December 3, 2018: Day 2 – Jonah 2

We find ourselves in the setting where Jonah is in the belly of the fish.  While he is in that fish he prays.  That’s not a bad thing to do while you are in the belly of a fish.  As he is praying he focuses on how he called out to God in his distress trusting and hoping that God would deliver.  He states  in vs.7 that as he was dying, he remembered the Lord.

Isn’t it nice to know that the Lord remembers us in every single moment of our lives, not just in these crises moments?  It is interesting to me that here is Jonah, a prophet of the Lord, and somehow in the midst of all these activities he had to “remember the Lord.”  It might be a reminder to us that we should never find ourselves in a place where we have to consciously “remember the Lord”, but rather that a song should always be on our lips.  When we say that we ought to pray without ceasing, taking our example from Paul in I Thessalonians 5:17, it means that we should constantly have the blessings and the presence of God on our mind and be aware of that.

In this sudden moment of clarity for Jonah we then read a proclamation that we are grateful that he makes.  He states: “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”  Oh yes it does, and immediately after that we see that Jonah is spewed up on the dry land.  At this point, at the end of chapter 2, we do not know yet where this dry land is.  We don’t know if he is spewed up in Nineveh, or somewhere else.  We just know that he was delivered.  Maybe he can go home and continue on his life without that impossible task of bringing the Gospel to the Ninevites.  Let’s see what happens next chapter.