This recent video by Dr. Sean McDowell draws our attention to one of the most famous, and infamous, Bible stories. Could Jonah have actually been swallowed by a big fish?
Sean makes a few interesting points that make the details of the story more plausible, but in the second half of the video Sean truly gets to the heart of the matter. He points out that if God has truly done so many of the other things, that we have great evidence for, the Jonah story would be no big deal.
Many who claim to be Christians today throw away Bible stories like this one because of their miraculous nature. Whether its the healings in the New Testament, or when Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, or even the resurrection of Jesus, we are often told that it’s the “moral of the story” that is the important part, and that we don’t need to believe the events really happened.
Here we find another way in which the secular worldview is being picked up by Christians. If we understand the bigger picture of who God is and what he has proven himself capable of, these smaller stories should not cause us any intellectual discomfort over their plausibility.
Sean says:
“If God can speak the world into existence, if God can make life from non-life, if God can come down in the person of Jesus and walk on water, heal the blind, and heal lepers, then putting Jonah in a fish for three days is child’s play.”