A Prayer for Backsliders
Jonah 2:1-9
Message begins at approx. the 26 min mark
We come this morning to what may be the heart of the book of Jonah. This prayer may be considered the main focus of the book. As a matter of fact, it is so central to the work that I thought about saving it until the very end of our series.
If you have been with me for any length of time you will likely be familiar with the literary device called chiasmus. Chiasmus is a way of writing that puts thoughts or concepts in parallel so that the main focus of the text is in the center. We Westerners usually will put the main point first in a paragraph. We call that the lead sentence. But the Jewish writers would often put the most important thing in the center of the text.
So the heart and core of the message, you might say, is at the heart and core of the passage. If you just take a birds eye view of the book of Jonah, you could look at it like this:
A. Jonah is sent to Nineveh and is angry with God because he is gracious
B. Pagan Mariners repent and turn to the Lord
C. A great fish swallows Jonah
D. Jonah prays
C' A great fish unswallows Jonah
B' Pagan Ninevites repent and turn to the Lord
A' Jonah is in Nineveh and is angry with God because he is gracious
So you see how this prayer is placed right there in the middle. This prayer is, therefore, very important. It is central to the message of the entire book.
And you will remember that the audience is a wayward people. The book is written to Israel, a people who, like Jonah, have been in rebellion. They are living in disobedience to God. They are in danger of coming under God’s judgement, like Jonah has. The book of Jonah is a warning. It is a prophetic confrontation, calling them to repentance.
Well, here in this chapter you have Jonah’s prayer. It is his prayer of repentance where he turns back to God.
Now, it is somewhat interesting; because, once Jonah is out of the fish, he doesn’t seem to be all that repentant. We’re going to see that he still isn’t altogether the most willing prophet. He does go and do what God wants him to do, but we’ll see that he’s still holding a curmudgeonly attitude. He’s obedient, but his heart isn’t quite in it.
That’s kind of one reason I considered saving this passage until the end. It is obvious that Jonah didn’t have a pen and paper to compose this while in the fish. He would have written this after his adventures.
But the prayer is a prayer for apostates. It’s a prayer for backsliders. We’ve seen that Jonah has been rather reluctant to call out to God. The mariners, who should have been the last people who pray to the Lord, were not holding back in their prayers. But in this passage, Jonah prays. And his words are instructive. They are words that not only speak to God, but they are designed to speak to us. It’s something of a preachy prayer. Jonah’s prayer calls sinners to turn to the Lord.
I. The context of the prayer
Now, the most obvious context is the fish’s stomach. Jonah has been swallowed up and our passage begins by telling us that Jonah prayed to the Lord from the belly of the fish.
But there’s a little more to it than that. You see in verse two that Jonah talks about being in the belly of Sheol. That’s the Hebrew word for the grave. And a couple verses talk about the water. It’s giving us the experience that he had before the fish got to him.
For instance, verse 3 says, “You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.” Then in verse 5 he says, “The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me.” He even had seaweed wrapped around his head. It’s like he was in chains and couldn’t get loose.
All in all, the picture is that of being trapped. Trapped not so much in the water, but in a kind of death. It’s as if he was entering into the underworld; the place of the dead.
Now, some people have said that this was expressing the fact that Jonah actually died. They will say that the three days and three nights Jonah was in the fish he was not alive. And they will say that gives credence to Jesus’ words that he would be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.
I don’t think that’s the case. After all, it says that he cried out from sheol. People who are dead don’t talk.
But it seemed like death. It was a kind of death, I’ll definitely give you that. You really can’t call it life. Jonah was not dead, but he certainly wasn’t living either.
One of my seminary professors once said something quite profound. There’s a lot from seminary I don’t remember, but this one thing has stuck with me: He said that hell is more of an existence than anything else. People live on after death. They come to the resurrection of the living and the dead. But life in hell isn’t really life. The Biblical idea of life is something that is full. It is robust. It carries the idea of blessing and vibrance.
Life in hell is not really life in the biblical sense of the term.
And there’s a sense in which that is true for anyone who is living in opposition to God. Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the full. And there’s a sense in which those who are living a Christless life don’t really have true life. They live, that’s true enough. They have heartbeats and they breathe. They have daily experiences of consciousness. But you can’t really say that they are really living.
