Flowers of Thy heart, 0 God, are they, Let them not pass, like weeds, away.
Tf In poor cottages, looking so destitute one hardly likes to enter them, women nurse flowers calling them "pets" and " beauties," and cherishing them as gently as though the flowers could smile on them, and repay them for their care. These women know what it is to love the plants ; and many a one is bound by this tenderness to a world of men and women which else she might regard with selfish, bitter scorn. The " little ewe lamb," says Nathan, the prophet, that the poor man had, " lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter." Over the wretched, gloomy Jonah, sprung up the wondrous plant, and its leaves and tendrils drew off his thoughts from himself; and as he w .itched it grow, a new interest was awakened in him. His heart softened to the plant ; and the man who, a little before, despised his own life and scorned all Nineveh, becomes strangely tender and reveren- tial over a gourd. There is something wonderful in life, even though it be the life of a common weed. Such things speak to us, however faintly we may understand them, of an awful power that forms, and an ever watchful care that tends them : they are " fear- fully and wonderfully made." Around us are manifold influences to wean us from perverse melancholy, and draw us out of ourselves. Jonah loves his gourd, and " has pity " on it when it is smitten,1
1 A. Mackennal, Christ's Healing Touch, 96.
350 THE WIDENESS OF GOD'S MERCY
3. Notice the exceeding gentleness with which God reproves and seeks to restore the angry prophet. He does not follow him again with terrors, as when He pursued him with shipwreck, and caused the depths to close around him, and wrapped his head about with weeds, and barred the earth about him, and made his soul to faint within him. The disobedient are constrained by a force too strong for them ; but even the ungracious doing of duty brings the spirit into fitness for gentler discipline. The Lord cares for Jonah in his self-will : He " prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his evil case. So Jonah was exceeding glad because of the gourd." And when He smites the gourd, and sends the vehement east wind and burning sun to beat on Jonah's head, it is that He may speak in words gentler than the gourd-shade, and reveal Himself to the stricken spirit as " the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." How different is this from man ! We should have said, " Let Jonah experience to the full the barrenness and bitterness he has brought upon himself ; let the life he scorns be taken from him." So we speak, repaying scorn with scorn, glad that the self-absorbed man is his own tormentor. " My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord."
Tj What is the Divine gospel which, through this Book of Jonah, is revealed to us ? In a word it is this : that God cares for the sinners of Nineveh as well as for the saints of Jerusalem ; that little children and even dumb cattle are dear to Him ; that His tender mercies are over all His works. Where in all the Old Testament is there so moving a parable of the love of God ? Is not this the very tone and temper of Jesus Himself ? " Out there, beyond the Covenant, in the great world lying in darkness " — this was the truth our author told into the prejudiced faces of his people — « there live, not beings created for ignorance and hostility to God, elect for destruction, but men with consciences and hearts, able to turn at His Word, and to hope in His Mercy — that to the farthest ends of the world, and even in the high places of un- righteousness, Word and Mercy work just as they do within the Covenant." And so this little book, which to some of us, perhaps, has seemed little more than a strange fairy-tale, or a riddle of which we had lost the key, " opens out," in the words of Mr. R C. Gillie, " like an exquisite rose till we find in the heart of it the glowing crimson of the love of God." 1
1 G. Jackson, Studies in the Old Testament, 154.
JONAH iv. 10, ii 351
4. But there is an implied argument, which takes us deeper into the heart of God. The prophet pitied the gourd because it had been useful to him, giving him shelter from the fierce Eastern sun. But the gourd was not of his making ; he had not spent labour of heart and brain upon its growth. God has a far closer relation to men than the prophet had to the gourd, " for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow." God has done all that for men ; He has laboured for them and made them grow. God is our Maker. That is an elementary thought of God, but the author of the Book of Jonah discovers a gospel in it. There are other names for God, richer, perhaps, more endearing — Shepherd, Father, Saviour. But here is the ground-fact of religion — God our Maker. The Hundredth Psalm says joyously, " It is he that hath made us, and we are his." These words are the ground of God's claim on us, and we may reverently add that they are the ground of our claim on God. It is part of Job's pathetic appeal out of his agony of loss and pain, " Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about ; yet thou dost destroy me." Every man loves, to some extent, the thing he has made, which has taken something of himself into it, which he has watched with keen interest as it slowly arose to the fulness of its being. How much more must God love the souls whom He has made in His image, capable of unravelling and following His thoughts in the courses of the stars, and all the vast interplay of Nature's forces, capable of reaching out to Him in love and aspiration after the highest. How beautifully and truly is it said in the Wisdom of Solomon, " Thou lovest all things that are, and abhorrest none of the things which thou didst make; for never wouldest thou have formed anything if thou didst hate it " ! The fact that God has made us is a proof that He loves us. Creation is full of the loving joy of the Creator in His works.