Introduction
In Scripture, we read several prayers of confession. Two famous ones are prayers of confession for the sins of the nation, Israel. Both take place after the exile. The prayer of Daniel (ch. 9) is his prayer for the nation and takes place while the Jews are still in exile. This is, therefore, the prayer of a righteous person on behalf of the whole nation for their sins. The prayer of Nehemiah takes place after the return from exile to Jerusalem and is a national repentance led by Nehemiah and representative elders, with the people gathered (ch. 9). The prayer of confession in Psalm 51, on the other hand, is a personal prayer for personal sin. The prayer of Jonah from the belly of the fish in chapter 2 is of the same sort.
Let’s look at Jonah’s prayer. I remember my Hebrew professor in seminary telling us that he would read this prayer exactly as it sounded. We expected to hear what Hebrew sounded like some 2,700 years ago and sat on the edge of our seats. He proceeded to make gurgling sounds as though he was underwater! Very funny. I’m sure we have all tried to picture this story in our minds—it sounds so very incredulous. We do, however, need to listen to the words and theology in Jonah.
In fact, the theology outpaces the narrative. The whole book of Jonah—all four chapters—is a commentary on God’s steadfast love. God tells the prophet Jonah to go to the capital of Assyria, the big city of Nineveh, and issue God’s verdict of condemnation for their sins. We think that Jonah does not want to do this because it is a scary job assignment, but we learn over the next chapters that this was not so. In any case, what Jonah does instead is head west in a boat to Tarshish, which is probably Spain today. God sends a terrific storm, and the ship is in great peril. Jonah, however, is fast asleep in the belly of the ship. He is calm in his sin against God. The crew wake him, cast lots to see who might be the cause of their plight, and discover it is Jonah. Jonah finally comes clean about his sin, once he is caught out for it. He explains to them that His God is the God of land and sea, and they are terrified. The storm intensifies, and the desperate crew follow Jonah’s solution: throw him to the waves. Once they do, Jonah is swallowed by a large fish. This is when Jonah finally prays to God, from the belly of the fish.
The prayer in Jonah 2 is from different perspectives—from while still in the fish and afterwards. In the end, we learn nothing about how humans might be swallowed by a large sea creature such as a whale and can be assured we do not have a stenographer’s report on what Jonah actually prayed. What we do learn is something about prayers of confession and repentance, and we especially learn something about the God to whom we pray.
First, we learn that God sometimes awaits our calling out to Him before He saves us. Now, our great salvation through Jesus’ death on the cross came while we were yet sinners (Romans 5.8). But sometimes God lets us go through a punishing time for sin to teach us to turn to Him in confession, repentance, and faith. You might have thought that Jonah would have prayed before the sailors threw him overboard. But we read,
Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, 2 saying,
“I called out to the LORD, out of my distress …
out of the belly of Sheol I cried… (2.1-2, ESV here and throughout).
Sheol is the place of the dead. The belly of the great fish was just as good as the place of the afterlife. Things could not have been worse for Jonah. He was no longer in the storm facing imminent disaster; he was already there. He was not confessing his wrongdoing and repenting before God punished him; he was already punished. I say ‘punished’, not ‘being punished’. Yes, we know that he is saved in the end; the fish vomits him out on shore, and he survives. But the judgement is passed, the punishment meted out, and you would think that there is no room for confession and repentance at this point. One take-away for us from this is that it is never too late for us to repent and confess our sins. I’m not introducing here the erroneous teaching, in my view, that we can pray for people’s sins and salvation after death. We read in Hebrews, ‘it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment’ (9.27). Paul says, ‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil’ (2 Corinthians 5.10).
Second, Jonah describes what his experience of judgement was like. One aspect of this was his experience in the water, which emphasises his desperate and deadly situation. He says,
For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your breakers and your waves
passed over me….
The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head (2.3, 5).
These words give us a graphic picture of the separation from God that we feel in our sin. Judgement is the absence of salvation and the absence of God in our plight. As David says in Psalm 51, ‘Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me’ (v. 11). Once we understand our sin, we feel our separation from our holy God. Feeling our separation and desperate plight, we become sorrowful over our sin. Sorrow for our sin leads us to confession, and confession leads us to repentance. In Psalm 51, David says,
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!
3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you may be justified in your words
and blameless in your judgment (1-4).
