The Bible as Science: A Modern Jonah

A whale, a missing sailor, and a ship’s doctor who signs the record. If you’ve ever heard someone scoff that Jonah and the great fish is “obviously unscientific,” we put that claim under a bright light and ask a better question: are we dealing with facts, or with assumptions dressed up as certainty?

We start with a quick look at how far the preaching of God’s Word is traveling through this radio ministry, then we return to our series, The Bible as Science. Pastor James W. Knox argues that Scripture doesn’t wobble with the trends of the moment, while scientific “truths” often get revised, replaced, or forgotten. That sets the stage for the Jonah objection and a practical, nuts-and-bolts conversation about marine life, whale size, and what these creatures can actually do.

From there we walk through one of the most vivid modern parallels ever told: the James Bartley account, sometimes called a “modern Jonah.” You’ll hear the details of the whaling accident, the missing man, the startling discovery during processing, and the reported aftereffects that fueled debate. Along the way, we tackle the deeper issue behind the argument: why some people refuse the Bible before they ever read it fairly, and what it means to trust Jesus Christ when He affirms the Jonah story.

If you care about Bible and science, Christian apologetics, and the reliability of Scripture, this message will challenge you to think clearly and honestly. Subscribe for daily teaching, share this with a friend who wrestles with Jonah, and leave a review with your biggest Bible question.

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Transcript

Welcome And Ministry Mission

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Welcome to the Preaching the Cross Radio Podcast, featuring the radio ministry of Pastor James W. Knox of the Bible Baptist Church of Duana, Florida. Our prayer is that these half-hour Bible study programs bring the lost to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and enable the saved to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Savior. Now here's your host, Pastor James W. Knox. All right, good day to each and every one of you. I'm Brother James. I greet you once again in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. And I welcome you to the preaching of the Cross Radio Broadcast, Ministry of the Bible Baptist Church of the Land of Florida. You know, we tell you sometimes, you you hear us say, uh heard on this station and around the world by the grace of God, and that's not just some um exaggeration. That's not just some uh preacher statement that we try and uh make to puff ourselves up. The truth of the matter is, uh, God's been mighty good to us. Just just this past week, just this past week, we have had letters come in the mail requesting uh cassette recorded materials of uh what we preach at our local church and what we broadcast on this radio station from India, Iran, incredible as it may seem, we actually have materials uh going into Iran. Missionaries can't go there, but we can send our cassette materials in there. India, Iran, Scotland, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Canada, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Benin, Ivory Coast, Togo, Nigeria, Ghana, and two or three others I can't even call to mind right now. Now you know something, folks, that's remarkable. It's incredible to think Russia, I didn't mention Russia, had a letter came from Odessa in Russia, had a letter came from the Ukraine. What a marvelous thing it is. To see God's word go forth. Uh a little group of people who pray and ask God to provide the funds and the financing. We begin to broadcast, we begin to proclaim the truth of God's word, and we we don't solicit funds, we don't play music, we don't try and entertain you, we just simply preach the word of God and ask God to bless his word as it goes forth, and he does so. And it's wonderful, it's it's a marvelous thing, it's a joy to our hearts to see how God's word is not bound and how it reaches all those men and women around this world that want to hear it. If you've got a desire to know God, if you've got a hunger to know the truth, have no fear, God will get the truth to you. And it's just a joy for us. It's a joy for those of us at our little church, it's a joy, should be a joy. I hope it's a joy to those of you who pray for us and pray with us to know that God is using uh this little uh ministry, God is using this one little preacher to get his word out all around the world, and we certainly rejoice in that. We are in the middle of a series of uh studies entitled The Bible as Science, and we are showing to you, we are proving conclusively that the Word of God is true, and that we don't have to apologize to science, falsely so-called, for our faith and our belief in the Word of God. We have shown over and over and over again that the Bible is more scientific than