What I’m driving at is this: Jonah is speaking about God’s judgment. He’s been avoiding God; he’s been running from God. And God has put his heavy hand upon Jonah. He’s made Jonah to taste death and hell. He’s finding that the life that he has wanted to live is anything but life in the real sense of the term. God’s blessing and the blessings of life are being taken away.
So the context of Jonah’s prayer is something of a hell. It’s a place of death. A living tomb.
That’s the way that we should think of a life without God. If you are seeking to live a godless life; or if you are seeking to live a great life without the Lord - enjoying all the pleasures that you can imagine and completely ignoring the call to follow Christ, then you’re not really living. The wages of sin is death. The further you run from God, the more death you will find. Death will follow you and it will press in upon you. Because the only place to find life, I mean real life, is in Jesus Christ. He came that we may have life and have. It. To. The. Full. And the only way to have that life is to embrace Christ and begin to follow him.
So that’s the context of Jonah’s prayer. The second thing I’d like you to notice is the confidence of his prayer.
II. The confidence of the prayer
Even though Jonah is undergoing this experience of death; even though he’s dropping down to the bottom of the sea, there’s a strong beam of hope that are found in this passage.
Look at verse 4. He says, “I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.” The same sort of thing is found in verses 6-7. He says he feels like he being taken down to the very roots of the mountains. He went down to the land whose bars closed upon him forever, then there’s that word: “yet.” 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.”
Do you see the confidence that Jonah has? Jonah is languishing in this watery death, but he has every confidence that God has not forsaken him. He fully expects he will be able to walk into the temple once again. I get to go to church.
What is he saying? He’s talking about the hope of God’s presence. He knows that, despite his best efforts of ditching God and getting away from him, the Lord has not given up on him. The Lord is ready to forgive him and welcome the one who returns.
It’s a picture of a resurrection. It’s a message of grace. It’s a recollection that God has made a promise; a promise of redemption. And the heart of that promise is not just life, but a life with God; communion.
That’s what the temple is. The temple is the place where God figuratively lived. It was a place where you found communion with God. Going to church is not just a place to gather and see friends. It’s not just a place of rituals and songs. It’s a place where God himself comes to meet with his people.
And the message of Jonah is that he is the God of second chances. He doesn’t turn a cold shoulder to the one who would seek him. No matter what you’ve done; no matter where you’ve been; no matter how far you have run from Him, the message of the gospel promise is that God is right there when you turn back to him. And he is ready to give you the life that you do not deserve. Above all else, he is ready to give you himself.
And Jonah knows this. Jonah has no question about this. Jonah realizes that the grace he has hated so much, is the very thing that God is most inclined to give to him.
When you are living the wrong life, there are a lot of lies that you can tell yourself. In your mind you can think, “God will never have me back; not after what I’ve done.” We might not voice it, but subconsciously we can be thinking that the will hold a grudge. And we can say, “Well, I don’t deserve his favor.”
And there is a little truth to that. We don’t deserve his favor. But we ought not to forget that is the very point. That’s what favor is all about.
God is merciful. And he is always willing to give himself. Jesus says, “He who comes to me I will by no means cast out.” God’s promise is a promise of restoration. It is a promise of his returning to us just as much as we return to him.
It is that word “yet” that should be most meaningful to us. “Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.”
Jonah has every bit of confidence that his life will not end in death. He fully expects that he will come face to face with God, not for judgment, but for communion.
And this certain expectation that Jonah has is laid down here in order to boost our own confidence. To help us understand that if we repent and turn to the Lord, we will also find that there is deliverance. God will deal mercifully with us and he will welcome and accept us. The prodigal son will be received back into the family with great joy.
This is the confidence that we too may have. But having seen the context and confidence of Jonah’s prayer, let us also note its concern.
III. The concern of the prayer [8]
As I mentioned a few minute ago, Jonah’s prayer is a preachy prayer. Jonah’s prayer is not merely a prayer to God, it is a sermon. A sermon that he delivers to Israel. He is very much concerned for his fellow Israelites. As he writes this prayer and cries out to God, he cannot help but speak to his fellow backsliders.
Look at verse 8. He offers this warning, “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.”
