05.4. JONAH’S GOSPEL
JONAH’S GOSPEL Jonah 2:10, John 3:1-10.
PERMIT me a word of regret that the sickness to which I have been subjected interfered with our studies of the book of Jonah; and a word of gratitude that, under the blessing of God, I am able this evening to resume the same. The last we heard of Jonah was voiced in his wonderful speech made in the belly of the fish while in the bowels of the deep, “Salvation is of the Lord.” Whether Jonah anticipated that God was so soon to save him out of his perils we may not affirm, but the fact remains that the very next reading is, “And the Lord spake unto the fish and he vomited Jonah out on the dry land.” And I believe what is written. No matter how much of quibble a man might make concerning the unlikelihood of such a thing, I affirm my faith in the historicity of this text, “And the Lord spake unto the fish and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.” To be sure if a man is bent on criticism he could raise a number of question here. He could ask why a “great fish” came so near to the shore, since that is not the habit of these monsters; and he could ask how it happened that the fish there threw Jonah out on the dry land instead of in water over his head. But the sufficient answer is, “The Lord who prepared the fish to swallow up Jonah” was still in control of the monster when he “threw him up.” As one listens to the criticisms of this and other books of the Bible it gives occasion at least to think upon an illustration employed a while ago by Russell Conwell.
He told the story of a man in Kentucky who lived in the region of the Mammoth Cave. Across the fields of this prosperous farmer there ran a beautiful stream. It quenched his thirst, irrigated his farm and turned his mill, but he was ill-content and decided to have a well dug hard by his door; and at once he was blasting, blasting, blasting, down, down, down and deeper still. At last he put in an overcharge of dynamite which blew the bottom out of the well, for it was a cavernous region, and all the water ran now into the depths below. In a little while the brook began to dry up, and it was found that it seiped through crevices in the rocks into this same bottomless well, and lo, the farm was ruined, its land parched, its mill was motionless, and its owner without water to slake his thirst. And Conwell saw in this a picture of those students of the Bible who, instead of drinking therefrom, having their lives irrigated thereby, and all the wheels of human energy turning under the power of the same, go at the Word with pick and dynamite, and dig after Hebrew and Greek roots, and blast in the hope of uncovering its origin, until they have lost the very blessing they once enjoyed. For my own part I am content with the stream of life I find flowing through this Word, and I want to show you that if you stop beside it, even in the book of Jonah, it prove the same life-giving fountain, rising from beneath the everlasting throne.
Four truths in this third chapter are worthy of attention:
I. Jonah is reappointed.
“And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time.”
There is such a thing as a divine appointment to preach. In the Old Testament every prophet claimed that appointment. In the New Testament every preacher had his commission from Christ. Even the apostle Paul, entering into the ministry after Christ’s ascension, stoutly affirmed that he had seen the risen Christ and received from Him his commission to preach. This record of the Acts, he reaffirmed in his epistles to the churches, saying to the Romans, “I am Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the Gospel of God;” to the Corinthians, I am “Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God;” to the Galatians, “Paul an apostle not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father,” and so on!
Men who are to preach the Gospel today can only hope for success in the same by being sure that the Word of the Lord has come to them in a call to preach. And I believe with Pastor Stalker that “the soul-winner must be conscious that he is doing God’s work and that it is God’s message that he bears to men.” Unless a man has that conviction there will come to him trials that will take away his foundations; there will come to him such evidences of non-appreciation and ingratitude, and even malignant opposition as will raise in his mind the question, “Are men worth one’s devotion?” And unless he can fall back upon the plain command of God, unless he can find in his own heart an abiding conviction that he must do what he is doing, and say what he is saying, and that God can no more leave his labors unblessed than God Himself can lie, he is unfitted to preach. I have had people ask me why I entered the ministry, and my answer has been, “The Word of the Lord came unto me saying, Go and preach the preaching that I bid thee;” and in the midst of every temptation, and in the experience of every trial known these eighteen years past, the plain consciousness of a call from God has been to me at once foundation and inspiration—standing ground and secret of satisfaction. Our chapter also suggests that man’s indisposition to preach does not rid him of obligation. “And the Word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time.”
