It's been a couple of weeks, so I want to do just a quick review of Jonah 1 and highlight a few of the points that I've made that'll just lead us into this, really into Jonah 2 today is the plan. So the storyline I think is pretty familiar, and again, we did go over it in terms of Jonah running away from the Lord, We saw a couple of interesting things about how Jonah, in a sense, if he was just reading Providence, if he was just reading circumstances, he might think that running away from the Lord was kind of working out for him. He finds this boat that's going to the exact place he wanted to go, which was at the far edge of the world. And so, but the word of the Lord has been very clear to Jonah, and so, and he's disobeying him. And that's the message in verses one through three. Now, the way the chapter is set up, we put, I'm not gonna do it again, but we put two columns up on the board. One that represented what Jonah does and says and the other that represented what the sailors did and say and and that's that's pretty instructive because it really is Jonah one is really set up to show this tension or this difference, this divide, really, between how Jonah, the prophet, who you would think would be equipped to understand who God is and obey what God says. We talked about the background of prophecy in the Old Testament, but actually what Jonah does is he's handling things all the wrong ways, and the sailors, oddly enough, even though they're told virtually nothing about the Lord by Jonah, just a few things here and there when he says, I'm running away from the Lord. They respond in an amazing way. They basically, initially, they're crying out to their own pagan gods, but when they learn about the Lord through Jonah just telling them that's who he's running away from, they understand, and they recognize he's the God of heaven and earth, and therefore we need to pray to him. And they do, and they offer sacrifices to him, and they fear him, and at the end, In verse 16 it says, "...the men feared the Lord exceedingly and offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows." And it's all very specific. It's not just a general, they made vows to God, which could be their God or the real God. It's Yahweh that they're making vows to. It's Yahweh that they're coming to. So the real action in a sense in Jonah 1 has to do with the fact that Jonah is going the wrong direction even though he should have known better and these Gentile pagan initially sailors who were sort of known for their sin they're actually responding to the very slightest mention of the Lord. Jonah's a terrible missionary, and he does a terrible job, but yet the Lord uses just the fact that he tells them he's running away. The Lord uses it. So that's the juxtaposition, and that's the storyline. Now, in 17 Really, a lot of people have said this, and it's probably true, that Chapter 2 of Jonah, I mean, the chapter divisions, as you know, come late, so they're not, you know, they're valuable, but they're not inspired. Really, 117 seems to almost go better with Chapter 2, because it starts this new section. So now, so if in Chapter 1, we were talking about Jonah versus the sailors, and how they're responding. In chapter two, the sailors are out of the picture. It's ended well with them, actually. The last thing we see of these sailors is worshiping the Lord, offering sacrifices, praying to the Lord, they're putting aside their false gods. They've converted by the end of chapter one. So now the focus shifts in chapter two to Jonah's prayer. Now, there are two major prayers in the book of Jonah. In fact, the book is kind of structured around two prayers. Chapter one tells us the account of Jonah and the sailors, then we have a prayer. Then chapter three tells us the account of Jonah and the Ninevites, and that's an interesting, we're gonna have to do the same thing, draw two columns on the board and kinda keep track of who does what. And then chapter four's a prayer again. So it goes, you know, contrast between Jonah and the and the Gentiles' prayer. Contrast between Jonah and the Gentiles' prayer. That's really how the whole thing is set up. Now, so this is our major prayer in the center of the book. Now, there are a couple things to note about this. Well, there's actually a lot of things. We spend the whole time looking at, noting things about this prayer. But I wanna set it up by saying this. In verse 17, notice this. At a really obvious level, you know this, it's the Lord who's doing all this. It says Yahweh, so the last thing we read of Yahweh is they're making vows and sacrificing to it. And then Yahweh we pick up with again in verse 17, appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah. And this is interesting, the way that the story progresses. Because in the second sentence of verse 17, it tells us the outcome of the whole thing. And you'll see that, in a sense, it does what verse 10 does in chapter 2. So chapter 2.10 says, And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out on the dry land. And in 1.17, we already know that, in a sense, that outcome is not in doubt. going into chapter two. So there's no real mystery