Peter SmytheA Different Kind of Word Preacher

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, and he said, I called out of my distress to the Lord, And He answered me, I cried for help from the depth of Sheol; You heard my voice. Jonah 2:1-2 (NASB, marg.)

Once the fish, whale, or sea monster swallows Jonah, the Word doesn’t piddle around, but heads directly into his prayer. From verse 2, where Jonah cries for help from the depth of “Sheol,” we immediately see an echo of Acts 2:27:

Because you will not abandon my soul to Hades, Nor allow Your Holy One to see destruction. Acts 2:27 (Smythean translation)

From our previous posts, we understand that Sheol was the Old Testament Hebrew word for the place of the dead, encompassing both Abraham’s bosom and Hades. From Jonah’s prayer, we understand that his experience is not akin to Abraham’s bosom, see Luke 16, but rather is akin to a man in Hades. But before we begin ascribing Jonah’s prayer as testimony of an actual death experience, we see that he is actually praying out certain psalms:

The cords of death encompassed me, And the torrents of ungodliness terrified me. The cords of Sheol surrounded me: The snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, And cried to my God for help; He heard my voice out of the His temple, And my cry for help before came into His ears. Psalm 18:4-6 (NASB)

It is unmistakable that Jonah 2:2 is a clear echo of Psalm 18. But Psalm 18 is a psalm of David and we know that David didn’t have anything to do with Jonah. So what is going on? We see the answer in the New Testament. In Romans 15, Paul begins the chapter by ascribing certain psalms as the first person voice of Jesus, Himself. In Romans 15:3, Paul cites Psalm 69:9, a Davidic psalm, as the very words of Jesus without any qualification whatsoever. He does the exact same thing with Psalm 18:54 in Romans 15:9:

and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy; as it is written, Therefore I will give praise to You among the Gentiles, And I will sing to Your Name. Romans 15:9 (NASB)

Paul’s use of Psalm 18 this way opens up the entire psalm as constituting the very words of Jesus. Consequently, Jonah’s prayer is not the idle prayer of a mischievous prophet suffering a “strange fate,” but it is an echo of Jesus’s own prayers as He suffered in hell (hades) while waiting to be raised by the Father for our redemption. (see our post, Psalm 40 - No Self-Help Here).

Amazingly, verse 2 not only echoes Psalm 18, but also Psalm 22:

For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; Nor has He hidden His face from him; But when he cried out to Him for help, He heard. Psalm 22:24 (NASB)

From Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 (“My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”), we understand that Psalm 22 is also the first-person words of Jesus.

Just from Jonah 2:2, we see that Jesus’s remark about the “sign of Jonah” wasn’t an odd way of saying “a three day period.” Nor was Jonah a sign of God’s recompense for a prophet’s disobedience. Jonah’s “strange fate” in the belly of the whale, instead, was a prophetic sign of Jesus’s own experience in the belly of hell.