The Pulpit Commentary — Jonah — Section 71

11There le not the greatest minister, not the mollt learned or acute, but muet observe this rule; not Jamee, not John, not Peter, not all the troop of the apostles, may once vary from this: he who she.II bring other doctrine, let him be accursed by us ; he who speaketh of himself, let him be refused by us; howsoever godly or holy he do pretend himself, yet if he decline that word which should be his direction, let him be declined by us" (Abbot). Here is o.n admirable maxim for universal use, "according to the Word.of the Lord." -It is good, and wise, and true, and pertinent to every case, and the key to every puzzle of life. Are you a sinner? there is salva.tion for you, full, and free, and present, and "according to the Word of the Lord." Are you a seeker? expect to find, for salvation is in Christ, and of those that come to him there are none cast out," according to the Word of the Lord." .Are you a saint? then fight and persist and hope; for that you are " kept· by the power of God," and will yet "reap if you faint not," is "&e90rding to the Word of the Lord."-J. E. H. Vera. ~10.-.A heathen city in sac/scloth. Let us try to realize the scene. An Eastern oity sleeps in the rosy morning light. Its moated ramparts tower a hundred feet ii!- air, and, dotted with fifteen hundred lofty towers, sweep around it a length of over sixty miles. Already the gates are open for the early traffic, and conspicuous among the crowd a stranger enters. The stains of travel are on his dress, and he looks with curious nwe at the figures of winged colossal bulls that keep silent symbolic guard over the gate by which he passes in. Within, things new and strange appear at every step. The houses, sittiag each in its own grounds, are bowered in green. The streets are spanned at intervals with triumphal arches, whose entablature is enriched by many .a sculptured story. On every eminence is a palace, or monument, or idol temple, guarded by symbolic monsters in stone, and adorned in carving of bas-relief with sacred symbols. 'l'he markets fill, the bazaars are alive with multifarious dealing, soldiers and war-chariots parade the streets, and the evidences of despotic power and barbaric wealth and heathenish worship, with their inevitable accompaniments of luxury, corruption, and violence, 3bou.nd on every side, The stranger is deeply moved. Surprise gives place to horror, then horror warms into righteous indignation; and with trumpet voice and dilating form and eye of fire he utters the words of doom, "Yet forty days, and :Nineveh shall be destroyed." Through street, and park, and barrack, and bazaar the direful message rings. There is momentary incredulity, then swift alarm, then utter consterna- tion. Like wildfire the news, and with it the panic spreads. It reaches the nobles in their palaces. It penetrates to the king upon his throne. It moves society to its depths. And the result is the scenes of mourning and self-abasement our text records. .· I. REPENTANCE CO!tl.EB READILY TO UNTUTORED MINDS. Never did preacher see better or speedier fruit of his labours than Jonah did in heathen Nineveh. By 11, single -sermon but a few sentences long he sent the entire city into penitence and sackcloth. Granted that there was much to account for this in the preaching itself. It was bold .and oracular and explicit, and spoken with the conviction that is most of all contagious. It was enforced by such a narrative of his own recent history as made him nothing less than a sign to the men of Nineveh (Luke xi. 30). Granted too "the great sus- ceptibility of Oriental races to emotion, the awe of one Supreme Being which is peculiar to all the heathen religions of Asia, and the great esteem in which soothsaying and oracles were held in Assyria from the very earliest times" (Keil), Yet still the repent- a.nce,.so. widespread, so real, so s11dden, has in it something phenomenal in the religious sphere,, Not thus did the prophets and their utterances move the Jews. They" beat one, and killed 11nother, and stoned another," and disregarded all as a general rule (Matt, xxi. 35), A greater than Jonah, the Truth himself, spoke to them, and spoke in vain (Matt. xii. 41), Unbelieving and lengthened contact with truth had no doubt produced the exceptional hardness of the Jewish nature. The works done in vain in the gospel-hardened Chorazin or Bethsaida would, as we know, have brought Tyre and Sidon to repentance in dust and ashes. Even filthy Sodom would have oleansed its way, and been spared on earth, had it seen the mighty works by which Capernaum was yet utterly unmoved (Matt. xi. 20-24). So when the soil of the Jewish nature, piled with the truth-seed till trodden hard by the sowers' feet, refused utterly to produce, the apostles found a fertile seed-bed in the virgin soil of the Gentile mind ,{Acts xiii, 44-48). An analogous fact is the success of Christ among the commou  68 THE BOOK OF JONAH. [cH. m.1-1~