Jonah 2:9
9But I will sacrifice to You With the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay what I have vowed.
Salvation is of the Lord.” 10So the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.
How can a simple story of a man pierce hearts of men and children in cities and countries around the world. Yet, there are times as adults we have not learned our lesson. We are still hard hearted with God and we don't want to listen. Finally, Jonah learned this sentence of good theology in a strange college. He learned it in the whale's belly, at the bottom of the mountains, with the weeds wrapped about his head, when he supposed that the earth with her bars was about him for ever.
Most of the grand truths of God have to be learned by trouble; they must be burned into us with the hot iron of affliction, otherwise we shall not truly receive them. No man is competent to judge in matters of the kingdom, until first he has been tried; since there are many things to be learned in the depths which we can never know in the heights.