“And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”

Jonah 1:17a (ESV)

The biblical story of Jonah is a popular one. Almost every church-going adult and child and many unchurched people can recall the basics of the story. God tells Jonah to travel to an evil city (Nineveh) and call the people to turn from their sin. Jonah finds a boat sailing in the opposite direction and hops aboard. God sends a storm that threatens to destroy the boat. After a great deal of panic among the crew, Jonah admits that the storm is punishment from God for his disobedience. He asks the men to throw him overboard and they happily oblige him.

At this stage many people believe God sends a big fish (probably a whale, but the Bible is not clear here) as a further punishment for Jonah’s rebellion. It’s a last line of suffering for the unruly Jonah.

However, the fish was actually an instrument of salvation.

In asking the men to toss him overboard, Jonah was inviting his death. He was abandoning the relative safety of the boat for the certain doom of the sea. Jonah was not looking for salvation; he was accepting death. His defiance incensed God. The God of the storm was coming after him. The ridiculous attempt to out-run God was foiled. He had nowhere to turn.

Yet God was not quite finished with Jonah. God used the storm to change Jonah’s direction, but He was not prepared to let it take Jonah’s life. In the midst of the raging storm, God uses a large creature to rescue Jonah from death. The big, probably scary animal swallows Jonah. The fish must have been frightening, but the storm was even more ominous. Without the whale, Jonah’s story ends in the sea.

After 3 days Jonah was saved from the whale, but first he was saved by the whale. Often God uses the scary and difficult to rescue His people from the eternally disastrous. Has God ever spared you from the storm by sending you into a whale?

Take a moment or two to consider the ways God has used a difficult circumstance to rescue you from an even more disastrous one.