from the reader's perspective. Now Jonah's different. Jonah is in the belly of the fish. And so he doesn't, you know, we don't necessarily know what he expected. Uh, probably he thought he was dying, but, but, um, but we know as readers like that, that action. And so it's kind of interesting because when you, when you think of the story of Jonah and the, and the, great fish, or when we tell the story to children because it's an exciting story, actually what we focus on is the part that, I mean it's important, I'm not saying it's not important, but The Bible actually gives very little detail to Jonah being in the belly of the fish. He was. Again, I'm not pulling back from that. He was. But it doesn't detail out this moment by moment. tension in Jonah's mind or anything like that. Chapter 1 does. Chapter 1 we get a pretty significant series of details about Jonah and the sailors. It's actually quite a lot. In the Bible, in biblical narrative, it's extremely compact. I think I've probably made this point before here in this class, but if you think about one of the features of narrative in the Bible is how how compactly the writers can make these amazing points. Think about, the example that always comes to my mind with this is, think about the story of Abraham offering Isaac on the altar. And there's so much poignancy to that, so much tension, so much drama, so much theological significance, so much packed into that, whole books have been written just meditating on that. But if you look in your Bible, it's like a couple paragraphs. It's pretty short. And there are some key moments of dialogue, like when Isaac says, I see the wood and I see the implements for sacrifice, but where is the sacrifice? And that's a moment of tension. And obviously there's this moment where Abraham actually has the knife and the Lord stops him. But the point is, all this to say, you would be surprised if you went through the big stories of the Bible that are familiar and kind of live in your head, and they should live in your head, and you actually went through and said, how much space did they actually take up? And it's really short, because the biblical writers are masters of compact, terse narrative. So what that means is, the takeaway from that is that whenever they do give space to something, we really need to pay attention to every detail. But again, the terseness is so evident. If you want to talk about the narrative portion of the text, that talks about Jonah being in the fish, the narrative of it, are its two verses. It's verse 17, it's 117, and it's 210, sort of. It's really just 117. Honestly, the whole narrative of Jonah, the story of Jonah and the fish is one verse, really. in the Bible. So again, all I'm trying to say is I'm trying to, I guess, say number one, it's pretty amazing how the biblical writers operate, but it's also, I'm actually then saying we need to pay special attention to the other parts of the text where there is a little more of a drawn out, developed narrative. We get some detail, we get some back and forth like chapter one. So Jonah and the sailors has, you know, you could say 16 times more space given to it than Jonah and the fish in terms of the narrative. All right, so that's, so now the fact that we are already told what happens in 117. 117 says he's in there three days and three nights. Okay, we know that now. The fact we're already told that actually then makes us focus in on perhaps a few different things in the prayer. Because when we're coming into the prayer, we're not supposed to be asking a question like, does this work? Does God listen? Does Jonah get out of this? I mean, again, it's hard because we know the story, so we might not ask those questions anyway, but imagine you're reading this and you don't know the story. You already know what's going to happen. You already know that Jonah's there three days and three nights, and then he's out somehow. So the prayer, again, then takes on a little bit of a different cast. It's not a prayer where we're kind of playing a guessing game. It's a prayer where we already know how the Lord's responded. We already know the outcome of it. We already know where Jonah ends up at the end. Now, that's all, I'm saying all of that, does that make sense? Do you understand what I'm saying? Okay, so I'm saying all of that to preface it because we know all those things, but Jonah, of course, He does not know three days and three nights. He does not know that the fish is gonna vomit him up onto dry land. He's just there being swallowed up. But having said that, look at the way he frames his prayer. We'll just look at verse two. Jonah prayed to Yahweh his God from the belly of the fish, saying, Look at the tenses here. 