Jonah 2

Jonah 2:1

II. THE DELIVERANCE OF THE PROPHET (Chap. 2) A. Jonah’s Prayer (2:1-9)Jonah’s prayer to God from the stomach of the fish celebrates his deliverance from drowning and not his escape from the fish. The escape followed his prayer. His prayer is remarkable in that it contains fragments from the Book of Psalms. J. Sidlow Baxter analyzes the prayer as follows: There is not one word of petition in Jonah’s prayer. It consists of thanksgiving (verses 2-6), contrition (verses 7, 8) and rededication (verse 9). It is really a psalm of praise, a “Te Deum,” a “doxology.” I know of a man who once sang the Doxology with his head in his empty flour barrel, as an expression of faith that God would send a further supply of flour! But the novelty of singing a doxology with your headand all the rest of youinside a great fish in mid-ocean, is absolutely without rival. Jonah’s prayer is a foreshadowing of Israel’s future repentance. When the nation acknowledges the Messiah as Savior, it will be restored to a place of blessing under Him. The mention of the belly of Sheol in verse 2 has led some to believe that Jonah actually died in the fish and was resurrected. However, the Hebrew word Sheol can mean grave, afterlife, and other things. Here it is probably a poetic usage for “the depths,” or as modern idiom might put it, “the pits.” Even though it is most unlikely that Jonah literally died and was raised again, our Lord Himself used the prophet as a picture of His own death, burial for three days and nights, and His glorious resurrection (Mat_12:40). Incidentally, this shows that Christ accepted Jonah as a historical character, and not merely as a “parable,” as some modern preachers claim.

Jonah 2:10

B. God’s Answer (2:10)As soon as he acknowledged that salvation is of the LORD, the fish . . . vomited Jonah out onto dry land.