While I had been doing my research about the subterranean chambers hinted about in Genesis 1, I came to realise that all my beliefs about what happened to Jonah those three days were wrong. I thought it a little odd that a human being stayed inside a fish’s stomach for three days and still survived to tell the tale.
In Job 26:5 we see that many of the entrances of Hell are located under the seas. Lets’ look at what Jonah says in chapter 2 verses 1-7:
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the fish’s belly. And he said:
“I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction,
And He answered me.
Out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
And You heard my voice.
For You cast me into the deep,
Into the heart of the seas,
And the floods surrounded me;
All Your billows and Your waves passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I have been cast out of Your sight;
Yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.’
The waters surrounded me, even to my soul;
The deep closed around me;
Weeds were wrapped around my head.
I went down to the moorings of the mountains;
The earth with its bars closed behind me forever;
Yet You have brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord, my God.
When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
And my prayer went up to You,
Into Your holy temple.”
First we see that Jonah drowned as he said “my soul fainted within me” referring to his soul leaving his body.
He says “You cast me into the deep” and I previously wrote about the word ‘deep’ used in Genesis and how it refers to subterranean chambers under the earth. So Jonah then must have descended into the ‘belly’ of these subterranean chambers for three days because he makes reference to being in Sheol, which is a place of departed dead. The fish in the meanwhile preserved his body. He was not spiritually in the fish’s belly because he says “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried.” The bars he refers to can also be found in Job 38:17: “Have the gates of death been revealed to you?
When Jonah prayed to the Lord, God brought Jonah’s spirit back into his body. Jesus made reference to Jonah’s three days by comparing it to His three days and nights in the heart of the earth (Matt 12:40).
The fact that Jesus uses that as an example means if Jonah did not die, then nor did Jesus, which is impossible.
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