Oct. 2026
I was reading through the book of Jonah recently, and the Lord faithfully opened my eye to some new observations and application points.
One theme kept jumping out:
1:17 — And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.
4:6 — So the Lord God appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant.
4:7 — But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered.
4:8 — When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, “Death is better to me than life.”
I was reminded that God’s sovereignty extends over all things. Look at the breadth of the things God appointed and controlled in this short book: a great fish, a plant, a worm, and a scorching east wind. And those are only the areas where we explicitly read “appointed.” The Hebrew word rendered “appointed” in these four verses is “manah” (corresponding to Strong’s #4487) and means “to count, number, or reckon” according to The Strongest NASB Exhaustive Concordance. In the context of Jonah, I think that “reckon” is the closest definition: essentially, God wills a creature or thing to act, and it is done. He has truly infinite sovereignty over all of creation.
But in addition to these passages where God explicitly “appointed” creatures and inanimate entities, there is the appointment of Jonah as a prophet, which we see in 1:1-2 where God commissions Jonah to go and preach to Nineveh:
The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.”
We all know of how Jonah struggled with delivering God’s message of coming judgment to the Ninevites because he did not want God to relent concerning the calamity. As Jonah attested, he did not want the Ninevites to repent (have a genuine change of heart): “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity” (4:2).
Even in the face of Jonah being downright disgruntled and petulant, we see God’s sovereignty on display. For one, we know that God worked through the storm and through the fish to move His prophet to warn the Ninevites. But additionally, we see God’s sovereignty heralded because God operates independently of Jonah’s clear dislike of the Ninevites. God is not influenced or swayed one way or another by Jonah; rather, He operates in total freedom. As He declares in Romans 9: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” (Rom. 9:15). God alone is completely free and absolutely sovereign in His authority over all things, because He is their (and our) Creator.
In fact, in light of the sovereignty of God, who Himself declares in Proverbs 21:1
The king’s heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord;
He turns it wherever He wishes.
we understand that God knows and controls even man’s heart, a truth that we also see again in Romans 9:17. That brings me to marvel at the fact that God sovereignly permitted and made Scriptural canon of Jonah’s struggle to submit to Him. What beautiful understanding and mercy from God to capture for us the flaws and challenges of those whom He uses! God also gets down on Jonah’s level in a sense in chapter 4 to explore the prophet’s anger and to declare God’s prerogative to act freely.
So, a few takeaways:
- Praise for God’s absolute sovereignty over all of creation
- Comfort from resting in the omniscience of God: He knows our struggles and still uses flawed people
- A reminder that it’s not in our best interests to resist God’s will for us (and can even lead to others around us suffering unnecessarily)
Do any other points stand out to you?
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