Swallowed Into Mercy

In 1985, a commercial diver named Michael Packard was working off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts, when a humpback whale accidentally scooped him into its mouth. For thirty terrifying seconds, Packard tumbled in warm, crushing darkness, convinced he was going to die. Then the whale surfaced and spat him out, battered but breathing, into the Atlantic light.

Packard's accident lasted half a minute. Jonah's lasted three days.

But here is what we so often miss about Jonah 1:17 — the fish was not the punishment. The storm was the punishment. The drowning was the punishment. The fish was the rescue. God prepared that great creature not to destroy His runaway prophet but to swallow him whole and carry him, alive and kicking, through the deepest waters Jonah would ever know.

Sometimes the Almighty saves us in ways that feel an awful lot like being consumed. The rehab center. The bankruptcy. The friendship that finally tells us the truth we have been outrunning for years. We thrash in the dark, certain we are being devoured, when in fact we are being delivered.

Jonah ran toward Tarshish and toward death. God sent a living submarine to intercept him. Three days in the belly of grace, and the man who fled the presence of the Lord was deposited, gasping and repentant, exactly where mercy wanted him all along.