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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadEzekiel, Jonah, and Pastoral Epistles by Patrick Fairbairn - Jonah 1:17 - 1:17
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But in what presently befell Jonah we are also called to behold the goodness of God; for no sooner is he cast out, as a victim of divine justice, into the raging deep, than a great fish was ready to swallow him up—not for instant destruction, but for safe preservation. The peaceful elements of nature had been lashed into fury when the means of chastisement were required; and now, when a purpose of mercy was to be accomplished, the devourer was at once transformed into a house of safety—a proof, both ways, of the infinite resources of God, and how easy it is for him to provide himself any where with the instruments required for the execution of his designs. What precisely the great fish might be, (The view commonly adopted from the earliest times has understood by the great fish a whale—although it is well known that the Hebrew word here, and even the corresponding Greek word in Mat_12:40, is applicable to any great fish. The narrowness of the neck of the whale has led many commentators to think of some other fish—Bechart the dog-fish, and others some species of shark; and yet in whales there is another cavity besides the stomach—a sort of huge air-vessel, which might have been made to serve the purpose.— (See Jebb’s Sacred Literature, p. 178). But recent writers have wisely given up speculations of this kind; a miracle any way was needed; and that various large fishes might be found in the Mediterranean suitable for the purpose, is no longer a matter of doubt.) or why exactly this mode of preservation might be resorted to, it is of little moment to inquire. In the act of preservation there certainly was a miraculous display of the power of God; and the particular mode of doing it seems to have been adopted with the view of rendering Jonah’s condition, while under punishment, as much as possible an emblem of death. With such guilt upon him, he should have died; and, although he was miraculously spared, yet the means employed for his preservation formed a kind of temporary death—as he seems, from the moment of his ejection into the sea, to have lost all further consciousness of life, to have felt simply as a drowning man, plunged into the deep waters, and no longer numbered among the living. The whole was ordered with a special view to his being constituted such a sign, both to the generation then living and to future times, as the purposes of Divine wisdom required. And to this our thoughts must now be turned—but not till we have first descended with Jonah into this valley of the shadow of death, to learn from him what lessons of wisdom his experience there has furnished for the Church and people of God.