Third, in this situation, God hears Jonah’s prayer of confession. This prayer sounds very much like it is written after the fact because Jonah testifies that God heard him when he prayed. He says, ‘ and he answered me,’ and ‘you heard my voice’ (v. 2). God hears the prayers of the repentant heart.
Fourth, and this is the main message of the book of Jonah, we learn why God answers Jonah’s prayer of repentance. We learn that the character of God is ‘steadfast love’. You may know that this term, ‘steadfast love’, is actually a single Hebrew word, ‘hesed’, which is somewhat difficult to translate with one word. It has to do with God’s grace, His mercy, and His love. It is very often paired in the Old Testament with the word ‘faithfulness’. Both terms are what we might call ‘covenantal’ words: they are words used in reference to an existing relationship. Because of the close relationship, one gives to the other hesed. Because of the close relationship, one is faithful to the other and will remain steadfast in love despite difficulties faced in the relationship. One Old Testament professor once put it this way in a lecture, hesed involves God’s doing whatever He must do in order to maintain the relationship. That might be love, it might be showing mercy or giving grace, or something else. It might involve overlooking some sin or wrongdoing for the sake of the relationship. The Old Testament as a whole is a story of God’s steadfast, covenantal love for a sinful, disobedient Israel.
So, what do we learn about hesed in Jonah? Interestingly, Jonah is said in 1.1 to be the son of Amittai. His father’s name means, ‘My faithfulness’. Here is the son of a man whose name reminded everyone that God is faithful. He is faithful to the relationship He has with the people with whom He had entered a covenant, the Jews.
Now, we meet the word hesed (steadfast love) first in Jonah 2.8-9:
8 Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the LORD!”
Jonah
is sure of God’s steadfast love because he is not a pagan serving other gods
but is one of God’s covenant people. He
is, we might say, one of God’s elect people.
There is some irony in all this.
The pagan sailors are safe in the boat, the storm has subsided, and, we
learn at the end of chapter 1, they actually offer a sacrifice to Israel’s God,
to Yahweh, the ‘God of the sea and the land’, as Jonah had told them. Yet Jonah, the child of the covenant, is
sitting in Sheol in a big fish’s belly at the bottom of the sea! Israel herself was in this situation:
although God’s covenant people, they were in exile among the Assyrians. Even so, in Jonah ch. 2, we see that God’s covenant
love reaches down into that place of absolute destitution, and it brings Jonah
salvation.
As we read on in Jonah 3, we learn more about God’s hesed. We find Jonah in the great Assyrian city of Nineveh, fulfilling the mission he ran from in ch. 1. He calls out that there will be judgement on the city from God in forty days: he shouts, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh will be overthrown!’ (3.4). Notice the message is not, ‘If you do not repent, you will be overthrown.’ Has God boxed Himself into a corner so that He cannot relent from judgement? Just as Jonah in the fish was already under God’s judgement, the Assyrians are beyond the time of appeal: judgement is proclaimed.
As it happens, the Ninevites repent in sackcloth (3.5). Whenever we read about fasting or sackcloth or ashes on someone’s head in the Old Testament, we are reading about practices that enact sincere repentance. These Ninevites are not just confessing their sins and repenting to get out of trouble, they are sincerely repenting. Even the king gets involved. He pops off his throne, takes off his royal robes, covers himself with sackcloth, and does not simply put on ashes: he sits in ashes (3.6). He then sends out a royal decree:
Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, 8 but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. 9 Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish” (3.7-9).
Notice that the Ninevites hope that God is merciful in general. They hope that, if they repent, God will show them mercy. Unlike the Israelites, they do not appeal to their covenant relationship with God because they have none. Incidentally, we know that this story takes place in the time when the Assyrians were establishing themselves as a great, Middle Eastern Empire. They were notorious for their merciless violence toward other nations, including Israel, as their armies swept over nation after nation. They killed men, women, and children. They enslaved the people that they conquered. They took them into exile in the attempt to obliterate their nation and culture. Now, these same people, were repenting of their evil ways and the violence in their hands and were hoping that God would be merciful so that they would not be perished.
Just what kind of God is this God of the Hebrews? If He is a just God, He will return on the Ninevites—the Assyrians—a judgement that fits the crime. But repentance throws a wrench into the works of justice. Will this just God also be merciful? We get our answer in 3.10: ‘When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.’ God is indeed merciful, but we are still to learn more about hesed.
