PT-1 “A Hope-Filled Confidence” (Jonah 2:5-7)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/09/2025 9:43 AM

My Worship Time                                                         Focus:  PT-1 “A Hope-Filled Confidence”

Bible Reading and Meditation                                                                       Reference: Job 2:5-7

            Message of the verses: 

“Water encompassed me to my very soul. 

The great deep surrounded me,

Weeds were wrapped around my head. 

I went down to the base of the mountains. 

The earth with its bars closed behind me forever,

But You have brought up my life from the pit, O Yahweh my God.

While my soul was fainting within me,

 I remembered Yahweh,

And my prayer came to You,

To Your holy temple. 

            This morning I begin looking at Jonah 2:5-7 and in these verses in order to magnify the depth of his dependence on God, and the certainty of his hope in the Lord, Jonah expounds upon the extreme danger that he faced, and it is surely a danger that causes me, a person who does not like the water because of almost drowning when I was a very young boy, to cringe as I read what happened to Jonah almost drowning, and like Jonah as I look back at the incident of me almost drowning I believe that it was the Lord who brought my older sister to pull me up out of the water.  Jonah’s story is similar to mine, but as stated it still makes me cringe.  Now the prophet again took his words from the Psalms and as we can see these words were also written in Hebrew pottery as we can see these words are similar to Psalm 18:4 and 2 Samuel 22:5; Psalm 40:12; and Psalm 116:3).  Now while the Psalms used such language metaphorically to depict being overwhelmed by calamity, Jonah was describing the terrifying reality of drowning.  As the water flooded Jonah’s lungs and brought him to the point of suffocation, then Yahweh intervened to rescue His servant.

            John MacArthur then writes “The currents of the waters (cf. Jonah 2:3) had dragged Jonah to the great deep which surrounded him.  Far below the surface, in the cold darkness of the deep, he became entangled in kelp as the weeds were wrapped around his head.  It was as if the plants of the ocean floor were reaching out to shackle him and force him to the bottom.  Descending even deeper, Jonah exclaimed, ‘I went down to the base of the mountains.  The earth with its bars closed behind me forever.’  Death seemed inevitable.  The prophet stated that he went down, employing the same word he had used to describe how he had gone down to Joppa (1:3), down to the boat (1:3), and down inside that vessel (1:5) in his efforts to run away from God.  Jonah recognized that the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23) as his disobedience now led him down to the bottom of the sea, the base of the mountains.  Jonah’s description expressed the tormenting experience of nearly drowning.  The prophet had entered death’s door as the earth with its bars closed behind him forever.  It was as if he was imprisoned, and the bars that held him were permanently locked behind him, leaving no escape.  But the Lord was with Jonah in that aquatic valley of the shadow of death (cf. Ps. 23: 4).”

            Now as mentioned before this must have been a frightening experience for Jonah, and yet perhaps it was something that he truly expected, as he had told the sailors to throw him into the ocean thinking that he was going to drown, for as Jonah’s lungs were filled with the sea water and he had no hope for life, that is when God intervened to save him.  Now Jonah recalled that moment with the exclamation “but You,” and this is a phrase capturing the essence of so many divine interventions (cf. Ps. 44:7; 49:15; Eph 2:4).  When there was no hope, Jonah fixed his hope on the only One who could deliver him (see Jonah 2:3).  The prophet who had tried to hide from the presence of the Lord now cried out to the Lord to not be hidden from Him (cf. Ps. 27:9; 69:17).  And Yahweh, in His grace, answered that prayer.

Spiritual Meaning for my Life Today:  I can think of the time when the Lord saved me from my sin, as I was about to sin when I went to visit a friend of mine in January of 1974, “but God” had other plans for me, as His plan was to save me from my sins and to cause me to serve the Lord, and not do the sinful things that I had done in my past, sins like taking the name of the Lord in vain, which I did very frequently, “but God” took my sinful mouth never to swear again and use it to do things like teaching different classes for the glory of the Lord.

My Steps of Faith for Today:  I have been writing in this section of my Spiritual Diaries things that are going on with my wife having cancer, and I surely pray that there would be a “but God” in her very grave situation.

10/9/2025 10:19 AM