God had called Jonah before he ever shipped to Tarshish, but Jonah was unwilling and thought to make an end of the divine command by refusing obedience to the same! and Jonah is not alone in this. There are many men in the ministry who ought to be pleading law, practicing medicine, running a grocery, shaving the faces of their fellows, or plowing corn. They have put themselves in their places, or been put there by over-pious parents. It is quite impossible for one to believe that God has picked out all the preachers who are now filling pulpits. The old farmer had the right of it, whose ambitious boy reported to him that he was going to preach, and when the father asked why he thought he was called to preach, the young man pointed to Mark 16:15, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” To which John Ploughman replied, “Oh, yes my boy, the Scripture do say, Preach the Gospel to every crittur; but they don’t say Every crittur shall preach the Gospel.” But while there are men in the ministry who ought to be in other professions, there are men out of the ministry, and I am persuaded not a few of them, who perfectly well know that God has called them to preach. But, like Jonah, they did not want to do it. They were ambitious for a higher station than the ministry might bring them, for more money than is promised in a ministerial salary, or for more worldly living than is consonant with one who is under command from the Lord.
Twenty years ago, I sat on the porch of a country home and talked with a young man, who was on his vacation from college, about this call to the ministry. After we had retired he communicated to me his own conviction of a call to preach and his deliberate purpose not to do it. As I tried to show him the folly of fighting against God, he desperately replied, “God gives me no peace about this thing and sometimes I think if I don’t preach He will never permit me to enter heaven. But I am determined to practice law even though it results in sending my soul to perdition.” He has gone on in the practice of law. The last I heard of him he had lost his faith, drank, gambled, and in his dealing with men was generally regarded a rascal. And yet, I have an idea that if you could break through the walls of outer conduct, and sound the recesses of his heart, you would find that even now he is conscious of God’s command for him, and knows that he had never discharged the obligation. Oh, what folly when men so fight against God!
Mr. Moody said, “If God should offer me whatever I willed, it would not take me a minute to say, ‘Lord, I don’t will any thing; but Thy will be done, for I know Thy will for me is best .’ ” Do you know that, my brother? Do you, my sister? Are you ready, tonight, to say, Oh, God, show me the way of life that I may walk in it? It is written to the eternal credit of Jonah, “So Jonah arose, and went into Nineveh according to the word of the Lord.” A second truth, Jonah preached II. Impending Judgment.
“Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey, and Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey; and he cried and said, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” His message was not man-made. “He cried and said, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” That was exactly what God had commissioned him to say. The only ministry that is true, is that of the preacher who is preaching according to the Word of the Lord; who is preaching the preaching that God has bidden him preach. A minister is a messenger. “As it is written in the prophets, ‘Behold, I will send My messenger before thy face.’ ” What is the business of a messenger? One came to my house the other night and brought a message. It was a sad message. It was a message that I would much have preferred not to hear. It contained the announcement of the death of one of my dearest friends, of one of the Lord’s most efficient servants. But I knew the messenger-boy was not responsible for the message. He had merely performed his part of medium in bringing it to me. He had changed it in nowise, but delivered it just as he received it; and that is the business of every minister. It is ours to carry to men what God has said.
There are two ways of receiving this message, the one is to hold the messenger responsible for it, and if it does not suit you, behead him. That is the way Herodias did with John the Baptist, God’s messenger, who brought to her God’s Word regarding chastity. The other way to receive it is illustrated in the life of the old prophet Eli, who, you remember, called young Samuel into his presence and said, “Samuel, my son, what is the thing that the Lord hath said unto thee? I pray thee hide it not from me.” And when Samuel told him all that God had said regarding him, how he was going to come against the prophet in judgment, to perform against Eli all the things which had been spoken concerning his house, how God declared that when He began a judgment He would make an end, Eli answered, “It is the Lord.” That is the better way to treat God’s messenger. That is the better way to receive God’s message. The most unwelcome message may be the most needful one; and, if it comes from God, it is the most needful one.