The Bible As Science Claim

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science. When the Bible speaks about scientific matters, it does so with a greater accuracy than modern science, because modern science of today differs from the modern science of a hundred years ago, which differs from the modern science of a hundred years before that. In other words, the outstanding great wonderful truths proclaimed by science today, many of them will be forgotten tomorrow. They will sweep them under the rug, they will hide the books in the back of the library because it will be proven they were absolutely wrong. There are six miles of shelf space given to scientific books in the Louvre, the National Library in France, containing books of science which have no validity whatsoever today, except for Christians to go and laugh at, because all the material in them has been proven false. That has never happened one time, one place, with one verse of Scripture in the Word of God. Science may laugh at a statement in the Bible today, and then 50 years later they will come to find out the real truth, and it will match the Bible every time. We've showed you that over and over again in this series of studies. Now, we've been talking about one of the greatest arguments raised by scientists, raised by infidels against the Word of God, and that is the story of Jonah being swallowed by the great fish, Jonah, Jonah being swallowed by the whale, Jesus Christ in Matthew. And we have given you on the last broadcast, we gave you three or four examples of men six feet tall being swallowed whole by great fish and great monsters of the deep. One man we read to you about on the last broadcast from a newspaper account in England was swallowed alive in the English Channel. The creature that swallowed him was then captured, cut open, and the man was found to be alive, in shock, but suffering no other detrimental effects from his strange journey. Now I want to give you some more of these.

Jonah And The Great Fish

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Now, some baleen whales, and if you recall from our last study, those are the kind that don't have teeth, but they have rather a bony structure in the back of the throat that forms a type of a sieve, and they rush through the water with their mouth open, taking everything they possibly can, then force the water out, and swallow down whatever remains. Some baleen whales are up to 100 feet long, forty feet around, and weigh up to 300,000 pounds. Up to 300,000 pounds. A Mediterranean fish, caught and exhibited in Beirut, had a head that weighed six tons. Just the head weighed six tons. A man standing on the lower jaw could not reach the upper jaw. I'm not talking about standing there, I'm talking about standing there with his arms outstretched. He couldn't reach from lower jaw to upper jaw. The April 4, 1896 Literary Digest gave a story of a Mediterranean whale that demolished a harpoon boat. Two men were lost. One, James Bartley, was found alive in the whale's belly a day and one half after

Whale Facts And Modern Examples

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it was killed. I don't mean a day and a half after he was swallowed. I mean a day and a half after the whale was killed. They were working on the thing, cutting it up and, you know, making use of the parts of the byproducts and so forth, and found this guy in there a day and a half later and he was still alive. He lived with no after effects, save that his skin was tanned by the gastric juices. Then there was a pure fish caught off the Florida coast. It weighed 30,000 pounds, it was 45 feet long, it was eight feet thick, and in its belly was a large octopus and a fifteen hundred pound fish. Now let me tell you something, folks. If a great fish off Florida could swallow another fish that weighed 1,500 pounds, it wouldn't have much trouble with a 180-pound man. You can rest assured of that. Now probably the most extensive and the most detailed record of these kinds that we have available to us is the record of a man that can truly be called a modern Jonah. Is it possible for a man to be swallowed by a whale and live to tell the story? The scientific answer is no. But the correct answer is yes. The official records of the British Admiralty provide documentary evidence for the astounding account of James Bartley that we've mentioned, a British seaman who was swallowed by a whale and lived to tell about it. James was making his first and only trip as a sailor aboard the whaling ship Star of the East. In February of eighteen ninety one, she was pounding along before a fair wind a few hundred miles east of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Suddenly the lookout gave his electrifying cry of there she blows, for he had sighted a huge sperm whale half a mile off the port bow. The Star of the East slackened her sails, and the whaling crews scrambled into their three small boats off to harpoon the mighty mammal if possible. I don't know about you, but I have considered all kinds of occupations. I have considered all types of jobs in my life and thought about them. I suppose probably the worst job that I've ever seen, the worst job that I can imagine, is the poor man on the highway crew in Florida in the summer, with a shovel in his hand, following that machine that lays out the hot asphalt, and scraping up any that may

