1Yahweh’s word came to Jonah the second time, saying,2“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I give you.”
3So Jonah arose, and went to Nineveh, according to Yahweh’s word. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey across.4Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried out, and said, “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!”
Deuteronomy 18:22(v4)When a prophet speaks in Yahweh’s name, if the thing doesn’t follow, nor happen, that is the thing which Yahweh has not spoken. The prophet…
Jeremiah 18:7-10(v4)At the instant I speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to break down and to destroy it; if that nation,…
Jeremiah 1:17(v2)“You therefore put your belt on your waist, arise, and say to them all that I command you. Don’t be dismayed at them, lest I dismay you…
Ezekiel 2:7(v2)You shall speak my words to them, whether they will hear, or whether they will refuse; for they are most rebellious.
2 Kings 20:1(v4)In those days Hezekiah was sick and dying. Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, “Yahweh says, ‘Set your house…
Show all 18 cross-references
2 Kings 20:6(v4)I will add to your days fifteen years. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city for…
Jonah 1:1(v1)Now Yahweh’s word came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying,
Jonah 1:2(v2)“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.”
Jonah 3:3(v2)So Jonah arose, and went to Nineveh, according to Yahweh’s word. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey across.
Jonah 3:10(v4)God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. God relented of the disaster which he said he would do to them, and he didn’t do…
Jeremiah 15:19-21(v2)Therefore Yahweh says, “If you return, then I will bring you again, that you may stand before me; and if you take out the precious from the…
Ezekiel 3:17(v2)“Son of man, I have made you a watchman to the house of Israel. Therefore hear the word from my mouth, and warn them from me.
Zephaniah 2:13-15(v2)He will stretch out his hand against the north, destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation, as dry as the wilderness. Herds will…
Matthew 3:8(v2)Therefore produce fruit worthy of repentance!
John 5:14(v2)Afterward Jesus found him in the temple, and said to him, “Behold, you are made well. Sin no more, so that nothing worse happens to you.”
Genesis 22:3(v3)Abraham rose early in the morning, and saddled his donkey; and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son. He split the wood for…
Psalms 80:10(v3)The mountains were covered with its shadow. Its boughs were like God’s cedars.
Matthew 21:28-29(v3)But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first, and said, ‘Son, go work today in my vineyard.’ He answered, ‘I will…
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this passage (27 sources)
Historical commentary, presented as a primary source — not an endorsement.
John Calvin1540 · Public DomainOn vv1–4There is here set before us a remarkable proof…
There is here set before us a remarkable proof of God’s grace, — that he was pleased to bestow on Jonah his former dignity and honor. He was indeed unworthy of the common light, but God not only restored him to life, but favored him again with the office and honor of a prophet. This, as I have said, Jonah obtained through the wonderful and singular favor of God. As he had previously fled, and by disobedience deprived himself in a manner of all God’s favor, the recovery of his prophetic office was certainly not obtained through his own merit.
It must, in the first place, be observed, that this phrase, The word of Jehovah came the second time, ought to be noticed; for the word of God comes to men in different ways. God indeed addresses each of us individually; but he spoke to his Prophets in a special manner; for he designed them to be witnesses and heralds of his will. Hence, whenever God sets a man in some peculiar office, his word is said to come to him: as the word of God is addressed to magistrates because they are commanded to exercise the power committed to them; so also the word of God ever came to the Prophets, because it was not lawful for them to thrust in themselves without being called.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators1599 · Public DomainOn vv1, 3, 4This is a great declaration of God’s mercy, that…
This is a great declaration of God’s mercy, that he receiveth him again, and sendeth him forth as his Prophet, which had before showed so great infirmity.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp1656 · Public DomainOn vv1–4Jon 3:1 And the word of the LORD came…
Jon 3:1 And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
Ver. 1. And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time] Jonah is a sinner, but not a castaway. God lays him not by as a broken vessel, treads him not to the dunghill, as unsavoury salt; but receives him upon his return by repentance, and restores him to his former employment, gives him yet a name and a nail in his house; yea, sends him a second time on his message to Nineveh; and counting him faithful, puts him again into the ministry, who was before a runagate, a rebel, &c. But he obtained mercy, 1Ti 1:13, as did likewise the apostles, after that they had basely deserted our Saviour at his passion; and Peter, after he had denied him, see Joh 20:22-23; Joh 21:15-17. The penitent are as good as innocent, Quem poenitet peccasse, pcene est innocens (Sen. Agam.). "Return, ye backsliding children" (saith the Father of mercies), "and I will heal your backslidings," Jer 3:22. The Shulamite returning is as lovely in Christ’s eye as before; and all is as well as ever between them, Son 6:4. There is a natural Novatianism in the timorous conscience of convinced sinners to doubt and question pardon for sins of apostasy and falling after repentance; but had they known the gift of God, and who it is that saith to them, "Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee," they would have conceived strong consolation.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole1685 · Public DomainOn vv1–4And, after that Jonah had been well disciplined for…
And, after that Jonah had been well disciplined for his contumacy, and was set at liberty,
the word of the Lord came; the command, or the prophetic Spirit: see Joh 1:1.
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The second time; the first time Jonah rebels against the command, now, better prepared and humbled, he is tried again, God doth give him the gift of prophecy, and by that signifies his reconciliation to him, and admits him into his old station.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill1763 · Public DomainOn vv1–4And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah…
And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time,.... Jonah having been scourged by the Lord for his stubbornness and disobedience, and being humbled under the mighty hand of God, is tried a second time, whether he would go on the Lord's errand, and do his business; and his commission is renewed, as it was necessary it should; for it would have been unsafe and dangerous for him to have proceeded upon the former without a fresh warrant; as the Israelites, when they refused entering into the land of Canaan to possess it, upon the report of the spies, and afterwards reflecting upon their sin, would go up without the word of the Lord, and contrary to the advice of Moses, many of them perished in the attempt, being cut off by the Amalekites, Num 14:1; and this renewal of Jonah's commission shows that he was still continued in his office as a prophet, notwithstanding his failings; as the apostles were in theirs, though they all forsook Christ, and Peter denied him, Mat 26:56; and that the Lord had heard his prayer, and graciously received him, and took away his iniquity from him, employing him again in his service, being more fitted for it:
saying; as follows:
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley1765 · Public DomainOn vv1, 3, 4Jonah's mission renewed and executed, ver. 1-4. The humiliation…
Jonah's mission renewed and executed, ver. 1-4. The humiliation and reformation of the Ninevites, ver. 5-9. Their sentence revoked, ver. 10.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke1810 · Public DomainOn vv1–4Jonah is sent again to Nineveh, a city of…
CHAPTER III
Jonah is sent again to Nineveh, a city of three days' journey,
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(being sixty miles in circumference, according to Diodorus
Siculus,) 1-4.
The inhabitants, in consequence of the prophet's preaching,
repent in dust and ashes, 5-9.
God, seeing that they were deeply humbled on account of their
sins, and that they turned away from all their iniquities,
repents of the evil with which he had threatened them, 10.
NOTES ON CHAP. III
Verse 1. And the word of the Lord] The same oracle as that before given; and which, from what he had felt and seen of the justice and mercy of the Lord, he was now prepared to obey.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson1811 · Public DomainOn vv1, 4Jon 3:1-3. And the word of the Lord, &c.…
Jon 3:1-3. And the word of the Lord, &c. — After Jonah had been well chastised for his disobedience, and was set at liberty, as recorded in the preceding chapter, the divine call to him to prophesy was repeated. He had rebelled against God’s command the first time, but now, being humbled and better prepared, he is tried again. So — Hebrew, And, Jonah arose and went into Nineveh — He now obeys without reluctance. Such was the blessed fruit of the correction which he had received. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city — The Hebrew reads, A great city to God: so the mountains of God are the same with great mountains, Psa 36:6, and the cedars of God are translated goodly cedars, Psa 80:10. Nineveh was the greatest city in the known world at that time; greater than Babylon, whose compass was then three hundred and eighty-five furlongs; but Nineveh was in compass four hundred and eighty furlongs, which makes something more than sixty of our miles. It is said that its walls were one hundred feet in height, and broad enough for three coaches to meet and pass safely by each other: that it had one thousand five hundred towers on its walls, each two hundred feet high. Diodorus Siculus represents it as an oblong figure, the two longer sides of which measured one hundred and fifty stadia, and the two shorter ninety. “Ninus,” says he, “hastened to build a city of such magnitude, that it should not only be the greatest which then existed in the whole world, but that none in succeeding ages, who undertook such a work, should easily surpass it; and his expectation has not been deceived. For no one has since built so great a city; both as to the extent of its circuit, and the magnificence of its wall.” According to a report recorded by Eustathius, fourteen myriads of men were employed for eight years in building this city. It is here said, that it was of three days’ journey; and Diodorus asserts the same; that is, of three days’ journey in circuit, allowing twenty miles to each day.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes1834 · Public DomainOn vv1–4And the word of the Lord came a second…
And the word of the Lord came a second time to Jonah - o “Jonah, delivered from the whale, doubtless went up to Jerusalem to pay his vows and thank God there. Perhaps he hoped that God would be content with this his punishment and repentance, and that He would not again send him to Nineveh.” Anyway, he was in some settled home, perhaps again at Gath-hepher. For God bids him, “Arise, go” . “But one who is on his way, is not bidden to arise and go.” God may have allowed an interval to elapse, in order that the tidings of so great a miracle might spread far and wide. But Jonah does not supply any of these incidents . He does not speak of himself , but only of his mission, as God taught him.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary1859 · Public DomainOn vv2–4Bid thee before, or when thou shalt be there.…
Bid thee before, or when thou shalt be there. (Calmet) --- He seems to have retired to Jerusalem. (Menochius)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures1864 · Public DomainOn v1[The Renewal of Jonah’s Commission (Jon_3:1-2). His Preaching to…
CHAPTER 3
[The Renewal of Jonah’s Commission (Jon_3:1-2). His Preaching to the Ninevites (Jon_3:3-4). Humiliation and Reformation of the Ninevites (Jon_3:5-9) Reversal of the Divine Sentence (Jon_3:10).—C. E.]
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1And the word of the Lord [Jehovah] came [was communicated] unto Jonah the second time, saying, 2Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto 3it the preaching [make the proclamation to it] that I bid thee. So [And] Jonah arose, and went unto [to] Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord [Jehovah]. Now [And] Nineveh was an exceeding great city [a great city to God] of three days’ journey. 4And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey [a journey of one day], and he cried1 [proclaimed], and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall 5be overthrown. So [And] the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. 6For [And] word came [had come] unto [to] the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he [omit he] laid his robe from him [put off his robe from him], and covered him [himself] with sack cloth, and sat in ashes. 7And he caused it to be proclaimed and published [and said] through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let 8them not feed, nor drink water:2 But [And] let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea [and] let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. 9Who can tell3 [knoweth] if [but that] [the] God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger 10[glow of anger], that we perish not? And [the] God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that [which] he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
Jon_3:1-9. The preaching of Repentance by Jonah in Nineveh and its Result.
Jon_3:1-2. God sends the prophet, the second time, to make his proclamation—his Krîah—against Nineveh; the same that was to be put in his mouth. דֹּבֵר, part. fut. as in Isa_5:5. [דֹּבֵר signifies, according to the idiomatic use of the participle, about to tell, and suggests the idea of a proximate futurity.—C. E.]
Jon_3:3. Jonah is made wiser by the chastisement which he experienced, and does not again attempt to evade the call.
Now Nineveh was a great city (comp. the Introduction, p. 9) before God [für Gott]. The ,dativus ethicus designates not an inward peculiar relation of Nineveh to God, as in the passage (Act_7:20) quoted by Hitzig; but it corresponds to the phrase “before God,” which is applied to Nimrod, the founder of the city (Gen_10:9), and denotes here the world-position of the city, there of the person. Men may appear great to their people; cities to their possessors, or spectators, and still not occupy a world-position. (Deu_1:28). [“עִיר גדוֹלָה לֵאלֹהִים, a city great to God. This phrase has been variously explained. Some, with Kimchi, deem it merely a superlative form; Gesenius construes the ל instrumentally, great through God, i. e., through his favor. Others consider it to be equivalent to לפִנֵי אֱלֹהִיםbefore God, Gen_10:9. Thus the Targum קָדָם יִיָ. Of this last interpretation I approve, as it was most natural to refer the size of a city, of which the Hebrews could form no adequate conception, to the Divine estimation. I have accordingly rendered the words literally, as our preposition to is often used to note opinion, or estimate.” Henderson On Jonah.
“But Nineveh was a great city to God (le’löhîm), i. e., it was regarded by God as a great city. This remark points to the motive for sparing it (cf. Jon_4:11) in case its inhabitants hearkened to the word of God.” Keil and Delitzsch.
“Nineveh was an exceeding great city; lit. great to God, i. e., that would not only appear great to man who admires things of no account, but what, being really great, is so in the judgment of God who cannot be deceived. God did account it great, who says to Jonah, Should not I spare Nineveh that great city, which hath more than six score thousand that cannot discern between their right and their left? It is a different idiom from that, when Scripture speaks of the mountains of God, the cedars of God. For of these it speaks, as having their firmness or their beauty from God, as their Author.” Pusey.
