Verse-by-Verse Bible Commentary
Jonah 2:10

Clarke's Commentary

Verse :-. And the Lord spake unto the fish — That is, by his influence the fish swam to shore, and cast Jonah on the dry land. So the whole was a miracle from the beginning to the end; and we need not perplex ourselves to find out literal interpretations; such as, "When Jonah was thrown overboard he swam for his life, earnestly praying God to preserve him from drowning; and by his providence he was thrown into a place of fish-a fishing cove, where he was for a time entangled among the weeds, and hardly escaped with his life; and when safe, he composed this poetic prayer, in metaphorical language, which some have wrongly interpreted, by supposing that he was swallowed by a fish; when dag should have been understood, as a place of fish, or fishing creek," c. Now I say the original has no such meaning in the Bible: and this gloss is plainly contrary to the letter of the text to all sober and rational modes of interpretation; and to the express purpose for which God appears to have wrought this miracle, and to which Jesus Christ himself applies it. For as Jonah was intended for a sign to the Jews of the resurrection of Christ, they were to have the proof of this semiosis, in his lying as long in the heart of the earth as the prophet was in the belly of the fish; and all interpretations of this kind go to deny both the sign and the thing signified. Some men, because they cannot work a miracle themselves, can hardly be persuaded that GOD can do it.

The text, and the use made of it by Christ, most plainly teach us that the prophet was literally swallowed by a fish, by the order of God; and that by the Divine power he was preserved alive, for what is called three days and three nights, in the stomach of the fish; and at the conclusion of the above time that same fish was led by the unseen power of God to the shore, and there compelled to eject the prey that he could neither kill nor digest. And how easy is all this to the almighty power of the Author and Sustainer of life, who has a sovereign, omnipresent, and energetic sway in the heavens and in the earth. But foolish man will affect to be wise; though, in such cases, he appears as the recently born, stupid offspring of the wild ass. It is bad to follow fancy, where there is so much at stake. Both ancients and moderns have grievously trifled with this prophet's narrative; merely because they could not rationally account for the thing, and were unwilling (and why?) to allow any miraculous interference.

Bridgeway Bible Commentary

2:1-10 A PSALM OF THANKSGIVING

Jonah regained consciousness inside the great fish. This almost unbelievable experience caused him to believe that it was God’s way of saving his life. From inside the fish he then thanked God for saving him from drowning. He seems to have remembered phrases from various psalms and prayers used in temple worship, and he brought these together to form his own prayer of thanksgiving.
In the opening words of the psalm Jonah recalled his prayer of desperation as he found himself overcome by the rough seas. He was sinking into what he feared was the world of the dead (2:1-3). As he sank deeper, the pressure of water increased and he could feel himself losing consciousness. He felt that his end had come and that he would be cut off from God for ever (4-6). The next thing he knew was that he was alive, inside the great fish. God had answered his prayer and saved him (7-8).
Jonah had no idea how he would return to the world of his fellow human beings, but he knew that if God had done this much for him, the same God would finish his work and save him fully. In confidence he offered thanks for his salvation, even though it was still not complete. God rewarded his faith and gratitude by delivering him from the fish (9-10).
Various attempts have been made to prove and disprove that a person could be swallowed by a great fish or whale and still live. Regardless of these arguments, the events described in Jonah were still the miraculous work of God. It was highly unlikely that such an animal should have been at the spot where Jonah was thrown overboard, that it should have swallowed him, and that the place it vomited him up should have been near the mainland shore. The entire course of events to this point, as well as what was to follow, was a demonstration of God’s sovereignty. He had complete power over the natural world, he was in control of events, and he showed mercy on sinners.

Coffman's Commentaries on the Bible

"And Jehovah spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land."

"Jonah's deliverance is the only pleasant usage of the word vomit in the whole Bible."William L. Banks, op. cit., p. 67. We do not know, of course, exactly where Jonah was deposited on dry land; but Josephus stated that it was upon the shore of the Euxine sea.Flavius Josephus, translated by William Whiston (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), p. 293. If that was true, the great fish passed through the Dardenelles before depositing him, thus following the strong current which is mentioned in Jonah's prayer. Some have quibbled about how Jonah got his information about being in the fish "three days and three nights"; and we cannot give a positive answer to that either; however, as an inspired prophet of God he accurately foretold the calm that would follow his being thrown overboard; and it appears that this was a far more wonderful knowledge than that of the exact time he was inside the fish. We may therefore trust the holy record implicitly.

An ancient poem attributed to Tertullian describes Jonah's deliverance thus:

"His sails… the intestines of a fish; Himself shut in by waters, yet untouched;
In the sea's heart, and yet beyond its reach;
Mid wrecks of fleets
Half eaten, and men's carcasses dissolved
In putrid disintegrity: in life
Learning the process of his death; but still-
To be a sign hereafter of the Lord,
To witness was he in his very self,
Not of destruction, but of death's repulse!"Tertullian. Appendix, in Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), p. 293.

Barnes' Notes on the Whole Bible

And the Lord spake unto the fish - Psalms 148:8. Wind and storm fulfill His word. The irrational creatures have wills. God had commanded the prophet, and he disobeyed. God, in some way, commanded the fish. He laid His will upon it, and the fish immediately obeyed; a pattern to the prophet when He released him. “God’s will, that anything should be completed, is law and fulfillment and hath the power of law. Not that Almighty God commanded the fish, as He does us or the holy angels, uttering in its mind what is to be done, or inserting into the heart the knowledge of what He chooseth. But if He be said to command irrational animals or elements or any part of the creation, this signifieth the law and command of His will. For all things yield to His will, and the mode of their obedience is to us altogether ineffable, but known to Him.” “Jonah,” says Chrysostom, “fled the land, and fled not the displeasure of God. He fled the land, and brought a tempest on the sea: and not only himself gained no good from flight, but brought into extreme peril those also who took him on board. When he sailed, seated in the vessel, with sailors and pilot and all the tackling, he was in the most extreme peril: when, sunk in the sea, the sin punished and laid aside, he entered that vast vessel, the fish’s belly, he enjoyed great fearlessness; that thou mayest learn that, as no ship availeth to one living in sin, so when freed from sin, neither sea destroyeth, nor beasts consume. The waves received him, and choked him not; the vast fish received him and destroyed him not; but both the huge animal and the clement gave back their deposit safe to God, and by all things the prophet learned to be mild and tender, not to be more cruel than the untaught mariners or wild waves or animals.

For the sailors did not give him up at first, but after manifold constraint; and the sea and the wild animal guarded him with much benevolence, God disposing all these things. He returned then, preached, threatened, persuaded, saved, awed, amended, stablished, through that one first preaching. For he needed not many days, nor continuous exhortation; but, speaking these words he brought all to repentance. Wherefore God did not lead him straight from the vessel to the city; but the sailors gave him over to the sea, the sea to the vast fish, the fish to God, God to the Ninevites, and through this long circuit brought back the fugitive; that He might instruct all, that it is impossible to escape the hands of God. For come where a man may, dragging sin after him, he will undergo countless troubles. Though man be not there, nature itself on all sides will oppose him with great vehemence.”

“Since the elect too at times strive to be sharp-witted, it is well to bring forward another wise man, and show how the craft of mortal man is comprehended in the Inward Counsels. For Jonah wished to exercise a prudent sharpness of wit, when, being sent to preach repentance to the Ninevites, in that he feared that, if the Gentiles were chosen, Judaea would be forsaken, he refused to discharge the office of preaching. He sought a ship, chose to flee to Tarshish; but immediately a tempest arises, the lot is cast, to know for whose fault the sea was troubled. Jonah is taken in his fault, plunged in the deep, swallowed by the fish, and carried by the vast beast thither whither he set at naught the command to go. See how the tempest found God’s runaway, the lot binds him, the sea receives him, the beast encloses him, and, because he sets himself against obeying his Maker, he is carried a culprit by his prison house to the place whither he had been sent.

