The God of Fish & Men
. . .
A story that isn't really all that hard to swallow
"And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."
Jonah 1:17
Well, this morning we come to the moment you all have been waiting for.
If you are visiting with us today, you may like to know that we started a series in the book of Jonah two weeks ago. We have taken the first two weeks to meditate on verses 1-16. We’ve sought to look at everything that led to Jonah being flipped overboard.
But this morning we finally come to verse 17 and to the great fish.
This verse (and this fish) are, what I do not doubt, some believe to be most climactic point of the book. I mean, if you know anything about the book of Jonah, you know about his getting sucked into the belly of this giant sea creature.
I don’t know if its just the curmudgeon in me, but I feel the need to say that the book of Jonah is not about a whale. It’s not about the fish.
Now, it’s kind of funny that the most noteworthy thing about the book of Jonah is this sea creature. It’s weird because the fish is only mentioned in three verses in the whole 4 chapters. Here in verse 17 he is swallowed by it. In the next verse (chapter 2) we are told that he prays from its belly. And then in the last verse of chapter 2 we are told that the fish vomits him up onto the dry land. Even though Jonah is in the fish for all of chapter 2, most of the chapter doesn’t even acknowledge the thing.
But it’s understandable why it can become the focal point of the book. After all, it’s crazy. It’s completely bizarre. Not to mention comical. I mean, again, why is Jonah such a great book? It’s because it is hilarious.
You may know the old saying, “When a dog bites a man, that is not news. But when a man bites a dog, now that is news.” We might say something similar here. When a man catches a fish, that’s not news. But when a fish catches a man, now that is news.”
That’s exactly what we have here. We are essentially told that all creation is against Jonah. God had told him to go to Nineveh and preach. And Jonah does his very best to avoid it. But the Lord essentially says, “O no you don’t.” And so Jonah ends up fighting against every force of nature under the Lord’s control.
Being that we are not familiar with the culture of the time, we do miss some of the comedy. One of the Assyrian gods was the goddess Nina. She would have been one of the patron gods of the city of Nineveh. And it just so happens that Nina was the goddess of…fish. (1) Nineveh was located on the bank of the Tigris River. So you’d certainly want a fish goddess to help you out as that would be one of the main resources for your daily diet.
Nina is described as “the one who assigns the destinies of lives while swimming as a fish.” If you are interested, the cuneiform symbol for Nina is a fish inside of a house. And Nineveh was essentially the “Place of the Fish.”
Now you can imagine Jonah, contemplating the irony of this as he sits in the belly of this great fish. God is saying, “Jonah, you will open your mouth to the ‘House of the Fish, or you will find yourself housed within a fish who has opened his mouth to you.”
Well, again, the gods of the old world are cast down, are they not? In this verse we see who really is the God of the fish.
But we have our own gods to deal with in our own day. We’ve been saying for the last couple weeks that the book of Jonah is a prophetic book. It’s super entertaining, but its main objective is to call out our sin and idolatry. Its aim is to confronts us. And it is to turn us back to the true religion.
And that’s what we need to do today. We have to remember that we have our own gods today. The god of secularism has been trying to tell us that the God of the bible is silly. He doesn’t exist. And we are constantly being wooed into worshipping science and reason and man.
And we’ve been told that the book of Jonah is nothing more than a fish story. You know how it is. You got out on the boat and you catch some little guppy. And for the rest of your life, you go around saying, “I once caught a fish THIS BIG.” and that’s how the story of Jonah has been treated. We’re told that it’s just a mythological story. It’s obviously not true. I mean, really. Let’s get serious. We know that people aren’t swallowed by fish. If they were, they couldn’t live to tell about it.
All in all, we don’t really believe the story of Jonah; it wasn’t telling a real, historical story. It’s just a story that was made up to teach us a little moral tale. That’s what secularism has been preaching. And that’s what the world would have you believe.
And we can be tempted to believe all that. I mean, when you hear it, it does sound a little prosperous, doesn’t it? It sounds a little far out and it goes against all our human sensibilities.
