3. THE HEART OF GOD AND THE HEART OF MAN. (Chap. 3:3-iv).

God summons His messenger once more to the work; and this time he is obedient. "Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh according to the word of the Lord." His message is a short, decisive announcement of impending judgment:"Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." But God threatens that He may not have to strike; and the proclamation of judgment is itself grace. The voice of one who has come, by divine power, as it were, out of death itself, to utter it, startles the great city, and there is immediate humbling before God. They proclaim a fast and put on sackcloth, covering the very beasts themselves with it, and cry mightily to God, turning at the same time every one from his evil way and the violence of his hands.

We are not to suppose that it was true conversion to God that followed, although we need not question that on the part of some, at least, there was true conversion But God was pleased to respect the humbling even of an Ahab, though only the fear of judgment produced it. But His grace encourages the feeblest manifestation of obedience to Him. So far as it went, the change was real. God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and the consequence followed which He declares by His prophet would follow in such a case (Jer. 18:7, 8). "At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to pull down and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have pronounced turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them." So here, therefore, God repented of the evil that He had said that He would do unto them and He did it not. This was no exception, therefore, to His common dealing with men. Nor is such repentance any argument of instability as to His purposes. On the contrary, His heart is told out by it. It is what He has been seeking that He has obtained, and the prophet who has been commissioned to deliver the message knew beforehand what the effect would be if Nineveh repented.

Nevertheless, "It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry"! How solemn it is, remembering this Jonah was a prophet of the Lord, one in a place of special nearness to Him, stamped with that wonderful significant name which accredits him as the instrument of the gracious Spirit of God! "For I knew," he says, "that Thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger aud of great kindness, and repentest Thee of the evil." Yet as he puts it, the knowledge of this grace is what only had incited him to refuse the commission, and he puts it to God Himself as what, in measure at least, justified his flight to Tarshish. When the soul, even of a believer, is plowed up, what depths of evil can come out of it? Job learnt to know himself in his murmuring under the chastening hand of God, but Jonah has to gain a deeper knowledge, and to learn himself in his murmuring at God's grace.

No doubt he would urge that he was put by it into the place, apparently, of a false prophet; but could he rightly urge even this? For it was not to a nation disregarding his voice that this grace was shown, but on the contrary, to those who recognized God's voice in him, and honored it. Yet Jonah would rather, as it were, go back to the depths out of which he had been delivered than see such mercy to others. Think of the awful and pitiful wail:"Therefore, now, O Lord, take, I beseech Thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live!" What is man, surely, at the best? But how beautiful the grace that will not deal with him yet according to his petulant haste,-the gentle question which one would say could not fail to be answered in his soul at once, "Doest thou well to be angry?" But his anger is not quenched, and we see the strange infatuation that it produces in him. He turns from the city, as hateful to him, just for the goodness of God towards it and makes him a booth and sits down under it to see if, after all, God means to carry out this mercy to the full. What a mirror for Israel to look into and! see their own spirit with regard to the Gentile world about them! But it is all in vain for us to expect to bend God to our thoughts when we will not bend to His. Jonah may nurse his anger and his pride, but he only lapses, by this, into the very condition of heathenism itself, which always takes its god's to be such as it can control for its own interests, according to what it deems such. Idolatry means everywhere, man the maker of God, instead of God the Maker of man; and Jonah would gladly be that now. Is it so strange a thing as at first sight it may seem here, and do we not act oftentimes more or less after his pattern? Which of us would not some time make his own will supreme, though it be to dethrone God to do so?

