Daily Devotional | Jonah Sleeps

Growing up in Arkansas, I’ve lived through my fair share of tornado warnings. As a child, I viewed them as barely a blip on my radar. As an adult with my own family, tornado alarms were much more serious for me because I had the responsibility to care for the people around me.

In today’s passage, we find Jonah on a ship to Tarshish, where he believes he can escape God’s call to preach repentance to the Ninevites. Meanwhile, the Lord “sent a great wind on the sea” that caused “a violent storm” (v. 4) The sailors aboard the ship—pagans who did not know the Lord—were terrified and did what they knew to do. They began tossing cargo overboard and “each [was crying] out to his own god” (v. 5). Meanwhile, Jonah, God’s prophet and the only person aboard who knew the Lord—and the reason for the storm!—was below deck, fast asleep. Just as he showed no concern for the people of Nineveh in 1:1–3, here he shows no concern for the rest of the men aboard the ship. When the ship’s captain found Jonah asleep during the storm, he shook him awake and demanded that Jonah “call on your god” (v. 6).

Notice the irony here: the pagan sailors are trying to rescue the ship and save their lives as they pray fervently to gods who cannot help them, while God’s own prophet is in a “deep sleep” (v. 5). The captain, also a pagan, has to wake Jonah up and tell him to take note of the danger they’re in and to do something about it. Although Jonah cannot flee God’s presence, he seems to be far, far away from the God he serves.