Jonah in the Bible

Jonah was a prophet of Israel whose story is one of the most vivid and unsettling in all of Scripture, because it is less about a great fish and more about the great mercy of God. When the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, commanding him to preach against the wicked city of Nineveh (JON.1.1), Jonah did the unthinkable for a prophet: he ran. He boarded a ship bound for Tarshish, fleeing from the presence of the Lord and traveling in the exact opposite direction (JON.1.3). His rebellion exposes a heart that resented God's compassion toward Israel's enemies. God pursued His runaway prophet. A violent storm threatened the ship, and at Jonah's own request the sailors threw him overboard, where the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow him for three days and three nights (JON.1.17). From the belly of the fish Jonah prayed, and God commanded the fish to vomit him onto dry land (JON.2.10). Given a second chance, Jonah finally obeyed and proclaimed, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown" (JON.3.4). Astonishingly, the entire city repented, and God relented from the disaster He had threatened (JON.3.10). Rather than rejoicing, Jonah was angry, and his prayer exposed the real reason he fled: he knew the Lord to be "a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness" (JON.4.2), and he did not want that mercy extended to Nineveh. The book ends with God questioning Jonah's pity for a withered plant while showing no pity for a city of thousands. Jesus pointed to Jonah's three days in the fish as a sign of His own death and resurrection (MAT.12.40). Jonah's life is a mirror held up to every believer who struggles to extend the grace they themselves have received.