But I don’t want you to be fooled. In the face of the gods of our time, we must be bold to confess the truth of the Lord. And we must confess the truth of the book of Jonah; the truth of this text. That’s what we want to meditate on this morning.
Now, as we come to this text, we should readily admit that we can’t explain everything. And that’s our first point this morning. As we confess the truth of this text, we confess that there’s some mystery to the text.
I. We confess the mystery of the text
We should recognize that God does something miraculous. We accept that. You know why the secular mind rejects Jonah’s being swallowed? It’s because it doesn’t have a worldview that is big enough to accept it. It doesn’t believe that miracles can happen. It has what we call an anti-supernatural perspective.
Over and against this, we do believe in the supernatural. We understand that there is a God. He created the world. And he can bend and break the laws of nature as he desires.
DL Moody once was asked if he actually believed the story of Jonah and the fish. And Moddy replied by saying, “I believe the Bible and I believe that the Bible is true. And so, yes, I believe that Jonah swallowed the whale. As a matter of fact, if the Bible said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I’d believe it.”
You understand that it’s all about presuppositions. If you have a naturalistic worldview, you’re going to say that fish don’t get this big and fish don’t swallow people whole. And even if someone could get swallowed by a fish this big, there’s no way he would be able to survive the digestive juices for three days.
If you don’t believe that there is a God who has authority over every aspect of this creation, then none of this going to be able to fit in your brain. It is going to be preposterous. It is utterly unbelievable. And so you must explain it away or outright reject it.
People come up with things that sometimes seem even more unbelievable. For instance, Curtis Daniel says that one liberal theologian remarks that Jonah swam to shore and stayed the night at an inn that was called “the great fish.” When you come to the text with a belief that nothing like this could happen, it’s no surprise that you come away from the text with something completely different.
But that’s the point. We don’t have to explain everything. We don’t have to worry about the details. We can trust that there is a God in the heaven who does as he pleases. He is happy to abide by the rules that he has created. He is also free to intervene and adapt those rules as he sees fit.
Ultimately, we confess this because we recognize that this story of Jonah points us to the greater miracle of the resurrection of the Lord. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so the Lord himself was in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.
We recognize that there was a greater miracle than the one Jonah experienced. Our Lord was dead, sealed in a tomb, and absolutely lifeless for a time. But he was then brought back. He rose again. He began to breath. His blood began to circulate. His body became warm. And his muscles began to move again.
And that miracle is the foundation for our own resurrection. Our whole faith very much lies in the fact that what we call the natural process of death and decay will be wholly overridden. The dust of the earth will be revived and restored as our bodies enter into a new and glorious state. Each and every one of us who are trusting in Christ will be the objects of God’s miracle working activity. Each and everyone of us who believes in Christ will be resurrected from the dead.
So as we come to the text, we will confess that it is true. There’s a lot that is not explained. And there may be a lot that cannot be explained. But we leave the unknown in the hands of God. And we rejoice in the brevity of the text. We do not need to pry into the details and try to understand every little caveat. We don’t need to make sense of anything either. Because it already makes perfect sense. If we believe in the absolute sovereignty of an omnipotent God we have all the answers we need.
While we might not know everything about the text, we do have an explanation of some of the things in our text. So, we not only confess the mystery of the text, we also need to confess its authenticity.
II. We confess the authenticity of the text
Where the text is silent, we are silent. We don’t venture where the text doesn’t lead. And we are happy to say “God is God and he does as he sees fit.” But where the text speaks, we are supposed to be bold to say that is exactly true.
In other words, we need to recognize that our Bibles are reliable. What it says can be believed. We can confess that our God not only has the power to do miracles, but we also should boldly confess that this book testifies in the clearest possible way to the reality of the world that God has created.
What does our text say? It says that there was a giant fish. And this fish was so big that it could suck Jonah down into its belly without any kind of problem.
Some of those who balk at the text do so because they can’t imagine a fish big enough to do that. The fish would have had to been simply immense in order to first gulp him down and then to have the whole of him in his belly.
