Gut-Felt Thanks: Jonah Thanks God FOR the “Storm”

I grew up hearing the powerful message of praising God in the storm. Then one day I heard Helen Roseveare speak.

Born again at 20, she became a career medical missionary to the Congo, building and running hospitals and clinics. In 1964, she was captured by rebel forces, brutalized, raped and held captive for five months. What shocked me in her message, was not just her testimony of forgiveness, but a perspective on suffering that challenged a good deal of typical Christian thinking.

She writes,

“God never uses a person greatly until He has wounded him deeply. The privilege He offers you is greater than the price you have to pay.”

“I must ask myself a question as if it came directly from the Lord. “Can you thank me for trusting you with this experience even if I never tell you why?”

“To love the Lord my God with all my soul will involve a spiritual cost. I’ll have to give Him my heart, and let Him love through it whom and how He wills, even if it seems at times to break my heart.”

Jonah learns these very lessons in waves through the horrifically wonderful experiences related to God’s desire to use Jonah to do a great work of redemption amid Jonah’s most hated enemies.

God calls Jonah to do what none since Joseph & Moses had done, and what no other recorded person after him does until Jesus comes—To intentionally travel to deliver a missionary message of divine warning to a pagan people on their own soil.

Now, Jonah, like most of his people, hates the Assyrians. In an oppressive and cruel world, they are renowned for their oppression and cruelty. They are the terror of the Ancient Near East. Jonah has every legitimate human reason to hate them and to cry out to Heaven for this divine judgement to come.

But there is a problem. Jonah confesses in the last chapter that he reasoned out Yahweh’s request thus:  

1. God would not send me to warn Nineveh of some coming destruction unless he knew that doing so would avert it… at least for some of them.
2. I don’t want the Assyrians to be delivered, not in Nineveh, not anywhere.
3. If I don’t go, they won’t hear; if they don’t hear, they can’t repent; if they can’t repent, God can’t save them.

So, rather than traveling 500 miles east to Nineveh, Jonah jumps on a ship heading some 2000 miles west to Tarshish.

With great privilege and responsibility comes great accountability. Given the history of those prophets who wiggled on direct divine command, Jonah must have anticipated the likelihood that this move would cost him his life.

In Numbers 20, when the great prophet Moses disobeys Yahweh amid an uprising of grumbling from the Israelites by striking the rock to which he was commanded to speak, Moses was denied entrance into the promised land, and Aaron forfeited his life.

In 1 Kings 13, when an unnamed prophet is tricked into disobeying the explicit instructions of Yahweh in regard to his prophetic warning to Israel, God sends a lion to meet him on the road. It ends poorly.

Jonah is not disappointed. Things start looking pretty bad for Jonah when God sends a storm to waylay that ship. No worries though… Jonah would rather die than see Assyrians saved from divine judgement.

In a panic, the pagan sailors on Jonah’s ship throw all the cargo overboard to lighten the ship. The captain commands that everyone start seeking mercies from whatever god they fancy… even arousing Jonah from deep sleep below deck to do the same.

Jonah, however, makes a full confession to all—well, he makes a full confession as soon as they cast lots that Yahweh interferes with so as to accuse Jonah. He confesses that the storm is his fault. He’s fled the God of heaven, creator of the sea and dry land, by taking to the sea.

The pagans figure he’s a special kind of stupid, but they try to save him anyway, unwilling to kill the servant of the God whose power extends to enraging the sea itself. They show more concern for Jonah’s life than he did for theirs by mounting that vessel.

But there is nothing for it. The storm keeps getting worse and Jonah keeps telling them that if they wish to be delivered from the storm, Jonah’s gotta go.

After pleading for forgiveness and mercy ahead of time, the pagan sailors reluctantly toss Jonah overboard… the storm stops.

Now, they were afraid of the storm. They were yet more afraid to discover that Yahweh, God of heaven, who made the sea and dry land, was causing the storm to get at Jonah. But their fear reaches its climax when witnessing Yahweh’s power to quell the sea, that most unruly of creational forces.

They turn from their pagan ways and dedicate themselves to Yahweh.

And as far as the tension of the story is concerned, Jonah is dead. (The English translations shift the first verse of the Hebrew’s chapter 2 to be the last verse of chapter one and totally ruin the effect of the Hebrew of chapter one.) It is important for the book that chapter one end with Jonah’s certain death.

