“…But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, ‘What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god!…’” Jonah 1.5-6 ESV
There was another man who slept in a storm on a boat, but He didn’t need to call out to God to calm the raging tempest; He is God, and the sea knows the voice that made and sustains it. This Yeshua is the same Yahweh, yesterday, today, and forever, whom Jonah is running from.
The captain’s understanding of the supernatural admits no sovereign supreme deity. Did you notice that his concept of God is rendered without capitalization? There are other notable points in these verse fragments.
Imagine how bizarre the scene would be to your mind if you were the captain of this ship. On deck it’s chaos. The wind is so strong and the waves so immense that the sailors fear the ship is going to be destroyed in the strain. Indeed the language used (that it “threatened to break apart”) suggests that it had already sustained severe damage. The captain orders that the cargo—that is, the whole reason they were engaged in business on the sea in the first place—be thrown overboard. The captain’s decisions now are not about how profitable his business might be but about whether he might live or die.
Imagine how bizarre the scene would be to your mind if you were one of the sailors. Ordered below decks to begin the process of jettisoning all cargo, you see a man in the hold, fast asleep. Incredulous, you tell the captain, because this Jonah is such a peculiarity that he’s suspicious. Meanwhile your mates are all around you, working as quickly as possible to hurl overboard anything that’s not nailed down, and the atmosphere is filled with howling wind, pelting rain, and desperate prayers as wave after wave swamps the ship. Things do not look good.
And Jonah is fast asleep in the hold.
The captain, ignorant of the God of all that is, nevertheless issues the call that God Himself could have spoken (again) to his wayward prophet: “Arise!” This word to Jonah is exactly the same word to Jonah that kicked this whole thing off. The gift and call of God is irrevocable. Run from it or run into it, it remains.
And lest we condemn Jonah too quickly, we should take at least a moment to consider our own ways. Surely there is a hold in our lives where we attempt to sleep the storm away, ignore the call of God, and damn the consequences. As I’ve said before, ambivalence is the modern disease. What’s it going to take for us to begin to care? God can speak with just as much power and saving grace to ignorant sailors as he can to His chosen sent ones. And even in the midst of Jonah’s harshest disobedience, God uses the opportunity to reveal Himself to those who don’t know Him. I wonder if, at the end of it all, the sailors believed?
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