“The phrase ‘an exceeding great city,’ stands in the Hebrew, ‘a city great to God,’ i. e., great before Him,—great as to Him, in his estimation. The Hebrews were accustomed to express their highest ideas of the superlative degree by using the name of God, e.g., ‘mountains of God,’ etc. The sense of this passage may be somewhat more specific, representing the city as great in its relations to God, and not merely as very great apart from these relations.” Cowles.
See Lange on Gen_10:9; also the note by T. L.—C. E.]
Three days’ journey—accusative of measure, as in Gen_14:4.
Since (comp. on Jon_1:2) the direct diameter of the city was only a day’s journey, then the circumference is either designated by מַֽהֲלַךְ (this signification of מַֽהֲלַךְ, though consistent with the statement that the circumference of the city was four hundred and eighty stadia in extent, cannot be maintained), or the way (comp. Eze_42:4), which united together the market-places of the different individual cities forming the great aggregate [complexes], and which it was, therefore, necessary to travel over, in order to go entirely through the city. Jon_3:4, in which מהלךְ designates the way which Jonah travelled over, during the first day (יוֹם אחד, Ges. sec. 120, 4), points to the latter supposition. So certain is he of his message, and so impressed with the urgency of his mission, that he immediately begins to enter into the city, before obtaining a survey of it, and commences to preach on the first day’s journey. His sermon is short, but powerful: Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Forty days are here a round number, meaning after a short time, whose term Jonah measures by the period of the deluge. The LXX. translate it by a still more rigid formula,—Yet three days. This shortening of the time, however, would not harmonize with the facts of the case, since no time would have been left to the Ninevites for repentance,4 for Jonah required three days to go through the city. The word employed to denote the destruction is the old prophetical technical term הפךְ, evertere (Isa_1:7; Isa_13:19), which everywhere points back to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha. (Original passage, Gen_19:25)
[Jon_3:4. “Its greatness amounted to a ‘three days’ walk.’ This is usually supposed to refer to the circumference of the city, by which the size of a city is generally determined. But the statement in Jon_3:4, that Jonah began to enter into the city the walk of a day, i. e., a day’s journey, is apparently at variance with this. Hence Hitzig has come to the conclusion that the diameter of the city is intended, and that, as the walk of a day in Jon_3:4 evidently points to the walk of three days in Jon_3:3, the latter must also be understood as referring to the length of Nineveh. But according to Diod. ii. 3 the length of the city was one hundred and fifty stadia, and Herod. (v. 53) gives just this number of stadia, as a day’s journey. Hence Jonah would not have commenced his preaching till he had reached the opposite end of the city. This line of argument, the intention of which is to prove the absurdity of the narrative, is based upon the perfectly arbitrary assumption that Jonah went through the entire length of the city in a straight line, which is neither probable in itself, nor implied in בּוֹא בָעיר. This simply means to enter, or go into the city, and says nothing about the direction of the course he took within the city. But in a city, the diameter of which was one hundred and fifty stadia, and the circumference four hundred and eighty stadia, one might easily walk for a whole day without reaching the other end, by winding about from one street into another. And Jonah would have to do this to find a suitable place for his preaching, since we are not warranted in assuming that it lay exactly in the geographical centre, or at the end of the street which led from the gate into the city. But if Jonah wandered about in different directions, as Theodoret says, ‘not going through the city, but strolling through market places, streets,’ etc., the distance of a day’s journey over which he travelled must not be understood as relating to the diameter or length of the city; so that the objection to the general opinion, that the three days’ journey given as the size of the city refers to the circumference, entirely falls to the ground. Moreover, Hitzig has quite overlooked the word וַיָּחֶל in his argument. The text does not affirm that Jonah went a day’s journey into the city, but that he ‘began to go into the city a day’s journey, and cried out.’ These words do not affirm that he did not begin to preach till after he had gone a whole day’s journey, but simply that he had commenced his day’s journey in the city when he found a suitable place and a fitting opportunity for his proclamation. They leave the distance that he had really gone, when he began his preaching, quite indefinite; and by no means necessitate the assumption that he had only begun to preach in the evening, after his day’s journey was ended. All that they distinctly affirm is, that he did not preach directly he entered the city, but only after he had commenced a day’s journey, that is to say, had gone some distance into the city. And this is in perfect harmony with all that we know about the size of Nineveh at that time. The circumference of the great city Nineveh, or the length of the boundaries of the city of Nineveh in the broadest sense, was, as Niebuhr says (p. 277), ‘nearly ninety English miles, not reckoning the smaller windings of the boundary; and this would be just three day’s travelling for a good walker on a long journey.’ ‘Jonah,’ he continues, begins to go a day’s journey into the city, then preaches, and the preaching reaches the ears of the king (cf. Jon_3:6). He therefore came very near to the citadel as he went along on his first day’s journey. At that time the citadel was probably in Nimrod (Calah). Jonah, who would hardly have travelled through the desert, went by what is now the ordinary caravan road past Amida, and therefore entered the city at Nineveh. And it was on the road from Nineveh to Calah, not far off the city, possibly in the city itself, that he preached. Now the distance between Calah and Nineveh (not reckoning either city), measured in a straight line upon the map, is eighteen and a half English miles.’ If, then, we add to this, (1) that the road from Nineveh to Calah or Nimrod hardly ran in a perfectly straight line, and therefore would be really longer than the exact distance between the two parts of the city according to the map, and (2) that Jonah had first of all to go through Nineveh, and possibly into Calah, he may very well have walked twenty English miles, or a short day’s journey, before he preached. The main point of his preaching is all that is given, namely, the threat that Nineveh should be destroyed, which was the point of chief importance, so far as the object of the book was concerned, and which Jonah of course explained by denouncing the sins and vices of the city.” Keil and Delitzsch.—C. E.]
Jon_3:5. Then the men of Nineveh believed God. That the Babylonians had a great respect for divination, so that what is here related does not appear strange (Keil), may appear apologetically an important observation; but this was probably not in the mind of the writer: it was his intention to relate something extraordinary. Moreover, he would not have employed the expression “believe,” but the more common פחד, fear, or a similar word. (See moreover below at Jon_3:8.) The word believe here, as often elsewhere, is used with special reference to the appropriation of prophetical instruction to the soul’s inner life (Isa_7:9; Hab_2:4), without however excluding the element of justification, when confidence is exercised in the mercy of God. Its fruits, Jon_3:5 ff., are those which are required from preaching, repentance, and conversion (Joe_2:15 ff.). And this repentance was indeed a general one, a repentance of the people, as it was carried out by bringing over to it all the inhabitants, the king, and even the beasts. Jon_3:6 ff. is only a fuller recital of the brief historical statement in Jon_3:5, and should, according to the context, be rendered in the pluperfect: For the matter had come to the King of Nineveh, etc, to Jon_3:9. Our author is fond of such pluperfect adjuncts (Jon_1:5-10). Following the natural, epic character of the narrative, we have retained the aorist in the translation. The king rises from his throne (comp. 2Sa_13:31), and lays aside his royal robe (comp. Jos_7:21), puts on a mourning-dress and sits in ashes—all a sign of sorrow and repentance (Eze_26:16).
The verbs in Jon_3:7 ff. have the indefinite subject “one”: one proclaimed and said in Nineveh by the command of the king and his nobles also, etc. The royal heralds are meant, to whom the execution of the טעם (a north-Semitic word = תּוֹרָה, comp. Dan_3:29 f.) was committed. That the beasts were included in the public humiliation is nothing unusual in the East. When Masistios fell at Platæa, the Persians, in honor of him, sheared the hair from their horses. (Herod. ix. 24. Comp. Brissonius, De Regni Persarum Principiis, II. c. 206). Horses hung with black were, in the time of Chrysostom, frequently seen at funeral processions, and they are frequently to be seen at the present day. The custom has its foundation in the lively feeling of the mutual adaptation of man and nature. (Comp. Joe_1:18, and the description of the great grief in the fifth Eclogue of Virgil [also Æneid, 11:89, c. e.].) Besides it is especially mentioned here as a reason, just as “great and small” Jon_3:5, that not merely repentance of sin, but also compassion toward guiltless creatures should move God to spare them (Jon_4:11). But it is not required to press to the utmost the separate applications of the royal edict, in the interest of the fides historica, otherwise we would be obliged to infer from Jon_3:8 that the cattle were clothed in mourning and that their lowing was taken for prayer, which was certainly not so. The strength of the expressions paints the depth of the repentance, and Jon_3:8 b shows the reason of their use by the king and by the narrator, who reproduces the edict: and let them turn every one from his evil way (Eze_18:23), etc., that we perish not (comp. Jon_1:6). It is too strongly asserted that this result of Jonah’s denunciation of doom is psychologically incomprehensible in itself (Hitzig), because he spoke as a foreigner to a foreign people in a foreign language. But the esteem of antiquity for the oracles of the gods [Götterstimmen] is known; and the fact that the limits of national worship were thereby left undetermined, in proof of which we cite the well-known fact that Crœsus consulted the Grecian oracles (comp. Ezr_1:1 ff.; Genesis 41; Numbers 22; Luke 7). And the more threatening these oracles were, the more certain were they to obtain belief, as is natural, since the threatenings of divine punishment have a powerful ally in the conscience of man. If one reflects on the excitement, which ruled the souls of men about the year 1000 A. D.; on the results which the discourses of a Peter of Amiens, Capistrano, and others of their time had, though delivered in a language not understood; and considers that awe in which holy men were held by antiquity, of which even profane writers afford frequent examples, then the psychological difficulty vanishes, and there is no need of bringing the affinity of the Hebrew and Assyrian languages to our help, in order to find the result possible. It is injudicious to remove, in the interests of apologetics, everything miraculous from the narrative; but it is equally so to push, in the interest of polemics, the miraculous to silliness. Another psychological motive to repentance on the part of the Ninevites our Lord indicates, Luk_11:30, when by the expression σημεῖον τοῖς Νινευίταις, he undoubtedly brings to light that the account of the wonderful events of his life formed an essential part of Jonah’s sermon on repentance. (Comp. Luk_11:32, and the Ob. of Luther on Jon_3:4 below.)
With reference to האלהים, Jon_3:9-10 (comp. Jon_1:6) Burck remarks: “Non hic adhibetur nomen Jehovah, quia de populo gentili ser mo est. Jehovœ cognitio sublimior, quam Dei.”
Jon_3:10. The Compassion. As faith expects, so it comes to pass. (Comp. Exo_32:12; Exo_32:14.) God looked upon the Ninevites: He turned his countenance, with kind thoughts, toward them. (Comp. Jon_3:9; Jon_3:1; Jon_3:6.)
[“But however deep the penitential mourning of Nineveh might be, and however sincere the repentance of the people, when they acted according to the king’s command; the repentance was not a lasting one, or permanent in its effects. Nor did it evince a thorough conversion to God, but was merely a powerful incitement to conversion, a waking up out of the careless security of their life of sin, an endeavor to forsake their evil ways which did not last very long. The statement in Jon_3:10, that “God saw their doing, that they turned from their evil ways; and He repented of the evil that He had said that He would do to them, and did it not” (cf. Exo_32:14), can be reconciled with this without difficulty. The repentance of the Ninevites, even if it did not last, showed, at any rate, a susceptibility on the part of the heathen for the word of God, and their willingness to turn and forsake their evil and ungodly ways; so that God, according to his compassion, could extend his grace to them in consequence. God always acts in this way. He not only forgives the converted man, who lays aside his sin, and walks in newness of life; but He has mercy also upon the penitent who confesses and mourns over his sin, and is willing, to amend. The Lord also directed Jonah to preach repentance to Nineveh; not that this capital of the heathen world might be converted at once to faith in the living God, and its inhabitants be received into the covenant of grace which He had made with Israel, but simply to give his people Israel a practical proof that He was the God of the heathen also, and could prepare for Himself even among them a people of his possession. (Keil and Delitzsch.)
Dr. Pusey expresses himself unwarrantably, when he says: “But, what Scripture chiefly dwells upon, their repentance was not only in profession, in belief, in outward act, but in the fruit of genuine works of repentance, a changed life out of a changed heart. …Their whole way and course of life was evil; they broke off, not the one or other sin only, but all, their whole evil way. Dr. P. has inserted the adjective “whole” before “evil way.” It is not used by the sacred writer. The repentance of the Ninevites was—though in some instances, it may have been more—a public confession and humiliation ordered by the “king and his nobles.”—C. E.].
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL5
See Introduction, p. 5 ff.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
The repentance of the Ninevites, a model of a genuine national repentance.
1. It hears God’s proclamation and asks not why? Jon_3:1-4.
2. It springs from faith and is accompanied by faith? Jon_3:5; Jon_3:9.
3. It bows itself under the curse of the common guilt, and not a single person asks: how much have I deserved? Jon_3:6 ff.