Well, I want to simply suggest that this is not as implausible as some would make it out to be. While there is some miraculous element to the story, we don’t have to make it into a fairy tale. We don’t have to disbelieve it simply because the idea of a great fish doesn’t fit our understanding.
Actually, when you listen to the text and take into consideration the whole teaching of the Bible, we understand that the fish story really does make perfect sense.
Let’s start by examining the Hebrew. The text says that Jonah was swallowed by a “dag gadol.” The word gadol is the word for great. It is actually a word that is used many, many times throughout the book of Jonah. For instance, Nineveh is called a “great city.” When Jonah ran away, we read that the Lord hurled a gadol wind upon the sea. The mariners are said to have feared the Lord exceedingly. That is to say, they feared greatly.
This fish is said to be a gadol fish. In other words, it was a very big fish. Its size was much larger than your ordinary fish.
Secondly, the Hebrew word for fish is the word dag. Some of you might be familiar with the story about the time when the ark of the covenant was captured by the Philistines. They took the ark and placed it in the temple of their god. That’s god’s name was Dagon. Dagon was an idol that had the form of a fish. He was a fish like god.
Now, the word dag literally means vibrating one. You think about a fish and how it swims. It makes a wiggling, vibrating motion with its body and its tail.
I mention that because that makes us realize that it could be virtually any kind of sea faring animal. A lot of people say it can’t be a whale because whales are technically mammals. They say it has to be a fish. But the Bible doesn’t make that distinction. It doesn’t have that kind of genus and species differentiation. In the Hebrew mind a fish could be any kind of sea creature that has a back and forth motion with its body.
Now, when you think of whales, there are likely various candidates that could possibly have swallowed up our little prophet. For instance a sperm whale can be up to 60 feet long. Granted that whales are not typically found in the Mediterranean, but they have been found there from time to time. And we know that God could have appointed a whale to wonder into the Mediterranean Sea and be there right when Jonah was hitched overboard.
What is interesting though, is that it may have been something even greater than a whale. And a clue to this may be found in the Septuagint. The men who translated this text into Greek translated it as a “ketei megalo.”
Now, you know what the word megalo means. It is the word from which we get our word mega. If it is mega sized, it is extra big.
But the word ketos is a unique word in the Greek language. It is not the normal Greek word for fish. Some of you may know the Greek word ichthus. It became an early Christian symbol That’s the word that is normally used for fish.
Ketos is a unique Greek word. It is a word that often referred to large sea monsters. For instance, there are many sources outside the Scripture that refer to a large sea serpent; something like a dragon of the sea.
Those of you who are familiar with astronomy may even know that there is a ketos constellation. It is a water beast which is referred to in a lot of Greek mythology.
What’s even more interesting is that in Job 3:8 we read about a great sea creature, who in the Hebrew is called leviathan. But in the Greek translation he is called a ketos.
Now leviathan is described in a few different passages of Scripture. For instance, Job 40 has a very detailed description of him. He is a mammoth sized animal who’s strength cannot be tamed. He is described as a fearful and terrifying thing, possessing scales that are like armor that cannot be pierced with swords or spears.
What is leviathan? Some have said that it is a large crocodile. However, Job seems to describe him as something much larger, much more versatile, and much more menacing. Most who run in my kind of circles would call it a dinosaur of some sort.
Dinosaurs? I can probably hear what some people are saying. Matt, you said that this was supposed to be believable. We know that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago. But where did you learn that? You learned that from secular sources. Millions of years is a product of anti-biblical, evolutionary science. Millions of years comes from a worldview that hates the Bible and despises Christianity.
The Bible tells us that God created all the animals on the 5-6th days. And that would have included the dinosaurs. So man would have lived right along side of the dinosaurs. However, we didn’t call them dinosaurs. As a matter of fact, we didn’t use that term until the 19th century. Prior to that they were called something else. They were typically called dragons.
For instance, we sang about this last week. In Psalm 148 we sing about all kinds of beast and cattle and birds who are supposed to praise God. Included in that list are dinosaurs. We just call them dragons.
