But As For Me
"Bless us Lord, rain down your blessings on us, we just ask you Lord to bless us." I didn't object to the prayer in a formal sense. I want God's blessings as much as anyone else. I cringed at the Christianese. But I stopped praying along when it became clear that we were only praying for God to bless us. Looking back on it, I felt spiritually superior to the person praying. I knew I would have prayed a better prayer.
In his prayer, at his moment of greatest distress, Jonah remembers the Lord. It's exactly the right thing to do. Jonah also expresses conviction that God hears his prayer. It's an indication that Jonah trusts the mercy of God. No matter what we've done, we can always turn back to God and know he hears us. In a narrow sense, Jonah's prayer is theologically perfect. Jonah's prayer is formally a prayer of thanksgiving. It goes like this: I was in a bad place, I asked God for help, he responded to me, I promised to thank him, and here's what I learned. But that's different from a prayer of confession. That sounds like Psalm 51:3, "For I am conscious of my rebellion, and my sin is always before me." Jonah never acknowledges that. Instead, his concern is that his life was fading away. Leslie Allen explains, "his plight was due to his deliberately forgetting Yahweh and his claims upon him." When we read what Jonah prays and compare it to the prayers he could have prayed, the meaning of his prayer becomes clear. He wants better circumstances, not obedience to God. The commitment to fulfill what he has vowed is empty until he acknowledges that he has broken those vows. It's true that those who cherish worthless idols abandon God's faithful love. I think Jonah is criticizing the pagan sailors for how they prayed to their idols. But before they threw Jonah into the sea, they prayed to Yahweh: "Please, LORD, don’t let us perish because of this man’s life, and don’t charge us with innocent blood! For you, LORD, have done just as you pleased" (1:14). The last thing Jonah heard before he went into the depths was the sailors crying out to his God for mercy. Jonah is promising that he will make vows and sacrifice to God. The pagan sailors have already done that (1:16). Jonah acknowledges that salvation belongs to the Lord. But as we know from the story, Jonah wants to decide who gets saved. Right before a sea creature vomits Jonah onto dry land, he is praying as if he is better than anyone else. The good news is that God still saved Jonah.
What does it tell us about God that he commanded the fish to swallow Jonah and put him on dry land?
When was the last time you judged someone else's prayer?
What's the ratio of how much you pray for yourself versus other people?
Who is someone who's hard to pray for? Tell God, "You know how I feel about [this person]. Help me to pray for them. Please show them your mercy, too."
Source:
Allen, Leslie C. The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1976).