4. It is united with the purpose of amendment.
On Jon_3:1. The Lord does not withdraw his calls. (Comp. Joh_21:16.) It is a great and enduring grace to be called by Him. Jon_3:2. No one should undertake, of his own absolute power, to threaten others with the Divine wrath and punishment. Preachers, who speak from their own mind, have no right to do so. Therefore, consider well and pray for the Holy Spirit, and entirely humble thyself, and forget thyself, if thou hast in mind to, or must perform such a duty.
Jon_3:3. Whoever feels that he is sent of God should not be afraid of the greatest city. As many a the Lord intends shall hear Him, will hear Him.
Jon_3:4. Speak promptly and delay not. In God’s kingdom every moment is precious. The time, when He puts his word in thy mouth, is the right time; not that which thou fanciest for thyself.
Jon_3:5. Because the Ninevites believed, they repented. Repentance comes not from the law alone; but from the law and faith. From the law alone comes death. Children are not innocent.
Jon_3:6. It becomes a king, who takes precedence in everything, to take the lead also in repentance. (Psalms 51) In repentance and especially before God, all are on a level; purple is of no avail, but only a broken heart. Magistracy is of God’s appointment; but those who possess it are nevertheless sinners.
Jon_3:7. It is a good work and belongs to the office of the magistrate to foster true piety. The state has not merely the negative duty of providing that those who observe their religious festivals [Feiertage] be not disturbed, but also a positive duty. There is no state conceivable with out having duties to discharge to religion and the church. The kingdom of God can subsist without it, but not the reverse. To repentance belongs necessarily the purpose of amendment.
Jon_3:9. The heathen do not despair of God’s mercy, though they do not yet know Christ. It is worse than heathenish to doubt that God is gracious and ready to forgive.
Jon_3:10. The repentance of God is included in his gracious decree. It is the harmonizing of [die Auseinandersetzung zwischen, lit., the settlement between] wrath and forgiveness, justice and love. Wrath is not the final end; but it has for its end and object, love. Law without the Gospel would be an ungodly thing: the Old Testament cannot subsist without the New. Woe to him who makes light of the wrath of God: he can never taste of love.
Luther: Jon_3:1. It is therefore written that we may bear in mind, that nothing is to be undertaken without God’s word and command. For the first command, of God having been violated by disobedience, had not God renewed it, Jonah would not have known, whether he should do it, or not. (Comp. Num_14:1 ff.; Deu_1:41 f.) The Israelites at first would not fight at God’s command; afterward they wished to do so of their own accord and were beaten. (1Pe_4:11.)
Jon_3:2. Nineveh, the city of God. God cares also for the heathen. (2Ki_5:1; Jer_25:9.)
Jon_3:4. He doubtless did not confine himself in preaching to these words; his proclamation is briefly reported.
Jon_3:5. They do some things, which God does not command. Therefore He, afterward, Jon_3:10, does not commend their fasting and sackcloth, but that they turned from their evil way. God saw their earnestness; therefore He permitted the foolish things—that the animals should fast, etc.,—to be acceptable to Him, which He would not have beheld with favor, had the earnestness been wanting. Free will, or our own power, does not produce such earnestness; but faith by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Jon_3:9. The king speaks as if he doubts. But he doubts not; for doubt does not call upon God and employ such earnestness. A truly penitent heart stands with fear in the contest, and fights against despair; but as it has not yet won, it speaks as if it were uncertain. If there were no faith, it would not hold out amidst such toil and trouble. Therefore, words are rather a sign that faith is there.
Jon_3:10. Here the works are commended; what shall we say against it? Here the legalists have the advantage, yes, a fine advantage! Look at the text. It says, God saw their works, that is, they pleased Him. But what kind of works were they? The text shows: They turned from their evil way. Such works do and teach, then we will not refuse to thee the praise of works; but we will help thee to extol them. To turn from one’s evil way is not a trifling work; it includes, not fasting and sackcloth, but faith in God from the heart, and the loving of our neighbor as ourselves; that is, it requires the whole man to be pious and just in both body and soul. For God requires the whole man, and dislikes half-converts and hypocrites.
Starke: Jon_3:1. God’s purpose and command must succeed and be accomplished; for it cannot be hindered or frustrated by any human designs. God by means of the ministry saves sinners by sinners.
Jon_3:2. God even during the time of the Old Covenant, sought the salvation of the heathen.
Jon_3:3. Nineveh, a great city to the Lord, should surely have been devoted to God: God had wrought for it (Jon_4:10). Παθήματα, μαθήματα, nocumenta, documenta, poor in spirit, rich in faith (armselig macht gottselig, Isa_28:19). God can well tolerate great cities, if they only give place to Him and his word.
Jon_3:4. Since God has still his own everywhere, these most likely were the first to have been awakened, and to have served as coadjutors in the preaching of repentance.
Jon_3:5. Credidit Ninive et Israel incredulus perseverat; credidit Præputium, et circumcisio permanet infidelis. Where the Word of God is preached sincerely and purely, there it brings fruit in its season, if not in all, at least in some. (1Th_2:13.) Jonah did in his mission, as did the Apostles. Wherever they came, they did not seek first permission from the magistrate; but they rested [their authority] upon the command of Christ.
Jon_3:7. It is well for the masses of a community, when pious magistrates have also pious servants around them. It is a strong proof of sincere repentance for sins committed to remove every occasion to lust out of the way.
Jon_3:8. One must prove his repentance by external acts. It is a peculiar instance of Divine justice that God suffered Israel to be destroyed by the same people, who repented at the voice of his prophet, while on the contrary, the Israelites had despised all the prophets from Samuel down. God’s decree has always a fundamental reference to conversion [hat die Ordnung der Bekehrung immer zum Grunde].
Pfaff: God does not change his commands. He repeats his calling grace. He calls the sinner twice, thrice, yea, even to the end.
Jon_3:4 : A preacher must speak the truth frankly [deutsch], and not sugar it over and deprive it of its power by ornaments and flattery. One must plainly say to sinners that they are hastening to destruction.
Jon_3:7. Here we find established the right of the magistrate in spiritual things; especially in regard to the externals of Divine worship and its right ordering.
Jon_3:9-10. It is certain that God bestows his grace upon the penitent.
Quandt: Jon_3:1. With God nothing is impossible. Truly, the heart must suffer itself to be broken, otherwise even God cannot break it by his Almighty power. The same word of God, which was rejected and despised by us in former times, is received by us with devotion, when it comes to us the second time and we in the meantime have become different persons. Many individuals and families want nothing but the cross to bring them back.
Jon_3:3. Alas! Jonah has more followers in the way of flight than in the way of obedience.
Jon_3:4. Three ways may be pursued on receiving such a terrible message—despair, frivolous mockery, repentance and conversion. The Ninevites chose the third.
Jon_3:9. Faith disappoints nobody.
Jon_3:10. That Nineveh was converted was a wonder. With us, it is a wonder, if we are not converted.
Marck: Jon_3:1. God is so good and so indulgent to the weaknesses of his servants, that even after repeated proofs of his grace, He makes known his will to them, not once, but oftener, in order that they may have no pretext of ignorance, but may know the true object of their redemption, namely, to obey the commands of their Redeemer and to manifest his glory.
Burck: God does not utterly reject him, who has failed once; but He rather gives him a new opportunity of correcting former faults.
Rieger: To him, who comes out of trouble, danger, and sickness, God commonly permits an opportunity soon to occur, when he can pay his vows.
Schlier: In renewing the command, God says not a word about the guilt of Jonah; for Jonah is humbled. In the miracle of his deliverance he has learned what obedience is, although he does not yet know what Divine compassion toward the perishing heathen is.
Burck: Jon_3:4. Preaching is usually efficacious, from the very first, among those who do not receive the Word in vain. There is very little hope of those, who have heard the Word of God proclaimed by the same messenger, not merely many days, but years, without becoming better, even if they should have the opportunity of hearing the same preaching a thousand years.
Marck: Jon_3:5. There is not only a very close connection between evil, guilt, and punishment, so that they are commonly mutually dependent, but also the good is connected by intimate bonds, since from one virtue of one man other virtues of others flow, and the Divine blessing follows virtue. This is illustrated by the obedience of Jonah, with which the repentance of the Ninevites and the Divine compassion were closely connected.
Rieger: The exercises of repentance are here described for the most part by the outward circumstances that accompanied them,—quite different from what is practiced at the present day, when one would perform the several acts of repentance, devotion, and prayer, in such a quiet way as to be scarcely perceived by those who are nearest about him. But where there is genuine earnestness within, there the outward manifestation is not so readily suppressed.
Burck: Jon_3:6. There is a difference between a court, which is a stranger to the true religion, and one that is attached to it in only a hypocritical way. The former is more easily moved; the latter, in consequence of God’s decree, is more hardened.
Bochart: Jon_3:7. This edict, issued to the Ninevites, in order to appease the anger of God; the edict of Darius (Dan_6:26 ff.); that of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan_3:20), and others, were just so many preparations for the conversion of the heathen, which followed the advent of Christ. In this way God’s goodness and glory became gradually, and in a certain measure, known to the nations, which were strangers to Israel (Exo_5:2).
Schmieder: Jon_3:8. The understanding may call the penitential acts on the part of the beasts foolish; but the heart will seize upon them, because they show deep contrition of heart; and this is certainly the main point here.
Hieronymus: Jon_3:10. God soon changed his purpose, because He saw that their works were changed. He did not hear words, such as Israel was wont to say: “All that God has said will we do” (Exo_19:8; Exo_24:3); but He saw works. He will rather that the ungodly turn from their evil way, than that they should die. (Eze_18:23; Eze_18:32).
Talmud: Dear brethren, sackcloth and fasting avail nothing; but repentance and good works. For it is not said of the Ninevites, etc.
Burck: How far are God’s thoughts removed from the thoughts of man, even from the thoughts of men, who seem unto others to be sound in the faith.
Rieger: The Lord Jesus bears testimony to this repentance of the people of Nineveh (Mat_12:14), that, in its good consequences, it will extend to the day of judgment; and hence, in sparing them, God must have been sincerely and kindly in earnest. But because Nineveh fell back into its former sins, it was overthrown by the wrath of Jehovah scarcely a century after this salutary conversion: so also it befell Jerusalem, because it did not acknowledge and receive Him, of whom Jonah was a type.
[Calvin: Jon_3:3. He went, then, according to the command of Jehovah; that is, nothing else did he regard but to render obedience to God, and to suffer himself to be wholly ruled by him. We hence learn how well God provides for us and for our salvation, when he corrects our perverseness; though sharp may be our chastisements, yet as this benefit follows, we know that nothing is better for us than to be humbled under God’s hand, as David says in Psalms 119.
Jon_3:10. God had respect to their works—what works? not sackcloth, not ashes, not fasting; for Jonah does not now mention these; but he had respect to their works, because they turned from their evil way.
Fairbairn: “Why should God have sent his prophet to admonish us of sin, and foretell his approaching judgment, a prophet, too, who has himself been the subject of singular mercy and forbearance? If destruction alone had been his object, would he not rather have allowed us to sleep on in our sinfulness? And why, in particular, should these forty days have been made to run between our doom and our punishment? Surely this bespeaks some thought of mercy in God; it must have been meant to leave the door still open to us for forgiveness and peace.” So undoubtedly they reasoned, and, as the event proved, reasoned justly.
Pusey: Jon_3:10. And he did it not. God willed rather that his prophecy should seem to fail, than that repentance should fail of its fruit. But it did not indeed fail, for the condition lay expressed in the threat.
Cowles: Jon_3:10. Works meet for repentance will infallibly secure the reversal of threatened and impending doom. God’s immutability is that of principle—not of plan and action. He immutably hates and punishes sin: hence, when a sinner becomes a penitent, God turns from threatened vengeance to free pardon.—C. E.]
Footnotes:
[1][Jon_3:2.—קְרִיאָה, that which is proclaimed, proclamation; τὸ κήρυγμα, (LXX.); prædicatio (Vulgate).
[2][Jon_3:7.—טַעַם = טְעֵם, Dan_3:10; Dan_3:29, a technical term for the edicts of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings.
[3][Jon_3:9.—מִי־יוֹדֵעַ, who is knowing?—C. E.]
[4]For the Heb. Text are Aqu., Symm, Theodot., Syr.; also, Hieron., Theodoret, Aug. Lange, Bibelwerk O. T., 19.
[5][ [Reichsgedanken, see note, p. 20.—C. E.].
