The last verse of chapter 1 tells us that the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and that Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. It is in this fact that we find the key of the interpretation of chapter 2; for our Lord expressly connects this circumstance with His own death. He says, “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Matt. 12:40. And it is exceedingly interesting to trace the way in which Jonah, under the judgment of God, becomes a type of Christ in His rejection and death.
We have seen in our consideration of chapter 1 That the prophet was a type of the Jewish nation—the remnant who always take the place of the nation before God. Unfaithful in their mission to the world, God rejected them as His vessel of testimony, and caused His waves and billows to pass over them; and it is in this position, we see them, as personified by Jonah at the commencement of chapter 2. Now, it was into this very place that Christ in grace, in His unquenchable love for His people, descended. He was rejected, not by God surely—far be the thought—but by “His own,” to whom He came.
Their iniquity, however, black as it was, did but accomplish the counsels of God, and became, at the same time, the occasion for the display of the depths of the heart of Christ. In the same night in which He was betrayed He took bread and gave thanks; and of the cup He said, “This is My blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” Matthew 26:28. He thus suffered Himself to be led as a lamb to the slaughter, and voluntarily went down under all the judgment of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. All God’s waves and billows therefore passed also over His head. They had passed over (or rather, viewed prophetically, will pass over) the remnant because of their sins; they went over the head of Christ because in grace He took the place of the people before God, died for that nation, so that God might afterward righteously, on the ground of the atonement, fulfill all His counsels of grace toward His ancient people.
It is in this way that Jonah in the belly of the whale becomes a figure of Christ in the grave. He thus uses expressions, as led of the Spirit of God, which have a far wider application than to his own circumstances. Look, for example, at Psalm 42. This psalm is the commencement of the second book, in which the remnant are viewed as cast out of Jerusalem, while the city is given up to wickedness. They have fallen, therefore, under the judgments of God, and they use, in respect of this, the very words found in Jonah— “All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” Psalm 42:7. But the full significance of this statement is only seen when considered in connection with the place our Lord took, when He identified Himself, not only with His people, but also with their sins, when He bore them in His own body on the tree.
We may now trace further the way of God with Jonah, as also with the remnant, as set forth in the language here employed. The chapter commences with the significant statement, “Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly.” His face is now in the right direction. He had turned his back upon Jehovah; but now, under the stroke of the divine rod, he is not only arrested, but his eyes are drawn upward to Him from whom he had attempted to flee. Blessed effect of chastisement when the soul owns its dependence, and humbles itself under the mighty hand of God. “Is any among you afflicted,” says James, “let him pray.” Yes, just as a song of praise is the channel of the soul’s joy, prayer is the vehicle of its sorrow. Thus Jonah tells us, “I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He heard me; out of the belly of hell (margin, the grave) cried I, and Thou heardest my voice.” And then the prophet recounts the whole process which had been wrought out in him, and by which his soul had been restored. (vss. 2-7.) It will be profitable to mark for our own instruction its several steps.
First he owns the hand of the Lord. “Thou,” he says, “hadst cast me into the deep.” There was no entanglement in second causes, as is so often the case with ourselves, and by which we lose all the blessing of the Lord’s dealings with us. Jonah at this moment thought neither upon the storm nor upon the sailors. It was the Lord who had cast him into the deep. So with our Lord, in a more blessed and more perfect manner, when suffering upon the cross. “Thou,” He said, “hast brought Me into the dust of death.” Psalm 22:15. And what rest of soul it gives to take everything that befalls us, as it is our privilege to do, from the hand of the Lord Himself! It stills every murmur, opens the ear to the divine voice, and puts the soul into the condition for profiting by the discipline through which it may be passing.
Moreover, Jonah confesses that the Lord’s hand was upon him for judgment. All the figures he employs—the seas, the floods, billows and waves—though literally true in his case, explain this; for they are all the symbols everywhere in the Scripture of God’s judicial wrath. The effect was, that he felt he was cast out of God’s sight, and his soul fainted within him. (vss. 4, 7.) In other words, like Paul, though in another manner, he had the sentence of death in himself. He was brought to a sense of his utter nothingness before God, and all the more because it was on account of his own sin. From a rebel fleeing from the divine Presence, he is changed into a penitent, having no plea of justification for what he had done, but taking the place of having nothing and deserving nothing but the judgment from which he was suffering. And this, the only true place for the soul, whether of a sinner, or of a backslidden saint, and the only place where God can meet the soul, on the ground of accomplished atonement, with forgiveness and restoring grace.