Keep in mind that Job not only talks about leviathan, he also talks about Behemoth. Behemoth was a beast with a long tail that resembled a cedar tree. He’s described as incredibly strong and having bones like tubes of brass. Sounds to me like a dinosaur.
You really don’t hear about it from normal outlets, but there are actually testimonies about these great and imposing beasts all over the world. They just aren’t called dinosaurs. They are usually called dragons.
Just for an example, think about the Chinese calendar. Did you know that 2024 is the year of the dragon? The Chinese have all kinds of animals that they associate with each passing decade: The year of the Rat, the Ox, the Tiger, the Rabbit, the Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Pig. Now, you have all these common animals, but you also have a dragon. Why do you suppose they put a dragon in the list? Were they making it up? Well, they weren’t making up the other animals? Why would they all of a sudden throw in a mythological creature? It’s more likely that they were familiar with large reptiles that roamed the earth.
It becomes even more believable when you see that there are testimonies of reptilian creatures living and interacting with men all over the up until fairly recently; we are talking the 13th, 16th, and even the 17th centuries.
You don’t typically hear about them because that conflicts with the secular worldview. They were supposed to have died out millions of years ago. So they don’t want you to hear about these kinds of things. But the reality is the dinosaurs came on Noah’s ark and only died out fairly recently.
Now, if these massive reptiles were known to walk the earth, what do you think could lurk in the water? Is it too far fetched to say that a giant fish, perhaps even a leviathan like creature, could have gulped Jonah down? It’s not far fetched at all.
Now, why do I go through all this? It’s simply to show the authenticity of the text. We are to recognize that God’s word can be trusted in absolutely every single thing it says.
A secular perspective will tell you that dinosaurs and being swallowed by a great fish is absurd. The god of secularism will tell you that you need to vomit this from your mind.
But as we listen to the text, we understand that there’s no reason to question the Bible. If we listen to the text and trust what God has said, we have more reason to believe than we do to disbelieve it.
But there is one more point I would like to make. As we confess the truth of this text, we can confess the mystery of it and the authenticity of it. But we can also confess the practicality of the text too.
III. We confess the practicality of the text
We can get caught up in all these little details and really miss the real point of the story. We should never lose the forest for the trees.
We’ve been looking up close at the trees. We’ve been thinking about all the things that are actually ancillary to our passage. We should step back and remember that this passage of scripture was written for a specific purpose. It is given because the Lord wanted to convey something that is even more practical.
The point of the story is that Jonah does not die. He was tossed overboard. He was left for dead. Death was ever so imminent for him. He would have died. He should have died. He had been in rebellion to God and the storm of the Lord should have swallowed him up.
But that’s not what happened. Jonah didn’t die. The Lord had mercy upon him. He appointed this fish to come along and be a divine life preserver.
Let me say that this is the most important lesson that this passage teaches. This incident with the fish is a reminder that the Lord saves sinners. He is one who graciously gives life to those who do not deserve it.
Now the absurdity of it is clear. The Lord uses the most unexpected, cockeyed way of extending his grace. But, as we noticed earlier, it is emblematic of how Christ himself brings his grace to bear on us. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish 3 days and 3 nights, so too Christ was in the tomb but rose again.
Let me just say, that this is the lesson that is most practical because it deals with the secular spirit in each and every one of us. We must understand that each and every one of us is a secularist at heart. Even if we are not full fledged secularists, the secularist spirit abides in us. Every time we disbelieve the Bible, we are putting our trust in the god of secularism. Every time we go against the commands of Scripture, we are living that autonomous life that secularism promotes. And it is that spirit of godlessness that dooms us all. The wages of secularism is death.
But this is the good news. That the Lord willingly and freely saves his people when they run from him and incur his judgment. The Lord snatches us out of death’s way. He gives us the gift of eternal life.
And it is in view of this truth that we should put away the spirit of secularism. We should bow only to the Lord and resist the urge to forsake his word.
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1. Sjur Cappelen Papazian, Cradle of Civilization: A Blog about the Birth of Our Civilization and Development, "Lagash, Nineveh and Nina." https://aratta.wordpress.com/2019/02/20/lagash-nineveh-and-nina/