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown1871 · Public DomainOn vv3–4arose and went--like the son who was at first…
arose and went--like the son who was at first disobedient to the father's command, "Go work in my vineyard," but who afterwards "repented and went" (). Jonah was thus the fittest instrument for proclaiming judgment, and yet hope of mercy on repentance to Nineveh, being himself a living exemplification of both--judgment in his entombment in the fish, mercy on repentance in his deliverance. Israel professing to obey, but not obeying, and so doomed to exile in the same Nineveh, answers to the son who said, "I go, sir, and went not." In it is said that Jonas was not only a sign to the men in Christ's time, but also "unto the Ninevites." On the latter occasion () when the Pharisees and Sadducees tempted Him, asking a sign from heaven, He answered, "No sign shall be given, but the sign of the prophet Jonas," . Thus the sign had a twofold aspect, a direct bearing on the Ninevites, an indirect bearing on the Jews in Christ's time. To the Ninevites he was not merely a prophet, but himself a wonder in the earth, as one who had tasted of death, and yet had not seen corruption, but had now returned to witness among them for God. If the Ninevites had indulged in a captious spirit, they never would have inquired and so known Jonah's wonderful history; but being humbled by God's awful message, they learned from Jonah himself that it was the previous concealing in his bosom of the same message of their own doom that caused him to be entombed as an outcast from the living. Thus he was a "sign" to them of wrath on the one hand, and, on the other, of mercy. Guilty Jonah saved from the jaws of death gives a ray of hope to guilty Nineveh. Thus God, who brings good from evil, made Jonah in his fall, punishment, and restoration, a sign (an embodied lesson or living symbol) through which the Ninevites were roused to hear and repent, as they would not have been likely to do, had he gone on the first commission before his living entombment and resurrection. To do evil that good may come, is a policy which can only come from Satan; but from evil already done to extract an instrument against the kingdom of darkness, is a triumphant display of the grace and wisdom of God. To the Pharisees in Christ's time, who, not content with the many signs exhibited by Him, still demanded a sign from heaven, He gave a sign in the opposite quarter, namely, Jonah, who came "out of the belly of hell" (the unseen region). They looked for a Messiah gloriously coming in the clouds of heaven; the Messiah, on the contrary, is to pass through a like, though a deeper, humiliation than Jonah; He is to lie "in the heart of the earth." Jonah and his Antitype alike appeared low and friendless among their hearers; both victims to death for God's wrath against sin, both preaching repentance. Repentance derives all its efficacy from the death of Christ, just as Jonah's message derived its weight with the Ninevites from his entombment. The Jews stumbled at Christ's death, the very fact which ought to have led them to Him, as Jonah's entombment attracted the Ninevites to his message. As Jonah's restoration gave hope of God's placability to Nineveh, so Christ's resurrection assures us God is fully reconciled to man by Christ's death. But Jonah's entombment only had the effect of a moral suasive; Christ's resurrection assures us God is fully reconciliation between God and man [FAIRBAIRN].
Nineveh was an exceeding great city--literally, "great to God," that is, before God. All greatness was in the Hebrew mind associated with GOD; hence arose the idiom (compare "great mountains," Margin, "mountains of God," ; "goodly cedars," Margin, "cedars of God," ; "a mighty hunter before the Lord," ).
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three days' journey--that is, about sixty miles, allowing about twenty miles for a day's journey. Jonah's statement is confirmed by heathen writers, who describe Nineveh as four hundred eighty stadia in circumference [DIODORUS SICULUS, 2.3]. HERODOTUS defines a day's journey to be one hundred fifty stadia; so three days' journey will not be much below DIODORUS' estimate. The parallelogram in Central Assyria covered with remains of buildings has Khorsabad northeast; Koyunjik and Nebbi Yunus near the Tigris, northwest; Nimroud, between the Tigris and the Zab, southwest; and Karamless, at a distance inward from the Zab, southeast. From Koyunjik to Nimroud is about eighteen miles; from Khorsabad to Karamless, the same; from Koyunjik to Khorsabad, thirteen or fourteen miles; from Nimroud to Karamless, fourteen miles. The length thus was greater than the breadth; compare , "a day's journey," which is confirmed by heathen writers and by modern measurements. The walls were a hundred feet high, and broad enough to allow three chariots abreast, and had moreover fifteen hundred lofty towers. The space between, including large parks and arable ground, as well as houses, was Nineveh in its full extent. The oldest palaces are at Nimroud, which was probably the original site. LAYARD latterly has thought that the name Nineveh belonged originally to Koyunjik, rather than to Nimroud. Jonah () mentions the children as numbering one hundred twenty thousand, which would give about a million to the whole population. Existing ruins show that Nineveh acquired its greatest extent under the kings of the second dynasty, that is, the kings mentioned in Scripture; it was then that Jonah visited it, and the reports of its magnificence were carried to the west [LAYARD].
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon1874 · Public DomainOn v1JONAH’S PREACHING AND NINEVEH’S REPENTANCE, Jon_3:1-10.
JONAH’S PREACHING AND NINEVEH’S REPENTANCE, Jon_3:1-10.
Jehovah repeats the command to Jonah, to preach to Nineveh (Jon_3:1-2). This time Jonah obeys and delivers the message, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jon_3:3-4). The preaching results in the conversion of king and people, who give every evidence of heartfelt repentance (Jon_3:5-9); whereupon Jehovah withholds the judgment (Jon_3:10).
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1-4. The preaching of Jonah. Jon_3:1, is almost identical with Jon_1:1, the only difference being the addition of “the second time” and the omission of “the son of Amittai”; Jon_3:2 a, is identical with Jon_1:2 a; but Jon_3:2 b is different.
Preach — The same word as in Jon_1:2, “cry”; “preaching,” derived from the same root, occurs only here in the Old Testament. The message is to be determined by Jehovah.
Jonah has learned a lesson; and, though still rebellious in heart (Jon_4:2), he proceeds immediately to carry out the divine commission. The narrative of Jonah’s preaching is interrupted by a brief description of Nineveh’s greatness (Jon_3:3; compare Jon_4:11).
Was — Definitely expressed in Hebrew; may indicate that Nineveh was no longer a “great city,” when the description was written (see p. 335).
An exceeding great city — Literally, a city great unto God, that is, great even in the estimation of God (compare Gen_10:9); Kautzsch renders in German “unmenschlich gross” (superhumanly great). Probably an anticipation of Jon_4:11, where the size of the city and the number of the inhabitants are given as a reason for God’s desire to save it.
Three days’ journey — It seems more natural to interpret this of the diameter than of the circumference. True, some of the classical writers make it appear that the diameter was only one day’s journey, while the circumference was approximately three days’ journey. But, as Marti suggests, there is no reason why Herodotus and the Book of Jonah should agree on this point; besides, if we should interpret “three days’ journey” of the circumference, and make the diameter only one day’s journey, Jonah must have passed through the entire city before delivering his message, while Jon_3:4 declares that he “began to enter into the city a day’s journey,” which expression certainly presupposes that there was considerable distance to traverse before he could reach the other end (see further on Jon_3:4). It seems best, therefore, to interpret “three days” of the diameter. The extent of the city walls is given by C.H.W. Johns as follows: “The city on the river side of the Tigris extended about two and one half miles; its north wall measured about seven thousand feet, the eastern wall was nearly three miles long, and the southern about one thousand feet.… The actual extent of Nineveh proper is about eighteen hundred acres.… Outside this citadel city lay the ‘outskirts.’… Farther afield, and apparently close to Khorsabad, lay Rebit Ninua.” The latter is perhaps the Rehoboth-Ir of Gen_10:11. In order to get a city three days in diameter or three days long, it is necessary to include all the cities mentioned in Gen_10:11-12, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen, which, though not all identified, must have been in the immediate neighborhood of Nineveh proper. Koenig insists that even this combination would fail to give the required size (see p. 317).
Began to enter into the city a day’s journey — A day’s journey is still called a beginning, because two more were beyond. The natural interpretation seems to be that he journeyed one day; then, having found a suitable place, he delivered his message. Others give a different interpretation. “He began to perambulate the city, going hither and thither, as far as was possible in the first day.” While thus going from street to street, and market place to market place, he is thought to have delivered his message again and again. While the former is the more natural interpretation of the Hebrew, the latter has this advantage, that, with it, Jon_3:4 throws no light on the meaning of “three days’ journey” in Jon_3:3. It would be possible, then, to understand the extent indicated of the circumference, which would reduce the size of the city, and thus remove a geographical difficulty.
Yet forty days… — A very simple message, but one destined to create consternation. Apparently the words of Jonah contained an unconditional announcement of judgment; but later developments showed that it was conditional, that the execution depended upon the people’s attitude toward the prophetic message.
Several modern commentators insert Jon_4:5, after Jon_3:4. Jonah, after having delivered his message, is thought to have left the city to await further developments. Jon_4:5, would make a good continuation of Jon_3:4, but the transposition is not necessary.
Marti’s statement, “Undoubtedly Jonah did not await the coming of the fortieth day in the city, but left the same previously,” is not conclusive.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges1878 · Public DomainOn vv1–41–4. Jonah’s Preaching
1–4. Jonah’s Preaching
1. the second time] Like St Peter (Joh_21:15-17), Jonah is not only forgiven, but restored to his office, and receives anew his commission.
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Ch. Jon_3:1-10. Jonah’s Preaching and its result
Sent a second time by God on a mission to Nineveh, Jonah promptly obeys, Jon_3:1-3 a. He enters into Nineveh and delivers his message, Jon_3:3 b–4. The Ninevites believe God and repent, Jon_3:5-9; and are spared, Jon_3:10.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers1878 · Public DomainOn vv2–4
III.
THE PROPHET FULFILS HIS COMMISSION.
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ITS RESULT.
(2) Preach.—In Jon_1:2 the word is rendered “cry.”
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary1880 · Public DomainOn vv1–4Vers. 1-10. Part III JONAH"S PREACHING IN NINEVEH; THE…
Vers. 1-10. Part III JONAH"S PREACHING IN NINEVEH; THE REPENTANCE OF THE NINEVITES.
Vers. 1-3. Jonah is sent a second time to Nineveh, and obeys the command.
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The second time. He is forgiven and restored to his office, and the commission formerly given is renewed. Commentators have supposed that he went up to Jerusalem to pay his vows, and that the word of the Lord came unto him there. But all unnecessary details are omitted from the account, and we know nothing about this matter. The beginning of the next verse, "arise," seems to imply that he was then in some settled home, perhaps at Gath-hepher.
HOMILIES BY J.E. HENRY Vers. 1-3. Peremptory reiteration and prompt obedience.
We see Jonah entering here on the second stage of his strange career. And it is adjusted logically to the first. His recent experiences and their resulting sentiments form an obvious preparation for the duty next to hand. He has sinned and suffered and repented. He has deserted, and been captured and surrendered unconditionally. He has prayed, and been forgiven and set free. And it is natural that duty should be faced from a different standpoint henceforward. He is in another mind now, and ready for a new departure in personal effort and official tactics. And the opportunity to make it is promptly furnished.
I THE SPIRITUAL DESERTER"S RETURN IS FOLLOWED BY HIS RE-ENGAGEMENT. Jonah had discarded much and been stripped of more. He had refused to act, and had ipso facto forfeited his commission. Now with a return to his right mind there is reinstatement in his lost calling, and re-employment in his forsaken work. We account for this on the principle that:
1. There is forgiveness with God, that he may be feared. There is a forgiveness that only encourages transgression. Such is weak forgiveness, implying a want of firmness in the forgiver, on which there is the temptation to make further aggressions. Such is careless forgiveness, that takes no hostages for the future, nor even makes terms. Such is inequitable forgiveness, in which principle is ignored, and the offence hushed up without regard to the claims of justice. But the Divine "more excellent way" of pardon is at once equitable and defined and strong. Amends for the past and amendment for the future are both exacted sternly. God forgives when he has punished, and on the unbending condition that the offence cease. Then punishment is mingled with so much of mercy, and requirement is sweetened by such]promise of grace, that gratitude mates with reverence, and obedience is the firstborn issue of the happy tie. The insubordinate, mutinous Jonahs having been ironed and subdued, are at length released, that in after action they may exemplify obedience unquestioning and without a semblance of the old self-will.
2. Spitual office attaches to existing spiritual relation. The Divine government is paternal God"s officers are first, of all his children. Their fitness for the discharge of spiritual functions is due to their previous endowment, with spiritual gifts. If unspiritual men and whilst unspiritual they may be formally in office, but are incapable of spiritual work. When Jonah fell for the time being out of the spiritual connection, he ceased to be a prophet of God. He could not be at once a recruiter and a deserter, an ambassador and a rebel. Now he has come back, and in resumed spiritual relations he finds the condition of restored religious functions. He may again speak for God now that again he is on God"s side. No man goes legitimately on God"s errand who cannot do it con amore. Spiritual officers are to be sought exclusively by promotion from the spiritual ranks. Every true shepherd has been first of all a sheep in God"s fold, and to each relation has come in by Christ, the Door.
II GOD"S PROGRAMME IS STEREOTYPED, WHATEVER ELSE MAY CHANGE. (Ver. 2) God has not changed, although Jonah has. The prophet"s mutinous outbreak has not moved him a hairbreadth from his purpose. What he meant at first he means still, and will have. So the prophet is brought back exactly to the point at which he had broken away, and told to begin where he had left off.
