going down to Joppa, down into a ship, down into the depths of the ship—and now, finally, he goes even further down into the very depths of the ocean. “But not until he was all the way down, finally stripped of his own buoyant self-sufficiency, was deliverance possible.”2 There was a fatal flaw in Jonah’s character, and it had lain hidden from him as long as his life was going well. It was only through complete failure that he could begin to see it and change it.