God will do a work of redemption through his people by hook or by crook, through their lives and through their deaths. God WILL do a work THROUGH them… but that work usually involves the terrifying beauty of God doing a work IN THEM.

We all know what comes next, however. God sends a great fish, what we usually imagine to be a whale. I had a friend’s son, a pompous little boy if ever I met one, scold me for referencing Jonah and the whale. “The Bible says it was a great fish… whales aren’t fish!”

I bent down and retorted—in a tone that said snotty little brat—”that only works in English. To the ancient Hebrews if it flew it was עוֹף (pronounced OAF) which we translate BIRD and if it lived in the water it was דָּג (pronounced DAG) which we translate fish. So, you are wrong. It was, quite possibly, a whale.”

And there inside the whale, Jonah is recorded as having bemoaned his fate, and authored a bitter lamentation of his troubles… yes…  that most famous of children’s songs that we sing to this day… “I don’t wanna be a Jonah, and get swallowed by a whale. Down to Nineveh I will go, if the Lord should tell me so, and I’ll cry aloud you must be born again.”

No… Not quite. Jonah does author a song in the whale, but it is, oddly enough, a thanksgiving song. It details his plight. His looming death. His cry of repentance. His deliverance and hope for a future before the Lord. He chastises those who forsake God through idol worship and miss out on the covenant blessings to be found in right relationship with Yahweh.

God answers Jonah’s song and restores him to land.

Jonah’s story doesn’t end here, however. God dealt with Jonah’s rebellion, but He still needs to deal with Jonah’s hatred for people whom God loves.

Saved from death, moved in heart, God commands Jonah again to go to Nineveh. His feelings about these oppressors has not changed, but he goes. He marches into the city and announces, “You guys stink, and God’s gonna get you real soon.” I paraphrase of course… but I like to imagine that he intentionally preached the worst sermon ever delivered from any pulpit anywhere (and that’s really sayin’ something) and that he kinda smirked with hope that they might reject his message and perish.

He goes off a ways to watch the fall out. The people repent, however, and Jonah, as he feared, watches for their death in vain.

God, still not done with Jonah, decides to keep messing with him. The sun is intense, so God makes a plant grow up to shade him well. Jonah’s pretty happy about the divine love and care shown in the plant. Then God appoints a worm to kill the plant. Then he sends a scorching desert wind to beat on him. Jonah becomes miserable enough to say, “It is better for me to die than to live.” (Jonah 4:8)

God presses the matter. “Do you do well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:9)

Jonah pushes back, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” (Jonah 4:9)

The book actually ends with a question. The LORD said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:10-11)

The question is more than a historical record. The question is meant for the reader too. Jonah is not recorded as answering the question, but I think it fair to point out that the book itself is the answer to the question. Jonah told his tale. He makes himself ridiculous. He shares the lesson with us.

God did a great work through Jonah. First, however, He did a great work IN Jonah.

Yahweh appoints a storm. He manipulates lots. He provokes Jonah’s certain death. He uses that assumed death and the manifestations of power through the storm provoking and quelling to deliver pagans from paganism. Yahweh delivers Jonah from actual death with a “whale”, leaves him in that muck for “three days and nights” then has him vomited back to land. He sends him to Nineveh again, he makes him preach, torments him with a blazing sun, comforts him with a shading plant, appoints a worm to kill the plant, and sends a blasting desert wind to torment him again.

He does all this and more, to do a work IN Jonah so as to do a yet better work THROUGH Jonah. He teaches Jonah not merely to praise God in the storm. He teaches Him, as evidenced in the penning of the book itself, to thank Him FOR the storm. He learns to thank God for trusting him with these experiences. He learns to let God love whom and how He wills, even if it breaks Jonah’s own heart.

The secret to happiness is gratitude. We must worship even in the storm. And we must learn to thank God for trusting us with the experience of the storm as well.

We are all victims AND victimizers. Injury and oppression are not exemptions from discipleship and the demand to develop Christ-like character.

So, let me ask you. What things is God doing in your life to do a work in you so that he can do a work through you? What’s your excuse for ingratitude?

Suffering is often an unwelcome gift from a loving creator seeking to do a work in us… for our eternal good… so that he can do a yet greater work through us to others eternal good.

Can you thank God for trusting you with those experiences… even if He never tells you why?

Find Thankfulness… and you’ll find happiness.

~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD