Christ, Our Greater Jonah: A Gospel View of Facing Our Storms of LifeSýnishorn

Day 4 Devotional:

The Identity of Christ in Our Storms

Mark’s account of the storm in Mark 4 uses identical words and phrases as the story of Jonah in Jonah 1.

In both stories, both Jesus and Jonah are in a boat in a storm. Both boats have other people in them who are terrified to death. Both groups of terrified people wake up the sleeping prophets angrily, rebuking them. Both storms are miraculously calmed and the people in the boat are saved. And in both stories the men in the boats are more terrified after the storm is stilled than they were before.

Every feature in the two stories is the same, with one notable exception; in Jonah’s story, Jonah is sacrificed into the storm, thrown into the deep, to satisfy the wrath of God so that the other men in the boat will be saved from the storm. In Mark’s account, however, Jesus is not thrown overboard.

It is easy to miss the fact that the accounts are not really that different in how they end.You see, in Matt. 12:41, Jesus compared Himself to Jonah by saying, a greater than Jonah is here. By saying this, Jesus was pointing to the fact that He is the ultimate Jonah, who, on the cross, was thrown into the waters of God's wrath for us.

In Jonah 2:4, in the belly of the fish that eventually swallowed him, Jonah prayed to God by saying: I have been banished from your sight. Jonah meant that he felt forsaken by God.

When in Matthew 27:46, on the cross, Jesus said: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was saying that for your sin and my sin, He had been put under the waters of God's wrath.

This shows us how ironic it is that in verse 38 of our Mark passage the disciples rebuked the Lord by saying, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?" They believed He had gone to sleep on them in their hour of desperation and need.

But it is the other way around because, in the Garden of Gethsemane, in Matthew 26:36-44, it is they, the disciples, who will go to sleep on Christ. It is they who would abandon Him in His great hour of need and flee from Him.

And yet, even after they had abandoned Him like that, Jesus still loved them enough to go to the cross for them, and for us. Jonah was thrown into the storm for his sin. Jesus was thrown into the storm for our sin.

In verse 41, we read that the terrified disciples, after Jesus had calmed the storm, asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” This shows us that they had not yet come to understand the real identity of Jesus Christ as God the Son, who has complete control of nature.

So, we can summarise our third "I" by saying that, as Christians, the gospel assurance of the identity of Christ Jesus as our greater Jonah renews our faith in the Lord’s willingness, and in His ability, to bring us across the stormy waters of life in this broken and fallen world.