The grace of Jesus Christ that saved Jonah and Nineveh is available to you.
Dennis Versiani
Historical context
“Nothing can actually prepare you for an event where you end up inside a whale. It’s pure instinct!” This is the story of Rainer Schimpf, who was filming dolphins, sharks, penguins and birds feeding on sardines 25 nautical miles off Port Elizabeth, on the South African coast. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the sea was calm. “I was photographing a shark that was preparing to cross the school… The next moment, everything went dark, and I felt pressure around my waist; and, the moment I felt that pressure, I immediately knew that a whale had bitten me.” Rainer said his immediate instinct was to hold his breath as he knew he could be swept into deep water. Bryde’s whales can easily reach 20 tons, and dive quickly. With all that mass, its mouth could easily crush Rainer’s ribs, or it could take him to a depth where he would certainly die. But, Bryde’s whales, even though they are giants in nature, are known for being very docile animals. A few seconds later, about 15 meters away, the pressure was released, and Rainer was expelled from the mouth of that incredible animal. We believe the whale was as scared as Rainer was, because it is unusual for a whale to swallow a seal, a dolphin or any other animal.
Stories like this are extremely rare, and Rainer was very lucky. Of course, his story is reminiscent of someone who not only got stuck in a fish’s mouth, but was swallowed, and stayed there for much longer.
The story of Jonah is one of the most impressive stories in the Bible. How can someone survive for three days inside a fish’s stomach? But this is just one detail of an engaging story that presents a God always interested in saving.
“The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to the great city of Nineveh, and cry against it: for its wickedness has come up unto me” (Jonah 1:1, 2).
Jonah, son of Amittai, of Gath-hepher (2 Kings 14:25) accepted God’s call to promote political and spiritual reform in the nation of Israel during the reign of Jeroboam II, in the probable period between 793 and 753 BC. of Jonah an influential prophet in Israel during a period of great national distress caused by previous kings, who did what was evil before the Lord. There is a consensus that the book of Jonah was written by the prophet himself.
During this reform, God calls Jonah to the special mission of warning Nineveh of the dangers of its cruelty. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, an idolatrous nation known for exerting harsh repression over the dominated peoples. Nahum called Nineveh a “bloodthirsty city,” “full of lies and theft” (Nahum 3:1; see 3:19). But if God called Jonah to cry out against her, that means that Nineveh was not yet completely lost.
The statement that God is love permeates the entire Bible. God had no interest in the destruction of a city with more than one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. He exercised his grace over Sodom and Gomorrah, trying to save their people for over four hundred years before destroying them. But those people obstinately decided to reject God (Genesis 18:20, 21); and Nineveh was going fast along the same path, and needed to be warned, before she passed the limit of grace.
“Jonah was prepared, but to flee from the presence of the Lord, to Tarshish; and having gone down to Joppa, he found a ship going to Tarshish; So he paid the fare and boarded it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord” (Jonah 1:3).
The Bible does not make it clear what Jonah’s motivations were, but, reading the entire book, it seems that he harbored some very deep grudge against the Assyrians, probably due to the fact that the Assyrian empire sometimes oppressed Israel. In fact, years later, the northern kingdom was completely destroyed by the Assyrians. The nation was scattered across the empire and the culture of the northern tribes was disintegrated. It may be that one of Jonah’s family members was taken captive or killed by the cruelty of the Assyrians, or that Jonah witnessed their cruelty and judged that they were already beyond the grace of God (see Jonah 4). The fact is that he thought God was wrong in saving those merciless people.
Jonah fled from the presence of God, or at least he fooled himself into thinking he could. God’s call led Jonah into a state of deep depression. It was too harsh a call. The prophet actually thought that if he did not preach, God would manifest his wrath and destroy the Assyrian capital, freeing Israel from the oppression of its enemies (Jonah 4:2).
As an Israelite prophet, Jonah knew Psalm 139, which recognizes God’s omnipotence. “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Where will I flee from your face? If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; If I make my bed in the deepest abyss, you are there too; If I take the wings of the dawn and dwell on the ends of the seas, your hand will still guide me there, and your right hand will sustain me.” (see Psalm 139:7-12). But the hurt the prophet felt didn’t make him think straight. He did exactly what the psalmist wrote, deceiving himself with the idea that he could hide from God. Therefore, he tried to flee to Tarshish, a city located on the southern coast of Spain, on the other side of the Mediterranean, almost 4 thousand kilometers from Israel.