When God commanded, man would not minister the prophecy; when God enjoined, the beast cast forth the prophet. The Lord then “taketh the wise in their own craftiness,” when He bringeth back to the service of His own will, that whereby man’s will contradicts Him.” “Jonah, fleeing from the perils of preaching and salvation of souls, fell into peril of his own life. When, in the ship, he took on himself the peril of all, he saved both himself and the ship. He fled as a man; he exposed himself to peril, as a prophet” . “Let them think so, who are sent by God or by a superior to preach to heretics or to pagan. When God calleth to an office or condition whose object it is to live for the salvation of others, He gives grace and means necessary or expedient to this end. For so the sweet and careful ordering of His Providence requireth. Greater peril awaiteth us from God our Judge, if we flee His calling as did Jonah, if we use not the talents entrusted to us to do His will and to His glory. We know the parable of the servant who buried the talent, and was condemned by the Lord.”

And it vomited out Jonah - Unwilling, but constrained, it cast him forth as a burden to it . “From the lowest depths of death, Life came forth victorious.” “He is swallowed by the fish, but is not consumed; and then calls upon God, and (marvel!) on the third day is given back with Christ.” “What it prefigured, that that vast animal on the third day gave back alive the prophet which it had swallowed, no need to ask of us, since Christ explained it. As then Jonah passed from the ship into the fish’s belly, so Christ from the wood into the tomb or the depth of death. And as he for those imperiled in the tempest, so Christ for those tempest-tossed in this world. And as Jonah was first enjoined to preach to the Ninevites, but the preaching of Jonah did not reach them before the fish cast him forth, so prophecy was sent beforehand to the Gentiles, but did not reach them until after the resurrection of Christ” . “Jonah prophesied of Christ, not so much in words as by a suffering of his own; yet more openly than if he had proclaimed by speech His Death and Resurrection. For why was he received into the fish’s belly, and given back the third day, except to signify that Christ would on the third day return from the deep of hell?”

Irenaeus looks upon the history of Jonah as the imaging of man’s own history . “As He allowed Jonah to be swallowed by the whale, not that he should perish altogether, but that, being vomited forth, he might the more be subdued to God, and the more glorify God Who had given him such unlooked for deliverance, and bring those Ninevites to solid repentance, converting them to the Lord Who would free them from death, terrified by that sign which befell Jonah (as Scripture says of them, ‘They turned every man from his evil way, etc. ...’) so from the beginning, God allowed man to be swallowed up by that vast Cetos who was the author of the transgression, not that he should altogether perish but preparing a way of salvation, which, as foresignified by the word in Jonah, was formed for those who had the like faith as to the Lord as Jonah, and with him confessed, “I fear the Lord, etc.” that so man, receiving from God unlooked for salvation, might rise from the dead and glorify God, etc. ... This was the longsuffering of God, that man might pass through all, and acknowledge his ways; then, coming to the resurrection and knowing by trial from what he had been delivered, might be forever thankful to God, and, having received from Him the gift of incorruption, might love Him more (for he to whom much is forgiven, loveth much) and know himself, that he is mortal and weak, and understand the Lord, that He is in such wise Mighty and Immortal, that to the mortal He can give immortality and to the things of time eternity.”

Calvin's Commentary on the Bible

The deliverance of Jonah is here in few words described; but how attentively ought we to consider the event? It was an incredible miracle, that Jonah should have continued alive and safe in the bowels of the fish for three days. For how was it that he was not a thousand times smothered or drowned by waters? We know that fish continually draw in water: Jonah could not certainly respire while in the fish; and the life of man without breathing can hardly continue for a minute. Jonah, then, must have been preserved beyond the power of nature. Then how could it have been that the fish should cast forth Jonah on the shore, except God by his unsearchable power had drawn the fish there? Again, who could have supernaturally opened its bowels and its mouth? His coming forth, then, was in every way miraculous, yea, it was attended with many miracles.

But Jonah, that he might the more extol the infinite power of God, adopted the word said. Hence we learn that nothing is hard to God, for he could by a nod only effect so great a thing as surpasses all our conceptions. If Jonah had said that he was delivered by God’s kindness and favor, it would have been much less emphatical, than when he adopts a word which expresses a command, And Jehovah spake, or said, to the fish.

But as this deliverance of Jonah is an image of the resurrection, this is an extraordinary passage, and worthy of being especially noticed; for the Holy Spirit carries our minds to that power by which the world was formed and is still wonderfully preserved. That we may then, without hesitation and doubt, be convinced of the restoration which God promises to us, let us remember that the world was by him created out of nothing by his word and bidding, and is still thus sustained. But if this general truth is not sufficient, let this history of Jonah come to our minds, — that God commanded a fish to cast forth Jonah: for how was it that Jonah escaped safe and was delivered? Even because it so pleased God, because the Lord commanded; and this word at this day retains the same efficacy. By that power then, by which he works all things, we also shall one day be raised up from the dead. Now follows —

Smith's Bible Commentary

Chapter 2

Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish's belly ( Jonah 2:1 ),

Jonah must have been a stubborn man indeed that he would wait three days and three nights before he would begin to pray. He was determined not to take the gospel to the Gentiles. He was determined not to go, sitting it out for three days and three nights.

Now he describes the conditions that he was in.

And he said, I cried by reason of my affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I ( Jonah 2:2 ),

He thought the conditions... he maybe even thought he died and gone to hell. After all, he was trying to run from God, and it was so hot, 98.6 if it were a whale and it's a mammal, so it has a 98.6 temperature, body temperature, beside the heat, the humidity that must have been inside that whale. The gastric juices sloshing around him, the seaweed wrapped around his head. "Out of my affliction, out of hell I cried,"

and you heard my voice. For you had cast me into the deep, into the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all of thy billows and thy waves passed over me ( Jonah 2:2-3 ).

It is interesting that most of his prayer can be found in the Psalms. Jonah evidently had a very good knowledge of the Psalms, because his entire prayer you can reference back in the Psalms. And that might be an interesting little project for you to take your concordance and reference Jonah's prayer. And he is jumping all over the Psalms in his prayer. It's too bad he didn't get to the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm, and he could have saved himself problems to begin with, because he would know there is no way to escape from the presence of God. For in Psalm 139 , "If I take the wings of the morning and flee to the uttermost parts of the sea, even there You will lead me." Now he knew the Psalms. He knew them well, because he really quotes them in his prayer, but isn't it interesting how that so many times we overlook important things.

Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight [ Psalms 31:22 ]; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple ( Jonah 2:4 ).

You remember when Solomon was dedicating the temple he said, "Lord, if your people get in trouble, if they be taken captive by the enemy, if they be in a strange land or whatever, if they turn towards the temple and pray, then hear Thou from Thy place in heaven and answer their prayer and all." Now how he knew which direction the temple was I don't know. He surely had no sense of reference, but he turned in what he evidently thought was the direction of the temple to pray unto the Lord. You know he is going to cover all of his bases.

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped around my head. I went down to the bottom of the mountains ( Jonah 2:5-6 );

This thing was sounding and going way down and no doubt would get dark, dark, dark, dark and then surfacing. Oh, what a miserable experience as this movement within. Probably seasick and just horrible.

the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came unto thee, into thine holy temple ( Jonah 2:6-7 ).

Now Jonah shares with you the valuable lesson that he learned. He learned it the hard way, but he shares it with you so that you can learn it the easy way.

They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercies ( Jonah 2:8 ).

If you are following after deception or after a lie, you're only making it hard on yourself and you're only running away from that which is best for you. It is a lie to think that you know better for your own life than does God. It is a lie for you to think that you can find happiness apart from God. It is a lie for you to think that you can escape from God, or from the call of God, or from the presence of God. And for you to attempt to do so you are only bringing misery and disaster upon yourself. You're forsaking your own mercy, because God is merciful, God is loving. And whatever God has in mind for you is the very best thing that could ever happen to you, though you may not think it. God may be calling you to something, and you are trying to run. And you think, "Oh, that's the last thing I want to do. I never want to do that." And you are trying to run, because you have this fear that to do what God is calling you to do will mean such deprivation and mean all of this, and you think "Oh, I can't do that. I don't want to do that." And you are trying to run from the call of God. Really you are running from what is the very best thing that could ever happen to you. If you are running from the will of God, trying to run from the will of God.

"They that observe these lying vanities are only forsaking their own mercies." You're creating your own hell, a misery in which you are going to find yourself sitting, and the misery is of your own making, and it is come from your own foolishness in thinking that you know better than God what is good for you. And yet, haven't we all been in that position in our lives?