James Bartley A Modern Jonah

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go over the designated line. You ever watch that man? Have you ever thought about that? Smelling that stuff all day, the heat rising up off the highway, the heat beating down from the sun, and just having to stand there on your feet with a shovel following that machine all day long, that's gotta be a terrible job. That's got to be the worst job I can imagine. There are all kinds of difficult jobs. There are all kinds of jobs that are very demanding, both both intellectually and physically. But for the life of me, I cannot understand what type of man it takes. I cannot understand either the courage or the absence of understanding. I can't understand what kind of man would get into a little wooden rowboat and go out in the middle of the ocean with a rope and a harpoon and try and capture the mightiest creature that God has placed on planet Earth, these great whales. I just I marvel, it's incredible to me. I remember as a boy seeing pictures of men in one of these little boats and and having the tail of one of these great uh fish to smash that boat and knock it up into the air and see the men flying out of the craft, and and uh I just I couldn't believe it that that men would actually do that. Now I think it's got to be awfully difficult to be involved in any type of fishing work. We used to have a man in the church who was a commercial fisherman. He talked about how long and how hard and how difficult the job was, and I believe him. I believe him. I think it would be even worse up in the in the North Sea, where you're not only uh doing this terribly difficult work, but doing so in such incredibly difficult conditions because of the cold and the uh that's added to the water and to the wind that's blowing you. You just I don't see how those men don't freeze to death. But still, I'd rather do that than get in a little rowboat and plunge a harpoon into a whale and then hang on for dear life. I can't imagine the type of of man, I can't imagine the type of mentality or the type of courage that this must require. I I'm dead set against drinking. I'm dead set against one drop of liquor ever being produced and made. I'm dead set against one ounce, one drop, one thimble full of alcohol ever passing in a man's lips. But I can understand, I can understand why a fella going out in a little rowboat in the middle of the ocean to take on a whale might want to down a little something to kind of numb his senses a bit, if you know what I mean. I didn't say it was right, I can understand it. Anyway, young James Bartley was in the first longboat to reach the side of the whale. Pulling slowly on their oars, the sailors drove their frail cockle shell behind the unsuspecting creature, so near that the harpooner could lean over and drive his huge spear deep into the whale's vitals. Bartley and his fellow seamen backed frantically to get out of the reach of those massive tail flukes which threshed the water to foam as the stricken beast fought to free itself of the barbed harpoon. For a moment, all seemed to be well with the sailors. The whale plunged deep into the ocean, and eight hundred feet of heavy line streaked out of the tub before the creature ceased to dive. Then there was an ominous slackening of the line. The great brute was coming up, but where? In such cases this was a matter of life and death, and the sailors did not have long to wait for the answer. They hunched over their oars, ready to pull for their lives once they knew which way to pull. Without warning, the sea boiled up around them. There was a splintering crash as their frail boat spun into the air. The mortally wounded whale threshed about madly in his agony, beating the water to a bloody froth before he sounded into the depths again. He had come up directly under the boat. He had smashed it to bits, he had thrown the planks in the wood and the oars scattered it about. The men were tossed into the air, came crashing down into the sea. A nearby longboat picked up the survivors, but two men were missing. One of them, the apprentice sailor, James Bartley. The wind which had borne the star of the East to the scene of this tragedy, now deserted her, and she wallowed in the long swells, her sails flapping. Shortly before sunset on that same fateful day, the dying whale floated to the surface about four hundred yards from the vessel. The crew hastily fastened a line to the whale, and the winch brought it slowly to the ship. Hot weather made it imperative that it be cut up at once. The meat would spoil, the whale uh would go to the bat rather rapidly, and so they set right to work upon it. Since they had no means of raising the hundred ton mammal to the deck, the men took flencing spades and peeled off the thick blubber as they slipped and slid along the creature's back. Dirty work and dangerous. You see, the the blood that was pouring from this whale and had been since it was first harpooned, had of course attracted a great host and great company of sharks. Again, I say not the best of jobs. The water was full of sharks, maddened by the taste of the blood. Shortly before eleven that night, working by lantern light, the tired crewman removed the stomach and the huge liver and hoisted them aboard ship for processing. There on deck they were startled to notice movement inside the giant paunch, a slow, rhythmic movement that looked like something breathing. The captain hurriedly called the ship's doctor, and a great incision was made in the tough flesh of the whale's belly. A human foot became visible, shoe and all. A moment later they had pulled out one of the missing sailors. It was James Bartley, doubled up, unconscious, but alive. Perhaps for want of anything better, the excited doctor ordered Bartley drenched with buckets of seawater. This treatment soon restored consciousness, but not reason. Bartley was babbling incoherently as he threshed about in his delirium. Someone on the deck shouted he's got the gift of tongues, but others knew that he was just in a state of madness because of his extreme condition. For almost two weeks he lingered between I just threw that in extra, nobody on the deck was foolish enough to say that. Bartley was for two weeks, lingering between life and death, strapped to the bunk in the captain's cabin. Gradually, so the ship's doctor wrote in the record, which was signed by all on board gradually, Bartley recovered his senses. But it was a month before he was able to tell what had happened. Now, folks, this isn't listen, this is not some fairy tale story a preacher made up to try and prove his point. This is a signed, documented record by a medical doctor as sea captain, and the entire crew of that whaling vessel, save the one man who was never found. When Bartley, nearly a month later, was finally able to regain his senses and to discuss what happened to him. He said he remembered being flung into the air when the whale crushed their longboat. And as he fell back into the sea, he saw the tremendous mouth open over him. Could not Jonah tell the same tale? Could not Jonah make the same statement? He screamed as he was engulfed. There were sharp, stabbing pains as he swept across the rows of tiny sharp teeth. Then he found himself sliding down a slimy tube. He could recall fighting for his breath, kicking about in panic and terror, and then blissful oblivion. And he could remember nothing until he regained consciousness a month later in the captain's cabin. He had been inside the whale's stomach for fifteen hours, and as a result he lost all the hair on his body. His skin was bleached to an unnatural whiteness, and as he was almost blind for the rest of his life, he spent his days, his remaining days, as a shoe cobbler in his native Gloucester. Numerous medical men from many lands came to examine him and to discuss his incredible experience. He lived for eighteen years after his adventure, and on his tombstone is a brief account of his experience. The footnote which says James Bartley, 1870 to 1909, a modern Jonah. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no question the Bible is true and accurate as it is written. If science wishes to call it into question, science and scientists