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. Now, that's very different from the prayer you might expect Jonah to pray, or the prayer that you would pray if you were in this situation. If you were in this situation, the prayer that you would pray, the prayer that we would naturally be drawn to and what we would expect Jonah to pray is, Lord, I'm in this, save me out of it. Preserve me somehow in this. But notice Jonah actually doesn't, this is I think one of the key, I don't think it is a mystery, but initial mysteries of the prayer, is why does Jonah pray as if it's a done deal already? that he's already rescued. I did cry out to the Lord, I did call out to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me from the depths of Sheol. So Jonah prays as if it's already happened, as if this whole thing is just, you know, he's already been rescued. So why, I'm asking for some opinion here, why is it that Jonah, do you think, why is it that Jonah prays that way? How is it that he prays that way, given the way the whole story has gone thus far? Do you understand what I'm asking? You understand what you would say? Lord, please do this? It's still an open question. Please, this is what I'm asking for. And actually, it's really interesting because the language of verse one, Jonah prayed to the Lord. I don't know that this is strictly speaking true, but in, well, no, I think this is actually strictly speaking true, sorry, what I'm about to say. In other places where you see this word appear, this Hebrew word appear, it's asking for something just like we think prayer is. It's asking for something that hasn't yet happened. And so, again, there's, but that's not how Jonah deals with it. That's my, that's my question. Why do you think that is? Yeah. I mean, is it possible that when he says, this is what he prayed, he's speaking very loosely and really, okay, here's the spirit of the prayer that he prayed from the belly, as captured in his afterwards reflection. Like, is that possible? It's possible, and there are commentaries that say, actually, verses 2 through 9 should come after verse 10. So you'll have critical scholars of Jonah who will say it's kind of out of order. It's supposed to move from 117 to 210 and then to 1 to 9. For exactly this reason, because he acts like it's a done deal. Now, I don't actually think that's the case. I mean, what you're saying may be true. It is obviously a later reflection that Jonah makes. But I don't think, I mean, there's no textual evidence that this is out of order. And so, while certainly Jonah is reflecting retrospectively, know even also push back even at that like if you were reflecting back retrospectively on something like this you would say I pray that the Lord would do this wouldn't you so I'm not I'm not even sure that the psychology of that would would work that way if you if you talked about an answered prayer it would be Lord you know we need please please heal me of this sickness please heal my child and then he did you know not You healed him, retrospectively written down. I don't know, I don't know. But look, that's the most, but that is the most common explanation that you get in the commentaries, what you just said. And usually it's got a kind of critical cast to it, which is not the perspective you're approaching it from, but still. Other thoughts? Why does Jonah pray this way? Sure. Less charitable. Okay. So, the more charitable understanding is, in a sense, he's so certain maybe that the Lord will do this because he trusts the Lord now, at this point, that he's just convinced the Lord is going to rescue him. Right. The less charitable is, he's convinced, but he's almost presuming. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. Yeah, and actually both of those ways of looking at it, and there's just slight shades in between, both those ways of looking at it are also ones that you'll find. So one of the commentators that I lean on the most heavily in Jonah and have found the most helpful is a 19th century commentator named Hugh Martin, and he puts it more the charitable way that you said, which is he said, this is, we need to learn about prayer from this. This is faith and, how does he put it, he says there's, There's sense and faith. There's what you see and what you believe. And this is a good example of Jonah allowing his faith to overcome what he sees. Lord, this is what you're gonna do. And it's not presumptuous, he just knows it to be true because you could make a lot out of the way it's described in verse one. This is the Lord his God. And so Yahweh is still his God, and so he goes into the fish, and he just, it looks bleak, but nonetheless, it's a done deal. I'm getting out of this. If he did have that kind of, let's talk about the presumption thing. If Jonah does have that kind of confidence, and it seems he does, why would he have that kind of confidence? In other words, what is it that would make him say, this is a done deal? Is there anything, can you, again, we're sort of just taking shots now. Is there anything that would, where would Jonah get this kind of confidence that this is going to happen? I was just thinking, I mean, he's in the fish for three days. It's not like there was one prayer. No, that's true. At the beginning of the three days, been praying, like we would say, like, please heal me, and then this is just and God has given him confidence that I've heard you, you've been pleading, and now I'm gonna hear you. So that's good. So there's a couple really important observations there. One is that we don't know when during the three days Jonah prayed