Jonah 2

Jonah 2:1-9

JONAH Jonah 1:17 to Jonah 2:9WE come now to a further study of the Book of Jonah. You will remember our last discourse ended with the sixteenth verse, with Jonah overboard, and the sailors offering sacrifice unto the Lord and making vows. That seemed indeed to be the end of Jonah; but one of my professors used to say, “A man is immortal until his ministry is finished”. Whether that is always true, it will appear to have been the fact of this Prophet’s existence, for although he is thrown into the midst of the sea and is swallowed up by a great fish, his history goes right on, and the belly of that fish, instead of being his grave, was converted into a closet of prayer.This is one of the points at which the critics stumble. They cannot quite believe that anything so improbable ever actually took place. If the text of this night could be cut out of the Book of Jonah, the modern Jehoiakims would be made more happy thereby, and would the more readily consent to the inspiration of the Minor Prophets. But this is the very part of the Book which cannot be set aside. Upon these ten verses Jesus Christ has set the seal of His own acceptance. To cut them out is to call in question either His knowledge or His honesty.

Personally I am not disposed to do either! To me this record contains no serious barrier to belief. My reason is no more offended by it than by many another historical incident of the Word of the Lord. I do not see one feature in the whole narrative which ought to strain the faith of the man who admits that there is a God in Heaven. The record is,“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. “Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly. “And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and Thou hearest my voice. “For Thou hast cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about; all Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me, “Then I said, I am cast out of Thy sight; yet I will look again toward Thy holy Temple, “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head, “I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God, “When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto Thee, into Thine holy Temple, “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy, “But I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord”. Three or four suggestions for our consideration! In the first place Jonah’s experience involves bothTHE NATURAL AND THE “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah”—natural!There is not the least occasion to suppose a miracle here. The Mediterranean Sea has in it many a white shark which could, and if he had a chance, would swallow a man. The scholarly Pusey in his “Notes on the Book of Jonah” cites from history a number of instances in confirmation of the naturalness of this episode. There are a half dozen instances on record where these sharks, which sometimes attain the enormous weight of 10,000 pounds, with an extreme length of thirty to forty feet, have swallowed men. He also cites well authenticated instances where this same specie of fish has been found, one with a deer, absolutely whole, in the stomach; one with a large sea-calf, undigested; and one which had a full grown horse. Mueller still further confirms the naturalness of this incident by saying, “In 1758, in stormy weather, a sailor fell overboard from a frigate in the Mediterranean.

A shark was close by, which, as he was swimming and crying for help, took him in his wide throat so that he forthwith disappeared. The captain had a gun which stood on the deck discharged at the fish, striking it and sickening it so that it cast out the sailor, who was taken up alive.

The wounded fish was harpooned and presented to the man who, by God’s providence, had been so wonderfully preserved. The sailor went around Europe exhibiting it at Farnconia, Erlangen, Numberg, and other places. It was twenty feet long and weighed 3,924 pounds when dried.”Yet people go up and down the country saying, “A whale cannot swallow a man.” Well, the record says, “A great fish”. Naturalists know that the larger of these white sharks could, at one gulp, swallow a descent sized family without effecting a sore throat. Natural!“And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights”—supernatural!This might have been accomplished by natural means so far at least as the preservation of life is concerned. It is claimed that the fakirs of India have a custom of sealing up the lungs by turning the human tongue back into the epiglotis, thereby rendering the victim insensible, and leaving him in a comatose condition for weeks, out of which he is aroused at their pleasure.

It is a fact of natural history that life can be sustained for sometime in the belly of a fish, possibly because the gastric juices hermetically seal the body swallowed.But we are not so anxious to escape the miracle as to insist upon this as an explanation of Jonah’s remaining alive. In fact, we do not believe it is the explanation.

The admission of a miracle from God in preserving his life seems the more rational. It is one of the amazing features of modern thinking that so many men seem determined to deny the supernatural. Anything, any explanation, is regarded by a certain class of so-called thinkers as more satisfactory than an assent to the intervention of divinity. You have heard the story perhaps of the colored man who had caught the spirit of modem criticism and was disposed to remove the miraculous element from the Word. He was preaching about the Israelites’ passage over the Red Sea, and the overthrow of Pharaoh and his host in the waters thereof. Looking at his congregation with a learned air, he said, “My bredern; der ain’t no use sposin a miracle heah.