Jonah speaks to God, but he sends a clear message to everyone who is eavesdropping on his conversation: idolatry kills. Idolatry is the kiss of death.
Jonah recognizes that a life without the Lord has nothing to offer. It is empty. There may be lots of pleasures. There may be some good that you experience, but it is void of any significance. It has no eternal value. To turn away from the Lord, is to turn away from love and the blessings of God’s covenant.
In our day and age, we are finding that there are people who are deconstructing their faith. There are people called “ex-evangelicals.” They have grown up in the church and have been raised in Christian families, but they are turning away from those roots. They are turning away from the God who they have grown up with. They are embracing the ideas of our own age and they are taking on the name “progressive.” They may even begin to mock the things that they had learned as they were growing up.
There are others who are not so strident. They tend to be people who drift away rather than intentionally build a contrary faith. They might have been active in attending worship at one time, but they missed a Sunday here and missed a Sunday there. More and more it became a pattern. They once had bibles that they opened, and they can still name all the books of the Bible. But this or that happened and, over time, they drifted. They didn’t intentionally run, but they slowly drifted away. One wave after another created a little more distance between them and their God. If you would ask them, they may say they are a Christian, but there really isn’t a lot that is Christian about them except for some hollow morals; some residual religiosity. There certainly isn’t a lively faith and yearning for the Lord. It is a secular faith, at best. We might call it a “Cultural Christianity.”
If you are in such a position or are finding yourself in that kind of drift, you need to hear the burden that Jonah carries upon his heart. His concern; his message is that this godlessness that is beginning to characterize your life has no profit. It has no future. You are gaining nothing by going in that direction. But you are giving up a host of blessings.
You forsake steadfast love; you lose the God who expresses covenant love, hesed. This is what the book of Hebrews taks about. In Hebrews the Lord is talking to those early Christians who were tempted to go back to their Judaism. They were drifting. And in chapter 10 the author says, “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.”
The concern of the book of Hebrews is the same message that Jonah speaks in verse 8: recognize that the place you are in is very dangerous. And do not let your faith grow cold. This new direction may have some allure, but the consequences are grave.
Literally, the consequences are the grave. That’s what we have been emphasizing. And that leads us to our fourth and final point. In verses 9-10 we see the conclusion of Jonah’s prayer.
IV. The conclusion of the prayer
And the conclusion is this: Salvation belongs to the Lord. Salvation is found no where else. It belongs to the Lord and no one else.
Jonah feels the trust of the fish as he begins swimming towards the shore. The G-force pushes him against the gut of the fish just as a plane pushes you back in the seat as you begin speeding down the runway towards take off. And in that moment Jonah knows that he is safe. The threat of death has passed. God has captured him. It might not be the most comfortable moment of his life, but right here he knows that he has experienced salvation from death and damnation.
And, again, these words are not for the benefit of Jonah. This is not merely an exclamation of praise or a word that he utters out of relief. These are words that are directed to Israel; to you and to me.
There are a lot of things in this world that offer salvation. There are no shortage of messiahs out there. There are messianic philosophies: Beliefs that will say that they have all the answers that you have been looking for. There are messianic pleasures: Little joys that will tell you that you can escape all the hardships and the pains of life. There are all kinds of messianic people who will tell you that they have what you’ve always been looking for.
But the truth is there is only one name under heaven given among men by which you must be saved. There’s only one who can truly offer you the eternal. There’s only one that can offer you the fullness of life that you crave.
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
My friends, we ought not to miss the beauty of this passage. The prayer that Jonah offers is not a lament or a mournful tune. Jonah’s prayer is a psalm of thanksgiving. The psalm sings of death, but it is a joyful tune. Jonah’s prayer is a prayer that exalts the Lord’s saving power. This watery grave is actually a place of blessing and praise.
And I’d like us to remember that. In the midst of the flood of the liquid tomb is a celebration of life.
And we remember this because that is exactly what we have in our baptism. God uses the waters--the deeps to bring life. There’s no coincidence that Paul says that “we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
Jonah not only concludes his prayer, but he makes a conclusion in his prayer: From the deeps of the water he cries out: Salvation belongs to the Lord.
