Jonah 1:2

CHAPTER II. THE PROPHET'S COMMISSION TO GO TO NINEVEH WHY GIVEN? AND FOR WHAT ENDS?

JONAH, we have already seen, was a prophet in the kingdom of Israel; and as the prophetical gift, like every other communication of the Spirit, was always bestowed for the special benefit of the visible church, we cannot doubt, that to be a witness to Israel was the great end and object of his mission. But the singular thing is, that when we turn to the Book of Jonah, which contains the record of his prophetical calling, we find no mention whatever made of Israel; the commission given him calls him away to another land, and requires him to transact with the inhabitants of a heathen city. The word that came to him was, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.” The message, too, with which he was charged, appears in the circumstances scarcely less strange in regard to its matter, than in regard to the people to whom it was to be delivered. It was to be simply a cry against their heaven-daring iniquities, and an intimation that God was ready to come down to the execution of judgment. But why send such a message to Nineveh by this prophet, when there was so loud a call for it at home? The people of Israel, his own kinsmen, had now also reached a condition of almost hopeless profligacy and corruption; so that the cry of their iniquity must still more have gone up to the heavens, and called for the summary execution of divine wrath. Nor can we reasonably doubt, though the fact is not expressly recorded, that this prophet, after the example of those who preceded him in Israel, took many occasions in the course of his ministry to reprove the evil of the times, and to proclaim the certain approach of judgment. Yet it can as little be doubted, on the other hand, that the special work he had to do as a witness of heaven against the abounding iniquity, and a sign to Israel of the mind of God respecting it, consisted in the work committed to him as God's ambassador to a people who lay altogether beyond the territory of Israel, and who had not hitherto been subjected to any peculiar moral treatment.

The appearance of strangeness, however, which this at first sight presents, will be found to vanish when the whole circumstances of the case are taken into consideration, and the bearing is seen which the singular work now to be wrought by God was designed and naturally fitted to have upon Israel. Why Nineveh in particular should have been chosen as the theatre of such an experiment for this, indeed, we have no definite reason to assign beside the sovereignty of God; as there were, no doubt, many other cities at that time to which a similar message might with equal propriety have been sent. But there were two properties in the condition of Nineveh which rendered it peculiarly suitable for the great object contemplated by God; these were the magnitude of its population and resources, and the enormity of its crimes. In the word to Jonah, it is simply styled “that great city” (literally, “a great city of God”), an appellation which seems also to have been in familiar use among heathen writers. By these the most extraordinary accounts have been handed down of its grandeur and extent; it is even reported to have been “much greater than Babylon,” and to have been surrounded with walls “a hundred feet high, and so broad that three waggons might be driven on them abreast.” These walls, we are further informed, were fortified with 1500 towers at proper distances, each rising 200 feet in height, and rendering the whole so strong that the city was thought to be impregnable. That it should, therefore, have contained 120,000 little children, as we learn from the last chapter of Jonah, or an entire population approaching to a million, need not at all surprise us. It is also in perfect accordance with those other accounts derived from heathen sources, to have it spoken of as a city of three days' journey; taking this in connection with the twofold fact, that a day's journey in so hot a climate necessarily indicates a much shorter space than it does here, and that the cities of the East in ancient times comprehended in their circuit, as they often do still, many gardens and large spaces of vacant ground.