When I think that I know better than God what will make me happy and what is good for me. And as I look back on those instances in my life, when I was observing these lying vanities, and when I had forsaken the path that God had set before me and I thought that I could find greater happiness and greater pleasure by leaving the path of God, I look back upon those experiences today and I realize they were the most miserable experiences of my entire life. The misery that I brought to myself and brought to others when I thought I knew better than God what would make me happy. And I created a hell in which I had to live until with David I confessed my sin before the Lord and received His forgiveness and His cleansing and the blotting out and was restored in fellowship with God. Oh, to be out of fellowship with God is hell itself. That is what hell is all about. It is out of fellowship with God. And to think of being out of fellowship with God eternally is unthinkable.

So he declares,

I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving ( Jonah 2:9 );

Now he couldn't offer a lamb or anything where he was. He could not build a fire and offer a sacrifice to God there in the whale, so he's gonna have to just be satisfied with offering to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving. This is the offering that we are encouraged to give to God in the New Testament in the book of Hebrews, to offer unto God the thanksgiving of praise unto Him, which is a sacrifice that is well accepted by Him.

I will pay that that I have vowed ( Jonah 2:9 ).

Evidently he said, "God, I give up. I'll go to Nineveh." So I'll pay that which I vowed.

And then the acknowledgment,

Salvation is of the LORD ( Jonah 2:9 ).

What an important lesson to learn for us, for you, for me. Salvation is not of my own works. It is not of my own efforts. I tried for a long time with my works and my efforts to be pleasing to God. Knowing about the little boy that had to leave Jesus outside when he went to the show, I didn't go to shows. And I was trying to be righteous in my own works. But what a glorious day when I learned the lesson that Jonah learned: salvation is of the Lord. I learned that after a lot of bitter experiences, bitter experiences of failure, trying to do what was right, unable to always do what was right, feeling this failure before God, living in this yo-yo Christian experience, up and down and up and down, great highs, tremendous lows. Until I came to the truth that Jonah discovered there in the whale-salvation is of the Lord, and I began to rest my salvation with Him. Oh, what a glorious day when I ceased from my labors and I entered into His rest. One of my most happy days in my whole Christian experience when God taught me this truth-salvation is of the Lord. "

Dr. Constable's Expository Notes

G. Jonah’s deliverance from the fish 2:10

Again the writer glorified Yahweh by attributing control of this formidable sea creature to Him (cf. Jonah 1:17). The first and the second chapters both close on this note. The Hebrew text says, "The Lord spoke to the fish" (cf. Jonah 1:1). Unlike Jonah, the fish obeyed God and vomited the prodigal prophet onto dry land. Jonah had spoken to the Lord in confession (Jonah 2:1-9), and now God responded by speaking to the fish in deliverance. Having gained a preview of Sheol (Jonah 2:2) Jonah was now prepared to go to the Ninevites whose destiny was Sheol.

The Hebrew word for salvation is yeshua, here used in its intensive form. The Hebrew name Joshua means "Yahweh is salvation." The Greek name Jesus is the translation of Joshua. Thus we can see a close connection between what Jonah declared ("salvation is of the Lord") and what all Scripture declares, namely, that salvation is through Jesus Christ.

"This miracle has also a symbolical meaning for Israel. It shows that if the carnal nation, with its ungodly mind, should turn to the Lord even in the last extremity, it will be raised up again by a divine miracle from destruction to newness of life." [Note: Keil, 1:385.]

"When Israel turns to the Lord, when the veil is removed from the heart, when they cry out in truth to the Lord from the midst of their distresses, the Lord will restore them not only to their own land but also to the commission of witnessing to the Lord [cf. Revelation 7:1-8]." [Note: Feinberg, p. 38.]

We do not know where on the coast Jonah landed. Unfortunately several interpreters have made applications based on their speculations.

Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible

And the Lord spake unto the fish,.... Or gave orders to it; he that made it could command it; all creatures are the servants of God, and do his will; what he says is done; he so ordered it by his providence, that this fish should come near the shore, and be so wrought upon by his power, that it could not retain Jonah any longer in its belly. It may be rendered h, "then the Lord spake", c. after Jonah had finished his prayer, or put up those ejaculations, the substance of which is contained in the above narrative:

and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry [land] not upon the shore of the Red sea, as some; much less upon the shore of Nineveh, which was not built upon the seashore, but upon the river Tigris; and the fish must have carried him all round Africa, and part of Asia, to have brought him to the banks of the Tigris; which could not have been done in three days' time, nor in much greater. Josephus i says it was upon the shore of the Euxine sea; but the nearest part of it to Nineveh was one thousand six hundred miles from Tarsus, which the whale, very slow in swimming, cannot be thought to go in three days; besides, no very large fish swim in the Euxine sea, because of the straits of the Propontis, through which they cannot pass, as Bochart k from various writers has proved. It is more likely, as others, that it was on the Syrian shore, or in the bay of Issus, now called the gulf of Lajazzo; or near Alexandria, or Alexandretta, now Scanderoon. But why not on the shore of Palestine? and, indeed, why not near the place from whence they sailed? Huetius l and others think it probable that this case of Jonah gave rise to the story of Arion, who was cast into the sea by the mariners, took up by a dolphin, and carried to Corinth. Jonah's deliverance was a type of our Lord's resurrection from the dead on the third day, Matthew 12:40; and a pledge of ours; for, after this instance of divine power, why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the dead?

h So ו is sometimes used, and is so rendered, Psal. lxxviii. 34. Job x. 10. See Noldius, p. 308, 309. i Antiqu. l. 9. c. 10. sect. 2. k Hierozoic. par. 2. l. 5. c. 12. col. 744. l Demonstr. Evangel. prop. 4. p. 294.

Henry's Complete Commentary on the Bible

      10 And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

      We have here Jonah's discharge from his imprisonment, and his deliverance from that death which there he was threatened with--his return, though not to life, for he lived in the fish's belly, yet to the land of the living, for from that he seemed to be quite cut off--his resurrection, though not from death, yet from the grave, for surely never man was so buried alive as Jonah was in the fish's belly. His enlargement may be considered, 1. As an instance of God's power over all the creatures. God spoke to the fish, gave him orders to return him, as before he had given him orders to receive him. God speaks to other creatures, and it is done; they are all his ready obedient servants. But to man he speaks once, yea, twice, and he perceives it not, regards it not, but turns a deaf ear to what he says. Note, God has all creatures at his command, makes what use he pleases of them, and serves his own purposes by them. 2. As an instance of God's mercy to a poor penitent, that in his distress prays to him. Jonah had sinned, and had done foolishly, very foolishly; his own backslidings did not correct him, and it appears by his after-conduct that his foolishness was not quite driven from him, no, not by the rod of this correction; and yet, upon his praying, and humbling himself before God, here is a miracle in nature wrought for his deliverance, to intimate what a miracle of grace, free grace, God's reception and entertainment of returning sinners are. When God had him at his mercy he showed him mercy, and did not contend for ever. 3. As a type and figure of Christ's resurrection. He died and was buried, to lay in the grave, as Jonah did, three days and three nights, a prisoner for our debt; but the third day he came forth, as Jonah did, by his messengers to preach repentance, and remission of sins, even to the Gentiles. And thus was another scripture fulfilled, After two days he will receive us, and the third day he will raise us up,Hosea 6:2. The earth trembled as if full of her burden, as the fish was of Jonah.

Kelly Commentary on Books of the Bible

Lectures on the Minor Prophets.

W. Kelly.

The most cursory reader can hardly avoid seeing that Jonah has a peculiar place among the prophets. There is none more intensely Jewish; yet his prophecy was addressed to the Gentiles, to the men of Nineveh in his day. Indeed here we learn nothing at all of his service in Israel. He is severed by God's call to this then most extraordinary mission and testimony. Thus, as it has been well observed, Jonah seems outwardly as singular in the Old Testament among the prophets as James is apt to sound strange to many ears among the New Testament apostles. Perhaps every one has felt the difficulty: certainly we know that in some eminent servants of the Lord the difficulties have been allowed to interfere with the reverential confidence due to an inspired writing, as I am assured most mistakenly. Nevertheless such remains the notorious fact. Even a man known for the wonderful work God gave him to do like Luther put a signal slight on the Epistle of James. No argument is needed to prove that he had not one good reason, that his unbelief was quite unjustifiable, and that the error wrought exceeding evil in proportion to the eminence of the man. For the influence of a leader's words, if he go seriously astray, is so much the more dangerous. Hence the Lutheran party in Germany have always shown the strongest tendency towards what some have called "a free handling" of the word of God, but it is to be feared in anything but a becoming spirit. Who can wonder that this has at length developed into the various forms of decided rationalism in the present day, though indeed more or less ever since the Reformation? They may ever so little reflect or sympathize with what was of faith and of divine excellence; but they are none the less disposed to cite Luther as giving an anticipative sanction to their own sceptical spirit towards the word of God.