The Storm and the Big Fish
The book follows the report saying that, on the high seas, the ship was hit by a violent storm. The sailors tried everything to keep the ship afloat: they threw the cargo and cried out to their gods for deliverance. Meanwhile, Jonas, to forget the anguish he was in, slept soundly in the cellar. The sailors felt that this storm was very strange, and they turned to their superstitions to find out who caused this storm. The Lord used the method to determine the culprit, so that “the lot fell on Jonah” (Jonah 1:7).
The prophet admitted his guilt before the sailors and asked that he be thrown into the sea; Only then would the storm calm down. When Jonah was thrown into the sea, the fury of the storm calmed down (Jonah 1:15), and God made himself known to those sailors. It was then that “the Lord found a great fish to swallow Jonah; And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17).
There is another story we know of someone being swallowed by a fish. Pinocchio, the wooden boy created by master Geppetto who came to life got involved with bad friends and was swallowed by a whale, or by a shark, the great “Attila of the seas”; but this is just a fable.
Dear reader, it is a mistake to think that Jonas, like Pinocchio, was swallowed by a whale or a shark. Studies say that even the blue whale, the largest mammal in the seas, could not swallow a man. Whales have a device called a “whale baleen” to filter food, which consists of small fish, squid and krill, a tiny crustacean. Even if a whale could accidentally swallow a man, he would be crushed as soon as it closed its mouth; and if the victim was lucky, he would probably die stuck in the animal’s throat, because the esophagus is not wide enough for a human to pass through.
So what animal was this? The book does not indicate whether the fish was created by God for the occasion, or whether the Lord used an existing one capable of swallowing a man. Hebrew uses a generic word for “fish.” But when Jesus spoke about this account, Matthew used the Greek word “ketos,” which means “sea monster” (Matthew 12:40). Some think it was the leviathan of Job 41:1, or some extinct species of sperm whale. But speculating about this is irrelevant to the story.
What is important to know is that Jonah was not just swallowed, but he remained alive “for three days and three nights” in the belly of the fish. Although it is totally incredible, this fact was real, to the point of being mentioned by Jesus himself. We are used to seeing children’s images of Jonah kneeling and praying to God inside the fish. But, it wasn’t like that. In that fish’s stomach, gastric juice entered its nose and mouth and burned its skin and mucous membranes. The toxic smell of ammonia, carbon monoxide and methane from decaying animals and algae must be terrible and suffocating. He had nowhere to stand and, as the animal moved, everything moved, and Jonas must have thought several times that he would drown or be digested. That moment was one of deep agony, and he may have thought it would be the end of him.
By rejecting God’s call, Jonah rejected God himself as his Master, giver of all the blessings in the prophet’s life. We often deceive ourselves into thinking that we can run away from God and do our own will, attend to our own vices and sins. On several occasions, God allows us to go through deep agony because we reject the blessings of his grace. God cannot bless the one who rejects Him. We are totally dependent on God, and every millisecond of our life is a gift of his power and love. There is no point in abandoning God and thinking that nothing will change. Therefore, difficulties are useful in making us see who we are and what we are doing with our lives.
Although the account said “three days and three nights”, he may not have spent all that time in the belly of the fish. The Hebrew expression does not necessarily mean a full 72-hour period. This is because, when quoting Jonah in Matthew 12:40, Jesus said that “the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights”. But Jesus was buried on a Friday afternoon, remained dead on Saturday and was resurrected at dawn the next day. It is not a lie, but the expression involves entire days.
Jonah thought he was going to die buried in the belly of that fish. Therefore, he prayed to God, quoting Psalms, such as 18:6; 120:1; 50:5; 107:6 and 31:22, among others. Jonah’s prayer was a sincere request for forgiveness, based on the absolute faith of deliverance that only the Lord can provide (Jonah 2:1-9). Jonah recognized that if he were to descend into the deepest abyss or stand in the depths of the sea, the mighty hand of God would guide him, and His right hand would sustain him (Psalm 139:8-10). “So the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out onto the ground” (Jonah 2:10).
Grace to Nineveh, Grace to Jonah
“Get ready, go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim against it the message that I tell you” (Jonah 3:2). Why did God practically force Jonah to preach in Nineveh? Couldn’t God have chosen someone else whose heart was more open to this mission?
There is a very important lesson here: God’s grace is the reason we are not destroyed. It is the grace of God that frees us from sin and saves us from death. It is the free gift of God that gives us eternal life (Romans 6:23) and renews us for the good works that he himself prepared for us (Philippians 2:8-10).
But if grace…