Those Who Cling

“Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them. But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’”

Jonah’s prayer from inside the fish shows what spiritual transformation requires. Jonah had real faith, but his faith was fitted to his old world and not yet ready for God’s call to Nineveh. Jonah 2:8-9 gives the frame: grace is the key, learning and loving grace is the method, eroded fear and eroded bigotry are the marks, and fresh obedience requires fresh grace.

The Passage

1. From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God.

2. He said: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry.

3. You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me. All your waves and breakers swept over me.

4. I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight. Yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’

5. The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me. Seaweed was wrapped around my head.

6. To the roots of the mountains I sank down. The earth beneath barred me in forever. But you, Lord my God, brought my life up from the pit.

7. “When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple.

8. “Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.

9. But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’”

10. And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.

Verse 8 appears here as “forfeit the grace that could be theirs,” which reflects an earlier NIV edition. The current NIV, 2011, renders it “turn away from God’s love for them.” Both translate the same Hebrew clause. The older wording is the reading used throughout.

Jonah’s Old World and His New Call

Jonah was a prophet with a real relationship with God, real faith, and real theological understanding. In his old world, he was moving along just fine.

Then his world changed. God called him into a new ministry, a new situation: “Go to Nineveh.” Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the emerging world power, violent and ruthless and imperialistic, a clear and present danger to the very existence of Jonah’s country. To use the technical theological term, the point is, “Jonah freaks. He freaks out.”

The diagnosis is precise. Jonah had a certain amount of confidence, but the new danger was too much for the confidence he had in God. He had a certain amount of humility, but when confronted with people he despised, his humility collapsed into “disdain and hatred and bias and bigotry.” In other words: Jonah’s level of spiritual functioning was fine for his old world, but not for the new world he found himself in.

The same diagnosis lands after national crisis. People are shaken out of “the glitz and the busyness” and forced to admit that the level of faith they had may not be enough for the world now in front of them.

Then the encouragement: Jonah does break through. He runs, the storm comes, he is thrown overboard, he sinks, the great fish swallows him. “Some people, it takes radical things to get you to just finally think,” the observation is. “In a fish there’s like nothing else to do… I don’t think you can even move your hands probably.” In that confinement Jonah begins to reflect, and the prayer recorded in chapter 2 is the result. By the end of the prayer the same word comes to him a second time, go to Nineveh, and this time he can do it. He has been moved to a new level.

The prayer gives four points: the key to spiritual transformation, the method, the marks, and the continual need for it.

The Key. “Salvation Is of the Lord”

The climax of Jonah’s prayer comes in verses 8-9, especially the closing line: “Salvation comes from the Lord.” That is the moment Jonah is released. The same word comes back to him, and he can finally move toward the place God called him to go. Whatever Jonah grasps at the end of verse 9 is the key to his transformation, and ours.

Tim Keller has called this the key verse of the Bible, the theme of the Bible, and the whole Bible boiled into one line. The claim is large, but the verse can carry it: salvation belongs to the Lord.

Why is grace the unifying theme? Because it is what makes the gospel categorically different from every other religious thought form. There are not two kinds of people in the world but three: religious, irreligious, and Christian.

The world tends to picture everyone along a single spectrum: irreligious at one pole, religious at the other, most people somewhere in the middle. The Bible says no.

The irreligious person says: “I’m doing just fine, thank you. I’m savvy. I’m okay. I’m a good person. I don’t need salvation.” Salvation, in their view, is unnecessary.

The religious person says: “I’ve got to be good, and I’ve got to obey the Bible, and I’ve got to try to live like Jesus, and I’ve got to pray, and I’ve got to go to church, and I’ve got to do all the things that God wants. And then God will bless me and help me.” Salvation, in their view, comes from them.

The gospel says neither.

Salvation is of the Lord. Utterly and solely and surely of the Lord. Not unnecessary, not earned. Received.

This is not just the doctrine of conversion. It is the engine of every subsequent transformation. Colossians 1:6 says the gospel “has borne fruit in you since the first day you understood the grace of God in all its truth.” Not the day you signed up, not the day you said “I believe it,” but the day grace began to land. The gospel starts bearing fruit when grace catches fire.

If this feels obvious, Jonah pushes back. Even a prophet who received revelation from God did not have grace straight. Jonah 4:2 will show that he knew God’s graciousness in theory. That is exactly why he ran. If Jonah did not have grace straight, neither do we.

