Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai,
saying, 2. Arise, go to Nineveh, that great, city, and cry against
it; for their wickedness is come up before Me. 3. But Jonah rose
up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went
down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid
the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto
Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. 4. But the Lord sent out a
great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea,
so that the ship was like to be broken. 5. Then the mariners were
afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares
that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But
Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was
fast asleep. 6. So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him,
What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be
that God will think upon us, that we perish not. 7. And they said
every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may
know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and
the lot fell upon Jonah. 8. Then said they unto him, Tell us, we
pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us; What is thine
occupation? and whence comest thou? what is thy country? and of
what people art thou? 9. And he said unto them, I am an Hebrew; and
I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the
dry land. 10. Then were the men exceedingly afraid, and said unto
him, Why hast thou done this? For the men knew that he fled from
the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. 11. Then said
they unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea may be calm
unto us? for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous. 12. And he said
unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the
sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great
tempest is upon you. 13. Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring
it to the land; but they could not: for the sea wrought, and was
tempestuous against them. 14. Wherefore they cried unto the Lord,
and said, We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not
perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood: for
Thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased Thee. 15. So they took up
Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea; and the sea ceased from her
raging. 16. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a
sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows. 17. Now the Lord had
prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the
belly of the fish three days and three nights.'--JONAH i. 1-17.
Jonah was apparently an older contemporary of Hosea and Amos. The
Assyrian power was looming threateningly on the northern horizon, and a
flash or two had already broken from that cloud. No doubt terror had
wrought hate and intenser narrowness. To correct these by teaching, by
an instance drawn from Assyria itself, God's care for the Gentiles and
their susceptibility to His voice, was the purpose of Jonah's mission.
He is a prophet of Israel, because the lesson of his history was for
them, though his message was for Nineveh. He first taught by example the
truth which Jesus proclaimed in the synagogue of Nazareth, and Peter
learned on the housetop at Joppa, and Paul took as his guiding star. A
truth so unwelcome and remote from popular belief needed emphasis when
first proclaimed; and this singular story, as it were, underlines it for
the generation which heard it first. Its place would rather have been
among the narratives than the prophets, except for this aspect of it. So
regarded, Jonah becomes a kind of representative of Israel; and his
history sets forth large lessons as to its function among the nations,
its unwillingness to discharge it, the consequences of disobedience, and
the means of return to a better mind.
Note then, first, the Prophet's unwelcome charge. There seems no
sufficient reason for doubting the historical reality of Jonah's mission
to Nineveh; for we know that intercourse was not infrequent, and the
silence of other records is, in their fragmentary condition, nothing
wonderful. But the fact that a prophet of Israel was sent to a heathen
city, and that not to denounce destruction except as a means of winning
to repentance, declared emphatically God's care for the world, and
rebuked the exclusiveness which claimed Him for Israel alone. The same
spirit haunts the Christian Church, and we have all need to ponder the
opposite truth, till our sympathies are widened to the width of God's
universal love, and we discern that we are bound to care for all men,
since He does so.
Jonah sullenly resolved not to obey God's voice. What a glimpse into the
prophetic office that gives us! The divine Spirit could be resisted, and
the Prophet was no mere machine, but a living man who had to consent
with his devoted will to bear the burden of the Lord. One refused, and
his refusal teaches us how superb and self-sacrificing was the
faithfulness of the rest. So we have each to do in regard to God's
message intrusted to us. We must bow our wills, and sink our prejudices,
and sacrifice our tastes, and say, 'Here am I; send me.'
Jonah represents the national feelings which he shared. Why did he
refuse to go to Nineveh? Not because he was afraid of his life, or
thought the task hopeless. He refused because he feared success. God's
goodness was being stretched rather too far, if it was going to take in
Nineveh. Jonah did not want it to escape. If he had been sent to destroy
it, he would probably have gone gladly. He grudged that heathen should
share Israel's privileges, and probably thought that gain to Nineveh
would be loss to Israel. It was exactly the spirit of the prodigal's
elder brother. There was also working in him the concern for his own
reputation, which would be damaged if the threats he uttered turned out
to be thunder without lightning, by reason of the repentance of Nineveh.
