shaming His servant by the mercy of heathen sailors, showing Jonah, who begrudged grace to his enemies, what grace toward a doomed man actually looks like, lived out by the very pagans he despised.
There is a pattern here we must not rush past, for it can serve as a picture of the deep logic of the whole Bible written small. One man is cast into the deep, and because he goes down, the others are saved; the storm that would have drowned them all falls instead on him alone, and the moment he goes under, the sea is still. One goes down that many may live. Centuries later a high priest would say, without understanding the full weight of his own words, it is more to your advantage to have one man die for the people than for the whole nation to perish (John 11:50), and the evangelist tells us that he spoke better than he knew, prophesying that Jesus would die for the nation (11:51). The Lord Jesus would be cast into the deep of God’s judgment so that the rest of us, who deserved the storm, would find the sea suddenly calm. Jonah is a flawed and reluctant figure of it; he is cast in for his own sin, not another’s. But the shape is unmistakable, and the Lord Jesus would fill it perfectly: the One thrown into the depths so that the storm of wrath we had earned would spend itself on Him and leave us in peace.
And do not miss what becomes of the sailors. The men feared the LORD greatly, and earnestly vowed to offer lavish sacrifices to the LORD (1:16). A boatload of pagans, who began the chapter each crying out to his own god, ends it fearing the true God, the LORD, with vows of sacrifice. Before Jonah has preached a single word to the Gentiles he was sent to, Gentiles have already been brought to fear the LORD: not by his obedience but, strangely, through his disobedience and the God who overruled it. It is the first hint of the great theme that will break open in the next chapter and the next session: that the mercy of God was never meant to stop at the borders of Israel, and that the LORD will gather the nations in spite of His prophet if He cannot do it through him. The dove sent to one city has, without meaning to, brought a shipful of strangers home to God.
Down to the Bottoms of the Mountains
The LORD sent a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights (1:17). We have already said we will not linger on the mechanics, but we must say one thing about the fish that changes everything: it is a rescue. Jonah has been thrown into the open sea to drown, and the great fish is not his punishment but his salvation: the LORD’s strange lifeboat, appointed and sent to swallow him before the waters close over him for good. What looks from the outside like the most horrifying fate imaginable, to be swallowed alive into the dark, is in fact the hand of God reaching down into the deep to catch a sinking prophet. The same God who sent the storm sent the fish. The judgment and the mercy are the same hand.
And out of that darkness Jonah prays, and the prayer is a psalm, a tapestry woven from the Psalter, the words of David and the sons of Korah rising up now from the belly of a fish. I called out to the LORD from my distress, and he answered me; from the belly of Sheol I cried out for help, and you heard my prayer (2:2). From the belly of Sheol: Jonah is describing not merely the inside of a fish but the realm of death itself, the pit. Jonah was as good as dead. His prayer deliberately uses the language of Sheol, the Pit, and death’s barred gates to portray the extremity of his judgment and his rescue. Yet the text does not say that he actually died and was raised; he was swallowed alive, and alive he prayed from inside the fish. From the very edge of the grave he cries to the LORD, and the LORD hears him there. There is no place so deep, no darkness so total, no belly of Sheol so far down, that a believer’s cry cannot reach the throne of God from it. Jonah teaches the despairing soul that the bottom of the sea is not out of earshot.
And it is worth noticing what Jonah prays with, down there in the dark. He does not compose something new; he prays the Psalms. Line after line of his prayer is stitched together from the Psalter (the waters and the waves sweeping over him, the fear of being banished from God’s sight, the prayer coming to God’s holy temple), phrases learned long before in the daily worship of Israel and stored up in him against the day he would need them. When he had no words of his own left, the LORD’s own words rose to his lips from the belly of Sheol. There is great comfort in this for every believer. When trouble takes our words away, when we are too frightened or too far down to pray as we would, the LORD has given us a prayer book, the Psalms, that prays for us, putting the right words in our mouths from the bottom of the sea. Jonah prayed the Scriptures back to God, and was heard.