The Method. Learning, Loving, and Living Grace

If grace is the key, how does a person actually grasp it? Three components map onto Martin Luther’s classical anatomy of saving faith: notitia, mental knowing, assensus (heart consenting, pronounced here as “essensus”), and fiducia, life committing. Jonah is doing all three. These are not only the way grace is grasped initially. They are the way grace is grasped at every breakthrough.

Learning grace, mind. Drawing on Jonah 2:4 (“I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple”), grace is defined as “a completely undeserved gift from a completely unobligated giver.” Two components matter: undeservingness and unobligation. People usually miss one.

Three case studies illustrate the point, each isolating one component.

First, imagine you are the parent of a disobedient, rebellious, ungrateful, irresponsible teenage child. What do you do? You still help them, you still do everything for them. They are profoundly undeserving. But you are still obligated. Being a parent is both a moral and a legal obligation. You do not get into parenting without that obligation. So this is undeserved help, but the giver is bound to give it. Imperfect picture of grace.

Second, imagine you are in a Bible study and your leader is genuinely great. At the end of the session, you all chip in and buy her a really nice gift. In that situation, you as students were not obligated, that wasn’t part of the deal when you signed up. But she is deserving. So this is unobligated giving, but to a deserving recipient. Also imperfect.

Third, the case that captures both components. You live in a small apartment building with thin floors and walls, and one of your neighbors is absolutely insufferable. When anyone politely asks him to turn down his music, he turns it up and slams the door in their face. Whenever anyone else in the building plays music at all, he calls the police. Then he gets sick. And you run errands for him and bring meals to him. Now you have someone who absolutely does not deserve the sacrifice, and nobody in the world thinks you have any obligation to make it. “If you do, that’s grace.”

Why insist on both components? Because people usually lose one or the other. Some have too light a view of their own need: “I’m doing fine.” Others feel deeply unworthy but have too light a view of God’s love: “I’m too bad for him to love and accept.” Different personalities, same problem: grace stays fuzzy, so it does not transform them.

Then something disrupts the equilibrium. A therapist described a client filled with anger and hatred who saw nothing wrong with it until September 11 exposed where hatred can lead. Crisis can bring people to a deeper grasp of need.

Now comes the prescription, stated unusually plainly:

“You have to move over and you go back to the things you’ve heard a hundred times. You go back to the texts you’ve read a hundred times. You go back to the truths you believe maybe or you discarded because they weren’t transforming. You go back to them and you look at them and you reflect on them and you yearn for them and you seek after them, until your existential grasp of the freeness of his love catches up with your existential grasp of your undeservingness.”

The catch-up phase is painful. It can feel like surgery without anesthesia. But that is how grace moves from idea to lived reality.

Loving grace, affections. Jonah’s prayer keeps directing attention toward the temple, vv. 4, 7, even though he is nowhere near it. He is not theorizing about the sacrificial system. He is yearning toward it.

Why? Because the temple addresses a real conundrum about evil. If someone wrongs you and you don’t forgive, if you simply vent hatred, vengeance, the desire to pummel the evildoer, you have not removed the evil. You have spread it. You may take the wrongdoer out, but the evil now lives in you and ramifies through everyone connected to either of you. If you don’t forgive, evil wins. But if you just let it go. “it’s all right, don’t worry about it”, that wrongdoer is now free to walk back out into the world unaltered. Is that good for the next person in his path? Is that good for him? If you just forgive, evil also wins.

What the temple displays is a third option. Sin is taken seriously, there is shedding of blood. Sin is not waved away. But the blood shed is not the blood of the sinner. Jonah does not yet know how God will resolve this. He only senses that God will. Somehow God will be just and the justifier. Somehow he will punish sin and yet forgive.

Jonah himself becomes a living analogy of the answer. Just as Jonah was voluntarily thrown into the stormy sea to save the sailors, chapter 1, so Jesus Christ bore our sin so that God could be just and yet forgive. Jonah only vaguely sensed this. Christians see it clearly. The freeness of grace teaches the mind. The costliness of grace draws out the affections.