You have a right to quarrel with a minister who brings you a man-made Gospel, but you have no right to object to his message, however unwelcome it may be; however deeply it may wound your pride; however clearly it may uncover your evil purposes; however severely it may condemn your evil practices, if it is according to “the Word of the Lord.” In one of my former pastorates there was an exceptionally sweet woman whose husband owned and operated a saloon. Many a time she sat through an arraignment of the bad business, and the preacher sympathised with her unfortunate station, and sorrowed to speak the words that he knew must wound. But one day she gave indisputable proof of her Christianity. At the close of a sermon in which God’s woe to the man who put the bottle to his neighbor’s lips had been urged, she sought me out and said, “Pastor, you can hardly understand the shame I feel whenever this subject of the saloon is mentioned, but I want you to know that however much I may suffer, I would not have you change or curtail what God has said.”
Jonah’s message gave no promise of mercy. “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” There are those to whom a preacher has no right to present mercy. They are subjects for justice. They have so long rejected God; they have gone so deeply into iniquity that justice is the very Gospel to be preached to them. I have met men, ere now, who had been Gospel-hardened by hearing of God’s love and God’s grace. Universalism is the natural outcome of such one-sided preaching, and even the vilest sinner comes to feel that his conduct is no occasion of fear. The longer I live the more I am impressed with the necessity of presenting judgment. Since I came to this pulpit there have been two or three tragic instances of men listening to the Gospel of mercy in this very room, and going out feeling God is good and He will forbear yet a little, and, ere they dreamed it, death was doing its work and they were being dragged by his merciless hand before the Judge of all the earth; and as I have thought upon their going, unprepared, as some of them have been, I have felt that it was my business to preach judgment as well as mercy. I think there are some men who must come to Sinai and hear the thunderings and threatenings thereof before they will ever see the necessity of Calvary. At one time when Mr. Moody was holding a meeting in New York he found in the inquiry room a personal worker pleading with a sceptic, and as Mr. Moody stopped and listened to the proud defiance of this man, and read in his face the evident pleasure he was getting from the argument, Moody said to the worker, “If that is the way he feels, don’t waste your time on him. There is no hope for him.” Instantly the sceptic was alarmed and said, “Do you really think there is no hope for me?” “None whatever,” said Moody, “while you feel that way.” The man went to his room, fell down upon his knees and began to plead with God, and ere morning dawned the light of an everlasting day had broken in upon his darkened heart.
III. Nineveh Repents in Sackcloth.
“So the people of Nineveh believed God and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.” The whole city was convicted of sin. We have long talked of pentecost, and supposed it to have occurred at Jerusalem ten days after our Lord’s ascension; and we have long held up Peter as the peerless evangelist. But the pentecost of Acts the second chapter fades to insignificance before the pentecost of Jonah third chapter, and the result of Peter’s preaching that day small indeed when compared with the consequences of this day’s work on the part of this so-called minor prophet. 3,000 men convicted of sin, asking, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” is a sight to astonish mortals, but 600,000 brought to sackcloth and ashes in a single day in consequence of the preaching of one man is a sight to astonish angels; and yet that is the record. “All Nineveh, from the least to the greatest.” It was a walled city sixty miles in circumference. Jonah could just about walk across it in a single day. One hundred and fifty stadia, or nineteen miles, was a day’s journey. One cannot read the words of Jonah in the original, “Od arbaim yom venineveh nehpacheth,” without being reminded of Daniel’s words, “Mene mene tekel upharsin.” And while Daniel’s words struck terror to the heart of the king this single sentence from Jonah alarmed the Ninevites from the greatest of them even unto the least of them.
Repentance reached even to the throne. “For word came unto the king of Nineveh and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes; and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the degree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock taste anything, let them not feed nor drink waters, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto God.” It is a great revival when it reaches even to the throne. There are a great many people in this country discussing the question, “How to reach the common people, how to reach the laboring men, how to reach the working girls.” That is not the difficult question. It is comparatively easy to reach these. A free church, a cordial reception, and a plain, pungent Gospel will answer that question for these classes. The hard question is, How to reach the self-constituted upper ten. When Mr. Moody began his work in this country the common people heard him gladly. It took twenty years, however, for him to get any hearing from the educated and wealthy. It was only after he became world-famed that they were interested in him, all of which makes one afraid that the interest was not spiritual but secular instead; the interest of standing alongside of and being associated with a man of a great name. If there is any one thing we need to pray for in this country it is a revival that shall reach up and bring to humility and repentance the proud, and the scholarly, and the kings of finance. And we ought to pray for such a revival for the souls of these are precious in the sight of our God, and their sins are the sins of Nineveh: fraud, violence, worldliness in every form. Oh, for a revival that might reach to the kings of finance, and to the queens of fashion. We are told that when Maud Ballington Booth lectured in one of the popular theatres of Paris, the fashionable habitues of the place went to hear her out of idle curiosity, and she reached their hearts and humbled them to their knees in penitence and prayer. Oh, that we might see it so in our day and in our land. The genuineness of this repentance is proven by reformation. The king’s degree was, “Let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands.” Sardanapalus understood the God could not be deceived, that no repentance would be accepted of him, save that which reformed a life. Every now and then people come to me and say with reference to some one who has just confessed Christ, “Do you think he is converted?” “Do you believe she is saved?” It is not my business to answer that question. Wait a few weeks or months and the individuals themselves will answer that question. If the repentance is genuine, it will manifest itself in reformation. The sinful habits will be given up and the Spirit of God will get “right of way” in the heart, and “by their fruits ye shall know them.”