1. God is moved still by the same compassion for the doomed. "That great city." The repetition of these words on each occasion of the mention of Nineveh is significant. It shows that God had regard to the tact of its size; that all through the arrangement of measures for its warning he was moved by the thought of its teeming population given over to death. Hence it is styled in ver. 3 "a great city to God," i.e. in his estimation, and in Jon_4:11 the Divine compunction is directly connected with the existence of its hundred and twenty thousand children, not yet responsible, but bound to perish with it. The Divine compassion is a glorious factor in human life. Its attitude is catholic. It embraces in wide paternal arms the heathen that knows not God, the infant that could not know him if revealed. Its outflow is unstinted, averting myriad evils altogether, softening the inevitable, indemnifying the past by the amends of rich compensatory good. Believe in God"s pity. It is a splendid fact. It is hunger"s provision, and pain"s anaesthetic, and misery"s comforter, and humanity"s good Samaritan in the darkest reaches of its Jericho journey, and the most calamitous experiences by the way.
2. God"s prescribed step remains the fitting one to take. What other methods it was within the resources of Divine omnipotence to use for the conversion of the Ninevites, we cannot tell. What we know is that the proclamation of the truth was the ordinary method, and that God keeps to it. "The sword of the Spirit," with which he pierces the soul and kills its sin, is the "Word of God." "The foolishness of preaching" is that special presentment of the Word by which in all ages it has pleased God to save them that believe. And there is, if we could see it, the perfection of fitness in this ordinance. Truth is light revealing things as they are and as they ought to be. Truth is motive, presenting considerations that move intelligence to seek that better state. Truth is force, conveying to the soul and constituting in it the Divine omnipotent energy in the strength of which the new man arises, and the new life is lived. Truth is comfort, unfolding the soul rest and joy of the free which climb the throne of being when the new regime of righteousness begins. Then truth preached with the living voice and personal element is all this and more. To the influence proper to the abstract truth is added its influence as concreted in a human life. As light it is intensified by the added ray of an illustrative experience. As power it is reinforced by the impulse of a cooperant human will. As comfort it is at once confirmed and sweetened by personal testimony and fellow feeling. There is no conceivable substitute in the enginery of grace for the personal preaching to sinners of the word of life.
3. Repentance is best proved by obedience in the matter at which there was stumbling before. Jonah had passed through a severe discipline for the conquest of his self-will. Whether or not it was really overcome, this reiterated commission would test. And there was a needs be that the point should be settled. All judgment is "unto righteousness;" to bring us to it if afar from it, to restore us to it if we have strayed. And it is this not in the general, but in the particular. It is to check particular faults and produce the opposite virtues. In this object God will see that it succeeds... He cannot fail as men fail. His chains must bind. He gives no disputable instructions, nor moves to their observance by futile action. In tow of his disciplinary privateers when they return to port, will be formal, as a prize of war, every skulking craft that had been trying to do the enemy"s work. The proof that his measures have not been nugatory is the circumstantial realization of their purpose. The iniquity he visits with the rod he must see put away. The forsworn task he enforces with the strong arm he must see done. "God looks upon men when he has afflicted them and has delivered them out of their affliction, to see whether they will mend of that fault particularly for which they were corrected; and therefore in that thing we are concerned to see to it that we receive not the grace of God in vain (Matthew Henry).
III THE DISCIPLINED SERVANT IS AN IMPROVED SERVANT. (Ver. 3) The stern discipline has done its work at last. The rebellious fit is over, and the unruly servant is pliant to his Master"s will. What evils of terror and pain and agony he might have escaped if he had only done this at first! But God bends all things to his purpose, and Jonah"s rebellious freak among the rest. His message to Nineveh is not only done, but better done than it could possibly have been at first.
1. Jonah is better prepared for it than he was. He has sinned and been forgiven, has suffered and been delivered, has prayed and received an answer. And each experience is of the nature of a qualification for the better doing of his work. "Rejoicing in the sweetness of a fresh and full reconciliation; lightened in spirit by tasting in God a mercy larger than he could formerly have thought of; cleansed from the darkness that brooded over his soul, and the countless images of terror and of evil which rose up before him while be was fleeing from his God in rebellion, and his God was pursuing him in wrath" (Martin), he would approach his Master"s work as never before. Reverence for a God so great and good, and gratitude to a God so merciful and kind, would spring together and work together the new mind and way. Affliction, moreover, had left its mark on him. He was subdued and chastened. He knew experimentally his impotence and God"s omnipotence. He could speak by book of the terrors of the Lord, and the fatuity of hoping to defy him and escape. And his preaching would have a reality and vividness about it attainable only by way of his late experience. Then "he had called upon the Lord in circumstances almost fitted to shut out the possibility of hope." If there be a case on record pre-eminently fitted to confirm the declaration, "Men ought always to pray, and not to faint," it is his. Would he not resume his post with livelier loyalty and implicit sense of duty, when he could resume it with the blessed protestation, "I love the Lord, because he hath heard the voice of my supplication: because he hath inclined his ear unto me, I will call upon him as long as I live"? (Martin).
2. He does it implicitly. (Ver. 3) "So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh: Submission is now as thorough as at first self-will was resolute. The change is excellent, and its occurrence a vindication of the treatment that has brought it about. An infinitely wise and holy will is God"s. The ideal of a man"s life is to believe in that will, and will it, and find his joy in doing it. From irreconcilable variance to absolute harmony with that ideal is Jonah"s change, a change that means his spiritual readjustment. It will mean no less to us all "The felicity of heaven greatly consists in perfect submission in all things to the government of Jehovah the Saviour. The misery of this world is the want of that temper of mind; the very end and desert of grace is to restore us to it; and so far as we are under the influence of the grace of life, we are brought back to it; the more grace the more submission; and grace will not cease its operation in the saints till every thought is brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (Jones). A man following absolutely the lines of the infinitely perfect will; a man moving thereon with fullest faith and sympathy and zest; a man starting therein as a child starts for the haven of a mother"s arms; a man incapable of other thought than following them to the highest good, and till his life"s end; that is a man in the highest sense, and to the highest spiritual effect.
3. He goes closely by his instructions. (Ver. 3) According to the word of the Lord. This terse record is instinct with suggestiveness. He went because he was told, and where he was told, and when he was told, and as he was told, and to do the thing he was told, and in the way he was told. His conduct now was exemplary as before it was intolerable. And his case is typical. His instructions were the preacher"s instructions for all lands and times. "Preach the preaching that I bid thee." It was this Moses preached, (Deu_18:18) and Jeremiah, (Jer_1:7) and Paul, (1Co_11:23) and Christ himself. (Joh_7:16 Joh_12:50) It is this we must preach. What else is worth preaching, or can or dare be preached? As to the substance of his message, the preacher has no discretionary power. He is not to preach science, nor philosophy, nor sentiment, nor his own notions, nor human knowledge. He is rightly to divide the Word of life. That is all, "There is not the greatest minister, not the most learned or acute, But must observe this rule; not James, not John, not Peter, not all the troop of the apostles, my once vary from this: he who shall bring other doctrine, let him be accursed by us; he who speaketh of himself, let him be refused by us; howsoever godly or holy he do pretend himself, yet if he decline that word which should be his direction, let him be declined by us" (Abbot). Here is an admirable maxim for universal use, "according to the Word of the Lord." It is good, and wise, and true, and pertinent to every case, the key to every puzzle of life. Are you a sinner? there is salvation for you, full, and free, and present, and "according to the Word of the Lord." Are you a seeker? expect to find, for salvation is in Christ, and of those that come to him there are none cast out, "according to the Word of the Lord." Are you a saint? then fight and persist and hope; for that you are "kept by the power of God," and will yet "reap if you faint not," is "according to the Word of the Lord. J.E.H.
HOMILIES BY W.G. BLAIKIE Vers. 1-4. Jonah"s second call.
"And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee," etc.
I REINSTATEMENT OF THE PROPHET. "The word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time." Jonah"s rebellion had had a twofold effect on his relations to God broken up his personal fellowship with him, and suspended his official function as a prophet. God"s grace restored him both personally and officially, as afterwards in the case of Peter; but, as in this case, the restoration of the first did not necessarily include that of the second. Servants of God who have fallen need a second call to public service; it needs to be shown that God trusts them with his work again. It is natural for ministers who have been publicly dealt with and censured to desire to be reponed; but this cannot be rightly done without some token that God again calls them.
II THE NEW COMMISSION. "Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee." We know not where Jonah was where he had been landed what had happened in the interval. Imagination can picture the prophet on the shore making for Gathhepher, and probably arriving there. Again the message is preceded by the word of stimulation, "Arise;" brace thyself, prepare for arduous work; and this time it would bring a lesson of warning remember how easily you were turned aside before! The work was not to be made easier out of regard to the prophet"s proved weakness, but the prophet must seek a higher strength. The greatness of Nineveh is again dwelt on that great city exceeding great city, and great unto God" (ver. 3). "Think of a whole vast city, full of this humanity, of this God-breathed life; and is it surprising that a great city should be great unto God? What flashings of intellectual lights in one day! as many almost as the separate rays of the sun. What throbbings of moral or immoral purpose, the moral faculty acting in each! What a sighing of wandering spirits, unconsciously or blindly seeking the lost portion! What a swell and heave of the great tide of animated life composed of the blended individual streams I London is like a great and wide sea of life. The daily agitations which stir in her bosom are felt in feebler pulsings even in far off shores; and in multitudes which no man can number her thoughts and acts, and in these her checkered moral history, are going up to God"s heaven. Such was Nineveh of old, and for such reasons as we have named, it was still, as at first, a city great to God" (Raleigh). The message is somewhat different from before: "Preach the preaching literally, "cry the cry"] that I bid thee." This may either mean, "the cry that I will bid thee at the time," or "the cry that I already bade thee." Either Jonah was to go, like an admiral, with sealed orders to be opened at a certain place; or he was to say what he had been ordered to say before, but had shrunk from saying. The latter view is probably correct a further trial of Jonah"s sincerity and submissiveness in the very matter which had dissatisfied him before, he was called to place himself in God"s hands, and to engage to do precisely as God would direct. In all cases, true preaching is "the preaching that I bid thee." It is a simple message from God; it becomes effectual when it is given as such. All very well to be able to reconcile it with reason and commend it to the conscience, and to set it forth with the enrichments of learning and, the embellishments of art; but there is danger lest its true simple nature be thereby disguised; nothing should be allowed which prevents it from being presented as a simple message from God: "the preaching that I bid thee." "How often did our Lord disclaim the authorship of all that he said, and assign it continually to the Father! "Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me; the words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself". (Joh_7:16) Himself personally cognizant of all truth, he acts as the Church"s Teacher under the responsibility and within the exact limits of his office. Officially ordained the Father"s Ambassador, he confines himself to a declaration of the Father"s words.... Exactly as the Father had said unto him, so he speaks" (Martin).
III THE OBEDIENCE OF THE PROPHET. "So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord." "How different every way from what he was when he fled to Tarshish? We see him no more consulting with flesh and blood, but yielding prompt obedience to the heavenly call. No more running away, but asking, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? Here am I; send me." The Lord saith, "Go to Nineveh;" he instantly goes without gainsaying or resistance" (Jones). "In the present case, Jonah would resume his commission with a new obedience; with a meekness, a faith, a courage, to all of which his punishment and pardon had been the signal means of disciplining him. He would resume his work and mission with another spirit
(1) as a sinful man, whose sin had been eminently forgiven;
(2) as a prayerful man, whose prayer had been eminently answered;
(3) as an afflicted man, whose affliction had been eminently blessed" (Martin). "The Word says, "Arise," and Jonah arose; the Word says, "Go," and Jonah went. It is beautiful It is grand. We must not indeed exaggerate. For we know that there is something dark and bitter in this man still, which will break out again. But meantime, and in this act of obedience, so far as we see it, there is a grandeur like that of an angel a simplicity like that of a child" (Raleigh).
IV THE MESSAGE DELIVERED. "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." Jonah in Nineveh what a contrast to Gath-hepher, Joppa, or even Jerusalem! What temples! what tombs! what monuments! what new impressions of its vastness and power! Perhaps new impressions of its horrible treatment of those who opposed themselves to it. It was no uncommon sight to witness a row of prisoners, each impaled alive on an iron spike; or men of mark flayed alive; or captives, with hooks in nose, dragged by halters, carrying the bleeding heads of their kings or nobles. Anyhow, pictures of such things abounded. They made no undue impression on Jonah. "Strong in faith," he went boldly forward and delivered the message. "He cried, and said lifted up his voice like a trumpet under the windows of the rich, in the resorts of the poor before the proud military array before nobles and judges and all His message was more specific and startling than before. Stern, but faithful and honest preaching; no flattery; no shrinking from exposure of the true mind of God. They might do with him as they pleased; he had not a single friend in that vast multitude no protection but God"s nevertheless, he would proclaim the message. As John Knox said long afterwards, "I am in the place where I am commanded of God to speak the truth; and the truth I will speak, impugn it whoso list." Contrast the feeling of Jonah now and when he fled to go to Tarshish. His soul tumultuous and agitated then, in peace and serenity now. "He that sayeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Acknowledge the reality of Divine protection and strength sense of peace and proof of it, for, after all, fidelity to God is the true policy. "Them that honour me, I will honour". W.G.B. (1Sa_2:30)
HOMILIES BY G.T. COSTER Vers. 1-4. Jonah in Ninevah.
