Hindsight is 2020, we’ve all seen God take “bad situations” and use them for good. We are usually so focused on Jonah’s disobedience and consequences, it’s easy to overlook God’s bigger picture in this story. He was still using Jonah to bring people to himself. Jonah told the shipmen he feared God. He told them who God was. We also see God’s mercy to Jonah. He could have drowned, but that wasn’t God’s plan. He could have died in the fish, but he didn’t. Our merciful God didn’t save just one man that day.
We see in this chapter God’s plan caused the men on the ship to see him calm the sea after they finally threw Jonah overboard–that he was the all-powerful GOD, and Scripture tells us “Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” (Jonah 2:16) They believed that God was the one, true God.
We know God has a plan and a purpose, if we can just hold on and keep trusting, even in the storms. People around us who don’t know him, or don’t know him well, are watching. We may never know (in this life) the impact of our responses of trust and faith in the midst of a storm on those people but God knows and often reveals it to us. Jonah told the shipmen to throw him over, trusting that God would calm the seas. God then gave him a “timeout” in the fish’s belly, but protected him. That was one gift, but the second was those men on the ship who believed in the one true God for the first time.
There are so many lessons here, Jonah learned the hard way, but we are still learning as well. God is still using Jonah’s fear, disobedience, running, sharing his belief in God in the middle of a storm, to impact and change lives.
Deb Hill