Faith, Fish, and Storms: The Story of Jonah 1:11-2:2

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The foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word.

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Did Jonah really get swallowed by a big fish? If so, how could he survive for three days and three nights? Welcome to Through the Bible. In this study, our teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, answers these age-old questions as we travel through the Old Testament book of Jonah. Now, if you think you heard everything that you need to know about the book of Jonah in Sunday school, well, stay with us. Dr. McGee is going to challenge your thinking and stretch your mind with some pretty amazing instruction. I’m Steve Schwetz, welcoming you aboard the Bible bus for another great adventure in God’s Word. So as you find your seat and open your Bible to Jonah 1, verse 11… Let’s hear a few letters from our fellow passengers. The first is from a listener named David who writes to us from his home in Tennessee. I have listened to Dr. McGee for over three years now and my walk with the Lord has never been stronger. Because of Dr. McGee’s way of presenting the Bible, I’m closer to God, my family is stronger, and my outlook on life has changed through daily prayer and seeking the Lord’s way in everything I do. I look forward to meeting Dr. McGee when I get to heaven. Well, thanks for writing, David. It’s a pleasure to have you aboard the Bible bus with us. Next is an email. This is from Sharon in Indiana. 2019 was my first year on the World Prayer Team. It is such a blessing. As we travel through the world on our knees, I am reminded of the beauty and diversity of mankind and how we are all united in the body of Christ. Too often those of us in the Western world don’t realize how abundant our culture is and how blessed we are. I’ve traveled to Colombia three times for ministry and each time have been overwhelmed at the lack of many basics. I find myself ashamed for the abundance that I enjoy on a daily basis when so many do without. Traveling the world in prayer reminds me of my true standing. I’m totally lost without the blood of Jesus saving me by His grace. Thank you for the daily reminder of who I am and whose I am. Well, thanks so much for your encouragement, Sharon. I pray we all remember who we are and more importantly, really, whose we are. And what’s your story? What’s God teaching you as we travel through his word? Well, if you haven’t written to us in a while, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a message in the feedback section of our app or send your email to BibleBus at ttb.org or mail your note to Box 7100, Pasadena, California, 91109. In Canada, Box 25325, London, Ontario, N6C, 6B1. And you can even call and leave a message at 1-800-65-BIBLE. Now let’s pray for one another as we dive into God’s Word. Thank you, Lord. Thank you that as a listening family, we encourage one another to keep going. And thank you, Lord, for your grace that gets us through even the most difficult times. As we travel through Jonah, remind us of your great plan and help us to realize how much you love us. In the name of Jesus, we pray.

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Amen.

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Now here’s Dr. J. Vernon McGee with a terrific study in Jonah chapter 1 on Through the Bible.

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Now, friends, here we are back at the book of Jonah today, and we are going to see the thing that happened to this man Jonah. Verse 10, these men were exceedingly afraid and said unto him, that is, unto Jonah, Why hast thou done this? Why are you running away from God? You worship the living God, and we worship nothing in the world but idols. For the man knew that he fled from the presence of the Lord, because he told them. Then said they unto him, What shall we do for thee that the sea may become unto us? For the sea raged and was tempestuous. Now, these men recognized they were up against a very hard decision, and they wanted Jonah to make that decision. Now, verse 12, And he said unto them, Take me up, cast me forth into the sea. So shall the sea become for you, for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. Now, Jonah recognizes the hand of God is in all of this and that God was moving in his life at this time. And that the only solution to that problem of the storm was to get him off the ship going to Tarshish. Because God has already determined that this man’s not going to Tarshish, but he is going to the place where God wanted him to go. Now, notice, nevertheless, the man rode hard to bring her to the land, but they could not, for the sea raged. and was tempestuous against them. Now, the men here, these pagan sailors, stand out in a good light at this point. They did not want to throw this man Jonah overboard. Though they were pagan, though they were heathen, they did not want to throw him overboard. But they tried their best to bring that ship to land. They tried to get out of that storm. And they rode as hard as they could. But they found out they could not do it. May I say at this particular place in the book, these pagan sailors stand out in better light