Does God hear the prayer of someone who is truly "down and out"? Who sees his entire life to be a failure? Who is crushed, humiliated, trampled on, disgraced, useless?
No prayer in the Bible is from anyone lower "down" or more disgracefully "out" than Jonah's from inside the great fish's stomach! No drug addict, alcoholic, or criminal is any lower down, more shamed and disgraced:
"Out of the belly of [Hell] I cried, and You heard my voice. For You cast me into the deep [actually it was the distraught sailors who "cast" him in], into the heart of the seas [to sink naked into a dark, raging "ocean" is anybody's "hell"]. … All Your billows and Your waves passed over me. Then I said, 'I have been cast out of Your sight.' ... The waters surrounded me, even to my soul, ... I went down to the moorings [foundations] of the mountains [can you think of a lower-down place?]" (Jonah 2:1-6).
Jeremiah often told the people of Judah that the Lord would punish them severely; yet in actuality He Himself never touched a hair of their heads--the Babylonians did it all. But God takes the blame for the evil that happens to us. We too feel that it's the Lord who punishes us as we deserve.
David taught Jonah to pray: "Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord … There is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared" (Psalm 130:1, 4). He too was a down and outer after his double crime (Psalm 51).
Jonah said: "When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord" (vs. 7). And the dear Lord remembered him! He hears you, too, even if you are on a cancer deathbed. Join Jonah in his little down-low place. God hears you there.
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: July 24, 2006.Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.
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