Paul Tripp is a minister in many contexts, including author and minister. He closed today’s sessions. While scheduled to speak on the subject of “The Gospel for Believers,” he laughingly said to put an “X” through those notes, turn the page over and title today’s notes: “God is Sovereign/Paul Tripp has trouble making decisions.” Admittedly, submitting notes ahead of time means that God will lay something else on your heart. With that in mind, Tripp turned us to Jonah’s prayer in Jonah 2 as a model, not only of redemption in Christ but as a model prayer for all believers.

Jonah’s prayer is one of the most surreal moments of prayer in all of Scripture. This is not your typical “prayer closets.” Jonah is praying from the belly of a fish! Yet it is because of the surreal nature of the situation that it is easy to miss the beauty and grace present in Jonah’s prayer. He was one of God’s servants, yet a man running from God. His running was so filled with intentionality that he acknowledges that he is trying to escape God’s presence, going to, what for him, would have been the end of the world.

The very fact that a prophet would do this shatters many of the elements we try to attribute to followers of God. Don’t think that believers aren’t capable of deliberately turning and going in another direction! As long as indwelling sin remains, we are under temptation to turn our backs and go in another direction. Because of that, our work has to be at a deeper level than just principles and information. We are not free from sin until glorification!

We might wonder why the book is in the Bible at all. It’s not really prophecy. In fact, it only captures one event in one man’s life. Tripp argues that it is included because it is an astonishing portrait of the coming grace of Christ. Jonah prayed from the belly of the fish and paints for us a beautiful portrait of redemption. What we have in the prayer of Jonah (Jonah 2) is the process of the transforming of the heart.

What should jump off the page at us is that Jonah is only praying because the amazing grace of God has already begun to operate. If we had been his god and he had run from us that way, we would most likely send him on his way or possibly even destroy him. But God did neither. God pursued Jonah. God certainly didn’t have a shortage of prophets, but He is a God of grace and will often pursue His people. When asked whom Jonah served, he gave an accurate description of God and yet still ran. Accurate theology is not enough. Here was a man who ran from the grace of God. We know that he knew God’s grace because he didn’t want it to come to Nineveh.

At a key moment, when the sailors come to Jonah after casting lots and ask him what to do, Jonah should have told them they couldn’t do anything, he had to do it; get on his knees and ask for forgiveness. Instead, he said “throw me over.” He would rather take his chances in the tempest than follow God at that moment. We must receive this warning. There are still vestiges of Jonah in all of us. There are times when we all know what God wants us to do and yet we don’t do it. We must never think that we are beyond Jonah. That’s why counseling is needed; we, none of us, have yet defeated sin. There are moments for all of us when we would rather be the messiah than serve the Messiah.

In a moment of sovereign grace and discipline, God sends one fish to swallow one man in a swirling sea. Jonah has the men throw him overboard and God still does not let him run or die. This is not about Jonah getting his act together and realizing things need to be different, he is running from God and in sovereign mercy, Jonah is rescued from Jonah! The true rescue was not from either the storm or the fish but from himself. The tempest and the fish are but instruments. There might be times when we, too are being swallowed up by something and we refuse to see this as grace. We too, seek control of our own lives, trying to wrestle it from God.

It’s a sweet grace that Jonah is praying at all. He probably has wrinkled skin, he smells and is not comfortable, yet he says: “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” (Jonah 2:1). Notice that Jonah doesn’t here acknowledge that he is the cause of his own distress! How often we do the same! Jonah did not somehow, some way fall into distress, it was his own doing! This whole experience is about God capturing the heart of Jonah and He’s willing to harness the powers of nature to pursue it. God settles for nothing less than our hearts. God is not pleased when we play self-pleasing games.

Then in Jonah 2:3, Jonah says: “For 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.” In doing so, He is beginning to realize that God did this to Him but wouldn’t have done so had God not been after something; had God not been seeking to capture Him. God will sometimes send distress upon us to draw us to Him Jonah is beginning to understand this concept. Once God sets His grace upon us, He will not turn from that Grace! His grace is unrelenting and will not let go, often in spite of us.

In verse 4, Jonah says that he was banished when in fact he was running from God and yet now becomes terrified at the separation between himself and God. He now recognizes in verse 4 that he wants to be back in the presence of God, in the temple, where God’s glory dwelt. The turnaround for Jonah was a desire to come back to his Lord, a desire for communion with his redeemer. The problem in counseling situations, most of the time is that people (we) don’t love God enough. Jonah here points out that fact for us. John in 1 John asks how we say we can love God whom we cannot see when we don’t love those we do see. The quality of our closest relationships often point out for us the quality of our relationship with God. For Jonah, and for us, it became and must become, no longer about our agendas but about the agenda of God. So many our difficulties are about what we want; we often want the creation more than the Creator. But Jonah begins to repent of this. Have we? This is not finally Jonah just begrudgingly saying that he would do what God wanted, it was a man who admitted that he ran, not from a job from a person, from God. Jonah wanted to be again with God because in God alone is true life.

We can only imagine the brokenness of God’s heart. He doesn’t know that he’s being rescued, he thinks he’s being digested! We will not see true transformation without some measure of this same amount of grief. Grief that we have tried to live apart from our Creator. It is communion with Him that must drive us. In verses 5-6, Jonah finally admits that he was in a dire place, unable to help himself. We too must confess our helplessness. Jonah says that he was sinking to the bottom and the weeds were around his neck! He could not rescue himself. Counseling is not just about manipulating circumstances so they look better but bringing us all to this point of helplessness, when we acknowledge that we cannot rescue ourselves. Sin can only be broken by divine rescue. Sin won’t be broken until we come to the point of no longer relying on self

Job then says: “When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love” (Jonah 2:7-8). Remember the context, the mariners were pantheists and each prayed “to their own god.” This was as futile as raking smoke with a rake. Distress reveals our hearts allegiances. That idol has eyes that can’t see and cannot help us but it is often our moments of deepest distress that reveal that we’ve been living for idols. This is in fact grace, even though we don’t always initially see it that way. The sailors did homage to their idols and yet the storm thickened!

Jeremiah 10 says that our idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber patch! We have to nail them up or they’ll fall over and yet we put our faith in them all the time! When we get angry and discouraged, it’s often because our idols cannot give us what we’re asking. The idols of our own creation are just that; of our own creation and Jonah’s prayer helps us to see this truth.

When we get to the final verse of this prayer, we ought to hear the crescendo: “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!” (verse 10). Remember again the context. When a person in the Old Testament vowed to sacrifice, it was because they were thankful and they had acknowledged their sin before God. Jonah, even in this prayer, had turned from, to God. No matter how outrageous the rebellion, we serve a God of forgiveness! We proclaim a message of fresh starts and new beginnings! Do we pray for deliverance from ourselves? Our hope is God’s forgiveness!

The prayer of one man in one, little 48-verse book of the bible is a portrait of what every believer needs. But there is more: Matthew 12:40 says: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” But this second Jonah did not go because of His disobedience but obedience. He came to be the sacrificial lamb, to suffer, to face rejection so that we might have life and hope and acceptance. Jonah and Jonah’s prayer point us to Christ. What we need, even as believers, is the continuing presence and power of an active redeemer who will continue His work of delivering us from us.

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