than Jonah stands out. Actually, they stand out as rather outstanding men. They didn’t want to throw him overboard, but they tried their best to get the ship out of the storm, but couldn’t. Now, verse 14 of chapter 1 of Jonah. Wherefore? They cried unto the Lord and said, We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not upon us innocent blood. For thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee. Now notice the change that’s taken place in these men’s lives. Actually, they’re turning now to the living and true God. They’re turning, of course, in their desperation. And they call upon God to forgive them. What they’re going to do, they have no other alternative. They can only do this. Now, verse 15. So they took up Jonah, cast him forth into the sea, and the sea ceased. From its raging. Now, that reveals, I think very definitely, that it was a supernatural storm and that God was controlling all of this. Now, verse 16, and I think this is very important. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly. And the fear of the Lord, we’re told, is the beginning of wisdom. They feared the Lord exceedingly. What Lord? Their God? No. They feared the one who is the creator of the sea and of the land. And now they feared him exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice unto the Lord. That sacrifice points to Jesus Christ. There’s no other alternative. And they made vows. Well, what vows would these men make? They’d make vows to the Lord that they now would serve him. And they turned through this experience to the living and the true God. So something has been accomplished by the storm and by Jonah being on board and now being thrown overboard. Now notice what’s going to happen to Jonah. We come now to verse 17 of this first chapter, the last verse. And the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. Now, I rule out the word whale. as it’s used in the New Testament. It’s called a great fish, but the thing that’s important, as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that the fish was prepared of the Lord for this special event. And I’m of the opinion that, again, we have a miracle in the fish in the sense that it was a specially prepared fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Now, it does not say that Jonah was alive inside of the fish. Now, that brings us now to the second division here. Chapter 2, and I go back to my timetable of the book of Jonah. In chapter 1, he left Israel. His destination was Nineveh, but he landed in the fish. And now chapter 2 says, He’s going to leave the fish. Of course, his destination is still Nineveh, and he’ll land on the dry land. But we want to see the experience that this man now has inside of the fish. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly. Now, immediately someone is going to say to me, you believe that Jonah was dead inside of the fish. And that God raised him from the dead. I certainly believe that. But somebody’s going to say, it says Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly. That means he was alive inside of the fish. It sure does. But my question is, when did Jonah pray that prayer? Did he pray this prayer that we have here? Did he pray it? When he first got into the fish, in other words, when the fish swallowed him and finally he went flop down in the tummy of the fish, is that when he prayed it? Or did Jonah, after he got inside the fish, did he say to himself, well, I’m really here in a precarious position and things sure don’t look good for me. So I want to prepare a prayer that will send to God and he’ll hear and answer it. And so Jonah decided that he would write out his prayer. And he worked on it for a couple of days. Then on the third day, he memorized it and then he gave the prayer. Now, if he did that, then my interpretation of this is all wrong. I’m all wet, if you please. Jonah got wet also, but I get wet too if he waited that long. But my friends, if I know human nature at all, I don’t think he waited very long to pray that prayer. When that man found himself in the condition he’s in, we’re going to see what it was. You can be sure of one thing, that he immediately went to prayer. Before God, he prayed. In fact, I think he prayed on the way down. And the time he got to the fish’s tummy, it was time for amen. But let me illustrate this, that men don’t pray in time of a crisis, a prepared prayer. They get down to business immediately when the crisis comes. A friend of mine who was in the ministry was a pastor in Somerville, Tennessee, for several years. He had a finger off. His index finger on his right hand was cut off. Nothing left there but just a stub. It is cut off below the first joint. And when anyone would ask him how he was called to the ministry or what his call was, he’d hold up that little stub of a finger and wiggle it. And naturally, people would ask him, well, what do you mean by that? And he’d tell them this story. He said, when I was a boy, my father was an officer in the church and an evangelist came to the church to hold meetings. Well, he said the first night that he preached, my dad made me sit on the front row. And I want to tell you, he says, the preacher made that seat very hot for me because I knew he was talking at me, although he