You Have Brought Up My Life From the Pit

Mt 12:39 But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.


My Calvinist friends may run wailing like banshees as I wax mystical here. You were warned - see the blurb in the side bar.

In reading the Jonah account (below) on the remembrance of this day between the burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ I ask myself who I see here? Is it Jonah? Is it Christ? Is it me? Is it all the redeemed? And the answer is...

YES!
...a resounding "Yes!" O can you see the type and the antitype here? And can you not recall those portions of scripture that speak of us being buried with Him so that we may rise with Him to newness of life? Was it not you who were drowned at the base of the mountains under the ocean of sin, beneath the storm of wrath, tangled in the weeds of iniquity. Did you not cry out to the Lord your salvation? And did He not answer?

And is there not the sense that, in His humanity, the Lord suffered the same experience so that you could cry out, being cut off from the Father that He cherished, drowning and entangled in OUR sins and yet without sin Himself. And did the Father not hear Him, and us, for His sake, with whom we died. And did He not raise us with Him?

God plants and records these things in history like dormant seeds to be awakened in their fulfillment in Christ. Did Christ not keep His vow to the Father and the Father honor that vow in the keeping of it by giving the promised people to the Son from out of the depths of the sea of sin? I tell you, the word of God is marvel. Like Doctor Who's Tardis, once the door is opened to you, a whole new dimension of thermo-nuclear exposition beckons.

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1 Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish,
2 saying,
“I called out to the LORD, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
3 For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
4 Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
Yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
5 The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
6 at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O LORD my God.
7 When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the LORD,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
8 Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the LORD!”
10 And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.