Daily Devotional | Salvation Comes

In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin called human nature “a perpetual factory of idols.” We are always looking for something or someone to worship, and it is all too rare that we acknowledge what Jonah says at the end of his prayer from inside the fish: “Salvation comes from the LORD” (v. 9).

But before Jonah comes to this bold declaration, he recounts that “when my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, LORD” (v. 7). In contrast to praying to the Lord, Jonah declared that “those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them” (v. 8). Not many of us would consider ourselves the same sort of idolaters as the pagan sailors who repented and turned to the Lord in Jonah 1. After all, we might not bow down in worship to physical idols. But as John Calvin reminds us, we are constantly producing one idol after another. Perhaps that idol is wealth or work, alcohol or food—anything that we look to in order to fulfill us, to satisfy us, to save us.

Jonah, in his darkest hour, reminds us that “salvation comes from the LORD” (v. 9). The word in Hebrew for salvation is yeshua. We see this name for Jesus in Matthew chapter 1 when an angel of the Lord appears to Joseph to assuage his fears about Mary. The angel says, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). This name, Jesus, is the English translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Jonah uses: Yeshua. Not only is Jonah’s salvation from the Lord, salvation for all of us is from the Lord, because Jesus lived a sinless life and died a substitutionary death on a Roman cross for our sins. What a gift!