Jonah: The Book And The Man

The Book Itself

The book of Jonah is the most charming bit of autobiography in the Bible, a drama of real life in three acts; a masterpiece of inspired story. The fascination of the book lies in its candor; its charm in its graphic descriptions. Short—a matter of five minutes reading—four chapters, forty-eight verses, 1,328 words; it is a study for time and eternity, a marvelous unfolding of the secrets of the soul. It is of interest to us because it is the story of a man who was a minister; an open air preacher, a city evangelist, a missionary, with all the faults and foibles, with all the weaknesses and pettinesses of the ministerial soul.

The book is one of the twelve prophets commonly called the Minor, though, nothing is major or minor in God’s Word. All Scripture is given by the inspiration of God, and though all is not equally valuable, all is equally inspired, for canonicity involves inspiration.

The Writer

The writer was Jonah the prophet, a man of ministerial family, and from the North. He was a Galilean by nature, and displays many of the characteristics of Peter and John. A man of impulse, of moods, easily upset, and of fickle temper and excitable; like many theological students, and young ministers, inclined to do rash things fatuously; a man of small sympathy with men, narrowly intolerant. But in spite of his impulsiveness, and narrowness in texture of thought, he was possessed of latent qualities of nobility that needed only to be evoked and ennobled by the winsome Spirit of the Lord.

The Call

To the average man, there is something appalling in the over-exaggeration of the untried and the distant. The spirit shrinks. That awful instinct of cowardice which is latent in sudden surprise of an unexpected call to assume a great obligation. As the voice of the Lord is heard saying, “Whom shall I send, Who will go for us? Lo, I will send thee far hence to the Gentiles,” there looms up large and terrific [in] us all [which] involves us in a very nerve-collapse of sudden fear. “Go to Nineveh? What? That awful city? So evil? So wicked, and cry against it! I cannot; I cannot.”

The Flight

“Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.” We all know how that is. We all know how God sometimes lays hold of mind and conscience with voices that call from deep to deep, and height to height; and yet when one of those calls comes, whether to the city, or to country, or to mission station far away, we know, we feel we ought to go, and then as if every element of revolt that ever stirred in our reluctant will was excited into a flame of rebellion, we say, “Impossible, impossible,” and we hurry from the presence of the Lord. Yes! There is not only something appalling in the sudden surprise of an unexpected summons like that, but there is always something appalling in the sin that stares at us from the midst of a multitude of men.

It is hard to talk to a city man about his soul. It is hard to talk to a city man about his sin. And there is not a worker, there is not a minister, who does not know the meaning of those words: “He rose up to flee from the presence of the Lord and went down.” Down? I should think he did go down. Down to Joppa? Yes. Down unto the ship? Yes. Down into the very hold? Yes. Down into the sea? Yes. Down into the very heart of the bottom of the deep, down to the bottom of the subaqueous mountains (2:6)? Yes. But that was nothing compared with the depth of the misery and the profundity of his self-reproach as he went down from the height of communion and gladness and joy and duty.

And ever as he went, there rang in his recreant ears, the burden of the Lord: “Go to Nineveh! Go to Nineveh.” Even as today in many a city and country parish in our land, the voice of the Lord, that still small inextinguishable voice is crying day in and day out, year in and year out, to many a worker, and many a minister in the luxury of city parish or country parsonage: Go to Cairo! Go to Calcutta! Go to Tokyo! Go to Teheran! Go to Central Africa, or to the Isles of the Sea!

So Jonah rose up to flee from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa, punctilious about the payment of the fare while omitting the weightier matters of obedience and mercy and faith. To flee from the presence of the Lord. Ah, he couldn’t do that. No, thank God, he couldn’t do that. He follows us even when we do not follow him.

The Divine Intervention

And then came the storm! We do not wonder there was a storm. There is a God in heaven, and His name is Love. The God of love was behind that storm and shipwreck. There was mercy and goodness in that tempest. Every flash of lightning was lit by loving kindness, and in every billow that buffeted the frail vessel, there was a loving Father’s tenderness. We make our little plans and God upsets them. We try to go far from Him, and we find He is still before us. O thank God for the stoppages, and the breakdowns of our lives; the storms that stay and overwhelm and destroy. Far up to the East and North is the Nineveh of Divine direction; far off to the West is the Tarshish of our infatuated impulse.

That question of the captain to the sleeping prophet is one of those questions that has sunk deep into the heart of the universal reader; the man of God rebuked by the man of the world; the expostulation of the man who knew to the man who ought to have known; the exhortation of the man who was a heathen with the man who was named in the name of Jehovah. It is a rebuke that may be made to many a modern Christian, and many a minister. We are living in stirring tempestuous times. The storms of life are raging all around us. Men of enthusiasm and intensity, earnest men, working, striving, straining every nerve, realize the gravity of life, and here and there in these times of storm, are men of God asleep. O incredible infatuation! O incredible stupidity. Do we wonder that the man of the world ofttimes rebukes the sleeping man of God for his indifference and lack of prayer? Do we wonder at their indignant surprise at ministerial inconsistency?

The rest of the story: the sailors’ soliloquy and lot-casting; their four-fold question to the discovered Jonah, his frank confession, and their contagious fear and sympathy are only part of this marvelous life story of the man who was humbled by God and made willing to tell the story of his fall (1:7–10).

There are two points here, though, that are of interest; the first is the nobility of these men. I have lived among sailors, and I can testify that it is marvelously true to life. They are a fine class of men. There are fine and heroic elements of self-sacrifice in them. I do not wonder our Savior chose His apostles from men of this type. There is a humanity and fellow sympathy in these rough men that almost startles us. This man Jonah had caused them a great deal of trouble. He was at the bottom of all that storm and loss. Yet how noble these men were in their consideration for him! Yes. There is a nobility, an unselfishness, a glamor of self-sacrifice in men like these that often is not found in Christians.

