Bible Verse of the Day Friday February 19th 2021

Jonah 2:2 He said: “In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry.

Jonah called out to God from the stomach of the great fish that had swallowed him. Jonah knew that God heard his cry for help, but more importantly, he had faith that God would deliver him from this predicament where he had found himself. Jonah was confident that God had heard his plea for help even before God's response. This example is a clear indication of Jonah's faith and that we can have total peace and assurance that God will answer our prayers. Throughout this chapter, we find various expressions and examples from Jonah in his prayers from the book of Psalms (Psalms 18:6; 42:7; 31:22).

Jonah was in the process of fleeing from God to keep from preaching to the people of Nineveh. Now that he had found himself in great difficulty and misfortune of being swallowed by a fish, he reached out to God. When the sailors threw Jonah overboard, he might have been psychologically prepared for death by drowning, but to be digested in the bowels of a fish was more than he could have imagined. The Bible does not tell us how long Jonah struggled in the ocean before the fish swallowed him. It could be the case that the terror of that tussle might have brought about his desire to repent. In this verse, "deep in the realm of the dead" does not mean that Jonah had died. The term "realm of the dead" is a hyperbolic term from the Psalms (Psalms 30:3) that would signify a cataclysmic situation near death. Jonah pleaded with God first to forgive him for his sin of rejecting the Word of God, then to rescue him from the entrails of the fish.

Some may ask: what does this story of Jonah have to do with me here in the 21st century? A giant fish will probably never swallow us; however, there are pits of darkness we can find ourselves in that are just as terrifying as Jonah's time in the belly of the fish. There will never come a time that we find ourselves so deep in anguish that God will not hear our pleas. Furthermore, just as God heard Jonah from inside the fish and answered his prayer. He will hear our prayers and respond to them no matter how far from Christ Jesus we have strayed.

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