The truth is that the value of the books of both James and Jonah is chiefly owing to, and seen in, their peculiarity. God is not narrow, though man is; and our wisdom lies in being lifted out of our own pettiness into the vast mind of God. Hence it will be found that, so far from James being one who slighted grace, his epistle is unintelligible unless a man really understands and holds fast the grace of God. He is the only apostle who uses the remarkable term "the perfect law of liberty." This supposes not law but grace. Therefore it was really the feebleness with which grace was apprehended which made people fancy and shrink back from the bugbear of legalism in the Epistle of James. Had they read it in the liberty of grace, they would have seen the real power of the Spirit of God in giving the Christian to realise his liberty.

Just so it appears to me that Jonah in the same way, although personally he might be eminently Jewish in his feeling, nevertheless was used of God for a final Old Testament testimony to the Gentiles. Nineveh, the capital of the then Assyrian kingdom, was at that time the great power of the world. It was before the days when Babylon aspired to supreme empire, and was permitted to acquire it; for Babylon was of itself a most ancient city probably before Nineveh; but it was not allowed to rise up into supremacy until the complete trial of Israel, and the proved failure even of Judah and David's house. Jonah was an early prophet. He lived in or before the days of Jeroboam II. I believe that modern speculation has put him a hundred years perhaps too late. However, this is a small matter. The grand point is the bearing of his prophecy. There is another difference too that is worthy of note in Jonah, and that is, that the book differs from others of the minor prophets by being for the most part prophecy in fact and not so much in word. The whole history of Jonah is a sign. It is not simply what he said but what he did, and the ways of God with him; and this it will be my business to endeavour to expound.

The New Testament points us out some of the most prominent parts of this prophecy, and will be found, I think, to give us the key to the bearing of it in a distinct and material way. Our Lord Himself refers to it, particularly also, it may be added, to that which has drawn out the incredulity of many divines. Now it is well known to those who are acquainted with the working of mind in the religious world, that they have found enormous difficulties in the facts of the book of Jonah. The truth is that, as elsewhere, they stumble over the claims of prophecy; it is here the difficulty of a miracle. But to my mind a miracle, although no doubt it is the exertion of divine power, and entirely outside the ordinary experience of man, is the worthy intervention of God in a fallen world. It is a seal given to the truth in the pitiful mercy of God, who does not leave a fallen race and lost world to its own remediless ruin. So far therefore, from miracles being the slightest real difficulty, any one who knows what God is might well expect Him to work them in such a world as this. I do not mean arbitrarily, or at such a time as ours; for although there be answer to prayer now and the most distinct working of God according to it, it is all to my mind a simple thing. We must never confound an answer to prayer, precious as it may be, with a miracle. For an answer to prayer is no more unintelligible than that your own earnest request to man should bring out a special intervention to your mind. What greater difficulty is there for God to hear the cry of His children? Have baptized men and women sunk into degrading epicureanism? It is then truly monstrous to shut out such a gracious interference of God every day, and there cannot be a stronger proof of where and what man has come to in Christendom than the notion that special answers to prayer are irreconcilable with the general laws God has established to govern the world as well as mankind. Now there is no doubt that there are general principles, if you will, as to everything, as to the universe, as to the moral ways of God with men, and also as to His dealing with His own children. But then we must never shut out that He is a really personal God, who, even when a miracle may not be, knows how to make His care a living and a known reality for the souls of all that confide in Him.

In the present case then we have one authority weighing infinitely more than all the difficulties which have been mustered by unbelief. For it is plain that our Lord Jesus singles out the particular point of greatest difficulty and affixes to it His own almighty stamp of truth. Can you not receive the words of the Lord Jesus against all men that ever were? What believer would hesitate between the Second man and the first? The Lord Jesus has referred to the fact that Jonah was swallowed up by the great fish, call it what you will: I am not going to enter into a contest with naturalists whether it was a shark, a spermaceti whale or another. This is a matter of very small account. We will leave these men of science to settle the kind; but the fact itself, the only one of importance for us to affirm, is that it was a great fish which swallowed and afterwards yielded up the prophet alive. This is all one need stand to the literal truth of the fact alleged. There is no need to imagine that a fish was created for the purpose. There are many fishes quite capable of swallowing a man whole: at any rate such have been. If there was one then, it is enough. But the fact is not only affirmed in the Old Testament, but reaffirmed and applied in the New by our Lord Himself. Any man who disputes this must give an account of his conduct before the judgment seat of Christ ere long.

Turning then to our prophecy, we read, "Now the word of Jehovah came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of Jehovah, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of Jehovah." But in Jonah is seen the stiff-neckedness of man. Jehovah told him to go east, and he at once hurries west; that is, he flies exactly in the teeth of the divine command. To some this seems unaccountable in a prophet; to the rationalist it is incredible, and casts a doubt on the historical character of the entire book. But we have to learn that flesh is no better in a prophet than in ourselves. For the real difference between men is not that the flesh of some is better than that of others, but that some have learned to distrust themselves altogether, and to live another life which is by faith, not by flesh. Therefore it is that the believer only in fact lives to God so long as he goes on in dependence on Him. The moment he ceases to do so, wonder not at anything he says or does. Here we have a flagrant witness of it in Jonah. He was told to go to Nineveh; but "he rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of Jehovah, and went down to Joppa," that is, to the neighbouring port of Palestine on the great sea, the Mediterranean, in order to go west.

"And he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of Jehovah. But Jehovah sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep." Now it cannot be doubted that there must have been some strong (however unjustifiable) impulse which gave a contrary bias to this godly man, as undoubtedly the prophet was. What was the motive? To our minds singular enough, but none the less influential over him for all that. Jonah was afraid that God would be too good! If Nineveh repented, he suspected that He would show it mercy. He feared therefore that his own character as a prophet would suffer. He did not choose them to hear the threat that God was giving to destroy the Ninevites for their wickedness, lest they might humble themselves under his preaching, and the threatened judgment might not be put into execution, and Jonah would thus lose his honour. What a miserably selfish thing is the heart even of a prophet, unless just so far as he walks by faith! Jonah did not so walk, but allowed self to gain a transient mastery. I do not speak of what Jonah felt as a man, but of his jealousy as he thought for his office. He could not bear that his ministry should be jeoparded for a moment. How much better to trust the Master!

Now I need not say at any length that we have the exact and blessed contrast to this in a greater than Jonah, who deigns to compare in a certain respect His own ministry with that of His servant. A greater proof of divine humility there could scarcely be. But in all things Jesus was perfect, and in nothing more than this that He, knowing all things, the end from the beginning, came down into a scene where He tasted rejection at every step rejection not merely as a babe when He was carried away into Egypt, but rejection all through a life of the most blameless yet divinely ordered obscurity; then through a ministry which excited growing hatred on man's part. There is nothing a man more dreads than to be nothing at all. Even to be spoken against is not so dreadful to the poor proud spirit of man as to be absolutely unnoticed; and yet the very much greater part of the life of Jesus was spent in this entire obscurity. We have but a single incident recorded of Jesus from His earliest years until He emerges for the ministry of the word of God and the gospel of the kingdom. But then He lived in Nazareth, proverbially the lowest of poor despised Galilee so much so that even a godly Galilean slighted and wondered if any good thing could come out of Nazareth. Such was Jesus; but more than this; when He did enter on the publicity of divine testimony, there too He meets opposition, though at first there was a welcome which would have gratified most men, yea servants of God. But He the Son, the divine person who was pleased to serve in this world, saw through that which would have been sweet to others when they, astonished and attracted, hung on the gracious words that fell from His lips. And how soon a dark cloud passed over it! For even that self-same day in which men heard such words as had never fallen on the ears of man, miserable and infatuated they could not endure the grace of God, and, had they been left to themselves, would have cast Him down headlong from the precipice outside their city. Such man was and is. How truly all that was fair was but as the morning cloud and early dew. But Jesus, we see, accepts a ministry of which He knew from the first the character, course, and results, perfectly aware that the more divine grace and truth were brought out by Him, the sterner rejection He should meet with among men.