And notice, too, how the nobility of the sailors evoked a respondent nobility in Jonah. “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea. . .for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you” (Jonah 1:12). It was as if he said, “I will die for you.” But they tried hard to row, and did all in their rude, rough way to save their fellow man. But failing, with a prayer for pardon, they took up Jonah and cast him into the sea and offered their sacrifice unto the Lord (Jonah 1:14–16).

Three Days In The Depths

Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the bowels of the fish three days and three nights.

Do you believe that? Do you believe that man could be three days inside the bowels of a great fish, of the sperm or whale or of the shark or any other variety and live beneath the waters of the sea for that length of time? Certainly I do. I believe it because the Bible affirms it. I believe it because the Master reaffirms it. I believe it because it sounds true. It sounds true? Yes. It has the ring of truth. The ingenious and evasive theories of the German critics, for all their cleverness, do not sound true. But it is wonderful. Quite so. But it is extraordinary. Quite so. Is that strange in a wonderful book—a book that comes from Him Whose name is wonderful? Is that extraordinary in a world full of the extraordinary? Is that extraordinary in a book full of the supernatural? O Lord, how manifold are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all.

It has been well said that a man would as soon continue to work and live after his vital organs have been removed, as Christianity to remain Christianity, or the Bible be the Bible, after the miracles have been eliminated. You cannot vitalize the Christian faith by destroying the vitals of the Christian faith. Without miracles, Christianity would be infinitely more miraculous than with them. Our blessed Lord Jesus appealed again and again to His mighty works without a blush and without apology. When then should we attempt to naturalize and apologize and neutralize with such studied care?

Chapter 2 contains the prayer of Jonah when in the depths. Like many great prayers, it was evoked by trouble. It was very earnest (I cried, I cried, v. 2), very humble, uncomplaining, submissive, and unrebellious (v. 3), very hopeful (v. 4), very personal and believing (v. 6), very scriptural (Psalm 42:7), very practical (v. 9), and very grateful.

It had a grand conclusion, a glorious conclusion. Salvation is of the Lord. This is all evangelical theology in a nutshell. It is the glorious Gospel of God’s grace in epitome.

The Second Chance

“And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time” (Jonah 3:1). Oh, it was love. It was wonderous love. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us. He hath not dealt with us after our sins. The Lord is merciful and gracious. The Lord is good, and His mercy endureth forever.

Oh, do not judge yourself, do not judge others; do not judge anyone from first failure. The best is yet to be. Oh, what would I have been today if it had not been for the second chance! As for me, my feet were almost gone, my steps had well nigh slipped. But the Word of the Lord, the word of pardon and peace, came unto me a second time, even as of old it did unto Moses and David and Peter and Thomas and Mark.

A Mighty Revival

The second time! But it is the first message. It is the Word of the Lord; the old, old story with a new meaning; a fresh delight, a novel sense of power. So Jonah rose and went. Tramp, tramp, tramp, the lonely man trudges over the sands, away off there to the northeast. But there is no fear now. There is no cowardice now. For it was according to the Word of the Lord that he went. And when he got to Nineveh, boldly he cried until that great city was shaken from circumference to center; from the greatest to the least; from the king on his throne to the poorest of the paupers. They believed God. They cried mightily to God. They turned from their sins. They fasted.

All Things Possible With God

But it is impossible! What is impossible? That a great city should be spiritually revolutionized, and that the records should say nothing about it. The city newspapers of today are not given to recording the mighty works of God’s Spirit, as you all know. But it is impossible! Who says so? Why the rationalist say so. The higher critics say so. What do they say? They say it is contrary to analogy. Contrary to analogy? I should think it was! Thank God, it was contrary to analogy! Pentecost was contrary to analogy, and every manifestation of God’s power from that day to this. But all things are possible with God, and all things are possible to him who believed.

Human To The End

As to the rest of the story—how exceedingly angry the prophet became, and how the gourd grew up in the night, and was withered, and how God expostulated with him for his narrowness and petulance like a pouting boy in the sulks, is it not written in the fourth chapter, and does it not show the power of the mighty Spirit who records with such fidelity a good man’s faults and foibles and a true man’s limitations? I have seen it all. I know it all. Oh, it is so true to life. The smallness of the man of clerical mind; their little jealousies, and narrowness; yes, selfishness. To treat this as poetry, whose figures are drawn from legends and myths, is not only to sin against the common sense which God has given us but against the simple and obvious intention of the author. It betrays such an absolute failure to appreciate the standpoint of the writer. It is blindness both to reason and to Scripture. How long, O Lord, must Thy prose suffer from those who only treat it as poetry. How long, O Lord, must Thy words of truth so real, so simply told in the natural and believable tones of truth, suffer from the incredible obtuseness of men who at the dictate of an invincible rationalism would fain destroy and denude and evacuate the Word of fact into legend, history into allegory, and miracle into myth?

A Closing Personal Appeal

Young men, young women, candidates for God’s hero roll, be willing to go to the hardest places. Let others take the easy, do you take the hard. God’s calls are high calls, oftimes hard calls. The grandest trial beds for character are the difficult posts. That was a noble saying of one of your American leaders to her graduating class, “Go,” said she, “when you choose your fields of labor, go where nobody else is willing to go.”

This is the word of the Lord that comes to His servants today as it did to Jonah: “Go to Nineveh! Arise, and go to Nineveh!”

Message from The Third Annual Conference on Summer Evangelism and Open Air Work, The Moody Church, May 31–June 3, 1910.