Jonah 3:1-4

CHAPTER VI. THE NEW COMMISSION GIVEN TO JONAH, AND THE WONDERFUL RESULTS THAT FLOWED FROM ITS EXECUTION

THE sojourn of Jonah for a time in the deep waters, and his singular experience there, having been mainly designed to prepare him for doing aright the work of the Lord's ambassador to Nineveh, he was no sooner restored to the dry land, than “the word of the Lord came to him the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee; “or, more exactly, “proclaim to it the proclamation that I speak to thee.” “So Jonah arose, and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. 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.”

Two things strike us here. The first is, the indeterminate form of the commission as now delivered on this second occasion to Jonah. When formerly issued, the specific object was at the same time declared for which he was to repair to Nineveh. He was to cry against it, because its wickedness had come up before the Lord. But now he must go without any definite instruction as to the precise end in view, with a readiness merely to proclaim whatever word the Lord might be pleased to put into his mouth. This, no doubt, was done for the purpose of more clearly exhibiting how much he now possessed of the spirit of unconditional obedience, and how freely he yielded himself as an instrument of service to God. Not by the substance only, but also by the very form of the commission he bore, he must go forth breathing the sentiment, “I delight to do thy will, O my God! thy law is within my heart.”

The other peculiarity here is, that when the general commission given to Jonah before his setting out for Nineveh, assumes on his arrival there a more express and definite form, it presents a considerably severer aspect than it originally wore. It is no longer a cry against the sins and abominations prevailing in Nineveh, but an authoritative and explicit announcement, that the ruin of the city was at hand: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Such was the word actually put into the mouth of Jonah; and the marked difference between it and the one formerly given, as it cannot have been unintentional, neither is it to be regarded as of slight importance. (It is strange that this difference should be so entirely overlooked by commentators, and still more strange, that Matthew Henry should so expressly affirm, that the first and second message were entirely the same!) Why precisely forty days should have been fixed as the ultimate period of Nineveh's existence as a city, and by what means the Lord purposed at the close of that period to overthrow it, we need not busy ourselves in attempting to conjecture, as these are points which it is impossible for us, in the absence of all information, to ascertain. But the fact of the message having passed, during the interval between the two communications, from a mere expostulation on account of sin, into the proclamation of an immediately impending doom, was plainly intended to mark the downward and darkening progress of things. The people with whom the prophet has to transact, are now in far more dangerous and desperate circumstances than before; they have reached within a few steps of the awful gulf, toward which their career of sin has long been precipitating them; and Jonah has but the melancholy, and it might be, in the circumstances, perilous task, of ringing in their ears a little beforehand the sound of the approaching calamity.

An important and salutary lesson was here conveyed to Jonah, and through him to every servant of heaven. For, how manifest had the sin and folly now become of delaying to execute the work of God, on account of the difficulties and troubles which at the first seemed to hang around it! These, it was found in this case, became not less but greater by the delay, and so it will ever be found. He who has a task from God to discharge for the good of others, if he would not aggravate the burden to himself, let him apply promptly to the performance of what is required at his hands; for, if the records of all experience were searched, there is nothing in respect to which they would be found to give a more clear and uniform testimony than this, that apart altogether from the recompenses of evil, which are ever ready to chastise a spirit of disobedience, incomparably the wisest and happiest course is to fulfil the behests of duty at the proper time, as well as in the appointed way.

But a lesson still more impressive and startling was doubtless also intended, by the circumstance in question, to be conveyed to the Ninevites themselves. That a prophet should have been first commissioned to go from Israel and cry against their sins, because of their enormous wickedness; and then, after the delay occasioned by the prophet's own backwardness to fulfil the appointment, that he should on the renewal of the commission have been instructed to proclaim the sure destruction of Nineveh itself in the short space of forty days this was certainly an appalling change for them. It indicated how rapidly the measure of their iniquities had meanwhile been filling up, and how near the forbearance of heaven had come to its termination. Nor can we reasonably doubt, that the change from the first to the second commission was perfectly known to the people of Nineveh before the message of the prophet had produced its due effect upon their minds. In the brief notice that is given of his labours at Nineveh, we have manifestly nothing more than the substance of his preaching, without the circumstantials, which were still essentially connected with its extraordinary success. And as we have already shown that the people must, either from spontaneous communications on Jonah's part, or, as is more probable, in answer to their own anxious inquiries, have become acquainted with his previous history, in order to his being such a sign to them as God's purpose required, we can have the less difficulty in conceiving that not only the message ultimately delivered, but that also which should have been delivered at an earlier stage of the history, were alike made known to them.

It is true, the people might have remained ignorant of any thing either in the past history of Jonah himself, or in the comparative stringency of the two messages he had received concerning them. They might have treated his appearance and his cry in their streets with supercilious scorn, as the act of a dreaming enthusiast; or, looking to their own lofty walls and numerous defences, they might have asked with an incredulous sneer, where the enemy was to be found that in forty days could level these with the dust? But it is to the credit of the Ninevites that they gave a different reception to this message of heaven. They neither treated the message itself with mockery, nor the bearer of it with violence and insult, but brought their minds with one accord to consider the peculiar circumstances in which they were placed, and to know the whole of the matter. Let us try to picture to our minds the wonderful phenomenon that then presented itself in Nineveh. A stranger of foreign mien appears of a sudden in the streets, crying aloud, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” He passes on from one portion of the city to another, and still the same cry is heard from his lips; he has no other word. Who and what is he? Is it a madman who thus speaks, or a mocker, who delights to “scatter firebrands, arrows, and death?” His intelligent and sober aspect forbids the supposition; he bears himself as a man deeply in earnest, and alive to the awful importance of the work he has in hand; and the very oneness of the message he delivers that he has just this solitary message to proclaim seems to betoken all the more an assured conviction of the truth and certainty of it. The busy crowd is by and by arrested; a solemn awe steals over the minds of the people; they press around the preacher to know whence he is, and why he utters such an ominous cry in their streets; and learning, as they now do, that so far from lightly speaking evil concerning them, he had already at the hazard of his life shrunk from executing the charge committed to him shrunk from executing it when it simply required him to testify against the sins that prevailed in the midst of them that he had been cast out for his wilful reluctance into the mighty deep, and miraculously restored only that he might be sent forth anew, with a still more severe and urgent message, to utter the loud cry they now heard of approaching destruction: learning all this concerning Jonah and his burden, how solemn and perilous must their situation have appeared in their eyes! Though personally a stranger to them, this man's fortunes, it seems, have yet been most intimately bound up with theirs; he has undergone wonderful and unheard-of things on their account. And the tide of divine wrath, all unconsciously to them, has been rising higher and higher around them, till it has left them as prisoners of justice on an isolated point, ready to be swept away into the devouring gulf! What grounds for serious consideration and alarm! (It is, of course, quite conceivable, and by no means unlikely, that certain events or circumstances in providence may have concurred with the appearance and preaching of Jonah to enforce and deepen this impression upon the minds of the people. There may have been accompanying signs of terror in the elements of nature, threatening an earthquake; or in the expected assault of some hostile neighbours, such as might give to the doom announced by the prophet the aspect of a near and pressing reality. But, whatever probability there may be in such conjectures, they still belong to the region of conjecture, and are not to be much accounted of. We have to do simply with the known facts of the case.)