I A GREAT RESTORATION. After his recreancy to duty, who had been surprised if Jonah had been thrust out of the prophet"s office? The guilt of his flight, the moral insensibility into which he had sunken, rendered him, many would think, unfit to be God"s spokesman to men. But God had mercy on him. And saved, he had presently the assurance of it. He was reinstated in the prophet"s office, and solemnly commissioned anew to the prophet"s work. A second time" bidden go, he went. It was a great restoration, and openly marked by the great errand on which he was sent. The work showed that the worker was restored. For that still the backslider is recovered. Not for mere personal enjoyment in religion. Not merely to have the assurance of individual safety. But also to "show" what great things God hath done for him. Was Peter restored? Let him prove it: "Feed my sheep .... my lambs." So was Jonah comforted; restored, he had the assurance of it in the renewed commission, "Go to Nineveh.
II A GREAT SPHERE FOR WORK. God himself, in giving this commission, spoke of Nineveh as "that great city." Jonah knew from human testimony that the city was great. But God says it is. Then let Jonah be ready for difficulties. It is no little work to which he is bidden. And is the greatness of Nineveh mentioned only to prepare him for the magnitude of the task before him? Is there not implied therein a reason, should the people repent, for the Divine compassion? "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city?". (Jon_4:11) In a town, with its many homes, families, cares, virtues, vices, how much to impress a human imagination, to affect a human heart! But in great cities, throbbing with restless life, each man of the millioned multitude with his own history, his own destiny, how the solemn interest is deepened! Great cities are great to God. Religion is the only protection of city or state. The repentance of the Ninevites averted the doom of Nineveh; its wealth, valour, fame, availed not to effect this. This punishment of nations as such comes in this world. The sins of nations have destroyed them. May our own nation know the time of its visitation, that it perish not!
III A GREAT EXAMPLE. Jonah is here seen at his best. There is a moral sublimity in his promptitude. "Arise, go." He went. The difficulty of obedience always grows by delay, it may be hard at the beginning, but it will be easier then than ever after. "God loveth a cheerful giver," whatever be the gift. Bold was Jonah. Wisely bold. As soon as Nineveh was reached he began his solemn cry. Bold, though alone. He had no human companion to encourage him, to help him. Bold, to utter the cry of woe. Destruction was the burden of his oft-repeated message. Nothing in that to gather affection to him loving, joyful attention. May his courage be ours! We have glad tidings to tell; and no such lonely path to tread as he. With such a message, and with the viewless presence of the Messenger, we may well be of good courage. G.T.C.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator1887 · Public DomainOn vv1, 3, 4And the Word of the Lord came unto Jonah…
Jon_3:1-2
And the Word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying.
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The restored commission
Here we learn what God is to those who truly repent. God may even restore all that has been forfeited. For those who have done grievous wrong, it is encouraging to think that there is honour, and glory, and a blessed restoration to the full love of God, if only they return out of the darkness into the presence from which they have departed. God sent Jonah on the very same mission in which he had failed before,--and yet with a marked difference distinguishing the second from the first call. The changed command, though full of restored confidence, implies a warning to be exact in fulfilling the will of God--to be careful as to giving the message exactly as he received it. It seems to say, Risk not any further disobedience even in the least particular of the mission on which you are sent.
1. The exceeding mercy of God shown in this, that He offers renewed opportunities to those who fail to profit by the first opportunity; and it may be even opportunities of the same kind. They may have to be followed after a different manner, but yet the same object, the same end may be set before us till finally accomplished.
2. There is this further wonder in the forgiving and forbearing of God, that He causes the trials of the returning penitent to be the means of good. Those who have passed through the experience of such penitential struggles and fears may become afterwards a blessing to others, because they can tell of the dangers that beset them, and of the mercy through which they have been saved. The grace of God not only restores a man generally, as it were, but renews him in the very point in which he had sinned and failed. Take courage then, you who are beset with some special sin. Let us learn from the long catalogue of those who have fallen and have been recovered to take hope for ourselves. God desires a perfect, not an imperfect work. Grace crowns acts of penitence and faith. (T. T. Carter.)
The preacher of judgment
Jonah, the runaway prophet, is now before us as Jonah the successful preacher.
1. Sin in God s servants is a great hinderer.
2. Faithlessness in the servant does not necessitate failure to the Master. Chastisement may lead to consecration, and that to successful service.
3. Moral delinquency repented of is no impassable barrier to former favour, privilege, and honour. God does not take advantage of our weakness to cut us off for ever. He is patient, pitiful, forgiving, and will restore His penitent servants to forfeited blessings and dignities.
4. The preachers true function is to declare what God commands him. The message as well as the commission must bear the impress of Divinity. Divine thoughts, purposes, desires, truths, and not human notions, creeds, sentiments, opinions, fancies, must ever fill the mind, inspire the tongue, constrain the utterance, and fire the eloquence and enthusiasm of every ambassador of the Cross. Note that Jonah was obedient at last to the holy orders. He did what he should have done at first. Obedience is true or false according to the temper in which we act. Notice the method and matter of his preaching. His method was earnest, courageous, impressive. He cried. His matter was adapted to rich and poor. It was solemn, humiliating, definite, merciful. We have the practical fruits of the preaching,--repentance and reformation. Ninevehs repentance was well timed, well grounded, well evidenced, by self-denial, self-abasement, earnest prayer, personal reform. Learn that genuine repentance averts the punitive purposes of God. God watches for genuine indications of moral reform. Behold them, He refrains from executing His threatenings. Repentance is a wonderful power in the domain of moral government. (J. O. Keen, D. D.)
The history of Jonah set before the young
The prophet Jonah opposed the will of God, and would not do what God commanded him, as did Balaam; but there was this difference between them,--that Jonah did fear and love God. God destroyed Balaam. He only punished Jonah, and brought him to repentance. It is then a very good thing to love and serve God; because those who do so cannot quite turn away from God, and Cod will never quite turn away from them. If they sin, they will be punished, like Jonah was; but those who love and serve God are still under His care, and like Jonah are brought back to repentance. If there are among you any that are wishing to serve God, but are yet sometimes tempted to disobey Him, you may learn much by thinking of what happened to Jonah.
1. God gave him a command to go and tell the people of Nineveh that He was about to destroy them. It was a very hard command for him to fulfil. Jonah could not tell what might happen to him, if he ventured into that great foreign and heathen city. But God could take care of him. He knew that God was a loving Father to him. Whenever we are disposed to do wrong, then we are afraid of the Bible; we are afraid of every thing that tells us of our sin; we are afraid of pious persons; we cannot bear to pray. Whenever you are disposed to do what is wrong, you feel equally disposed to flee from the presence of the Lord. You act like Jonah. Therefore our best way is to love and serve God with all our hearts, and ask Him for grace to do all our duty, as Jonah ought to have done. When the lot fell upon Jonah, they asked him what he had done; and he was obliged to tell them how he had been shrinking from doing his duty, and was trying to escape from God, who followed him, and who knew where he was, and what he was doing. It must have made him more miserable to have seen how much better the heathen were than he. For he had brought them into danger, and they were trying to save his life. At last, at his own wish, they took him up, and threw him into the sea. Ungodly persons, when they are brought into trouble, cannot pray. Now there is not a place on earth, and there is not a degree of guilt in which we may be living, in which our believing prayer cannot reach the ear and heart of God: for when Jonah cried unto the Lord, in the midst of his troubles, God heard him, and caused the fish to vomit him out upon the shore of his own land. How humble and grateful he must have felt that day! He was not left, however, to be indolent and inactive. Jonah was brought through all his troubles, to just this point, that he must obey the commands of God. Gods commands never alter. Our sins will not alter them; our troubles will not alter them; our deliverance will not alter them. God commands you to love and serve Him with all your hearts; God commands you to confess Jesus Christ in the world, to make the Bible your rule of life, and to live by faith and in prayer. Jonah was brought to Gods command a second time; and if he had refused, he would have been brought to it a third time. He must do Gods will. When he accomplished the will of God, and found it so easy, doubtless he thought, Why did I not do it at first? (Baptist W. Noel, M. A.)
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
Jonahs first and second commission
What are the points of difference between them? One respects Jonah himself. Formerly he knew the message that he was to deliver. Now he is simply told that a message will be given him, but he is not to know it until he arrives at the place. It may be the same. It may be milder; it may be sterner. Undoubtedly this change has reference to his former disobedience. The message was different in its substance also, to meet the change in Nineveh. When the message was given, it proved to be the never varying cry, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed. Some think he preached on this as a text; but as the cup of Ninevehs iniquity was now full, what was proper to the case was just a cry of coming judgment, brief and plain, startling, stern, unalterable, except by quick and unfeigned repentance. Probably Jonah did not add to this message by the faintest hint or suggestion. The simplest interpretation is the truest. This message makes us think.
1. Of the exceeding sinfulness of sin.
2. How inflexible is the justice of God.
3. What a stupendous power a city has for good or evil. (A. Raleigh, D. D.)
A missionary message
Jonah was foolish, Jonah was wise; foolish to expect to balk God, wise to learn so quickly his folly. Misery, calamity, peril, and the sense of an ever present God who had brought them, did their work; and the prophet, back again at the starting-point, heeds the Divine voice, and turns with an obedient heart to fulfil the mission which he had thought to escape.
I. Gods authority. The Being who speaks is conscious of His right. He does not mince words. Gods demand on Jonah now is precisely what it was in the first place. There is no effort to compromise because of Jonahs former flight. Now comes the command again, plain, stern, uncompromising--Arise, go, preach. The slight change of form in the expression seems full of meaning. Arise, go, and preach the preaching that I bid thee. See that thou preach no other message than Mine. God owns men. All that we are, all that we have, all the service of our lives belongs to God. We delude ourselves with any sense of self-ownership. We get the idea that we own what God only loans to us.
II. Gods way with the disobedient. See how God goes to work to bring this mans will into subjection to His own. What a complex of world-wide, universe-wide machinery the Sovereign of all can set in motion for the subduing of a human spirit! Jonah is not more obdurate than Pharaoh. The storms, the seas, the worse tumults in his own bosom, the upbraidings of the crew, his thoughts of his past, his fear,--all are Gods instruments, and under His direction each does its unconscious part toward the subjection of Jonah, and the salvation of the Assyrian capital. Jonah is a changed man. From a coward he has become a dauntless hero and prophet. Jonah thought himself free when he fled, but in fact his first real enjoyment of freedom came when he started to fulfil Gods command.
III. Gods missionary message and its effect. Jonah was the first foreign missionary. The men of far-off Nineveh were to learn of God, His love and holiness. The very heart of our conception of God as a moral being is His holiness. The holiness of God compels Him to insist upon holiness in all men. In Nineveh sin had taken on its most frightful developments. Nineveh had much, but it lacked just one element of fortune--righteousness. Ninevehs cup of iniquity was well-nigh full. Jonahs preaching was plain, earnest, effective, impressive. God went into the city with Jonah, but God had also gone before. The men of Nineveh were ready for the missionary. The people believed God. To believe God is a great thing. The best possible evidence of the Ninevites belief in the missionarys sermon was their conduct. They acted. They bestirred themselves as if they believed that the sin of their hearts and lives was endangering them. The ringing cry of Jonah reaches even the royal palace, and the king, humbled, joins his subjects in their plea for Gods mercy. The people turned from their sin, and cried for mercy.
IV. Gods mercy. Gods heart was moved; doom was averted; Nineveh was saved. God was merciful to Jonah in following him through all his flight, in bringing him back to the starting-point, in using him though he had shown himself unworthy. God was merciful to Nineveh in sending the messenger to warn the city, and in preparing the hearts of the people for the message. And God is merciful in listening to their cry for forgiveness. God repented. His attitude toward Nineveh was changed. What changed it? Ninevehs attitude toward sin. What is meant by Gods repentance? Speaking to man, God must use language with which man is familiar. Repentance means a changed attitude. The whole attitude of the Ninevites toward sin, and so, toward God, being changed, in that same hour Gods attitude toward them was changed. (John H. Mason.)
Conditions of ministerial success
I. The character of the sermon; or the objective elements of success.
1. It should be argumentative. To expect men to believe without proof is to expect them to become irrational.
2. It must be positive; mainly concerned in the teaching of truth, rather than in the refutation of error.
3. It is doctrinal. The larger part of those who compose our congregations depend upon the preacher for all the knowledge they will ever have of these great theological truths. That preaching is the most practical which indoctrinates the hearers with the fundamental elements of the Christian faith.
4. It should be systematic. As there is a logical coherence between all the parts of the religion we teach, why should we exclude system from our mode of exhibiting it?
5. A bold, unflinching testimony to the great doctrines of Gods sovereignty, mans inability, election, and other unpopular doctrines of the Gospel.
II. The character of the man; or the subjective elements of success.
1. Individuality.
2. Earnestness is self-evidencing.
3. Consciousness on the part of the speaker that he is speaking to his audience. Some preach for the sake of the sermon. Others preach for the sake of the people.
