The Plan of God

"Let's consider your age to begin with. How old are you?" "I'm seven and a half exactly." "You needn't say exactly," the Queen remarked, "I can believe it without that. Now, I'll give you something to believe: I'm just 101, five months, and a day." "I can't believe that," said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said, "one can't believe impossible things." "I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Of course, that is Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

Today, we are going to talk about the prayer of Jonah, but before we talk about the prayer, let's talk about the whale. It seems to me the whale is the elephant in the room—to mix the metaphor. Well, we'll have a whale in the room at least. You see at the end of chapter 1 verse 17, "but the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights." Is this not the most unlikely of miracles? That's the question. I think that is the elephant in the room, or the whale in the room. How could a man survive for three days in a whale? And that's the question I think people are probably wondering when they come to this particular passage. Is it like George Gershwin wrote, "It ain't necessarily so," the things that you read you're liable to read in the Bible, "it ain't necessarily so"?

As I was preparing this, I was thinking to myself, maybe I should have a question time at the end of this sermon. I haven't actually had a chance to work this out with Jeff, so what I'm going to say to you is if something I say to you today, or something I say this morning, you find that you do have a question about, then why don't you email it to me during the week? Next week, I'll try—depending on what the questions are like, how long they are and things like that—I'll try and capture some of them and maybe speak about them at the beginning. So there is my challenge to you, and it's a good thing too, because it helps us to engage with each other perhaps just outside of Sunday and be thinking along a certain track.

Now, when faced with the whale, some have tried to make it more plausible. For example, people have cited cases of allegedly people being swallowed by whales and surviving. There actually are some scary little video clips on YouTube. They kind of get swallowed and spat out straight away. Those are sometimes mentioned, or is the case of James Bartley in 1891, who was a whaler who was allegedly whaling somewhere near the Falkland Islands, and he was swallowed by a sperm whale and survived for 15 hours. They killed the whale, the whale sunk, the whale came back up, and allegedly he was there.

Others spend great amounts of time trying to work out what species of fish. Was it a fish or was it a whale? We say it was a whale, but the word in the original was just a big fish. Perhaps what we do is we think to ourselves, "It's a big fish, it's probably a whale." Others say, "Could the Mediterranean have contained such a fish? Was there sufficient infrastructure, if you like, in the Mediterranean for that to happen?" And then some people say, "Well, it wasn't really a whale. He got rescued by another ship, and the ship was called 'The Whale'," or "Jonah didn't actually get eaten or get swallowed by a whale, but he ended up on shore and he had to recuperate for three days at a place called 'The Fish Inn'," which is really a place in the UK. I think in Bournemouth. You can go to The Fish Inn. I've never been there myself, but maybe you have.

Others take the view that it's just a parable. I think you can stay open to that idea. Personally, it's always worth asking, if you say it's a parable, what do you lose by saying that and what do you gain by saying that? Jesus taught in parables. Sometimes the parables he clearly made them up to make a point, but others it seems like they had some sort of some sort of alignment with something in real life. Parable of the sower. I see a man there sowing seed, and Jesus tells the story about the parable of the sower. It's always worth, if you take that view, that it is some sort of parable, what do you lose from that? So, if you take that view because you are uncommitted to the notion of the supernatural, you're saying, "All there is in the world is the natural. There's no such thing as the supernatural." Well, what sort of god do you have at that point?

Those are some of the ways that people have tried to deal with the issue of the whale. But notice Jonah's creed in chapter 1:9. Can you see it back there on the page? Page 916. He answers, "I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land." That's Jonah's creed. We might say, "We believe in God the creator of heaven and earth, the creator of all that is." You might take that from the very first part of Genesis, Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." As soon as you say you believe in God, the creator of the heaven and the earth, anything's possible.

Or perhaps it's that you only believe in the more reasonable miracles. Jesus healed Simon's mother-in-law of her fever in Mark chapter 1, and you might say, "Well, I'm likely to believe that." But why are you more likely to believe that than this, if God is in fact the creator of heaven and earth?

It seems fair to say that we live on the other side of the Enlightenment, the period from the 100 Years' War to the French Revolution, a period that was defined by not believing beyond the evidence. If you want the words of John Locke, a famous philosopher, logical positivist. If what I'm about to say in the next couple of minutes makes no sense to you, I'll get you to wake up at the end of it, but if it's interesting to you. So the period of the Enlightenment led to the scientific revolution, 18th century, sometimes called the Age of Reason. Before it was a John Farnham song, it was actually a movement in history, the Age of Reason.

But philosophically, reason has its limits. So what are your assumptions? If you are following a reason-deductive argument, you've got to say, "What are the assumptions that these are based on?" See, if you assume there is no God, then probably you would say, "Humans cannot survive a whale swallowing." However, if your assumption is that there is a God and he is the creator, then it's utterly possible that this happened.

