The Sign of Jonah

So God was patient when man broke faith with him, because he could already see the victory that would be granted to man through the Word. For when strength was brought to its full in weakness, that showed God’s kindness and his surpassing power. Think of how patiently he let Jonah be swallowed by the great sea creature — not so that Jonah would be swallowed up and lost for good, but so that, once he had been thrown up again, he would be all the more obedient to God; so that he would give more glory to the one who had granted him a rescue he had no hope of; and so that he would bring the people of Nineveh to a lasting repentance, and they would turn to the Lord, who would deliver them from death. They had been struck with awe by the strange thing worked in Jonah’s case, as Scripture says of them: “And each one turned back from his evil way and from the wrong that was in their hands, saying, Who knows whether God will relent and turn his anger away from us, so that we do not perish?” [a]

In the same way, from the beginning, God allowed man to be swallowed by the great sea creature — the one who was the author of the transgression — not so that man should be lost altogether once he had been engulfed, but so that God might set in place and make ready the ordering by which salvation would come, carried out by the Word through the sign of Jonah, for those who thought about the Lord as Jonah did, and who confessed and said, “I am a servant of the Lord, and I worship the Lord God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

All of it was so that man, receiving from God a rescue he had no hope of, might rise from the dead and glorify God, and say for himself the words Jonah spoke in prophecy: “In my distress I cried out to the Lord my God, and he heard me out of the belly of the grave.” It was so that he might go on glorifying God and giving thanks without stopping for the salvation he has received from him, “so that no flesh may boast in the Lord’s presence”; and so that man should never take the opposite view of God, imagining that the freedom from decay that belongs to him is his own by nature. For by not holding to the truth in that way, he would boast with empty arrogance, as though he were like God by nature. That is exactly what the enemy did: he made man more ungrateful toward his Maker, clouded the love God had for man, and blinded man’s mind so that it could not see what is worthy of God — measuring himself against God and judging himself God’s equal.

This, then, was the point of God’s patience: that man should pass through everything, come to know what moral discipline is, then reach the resurrection from the dead, and learn by experience where his deliverance comes from. So he would live always in gratitude to the Lord, having received from him the gift of freedom from decay, and would love him the more — for “the one who is forgiven more, loves more.” And so he would know himself, how mortal and weak he is, while he also understood about God that he is immortal, and so powerful that he can grant immortality to what is mortal and eternity to what is bound by time. And so he would understand the other things God has shown him about himself, and, taught by them, would think of God in a way that matches God’s greatness.

For the glory of man is God, and God’s works are God’s own glory; and man is the vessel that holds all his wisdom and power. Just as a doctor is proved by his patients, so God too is made known through human beings. That is why Paul says, “For God has shut up all in unbelief, so that he may have mercy on all.” He does not say this about spiritual Aeons, but about man, who had disobeyed God and been cast off from immortality, and who then obtained mercy, receiving through the Son of God the adoption that the Son himself brings about.

For take the man who holds the true opinion about created things and about the Creator — who is the Almighty God of all, and has granted existence to everything — and holds it without pride or boasting; who goes on in God’s love and in obedience, and gives thanks. He will also receive from God the greater glory of an advancement, as he looks forward to the time when he will become like the one who died for him. For he too “was made in the likeness of sinful flesh,” in order to condemn sin and to throw it out beyond the flesh as a thing now condemned; but also to call man into his own likeness, appointing him an imitator of God, laying his Father’s law upon him so that he might see God, and granting him the power to receive the Father. He is the Word of God who lived in man and became the Son of Man, so that he might accustom man to receive God, and God to dwell in man, as the Father was pleased to have it.

This, then, is why the Lord himself, who is Immanuel born of the virgin, is the sign of our salvation: it was the Lord himself who saved them, because they could not be saved by anything of their own. And that is why Paul, when he sets out how weak human beings are, says, “For I know that in my flesh nothing good lives” — showing that the good thing that is our salvation is not from us but from God. And again: “What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Then he brings in the deliverer: “The grace of Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Isaiah declares this too: “Be strong, you hands that hang down, and you weak knees; take courage, you who are faint-hearted; be comforted, do not be afraid. Look, our God has given judgment with repayment, and he will repay. He will come himself, and will save us.” Here we see that we are to be saved not by ourselves, but by the help of God.

Again, that the one who was to save us would not be a mere man, and would not be without flesh — for the angels are without flesh — the same prophet announced when he said: “Neither an elder nor an angel, but the Lord himself will save them, because he loves them and will spare them; he will himself set them free.” And that he would himself become a real man, visible to the eye, while being the Word who gives salvation, Isaiah says again: “Look, city of Zion: your eyes will see our salvation.” And that it was not a mere man who died for us, Isaiah says: “And the holy Lord remembered his dead of Israel, who had fallen asleep in the land of burial; and he came down to announce his salvation to them, so that he might save them.” And Amos the prophet says the same thing: “He will turn back and have compassion on us; he will wipe out our wrongdoing, and will throw our sins into the depths of the sea.” And again, naming the place his coming would be announced from, he says: “The Lord has spoken from Zion, and has raised his voice from Jerusalem.”

And that the Son of God, who is God, would come from the region lying to the south of Judah’s inheritance — from Bethlehem, where the Lord was born — and would send out his praise through all the earth: this is what the prophet Habakkuk says. “God will come from the south, and the Holy One from Mount Ephraim. His power covered the heavens over, and the earth is full of his praise. Before his face the Word will go out, and his feet will advance across the plains.” So he states in plain terms that he is God; that his coming would be in Bethlehem, and from Mount Ephraim, which lies to the south of the inheritance; and that he is man as well. For he says, “his feet will advance across the plains” — and feet crossing open ground is a mark that belongs to a man.