In ch. 4, Jonah explains why, in ch. 1, he did not go to Nineveh with God’s message in the first place but headed in a boat in the opposite direction to Tarshish, the end of the world, as it were. He says, ‘I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster’ (4.2). He knew this because it is written in Exodus 34. After Moses destroyed the first tablets of the Ten Commandments because of the Israelites’ idolatry at Mt. Sinai, God gave a second set of tablets. This time, however, as we read in Exodus 34, He revealed more of His character to the them. He was not only the God of the Ten Commandments but also ‘a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin’ (vv. 6b-7a). Even though they Israelites sinned, God would still give them His covenant commandments by which they might live. God would go with this people, despite their sin, for He was in covenant relationship with them.
This identity of God actually separates the three religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The Jews know God’s steadfast love, but as a covenant relationship with them. Jonah, however, shocks the reader by saying that this is not just a covenant relationship but the very character of God, and therefore it extends to those who are not elect, those who are outside the covenant, even to those who have enslaved God’s covenant people and violently oppressed all other people. This would be like, in our time, a prophet going to Gaza and prophesying judgement in forty days, only to have them repent and God forgive them. God’s steadfast love finds Jonah in the belly of the fish at the bottom of the sea and forgives the violent Assyrians. We gain this much understanding of God from Judaism: God is like that. How do we know?
In Jonah 4, Jonah sets himself up outside the city to watch to see if the city will yet be destroyed. God teaches Jonah—and through him the reader—a lesson about His steadfast love. This is the Middle East, and the chapter tells us that God sent a blisteringly hot, easterly wind such that Jonah wished he would just die. One might be forgiven for thinking that Jonah is a bit of a drama queen, but remember, he is in God’s drama and experiencing the most extreme conditions. God then lets a plant grow up quickly beside him to give him shade. The next day, a worm eats the plant and Jonah is back to scorching in the heat. He again says it is better for him just to die (v. 8). The lesson God teaches Jonah contrasts Jonah to God. Jonah pities a mere plant he did nothing to help grow, but God pities a city full of people who, being outside God’s elect people, haven’t a clue about right and wrong. (The text says they don’t know their right hand from their left.) It is a city in which there are numerous cattle, for that matter--Jonah is further reprimanded for caring more for a single plant than for the many cattle, if not also the 120,000 people of the city. And there the book ends. And so we learn something about God’s steadfast love: as part of God’s very character, it extends not only to His covenant people but also to all His creation.
What we do not get is an understanding of the lengths to which this steadfast love of God will go. Yes, it will go so far as to save a sinner like Jonah at the bottom of the ocean, already in Sheol. Yes, it even extends so far as to offer forgiveness to sinners outside the covenant over whom judgement has already been prophesied. Yet we do not learn, as we do in Jesus Christ, that ‘God loved the world in this way, that He gave His only begotten Son, that everyone who believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3.16). God’s steadfast love is found in Christ Jesus, God’s Son, shedding His blood for our sins on the cross.
In the Koran of Islam, Allah is said to be ‘merciful and beneficent’ over and over again. I would argue that Allah is understood in terms of a powerful sheik in the religion. That is, his mercy is an aspect of his power. He can kill the enemy, render justice, or show mercy because he is so powerful. His mercy is not different from his power. Yet the Christian understanding of God’s mercy is based on love, weakness, the shame of the cross, God’s giving of His one and only Son for our sins. As a Jew, Jonah knew that God’s character was forgiving in a deeper sense than the all-powerful sheik’s whim to show justice on one occasion or to show mercy on another. Yet neither the Muslim nor the Jew can fathom the divine love that is self-sacrificing. Paul says that Christ Jesus, being
in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2.6-8).[1]
Conclusion
The book of Jonah teaches us that we can come to God with confession of our sins and in sincere repentance for them, even when the time of repentance seems to have passed, and we can trust in His steadfast love. It teaches us that this steadfast love extends even beyond God’s covenant people to others, even our enemies, when they acknowledge their sins and call out to God for forgiveness. This is because God’s steadfast love is not only a covenantal negotiation but is part of His very character. From the New Testament, we also learn that we can have an assurance of God’s pardon. This is because God has acted upon His steadfast love in Jesus Christ. His love for the world is such that He gave His one and only Son to die sacrificially for us and for our salvation on the cross. And so, as Paul says, we can ‘have boldness and access with confidence through our faith’ in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Ephesians 3.12).
[1] I have chosen to read the adverbial participle ‘being in’ rather than the ESV’s ‘although’ at the beginning of v. 6. It could just as well be, ‘Because he was in the form of God’.
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