God has also put this water mark on us so that we might have that we might Jonah’s words confirmed all that much more richly. We too were buried in the deeps -- we went to the watery grave. We should know that salvation belongs to the Lord. For we’ve been baptized into Christ, the one who raises us to eternal life.
If you have been with me for any length of time you will likely be familiar with the literary device called chiasmus. Chiasmus is a way of writing that puts thoughts or concepts in parallel so that the main focus of the text is in the center. We Westerners usually will put the main point first in a paragraph. We call that the lead sentence. But the Jewish writers would often put the most important thing in the center of the text.
So the heart and core of the message, you might say, is at the heart and core of the passage. If you just take a birds eye view of the book of Jonah, you could look at it like this:
A. Jonah is sent to Nineveh and is angry with God because he is gracious
B. Pagan Mariners repent and turn to the Lord
C. A great fish swallows Jonah
D. Jonah prays
C' A great fish unswallows Jonah
B' Pagan Ninevites repent and turn to the Lord
A' Jonah is in Nineveh and is angry with God because he is gracious
So you see how this prayer is placed right there in the middle. This prayer is, therefore, very important. It is central to the message of the entire book.
And you will remember that the audience is a wayward people. The book is written to Israel, a people who, like Jonah, have been in rebellion. They are living in disobedience to God. They are in danger of coming under God’s judgement, like Jonah has. The book of Jonah is a warning. It is a prophetic confrontation, calling them to repentance.
Well, here in this chapter you have Jonah’s prayer. It is his prayer of repentance where he turns back to God.
Now, it is somewhat interesting; because, once Jonah is out of the fish, he doesn’t seem to be all that repentant. We’re going to see that he still isn’t altogether the most willing prophet. He does go and do what God wants him to do, but we’ll see that he’s still holding a curmudgeonly attitude. He’s obedient, but his heart isn’t quite in it.
That’s kind of one reason I considered saving this passage until the end. It is obvious that Jonah didn’t have a pen and paper to compose this while in the fish. He would have written this after his adventures.
But the prayer is a prayer for apostates. It’s a prayer for backsliders. We’ve seen that Jonah has been rather reluctant to call out to God. The mariners, who should have been the last people who pray to the Lord, were not holding back in their prayers. But in this passage, Jonah prays. And his words are instructive. They are words that not only speak to God, but they are designed to speak to us. It’s something of a preachy prayer. Jonah’s prayer calls sinners to turn to the Lord.
I. The context of the prayer
Now, the most obvious context is the fish’s stomach. Jonah has been swallowed up and our passage begins by telling us that Jonah prayed to the Lord from the belly of the fish.
But there’s a little more to it than that. You see in verse two that Jonah talks about being in the belly of Sheol. That’s the Hebrew word for the grave. And a couple verses talk about the water. It’s giving us the experience that he had before the fish got to him.
For instance, verse 3 says, “You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.” Then in verse 5 he says, “The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me.” He even had seaweed wrapped around his head. It’s like he was in chains and couldn’t get loose.
All in all, the picture is that of being trapped. Trapped not so much in the water, but in a kind of death. It’s as if he was entering into the underworld; the place of the dead.
Now, some people have said that this was expressing the fact that Jonah actually died. They will say that the three days and three nights Jonah was in the fish he was not alive. And they will say that gives credence to Jesus’ words that he would be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.
I don’t think that’s the case. After all, it says that he cried out from sheol. People who are dead don’t talk.
But it seemed like death. It was a kind of death, I’ll definitely give you that. You really can’t call it life. Jonah was not dead, but he certainly wasn’t living either.
One of my seminary professors once said something quite profound. There’s a lot from seminary I don’t remember, but this one thing has stuck with me: He said that hell is more of an existence than anything else. People live on after death. They come to the resurrection of the living and the dead. But life in hell isn’t really life. The Biblical idea of life is something that is full. It is robust. It carries the idea of blessing and vibrance.
Life in hell is not really life in the biblical sense of the term.
And there’s a sense in which that is true for anyone who is living in opposition to God. Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the full. And there’s a sense in which those who are living a Christless life don’t really have true life. They live, that’s true enough. They have heartbeats and they breathe. They have daily experiences of consciousness. But you can’t really say that they are really living.