He traces his descent in words that have comforted the drowning ever since. You threw me into the deep waters, into the middle of the sea; the ocean current engulfed me; all the mighty waves you sent swept over me … Water engulfed me up to my neck; the deep ocean surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. I went down to the very bottoms of the mountains; the gates of the netherworld barred me in forever (2:3, 5–6). Down to the very roots of the mountains, the seaweed tangled round his head, the gates of the netherworld barred behind him forever: this is the language of a man who has gone as far down as a man can go, all the way to death’s locked door. And then the hinge of the whole prayer, the little word but: but you brought me up from the Pit, O LORD, my God (2:6). From the bottom of everything, the LORD reaches down and brings the life back up. The descent into the deep is real; but it is not the last word. The last word is brought up.
Salvation Belongs to the LORD
As his prayer rises toward its close, Jonah arrives at the confession the whole ordeal was meant to teach him, and it is the gospel itself in a single line. When my life was ebbing away, I called out to the LORD, and my prayer came to you, to your holy temple. Those who worship worthless idols forfeit the mercy that could be theirs. But as for me, I promise to offer a sacrifice to you with a public declaration of praise; I will surely do what I have promised. Salvation belongs to the LORD! (2:7–9). Salvation belongs to the LORD. The runaway prophet, who had tried to manage God’s mercy by fleeing from it, who had wanted to ration salvation and keep it from his enemies, learns at the bottom of the sea that salvation is not his to dispense or withhold. It belongs wholly to the LORD. It comes down from above; it cannot be earned, cannot be steered, cannot be hoarded. The man drowning in the deep has nothing to contribute to his own rescue; even his cry is only the reaching of empty hands. The salvation is all the LORD’s, start to finish.
There is one line in Jonah’s confession that cuts especially deep: Those who worship worthless idols forfeit the mercy that could be theirs (2:8). The Hebrew is starker still: those who cling to “empty vanities” forsake “their own mercy,” their chesed, the steadfast love that was held out to them. An empty vanity is an idol: anything we trust to save us that cannot. And Jonah’s word for what the idolater does is devastating: he forsakes his own mercy. The mercy was there, held out, his for the taking; and by clinging to a vanity that could not save, he let go of the only thing that could. It is a perfect description of every false trust. The man who leans on his own goodness, his own cleverness, his own height (like Edom on its rock) is not merely making a harmless mistake; he is forsaking the mercy that was reaching out for him. Every idol we clutch is a mercy we drop. And Jonah, who had run from the LORD’s mercy toward Nineveh, sees now from the deep that to run from that mercy was to forsake his own. The only safe thing to hold is the LORD; every other handhold is a vanity that lets the drowning man go down.
There is a deep sweetness hidden in the very word Jonah uses. The Hebrew for salvation here is a form of yeshu’ah, and from that same root comes the name the angel would one day give to a child born in Bethlehem: Jesus, the Greek form of Joshua, the name that means the LORD saves. Jonah, crying Salvation belongs to the LORD! from the belly of the fish, was speaking better than he knew. The word he gasped out in the dark shares its root with the Name, and read canonically, his confession fittingly directs us to the One in whom salvation would come in person, the Savior of the world. Salvation belongs to the LORD, and the LORD who saves has a face, and it is the face of the Lord Jesus.
And then the rescue is complete: Then the LORD commanded the fish and it disgorged Jonah on dry land (2:10). At the word of the LORD the deep gives up its captive, and the prophet who went down to the bottoms of the mountains is set, alive, on solid ground in the light of day. He was swallowed alive, preserved miraculously for three days and three nights, and delivered from certain death. His burial-like confinement and his emergence alive are the God-appointed sign of the Son of Man’s real death, burial, and resurrection. We are not left to guess what this means or whether it matters; the Lord Jesus has told us. This is the sign: the only sign He would give to a generation that demanded one.