Dis can all be splained on natural grounds. You see, it was like dis: It was about de middle ob de winter when dese Israelites was agittin out ob Egypt, and when dey come down to de sea, dey found it well froze ober.

And dey, bein’ afoot, all walked across on de ice. But when Pharo, with his great heaby charots tried to foiler ‘em, de ice wouldn’t hold ‘em up, and so he and all his army broke thro, and got drowned.”An old deacon of this colored church, not quite satisfied with this explanation on natural grounds, rose and said, “Hold on, Elder; jes’ a minute dere! I got one question I would jes’ like to ask ye! Ise been studin’ Gogaphy, an’ de Gogaphy do say dat am de place ob de tropics, whar it don’t freeze ober; now will you splain dat?”To which the colored parson replied, “Yes, sah; dat’s all easy enough. You see dis all happened before dey made any gogaphies, and dere warn’t no tropics den.”We smile at the colored man’s irrational method of avoiding the miracle, but we are not able to see wherein it is one whit less rational than the present-day critics’ endeavors to do the same. The man who has a mind so constituted that it can accept the Gospel record of Lazarus’ resurrection, a mind so constituted that it can believe Daniel’s report of how the three Hebrew children passed, unhurt, through the fiery furnace, and yet denies the possibility of Jonah’s Divine preservation in the fish’s belly at the bottom of the deep is not saved from the charge of faulty reasoning because his skin is white and he speaks the lingo of the schools.

The only man who need have trouble with this incident in the Book of Jonah is the man who is unwilling to admit the claim of Scripture, “With God all things are possible”.This supernatural experience was significantly symbolical. It had another meaning than that which then appeared.

If as a judgment it looked backward to Jonah’s sin, as a symbol it looked forward to Christ’s burial and resurrection. Doubtless that was the very reason God had prepared the fish to swallow Jonah up. He could as easily have gotten him ashore by means of a floating spar. He could have sent an angel to keep him afloat until another vessel came that way. He could have gone to him Himself, walking on the water, as He went to Peter and other disciples in an awful night of similar storm. But He let him go into the deep, and be swallowed up by this fish that He might prefigure His own descent into the earth and His escape therefrom by His resurrection. One day certain of the Scribes and of the Pharisees said to Jesus,“Master, we would see a sign from Thee. “But He answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the Prophet Jonas: “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth”. When Paul came to write to the Corinthians, touching the resurrection of Jesus Christ, he spoke of how “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures”. A disposition, therefore, to take Jonah from the sacred cannon, the present-day endeavor to cast discredit upon the record of the Prophet’s experience in the deep, is the disposition and endeavor which, if it were successful, would leave the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be followed by an interrogation point. Then, as the Apostle Paul says, “If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished”.God forbid! “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable”.In the second place Jonah’s experience as here narrated illustratesGOD’S PURPOSE IN If He follows with affliction it is for our reform.“Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly, “And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He heard me”. Of course He did. Long before this time David had been subjected to severe judgment, a judgment sent upon him for his good, and he wrote what Jonah is now quoting, “In my distress I cried unto the Lord, and He heard me”.The devil is responsible for our sufferings. He it is who led Jonah away from his Lord and landed him in the deep; but God in His great mercy makes even the plans of this arch enemy to praise Him, and the very troubles into which Jonah’s sin led were overruled for his good, in that he saw how serious it was to run away from the Heavenly Father. It was the devil who put it into the heart of the Prodigal son to say, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me”. It was the devil who deceived him into supposing that “riotous living” would lead to pleasure; and it was the devil who paid him off with pigs for his associates, and the sweet honeysuckle for his sustenance.But those very hardships proved to be a power in the hand of God in impressing the awfulness of his iniquity, the degradation of his station, and bringing him to a keen appreciation of the fellowships and the food in his father’s house.That is always the purpose of judgment so far as God has anything to do with it. His speech for the present-day sinner is exactly what it was three thousand years ago, when by Ezekiel’s lips He said, “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O House of Israel”?Jonah accepted his affliction with wisdom.

There are two ways to meet judgment. The one is to declare it unjust and plunge into deeper sin; the other is to see as Jonah saw, that it is sent for our good, and turn back to God.

