2:7
“When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you”. It is not uncommon for people to only pray to God when they are in trouble and have no idea how to get out of it. Jonah was not that much different. He was running away from God and did not want to meet Him. Yet when his life was in mortal danger he turned to God. Now we get to the really important point, God heard him! His prayer rose to God in His holy temple. We might think God would have been perfectly justified in rejecting or ignoring Jonah’s plea, for Jonah was in abject rebellion, but that is not what God did. When we are in trouble there are always lots of perfectly good reasons why God would be entirely justified in not saving us, but we should turn to Him anyway. We need to realise that one of the things that God is doing in our lives is dealing with our deep rooted sinfulness, He is sanctifying us and this is not an easy process.
2:8-10
When in trouble we have a choice, we can turn to worthless things. If we do that then we are turning away from God’s love. If we are in trouble at the moment we need to ask ourselves a very important question: “what are we turning to?” If we are turning to anything other than God, then we are turning away from God’s love.
Jonah, however, did not do this, he did turn to God. And he did this with shouts of grateful praise. And remember that this is a man who was running away from God. As we will find out in the latter part of the book, he was not a man who had suddenly become good! He knew that salvation comes from the Lord.
In response the Lord commanded the fish to spew Jonah out on to dry land.
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