Finally, being situated on the banks of the Tigris, and occupying a position most convenient for an emporium of merchandise between Eastern and Western Asia, we are quite able to understand how such a magnificent city should have arisen there, and how the prophet Nahum should speak of her as having “multiplied her merchants above the stars of heaven,” and as revelling in wealth and luxury. (We have the fullest confirmation of the ancient accounts respecting Nineveh, in the recent elaborate and beautiful work of Mr Layard on Nineveh, and its remains: “The city had now attained the dimensions assigned to it in the book of Jonah, and by Diodorus Siculus. If we take the four great mounds of Nimroud, Kouyunjik, Khorsabad, and Karamles, as the corners of a square, it will be found that its four sides correspond pretty accurately with the 480 stadia, or 60 miles of the geographer.” He here mentions in a note, that “from the northern extremity of Kouyunjik to Nimroud is about 18 miles; the distance from Nimroud to Karamles, about 12; the opposite sides of the square, the same. Twenty miles is the day's journey in the East; and we have consequently the three days' journey of Jonah for the circumference of the city. The agreement of these measurements is remarkable.” “Within the space there are many large mounds, including the principal ruins in Assyria, and the face of the country is strewed with the remains of pottery, bricks, and other fragments. The space between the great public edifices was probably occupied by private houses, standing in the midst of gardens, and built at distances from one another, or forming streets, which enclosed gardens of considerable extent, and even arable land. The absence of the remains of such buildings may easily be accounted for There is, however, sufficient to indicate, that buildings were once spread over the space above described; for, besides the vast number of small mounds every where visible, scarcely a husbandman drives his plough over the soil without exposing the vestiges of former habitations. Existing ruins thus show, that Nineveh acquired its greatest extent in the time of the kings of the second dynasty; that is to say of the kings mentioned in Scripture. It was then that Jonah visited it, and the reports of its size and magnificence were carried to the West, and gave rise to the traditions, from which the Greek authors mainly derived the information handed down to us.” Vol. ii., pp. 247-249.)

Considering the immense greatness which ancient Nineveh is thus known to have attained, and perceiving how large and populous cities invariably become nurseries of vice and corruption, it is precisely what we might have expected to learn, that the wickedness of Nineveh kept pace with its commercial importance and external greatness. The language used respecting it to Jonah, is quite similar to that employed at an earlier period concerning Sodom and Gomorrah, and denotes a state of flagrant immorality and vicious abandonment. They were no ordinary iniquities that were proceeding in the midst of it, but such as raised a cry that pierced the very heavens, and would no longer permit the righteous God, whose ears it entered, to look on as a silent spectator of the evil.

To send a messenger of heaven to such a city with a word of solemn rebuke and warning, supposing the mission not to be in vain, was a proceeding so unusual in its nature, and of so public a character, that it was evidently intended, as well as peculiarly fitted, to arrest the attention of others besides those whom it more immediately concerned. The pre-eminent greatness of the city, with its wide-spreading commerce and its unrivalled splendour, rendered it more than any other place, in that region of the world, a city set upon a hill; so that, whatever extraordinary result might be achieved there, it could not be as a thing done in a corner, but must send forth its report, as from a public theatre, to the nations around. Then its crying sins and abominations, while they rendered it peculiarly obnoxious to the condemnation of heaven, being found in connection with such gigantic strength and manifold resources, seemed to bid defiance to any attempt at reformation. Who could have ventured to predict on any grounds open to human calculation, that a city, at once so immersed in sin and so richly furnished with the means of security and defence, would quail before the voice of a single preacher of repentance, and that too the voice of a stranger? But if this one call to repentance, notwithstanding the unlikelihood of its success, should still prove effectual if the prophet of Israel, after having so long laboured in vain among his own people, should, by a kind of stray effort in the streets of Nineveh, become first the reformer and then the saviour of a mighty nation, what a loud rebuke and what a solemn warning should the whole transaction administer to backsliding and impenitent Israel! a people who had been long dealt with by special ambassadors of God, among whom an entire order of prophets for successive generations had been plying their high vocation; while yet no successful inroad had been made on the prevailing idolatry and corruption! Would it not seem as if God were acting toward them as the parent who, wearied with the long-continued and obstinate waywardness of a son, and now almost despairing of his recovery, should try once more to work upon the heart of the hardened profligate, by turning aside for a little to address himself to some wandering and neglected outcast? And, having found this wretched and homeless stranger ready to listen to the first word of wholesome counsel and rebuke, should then make his appeal to the home-born child by holding up the instructive example furnished by the other? “Does not the sight of this reclaimed outcast, so soon reclaimed, at length make thee ashamed of thy perverse and foolish behaviour? Wilt thou still stand out, as thou hast hitherto done, against a father's advice and entreaty? What, then, can I do to thee more? What should I do, but henceforth leave thee to the fate of an outcast, no longer worthy to be called a child, and honour this recovered alien above thee, to thy perpetual shame and confusion?”