Although he believed that God had cast him into the sea, so that the floods had compassed him about, and billows and waves had gone over him, still he said, “I will look again toward Thy holy Temple”. When the waters came even to the soul, when the depth closed him round about, when the weeds wrapped his head—symbol of the graveclothes—when he went down to the bottoms of the mountains, when the earth with Her bars were about him forever, when his soul fainted within him, he remembered the Lord, and his prayer made in the deep was heard in the holy Temple. That is the way to meet affliction.The prodigal son gives us an example of what to do in the darkest hour. When the waves and billows of trouble were rolling over him he said, “I will arise and go to my father”. Blessed way to meet them! The man who so treats affliction will convert it into a friend.

Manasseh at Jerusalem had forgotten God and gone after sin, but when he found himself in prison in Babylon, he turned again to God and was blessed in the turning.Charles Spurgeon says: “Troubles are called weights, and a weight, you know, generally cloggeth and keepeth down to the earth; but by the use of the laws of mechanics you can make a weight lift you up.” And the man who knows how to take hold on God in the time of trouble will find his affliction a weight that can be made to lift him into the very presence of the Infinite One.Jonah did his utmost, also, toward reparation.He offered “the [sacrifice] of thanksgiving”, and pledged the fulfillment of his vows. That was all he could do under the circumstances.

It was his best—his utmost. Had he been on land it would have been his business to have gone to Nineveh, and only such an action would have been acceptable; but, situated as he was he could only resolve, and God accepted the resolution as sufficient. It is high time that men who have sinned against God learn that in turning back to Him again, so far as lieth in them they must put the past right. There are some acts that one cannot undo, and for such he must plead forgiveness. There are others that he can reverse, and in these, reparation alone will suffice.A friend of mine about to die could gain no peace of mind whatever until she had sent for her stepmother and asked forgiveness for some things she had said to her.Dr. Louis Albert Banks tells the story of a lawyer of distinguished ability who went into the Music Hall of Cleveland, Ohio, to attend the Mills meeting there.

As he listened to the truth, he was convicted of sin, and because he had been pushing a suit and had already won it in the lower courts, knowing that the principal witness on the winning side had falsified for a definite sum of money, the attorney had been promised a fee of $12,000 on condition that the suit was won in the highest court. He went out from this meeting to face the crisis of his life—$12,000 on the one side for pleading a false issue, and defrauding the defendant.

On the other side a clean conscience, if he restored the payments already received, and refused to further prosecute the suit. All night he wrestled like Jacob of old, but the next day he settled the question by determining to retore the ill-gotten money, and resign his office as attorney in the case. Then it was he realized God’s favor in forgiveness; then it was he said to the friends to whom he communicated it all, “Now let me go home to my wife. She will be so happy, for she is a Christian woman, and godliness means more to her than gain.”Zacchaeus gave an excellent evidence of his conversion when he said, “If I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold”.But the concluding sentence of this study contains a most important suggestion, namely: IS OF THE LORD Jonah had lost confidence in self.There had been a time when Jonah had felt some self-sufficiency, but a fish’s belly is a poor place to exercise any such sentiment. When Peter attempted to walk on the sea, and found himself suddenly sinking, his self-confident spirit departed and he cried, “Lord, save me”. But even his predicament had more of promise in it than Jonah’s position presents. He has gone down already. He is at the bottom of the deep. Except God interfere, he is dead.

Except God save, there is absolutely no hope. Where could you find a better figure of the condition of the natural man who is “dead in trespasses and sins”, and who can do nothing whatever to help or save himself?Charles Spurgeon, in one of his sermons says:“Last week I stood beside that window of Carisbrooke Castle, out of which King Charles, of unhappy and unrighteous memory, attempted to escape.

I read in the guidebook that everything was provided for his escape. His fellows had means at the bottom of the wall to enable him to fly across the country, and on the coast they had their boats lying ready to take him to another land. In fact, everything was ready for his escape, but here was the important circumstance. His friends had done all they could, he was to do the rest. But that doing the rest was just the point and brunt of the battle. It was to get out of the window, out of which he was not able to escape by any means; so that all his friends did for him went for nothing so far as he was concerned.“So with the sinner, if God had provided every means of escape and only required him to get out of his dungeon, he would have remained there to all eternity.

Why, is not the sinner by nature “dead in sin?’ The Spirit must quicken him. He is bound hand and foot, and fettered by transgression.

