How long can you hold your breath underwater?
Sally sells seashells by the sea.
Wait, is that Mae?
Mae?
What is it? I'll never survive if I can't get this right.
What are you doing?
What's it look like, buddy? Practicing.
Practicing what?
Seeing how long I can hold my breath. Watch this.
How long was that?
I don't know, maybe six seconds?
Six seconds! Progress! Yeah.
Well, I mean I could probably do better than that.
Well, I'm gonna make it to three days so I just need to take a break.
Wait, three days? Mae, why three days?
I can't hear you.
Read your Bible, buddy. Book of Jonah chapter 1 verse 17.
Now, the lord set a huge fish to swallow Jonah and
Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.
It's clear to me Jonah disobeyed God and God punished Jonah by throwing him down
the gullet of a humongous guppy for three days.
There he stayed until he was vomited up yonder to the leeward side, he was that Jonah.
Which tells me I need to be prepared.
Bet I can hold my breath longer than you can.
Maybe, maybe not.
So wait, let me guess. You've done something wrong.
We all have. Ever heard of total depravity?
Uh, maybe. And do you think God's gonna punish you?
Because God is just. That's it. God is just.
Oh well, do you think he'd punish you by making you spend three days in the belly of a fish?
Totes my boats, Chris.
That's why I've started my new line of survival gear,
available to subscribers up at Fish Belly Livin.
#three day challenge
#don't be a jonah
#legally have to tell you this isn't real
Instead hit that thumbs up to like this video, and sub me.
Sub you?
Subscribe, Chris. Come on, buddy. Live in this century.
Great, but Mae, I think maybe you've misunderstood something about Jonah.
See, the real point of the story of Jonah isn't about
what happened with Jonah inside the big fish.
It's about what happened inside Jonah in his heart.
Now we all mess up and disobey God, but part of following God is that when we mess up,
we can confess and ask God to forgive us and God gives us a second chance.
Now, let's start by refreshing our memory of what the Bible actually says about Jonah.
Hit it.
God's story: Jonah.
So part of God's story is in the book of Jonah, and it begins like this.
God told Jonah go to the city of Nineveh and tell the people they have been wicked.
And they should stop being wicked or I will destroy them.
But Jonah got scared and decided to go to the city of Tarshish by boat.
Tarshish is in the opposite direction of where God wanted Jonah to go.
Can you imagine running away from God?
Anyway, when the bow was at sea, God sent a storm.
The storm was so scary that all the sailors thought the ship was going to be destroyed.
So they threw a bunch of stuff off the ship.
I don't know how less luggage was gonna help, but that's what they did.
While all this was happening, Jonah was inside the ship sleeping.
The captain saw him and said, "How can you sleep right now?"
Pray to your God and ask for help.
Then the sailors decided to cast lots to find out who was responsible for the storm.
Casting lots is a lot like the lottery
except when lots are cast, whoever wins doesn't always really win.
Like this time when the lot fell with Jonah.
The sailors asked him what he had done to cause the storm and what they should do to make it stop.
Jonah said, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea. That will calm the storm."
But the sailors didn't want to.
They tried really hard to row back to shore, but the ship just didn't go anywhere.
So the sailors apologized to God for throwing Jonah overboard,
and then they threw him overboard.
I don't know if they ever apologized to Jonah, but God is the one who made the scary storm.
And if you're gonna apologize to anyone, you should apologize to God.
It's just a good idea in general.
So as soon as Jonah was off the boat, the storm stopped.
I wonder if Jonah thought to himself, "What am I gonna do now?"
Well, God had an answer.
All of a sudden, a big fish swallowed Jonah.
Yep, Jonah was now inside a fish.
Things went from bad to worse real quick.
Now, the Bible says a fish swallowed Jonah.
We don't know if it was a whale or something else.
But whatever it was, it had to be big enough to swallow a man whole without having to chew.
Kids, always chew your food before swallowing.
You're not a giant fish.
Anyway, Jonah was in the stomach of the fish for three days and three nights.
Can you imagine being stuck in a dark and stinky place for three days straight?
Like a Porta Potty.
Well, imagine being inside a big fish,
dark and sloshy and really stinky.
Basically a Porta Potty with fins.
After the three stinky days, God made the fish spit out Jonah.
Actually, fish can't really spit.
Jonah got vomited out.
Vomit is also known as puke, barf, pearl oatmeal, seconds up,
chuck, blown grits, ralph, toss cookies, technicolor yawn, and chunder.
Basically the fish got rid of Jonah through its mouth.
Do you get the idea?
So while stinky Jonah was there on the beach,
God told him a second time to go to Nineveh and tell the people to stop being wicked.
This time Jonah went to Nineveh.
Listening to God is always a good idea.
When he arrived, he told the people that God said they should turn from their evil ways.
They believed him so everyone, and I mean everyone, fasted and put on sackclothes.
Fasting is when you don't eat and pray really, really hard.
Putting on a sackcloth is...putting on a sackcloth.
Now, when God saw how they had stopped doing bad things and were really sorry,
he decided not to destroy them.
And that's the book of Jonah.
So in case you missed it, here's the quick version.
God told Jonah to go to Nineveh.
Jonah ran away on a boat.
Jonah got thrown off the boat to stop a storm.
Fish swallowed Jonah.
Three days later, fish threw up Jonah.
Jonah told people of Nineveh to stop being wicked, and they stopped.
God didn't destroy them.
And that's a part of God's story.
