Last week at youth group we left Jonah in the belly of the fish. Having fled from his mission and his God, having endangered the lives of the sailors with whom he had gained passage, having despaired of life itself and having been hurled from the relative safety of the ship into the peril of the turbulent storm, Jonah experiences the unimaginable.
He is swallowed.
The darkness must have been impenetrable, the terror, paralyzing. Jonah, amazed to find himself still alive, must have determined that God thought a simple drowning too good for him. Instead, he was being drawn down to a far more hideous death, carried in the stomach of the fish ever deeper into the abyss. He would be crushed by the immense pressure of the sea, his skin scathed and blistered by the acid of the fish’s stomach, his breath stolen from him as whatever tiny pocket of air he had found depleted and he slowly succumbed to oxygen deprivation. The God whom he had deserted had now come back with a vengeance to find him, to torture him, to mock his weak, human desperation for breath and life and, finally, to leave him, lost forever at sea, never again to see the sun or even to receive a dignified burial.
But that’s not what we find.
Instead of despair, we find hope; instead of abandonment, we find commitment; instead of anger, we find gratitude. Jonah, far from stellar in the way he lives out God’s grace in his life, here gets it right. He recognizes that, though it must have been a horrific experience, the fish was the vehicle of God’s mercy. Though the fish represents suffering, it is also what God was using to bring Jonah back to himself.
In the belly of the fish, God was Jonah’s only hope. He could run no longer; the sovereign King of Israel and almighty Lord of the universe was inescapable. The only option open to Jonah was to abandon all pretense and run into the arms of the very God who had put him there, and that’s exactly what he does.
Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying,
I called out to the LORD, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
Jonah understands that even while he is in the pit, and he feels like death is but a breath away, God is in control, and God is calling him. Through the crucible of his pain, God is calling him. God has a plan for Jonah, and he’s using this experience to bring it about. Job understands this, too in Job 13:15.
Though he slay me, I will hope in him.
Our pain is God’s way of getting our attention. C. S. Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain (ch. 6),
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Jonah’s fish was a massive sea creature; your fish is your suffering, whatever form that may take. Just like Jonah, you may be suffocated by it, oppressed by it, crushed under its weight and see no way out. Just like Jonah, it may be the result of your own sin, or, unlike Jonah, you may have done nothing to deserve it. Nevertheless, it is also what God is using to bring you back to himself. Your pain is God’s call to you. Your fish is your suffering, and your fish is your rescue.
Jonah made a choice in the belly of the fish to call out to the only one who could save him, and you have the same choice open to you. Will you run to the God who can save, or will you sink into the abyss of your suffering?
Matt