What It Means For Faith

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and those who trust science must beware that historical fact, present-day fact, and future fact will disprove everyone and everything that sets himself, herself, or itself against the truth of the Word of God. Now my friends, you need to understand those that criticize the Bible and say it's not scientific, number one, have not read it. Number two, if they have read it, they have read it selectively and judged it in light of their preconceived ideas and prejudices. Or number three, they are deliberately lying to you because they do not want you to read and study the Bible for yourself. I mentioned to you on the last broadcast a man who was found unconscious but alive, and exhibited at the London Museum, called the Joan of the Twentieth Century, a man that was swallowed in the English Channel. Shortly after this, the man was interviewed by a scientist who was a Christian. He said, and this is very similar to what was said about Bartley, he said that the man had an odd physical appearance. His entire body was devoid of hair. Odd patches of a yellowish-brown color covered his entire skin. Now, many have reasoned from these testimonies that one of the reasons why the people repented when Jonah came to Nineveh was his odd, his unusual appearance, his strange and remarkable look that he had about him. This is possible. But it's also possible that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, and this matching Jesus Christ three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, and as Jonah came forth alive afterward, and so did the Lord Jesus Christ, it's quite possible that Jonah came out looking every bit as good or better as he did when he went in, scarred perhaps, as Jesus was, in his hands and feet, and yet not disfigured horribly and dreadfully by his experience, because neither was the Lord Jesus Christ. Anyway, for two days and two nights this man in England had lived in a monster of the deep, and this without any special providential care expressly stated or even implied. Does it seem reasonable to concede that if a man in the ordinary course of nature can exist for two days and nights inside a marine monster, that a prophet of God under God's direct care and protection could stand the experience a day and a night longer? Certainly does. So what's the summary? There are creatures which swim in the seas today, which could, in the very course of their nature, be hosts to a man like Jonah. The heart of the matter, however, is this statement from the book that God had prepared a great fish. Now it's impossible to state whether God prepared this fish in the natural order of generation and birth, or whether this was a special creature. But the purpose of our demonstration is to show the account in the Bible is reasonable. It could have happened, as the intelligent thinker suggested, if it could have happened, and the scripture says it did happen upon the authority of Jesus Christ and the weight of attested reason. Let us acknowledge the truth of this account. It did happen. It did happen. And so once again, science, true science, which studies, examines, compiles, and evaluates the facts, once again, true science proves the Bible to be just what it claims to be: the truth. And

Closing And Where To Listen

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thereby the Word of God. Thanks for tuning in today. Join us every weekday for another episode of the Preaching of the Cross Radio Podcast. For hundreds of hours of in-depth expository Bible teaching, please visit our YouTube channel, James W. Knox Sermons, our sermon audio page, Bible Baptist Land, or our website, Bible BaptistLand.com. Until next time and throughout eternity, may Jesus Christ be praised.