Finding Grace When We “Can’t Want To”

Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, 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.  
For You cast me into the deep,  
into the heart of the seas,  
and the flood surrounded me;  
all Your breakers and Your waves  
passed over me.  
Then I said, ‘I am driven away  
from Your sight;  
yet I shall again look  
upon Your holy temple.’  
The waters closed in over me to take my life;  
the deep surrounded me;  
weeds were wrapped about my head.  
To 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.
When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the LORD,
and my prayer came to You,
into Your holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to You;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the LORD!”

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

Jonah 2:1-10

When my nephew, Wilson, was a little guy, he expressed his exasperation with his parents’ discipline with this statement: “But I can’t want to!” Maybe he just hit one of his sisters or stole a toy away from a sibling. Whatever it was, down deep, little Wilson felt good about that misbehavior. Even when his parents asked him to say he was sorry or return the toy, his deep feeling was that he was doing exactly what he wanted to do, and he did not want to change! Thus, his honest heart cry: “But I can’t want to!” 

Jonah 2 takes us into the prayer Jonah prays from inside the belly of the large fish that swallowed him. God ordained the hurricane-force storm that ensued in Jonah 1, as well as the sailors throwing problematic Jonah overboard. This resulted in God calming the storm, and this stunned the men into a newfound fear of Him. And then, in another sovereign action, God “appointed” a great fish to swallow Jonah whole, where he stayed in the large fish’s stomach for three days and three nights. Engulfed in watery, total darkness and wrapped tightly in seaweed, Jonah thought he was at death’s doorstep.

Jonah ran away and rebelled against God’s assignment for him as His chosen prophet. He didn’t agree with where God sent him, who he was being sent to, or why God would have grace on such evil Ninevites. So, he ran in the opposite direction from Nineva. He ran as far as he could go. We can be certain, in Jonah’s rebellion from God, that he had not been praying. Why pray when you don’t like what God is doing? “You can’t want to”.

But in the belly of the large fish, facing imminent death, Jonah began to pray. He came to the end of himself. He hit rock bottom. And it is here that Jonah began to change.  Isn’t that the usual way God teaches us the greatest lessons of His grace? When we are at the bottom of our ability to control anything about our circumstances and all our efforts to save ourselves have failed, it is at that point we cry out to God in prayer.

Jonah’s prayer in this chapter is one of turning to God in repentance. It is not rock bottom that changed Jonah. His prayer at the bottom started his life change. When we pray to the Lord God, who is sovereign over all and loves us like no other, we find the greatest secrets of God’s grace in the middle of our crisis. Unbeknownst to Jonah, even as he was reaping the consequences of his sinful behavior, God was sending severe mercies to begin to change Jonah’s desire to obey the Lord. 

In verse 8, Jonah makes a statement that reveals he is deserving of this calamity:
    “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.” (NIV 1984)

An idol is anything we turn to that takes the place of God. In the Hebrew language, the word “worthless” means “vapor”, which indicates further how fleeting our idols truly are. Perhaps Jonah had in mind the pagan sailors whom he had shared the boat with. We can’t know for sure. But what we can know is that Jonah’s most prominent idol was the idol of self and the sin of pride. Aren’t we just like Jonah? We want what we want when we want it. And when the Holy Spirit begins to convict, we cry out, “But I can’t want to”.

Jonah is saying in this verse something he knows all too well at this point. Whenever a believer puts something else in front of God and turns from Him, he is also letting go of God’s grace and mercy. 

Years ago, I heard a Scottish pastor say something so wise. “When we do not call sin what it is, we deny ourselves the gift of receiving God’s mercy and grace through our repentance”.

May we all be a people who ask for the Holy Spirit to shine bright lights on our idols, to convict us of our sin, and in the process, may we know the great grace of God the Father who changes us so that we can want to obey Him.