The Spirit must cut his bands and then he will leap to liberty.”Spurgeon is right! Salvation is not of our effort. Salvation is of the Lord, and to see that truth as Jonah saw it is the first essential. So long as a man is expecting to be saved in some other way he remains in his sins, for “There is none other name under Heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved”.Jonah had ceased from trusting to circumstances.There had been a time when he was in health and his feet on solid ground, and he felt he could do as he pleased, and somehow or other make it right with God at the end. But all of that is past now, for at the bottom of the deep a man does not so reason. It is only when he is in health and prosperity!

After he is brought down low, after he is utterly buried, as it were, he wonders how he could ever so blunder as to imagine that sin could escape judgment, or that circumstances could be depended upon to effect a favorable issue of life.I appeal to those of you who are in health tonight, to those of you who are in prosperity, to make your calling and election sure. Circumstances now are favorable to your doing so, but who can tell what a day may bring forth.

Tomorrow the end may be on, and it may be associated with such untold suffering, such indescribable agony of body or mind, or both that it would be a poor time to settle the great questions of the soul. A dying man may pray but all preparation for a deathbed repentance seems unwarranted when we remember Jesus’ words, “Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in Heaven”.Jonah knew that God, and God alone, could save.Our text is authority for the claim, “Salvation is of the Lord”.The sea captain had seen the same truth in the time of storm. When the vessel rocked to the winds and was ready to go down, the shipmaster came to Jonah 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”.But there is something better than either the conduct of the shipmaster or that of Jonah, and that is to call upon God before the storm comes. I plead with those of you who have not made your peace with Him, to make it now, “Behold, now is the accepted time”. “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near”.Dr. Talmage tells the story about the ship “Rebecca Goddard”, which comes into our ports in midwinter. She was all scoured up and ready for the landing, when, coming almost into the harbor, an ice floe came and pushed the ship out to sea, and it drifted about two or three days.

There was great suffering and one was frozen dead at his post. They had been almost in the harbor, but they did not go altogether in.

Many of you will either come in now, or else the ice floe of indifference will push you out and out, upon the seas of irreligion, until at last you will be going down without hope and without God. God help you, now, to come!

Jonah 2:10

JONAH’S GOSPEL Jonah 2:10 to Jonah 3:10THE 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 it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land” (Jonah 2:10).We believe what is written. No matter how much of quibble a man might make concerning the unlikelihood of such a thing, faith accepts 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 questions 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 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 seeped 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.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 flowing through the Book of Jonah; life-giving, rising from beneath the everlasting throne.Four truths in this third chapter are worthy of attention:—JONAH IS RE- “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, “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.Pastor Stalker says 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?” 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 fifty years past, the plain consciousness of a call from God has been to me at once foundation and inspiration—standing-ground and secret of strength.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, 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 it don’t say ‘Every critter shall preach the Gospel.’”While there are men in the ministry who ought to be in other professions, there are men out of the ministry, not a few of them, who 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.Fifty 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 went on in the practice of law; he lost his faith, drank, gambled, and in his dealing with men was generally regarded as a rascal; finally landed in an insane asylum.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 anything; 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 now 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 unto Nineveh, according to the Word of the Lord”.A second truth!JONAH “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” (Jonah 3:3-4). 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. 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”. 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 sympathized 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 skeptic, 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 skeptic was alarmed and said, “Do you really think there is no hope for me?” “None whatever,” said Mr. 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.NINEVEH REPENTS IN “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 2 fades to insignificance before the Pentecost of Jonah 3, and the result of Peter’s preaching that day was small indeed when compared with the consequences of this day’s work on the part of this so-called minor Prophet. Three thousand convicted of sin, asking “Men and brethren, what shall we do”? is a sight to astonish mortals; but six hundred thousand 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 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”. 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 decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: “But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God” (Jonah 3:6-8), 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, the queens of fashion and the kings of finance.

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 theaters 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 decree was “let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands” (Jonah 3:8).Sardanapalus understood that 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?” 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 them99,GOD IN MERCY “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that He had said that He would do unto them; and He did it not” (Jonah 3:10). 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”? (Jonah 3:9). 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.”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, 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 men”. “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.I must remind many of you of my God’s provision for your repentance. Nineveh 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 that fifteenth chapter of Luke and read the parable of the prodigal son, and no matter 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 to me”. If you have been some time in the swirl of iniquity, wasting “your substance with riotous 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 realize 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 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 fullness of His affection, His heart overflowing in kisses! And that is the picture I would have you to see— God standing ready to receive every repentant one.