Such precisely, it will be remembered, was the use which our Lord made of the preaching of Jonah at Nineveh, and the success that attended it. He told the men of his own generation, among whom he had gone preaching the things of God's kingdom, that the people of Nineveh would rise up in the judgment to condemn them, because they had repented at Jonah's preaching; while He, a greater than Jonah, spoke only to cold and unconcerned hearts. But for the men who lived in the days of Jonah himself, the lesson came still closer; and the inference could scarcely fail to force itself on all but the most senseless and brutish minds, that the Lord, perceiving the hopelessness of any direct efforts, was now seeking to provoke his people to jealousy by the fruitful example of the Ninevites, and, at the same time, to press on their notice the imminent perils that surrounded their condition. Indeed, the procedure in respect to Nineveh was just an embodying of the principle so long before announced by Moses: “They have moved me to jealousy with that which is no god; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.” See Nineveh, he in a manner exclaimed, that hitherto no people of mine, that foolish nation, how they have bowed their hearts at my call, and broken off their sins by repentance at the first intimation of my threatened judgments; while you, my covenant-people, the children of my kingdom, have only despised my words, and hardened your hearts against my fear! How can I longer delay to vindicate my righteousness in your destruction? And if, in proceeding to do this, I should give to these penitent strangers the ascendancy over you, and honour them as the rod of mine anger to chastise your back-slidings, must not your own hearts discern the justice of the retribution?

This principle, from its very nature, could not possess a merely local or temporary place in the divine government, but is common to all ages. Accordingly, we find it again re-appearing at the beginning of the gospel, and even brought prominently into notice both in the words and the actions of our Lord. Not only did he make the appeal already mentioned, from the heedless and hardened impenitence around him, to the Ninevites under the preaching of Jonah; but when the centurion, a native heathen, came beseeching the interposition of his healing power in behalf of a dying servant, and giving utterance to a strength of faith at which Jesus himself is said to have marvelled, our Lord, seized the opportunity to declare, that this example of faith from a Gentile far surpassed what he had yet found in Israel; that many like examples of faith, however, were soon to arise among the different nations of the earth, who would thus attain to the heritage of Abraham, while the children of the kingdom, from the want of it, should go into perdition. “Verily, I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of God. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 8:11-12) Various parables, also, were spoken by our Lord, for the purpose chiefly of enforcing the same lesson; in particular, that of the royal marriage (Matthew 22:1-14), and the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Matthew 21:33-41), which was concluded by so direct and pointed an appeal to the Jewish hearers, as to leave no room to doubt regarding the contemplated change: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” This threatened expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom not only soon passed into a reality, but the footsteps of the divine procedure in accomplishing it followed exactly the same course as they had done in the days of Jonah. Grieved as the Lord now was with the wicked behaviour of the Jews, who even exceeded the measure of their fathers, he did not at once cast them off; but endeavoured, in the first instance, to shame them into repentance and amendment of life, as well as to warn them of impending danger, by presenting to their view all around them multitudes of converted heathens persons who had once been wretched and depraved idolaters, but who had now become, through the gospel of his salvation, enlightened and spiritual believers. Had the eyes of the Jewish people not been utterly blinded, and themselves given up to a reprobate mind, they would have found in this, God's last and loudest call to repentance, the final movements of the kingdom as regarded them, preparatory to its complete departure. But, instead of viewing the divine procedure in this light, their minds were only inflamed by it to a more bitter and settled enmity against the truth of God. The warnings of the past and the lessons of the present were alike lost upon them; and no alternative remained, but to take from them the appearance of what they had already ceased to possess, the reality to put an end, by an outward change in their condition, to their formal relation to God, and send them forth into the world with the brand of aliens and outcasts.