One of the difficulties philosophically with things like whale swallowing is that it's a once-er. It's a one-off. It just happens once. The Greek philosophers weren't really all that interested in things that happen once. They were not interested in the singular at all, because it couldn't really be tested. They were more interested in universals rather than particulars. A man has never been swallowed by a whale before, but that's the whole point. The Greek philosophers were not all that interested in arts or poetry or music or history, because they're all claims about the singular. They are more interested in universals.

Personal knowledge is a claim about the singular. "My friend Dollius is a reliable person." That is a claim about the singular. You might say, "How do I know she's your friend? Can you prove that?" No, I can't. "Does logic allow her to be acting like she's your friend or acting that she's reliable?" Again, I can't prove that to you. "How can you be so dogmatic? She might be reliable at the moment, but she might prove to be unreliable in the future." You see, I can't compel you to believe me. All I can say is there is an existential proposition on show here. And claims about personal knowledge are claims about the singular, and that is most like our claims to know God. And here you have God dealing with one man in one place in one time, but written for us so we can know and relate to this God as well.

Someone has said that God could have air-conditioned and carpeted the whale if he wanted to, and I agree. It must be possible. And if you get too hung up on the whale and the fish—I'll put him away in a moment—if you get too hung up on the whale and the fish, you miss the point that the whole book of Jonah is about something else. It's about how God deals with humans. In the book of Numbers, God spoke through Balaam's donkey, and you could say, "God spoke through Balaam's donkey? Yeah, but it was a donkey." "I know, but it was a donkey." So what? You're missing the point.

And it's interesting that the whale and the fish is hardly emphasized at all. You see it in chapter 1:17, "the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights." And right at the end, "the Lord commanded the fish and it vomited Jonah onto dry land." And maybe the fish said, "I think it was something I ate."

The whale or the fish or whatever you want to call it, bookends the prayer, and the prayer is the point of the text. The prayer is the focus.

So what about the prayer for a few moments? Let's think about this. You recall from last week that Jonah has been going away from God, running away from God. And as he runs away from God, he goes down. As he goes away from God, he goes down. It's often the way, is it? As you run away from God, you do tend to go down and down. Sometimes you don't realize it at the time. Sometimes it's when you stop and realize you're really going down. But Jonah goes down to Joppa. He goes down to the bowels of the ship. He goes down into the sea. He goes down into the fish. And then finally, chapter 2:2, he goes down to the grave. "See there from the depths of the grave I called for help and you listened to my cry."

And it's there, down in the grave, that he finally surrenders. He finally gives in to this God. It's taken Jonah a long time to get to this point. He doesn't pray during the storm. The captain of the ship says, "You better pray to your God. Get up and pray to yours. We're praying to our gods. You should pray to yours." Not Jonah. He doesn't even pray in chapter one.

Sometimes you have to be brought low before you will call out to God. Sometimes you have to be brought low before you will pray. Sometimes in his kindness, God will bring you low so that you cry out to him. Don't wait to that point, though. Don't wait to be brought low before you cry out to God. Do it early.

You might know the story of Augustine, great Christian believer, great thinker, father of the church, 4th century AD. As a young man, he had sampled various schools of philosophy and religion and morality. He had a longstanding relationship, about 15 years, with a woman who was older than him. They had a son. He loved her, but he would not marry her because it was deemed that she was not of his class. He went away. He found himself wrestling with the problem of evil. He realized the problem of evil was really his problem: how could he wrestle with his own evil? And he describes in his autobiography, I guess Confessions, what it was like to finally cry out to God and be saved.

He said this: "The tempest in my breast hurried me out into the garden where no one might interrupt the fiery struggle in which I was engaged with myself. I was greatly disturbed in spirit, angry at myself with a turbulent indignation. Now, when deep reflection had drawn up out of the secret depths of my soul all my misery and had heaped it up before the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm accompanied by a mighty rain of tears, the sound of my voice which was choked with weeping. And then I heard the voice of a child saying, 'Pick up, read! Pick up, read!'" He opened up the Scriptures and comes to Romans chapter 13:13, a passage that speaks directly to the darkness that he seemingly cannot escape. And speaking directly to his darkness, he said, "I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to, for instantly as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty, and all the gloom of doubt vanished away."

Well, in the depths of the seas, and the depths of the fish, in the depths of the grave, this is Jonah's prayer. What sort of prayer is it? Is it, if I could put it this way, is it an in-fish prayer or is it an after-fish prayer? That's a good question to think about. I think that's really an important question. Is it like he's there in the fish for three days, calmly, quietly, taking notes, journaling perhaps, sitting back in the fish, journaling about his response to God, therefore he comes up with this prayer? You might be familiar with the little red Gideon's Bible. I was given one in year 8, and you might be familiar at the beginning it says, "Where to find help when," and it's kind of like, "Okay, where to find help when swallowed by a big fish? Go to Jonah chapter 2." That's bound to be useful to you, right?

