Tertullian

In trying to run away from the Lord, you show up the fickleness of all who plan flight. A certain headstrong prophet also had run away from the Lord, crossing the sea from Joppa to Tarsus, as if he could escape from God. But God found him not on land or on sea but in the belly of a beast, where for three days he could not die or even in that way escape from the eyes of God. Is that man not better off who, though he fears the enemy of God, does not flee from but despises him? Who trusts in the protection of God or, if you will, has an even greater fear of God, having stood the longer in his eyes? He says, “He is the Lord, he is mighty, all things are his, and wherever I shall be I am in his hands. Let him do what he will, I shall not run away. If he wishes me to die, let him destroy me, as long as I faithfully serve him. Much would I rather bring odium on him, by dying according to his will, than to live by my own cowardice.”

Did Jonah, then, on this account, think that repentance was unnecessary for the pagan Ninevites, when he tried to avoid his duty of preaching? Or was it not, rather, that he foresaw that the mercy of God would be poured out on the heathen also, and so feared it would prove him a false prophet? Actually it was because of a pagan city, which did not yet know God and which sinned in ignorance, that the prophet was almost lost. And he would have been lost, were it not for the fact that what he endured was a type of the Lord’s suffering, by which pagan penitents also would be redeemed.

God is not one who heeds the voice; rather, it is the heart which He hears and beholds. Even the speechless He hears, and the silent petition He will answer. Do the ears of God await a sound? If they did, how could Jonah’s prayer from the depths of the whale’s belly have made its way to Heaven, up through the organs of such a great beast from the very bottom of the sea, up through such a vast amount of water? As for those who pray in such a loud voice, what else will they attain but the annoyance of their neighbors? (Prayer Chapter 17)

Jonah was swallowed by the monster of the deep, in whose belly whole ships were devoured, and after three days he was vomited out again safe and sound. Enoch and Elijah, who even now, without experiencing a resurrection (because they have not even encountered death), are learning to the full what it is for the flesh to be exempted from all humiliation, and all loss, and all injury and all disgrace. They have been translated from this world and from this very cause are already candidates for everlasting life. To what faith do these notable events bear witness, if not to that which ought to inspire in us the belief that they are proofs and documents of our own future and our completed resurrection? To borrow the apostle’s phrase, these were “figures of ourselves.” They are written that we may believe that the Lord is more powerful than all natural laws about the body.

Divine repentance takes in all cases a different form from that of man, in that it is never regarded as the result of improvidence or of fickleness, or of any condemnation of a good or an evil work. For it will have no other meaning than a simple change of a prior purpose; and this is admissible without any blame even in a man, much more in God, whose every purpose is faultless. Now in Greek the word for repentance (METANOIA) is formed, not from the confession of sin, but from a change of mind, which in God we have shown to be regulated by the occurrence of varying circumstances.

Now, if [forgiveness of sin had not] been predicted of Christ, I should find in the Creator examples of such benignity as would hold out to me the promise of similar affections also in the Son of whom he is the Father. I see how the Ninevites obtained forgiveness of their sins from the Creator—not to say from Christ [by way of anticipation], even then, because from the beginning he was acting in the Father’s name.