Living grace, life. Once Jonah has learned and begun to love grace, the same call comes a third time: “Will you go to Nineveh?” And this time Jonah says yes. Living grace means acting “as if I’m a recipient of grace… as if I’m that loved, as if I’m that cherished, as if I’m that bad. And yet that loved.” Practice consolidates the breakthrough.

The Marks. Eroded Fear and Eroded Bigotry

Two unmistakable marks of grace’s work appear in Jonah 2:8-9. They distinguish a real grasp of grace from mere increased religiosity.

Mark 1: Fear is eroded. Verse 9 says, “I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good.” This is not two separate actions, first temple sacrifice and then obedience. Hebrew parallelism often says the same thing two ways. Jonah’s vow as a prophet was to do whatever God called him to do. Now God is calling him to Nineveh. The sacrifice and the vow are the same act. Going to Nineveh is the sacrifice.

The 1942 analogy makes the point unforgettable. “If in 1942, the word of the Lord came to some American minister and said, go to Berlin and preach against its wickedness and its violence, what are that guy’s chances?” That is what Jonah is being called to do. And he says, in effect: “If I obey, I will be sacrificing myself. But I’m going to do it with thanksgiving.”

Why a song of thanksgiving? Because his fear has been eroded. The underlying mechanism is identity.

Religion and irreligion are essentially the same thing in this respect, both ground identity in performance. Irreligious people have more secular standards. Religious people have moral and religious standards. But for both, identity rests on “I can prove that I’m okay, I know I’m valuable, because look what I’m doing.” Both produce pride: “You look down your nose at anybody who hasn’t done as well as you have. In fact, you need to look down on other people to bolster the sense that I am achieving, I am living up to my standards.”

The gospel reverses the structure: “You are not saved by giving God a perfect record or a good record, and then he owes you blessing, but rather you receive through Jesus Christ a perfect record, which you accept by faith, and then you live for him.”

The result is psychological as well as theological. A performance-based identity can hold confidence, when standards are met, or humility, when they are failed, but never both. The two cannot coexist on that ground. A gospel-based identity, by contrast, holds them simultaneously: humbled because saved by sheer grace, assured because absolutely loved by the only person whose opinion ultimately counts. “Humble and bold together. What’s unique about the gospel-based identity is humility and confidence intermingle. In fact, they actually are mutually self-supporting.”

Romans 8 supplies the underlying logic: if God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also freely give us all things? Grace strengthens the soul away from fear.

Mark 2: Bigotry is eroded. In v. 8 (“Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs”), the word for “grace” is the Hebrew chesed. Chesed is covenant love, often translated “lovingkindness.” It names the permanent, committed love God gives to the people with whom he has a covenant. The phrase “worthless idols” translates havlê-shav’, literally “vanities of emptiness,” carrying the same word hevel that runs through Ecclesiastes. The verb “cling” portrays idol-worshipers as actively guarding their idols. What one grasps determines what one forfeits.

Here is what makes Jonah’s wording astonishing. As far as Jonah knew, the only people with whom God had a covenant were the Hebrews. So when he says that idol-worshipers forfeit “their” chesed, he is conceding that God’s covenant love is as much theirs as his. His self-righteousness keeps grace from him just as their idol worship keeps grace from them. That recognition is what frees him to go.

The contemporary objection is that all religious fervor leads to violence, that anyone who believes they have the truth tends toward harm. Two test cases complicate that claim.

The Amish: deeply conservative, patriarchal, traditional, religiously fundamentalist by any normal measure. “Are you really worried about Amish terrorism?”

The Khmer Rouge: atheists, dialectical materialists, no belief in moral absolutes, and yet “one of the most, if not the most, murderous and genocidal regimes in the history of the world.”

When Keller raised this with his wife Kathy, her response was: “It depends on what your fundamental is.” That is the answer. The Amish are peaceful not despite their fundamentalism but because of what their fundamental is. “The truth is a crucified God, a God who dies for you, a God who doesn’t come with spears in his hand, but nails in his hands, a God who says, here’s how I’m going to win you. I’m going to give myself away. I’m going to lose all my power. I’m going to lose all my strength.” If that is the God at the heart of the universe, the fervor of believing it does not produce hostility. It drains hostility away.

And the inverse holds: “If you don’t believe there is such a thing as truth, why can’t you do anything you want? It’s pretty stupid to say if you think you have the truth, that’s going to lead to violence. It all depends on what you think the truth is.” Grace eroding bigotry is a function of what grace actually is.