4. The good preacher speaks with authority. Which may be derived from--
(1) Consciousness of official dignity.
(2) Unwavering conviction of the truth.
(3) Consciousness of personal acceptance with God.
5. The manner of delivery should be in accordance with the rules of good speaking. Delivery is an art, and is based upon scientific principles.
6. The preacher must have weight of personal character; not only piety, but weight of character. Who of us is sufficient for these things? (J. W. Pratt, D. D.)
Preaching to great cities
The Lord seems to say to Jonah, Begin where you were when you started out to have your own way. Come back to the very point at which we were, and start again. But the Lord distrusted him a little still, notwithstanding the discipline to which he had been subjected. Now God is more definite. The preaching that I bid thee. There must be no mistake, no dodging, no evasion. Man may disobey God in two ways. He may not go, may plead excuses, and refuse to try to do the work. Or he may not do what God tells him to do, may do something somewhat like it, but not it. It is against this second kind of disobedience that God guards His servant. It is not difficult to obtain men, in this age, who are quite ready to go to great cities. But there are many who, when they go, do not do what God tells them to do. There is preaching enough, but when you come to take out of it the theological dialectics, and the wranglings, and the discussions of the secular phases of life, and the material interests of the Church, and the meddling with current events, you find that the bulk of Gods preaching is comparatively small, and often of weak portent. The great question which lays itself down at the door of our hearts is, Are we doing our whole duty to the city?--not to ones self simply, but to the city? We are here upon Gods errand. Is the city being saved? Is it being saved as we might save it? As God expects us to save it?
I. What are the methods with which we are to go into this great city as appointed by the Almighty? God sends us with a definite commission, and there is to be decisiveness of action on our part. There is to be activity, earnestness. We are to impress upon these sinners round that we can die for them, but we can never leave them unsaved. This indefiniteness, this far-off century, this millennium dawning out of small faith is not of the Gospel. That is for the prophets of evolution, of aesthetics and social culture, for the false prophets. Within the Church are the leverages and forces to bring the millennium to this sinking world.
II. What about the place; what about the exact methods; what about the appliances of the Gospel? If we are to preach to people the preaching God bids us to preach them, how are we to reach them? Jonah was to preach street preaching. Jesus Christ preached in the streets. The preaching of the Gospel should be just as accessible to men as when it is preached in the streets and in the fields. Christ expects men and women to be able to come to the preaching of the Gospel with as much freedom as they go along the highways. There should be nothing in the Churches or in the preaching of the Gospel that shall embarrass in the slightest degree any poor man, or plainly clad man, who may want to find Jesus Christ. We have built our churches away from the people. We imitate a useless, liturgical style of architecture. We let pews to the well-to-do. When men come to the altar of God, and it is their home, how they then throng about their minister; they dont hide away from him.
III. What shall we preach? The Gospel. Just simply the plain old Gospel of the old time. You and I are to preach that very same Jesus who went into Rome, and into Athens, and into Asia-Minor, and whom our fathers preached, and whom our fathers revered. Human nature needs it as much as ever it did. Preach to it the Crucified One; not a petty little philosophy of salvation, or a poetic story of a perfect Man Christ. But preach a God Christ, a Divine Christ, who was torn, lacerated by a devil-world; a risen Christ, risen by His own power, which He will exert in due time for all who die in Him. Preach a Gospel of conviction of sin, of repentance, of regeneration, of the witness of the Spirit, by which human hearts are made new, human character is transformed, human faces are transfigured, and dying mortals are translated into that glory where all are always like Him. (J. R. Day, D. D.)
Effect of Jonahs preaching
There was never a mission undertaken apparently more unpromising than this of Jonah to Nineveh. Here was.--
I. A most unsuitable missionary.
1. To begin with, he was thoroughly unwilling to go. His reason he gives in Jon_4:2. He was fearful that the heathen would repent at his preaching, and in that case God would have compassion, and forgive and spare them. What a fear to be entertained by a missionary!
2. Unsuitable because of the self-deception which he could practise on himself, and his moral confusion and compromise. Let us not think worse of Jonah than the case demands. He has his good traits. At least he is honest, and he is as severe on himself as he is on others.
3. It would have seemed unfavourable also that Jonah should be sent on such a mission entirely alone.
II. Nineveh was a very difficult field. Perhaps the most discouraging thing about it was that its people already knew Jonahs country, his race, and his religion, and thoroughly despised them all. It was to the proud metropolis of a resistless empire, overflowing with wealth and numbers, filled with insolence and luxury, that the lonely man from the village of Gath-hepher was sent. And did it not make matters worse that God had bidden Jonah to carry to Nineveh such a disheartening, exasperating message?
III. Yet the mission of Jonah was a success. A success scarcely paralleled in ancient or in modern times. Nineveh believed God. It is not possible to tell the extent or the permanence of this national repentance. Learn--
1. All races of men have been in Gods loving care.
2. We see the method of Gods mercy to the heathen.
3. We may cherish great expectations concerning the hardest fields of the heathen world.
4. The religious use of fear.
5. The moral power of leaders, whether social or political.
6. Learn Christs own lessons from this history. (Arthur Mitchell, D. D.)
Jonahs commission
The eye of God is always on man. We seem to act as if God retired into the distance of heaven, and took no cognisance of the actions of man. But if Gods eye does look upon man, the disposition of God is to show mercy to man. For do we not see here the messenger sent to Nineveh? If God has a disposition to show mercy, God is one whose patience has limits. We are not to suppose that we can trifle with God; that we can go on with our iniquity, and that God will never vindicate His honour. Learn also that we may hope in preaching to the very worst and most abandoned. Wicked Nineveh listened to the voice of warning. The text further teaches us the duty of the Church, the duty of all Gods people. They are to arise and go and preach the preaching which God bids.
1. We are to arise and go. Here at once activity is demanded at our hand. There must be no lethargy and no lukewarmness.
2. Besides showing activity, the Church is to be aggressive. Jonah was to go away into the haunts of wickedness, and there to scatter in the midst of those people the warnings of Almighty God. So we are to go unto the dark places, and carry that light which God has communicated to man.
3. The Church is to be as the salt of the earth. What does that involve? That it is to influence everything that it touches. And how many are the stimulants to urge us to this active, aggressive work! And observe that we are to preach the preaching that God bids. The preaching must be only what God wants. There must be no addition on our part, no fancies or imaginations of our own. Three parts in preaching.
(1) A warning to the people.
(2) We are affectionately to expostulate.
(3) We must speak the language of comfort and encouragement. (Canon Hussey.)
Christian enterprise
This is an age of enterprise. The world is more active and energetic than ever before. Gigantic schemes, of which the world scarcely dreamed in days gone by, are being hourly put into practical effect. This spirit also pervades the Church of Christ.
I. Christian enterprise is Divinely commanded. Arise and go is the Divine command to every church, to every society, to every Christian to-day.
II. The object of Christian enterprise. It is included in Gods command to Jonah, Arise, go . . . and preach . . . that I bid thee. The work of the Church is to preach, to proclaim what God commands it--all the word of God. Nothing can be accomplished without time, trouble, expense, and labour.
III. The effect of Christian enterprise.
1. It had its proper effect upon the people toward whom it was directed. They believed God, they repented in sackcloth and in ashes.
2. It received the approval of God. God was pleased with Jonah and with the people. He heard their cry of repentance. (S. H. Doyle.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible1887 · Public DomainOn v1Jonah 3
THE REPENTANCE OF THE CITY
Jonah 3
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HAVING learned, through suffering, his moral kinship with the heathen, and having offered his life for some of them, Jonah receives a second command to go to Nineveh. He obeys, but with his prejudice as strong as though it had never been humbled, nor met by Gentile nobleness. The first part of his story appears to have no consequences in the second. But this is consistent with the writers purpose to treat Jonah as if he were Israel. For, upon their return from Exile, and in spite of all their new knowledge of themselves and the world, Israel continued to cherish their old grudge against the Gentiles.
"And the word of Jehovah came to Jonah the second time, saying, Up, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call unto her with the call which I shall tell thee. And Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, as Jehovah said. Now Nineveh was a city great before God, three days journey" through and through. "And Jonah began by going through the city one days journey, and he cried and said, Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overturned."
Opposite to Mosul, the well-known emporium of trade on the right bank of the Upper Tigris, two high artificial mounds now lift themselves from the otherwise level plain. The more northerly takes the name of Kujundschik, or "little lamb," after the Turkish village which couches pleasantly upon its northeastern slope. The other is called in the popular dialect Nebi Yu-nus, "Prophet Jonah," after a mosque dedicated to him, which used to be a Christian church; but the official name is Nineveh. These two mounds are bound to each other on the west by a broad brick wall, which extends beyond them both, and is connected north and south by other walls, with a circumference in all of about nine English miles. The interval, including the mounds, was covered with buildings, whose ruins still enable us to form some idea of what was for centuries the wonder of the world. Upon terraces and substructions of enormous breadth rose storied palaces, arsenals, barracks, libraries, and temples. A lavish water system spread in all directions from canals with massive embankments and sluices. Gardens were lifted into midair, filled with rich plants and rare and beautiful animals. Alabaster, silver, gold, and precious stones relieved the dull masses of brick and flashed sunlight from every frieze and battlement. The surrounding walls were so broad that chariots could roll abreast on them. The gates, and especially the river gates, were very massive.
All this was Nineveh proper, whose glory the Hebrews envied and over whose fall more than one of their prophets exult. But this was not the Nineveh to which our author saw Jonah come. Beyond the walls were great suburbs, {Gen_10:11} and beyond the suburbs other towns, league upon league of dwellings, so closely set upon the plain as to form one vast complex of population, which is known to Scripture as "The Great City." To judge from the ruins which still cover the ground, the circumference must have been about sixty miles, or three days journey. It is these nameless leagues of common dwellings which roll before us in the story. None of those glories of Nineveh are mentioned of which other prophets speak, but the only proofs offered to us of the citys greatness are its extent and its population. {Jon_3:2} Jonah is sent to three days, not of mighty buildings, but of homes and families, to the Nineveh, not of kings and their glories, but of men, women, and children, "besides much cattle." The palaces and temples, he may pass in an hour or two, but from sunrise to sunset he treads the dim drab mazes where the people dwell.
When we open our hearts for heroic witness to the truth there rush upon them glowing memories of Moses before Pharaoh, of Elijah before Ahab, of Stephen before the Sanhedrim, of Paul upon Areopagus, of Galileo before the Inquisition, of Luther at the Diet. But it takes a greater heroism to face the people than a king, to convert a nation than to persuade a senate. Princes and assemblies of the wise stimulate the imagination; they drive to bay all the nobler passions of a solitary man. But there is nothing to help the heart, and therefore its courage is all the greater, which bears witness before those endless masses, in monotone of life and color, that now paralyze the imagination like long stretches of sand when the sea is out, and again terrify it like the resistless rush of the flood beneath a hopeless evening sky.
It is, then, with an art most fitted to his high purpose that our author-unlike all other prophets, whose aim was different-presents to us, not the description of a great military power: king, nobles, and armed battalions: but the vision of those monotonous millions. He strips his countrys foes of everything foreign, everything provocative of envy and hatred, and unfolds them to Israel only in their teeming humanity.
His next step is still more grand. For this teeming humanity he claims the universal human possibility of repentance-that and nothing more.
Under every form and character of human life, beneath all needs and all habits, deeper than despair and more native to man than sin itself, lies the power of the heart to turn. It was this and not hope that remained at the bottom of Pandoras Box when every other gift had fled. For this is the indispensable secret of hope. It lies in every heart, needing indeed some dream of Divine mercy, however far and vague, to rouse it; but when roused, neither ignorance of God, nor pride, nor long obduracy of evil may withstand it. It takes command of the whole nature of a man, and speeds from heart to heart with a violence, that like pain and death spares neither age nor rank nor degree of culture. This primal human right is all our author claims for the men of Nineveh. He has been blamed for telling us an impossible thing, that a whole city should be converted at the call of a single stranger; and others have started up in his defense and quoted cases in which large Oriental populations have actually been stirred by the preaching of an alien in race and religion; and then it has been replied, "Granted the possibility, granted the fact in other cases, yet where in history have we any trace of this alleged conversion of all Nineveh?" and some scoff, "How could a Hebrew have made himself articulate in one day to those Assyrian multitudes?"
How long, O Lord, must Thy poetry suffer from those who can only treat it as prose? On whatever side they stand, skeptical or orthodox, they are equally pedants, quenchers of the spiritual, creators of unbelief.
Our author, let us once for all understand, makes no attempt to record a historical conversion of this vast heathen city. For its men he claims only the primary human possibility of repentance; expressing himself not in this general abstract way, but as Orientals, to whom an illustration is ever a proof, love to have it done-by story or parable. With magnificent reserve he has not gone further; but only told into the prejudiced faces of his people, that out there, beyond the Covenant, in the great world lying in darkness, there live, not beings created for ignorance and hostility to God, elect for destruction, but men with consciences and hearts, able to turn at His Word and to hope in His Mercy-that to the farthest ends of the world, and even on the high places of unrighteousness, Word and Mercy work just as they do within the Covenant.