It's interesting that all the lines of this prayer can be found in the Psalms of the Bible. These red Bibles here don't show you the footnotes, but if you got a Bible with footnotes, you'll see all these cross-references. Almost every line comes from the Psalms. So maybe that's a really good advertisement for reading the Psalms regularly, so if you get pushed into this particular calamity or even something like it, you actually have these words to draw on in terms of how you relate to God. From the belly of the fish he prays. Is it a retrospective prayer? Well, that's up to you to decide. The sort of prayer itself is a prayer of lament and a prayer of thanks.

Maybe this is your sort of prayer. Maybe this is a prayer that you've prayed. I know some of you have been in the real depths. I know something of the deep waters that you have walked through just even in the small time I've known you. You may have prayed something similar to him.

See the elements of lament: "You hurled me into the deep, in the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me" (verse three). "All your waves and breakers swept over me" (or verse five). "The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head" (or verse six). "To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever." You might know what it's like to pray something like that to God, to be in the absolute pits.

And then there are elements of thanksgiving. Look at verse two: "In my distress I called to the Lord and he answered me" (or verse six). "He brought me up from the pit" (or verse nine). "But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed, I'll make good."

The heading for the whole thing seems to be verse two: "In my distress I called to the Lord and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called out for help and you listened to my cry."

Sometimes in the midst of distress, you can get stuck in the lament, and it feels like it's quite hard to get to the thanksgiving part. And sometimes it takes time, and sometimes it takes more than three days. Sometimes it can take years. But if you know the mercy of God, you'll know what it is to give thanks to him. We would say from our perspective that we know the mercy of God through the Lord Jesus Christ. We would say, perhaps with the New Testament writers, "I was in the depths of the grave." The Hebrew word here is Sheol, the dark, silent place of the underworld. "That's where I was, and God answered." Even at the extremity of life, he is there, the God who has spoken, the God who was there. He's even there in the extremities of life.

And it's a big distress, too. He says, "These are God's waves and breakers. I'm cast out from God's presence. You've cast me out from your presence." God does it. That's what he's wrestling with here. God is the one who's caused this. It's all part of God's plan, and it's all part of God's good plan for his grace to come upon Jonah, but also the people of Nineveh. And then the culmination right at the end, verse nine: "Salvation comes from the Lord."

We could say that our salvation is greater than Jonah's. Jesus suffered, and he died and he rose for our redemption. The Bible describes us in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul would say, "We were dead in our transgressions, but we've been made alive in Christ. It is by grace you've been saved," says Paul. And all of us are powerless against the powers of darkness. It doesn't matter who you are, you're powerless against the powers of darkness. But if you cry out to God for deliverance, you will be delivered because that is God's character.

But the question I want to leave you with here is, is Jonah's heart really in it? This prayer all sounds very good and fine, but is his prayer actually in it, or is it just pious clichés all the way through the book of Jonah? Jonah appears to be just a little bit arrogant, just a little bit haughty. He's very good at looking down on other people. And even here in this prayer, it's very grand the way he speaks about himself: "I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs." Is he just a little bit superior all the way through, and certainly here?

And you'll see that Jonah is an ambiguous character. You'll see that as the book closes, he's not in a great place. He's equivocal at best. He's half-hearted. He's angry. He's selfish and grumpy most of the way through. And maybe this prayer is a retrospect. Maybe it is him at his best. But he doesn't stay at his best. In fact, he's far from a transformed man even at this point. You'll see that next week and the week after.

Often when people give their testimonies, and we hear people's testimonies, and sometimes testimonies of the great one, it's kind of like, "I was like this, and now I went back down to this, and now I went back up to this." It's like a parabola. That's how you describe it. But Jonah's not like that at all. Jonah's up and down. And to be fair, we're up and down as well. I don't know whether any of us could describe, "This is how we were, and now we're in the pits, and now here again." It's messy.

And yet the plan of God and the purpose of God, what we might call the sovereignty of God, just pushes on. And this is the God we are dealing with. We little humans here in the 21st century are dealing with this God whose purposes are good and he will bring them to effect. And we need to work out how we relate to this God. You and I know what it's like to have a history with God, where it's like he's pastoring us, and sometimes it's not all good from our point of view, and sometimes we are less than honorable in the way we deal with him. But the challenge for us is the surrender to him, to surrender to his will.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, just as Jonah went through the depths, we are conscious that we do that as well. For some people here today, they might be experiencing that in spades. For others, we can remember our history, and for others, it's in our future. We pray, Heavenly Father, that we might be able to call out to you with a good heart. We might be able to tell the truth that your salvation comes from you. And we pray, Heavenly Father, that we might know the truth of what it means to call out to you and for you to answer, and for our trust to be in you in all things. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

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