God deals very tenderly with us in this respect. He does not fail to send somewhat to cheer and lift up the heart of the workman in praise to Himself; and only just so far as there is faith to bear it does He put on him a heavier burden. But as to the Lord Jesus there was no burden that He was spared; and if none in His life, what shall we say of His death? There indeed a deeper question was raised, on which we need not enter now, only referring to the first great principle as the contrast to the conduct of Jonah in going directly in the teeth of the Lord's distinct commission.

Another trait we find marked in Jonah his Jewish feeling. He was intensely national. He could not bear that there should be the slightest apparent failure of his word as a prophet in the midst of the Gentiles. He would rather that every Gentile had been swallowed up in destruction than that one word of Jonah should fall to the ground. It was precisely here where he had to learn himself short of the mind and heart of God. The wonders that were wrought were not too great for teaching the needed lesson. We have already referred to Jesus, but we need not even go so high as to the Lord of glory. In some respects the working of the Spirit of God in the apostle Paul may aptly serve for us, because he was a man not only of flesh and blood, but of like passions as we. Who ever suffered like him the afflictions of the gospel? Who with burning love to Israel so spent himself in untiring labours among the Gentiles labours too so unrequited then, that among the Gentiles themselves who believed he so often knew what it is to be less loved the more abundantly he loved?

On the other hand Jesus had no sin. Although perfectly man, every thought, feeling, and inward motion was holy in Jesus: not only not a flaw in His ways was ever seen, but not a stain in His nature. Whatever men reason or dream, He was as pure humanly as divinely; and this may serve to show us the all-importance of holding fast what men call orthodoxy as to His person. I shall yield to none in jealousy for it, and loyally maintain that it is of the substance and essence of the faith of God's elect that we should confess the immaculate purity of His humanity, just as much as the reality of His assumption of our nature. Assuredly He did take the proper manhood of His mother, but He never took manhood in the state of His mother, but as the body prepared for Him by the Holy Ghost, who expelled every taint of otherwise transmitted evil. In His mother that nature was under the taint of sin: she was fallen, as were all others naturally begotten and born in Adam's line. In Him it was not so; and, in order that it should not be so, we learn in God's word that He was not begotten in a merely natural generation, which would have perpetuated the corruption of the nature and have linked Jesus with the fall; but by the power of the Holy Ghost He and He alone was born of woman without a human father. Consequently, as the Son was necessarily pure, as pure as the Father, in His own proper divine nature, so also in the human nature which He thus received from His mother: both the divine and the human were found for ever afterwards joined in that one and the same person the Word made flesh.

Thus, we may here take occasion to observe, Jesus is the true pattern of the union of man with God, God and man in one person. It is a common mistake to speak of union with God in the case of us His children. Scripture never uses language of the kind; it is the error of theology. The Christian never has union with God, which would really be, and only is in, the Incarnation. We are said to be one with Christ, "one spirit with the Lord," "one body," one again as the Father and the Son; but these are evidently and totally different truths. Oneness would suppose identification of relationship, which is true of us as the members and body of our exalted Head. But we could not be said to be one with God as such without confounding the Creator and the creature and insinuating a kind of Buddhistic absorption into deity, which is contrary to all truth or even sense. The phrase therefore is a great blunder, which not only has got nothing whatever to warrant it from the Spirit, but there is the most careful exclusion of the thought in every part of the divine word.

And here it may be of interest to say a few words of explanation as to our partaking of the divine nature, of which Peter speaks at the beginning of his second Epistle (2 Peter 1:4). It does not seem to be the same as oneness with Christ, which in scripture is always founded on the Spirit of God making us one spirit with the Lord after He rose from the dead. Christ when He was here below compared Himself to a corn of wheat that was alone: if it died, it would bring forth much fruit. Though the Son of God was always the life of believers from the beginning, He promises more, and thus indicates that union is a different thing. They must never be confounded. They are both true of the Christian; but union in the full sense of the word was that which could not be till Christ had died to put away before God our sins, yea to give us our very nature judged, so that we might stand in an entirely new position and relationship, made one by the Spirit with Christ glorified on high. This I believe to be the doctrine of scripture. Along with this observe that the only one who brings out the body of Christ asserted dogmatically in the New Testament is the apostle Paul. Our spiritual oneness is referred to frequently in the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John; but this is not exactly the same thing as being one with Christ according to the figure of the head and the body, which is the proper type of oneness in scripture. Now it is by the apostle Paul alone that the Spirit sets before us the body with its head; and this it is which figures the true notion according to God of our oneness with Christ.

To be one with or have life in Him is not the same thing. This may be clearly illustrated by the well-known instance of Abel and Cain. They had the same life as Adam; but they were not one with Adam as Eve was. She only was one with Adam. They had his life no less than their mother. Thus the two things are never the same and need not be in the same persons. Oneness is the nearest possible relationship, which may or may not be conjoined with the possession of life. Both are in the Christian. The pattern of oneness or its proper scriptural model is found under that of the head and the body, which is the more admirably expressive as the head clearly and of right directs all the movements of the body. In a man of sound mind and body there is not a single thing done by the extremity of the foot which is not directed by the head. Such exactly is the pattern spiritually. The Spirit of God animates the assembly, the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit is the true bond of oneness between the members on earth and Christ in heaven. By and by, when we go on high, it will be- represented by another figure equally apt, though also anticipatively applied while we are on earth. We never hear of the head and the body in the day of glory? but of the Bridegroom and the bride. So we read inRevelation 19:1-21; Revelation 19:1-21 that the marriage of the Lamb is then come. This takes place in heaven after the translation of the saints and before the day of Christ's appearing. Scripture: avoids speaking of the marriage until the whole work of God is complete in His assembly, so that those who are baptized of the Spirit into that one body may be caught up to Christ together. These between the two advents of the Lord are all in one common position. But those before Christ came were surely quickened of Him; sons of God, they were partakers of the divine nature. So are Christians now; so will be the saints when the millennial kingdom is set up under the reign of Christ manifest to every eye. But to be one with Christ, members of His body, is only true now that He is in heaven as the glorified man, and that the Spirit is sent down to baptize us into this new body on the earth. That one body is now being formed and perpetuated as long as the church remains on earth. The marriage of the Lamb (of course a figure of consummated union and joy) will only take place when the whole church is complete, not before, whatever may be the language inspired by hope ere then.

As to the difficulty of some minds, whether Christ partook of our nature as it is here, or we partake of Him as He is in heaven, the answer seems to me that both are true; but they are not the same truth. Christ partook of human nature, but not in the condition in which we have it. This has been already explained, as it is essential not only to the gospel but to the Christ of God. The man who denies this denies Christ's person; he wholly overlooks the meaning of the supernatural operation of the Holy Ghost. Such was the fatal blot of Irvingism a far deeper mischief than the folly about tongues or the pretensions to prophesying, or the presumption of restoring the church and its ministries, or even its gross Judaising. It made null and void the Holy Ghost's operation, which is acknowledged in the commonest creeds of both Catholics and Protestants. These all so far confess the truth; for I hold that as to this Catholics and Protestants are sound but the Irvingites are not, although in other matters they may say a great deal that is true enough. Certainly the late Mr. Irving saw and taught not a little neglected truth. Notwithstanding they were, and I believe still are, fundamentally unsound in holding the human nature of Christ to be fallen and peccable through the taint of the fall, thus setting aside the object and fruit of the miraculous conception by the power of the Highest.

Hence then our being partakers of the divine nature is one thing, the gift of the Holy Ghost quite another. Both we have now. The first is the new nature that pertains to us as believers, and this in a substantial sense has been true of all believers from the beginning. But besides this there is the peculiar privilege of oneness with Christ through the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. Clearly this could not be until the Holy Ghost was given to baptize the disciples of Christ into one body; as again the Holy Ghost could not be given to produce this oneness till Jesus by His blood had put away our sins and been glorified at God's right hand. (Hebrews 1:1-14; John 1:1-51; John 7:1-53) Those who should be saved had been in every kind of impurity, and they must be washed from their sins before they could be righteously set in that position of nearness and relationship as "one new man." Esther was chosen and called to a high position; still, according to the habits due to the great king, there must needs be a great preparation before the actual consummation. I grant you this was but a natural place; still it is the type of a spiritual relationship; so that we may use it to illustrate God's mind. It is not consistent with His ways or His holiness that any should be taken out of the old things and put into the wonderful position of oneness with Christ until the work of redemption completely abolished our old state before God and brought us into a new one in Christ. Such is the order of scripture.