Israel was set among the nations, not as a dark lantern, but as the
great lampstand in the Temple court proclaimed, to ray out light to all
the world. Jonah's mission was but a concrete instance of Israel's
charge. The nation was as reluctant to fulfil the reason of its
existence as the Prophet was. Both begrudged sharing privileges with
heathen dogs, both thought God's care wasted, and neither had such
feelings towards the rest of the world as to be willing to be messengers
of forgiveness to them. All sorts of religious exclusiveness,
contemptuous estimates of other nations, and that bastard patriotism
which would keep national blessings for our own country alone, are
condemned by this story. In it dawns the first faint light of that sun
which shone at its full when Jesus healed the Canaanite's daughter, or
when He said, 'Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.'
Note, next, the fatal consequences of refusal to obey the God-given
charge. We need not suppose that Jonah thought that he could actually
get away from God's presence. Possibly he believed in a special presence
of God in the land of Israel, or, more probably, the phrase means to
escape from service. At any rate, he determined to do his flight
thoroughly. Tarshish was, to a Hebrew, at the other end of the world
from Nineveh. The Jews were no sailors, and the choice of the sea as
means of escape indicates the obstinacy of determination in Jonah.
The storm is described with a profusion of unusual words, all apparently
technical terms, picked up on board, just as Luke, in the only other
account of a storm in Scripture, has done. What a difference between the
two voyages! In the one, the unfaithful prophet is the cause of
disaster, and the only sluggard in the ship. In the other, the Apostle,
who has hazarded his life to proclaim his Lord, is the source of hope,
courage, vigour, and safety. Such are the consequences of silence and of
brave speech for God. No wonder that the fugitive Prophet slunk down
into some dark corner, and sat bitterly brooding there, self-accused
and condemned, till weariness and the relief of the tension of his
journey lulled him to sleep. It was a stupid and heavy sleep. Alas for
those whose only refuge from conscience is oblivion!
Over against this picture of the insensible Prophet, all unaware of the
storm (which may suggest the parallel insensibility of Israel to the
impending divine judgments), is set the behaviour of the heathen
sailors, or 'salts,' as the story calls them. Their conduct is part of
the lesson of the book; for, heathen as they are, they have yet a sense
of dependence, and they pray; they are full of courage, battling with
the storm, jettisoning the cargo, and doing everything possible to save
the ship. Their treatment of Jonah is generous and chivalrous. Even when
they hear his crime, and know that the storm is howling like a wild
beast for him, they are unwilling to throw him overboard without one
more effort; and when at last they do it, their prayer is for
forgiveness, inasmuch as they are but carrying out the will of Jehovah.
They are so much touched by the whole incident that they offer
sacrifices to the God of the Hebrews, and are, in some sense, and
possibly but for a time, worshippers of Him.
All this holds the mirror up to Israel, by showing how much of human
kindness and generosity, and how much of susceptibility for the truth
which Israel had to declare, lay in rude hearts beyond its pale. This
crew of heathen of various nationalities and religions were yet men who
could be kind to a renegade Prophet, peril their lives to save his, and
worship Jehovah. 'I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel,'
is the same lesson in another form. We may find abundant opportunities
for learning it; for the characters of godless men, and of some among
the heathen, may well shame many a Christian.
Jonah's conduct in the storm is no less noble than his former conduct
had been base. The burst of the tempest blew away all the fog from his
mind, and he saw the stars again. His confession of faith; his calm
conviction that he was the cause of the storm; his quiet, unhesitating
command to throw him into the wild chaos foaming about the ship; his
willing acceptance of death as the wages of his sin, all tell how true a
saint he was in the depth of his soul. Sorrow and chastisement turn up
the subsoil. If a man has any good in him, it generally comes to the top
when he is afflicted and looks death in the face. If there is nothing
but gravel beneath, it too will be brought up by the plough. There may
be much selfish unfaithfulness overlying a real devoted heart.