The same principle, we need scarcely say, is often acted upon still, as well in regard to single individuals as to entire communities, by the removal of the candlestick out of its place, when the light has come to be neglected and despised, and the exaltation of the least favoured with outward privilege, over such as have been most favoured, to the peculiar blessings of the kingdom. This, however, has so often been made matter of illustration and remark, that we have no intention to dwell on it at present; but would rather draw attention to the important and fundamental truth too much lost sight of by the greater part of those who handle the affairs of ancient Israel on which the method of procedure now in question is based. That truth is, that God is not, neither was formerly any more than now, a respecter of persons; and that, when he chose the seed of Abraham and endowed them with peculiar promises of blessing, the objects of his regard and blessing were not simply the offspring of Abraham, but that portion of them who possessed his spirit of faith and obedience his natural spiritual seed. This truth arises from the nature of God as the righteous and unchangeable Jehovah every where and perpetually the same; so that he cannot be to one what he is not ready to be to another in like circumstances; and what manifestations he gives of himself in one place, or in one age of the world, these he is in substance constantly repeating in others. The revelation he gave of himself to Abraham speaks substantially the same language to all, even to the end of time and in the remotest corners of the earth, who occupy the same spiritual relation with the patriarch, but contains no assurance of blessing to persons differently related, not though they might be able to trace with the utmost certainty their descent from the loins of Abraham; for the personal relation being different, the nature of God's manifestation can no longer be the same.

Now, the Israelites were in peculiar danger of forgetting this truth, after having received so much as a people of the promised goodness of God, and finding themselves securely settled in the land of Canaan. It then became one of their strongest temptations, and, as the event proved, their capital error, to conclude that natural descent from Abraham was all that was necessary to constitute their title to the inheritance they enjoyed; and that God was, in a manner, so pledged to them, his word of promise so bound up with their experience of good, that they could not, without dishonour to his faithfulness, be dispossessed of their territory, and supplanted by men of another nation. The right by which they thus sought to hold the land, and the general promise of blessing, was thrown upon a merely natural ground, which being for ever fixed and settled in the past, could not, they imagined, be materially affected by any thing that might take place in the future; their calling was a concluded transaction, and, happen what may, they must still be the chosen of God, and all besides outcasts and aliens.

There could not be a more fatal error; for as in God's character the moral element ever holds the highest place, so must it always come most prominently out in his dealings toward his people; all must be subservient to the claims and interests of holiness. Therefore, foreseeing the danger to which Israel would be exposed in this respect, the Lord took every precaution from the first to prevent the error referred to from taking root among them. He made it clear as noonday to every spiritual eye, at the very commencement of their history, that while the promise was to run in the line of Abraham's posterity, yet not there indiscriminately, only in so far as they breathed his spirit and trod in his footsteps. Hence the successive limitations in the seed of Abraham, as connected with the promise: not Ishmael, as being merely a child of nature, born after the flesh, but Isaac, the special gift of God; again, not Esau, the man of natural impulse and pleasure, but Jacob, the man of faith. These successive limitations manifestly did not happen at random they were a revelation from God, to make plain to future times whom in these covenant transactions he understood by the seed of blessing, namely, the natural-spiritual offspring of Abraham; so that, if the natural only existed, the peculiar or covenant blessing failed. It was scarcely possible, indeed, for the distinction to be kept up so plainly afterwards, when the descendants of Jacob were formed into a nation, and when many, who were simply connected with him by natural descent, came unavoidably to be mixed up with those who were also spiritually his children. But it was evident, from what had been done at the commencement, that the distinction would still be kept up in the view of God. And not only so, but to render the distinction as far as possible manifest to the eye of sense to show that they only who were Israelites indeed were entitled to an Israelite's name and inheritance and that if any others shared in the things outwardly belonging to it, it was from no title conferred on the part of God, but only from the faulty and imperfect administration of his will on the part of man: with this view more immediately the law entered before the people were permitted to take possession of Canaan, and was formed, along with the original promise to Abraham, into a covenant engagement between them and God; so that, while the one presented them with a title to the inheritance, the other furnished them with a criterion for determining whether the title were actually theirs. For, given as the law was, in what light could its requirements of holiness be regarded, but as a representation of the character of those whom God owned to be the rightful inheritors of the land the Jacob, as they are called in the 24th Psalm, or the generation of pious worshippers, whom alone God recognized as the seed of Jacob? And when, along with this law of holiness, the Lord coupled the stern injunction, so often repeated, that such as wilfully transgressed them were to be cut off from among their people, what could more clearly indicate that he considered all such as properly aliens false children, on whom he had settled no dowery of blessing? (The injunction about cutting off transgressors from among the people of God, has often been referred to as a proof of the harsh spirit of Judaism but quite falsely. It was an essential part of the Mosaic legislation; for the whole of this was constructed on the principle of its having to do with the true people of God, the seed of blessing, with the view of securing the continuance of such a seed, and their inheritance of the blessing. The land in which they were established was the Lord's land the people, therefore, must be his people, in character as well as name, and the ordinances adapted to persons in such a condition. Otherwise, the whole would necessarily have given a wrong impression of God, and conveyed a false instruction. Wilful transgressors were, ipso facto, cut off from the covenant, and should have been formally excluded or destroyed by the Church, just as now open sinners should be excommunicated, and must finally be destroyed.)