What I’m driving at is this: Jonah is speaking about God’s judgment. He’s been avoiding God; he’s been running from God. And God has put his heavy hand upon Jonah. He’s made Jonah to taste death and hell. He’s finding that the life that he has wanted to live is anything but life in the real sense of the term. God’s blessing and the blessings of life are being taken away.
So the context of Jonah’s prayer is something of a hell. It’s a place of death. A living tomb.
That’s the way that we should think of a life without God. If you are seeking to live a godless life; or if you are seeking to live a great life without the Lord - enjoying all the pleasures that you can imagine and completely ignoring the call to follow Christ, then you’re not really living. The wages of sin is death. The further you run from God, the more death you will find. Death will follow you and it will press in upon you. Because the only place to find life, I mean real life, is in Jesus Christ. He came that we may have life and have. It. To. The. Full. And the only way to have that life is to embrace Christ and begin to follow him.
So that’s the context of Jonah’s prayer. The second thing I’d like you to notice is the confidence of his prayer.
II. The confidence of the prayer
Even though Jonah is undergoing this experience of death; even though he’s dropping down to the bottom of the sea, there’s a strong beam of hope that are found in this passage.
Look at verse 4. He says, “I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.” The same sort of thing is found in verses 6-7. He says he feels like he being taken down to the very roots of the mountains. He went down to the land whose bars closed upon him forever, then there’s that word: “yet.” 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.”
Do you see the confidence that Jonah has? Jonah is languishing in this watery death, but he has every confidence that God has not forsaken him. He fully expects he will be able to walk into the temple once again. I get to go to church.
What is he saying? He’s talking about the hope of God’s presence. He knows that, despite his best efforts of ditching God and getting away from him, the Lord has not given up on him. The Lord is ready to forgive him and welcome the one who returns.
It’s a picture of a resurrection. It’s a message of grace. It’s a recollection that God has made a promise; a promise of redemption. And the heart of that promise is not just life, but a life with God; communion.
That’s what the temple is. The temple is the place where God figuratively lived. It was a place where you found communion with God. Going to church is not just a place to gather and see friends. It’s not just a place of rituals and songs. It’s a place where God himself comes to meet with his people.
And the message of Jonah is that he is the God of second chances. He doesn’t turn a cold shoulder to the one who would seek him. No matter what you’ve done; no matter where you’ve been; no matter how far you have run from Him, the message of the gospel promise is that God is right there when you turn back to him. And he is ready to give you the life that you do not deserve. Above all else, he is ready to give you himself.
And Jonah knows this. Jonah has no question about this. Jonah realizes that the grace he has hated so much, is the very thing that God is most inclined to give to him.
When you are living the wrong life, there are a lot of lies that you can tell yourself. In your mind you can think, “God will never have me back; not after what I’ve done.” We might not voice it, but subconsciously we can be thinking that the will hold a grudge. And we can say, “Well, I don’t deserve his favor.”
And there is a little truth to that. We don’t deserve his favor. But we ought not to forget that is the very point. That’s what favor is all about.
God is merciful. And he is always willing to give himself. Jesus says, “He who comes to me I will by no means cast out.” God’s promise is a promise of restoration. It is a promise of his returning to us just as much as we return to him.
It is that word “yet” that should be most meaningful to us. “Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.”
Jonah has every bit of confidence that his life will not end in death. He fully expects that he will come face to face with God, not for judgment, but for communion.
And this certain expectation that Jonah has is laid down here in order to boost our own confidence. To help us understand that if we repent and turn to the Lord, we will also find that there is deliverance. God will deal mercifully with us and he will welcome and accept us. The prodigal son will be received back into the family with great joy.
This is the confidence that we too may have. But having seen the context and confidence of Jonah’s prayer, let us also note its concern.
III. The concern of the prayer [8]
As I mentioned a few minute ago, Jonah’s prayer is a preachy prayer. Jonah’s prayer is not merely a prayer to God, it is a sermon. A sermon that he delivers to Israel. He is very much concerned for his fellow Israelites. As he writes this prayer and cries out to God, he cannot help but speak to his fellow backsliders.
Look at verse 8. He offers this warning, “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.”
Jonah speaks to God, but he sends a clear message to everyone who is eavesdropping on his conversation: idolatry kills. Idolatry is the kiss of death.
