Jonah 1:17
[ Jonah’s Prayer and Deliverance ] Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Life becomes real when we are swallowed by a great fish!

The tougher you are, sometimes the more God has to do to get your attention! There are several things I learn from Jonah:

1- I can never be too far away for God to hear me!

Jonah 2:1
Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the fish’s belly.

2 – God controls the fish

Jonah 2:10
So the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.

3- Jesus knows what it is like to suffer in the agonies of “the great fish”

Matthew 12:40
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

So many people look down on those of us who believe in this divine purpose. This God who has a purpose even in the sufferings we hate and try to avoid.

I’ve been asked how I, an intellectual, could be dumb enough to believe in God. Those who ask show me that they are missing out on the greatest experience of life itself… a relationship with God Himself!

Many hail Albert Einstein as one of the most intelligent men in the history of the human race. Listen to what he said:

“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science and art. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness.”

Yes, God is the source of science. To me, the method of creating the world is not so relevant — God is God, He can create the world any way He sees fit! A day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day so timing too is irrelevant.

The point is that I believe He created it all! His ways are so much higher than my ways and His thoughts so much higher than my thoughts! I am fascinated by history and science and how God created things but I wouldn’t pretend to know that I could understand it all — even if He told me how He did it!

In efforts to PROVE that God created the world, Christians forget the definition of faith — “substance of things hoped for, evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).” I doubt God will allow us to PROVE it unless “with eyes they see and with their ears they hear.” Faith is a permanent ingredient in our covenant relationship.