It is on this ground that the Psalmist David so often identifies his personal enemies who were enemies to him only because he represented the cause of God with the heathen or aliens. He could not regard them as properly belonging to the seed of Jacob, or occupying any other relation than that substantially of the uncircumcised. Thus, in Psalms 59, written on the occasion of Saul's party watching David in the house with the design of killing him, he says of those merely domestic enemies: “They run and prepare themselves without my fault: awake to help me, and behold. Thou therefore, O Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel, awake to visit all the heathen: be not merciful to any wicked transgressors.” “Swords are in their lips; for who (say they) doth hear? But thou, O Lord, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision.” (See also Psalms 9:5; Psalms 9:15; Psalms 10:16; Psalms 102:8; Psalms 144:11) And in like manner, when the people generally had become children of disobedience, as unquestionably was the case in the kingdom of Israel when Jonah lived, the Lord gave them distinctly to understand, that he disowned them as that seed of Abraham to whom he had given by a covenant engagement the inheritance of the land of Canaan, and that they were now related to him much as the surrounding heathen. The mission itself of Jonah to Nineveh virtually declared as much; for it obviously implied, that a heathen city afforded now as legitimate a field for the labours of an Israelitish prophet as the kingdom of Israel, while the result proved it to be a much more propitious soil. But what was only implied in this transaction was soon afterwards broadly announced by the prophet Amos, in the following cutting interrogations: “Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor? and the Syrians from Kir?” The one precisely as the other; you stand, as the present possessors of Canaan, exactly on a footing with those other nations in regard to their existing settlements; no more in your case than in theirs do the territorial changes that have taken place prove your connexion with the everlasting covenant of God; all is reduced now to the natural; the spiritual relation, and with that the title to the blessing, is gone.