But there is more to come. For although we have already the Holy Ghost as well as the new nature, there is a third requisite which the glory of Christ demands for us: we shall be changed. That is, we Christians, who have now not only humanity but this fallen, are destined at Christ's coming again for us to be changed. Christ had human nature but not fallen. In His case alone was humanity holy, free from every blemish and taint, and pure according to God. It was not only not fallen, but fit without blood to be the temple of God. This is far more than could be said about Adam in his pristine innocency. When Adam came from the hand of God, good as he was, it could not be said that he was holy. There was absolute absence of all evil. God made the man upright before he sought inventions. There was untainted innocence. But holiness and righteousness are more than creation goodness and innocency. Holiness implies the intrinsic power that rejects evil in separation to God: and righteousness means consistency with the relationship in which one is set. Both these qualities we see not in Adam but in Jesus even as to His humanity. "That holy thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." He was the Holy One of God, "Jesus Christ the righteous." Indeed He was the only one of whom it was or could be said of His human nature that it was holy; as it clearly is of humanity in His person that the expression "that holy thing" is used. The divine nature was not born of the virgin; and it was little needed to call that holy. There was the highest interest and moment in knowing the character of His humanity. Scripture as to this is most explicit. His humanity was holy from the very first, spite of being born of a fallen race.

And this agrees with all other truth. Thus had the human nature of Christ been tainted by the fall, how could He have been the "most holy" sin-offering for sinners? There was no instance about which there was so much scrupulosity of care as the meat-offering and the sin-offering. These two. are remarkable and remarkably opposed types of Christ: the one of His life, the other of His death.

But we shall have much more in the way of power and glory by and by. When Christ comes, human nature in us will participate in the victory of the Second Man, the last Adam, as it now shares in the weakness and ruin of the first man. Then indeed is the time when human nature will be promoted to a good degree; that is to say, it will be raised out of all the consequences of the fall of the first man, and will be placed in all the power and incorruption and glory of the Second Man as He is now in the presence of God. Never shall we be made God: this could not be, and ought not to be. It is impossible that the creature can overpass the bounds that separate the Creator from it. And more than that, the renewed creature is the very one which would most abhor the thought. No matter what the church's blessedness and glory may be, it never forgets its creature obligations to God and the reverence due to Him. For this very reason he that knows God would never desire that He should be less God than He is, and could not indulge or tolerate the self-exalting folly which the miserable illusion of Buddhism cherishes, along with many kinds of philosophy which are afloat now as of old in the west as well as the east the dream of a final absorption into deity. This is altogether false and irreverent. All approach to such thoughts we see excluded in the word of God. In heaven the lowliness of those whom the sovereign grace of God made partakers of the divine nature will be even more perfect than now while we are on the earth. Human nature under sin is as selfish as proud. Fallen humanity always seeks its own things and glory; but the new nature, the perfection of which is seen in Christ, (that is to say, the life given to the believer, what we receive in Christ even now, and by and by when everything is conformed to it) will only make perfect without a single flaw or hindrance that which we now are in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Returning from our long digression, I would now direct attention to the plain fact that Jonah too faithfully represents the Jews in his unwillingness that God should show mercy to the Gentiles. The effect of this uncomely narrowness and indeed failure in bearing a real witness to the true God is, that far from being the channel of blessings to the Gentiles, he brings a curse upon them. So with the Jew now, and it will be yet more verified at the end of the age. The ringleaders of the actual rationalism in the world have derived a vast deal of their cavils from Jewish sources. The miserable Spinoza of Amsterdam, the theological pantheist of the seventeenth century, is really the patriarch of a great deal of the philosophy that is overrunning the world now and ever since. And this will grow far worse. It is granted that this did not begin with him, but with heathen unbelievers, yet made more and more daring by Jewish and then Christian apostacy. I have no doubt that there is yet to be, from the dragons' teeth which they are sowing over Christendom, an abundant crop of men given up to lawlessness.

Here however it is a very different state: we see a godly man spite of all faults. Nevertheless the result of his unfaithfulness is that he brings a tempest from Jehovah on the ship; and his error brought no small danger on unconscious Gentile mariners, who little thought of the question between God and His servant, or of the deep reason that lay underneath so singular a controversy. But Jonah knew what the matter was, though he had never dared to look it fairly to the bottom: as men never do whose conscience is bad. And this he showed when the shipmaster came and waked him up from his sleep with the cry, "What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not." Even then he does not reveal the secret. "And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us." When men are ashamed and will is still active and unjudged, it takes no small discipline to set them right again. So Jonah held his tongue as long as he could, though he knew right well who was the culprit. "They did cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah." As it was not possible to hide his secret any longer, "Then said they unto him, Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us? What is thine occupation? and whence comest thou? what is thy country? and of what people art thou? And he said unto them, I am an Hebrew; and I fear Jehovah, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land. Then were the men exceeding afraid, and said unto him, Why hast thou done this? For the men knew that he fled from the presence of Jehovah, because he had told them. Then said they unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us? for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous."

The prophet then directs them like a genuine soul, as he was at bottom: all of which we have spoken freely and plainly, as the word of God warrants us to do, seems quite consistent with it. For all his short comings, his narrowness, and his official self-importance, he did not fear to trust himself in God's hands, as we shall see. For "he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea." Is it not evident and sad the mixture one sees even in a real believer? It is plain that he has not the slightest doubt of his own relationship to God; he entertains no question that all will be well somehow with Jonah. Yet had he really been, as he was often in danger of being, impatient, self-willed, and presumptuous. Jonah knew God well enough to dread that He would be better than his own message and warning to the Gentiles. He did not mind that God should be ever so good to the Jews, but he could not bear that his threat should seem vain through divine mercy to repentant Gentiles.

Jonah, I say, tells them to take him up and cast him forth into the sea. "So shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you." The shipmen, not having the heart to do it, "rowed hard to bring the ship to land; but they could not: for the sea wrought and was tempestuous against them." And they too cried unto Jehovah. A remarkable change, as we may here discern, takes place in them; for up to this time they simply owned God, but only after a natural sort, because they called on their gods withal. This was inconsistent enough. They did not see the grievous incongruity of worshipping false gods and at the same time owning the true God. Such however was exactly their state; but now they cried to the true God. They had heard His name was Jehovah, and they were struck by the reality of His government in the case of Jonah before their eyes. "And they cried unto Jehovah, and said, We beseech thee, O Jehovah, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood: for thou, O Jehovah, hast done as it pleased thee."

A remark may be made by the way in proof of the excess of the folly rationalism displays in judging of these names of God. In these days most people who read are aware that freethinkers have tried to build up the theory that each of the early books at least of the Bible must have been written by different authors at different times, because among other phenomena there occur two or more accounts sometimes of the same or of kindred features, in one of which the name God or "Elohim" is more prominent, in another the name "Jehovah." Their hypothesis is that the difference of these terms, backed up by other differences of thought and language, can only arise from distinct authorship. Superficial and transparent folly! As if even human writers do not vary their style with their subject and object: how much more when God gives according to His fulness and depth! There is not the slightest sense in the theory. And here is a proof before our eyes in the prophecy of Jonah. There is no question of early documents in this case. As compared with the books of Moses, Jonah after all is rather too late in the day. They contrived to eke out the case that in the dim and hoary age of Mosaic antiquity various documents had somehow been muddled together, and out of the later manipulation of these different records at length emerged the books of Moses as we have them: pretty much, one might suppose, as Jehovah plagued the people because they made the calf, which Aaron made, when he "cast the gold into the fire, and there came out this calf."