Let us, then, now see in what way the Lord responds to the cry of the prophet. Jonah says, “I cried ... and Thou heardest my voice.” Again, “When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto Thee, into Thy holy temple.” verses 2, 7. What could more strikingly illustrate the grace of God, or display the tenderness of His heart! The object of His dealings accomplished, He immediately answers the cry of His servant.
In the folly of our unbelief how often are we tempted to think that He cannot forgive us after our sinful and rebellious wanderings. But His grace never fails; nay, He waits upon His people, His ear ever being open to their cry; for His attitude toward us does not depend upon what we are, but solely upon what He is in Himself. Satan would always fain deceive us now as he deceived Eve in the garden of Eden, and hence the importance of learning the character and the ways of God from His own Word, and from the revelation He has made of Himself in Christ Jesus. Many examples of His readiness to hear His people’s cry, spite of their conduct, might easily be collected from the Scripture. Psalm 107 is a collection of such; see also Hosea 14; and especially the Lord’s message to Peter on the morning of His resurrection. (Mark 16:7.)
These words of the prophet, “I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He heard me,” should therefore sink deep into our hearts. They are a blessed encouragement to timid, and beyond all, to backslidden souls, teaching as they do that God waits for nothing, if we have wandered, but our return to Him. We have a sheet anchor whose hold no storm can loosen when we have learned the simple truth that God never changes His attitude toward us, that His love is always the same—the same when we have fallen into sin as when we are walking in the enjoyment of the light of His countenance. And it is just because of His unchanging love that He deals with us in chastening and affliction. “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.” It was on this same principle that He acted with Jonah, and the issue was that the prophet could declare, “I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.” verse 6.
Thus restored, the prophet now can testify of the folly of sin. “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.” And surely this witness is true. Will not all our hearts, indeed, set their seal to it? For whenever we have been beguiled by the lying vanities of the flesh, of the world, or the devil, have we not proved the truth of the prophet’s instruction? Ah! yes, there is a way that seemeth right unto a man (when under the power of these allurements) but the end thereof are the ways of death. Mercy is never found in the path of sin. Under the influence of this truth, wrought out by practical experience in Jonah’s soul, he cries, “But I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that I have vowed.” He thus recognizes the source of his preservation and blessing, and renders his thanksgiving and praise.
He then proceeds a step further. “Salvation is of the Lord.” And, together with these words, we are told that “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.” This is undoubtedly a remarkable foreshadowing of the truth of deliverance. All the exercises of Jonah’s soul lead him up to this beautiful conclusion— “Salvation is of the Lord;” and immediately he is set free. So with the soul in Romans 7: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God” (is the answer) “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And the deliverance is reached and enjoyed. Blessed conclusion, again we say, whether for the sinner or the troubled saint— “Salvation is of the Lord.” It brings peace into the soul; it stills all doubts and questionings; it puts an end to self-occupation, and it turns the eye upward to the only source of blessing and deliverance. The knowledge of this truth is essential to the whole of the Christian life, and brings ineffable rest to the soul when weary with its burdens and conflicts. “Salvation is of the Lord.” Then we have only, like the king of Israel, to say, “Neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon Thee;” and we shall find, as he did, that the Lord will come in with His delivering mercy beyond our utmost thought and expectation.
The prophetic application of Jonah’s deliverance to the Jewish remnant in the future is easily perceived. We have already called attention to the identity of the expressions used by the prophet with those found in Psalm 42. And the Lord’s way with them will be precisely the same as that found here. Bringing in upon them all His waves and billows, He will, by thus exercising their souls, reach their consciences, produce in them the sense of their guilt and utter helplessness, and turning their eyes up to Himself, evoke from their hearts cries and supplications for succor and deliverance. Then, as in the case of Jonah, the Lord, who had been waiting with yearning compassion upon His people, will instantly answer their cry and appear for their salvation. Thereon they will cry, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us: this is the Lord; we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.” Isaiah 25:9.
E. D.