THE KING’S BUSINESS
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Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be over thrown.” There were many things worth seeing in Nineveh, but Jonah did not spend any of his time sight-seeing. He had gone there for work, not for pleasure, and he began at once crying out, “Yet forty days and Nineveh, shall be overthrown.” He cried that because that was what God told him. to cry. To some with their modern ideas of preaching to men, it would have seemed better if Jonah had given a few preliminary discourses on the authority of the Word of God, or proof of his own prophetic calling, or “on the agreement be tween his message and current scientific and philosophical op i n i on s o r the argument for the existence and retributive justice of God. Instead of doing this he preached the plain, straight, blunt truth, without compromise or concession ; that is, he preached the Word of God, and that is the kind of preaching that counts (Isaiah 51:11; Luke 1:37). If some one had said to Jonah, “We want argument and not mere assertion,” he would simply have cried out again, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” The form of the warning itself showed that the ful fillment of the prediction was conditioned upon continuance in sin, “Yet forty days.” Those forty days were days of testing and opportunity for repentance. Forty is always the number of testing and probation in the Bible. Jonah’s God-given warning was in tended in mercy and not in wrath, and that is true of all God’s sternest warnings. Some may have thought Jonah a “harsh and cruel” preacher, but the kindest thing a man can do is to warn people of impending judgment, and the unkindest preacher in the world is the one who slurs over God’s warn ings and speaks of only the smooth things. Warning and opportunity for repentance usually precede judgment in God’s dealings with men (Luke 13:8, 9). Jonah did not hesitate to appeal to fear. No true preacher ever hesitates to appeal to fear. The shal low philosophy of our present day tells us that we ought not to appeal to fear, but to some higher motive; but every sane and ra tional man is moved by rational fear in
some of his actions every day of his life. The only man who is not moved by fear is the idiot. In this case'the appeal was ef fective, as it usually is. Jonah had the com fort and joy of knowing that he had de clared the whole counsel of God (cf. Jer. 1 : 17; Acts 20:27). v. 5. "So the people of Nineveh believed God.” The first step in Nineveh’s repent ance was that they “believed God.” That is always the first step in true repentance. It was by believing Jonah, who was God’s prophet, that they had believed God him self. To doubt God’s Word as spoken by a divinely commissioned teacher is to doubt God Himself (John 13:20). It always pays to believe God ; it is the shortest and surest road to real blessing (2 Chron. 20:20). If there had been any “liberal theologians” in Nineveh they would have taught the people that Jonah’s warning should be taken only as a poem and that they should be on their guard against slavish literalism and must not take Jonah’s prediction too literally. “Proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.” The people of Nineveh showed they “believed God” first of all by humbling themselves before Him. From the greatest to the least of them they fasted and put on sackcloth. Everyone who truly believes God and what God says about our natural con dition, will be brought under conviction of sin and will show it by humbling himself before the God against whom he has sinned. The revival under Jonah was of the deep and thorough-going kind, and reached all classes of society. vs. 6, 8. “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 anything; let them not feed, nor drink water; but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence
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