Jonah represented Israel here too, both in that the consequence of the
national unfaithfulness and greedy, exclusive grasp of their privileges
would lead to their being cast into the roaring waves of the sea of
nations, amid the tumult of the peoples, and in that, for them as for
him, the calamity would bring about a better mind, the confession of
their faith, and acknowledgment of their sin. The history of Israel was
typified in this history, and the lessons it teaches are lessons for all
churches, and for all God's children for all time. If we shirk our duty
of witnessing for Him, or any other of His plain commands,
unfaithfulness will be our ruin. The storm is sure to break where His
Jonahs try to hide, and their only hope lies in bowing to the
chastisement and consenting to be punished, and avowing whose they are
and whom they serve. If we own Him while the storm whistles round us,
the worst of it is past, and though we have to struggle amid its waves,
He will take care of us, and anything is possible rather than that we
should be lost in them.
The miracle of rescue is the last point. Jonah's repentance saved his
life. Tossed overboard impenitent he would have been drowned. So Israel
was taught that the break-up of their national life would not be their
destruction if they turned to the Lord in their calamity. The wider
lesson of the means of making chastisement into blessing, and securing a
way of escape--namely, by owning the justice of the stroke, and
returning to duty--is meant for us all. He who sends the storm watches
its effect on us, and will not let His repentant servants be utterly
overwhelmed. That is a better use to make of the story than to discuss
whether any kind of known Mediterranean fish could swallow a man. If we
believe in miracles, the question need not trouble us. And miracle there
must be, not only in the coincidence of the fish and the Prophet being
in the same bit of sea at the same moment, but in his living for so long
in his strange 'ark of safety.'
The ever-present providence of God, the possible safety of the nation,
even when in captivity, the preservation of every servant of God who
turns to the Lord in his chastisement, the exhibition of penitence as
the way of deliverance, are the purposes for which the miracle was
wrought and told. Flippant sarcasms are cheap. A devout insight yields a
worthy meaning. Jesus Christ employed this incident as a symbol of His
Death and Resurrection. That use of it seems hard to reconcile with any
view but that the story is true. But it does not seem necessary to
suppose that our Lord regarded it as an intended type, or to seek to
find in Jonah's history further typical prophecy of Him. The salient
point of comparison is simply the three days' entombment; and it is
rather an illustrative analogy than an intentional prophecy. The
subsequent action of the Prophet in Nineveh, and the effect of it, were
true types of the preaching of the Gospel by the risen Lord, through His
servants, to the Gentiles, and of their hearing the Word. But it
requires considerable violence in manipulation to force the bestowing
of Jonah, for safety and escape from death, in the fish's maw, into a
proper prophecy of the transcendent fact of the Resurrection.
'LYING VANITIES'
'They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.'--JONAH
11. 8.
Jonah's refusal to obey the divine command to go to Nineveh and cry
against it is best taken, not as prosaic history, but as a poetical
representation of Israel's failure to obey the divine call of witnessing
for God. In like manner, his being cast into the sea and swallowed by
the great fish, is a poetic reproduction, for homiletical purposes, of
Israel's sufferings at the hands of the heathen whom it had failed to
warn. The song which is put into Jonah's mouth when in the fish's belly,
of which our text is a fragment, represents the result on the part of
the nation of these hard experiences. 'Lying vanities' mean idols, and
'their own mercy' means God. The text is a brief, pregnant utterance of
the great truth which had been forced home to Israel by sufferings and
exile, that to turn from Jehovah to false gods was to turn from the sure
source of tender care to lies and emptiness. That is but one case of the
wider truth that an ungodly life is the acme of stupidity, a tragic
mistake, as well as a great sin.