What Jonah Did

TAKE ANOTHER LOOK at Jonah!  It is almost tragic that one of the noblest of the shorter books in the Bible should be known chiefly for its reference to a whale.  And the whale only appears in two short verses of that book - he did not have one of the leading roles.  He was scarcely more than a bit of stage setting in that drama of disobedience. Yet for some reason Jonah and the whale are always named together, like David and Jonathan or Romeo and Juliet.

The little book was never meant to be history.  If the author of it were alive today, he would be amazed and amused by the fact that men, lacking in the sense of humor and in the sense of perspective, still argue themselves hoarse over the question as to whether any whale would have a mouth large enough to swallow a man alive, and over the further question as to whether a man could live for three days in the inside of a whale and there compose a poetical prayer, as this man is said to have done.  Foolish arguments against the possibility of such an occurrence have been met by other arguments still more foolish to prove that God, being omnipotent, can do anything he likes.

The book of Jonah is a sermon cast in the form of a parable, like the Parable of the Prodigal Son or the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It stands here in the Bible not among the historical books but among the "Minor Prophets," which are made up of fragments of sermons.

This is the story.  "The word of the Lord," one of those commanding spiritual impulses, came to Jonah saying, "Go to Nineveh and call upon the people to forsake their evil doing."

But Jonah did not want to go.  He was a Jew and the Ninevites were Gentiles.  Jews had no dealings with Gentiles.  "The Ninevites can go to the bad for all I care," Jonah may have said to himself - he felt that they were on the way. Nineveh was to the east - he turned his back upon duty and started west on a ship bound for Tarshish, which was in Spain.

Then there came a frightful storm and the sailors feared that their ship was going down.  "They cried every man to his god." They felt that the god of the sea was angry with them for some reason, and they wanted a human scapegoat to be offered to that angry deity. They cast lots to see who should be "it". By some skillful manipulation, it may be, the lot fell upon Jonah.  The sailors promptly threw him overboard, and at once "the sea ceased from its roaring." The storm was over.  Apparently the god of the sea was satisfied with the offering they had made, and troubled them no more.

But the Lord had mercy on this disobedient prophet.  He prepared a great fish to swallow him and this kept him from being drowned.  There in the belly of the whale, Jonah repented of his weakness in running away from his duty and prayed forgiveness.  The Lord heard his Prayer and at the end of three days the whale spit Jonah out on dry land.

Then he went straight to Nineveh and called upon the wicked to forsake their ways and the unrighteous men their thoughts, and turn to the Lord.  The whole city, from the king to the scavenger, the story says, was converted.  The king laid aside his Purple and clothed himself in sackcloth and ashes, asking forgiveness for his sins.  So the fierce anger of Jonah's deity was changed into merciful forgiveness.

Now that is not history - it was never meant to be.  Entire cities are not converted to righteousness in that wholesale fashion.  But it is good preaching - "He spake many things to us in parables."

Here is the teaching of that splendid parable!  When a man runs away from his duty, he gets into trouble.  The trouble is here portrayed according to a certain habit of mind.  The ancient Hebrews were afraid of the sea.  They were land animals - they developed no maritime commerce as did their neighbors the Phoenicians.  In the Hebrew vision of Paradise in the last book of the Bible, we read, "There was no more sea." In that "new heaven and new earth wherein dwelt righteousness" there was no salt water.  If the sailors of that day had really believed it, they would not have wanted to go there - it would not have been heaven for them with no salt water in sight.  But that was the way the Hebrews felt about it, and for the disobedient Jonah to be cast overboard into a raging sea was a terrible fate.

Now that principle is just as true today as it ever was.  When any man, anywhere, runs away from his duty, he finds himself in trouble.  Sometimes right off, sometimes later - the Lord does not settle all of his accounts every Saturday night or at the end of each month.  He never forgets anything, however.  Sometimes the trouble takes one form, sometimes another - "the chariots of the Lord," which ride men down when they are doing wrong "are twenty thousand." He has all kinds of ways to combat evil doing.

We are caught and held in the grip of a great moral order from which there is no more escape than there is from the power of gravitation. Whenever we get off the rails, we get hurt.  Any man who turns his back on Nineveh, which represents duty, and sails for Tarshish, which represents disobedience, is in for trouble.

In the second place, when a man is sorry for his wrong doing and is ready to do better, he finds deliverance.  It is not necessary to drag in all of those sea serpents and other monsters of the deep with mouths wide enough to swallow a man alive, in order to make the truth plain.  How funny men have been in getting wrought up over the size and habits of the fish in the Mediterranean - they have missed the whole point of the story!

This man in the parable cast his prayer for deliverance in poetical form.  "The waters compassed me about and the billows went over me.  My soul fainted within me until my prayer came unto thy holy temple.  I said, I will offer unto thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving and I will pay that which I have vowed." His prayer was heard, and he was set upon his feet on solid ground where he could go straight for that neglected duty in the. city of Nineveh.

How sound and true all that is!  This is "the gospel according to Jonah," and in some of its features it is the same gospel that we find later in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Every man of us has turned aside from the right way and has followed too much the devices and desires of his own heart.  We have done those things which we ought not to have done and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and that is all there is about it.  "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.  But if we confess our sins, He" the God of Jonah and of John and of Jesus - "is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

"The highest moment in a man's career," Oscar Wilde wrote when he was in Reading jail for his own wretched wrongdoing, "may be the moment when he kneels in the dust and beats upon his breast and tells all the sins of his life". "God be merciful to me a sinner" - when a man utters that prayer sincerely, he is forgiven.  When he is sorry for his wrongdoing (as Jonah was) and is ready to do better, he finds deliverance.