Thank you, Chris. A cup of spiced chai.
You're welcome, Mae.
So you see, the story of Jonah doesn't end with God being mad at Jonah and then Jonah
getting thrown overboard into the sea and then Jonah getting swallowed by a big fish.
I mean there's more to it, but I always thought it was a whale mama marine mammal.
Oh no, the Bible says it was a big fish.
That's not what I always pictured, even as a kid.
Well, that's probably because lots of little kid books about Jonah have pictures of whales.
I remember them fondly.
Anyway, it's easy to make that mistake,
especially if we read lots of books that tell Bible stories but that aren't the Bible.
But we always need to go back to the actual words in the Bible.
The Bible is true, and it's always going to
be more reliable than what we think or feel or even imagine.
I guess a guy being swallowed by a giant fish does seem kind of imaginary.
But then there's the dragons and the giants and that crazy thing called the leviathan.
Is that real or imaginary?
This sounds like a job for Dr Archie Logical.
Leviathans and dragons and big fish, oh my.
I don't think we're in Canaan anymore, Toto.
Okay, I can't do this.
I'm Dr Archie Logical, and today we're talking about big animals in the Bible.
The big Bible beasts, those astounding animals in the annals of scripture.
What's up with these crazy huge creatures of preposterous proportions?
Well, there's a lot we could tackle here.
But for now, let's just focus on three biblical beasts and what they tell us about God. Um.
Dragons from the book of Revelation and the big fish that swallowed Jonah.
Primero, Leviathan. The leviathan is described in the book of Job as a
sea-dwelling creature with two coats of body armor,
big plates on its back, rows of razor-sharp teeth, a massive tail and super hot nasty breath.
It kind of seems like a sea monster or even a dinosaur.
We don't really know if there's any archaeological evidence of leviathan,
but leviathan isn't in the Bible.
To prove a paleontological point,
the leviathan was the most fearsome animal people could imagine in those days.
And if God made everything, including the leviathan, then God was more powerful than
the powerfulest thing in the world, and that's true even if leviathan wasn't.
Ditto for dragons. A man named John had a vision of the end of the world
and wrote some of it down in a letter we now call the book of Revelation.
And some of it talks about dragons but dragons are also mentioned 33 other times in the Bible.
Thing is, dragons are almost always symbols of something else.
In Revelation, God's enemy, Satan, takes the form of a gigantic red dragon
fighting against the armies of heaven but there's no contest.
The dragon gets thrown into a pit for a thousand years.
No matter how powerful evil seems in this world, God always wins.
Which brings us to the big fish who swallowed Jonah.
God sends a big fish to swallow Jonah because Jonah disobeyed God's direct orders.
God used the big fish to give people a message.
The big fish was part punishment, part second chance.
When Jonah is in the belly of the fish, Jonah repents and says he'll obey God in the future.
After three days, Jonah gets a chance to follow through on his promise.
Even Jesus saw the significant symbolism of this staggering sturgeon.
Jesus foretold his own death to his followers.
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish,
so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the Earth.
So these marvelous, mythic monsters all remind us of Jesus.
He's more powerful than anything we can imagine, and he's victorious over death and darkness.
Because even though Jesus died, he also rose from the dead three days later.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to feast on this fantastic big
fish fillet on focaccia with feta and fig fixins.
Oh no, is this the same fish from before?
It's normal to find out something you once thought or believed is different than you think.
Like when you're singing along to a song you
love and you find out the lyrics are way different from what you've been saying.
We built this city on sausage rolls.
The ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind, the ants are blowing in the wind.
You're the wobbly one, you are the wobbly one.
Or when you find out Jonah was swallowed by a big fish instead of a whale.
Right, Mae.
It can be confusing or even frustrating to learn the truth
but the important thing is to let the truth correct us.
And that's one good thing that comes from reading the Bible.
The Bible says all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching,
rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.
Which is just another way of saying God speaks to us in the Bible.
So we can learn from him and get corrected by God's true words.
That's what Jonah learned, right?
Oh, Jonah disobeyed God and God definitely got Jonah's attention.
We don't always focus on this part of Jonah's story, but Jonah spent
three days alone in the belly of that fish.
And he had a chance to think about how he had disobeyed God.
Jonah knew what God commanded, but Jonah did the opposite.
Jonah believed there was a whole group of people, the Ninevites,
who were not worthy of God's love, even though God himself said they were.
Jonah wasn't obeying God, and he also was not showing God's love to others.
Double whammy.
I wrote this in my God and me notebook.
Jonah chapter 2 was all about Jonah doing something called confessing or confession.
Jonah said aloud that what he had done was against God's will.
That's all confession really is.
We say it out loud and tell God we're sorry
to take responsibility and show we're not hiding our shame.
And because amazing things happen when we literally say the truth out loud.
1st john 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins,
God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
And Romans 10 says, "If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and
believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
That's a big deal.
If we want to be forgiven of our sins and saved,
we have to confess our sins and ask God to forgive us.
And we can trust what the Bible says, that if we ask God to forgive us, he does.
And remember, it's not because of what we do that we're forgiven.
It's because of what Jesus did for all time.
Oh, Chris, speaking of time. who do you think can hold their breath underwater for the longest time?
I bet you can.
No, I bet you can.
You can.
No, you can.
You.
Okay, let's find out.
Challenge accepted.
Are you ready?
Ready.
All right.
One, two, three.
Oh, no.
You won. You did it. Good job.