Peter Craigie writes that when we reject and disobey God, as Jonah did, it takes “radical treatment, if it [is] to be remedied.” He points out that the text has been depicting Jonah as descending—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
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