Jonah recognizes that a life without the Lord has nothing to offer. It is empty. There may be lots of pleasures. There may be some good that you experience, but it is void of any significance. It has no eternal value. To turn away from the Lord, is to turn away from love and the blessings of God’s covenant.
In our day and age, we are finding that there are people who are deconstructing their faith. There are people called “ex-evangelicals.” They have grown up in the church and have been raised in Christian families, but they are turning away from those roots. They are turning away from the God who they have grown up with. They are embracing the ideas of our own age and they are taking on the name “progressive.” They may even begin to mock the things that they had learned as they were growing up.
There are others who are not so strident. They tend to be people who drift away rather than intentionally build a contrary faith. They might have been active in attending worship at one time, but they missed a Sunday here and missed a Sunday there. More and more it became a pattern. They once had bibles that they opened, and they can still name all the books of the Bible. But this or that happened and, over time, they drifted. They didn’t intentionally run, but they slowly drifted away. One wave after another created a little more distance between them and their God. If you would ask them, they may say they are a Christian, but there really isn’t a lot that is Christian about them except for some hollow morals; some residual religiosity. There certainly isn’t a lively faith and yearning for the Lord. It is a secular faith, at best. We might call it a “Cultural Christianity.”
If you are in such a position or are finding yourself in that kind of drift, you need to hear the burden that Jonah carries upon his heart. His concern; his message is that this godlessness that is beginning to characterize your life has no profit. It has no future. You are gaining nothing by going in that direction. But you are giving up a host of blessings.
You forsake steadfast love; you lose the God who expresses covenant love, hesed. This is what the book of Hebrews taks about. In Hebrews the Lord is talking to those early Christians who were tempted to go back to their Judaism. They were drifting. And in chapter 10 the author says, “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.”
The concern of the book of Hebrews is the same message that Jonah speaks in verse 8: recognize that the place you are in is very dangerous. And do not let your faith grow cold. This new direction may have some allure, but the consequences are grave.
Literally, the consequences are the grave. That’s what we have been emphasizing. And that leads us to our fourth and final point. In verses 9-10 we see the conclusion of Jonah’s prayer.
IV. The conclusion of the prayer
And the conclusion is this: Salvation belongs to the Lord. Salvation is found no where else. It belongs to the Lord and no one else.
Jonah feels the trust of the fish as he begins swimming towards the shore. The G-force pushes him against the gut of the fish just as a plane pushes you back in the seat as you begin speeding down the runway towards take off. And in that moment Jonah knows that he is safe. The threat of death has passed. God has captured him. It might not be the most comfortable moment of his life, but right here he knows that he has experienced salvation from death and damnation.
And, again, these words are not for the benefit of Jonah. This is not merely an exclamation of praise or a word that he utters out of relief. These are words that are directed to Israel; to you and to me.
There are a lot of things in this world that offer salvation. There are no shortage of messiahs out there. There are messianic philosophies: Beliefs that will say that they have all the answers that you have been looking for. There are messianic pleasures: Little joys that will tell you that you can escape all the hardships and the pains of life. There are all kinds of messianic people who will tell you that they have what you’ve always been looking for.
But the truth is there is only one name under heaven given among men by which you must be saved. There’s only one who can truly offer you the eternal. There’s only one that can offer you the fullness of life that you crave.
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
My friends, we ought not to miss the beauty of this passage. The prayer that Jonah offers is not a lament or a mournful tune. Jonah’s prayer is a psalm of thanksgiving. The psalm sings of death, but it is a joyful tune. Jonah’s prayer is a prayer that exalts the Lord’s saving power. This watery grave is actually a place of blessing and praise.
And I’d like us to remember that. In the midst of the flood of the liquid tomb is a celebration of life.
And we remember this because that is exactly what we have in our baptism. God uses the waters--the deeps to bring life. There’s no coincidence that Paul says that “we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
Jonah not only concludes his prayer, but he makes a conclusion in his prayer: From the deeps of the water he cries out: Salvation belongs to the Lord.
God has also put this water mark on us so that we might have that we might Jonah’s words confirmed all that much more richly. We too were buried in the deeps -- we went to the watery grave. We should know that salvation belongs to the Lord. For we’ve been baptized into Christ, the one who raises us to eternal life.