But, however this may be, the prophecy of Jonah rises up to refute this pretentious folly. Bear with me if I cannot but use strong and plain terms in speaking of that which is so irreverent and revolting. One should never find fault with a man for ignorance;* still less can one justly lay blame on any man for not being wiser than God has been pleased to make him. It is our business to make the best use of the little which God may have vouchsafed; but that man should allow his mind or acquirements, whatever be his measure, to rise up in judgment of the precious and perfect word of God, to unsettle and destroy as far as his influence extends the absolute divine authority of everything that God has written, this I cannot but condemn with all my soul, and believe that it is the truest love even to the wrong- doers. We cannot exaggerate the heinousness of the sin. May the Lord forgive every one guilty of it! But we ought not to forgive the thing itself. Can one conceive that God would have the believer forgive the sin of speaking against His own word? Grace can forgive the worst of sinners; but never let us allow any thought about the sin except that it is most hateful to God. To have the strongest sense of sin is in no way incompatible with the utmost pity for and interest in him who is deceived and guilty and condemned. On the contrary it is as much a Christian's duty to abhor that which is evil as to love that which is good. So true is this, that the man who does not abhor evil can never be justly thought to have real love in his heart for what is good; because it is always in proportion to moral power that one hates the false and evil, and loves the true and good. As for the shilly-shallying that calls itself charity but really is indifference to either good or evil, it is at bottom either intense self-seeking or mere love of ease without a single quality which becomes a man, because there is no thought nor care for what is due to God. Against such heartlessness may all God's children watch diligently; for the air now-a-days is full of it. Depend on it, there is no grace in such laxity. It is as far as possible from Him who is our only unfailing test.

*The last words of the famous Laplace were, "Ce que nous connaissons est peu de choses; ce que nous ignorons est immense." Alas! he died without the knowledge of God, without eternal life in Christ. But he is no bad witness of the unsatisfying nature of the knowledge of one who knew much in comparison of most men, though he knew nothing of what man most needs to know.

In his distress then we find Jonah turns to the true God. Even for the heathen sailors it was no time for thinking of their false gods. They felt themselves evidently in the hand of Jehovah. Accordingly they cry to Him, and as we are told, "They took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging." What a sight! What solemnity must have filled these poor Gentiles! Thereon, we are told, they "feared Jehovah." They had cried to Him before; they feared Him now. If they cried to Him in their danger, they feared Him yet more when the danger was over. That is right, and shows reality. However common, it is a fearful mockery when a man fears the Lord less when he professes to have his sins forgiven by His grace. It is truly awful and perilous when the goodness of God weakens in the smallest degree our reverence for Himself and jealousy for His will. "Our God is a consuming fire, but this need not hinder our perfect confidence in His love. So here the mariners offered a sacrifice unto Jehovah, and made vows at the same time. "Now Jehovah had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."

Next (Jonah 2:1-10) we come to a very great change. It is not a man sent out on an unwelcome errand from Jehovah; nor his endeavour to escape from the execution of God's commission; nor yet again the divine dealings with him when he proved refractory and kicked against the goads. We see by the way that Jehovah is exceedingly pitiful and of tender mercy as regards the Gentile mariners, when they forsook their vanities and were brought to worship the only true God, Jehovah the Lord of heaven and earth. But now we have the silent and secret dealings of God that went on during those three days and three nights when Jonah lay in the depths and spread his misery before God. "Then Jonah prayed unto Jehovah his God out of the fish's belly, and said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto Jehovah, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice."

In this there can be not the slightest doubt to the believer that Jonah is a type of the blessed Lord Jesus Christ when He too was for three days and nights, as He said Himself, in the heart of the earth the crucified Messiah. But then how different! Jonah's singular fate was because of his sin his manifest insubjection to God. Christ suffered for others exclusively. It was for the sins of His people. Nevertheless the result was so far similar that our Lord Jesus Himself being without sin was utterly rejected, not because He did not the will of God, but because He did it to perfection, offering His body as a sacrifice once for all. Thus our blessed Lord obeyed unto death, instead of disobeying it like the first Adam. Jonah then cries, and Jehovah hears. Deeply does he feel the position in which he found himself; and this was well. Discipline is meant to be felt, though grace should not be doubted.

But I believe on the other hand that his confidence, as was natural, was not unmingled with fear. For if a type of Christ he was a type of the Jewish people. Indeed he sets forth not inaptly the people failing in their testimony, misrepresenting God before the Gentiles, not yet a channel of blessing on them according to the promises to Abraham, but rather a curse because of their own unfaithfulness. Nevertheless, just as Jonah was preserved of God in the great fish, so also are the Jews now preserved of God, and will be brought out to be a joy and praise to His name in the earth, whatever their present lost estate. That day is hastening apace. In Jonah's history we find its pledge; in Christ's its righteous ground and the means to accomplish it when Jehovah pleases to His glory.

It is a principle with God that "in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established." This I do not doubt to be at least one reason for the three days, whether one looks at the case of Jonah, or of Christ, or of any other. It means a fully adequate testimony, as in our Lord's case, to the reality of His death when He had been rejected to the uttermost; so with Jonah. Two would have been enough; three were more than sufficient, an ample and irrefragable witness. So our Lord Jesus, though by Jewish reckoning three days and three nights in the grave, literally lay there but the whole of Saturday the Sabbath, with a part of Friday not yet closed, and before the dawn of Sunday. For we must always remember in these questions the Jews' method of reckoning. Part of a day regularly counted for the four-and-twenty hours. The evening and the morning, or any part, counted as a whole day. But the Lord, as we know, was crucified in the afternoon of Friday; His body lay all the next or Sabbath day in the grave; and He rose early the Sunday morning. That space was counted three days and three nights according to sanctioned Biblical reckoning which no man who bowed to scripture would contest. This was asserted among the Jews, who, fertile as they have been in excuses for unbelief, have never, as far as I am aware made difficulties on this score. The ignorance of Gentiles has exposed some of them when unfriendly to cavil at the phrase. The Jews found not a few stumbling-blocks, but this is not one of them: they may know little of what is infinitely more momentous; but they know their own Bible too well to press an objection which would tell against the Hebrew scriptures quite as much as the Greek.

In Jonah 3:1-10 we come to another point. The word of Jehovah comes to Jonah again. How persistent is His goodness, and how vain for His servant to think of evading! A fresh message is given in these terms: "Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of Jehovah." And the Spirit of God tells us, "Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey. 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." The people listened to the word. And here is another use for which our blessed Lord employs Jonah. He does not merely cite the most marvellous part of Jonah's history as a type of His own rejection in Israel, or of the consequence of that rejection for Israel, but He holds up before the proud and hard spirit of the Jew in His day the repentance of the Ninevites at the preaching of Jonah, two wholly different references which are main incidents in the history of the prophet. "So the people of Nineveh believed God." They did not go so far as the mariners: they "believed God." There was a certain conviction that His moral character was justly offended by their wickedness; for well they knew that they were living as they listed, which practically means without God at all. "They believed God," it is stated, "and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth."

Does this again warrant the inference that the book had two authors? Later on, as at the early part, all is recounted with the most perfect order morally, and as naturally as possible flows from one and the same inspired mind. The fact is that the application of the different names for God is quite independent of the question of one or more authors, and is owing to a different idea which the author meant to convey: and this is true throughout scripture early or late, Old Testament or New. Indeed all the holy writings are parts of the same web; but it does not follow that there may not be a different pattern in different parts of it. To make it all the same monotonous colour or shape is not always necessary even among men. How strange that vain man should sit in judgment on God, not even allowing Him to do as He pleases with His own word! Of course the use of the names is adapted to a different apprehension of God on the part of men, the one being mainly the general expression of His nature, the other of that specific relation in which He was revealed to His chosen people of old; the one what, the other who He is. Hence under the hand of the Holy Spirit we may surely reckon that God furnishes the terms used with the most perfect propriety. Never is it either arbitrary or unmeaning; but we may not be able always to discern aright. So far indeed is it from being true, that I am persuaded a variety of authors would rather have struck these differences out. Thus, supposing there were two authors giving really conflicting reports, I consider that an editor, finding the two documents at variance, would have in all probability tried to assimilate them; for instance in this case either by striking out "Jehovah" and putting in "God," or by striking out "God" and putting in "Jehovah." This would have been no hard task, and most natural if there had really been a mere editor dealing with old relics which he wished to reduce into a tolerably harmonious whole for perpetuation.