The Sign of the Prophet Jonah
An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah (Matthew 12:39). When the religious leaders demanded that the Lord Jesus prove Himself with a wonder, He refused them every sign but one, and the one He gave was Jonah. For just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights (12:40). The whole strange episode in the deep, it turns out, was a prophecy acted out eight centuries in advance. Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish were a God-given picture of the three days the Lord Jesus would lie in the heart of the earth; Jonah’s coming up alive was a picture drawn ahead of time of the resurrection. Jonah was buried alive and given back; the Lord Jesus truly died, was truly buried, and truly rose. The sign of Jonah is the sign of the cross and the empty tomb.
There is something pointed in the Lord Jesus refusing every sign but this one. An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign: they wanted a spectacle, a wonder on demand, proof that would compel belief without repentance. And He would not give it. The only sign He would grant a sign-hungry world was the sign of a man swallowed into the deep, as good as dead, and brought up alive; which is to say, the sign of His own cross and resurrection. This is the theology of the cross again, the truth we met on the mountain of Esau: God does not validate Himself by the glory the world craves. He gives no proof but a buried and risen Savior. The crowd that wanted fireworks was offered an empty tomb; and the empty tomb is offered still, not as a spectacle to dazzle the curious, but as a sign to be believed by those who, like Jonah, have been down to the bottom and learned that salvation belongs to the LORD.
But we must mark the difference as well as the likeness, for it is the difference that holds the gospel. Jonah went down into the deep for his own disobedience, cast in because of his own sin; the Lord Jesus went down into death willingly, with no sin of His own, cast into the deep of God’s judgment for the sins of others. Jonah was a reluctant prophet who ran until the storm cornered him; the Lord Jesus is the willing Savior who set His face to go down into death and laid His life down of Himself. Jonah came to the very brink of death for his own fault; the Lord Jesus truly died for ours. The reluctant figure in the fish makes the willing Savior shine all the brighter: where Jonah fled the cost of mercy to the ends of the earth, the Lord Jesus embraced the full cost of mercy at the bottom of the deep, and was swallowed by death itself so that we might be brought up from the Pit with Him.
And this sign is not merely something to admire from a distance; it is something we have been brought inside. In Baptism we were united not with Jonah’s fish but with Christ Himself: buried with Him into death and raised with Him to newness of life (Romans 6:3–5; Colossians 2:12). Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, the apostle says, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life (Romans 6:4). What the sign of Jonah pointed to, the death and resurrection of the Son of Man, is given to every Christian at the font. We have died in Him, and we have been raised in Him, and the same word that called Jonah out of the deep will call our very bodies out of the grave on the last day. Salvation belongs to the LORD, and the proof of it is an empty tomb on the third morning.
Gathering the Threads
Jonah, told to carry the LORD’s word east to the cruel city, fled west to the ends of the earth: not because he feared the Assyrians, but because he feared the LORD might forgive them. His was the sin of a man who held the right creed and ran from it, who confessed the Maker of the sea while fleeing across that sea, who slept in the storm while pagans prayed. And the LORD would not let him go: He sent the storm as a mercy, and the great fish as a rescue, and brought His runaway prophet down to the very bottom of the deep, to the belly of Sheol, where at last, with the seaweed wrapped round his head and the gates of the netherworld barred behind him, Jonah called out to the LORD, and was heard, and learned the lesson the whole ordeal was for: Salvation belongs to the LORD! It cannot be earned, or steered, or hoarded against our enemies; it comes down from above, free, and it is wholly God’s to give. And after three days and three nights the deep gave him back alive.
And all of it is the things concerning Himself. The one man cast into the deep so that the storm-tossed others go free can serve as a picture of the One cast into the deep of God’s wrath that we might find the sea calm. The pagans brought to fear the LORD through a fleeing prophet are the first promise of a mercy that will not stay inside Israel’s borders. And the three days in the belly of the fish, the descent to the bottoms of the mountains and the bringing-up alive, are the sign (the only sign the Lord Jesus would give) of His own death and resurrection, into which every one of us was baptized. Jonah went down reluctant and came up a preacher; the Lord Jesus went down willing, truly died, and rose the firstfruits of the dead. The reluctant prophet’s worst day became the clearest picture, in all the Old Testament, of the willing Savior’s victory over the grave. Salvation belongs to the LORD, and the Lord who saves went down into our deep to bring us up.
