Jonah: The World's Greatest Fish Story (Jonah) John MacArthur
http://www.gty.org/resources/Sermons/80-393
Let's open the
Bible to
Jonah, the book of Jonah.
It's just four chapters, one of the minor prophets. And you know the story. We've gone through the story in years past, but in connection with the book, I want to reiterate it one more time to you. The opening chapter of Jonah is set in the midst of an intense storm, a really intense storm.
Modern meteorology has documented the development of tropical cyclones in the
Mediterranean Sea, which is where this takes place. A violent tempest, we know from meteorological records, can reach an excess of 90 miles per hour--that is hurricane level and even beyond that--and create surging waves as a result of those kinds of horrible, terrifying winds. And this is the kind of storm that one might assume was going on in Jonah's story. But really it was something qualitatively different than that.
Let's look at chapter 1 and let's understand what the storm really was. And we could start in verse 4, "
The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up." This isn't a natural storm, this is a supernatural storm. This is not one that basically was generated by some natural cause; this was generated by God Himself. This is a violent storm that God created supernaturally.
And undoubtedly the seasoned sailors who were on the boat along with Jonah had seen their share of storms and had encountered their share of challenges while trying to sail the
Mediterranean on other occasions. Undoubtedly they survived, listened to the tales of horrible storms in the past, and they probably told some themselves. But this storm that slammed into the helpless ship was something massive, some kind of a barricade of on-coming water, the likes of which they likely had never seen.
Tongue and groove planks that composed the ship would have begun to splinter and pull apart under the overwhelming pressure and crashing of these waves--wave after wave after wave, crashing on the decks, the crew becoming white-knuckled, panicked, unable to do anything as far as normal course of action to defend themselves. They cried out in a panicked desperation. This storm must have felt supernatural, and maybe a little bit personal to them. It must have been, they thought, some god that was offended. They even understood was not a storm that could be explained naturally. This storm had to be explained supernaturally
....