In the third place, God's mercies are universal.  When this Jew went to Nineveh, his very presence there declared that "God had granted to the Gentiles repentance unto life," just as we find it set forth later in the book of Acts.  It took a surgical operation and a sheet let down from heaven, full of all kinds of animals, to get that truth into Peter's head.  He finally rose to it and said to Cornelius, the Roman centurion, "Of a truth, I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that heareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted of him.  Thy prayers and thine alms are acceptable to God". But here was Jonah saying the same thing five hundred years, more or less, before Peter was born. The timeliness of this great truth in that day is apparent.  Israel was refusing her larger mission to the outside world.  She was failing to function as a Messianic nation in whose unfolding life all the nations of earth should be blessed.  She was becoming narrow, bigoted, selfish, intent on saving her own soul, letting the devil take Nineveh if he liked.  And when Israel refused to do her duty, there came the exile to Babylon.

Jeremiah, the leading prophet of that day, said that a great dragon had swallowed Israel up.  You see at once the broad scope of this little book of Jonah.  God's mercies, even in that far off time, were not confined to the Jews.

The book teaches the universal love of God.  "Go to Nineveh!" Go everywhere!  Go into all the world and disciple the nations, baptizing them into the name of that Infinite Mercy which is above all!  "God so loved," not the Israelites nor the Methodists nor the Episcopalians nor the "One Hundred per Cent Americans," as they like to call themselves - "God so loved the world," the whole of it, Nineveh, Calcutta, Shanghai as well as New York, London, and Rome, "that he gave his only begotten Son" to be the Lord and Savior of them all.

It was one of their limitations that some of the Jews learned to think of themselves quite as highly as they ought to have thought, "What nation hath statutes and judgments so righteous as this law?  Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have heard?  Has God ever assayed to take him such a nation out of the midst of another nation, by signs, by wonders and by war, by a mighty band and an outstretched arm?  What nation hath God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God unto us in all things that we call upon him for?" They were on exceedingly good terms with themselves. And there are others - the people of the United States of America, for example, in the days of their unparalleled material prosperity.

There is peril as well as privilege in feeling that one's own country is a nation favored of heaven.  Unless our advantages are held in trust, unless we regard ourselves as good stewards of the mercies of God for the service of interests wider than our own well being, we too are in danger.  If we become like that hated Pharisee, thanking God that we are not as other nations are, we shall go down to our houses unblest.  The nation that plumes itself upon its superiority loses out.

It is only by that wise investment of one's best in unselfish action that any man or any nation can rise. It is the duty of the church of God not to stand aloof, pleased with its reverent worship and its spiritual culture -it too must concern itself with Nineveh and Babylon.  It must insist that all the activities of this world, not merely worship and charity but business and politics, education, recreation, and all the rest, shall become kingdoms of our God, ruled by the spirit that was in Christ.

Finally, Jonah had a further lesson to learn about "follow-up work".  Nineveh was a great city, sixty miles in circumference.  It was spread out widely like London, or Los Angeles, which bids fair to annex all the outlying territory in southern California.  In that city of Nineveh there were one hundred and twenty thousand children, not old enough to know the difference between their right hands and their left.  This meant a population of a million or more.  In all that teeming multitude not a single individual is called by name or described as possessed of any particular distinction.  It was "the mute appeal of those monotonous crowds of plain people" which moved the Lord to send them a prophet with a message of help.

But even his experience in the sea had not transformed Jonah into a worthy messenger of the Most High.  He still had in his heart an ugly remnant of contempt for foreigners.  He approached that needy city denouncing it for its evil doing.  "Forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed," he said.  Then he stood off watching the sky and waiting for the fire and brimstone to burn them up.  But it did not come.

Then this man, who was never quite large enough for his job, became vexed.  This far reaching "executive clemency" of the Lord seemed to discredit him as a prophet of disaster.  The fact that the Lord had shown himself merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in kindness, seemed to give the lie to the red-hot message of condemnation which Jonah had delivered.  Forty days and Nineveh was not destroyed, because the people had repented of their evil doings and had been forgiven.  Then the angry prophet flung himself upon the ground and wished that he might die.

There is a delicate bit of humor in the quiet reproof which the Lord gave him in that hour.  "Doest thou well to be angry?"  Why so hot, little man?  Are you disappointed because your preaching has been so effective that all the people in the city have turned from their evil ways?  Are you vexed because it seems too good to be true?

"The love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind". Gentiles though they were, God had shown Himself able to release them from the mastery of evil.  Why was not this man on his feet singing a Te Deum?  By that further parable of the gourd, which grew up almost in a night to shield the tired prophet from the heat of the sun, the Lord taught him the beauty of compassion.

We do pray for mercy and that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.

"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."

Read that book of Jonah again!  Forget all about the great fish.  It was never meant to hold the center of the stage.  It is only a bit of furniture in the background of that scene in the drama of redemption.  When "Macbeth" is being played, how foolish men would be to fall into an angry discussion about some bit of bric-a-brac in the castle at Inverness and forget the tragedy of that crime committed by a guilty man and a guilty woman against their guest, against their king, against their God!

Study here "the goodness and the severity of God". To those who persist in disobedience to His gracious purpose, severity; but to those who are penitent and willing to do better, a merciful redemption which saves even unto the uttermost all those who put their trust in him.  That is the message of the book of Jonah.