Let me endeavour to illustrate the truth by a familiar figure. An artist of intelligence would not represent the Queen in the same way opening the Houses of Parliament as if reviewing the troops at Aldershot. He who could fail to see the reason of the differences in paintings of the two scenes' even if drawn by the same artist, would simply prove that he had no discernment of propriety. In the one case there might be a horse or a chariot; in the other there would be the throne. Horses would not be suitable in the House of Lords any more than. a throne at the camp. Every one can see in such a case as this that the difference of the surroundings has nothing to do with a question of this or that artist, of few or many, but is due exclusively to the difference of relationship.

So even we in ordinary life do not always address the same person in the same way. Suppose the case of a judge, and of a barrister who is the judge's son addressing him in court. Do you think the barrister would so far forget the court as to call the judge his father when addressing the jury, or even the judge? Or do you suppose when at home in the intimacy of his father's house that his son would call the judge "my lord," just as he and all else would in court?

It is to me then certain that the objection raised is due to nothing else than an astonishing want of discernment; but I should never blame one for this if he did not pretend to teach and in his effort dishonour God's word, and injure if not ruin man. If people cannot form a sound and holy judgment as to such questions, it is their own loss. But they are not entitled to publish the fruits of their ignorance of scripture, and palm them off as something new, profound, and important, without being sifted and exposed, especially as the necessary tendency if not the object of all they say is to destroy the true character of scripture as divine. Were the learning in which such efforts may be arrayed ever so real, which it rarely is, I do not think a Christian ought to make a truce for an hour.

Here then we learn that God was believed by the men of Nineveh, who accordingly took the place of the guilty in repentance before God. When the matter came to the king, "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." Here the place of humiliation is kept up in a thorough, if somewhat singular, manner. "Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?" They have not long to wait for an answer of mercy. "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry." Yes, Jonah is the same man still when proved to the core. It may appear to us wonderful that so it should be after all the dealings of God with him. The mercy shown was too much for him whose message covered Nineveh with sackcloth What he had warned he had warned; and he could bear no mitigation lest it should detract from himself. This feeling was too deeply ingrained in his nature to be altered even by such discipline as he had passed through. No experience can ever correct the evil of the fleshly mind. So thoroughly hopeless is it in itself that nothing short of death and resurrection with Christ, given to faith and kept up in dependence on Him, can avail. To be swallowed up by the great fish and to come forth again was used for good doubtless; but no such measure sufficed to meet the demand. We only live by present dependence on God; and there can be no greater ruin for a soul than to attempt to live on the past alone, still less going back to one's old thoughts and feelings.

Jonah indeed practically set aside the fruit of the solemn discipline for his soul which he had gone through in the depths of the sea. But God was the same God; and had His own way of setting Jonah right. "He prayed unto Jehovah." Here we find the propriety of the language again. The prophet does not fall back merely on the place of man as such with God; he speaks to Him as one who knew Him on special ground, according to the covenant name of Jehovah in which He is known to the Jew. "He prayed to Jehovah, and said, I pray thee, O Jehovah, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil." This was the secret spring of the prophet's dread God's mercy! "Therefore now, O Jehovah, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live." He could not bear to live if his word were not accomplished to the letter. He would rather see that word carried out rigorously in the extermination of all the Ninevites than that it should seem to fail. How proud, selfish, and destructive is the impatient heart even of a godly man! And how beautiful it is to find in the apostle Paul what I referred to at the beginning! A man of like passions with Jonah and with us, who nevertheless gives patience as the special, chief, and most memorable sign of an apostle. He says truly that all the signs of an apostle were found with him in reproving the ungrateful Corinthians; but what does he allege as the first great sign of it? Not tongues or miracles. Be assured of this that patience is better than any such powers; and patience in every form God wrought in the heart of that blessed man. Yet it does not seem to my mind from all we read that Paul was a patient man after his own nature. Does it not rather seem that he was amazingly quick of feeling, and as rapid in coming to a conclusion as he was firm in holding to it when formed? Nevertheless, though he had a mind as fitted for deep-sea fathoming as for taking in the various sides of whatever came before him, we know that he was thoroughly a Jew "a Hebrew of Hebrews" as he says himself, to whom his nation was unspeakably dear. At the same time he was a man most energetic in carrying out practically whatever conscience and heart received as according to God. This he was even in his unconverted days; and certainly he was not less so when broken down by grace and filled with a love which poured forth from every channel of his large heart. But the permanent quality that marks Paul as apostle, as he urges to the Corinthian doubters and for the good of all saints, is patience. I doubt that any other thing is so great a sign of spiritual power. There is a day coming when power will not be shown in patience; but the truest sign of divine power morally carried on now is this ability to endure. Now this was what Jonah completely failed in. He had known wonders of divine power and mercy in his own case; but there is nothing like the cross, no lesson like that of death and resurrection as Paul had learnt it. Some may think it a very unusual expression of our hearts, bad as they are, to put one's own reputation above the welfare and even the lives of the people of the great city; and that few or none of us would be tempted to feel so hardly. Be assured however that the flesh is untrustworthy; and that self is as cruel as it is paltry when allowed. This may seem to some a dreadful thought; but is it not true? Man is the first man still; and it is in the Christian ready to repeat itself, unless by faith held for dead.

"Then said Jehovah, Doest thou well to be angry?" How admirable His patience! "So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city." There sat the prophet coolly and deliberately waiting with what comfort he could muster to see if God would then and there exterminate the people he, Jonah, had devoted to destruction. And now we see the wonderful way in which Jehovah corrected the mischief. "Jehovah God prepared a gourd." It is not now simply "God," nor only "Jehovah," but the blending of nature with special relationship. Such seems the reason why it is Jehovah God in this instance. 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 grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd." Simply as God, we may say, He prepared the gourd; but as Jehovah God He prepared it to be a comfort for His servant Jonah. "But God prepared a worm." Observe the appropriate change. It is not "Jehovah God" now, but Elohim the author of creation. " God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live." Indeed impatience must always be about self. The thing that ever most provokes human nature is such a wound. It is never God; nor need the test by which God puts one to the proof provoke impatience, which is found when analysed to be just a finding fault with Him. Do you think that God has not His eye on every thing and every one? Do you forget that God is measuring all the grief and trial and pain inflicted and borne here below? Of course He concerns Himself actively with each and all. Hence it is only when we lose sight of this that the impatience of nature breaks forth; but it is assuredly always there ready to break forth. So it did break out with the vexed prophet. "And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death." How manifestly we see the same soul hot but feeble: "I do well to be angry!" "Then said Jehovah, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six-score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" You would like the gourd spared. What is the gourd to Nineveh? You value its ephemeral shade: what is it in mine eyes to that great city with its teeming myriads of such little ones as know not their right hand from their left? Yes, God even thinks of and feels for the cattle. What surer or more evident sign of greatness than to be able to take in what we consider petty along with what is to us boundless in magnitude? And such does our God; He despises not any. Such exactly is the God whom Jonah knew so little and was so unwilling to learn. There is no real knowledge of God except in crushing nature in its impatience, pride of heart, self-confidence, everything And it is right that it should be so. It is a poor gain to acquire considerable knowledge of God without its having at the same time a deep moral effect on the soul. God at any rated would have the two things together associated in us.

How admirably complete are His ways and His working! He who prepared the fish prepared the palmchrist and the worm and the vehement east wind. All things serve not His might only, but His gracious purposes. It is as characteristic of our prophet as of all scripture to state calmly every incident just as it was, all under God's hand, the least as truly as the greatest, and this too not to his own credit, but to the praise of mercy so infinitely above the thoughts of man. And this is imbedded among the Jewish prophets, written in the Hebrew tongue, by one who felt as keenly as ever Israelite did what it was to warn the destined captor of Israel, with the certainty that God would repent Him of the menaced judgment, if they by grace repented themselves of their ways against Him. And so he proved after that he, given back from the grave of the sea, had performed his mission, type of One risen from the dead, as much greater in His grace to the Gentiles as in the glory of His person and the perfectness of an obedience which went out only in doing the will of His Father. But God is as wise as He is good; and the prophet's grief over the perishing palma-christi is made a reproof to his own rash spirit, and a justification from his own mouth for the mercy of God to the men of Nineveh. Once more out of the eater comes forth meat, and out of the weak, as erst out of the strong, comes forth sweetness.

Such then is the book of Jonah, and I cannot help thinking that, as far as it goes, a more instructive book for the soul, and in view of the dealings and dispensations of God with man and creation, there is not in the Bible.