IV. God Responds in Mercy.
“And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that He said that He would do unto them, and He did it not.” God is merciful in character. This heathen king seems to have understood that fact, for when he called upon his people to turn from their evil ways he added, “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from His fierce anger that we perish not?” No man who knows anything of the mighty Jehovah can call in question the mercifulness of His character. Do you remember in Hugo’s “Les Miserables” what he makes the good priest to say? It was a note on the margin of one of Myriel’s books, “Oh, thou who art! Ecclesiastes names Thee Almighty; Maccabees names Thee Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians names Thee Liberty; Baruch names Thee Immensity; the Psalms name Thee Wisdom and Truth; John names Thee Light; the book of Kings names Thee Lord; Exodus calls Thee Providence; Leviticus, Holiness; Esdras, Justice; creation calls Thee God; man names Thee Father; but Solomon names Thee Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all Thy names.” And God is merciful in practice. Even in the preaching of judgment by Jonah His message was, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Why this withholding of judgment for forty days? They were God’s days of grace. They were Nineveh’s opportunity for repentance. It was according to God’s practice. Go back if you will to that first time when the world was filled with sin in Genesis 6:1-22, to that time when the sons of God lusted after the daughters of men, and the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not always strive with man.” “Yet, yet!” This same little word “yet.” “Yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” God’s practice of mercy. Even Sodom had her chance of repentance and her preacher of righteousness. But Jesus Christ said of the cities of His time that they had enjoyed better opportunities still, and upon them rested the greater condemnation. And I must remind many of you tonight of my God’s provision for your repentance. Nineveh never heard but one prophet. To how many of God’s prophets have you been privileged to listen? Nineveh was privileged only a single warning, how many hundreds have you known already? Nineveh was proffered forty days in which to get right. Some of you have already wasted twenty, thirty and even forty years. And yet you feel your lives to be wrong before God. My friend, in the day of judgment what shall you answer for having refused His grace, for having closed your ears to His warning, for having let the time set for repentance pass unimproved ?
It is penitence and penitence only that puts one in the way of salvation. Sardanapalus, the king, understood that, and you understand it.
Go over to Luke 15:1-32 and read the parable of the prodigal son, and I don’t care who you are, you will find your picture there. If you are just starting out to enjoy the world by indulging in its wickedness, you are portrayed by the words, “Father, give me the portion that falleth unto me.” If you have been some time in the swirl of iniquity, “wasting your substance with riot-out living,” you are pictured there; if you have “spent all” and are “in want;” if you have come even to “hunger;” if you have gone into the basest employment and unto swinish associations, still you may see yourself in that marvelous parable ; and, if tonight you realise your situation; if, like that younger son, you have come to yourself and are thinking upon God’s great bounty; if in your heart you are saying, “I will arise and go to my Father and will say unto Him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before Thee and am no more worthy to be called Thy son,” still you have only to look into this text to see the reflection of your own face; and, if there are those here tonight who have the good sense and the courage to resist Satan, and in true purpose turn back to God, then that parable contains a picture precious above any known to the galleries of earth, or ever imagined by the mind of man. It is the picture of the compassionate Father running to meet His unworthy child, falling upon his neck in the fulness of His affection, His heart overflowing in kisses. And, oh, that is the picture I would have you to see tonight—God standing ready to receive every repentant one.