How striking the story of Jonah is as a gospel illustration! He seeks to flee from God’s presence, a vain task. And just as Jonah was brought to heel, so will every man and woman in the world be brought into God’s presence.
Happy was it that if Jonah fled from God, God pursued after him for his blessing. Thus it is continually. He went down to Joppa (pleasant places) and took ship to Tarshish (destruction). Thus it ever is with man. In days of health and strength, with the mind alienated from God, how pleasant sin is in its committal, if indeed in its result it is destruction. “The pleasures of sin” is a true description, but they only endure for a season, and the wages of sin is death, destruction. Not a cessation of being or annihilation, but a second death, which is the lake of fire.
Jonah pays the fare for the voyage. The devil will make us pay for the travel we take through his territory. And what a price!
The tempest, divinely sent, frightened the mariners, but Jonah lay fast asleep in the sides of the ship. It often takes a good deal to wake the sinner. How kind God is in sending trials and troubles. How many in eternity will have to praise God for the tempests of time. Smooth sailing would have landed the traveller in Tarshish, but God in pity interposed.
Awakened roughly by the mariners he acknowledged he was fleeing from God and declared that the only remedy to stay the storm threatening them with destruction was to fling him into the sea.
Jonah could not have known of the great fish prepared for his reception and safety. Death was the only desert that was his, AND THIS HE ACKNOWLEDGED. It was because of this that God could save him from death.
It must have been a terrible ordeal to both the mariners and Jonah. Imagine the scene. A little vessel caught in a mighty tempest. The sailors knew the truth as to their ill-fated passenger. The way out of the threatened destruction he clearly pointed out. Jonah’s repentance must have been deep and his moral courage of a very high order to induce him to indicate such a way out of the difficulty.
The sailors laboured hard to bring the vessel to land. Look at them straining every nerve to reach the shore. But storm-tossed waters laugh at such a frail bark and such puny efforts.
What a moment when the mariners seize Jonah, not roughly nor unkindly, but forced to let one perish lest all should perish. What a moment for Jonah as he is flung into the boiling deep, expecting nothing but that the end of his running away from God would be to find a watery grave.
How this illustrates what is often called “an old-fashioned conversion.” Would that we saw more the depths of sorrow, of sin, of true repentance
How surprised Jonah must have been to have found himself safely in the belly of the great fish.
He betakes himself to prayer. He recognizes God in all that happens to him. It was God who had cast him into the deep. Circumstances might force Jonah to appoint this as the way for calming the sea. The mariners might be driven to carry the plan out. But Jonah recognizes the hand of God in it. They were His billows, His waves, that had passed over him.
Down he went lower and lower to the bottom of the mountains—symbolical of his deep repentance.
At length he gets to the point where he not only speaks of himself, of where his folly had landed him, or God’s power putting him in the low place, but he recognized that salvation was not by his prayer or his thanksgiving, or the fulfilment of his vows, but that SALVATION IS OF THE LORD.
Then and not till then was Jonah vomited out upon dry land.
Does this not illustrate the road that every sinner must travel before salvation is reached? It is not by his prayers or penance, or amending his ways, or his anything, but SALVATION IS OF THE LORD.
It is Christ’s work that accomplishes salvation. It is God’s work to give it to the repentant sinner who outstretches the empty hand of faith.
Jonah was a runaway, a stowaway, and a castaway—all the result of his folly. His hope lay in God’s mercy and compassion.
Jonah was independent, he paid his fare; indifferent, he went to sleep, but God followed him and reached him for his blessing.
Jonah furnishes also a type of the Jewish nation. Sent as a testimony among the Gentiles, as Jonah was sent to testify against Nineveh; refusing to take up God’s appointed role for them, as Jonah refused to do God’s bidding, the Gentile nations under the Roman Empire raise the storm against Jerusalem and the Jewish nation, just as the storm threatened Jonah in the Gentile ship as he fled to a Gentile port.
Jonah’s being cast into the sea, but miraculously preserved, is typical of Israel being scattered among the nations.
This scattering will continue till God brings His people back to the land, and after much tribulation and exercise of mind brings them to the point of saying, as Jonah said, “Salvation is of the Lord,” and then their blessing will commence.