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
Jonah fled not because he feared Nineveh but because he feared the LORD might forgive it (a motive he will state outright in the next chapter). What does it reveal about the human heart that a believer could run from God rather than see mercy reach an enemy? Where do we, too, wish to ration God’s mercy?
Jonah confessed a perfectly orthodox faith, I worship (literally, fear) the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land (1:9), while in open flight from that God. How is it possible to hold the right creed and live in rebellion against it? Why were the praying pagan sailors, in that moment, ahead of the sleeping prophet?
We read Jonah as real history on the authority of the Lord Jesus (Matthew 12:40–41), yet we refuse to let the fish become the point. Why is it a mistake to spend all our strength defending the fish and never arrive at the sign? Why does Jesus’ word guarantee the history of Jonah, even though the resurrection rests on God’s own act in Christ and not on Jonah? Where does the true weight of the book lie?
One man is cast into the deep, and the storm falls on him alone, and the others are saved (1:12–15). How does this picture the deep logic of the gospel, one going down that many might live? How does the reluctant Jonah make the willing Christ shine the brighter?
From the belly of Sheol Jonah cries, and is heard, and confesses Salvation belongs to the LORD! (2:9). Why must this lesson so often be learned at the bottom? What does it mean that salvation cannot be earned, steered, or hoarded, that it comes down from above as a free gift?
The Lord Jesus made Jonah’s three days and nights in the fish, and his coming up alive, the sign of His own death and resurrection (Matthew 12:40), and in Baptism we were buried with Christ and raised with Him (Romans 6:3–5; Colossians 2:12). How does it change daily life to know you have already died and been raised with Christ, and that the same word will call your body from the grave?
Looking Ahead
We have followed Jonah down into the deep and seen him brought up alive; in the next session we follow him onto dry land and into the great city at last. Jonah 3 and 4 give us the other half of the story, and the half that finally tells us, in the prophet’s own bitter words, why he ran. We will watch Nineveh, the cruel enemy capital, repent from the king on his throne to the beasts in the field at the preaching of a single reluctant sermon; we will see the LORD relent from the destruction He had announced; and we will hear Jonah, furious that his enemies have been spared, sit down outside the walls and ask to die. And in the LORD’s gentle dealing with His angry prophet (the little plant, the worm, the searching question, Should I not be even more concerned about Nineveh, this enormous city?) we will meet the breadth of a mercy that reaches even the Gentile enemy, and hear the Lord Jesus declare that something greater than Jonah is here!
Before the next session, read Jonah 3–4: the second call, the preaching, Nineveh’s astonishing repentance, the LORD’s mercy, and Jonah’s anger over the withered plant. Then read Matthew 12:41 (and Luke 11:30–32), where the Lord Jesus holds up the people of Nineveh and declares that something greater than Jonah is here. Ask why the prophet was angrier at God’s mercy than at the city’s wickedness, and where that same resentment of grace toward others might hide in us.
Closing Prayer
Almighty and most merciful God, we confess that we are too much like Your prophet Jonah: that we have run from Your call, slept in the storm while others prayed, and wished to keep Your mercy for ourselves and withhold it from those we count our enemies. We have confessed a right faith with our lips and fled from it with our feet. We thank You that You love us too much to let us run; that You send even the storm in mercy, and even the deep as a rescue, and will not let Your own go down to the bottom and stay there.
We bless You above all for the sign of Jonah fulfilled in Your Son, our Lord Jesus, who went down willingly into the deep of Your judgment for our sake, who truly died and was three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, and who rose from the dead, the firstfruits of all who sleep. We thank You that in our Baptism You buried us with Him and raised us with Him, so that His death is our death to sin and His life is our new life. Teach us, at the bottom of every trouble, to remember You and to cry to You, knowing that no depth, not even the belly of Sheol, is out of Your hearing; and let us learn, with Jonah, that salvation is not ours to earn or to hoard, but belongs wholly and freely to You; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.