this. He may have been right at the end. And so maybe Jonah gets through the first two days and realizes, you know what? This bull is gonna rescue me. He's doing something here. Or maybe the Lord even somehow revealed that to him, that there's a little bit there, but there was an event that took place or a word that took place that we are not given. And that is true, that could be, and it is interesting because it does, it's not super clear in terms of the timing, but it seems like, the way it's written, it seems like after verse 9 you get verse 10 like it's it's sort of as soon as Jonah prays this again it doesn't say as soon as but or immediately but it there's nothing in between the end of his prayer and the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited out Jonah upon dry ground so so all that could be a play that this is right at the end and maybe not only is it right at the end but there's kind of more that we don't know that kind of brings Jonah to this point She's got the answer. Oh, good! And maybe it seems that the fish itself is the miraculous deliverance, because Jonah's getting drowned if he's not swallowed up by the fish. And from the prayer, especially verses 5 and 6, it seems to indicate that he is drowning, and that when he's swallowed up by the fish, that's the first step in the Lord's miraculous preservation of his life. And that is constant with what then happens. Well, that's a great point. So you think about this from Jonah's perspective. We think of Jonah being in the fish and terrified, and I'm sure he was. But it is interesting, the language of the prayer is a great point. The language of the prayer is more like Jonah's sinking down and he gets rescued. And so then the fish becomes less the vehicle for judgment, although it has that element to it because he's in there three days and three nights but that actually this is the step one like once I got swallowed by the fish I knew I was going to be okay because if the Lord brought the fish to swallow me then clearly he has a plan for me beyond just drowning in the bottom of the ocean and so that's a great point that that that that there's nothing in the prayer that directly identifies the fish with the salvation, or sorry, the fish with death, it could be that the sea is death, and then the fish is like part one of the salvation. And so when he's into that, it's gonna happen. And that's interesting too, because we'll come back to that, because there is, as you know, Jesus uses this as the sign that was in the Old Testament that is paralleled by the sign of his own death and resurrection. And just to kind of pull the string a little bit more, Jesus does go down into the grave. He is, you know, three days and three nights, but it's finished as soon as he goes into the grave. according to his own way he describes it. So he doesn't say it is finished after he's raised from the dead, although we know the significance for our salvation of the resurrections, the vindication of everything he said. But what he said and when it was kind of done was when he died, when he went into the grave, was where it was finished. moment. And so that parallel, again, I don't want to be careful about the parallel because Jesus doesn't spell all this out, but that parallel would make sense. That the fish actually is a vehicle for salvation, and Jonah knows that. It's also a kind of holding place for him for three days and three nights, but he knows once that happens, it's done. that he's going to be rescued, that he's going to be saved. So that's interesting. That's a really interesting perspective. And I think there's actually quite a lot of validity to it. I'll throw out one more thing, which I think probably combines with that comment, which is one of the oddities of Jonah's prayer is that almost none of it is original. In other words, basically the entire prayer is lifted from two or three Psalms. Now, that's helpful because the first thing that teaches us is it teaches us about prayer. And I wanna just make this point, it's a little bit of an aside, but I think we have to address it. In the Bible, Prayer, the model prayers are almost all this way. They're almost all driven directly and consumed almost entirely with things that God has already promised in his word. Now that is, I've talked about how we would pray and how Jonah prays. This is a major gap between how we pray and how the model prayers in the Bible are set up. Because what happens in the model prayers of the Bible is they see their circumstances, whatever they may be, but then they reflect on those circumstances through everything God has said. And what you hear them doing is praying using all the language of what God had already promised. So in other words, you will find very few prayers or very few lines within prayers in the Bible that are not directly based on promises of God. Again, very different from our prayers. And I think it should be a corrective to our prayers. Because what we do is we say, well, if God's promised all these things, great, maybe I know that, maybe I don't. in my time of prayer, what I'm gonna do is ask for all these things that I wanna see happen. But in