But Jonah cannot provoke God even to deal with himself as his anger would have it. On the contrary, grace must only manifest itself more to him, and as he waits under the burning sun of the East, in the discomfort to which he has destined himself, the Lord God prepares a gourd and makes it to come up over Jonah, that it may be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. What labor God will take to get at the heart of His poor creatures! And how often it seems as if there was not even a heart to get at! Yet Jonah is exceeding glad of the gourd. But that is only the first step towards that recovery of him which God is seeking. The next seems a step in reversal. The mercy is taken away. "God prepared a worm, when the morning rose the next day; and it smote the gourd that it withered." Changeable these ways seem, as how often God's providences do seem changeable! But this, even, is not enough. "It came to pass when the sun arose, 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."He has gone back to his old position, and nothing seems to be wrought yet. Nevertheless, he has felt as a creature, in a way very keenly affecting himself, that he is in strong hands that cannot be resisted. Do we not remember how in Job's case also, though so different from the present one, it is the revelation of His might by which God awes an angry heart to stillness? But again there comes the question:" Doest thou well to be angry for the guard?"Was it indeed for the blighted gourd that he was feeling? God so represents it, as it were, Hot touching the sore spot exactly itself, and yet only to make him the more conscious of it. But he answers more passionately than ever:"I do well to be angry even unto death."Was it for the gourd indeed that he was angry, or was it for his personal loss in it? Did he care so much for the thing as to which he had not labored nor made it grow, the offspring of a night and which perished in a night? God would so represent it, as it were, as if he would not impute more to him. He has had pity on the gourd ; he has not had pity upon Nineveh, that great city of more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left; and their cattle too,-none of them forgotten by Him who made them. Pity for a gourd, and not pity for great Nineveh! A plentiful waste of a niggard heart ! Something there must be that has produced in him such complete incapacity to balance things aright; something there must be which seen will make consistent this gross inconsistency. Certainly; and which of us does not know what it is? There is but one thing capable of distorting things after this fashion. Here is the man who has been himself in the depths to learn to cry out there, " Salvation is of the Lord," yet now angered even unto death against the God of salvation! He who lives by grace alone, can plead only for judgment, and against grace to others!
Israel is, without doubt, in their inmost heart told out in this picture before us. Under law indeed, yet the lesson of the law, if learnt, would have preached the need of a grace which God had been ever showing. For the law is not against grace, but its handmaid ; and to every honest soul, most crushingly against legality. Israel, as the apostle reminds them, were all, by their idolatry in the worship of the golden calf, under the condemnation of the outraged law, and God's announced principle, upon which alone He could take them up, was, "I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion" (Rom. 9:15). To sovereign goodness they owed it that He could go on with them at all; and their whole history illustrated the same thing. Jonah's "Salvation is of the Lord " was their only hope all through, who (as the apostle again says') were found at last, "forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they should be saved, to fill up their sins always" (i Thess. 2:16). Yet even so they will be taken up as objects of mercy at the last, upon this same blessed only-sufficing principle (Rom. 11:31). " How good is the God we adore! "

But the moral of this history for ourselves, how important it is! We are in a place of special witness for God, far beyond that of Israel. Under the law with its closed sanctuary, there could as yet be no world-wide evangelism such as Christianity proclaims. We have a distinct message for "every creature." We are not merely the recipients of grace, as even Israel really was:we have learned it from the lips and in the gift for us of the Son of God Himself; the shadow of law is removed, and the sanctuary is open. The brooding "dove," of which Jonah's name speaks, is known in its blessed significance by those in whom there dwells the Spirit of Christ, the power of all ministry and divine testimony among men, and of whom the Lord speaks when He declares that if any one comes unto Him and drinks, "out of His belly shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:37, 38).

Thus we should naturally think that now there can be no Jonahs who do not answer to their name, and that as an admonition to us the story of the Jewish prophet would be all unneeded. But alas, man's fallen nature violates the most necessary conclusions, and makes its way through every indefectible argument. God asks as to the human heart, "Who can know it? "And we who are, as none ever were beside, the witnesses of divine grace, can we be trusted to maintain consistent testimony to that to which we owe our all? Do our words, our ways, our thoughts of others, our prayers for others, speak for us as those who have learned amid the depths of ruin into which sin has plunged us, to realize that break with all self-satisfaction, all self-sufficiency, all self-assertion, which is involved in fact in that cry of helplessness in which all help is found, "Salvation is of the Lord?"

All truth, all holiness, all liberty of soul, all power for devotedness, fruitfulness of whatever kind, comes to us out of that knowledge, when it is perfected in us; for out of that wreck, well understood, no other self arises than that which one who perhaps of all men knew it best could express only in the paradox, I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."
F. W. G.