didn’t know that he was. And he said I was made to go the second night. And he said, you know, I knew that if I stayed there, I would not only accept Christ as my Savior, But I would also give my life to enter the ministry because he said, I had a feeling that that would be my call. So he said that night after everybody went to bed, he said, I got my extra shirt and my pajamas and I went down the drain pipe because he slept upstairs. And he said, I ran off down to Mississippi and I got a job in a sawmill. And I do not know whether many of you folk acquainted with the old time sawmill where you took a great hook and you would roll the logs over on the carriage. And that carriage would take the log that was rolled on down to the big saw that was there and would rip that log right down through the middle of however they wanted to rip it. And he said that his job was to roll those logs on. And he said, after he worked there for a few weeks, well, he was working one afternoon and they ran out of logs. So the foreman got some old logs that they had had there, had not run them through because some of them, for one reason or another, they rejected. And he said there was one log that had been ripped about halfway. And for some reason, they hadn’t finished it and they just pulled it back out. He says, when I rolled that log over on the carriage that carried it into the bandsaw, that place where it had been ripped opened up. And he says, when it did, my finger, my index finger on my right hand got caught in it. And I felt myself being pulled along that carriage toward that big band saw. And he said, you know, I began to yell at the top of my voice. But he says, by the time I started yelling, the other end of the log had hit the saw and it was already going through. And if you’ve ever been around a sawmill, you know that makes a terrible racket. Nobody could hear him. And he was just yelling at the top of his voice and frightened and found himself being pulled against his will right into that saw. And the thing that happened, it said it took about 45 seconds for him to get to the saw. He said what happened was when he got there, of course, the finger was way out in front, caught in this place between where it had been sawed and did clamp down tight on it. And he says, when my finger hit the saw, it cut my finger off. But he says, it released me and I rolled to the side and didn’t have to go through. Now, he said, in that 45 seconds, for he says, that’s all it took for a log to go through. He says, in that 45 seconds, I prayed to the Lord. He said, I accepted Christ as my Savior. I promised him I’d go into the ministry and do his will. And he said, I told him a lot of other things. He said, you know, I told him more in 45 seconds at that time than I’ve ever told him in an hour’s prayer since then. And may I say to you, he prayed that prayer immediately when the crisis came. Because that’s when I pray, that’s when you pray. You don’t wait in time of an emergency. I know on a plane, when we got in unusually rough weather, and I don’t even like it in good weather, and this rough weather was terrific. The minute that that plane began to drop, or did drop, it seemed to me like it wasn’t going to quit dropping. I began to pray. I didn’t say, well, I’m going to wait until we are off of the plane. And I’m going to wait till we get out of this storm, at least to pray. I began right there and then. And I’m sure you do. And I’m almost sure that Jonah did. So Jonah prayed this prayer as he went down from the mouth of the fish through the esophagus. And by the time he said, kaplunk, When he dropped into the fish’s tummy, this man Jonah had already completed his prayer, and he had said, Amen. And I think he prayed a great deal more than is recorded here. I think we have the abridged edition of it. Now we’re going to look at this prayer. And we have now Jonah here. He is inside the fish. And I read again, verse 1, “…then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly, and said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me out of the belly of Sheol.” It’s the way it is in the New Schofield Reference Bible. That certainly is accurate, for that’s the original word. But that word is translated in many places by the word grave. Other places, the unseen world where the dead go. This is a word that any way you look at it, it has to do with death. This is a word that always goes to the cemetery. And you couldn’t take this word anywhere else. And he says, “…out of the belly of Sheol, or out of the belly of the grave.” Now, I don’t know what your interpretation is, but my interpretation of what Jonah’s saying is that the belly of the fish was his grave. And a grave is a place for the dead. You don’t put a live man in a grave. And I think that he recognized he was going to die inside of that fish and that God would hear him and raise him from the dead. Now, many years ago, I was still a student in seminary. And I was asked to supply my last year for a brief period of time. In fact, after I actually graduated, I stayed at the seminary till I finished my time at a little church. And the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia, asked me if I would supply because they had had a big problem in the church and