the Bible, it's really different. In the Bible, what they do is they say, here are my circumstances, what has God said about that? And then what I'm gonna do, it's not redundant, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pray the same things that God has already said. And you can go through almost all, like I said, virtually every prayer in the scriptures that's a model prayer, virtually every line of every prayer in the scriptures does this. I'll give you one example that's, because it's so clear. If you look at Daniel chapter nine, In Daniel 9, it's a great setup. It's mostly a prayer in that chapter, but it's a great setup because what it says is that Daniel was sitting up in his room, and he was reading through the prophecy of Jeremiah. So it was just maybe a generation and a half old. He has the scroll of Jeremiah, and he's reading it, and he's in exile. And he reads in Jeremiah, just like we've been doing in church. He reads and he says, oh, the exile is supposed to end after 70 years. After 70 years, we're supposed to return to the land. And then it says, and this is all right there in the text of Daniel 9, I calculated the number of years since Jeremiah prophesied this, and I realized, basically, we're coming up on that 70 years. And so then he prays. And what he prays is striking, because you and I at that point would go, oh good, we're almost at 70 years, so I'll look forward to that. But what Daniel does is he says, we're almost at 70 years, so I'm gonna pray that the Lord will do what he already promised to do in terms of the 70 year return. And three quarters of the prayer is confession of sin, and then at the end he says, Lord, this is what you've promised, Now do what you've promised. So he's taking his circumstances and applying the promises of God directly to his circumstances and asking God to do the very thing that God's already said he would do. Which again, is contrary to our view of prayer, because we think, no, I want to ask God to do the things that I want him to do, not the things he already said he would do. That's not most of biblical prayer. Okay, so there's a lesson here on prayer. This follows a model, and the model is, What you do when you sit down to pray is you go, here's all the things that are going on in my life. What does God's word say about them? I wanna ask for what God's word says about them. Now, it doesn't mean that there aren't areas where you just don't know. Lord, I don't know what your will is here. I know that you say that you sustain us and you want us to be strengthened and to rejoice in all things. But, and so please, please make that happen, but I'm asking if it's your will that you might see fit to glorify yourself by healing me in this situation. So I mean, there are these little cases that the Bible does show. So I'm not making a 100% thing here. There are these little cases that the Bible says, cast your burdens on him, he cares for you. But most of the model prayers have someone saying, what's the Bible already promised? That's what I'm praying for. All right, so Jonah does that. How does he do it? He combines these Psalms together. And how does he know that these Psalms are applicable? Well, this is what's interesting. Because possibly already Jonah's aware that the fish has grabbed him and therefore he's gonna be utilized by God in this way. But Jonah, Jonah understands, because if you go through each of the Psalms that Jonah picks up on, what Jonah does is he picks up on these Psalms that are also used in the New Testament to talk about the Messiah and the way in which the Lord saves the Messiah from death and enables him to be both a judge to the nations and a light to the nations. So what Jonah seems to be doing which is really remarkable at this moment, is he understands that the instructions that the Lord gave him, the command that the Lord gave him at the beginning, was a command to go and be a light to the nations. And he realizes when he's in the belly of the fish, either just because he got swallowed, he realizes it, or because he's gotten to the end and he sort of sees now what's happening, whatever the case, He now realizes that what God has called him to do is directly related to God's plan to be a light to the nations, and therefore, because that's what God is doing, ultimately through the Messiah, but now in a sort of lowercase sense through Jonah, therefore, What God is doing right now through me is He's saving me from death in order that I may carry out this work. Now, what's kind of striking about this, I don't want to jump ahead to chapter four too much, but the thing that you realize in chapter four is Judas still didn't really want to do it. And he still kind of hated that God operated in this way. So Jonah's not really speaking out of great affection for the Ninevites at this point, or great, he's not really, you know, he's not, he's still not thrilled about the whole thing. But he knows that ultimately, because salvation is of the Lord, that what the Lord is doing here is the Lord is going to use him sort of against his will. to carry out this meta-plan that's outlined in the Psalms of being a light to the Gentiles and saving him out of death in order to be a light to the Gentiles. Which is again why I think this is such an important messianic symbol that Jesus picks up on later. Now he also, he knows as well that everything that's happened is from the Lord. So look for instance in verses three and four. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas. The flood surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me. And I said, I'm driven away from your sight, yet I shall look again upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped around my head. And at the roots of the mountains, I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple." So Jonah knows that the Lord's been in charge of all of this. And the fact that the Lord has preserved him up to this point through the waters is a kind of sign that what the Lord is doing is exactly the kind of thing he outlines in the Psalter as his overall plan to be a light to the nations and to rescue his Messiah from death. In order that the Lord's steadfast love, his covenant love, that's the word used in verse 6, and his salvation, that's the word that's used in verse nine, I'm sorry, I said six, eight, and then nine, that his covenant love and his salvation will go wherever he wants them to go. Now, that's a really significant thing for an Israelite at this time to recognize. Because what constituted the Israelites, what they would have said made them who they were, was the covenant promises that God had made to them. And what Jonah is now saying is that anyone who turns away from idols can, if God so decides, because salvation is from the Lord, can be a partaker of that steadfast love, or that covenant love. And by the way, let me just, I don't want to assume this. What I'm saying is, in verse eight, you see that word, those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. That word steadfast love, translated steadfast love, equals a Hebrew word, chesed, which means Covenant faithfulness It's usually translated as something like loving kindness or Or steadfast love in English, but it's a covenant word And and because it's a covenant word what what? What he's doing is he's applying He's saying that those even who are worshiping idols are The bad thing about worshipping idols is that they're forsaking steadfast love. And that's the key verse, I think. Not just because of what Jonah's doing, but because of how he actually slightly alters it from the psalms. We haven't gone through every psalm, but I want to show you this one. So in verse 8, He uses this word steadfast love, and he's building on Psalm 31. Just turn to Psalm 31. I told you, he strings together a bunch of psalms. He knew his Bible, and he used his Bible when he prayed. But here, he changes the psalm slightly. Now, the word order makes it hard to see how he takes it, how he changes it, but he does. What Psalm 31 says, and by the way, I mean, he's built on Psalm 31 throughout this prayer, but here's what Psalm 31.6 says. This is the Psalm of David. I hate those who pay regard to worthless idols, but I trust in the Lord. And what Jonah says, this is the biggest change he makes to the Psalms. Most of the rest of them are just verbatim quotations. But what he says here is not, I hate those, although he probably does. But what he says is, those who pay regard to vain idols actually forsake their hope of this covenant love, of this hesed, covenant faithfulness. So Jonah knows exactly what's about to happen. Jonah knows that if he proclaims this offer of salvation to the Ninevites who are worshiping vain idols, what they're getting now by worshiping vain idols is they're not part of the covenant people. But if they do repent, then they are. Then they're participants in God's covenant love. And the reality is, what we learn in chapter 4 is Jonah actually doesn't want that to happen, but he knows that's what God is doing. But it's amazing because sometimes you think in the Old Testament, sometimes it's portrayed that in the Old Testament God isn't working at all with the Gentiles, but Jonah uses very specific theologically loaded language to say, no, no, no, God is at making his covenant available even to those who are currently worshiping idols, because what he says at the end is, salvation belongs to the Lord. And what do we know about the Lord from chapter 1? That he's the God of heaven and earth. He's the creator of heaven and earth. That means he owns it all, and his covenant then isn't just with one people, it's available even to those who are in the midst of idolatry. And we saw it worked out in chapter one, and now Jonah says it in his one alteration of the Psalms that he's quoting from. So there's a tremendous amount going on here in terms of redemptive history. I guess we're, you guys have to go to a choir, don't you? Let me pray. We're done, I went over time. Lord, thank you for the time that you've given us. We pray that you would take our feeble efforts and use them to your glory, that we might see things differently, and that we might pray differently, and read your word differently, and even look at the nations differently. And we ask that you would do this in Jesus' name, amen.