The Continual Need for Spiritual Breakthroughs

Spiritual breakthrough is not a one-time event. Each new world exposes the inadequacy of one’s current grasp of grace and drives a person back for a deeper grasp.

Keller has confessed openly about his own prayer life in this period. He had been praying for protection, for no more attacks, for the economy to recover, for the right military balance to be struck. All legitimate prayers. But underneath them, he realized, ran a single deeper request: “Lord, I want my old world back. Because in that old world, my little amount of spiritual faith, my little grasp of the grace of God was enough. And now it’s not.”

The boat-and-rock illustration crystallizes the diagnosis. You can pray for God to remove the rock, and that is legitimate. But you can also pray for God to raise the water. The first asks for the old world back. The second prepares the heart for whatever world comes.

The Lord of the Rings illustration follows, placing the setting in late 2001 before the first Peter Jackson film released. Tolkien’s hobbits live in a safe place and assume the world is like that. They come to think that peace and plenty are the rule of the world. The parallel to Americans after September 11 is direct.

Four hobbits are then drawn out into the real world. They cannot adjust. They are not used to a world of such darkness, such evil, such tall things. They do not become courageous overnight.

But one of them does have a transformation. He is on a battlefield, and one of the biggest, baddest figures in the book. “some kind of ancient evil sorcerer”, looms over him. “Such a horror was upon him that he became blind and sick.” He is paralyzed. He thought peace and plenty was the rule of the world. He had a little faith, enough for the old world. He cannot meet what is now in front of him.

Then he sees, just off to his left, one figure standing up to the sorcerer. Ready to die. Not only for him, but for everyone around him.

“Pity filled his heart and great wonder, and suddenly the slow kindled courage of his race awoke. He clenched his hand.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

The application is direct. The hobbit had enough courage for his old world, not enough for the new one. But when he saw someone ready to die for him, pity and wonder filled his heart, and courage awoke. If we keep looking at the One willing to die for us, courage will awake.

The closing prayer follows the same logic: not for the old world back, but for hearts “fearless enough and humble enough to handle the world, whatever it is.” Every person needs to learn, love, and live into the grace of God until it catches fire and changes the way they think about themselves.

Final line: “Salvation is of the Lord.”

Summary

Jonah’s existing faith was sufficient for his old world but inadequate for the new call to Nineveh. Jonah 2 exposes a pattern of spiritual transformation. The key, drawn from 2:9, is that “salvation is of the Lord”: grace, not religious or irreligious performance, distinguishes the gospel from the world’s usual categories. The method is to learn grace, love grace, and live grace. The marks, drawn from 2:8-9, are eroded fear and eroded bigotry. The continual need is illustrated through the boat-and-rock prayer and the Tolkien battlefield scene: each new world exposes the inadequacy of one’s current grasp of grace and drives a person back to fix attention on the One who dies for us. The recurring textual anchor is Jonah 2:8-9, with Colossians 1:6 and Romans 8:32 supplying the supporting New Testament framework.

Practice

Diagnose which component you are missing

Determine whether your grasp of grace is weak because you have too light a view of your own need (“I’m doing fine”) or too light a view of God’s love (“I’m too bad to be loved”). The two require different work.

Go back to texts you have read a hundred times

When something exposes the depth of your need, return to the passages, doctrines, and truths about God’s love that you already know, even ones you may have discarded as untransforming, and “reflect on them and yearn for them and seek after them” until your existential grasp of God’s love catches up with your existential grasp of your own condition.

Look toward the cross the way Jonah looked toward the temple

Direct prayer and attention not just at the doctrine of the atonement but at the One who gave himself. The freeness of grace teaches the mind. The costliness of grace draws the affections. “If you keep looking at the one who is willing to die for us, the courage will awake.”

Live as a recipient of grace before you feel it

Begin to act as one who is undeserving and yet irrevocably loved. Obedience like Jonah’s “song of thanksgiving” departure for Nineveh is part of how the breakthrough is consolidated, not merely its result.

Pray that the water rise, not only that the rock be removed

Continue praying for circumstantial protection and relief. But add, underneath those prayers, the prayer that prepares your heart for any world that comes. Both prayers are legitimate. Only the second prepares you to grow.

Credit

Based on Tim Keller’s sermons on Jonah at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City.