It is of great importance to bear in mind this principle, which runs like a sacred thread through all God's transactions with his ancient people, whether these transactions be viewed more directly in the bearing they have upon the natural descendants of Abraham, or more indirectly upon the world at large. In the former point of view, it shows, that while God for certain wise and important reasons, which had respect to the good of others as well as their own, chose Abraham and his offspring in a certain line to the enjoyment of peculiar privileges, there was nothing in his method of procedure arbitrary or capricious. He did not act as if determined to bless them, simply because they belonged to a particular race, and could trace their descent from the father of the faithful. St Peter announced no new principle in the house of Cornelius, when he said, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons;” but an old principle, on which God had acted toward Israel itself through all the history of the past, though Peter, like most of his countrymen, had been so blinded by prejudice as to have failed hitherto to perceive it. In the calling of Israel as a people, indeed, there was distinguishing grace, singling them out from the mass of the world to the enjoyment of peculiar advantages, but still no blind favouritism or foolish partiality; for the children of privilege could become the heirs of blessing only by yielding themselves as a spiritual seed to the Lord, and, if they failed in this, they entailed upon themselves a heavier doom. In a word, Canaan as a token of the divine favour and an inheritance of blessing, was the gift of Heaven only to believing and spiritual men; and, in so far as persons of a different description partook with them of the outward boon, it was only as the mixed multitude that followed Israel out of Egypt; they were there by sufferance only, and not by right or as proper denizens of the kingdom of God. It is only by keeping this in mind, that we can properly understand the nature of God's covenant relation to the seed of Abraham, and see how, amid outward failures, he was still faithful to his promises. (The principle which we have just unfolded is in one particular aspect brought very prominently out by the apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, viz., in reference to the blessing of justification, which belonged to Abraham and to his seed only as standing in faith; and it is by keeping clearly in view the principle itself, that we can properly understand and account for some of the expressions used, and especially those in chap. 3:30: “Seeing it is one God that shall justify the circumcision by (ἐκ) faith, and uncircumcision through (διὰ) faith.” The peculiarity here lies in the use of the two prepositions, which the commentators regard as synonymous; “and yet,” as Tholuck justly remarks, “the change can scarcely be thought to have been undesigned.” When he adds, however, that “perhaps it implies a gentle stroke of irony, of which we have elsewhere in St Paul's writings still stronger examples,” he only shows how little he was able to find his way to the true solution. To come at this, we must bear in mind two things: first, that the apostle has in his eye an essential distinction between the circumcised and the uncircumcised, there having been all along a justified portion among the one, but not among the other; and then, that the justified among the circumcised were not all who possessed the outward sign not the circumcision per se, but the circumcision who had faith. If we bear these things in mind, we shall easily perceive that there was an occasion for using different prepositions, and that the two actually employed are used in their proper and distinctive import. The preposition ἐκ, says Winer, with his usu al accuracy, “is originally used in reference to such objects as come forth out of the interior of another, from within; and, transferred to internal relations, it denotes every source and cause out of which something emanates.” (Gram., p. 296, 297) Now, it is precisely in this general sense, as denoting the relation from, or out of, that the preposition is used by the apostle in the passage before us. He is setting forth the identity in principle of God's method of justifying the saved, as well among Jews as Gentiles: he is “the same God,” the sameness of his procedure in the two cases proves him to be the same. For, in justifying the circumcision, it is not the circumcision as such, or all indiscriminately who belong to it, but only “the circumcision of (not by) faith;” that is, expressing the matter more fully, he justifies simply that portion of the circumcised who have their standing in faith, and out of that, as the ground of their spiritual being, have received the sign of circumcision. So also in justifying the uncircumcision, it is done “through faith,” through this as the means of their entering into substantially the same condition as was possessed by the true or spiritual circumcision. The uncircumcised, as such, did not stand in faith; nor did they possess the privilege of a justified condition; they needed to be brought into this as a new state, and it was through faith that the transition could alone be made. The circumcised, on the other hand, were already in a justified state if only their circumcision stood in faith, as the ground or root out of which it came. So that the prepositions are each used in their proper meaning, and there ia by no means, as is commonly alleged, a distinction without a difference. The statement simply is: The circumcised out of faith (as contradistinguished from those who are circumcised without faith) are justified; and so also are the uncircumcised, who through faith enter into the same spiritual condition. And the apostle then goes on to show, in chap. 4, how, in the case of the circumcised, it was not their being the circumcision alone, but their being the circumcision of faith, which secured their being in the condition of the justified. The other passages, where ἐκ πίστεως, and also ἐξ ἔργων, are used in connexion with justification. (for example, Romans 1:17; Romans 3:20; Galatians 2:16, &c) are all to be interpreted in the same manner as above. The expressions are never synonymous, though constantly regarded so by commentators, διὰ πίστεως, διὰ ἔργων; but always point to the ground, or standing-point, out of which the individual is contemplated. Justification or salvation is of faith, not of works; the one is, the other is not, the condition out of which the benefit comes to the possession of the soul. Of course, if we look only to the general meaning, it is not materially different to say, that salvation is through faith, not through works, as the means of its attainment.)