the pastor had left. And they figured a seminary student couldn’t hurt them very much. Now, that church is the church that Peter Marshall became the pastor of. In fact, I preached there my last Sunday, and he preached the next Sunday. And he was kind enough to recommend me to that church as to be the pastor to follow him. But I wasn’t about to follow a man like Peter Marshall, so I did not even consider the call to the church at all. But I was just a young student. And the Sunday evening service, I made it evangelistic. And I gave an invitation. And one night, several young people came forward. I was a young preacher at that time. And after the service, I talked to several of them. And then I went to the rear of the church. And a young fellow was standing there. And he told me, he says, I’m a student at Georgia Tech. And I would like to accept Christ. I said, well, why didn’t you come forward? Well, he says, I’ve got a hurdle. I got a problem and I can’t get over it. We’d call it today a hang up. Well, I said, what is it? He said, I just can’t believe that a man could live three days and three nights inside of a fish. Well, I said, who told you that a man lived? Well, he says, I thought the Bible said so and And I know I’ve heard preachers say so. And I’ve got a professor at school. He just spends his time ridiculing that. And so I said to him, I said, well, my Bible doesn’t say that he was alive. He said, you don’t mean it. I said, I sure do. And I’ll open my Bible here to this second chapter and read it as I’m going to go over it with you, but won’t be able to today. And I said to him to begin with, I said, this man, Jonah makes it very clear that the belly of the fish was his grave. And a grave’s a place for the dead. And the young man said to me, you mean then that he died? I said, yes. I think that’s a teaching. He said, well, then it means then that God raised him from the dead. I said, right. That’s exactly what happened. This book teaches the resurrection of Christ. Well, then he says, that’s a greater miracle than the other. I said, it sure is. And I take the greater miracle than keeping a man alive inside of a fish, because that can be proved as having happened on several occasions, and I’ll offer that proof next time. But the important thing to note here is that this man cried unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly, and he said out of the belly of hell. cried out, out of the belly of Sheol, out of the belly of the grave, cried out. And that’s the place for the dead. And so Jonah felt like he was there to die and that that was his grave. And you must understand he wrote this not while he’s inside of the fish, but afterward. Now, may I say there’s some of you today that are not going to accept this. I have several letters already on this. We’ll not accept your viewpoint. Well, I’m very much alone in this. However, the late Dr. DeHaan took this viewpoint. I wrote a book on it many years ago, and I was by myself. And then when Dr. DeHaan came out, Why I found out that many folk at that time, because they had confidence in him, they accepted that viewpoint. Now, if you hold the other viewpoint that he was alive, you go on with it. It’s all right. God could keep him alive. That’s not the question of the power of God. Question is, what did he really do? But don’t hold that view to the extent that you rob a lot of young people from defending the Bible today. This young man went back to college and he told me that when the professor brought it up again, why, he said to the professor, who told you that Jonah was alive inside the fish? Well, he says, the Bible says so. And this young fellow said to him, says, not my Bible. And the man got the Bible out and they looked at it. And they said they had a lot of trouble finding a Bible in Georgia Tech. But they finally found one. Found out the man was really, actually dead inside of the fish. We’ll see that next time. Until next time, may God richly bless you, my beloved.

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Well, Dr. McGee has more great teaching on this subject, so join us for his next study. If you’d like to learn more from Dr. McGee on this topic, why don’t you download his booklet titled God of the Second Chance, The Real Story of Jonah over at ttb.org. And while you’re there, be sure to check out Dr. McGee’s notes and outlines. You can download them for just Jonah or get all of them for the entire Bible in one volume, and it’s called Briefing the Bible. And we offer it two ways. You can download the full-length version as a free digital book and get an abridged paperback version as well. Either way, you’ll find Briefing the Bible online at ttb.org or just give us a call, 1-800-65-BIBLE. And good news if you use our app, all the notes and outlines are already right there for you. You’ll find that in your favorite app store. Is it possible for a man to be swallowed by a fish and live to tell the story? Well, we’ll find out more next time. I’m Steve Schwetz, and I’ll save a seat on the Bible bus just for you. Today’s study with Dr. J. Vernon McGee is brought to you by Through the Bible, and it’s made possible by the generous prayer and financial investments from listeners like you on the Bible bus all around the world.