Why would God be so ready to hear our prayers, especially if we have been like Jonah, who had hardly been a paragon of faith? He answers that his prayer came “into your holy temple” (Jon. 2:7). The temple was the place where the atoning sacrifices were offered. To leap forward from Jonah to the Gospels, we understand that God heard Jonah’s prayer because Jesus was going to die for his sins. We, too, can know that our prayers are heard if offered in Jesus’ name; his atoning blood has secured our acceptance into the love and grace of the Father.

Jonah 2 tells of God’s prophet being swallowed by a whale (or great fish) after disobeying the Lord’s command. This chapter is not precisely the prophet’s prayer, but rather his reflection on it afterwards. It begins, “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me” (Jon. 2:1). With seaweed wrapped around his head—one can only imagine the inside of a whale!—he prayed, and Jonah recalls, “you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God” (Jon. 2:6). The key to this verse is to realize that Jonah was still inside the great fish; literally speaking, he had not yet been “brought up” from the deep.

So to what does he refer? The clear answer is that he is talking about God’s deliverance from his unbelief and despair. He says, “When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you” (Jon. 2:7). How did Jonah know that his prayer was answered, when he was still deep in the ocean inside the whale? Because he “remembered the Lord.”

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