It is necessary to add, however, that what has now been stated respecting the covenant of God, applies to it only in so far as it came into contact with man's responsibilities and obligations of duty, not in its higher connexion with the ultimate designs and purposes of God. In this respect the covenant, standing simply in the sovereignty and power of divine grace, did infallibly secure a seed of blessing out of the natural posterity of Abraham, which was preserved through all backslidings and corruptions till the covenant was for ever ratified and made sure in Christ. And it seems to be implied in the reasoning of the apostle (Romans 11:25-32), that the grace of the covenant would still he continually securing an election from the natural seed, till the whole should be brought to a participation in the blessing. But of this only by the way.

The principle, however, on which God's covenant with Abraham was founded and administered, as now represented, is not less important when viewed in respect to the world at large. For, the spiritual seed being throughout alone the seed of blessing, the spiritual element was thus clearly elevated above the natural, and determined to be the real bond of connexion with the covenant, which might exist without the natural, as well as the natural without the spiritual. The necessity of a spiritual relation to God could not be dispensed with; but where this existed, the accident of birth was not of essential moment. Wherever any one possessed Abraham's faith, he could not fail to be received by an unchangeable and impartial God to the place and portion of a son of Abraham. It was just as competent for the people of Edom, or Moab, or Nineveh, to enter thus into the bond of Abraham's covenant, as for any of his natural posterity; and, in dealing graciously with the one, the Lord at the same time stretched out his hand to the other. In manifest proof of this, not only were Abraham's servants at the first circumcised, and thereby entitled to take up their standing with himself as heirs of blessing, but express provision was made in the law for strangers from the surrounding countries being circumcised and forming part of the Lord's heritage. (Exodus 12:44; Deuteronomy 23:1-8) The temple also was, with the same view, named “the house of prayer for all nations” (1 Kings 8:41-43; Isaiah 56:7); and examples of pious converts, such as the father-in-law of Moses, Euth, Ittai the Gittite, and thousands besides in the more flourishing periods of Israel's history, were from time to time added to the number of Abraham's seed. So that this seed, or the true Church of God in Old Testament times, though always Israelitish in name, was by no means exclusively Israelitish in origin, and that it did not consist more than was actually the case, of those converted naturalized Israelites that all the surrounding nations, indeed, did not press into the kingdom of God, arose from no unwillingness on the part of God to receive them, but merely from their own unwillingness to come; for it was from the first his design, that they should see in Israel the way to blessing, and, like the young Moabite widow, should go “to put their trust under the wings of the Lord God of Israel.”

The principle on which the whole of this proceeded is as fresh and operative still, let it be remembered, as it ever was in days of old; it partakes of the un-changeableness of Jehovah. What he has at any time done for one, he is ready to repeat to others similarly situated. In his communications to the father of the faithful, we may discern an assurance of his goodness to ourselves, and a divine warrant to look for like manifestations of grace in our own experience. On the other hand, the evils threatened or inflicted upon those who lived in unbelief, or fell back from their covenant engagements, should sound as warnings in our ear not to be high-minded but to fear, and to remember that, if we stand in grace, still by grace only can we stand. And hence it is that the apostle Paul could so readily bring forward, in proof of the doctrine that God was calling a church, “not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles,” a passage from Hosea which was originally addressed to the natural Israel. “As he saith also in Hosea, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.” (Romans 9:24-26) This, we are to bear in mind, the apostle cites as a direct and conclusive proof that Gentile or uncircumcised believers were as certainly called of God as converted Jews. And the only conceivable ground on which he could do so, is simply this, that God's communications of mercy and judgment to ancient Israel were a revelation to mankind at large; and that as Israel, in apostatizing, fell substantially into the condition of the heathen, so the promise of his reception again, on conversion, into the family of God, was equally a promise of the reception of all believing Gentiles into the same family. For God would otherwise have acted from caprice, and his dealings could not have been, what, however, they must always be, the manifestations of his own holy and unchangeable nature.