The fashion in which the repentance of Nineveh is described is natural to the time of the writer. It is a national repentance, of course, and though swelling upwards from the people, it is confirmed and organized by the authorities: for we are still in the Old Dispensation, when the picture of a complete and thorough repentance could hardly be otherwise conceived. And the beasts are made to share its observance, as in the Orient they always shared and still share in funeral pomp and trappings. It may have been, in addition, a personal pleasure to our writer to record the part of the animals in the movement. See how, later on, he tells us that for their sake also God had pity upon Nineveh.
"And the men of Nineveh believed upon God, and cried a fast, and from the greatest of them to the least of them they put on sackcloth. And word came to the king of Nineveh, and he rose off his throne, and cast his mantle from upon him, and dressed in sackcloth and sat in the dust. And he sent criers to say in Nineveh":-
"By Order of the King and his Nobles, thus:-Man and Beast, Oxen and Sheep, shall not taste anything, neither eat nor drink water. But let them clothe themselves in sackcloth, both man and beast, and call upon God with power, and turn every man from his evil way and from every wrong which they have in hand. Who knoweth but that God may relent and turn from the fierceness of His wrath, that we perish not"?
"And God saw their doings, how they turned from their evil way; and God relented of the evil which He said He would do to them, and did it not."
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary1892 · Public DomainOn vv1, 3, 4Jon_3:2. Arise] J. might not imagine that God would…
CRITICAL NOTES.]
Jon_3:2. Arise] J. might not imagine that God would send him again. But he appears to have some settled home, and an interval seems to have elapsed before the second commission, to give time for the report to spread. Preach] Lit. proclaim.
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HOMILETICS
JONAH A SIGN TO THE NINEVITES.—Chap. Jon_3:1, and Luk_11:30
Jonah would obey the second commission with renewed strength and Divine authority. He would appear in Nineveh as a sign, an outward proof of a Divine purpose in his life and work (cf. Luk_11:30).
I. A sign of God’s mercy towards men. As in a mirror, we see much of God and men, of sin and grace, in the history of Jonah. God proved that he was reconciled.
1. In forgiving sin.
2. In restoring a backslider.
3. In reinstating a runaway prophet. If we abuse the confidence of our fellow-creatures, they seldom forgive and employ us again. But God freely forgives, restores to favour after rebellion, and grants commission to unworthy servants. “I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins; return unto me, for I have redeemed thee.”
II. A sign of God’s inflexible justice towards men. God’s servant must be punished and corrected. The sincerity of his penitence, and the honour of his God, must be vindicated. Nineveh must be threatened, and her sin forsaken. Pardon gives no licence to disobedience. Neither the righteous nor the wicked can sin with impunity. God will be glorified in the life of his people, and the law magnified in the destiny of nations.
III. A sign of God’s unchangeable purpose towards men. God’s plans are made in wisdom, and must be accomplished. He does not alter them to gratify the whims and caprice of man. “He is of one mind, and who can turn him?” Nineveh must be warned, and Jonah must go. All pleas and excuses are in vain. God gives to every one his work, and expects him to do it. If he runs away he must be fetched back. Treachery and cowardice God has determined to scourge. “He that knoweth his Master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”
THE SECOND CALL.—Jon_3:1-2
If Jonah doubted whether after sin like his he would ever be restored to favour and service again, he had not long to wait for an answer; for “The word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time.” This second call was—
I. Divinely given. The prophet might be ready, but he had need to be certain that God required him to go. If we are willing, we require instruction in duty. The spring of action is not mere religious feeling, but apprehension of God’s word. Emotion will not ensure consistent life, without faith in Divine truth. God had to speak again. “The first verse,” says Luther, “is therefore written that we may bear in mind that nothing is to be undertaken without God’s word and command. For the first command of God having been violated by disobedience, had not God renewed it, Jonah would not have known whether he should do it or not.”
II. Urgent to immediate service. “Arise, go,” are terms of incitement, and indicate that he was not girded for work, but resting in contentment and ease.
1. The duty was imperative. The more quickly we perform, the better for our souls. Delays are signs of distrust, and impeachment of Divine wisdom. We must prove the sincerity of our profession by prompt obedience. “Be ready to every good work.”
2. The communication was suspended. The exact message seems not to be given at first. Immediate departure to Nineveh was required, and further revelations were delayed. God thus cultivates the dependence and tries the faith of his servants. His own authority in prescribing duty must be sufficient. His simple word is entitled to respect and compliance. Present duty should be enough for us. God will give enlarged views, greater strength, and more consolation, if we practise what we already know. “If any man will do the will of God, he shall know,” &c.
III. Specific in directions.
1. The destination was still the same. “To Nineveh, that great city.” The trial is not abated, the dangers are not hidden. He is again reminded that it was a great, proud, and heathen city, to which he was sent. A city whose inhabitants were pre-eminently wicked and violent, and whom he was to threaten with speedy and complete ruin. But God had given Jonah proofs of his love, and Jonah should give not less evidence of his obedience.
2. The message would be given him. “The denunciation that I shall speak to thee.” He was not to concern himself about his message and its results. That would be given to him when he was ready for it. He is to add nothing, nor diminish nothing. The Christian minister is not left to his own discretion, nor must he study to gratify the taste of the people. He must preach the Word—the message from God to him—earnestly and faithfully. If he tries to explain away or soften down what is severe to the ungodly, “he takes upon himself a double responsibility—responsibility for the salvation of the souls entrusted to him, and responsibility for his own disobedience.” Many may speak to us smooth things, but we must not please men, for how can we then be servants of God? Jonah must be faithful:
(1) In the matter of his preaching. The unwelcome message must be delivered. Nineveh was to be denounced for sin.
(2) In the manner of his preaching. He was to “cry.” Cry in compassion for perishing men, as a proof of his own sincerity, to rouse a careless and sinful people. “Proclaim the preaching that I shall bid thee.”
(3) A second call summoned him. Ingratitude and failure had disgraced his conduct. But God had chastised and forgiven him. His experience was a preparation for service. Before we can proclaim mercy to man we must receive it ourselves. Profound repentance and perfect restoration to Divine favour will qualify us for a proper discharge of duty. Repeated acts of grace to us are a ground of hope for others. Severe trials and deep sorrow are often forerunners of great trust and high distinction. “Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners shall be converted unto thee.”
HOMILETIC HINTS AND OUTLINES
Jon_3:1. God does not utterly reject him who has failed once; but he rather gives him a new opportunity of correcting former faults [Lange].
The most prominent lesson in this verse is that God gives to men successive opportunities for the accomplishment of their life-work. We are not crushed by the weight of our first sin or failure. If so, few would have anything like hope for the future. Life would be a dreary foreboding, lest any message committed to our care should be neglected, and entail final condemnation. The world would be full of wretched mortals, upon whom would rest the woe of unfulfilled mission [Exell].
Jon_3:2. Jonah would resume his work with a new obedience.
1. As a sinful man, whose sin had been eminently forgiven. He would accept his mission in a spirit of gratitude, reverence, and submission.
2. As a prayerful man, whose prayer had been eminently answered. Prayer answered was (a) a testimony to him of his sincerity and integrity; (b) It would inspire him with the assurance that he was not returning alone—that he had One who would carry him through all danger, and give him success in his work.
3. As an afflicted man, whose affliction had been eminently blessed. Like the Psalmist, before he was afflicted, he went astray, but was chastened and subdued. He knew the “goodness and severity of God,” and was fitted to teach them to others [H. Martin].
The preaching. Nothing should be more sacred to the preacher of God’s word than truth, and simplicity, and inviolable sanctity in delivering it [Pusey]. The grand doctrines of the New Testament are eternally fixed. We must preach them, all, faithfully and fully; should we alter, add, or diminish, we do not preach unto the people the preaching which the Lord bids us. If, instead of this, we preach another gospel, we shall bring down upon us a curse and not a blessing [Jones].
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 3
Jon_3:1-3. This is substantially the same commission, and yet different. The “second” call to a man is never exactly the same as the first. The third is never a repetition of the second. Another tone is in the voice of the speaker, firmer or milder. Other shades of meaning are in the message. If it is “the second time,” still more if it is the seventh time, or the seventy-and-seventh time, there will be changes in the message corresponding with changes which time has brought in circumstances and in character. It may seem a refinement, but, properly understood, it is but a simple truth, that he never receives exactly the same command or invitation from God more than once. “If slighted once, the season fair can never be renewed” [Raleigh].
A great city. Nineveh covered a great extent of ground. Historians say that its walls were 480 stadia, or 60 miles, in circumference. It was great in population. Jonah mentions 120,000 who could not discern between their right hand and their left. It was great in splendour and power. “The researches in the mounds have astonished Europe with the barbaric grandeur of the statuary, and the full details of life and history sculptured on marble, or stamped in arrow-headed characters upon the bricks.” But it was morally great to God on account of the human souls, and their spiritual condition. In God’s sight, grandeur, territory, and architectural beauty, are nothing to immortal souls, and the influence which they exert. The material worlds, the sun with its satellites, are not so great as a man. Try to realize how great you are in the sight of God.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible1900 · Public DomainOn v1I. From Joppa the prophet probably went up to…
Jon 3:1
I. From Joppa the prophet probably went up to Jerusalem, to appear in the Temple, to which he had looked from the deep, to sacrifice to God with the voice of thanksgiving, to pay what he had vowed. Then, probably, he returned to Gath-hepher, his former home. And there, as it would seem, he was living when he received the second commission to go to Nineveh. Notice the points of identity between the first and the second commission. (i) God still needs to speak. (ii) Nineveh is still a great city. Therefore that is the place for Him to speak. There are also points of difference between the first and the second commission. (1) One respects Jonah himself, and glances, not reproachfully, but still in a spirit of fatherly faithfulness at his recent disobedience. "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, preach the preaching that I bid thee." Formerly he knew the message that he was to deliver. Now he is simply told that a message will be given him, but he is not to know it until he arrives at the place. He is relegated, as it were, from the position of the "friend who knoweth his Lord’s will," to, or towards, that of the "servant who knoweth not." (2) The message is different in its substance also, to meet the change in Nineveh.
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II. From Jonah’s preaching in Nineveh we see: (i) The exceeding sinfulness of sin. The horror of great darkness which settles down with the night upon Nineveh is all brought by sin. (ii) The inflexible justice of God. (iii) The stupendous power a city has—power for good and power for evil.
A. Raleigh, The Story of Jonah, p. 189.
References: Jon 3:1-4.—W. G. Blaikie,Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 250. Jon 3:2.—J. McC. Hussey, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 177; J. Keble, Sermons from Lent to Passiontide, p. 279. Jon 3:4.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi, p. 333; J. Vaughan, Sermons, 15th series, p. 85.
Jon 3:5
I. Our Lord tells us that "Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites." He was a sign (1) of the impartiality and inflexibility of the Divine justice. Prophet though he was, raised to a higher place of life than common men, admitted to a knowledge of some of the secrets of the Divine government of the world; in favour, as might be supposed, in the celestial court, he no sooner swerves and turns from the way of obedience, than God turns upon him the arrestive and vindicative powers of His government. He is pursued, convicted, cast into the deep. It will appear manifest to them that all nature serves God for His just occasions; that the nets of capture are already woven—spread wherever there can be the footsteps of flight; that storms are brooding in the air and vengeance sleeping in the sea, for those who choose to awake them. (1) He was also a sign of Divine mercy. For he is alive! He has been delivered. From sea and grave, and death and hell, he has come forth. He is not merely in life, he is in favour, once more, with God. Let us take this man as a sign of mercy,—repent and pray, and press towards the gate—see if it will not open a little wider. So the prophet was "a sign" unto them.
II. Notice the effects which are produced upon the city by Jonah’s progress through it. They are such as no man ever produced in a single day, either before or since. They are such as could flow only from the presence and action of the mighty power, and the still mightier grace of God. A sense of God soon filled the city. It was shed from group to group, from street to street. It was awful, painful, at the first, like a "resurrection of condemnation," to their spirits. It turned them away from their own gods as effectually as the sailors in the ship were turned from theirs. "They believed God." Possessed of that faith, all that follows is natural and inevitable.
III. The proclamation which was the faithful exposition of the true sentiments, both of king and people, bears certain marks which we may briefly note. (i) We cannot fail to be struck with the comprehensiveness of it. The prohibition is over every human being, and over all the animals possessed by and related to man. (ii) Fasting was the first part of the decree. Fasting has been a religious exercise in the East as far back as history takes us. The efficacy of it will be more or less, according to climate, individual temperament, and other circumstances. (iii) The covering with sackcloth was the next part of the decree. In its nature and purpose it is closely allied to fasting—with this difference, that it is visible. (iv) Each person is to utter a mighty cry. The Eastern nations have always been addicted to vocal demonstration for the expression of the stronger emotions. The "might," no doubt, is to be in the desire more than in the mere voice that utters it. (v) But by far the most striking and satisfactory characteristic of this proclamation is the last—that which requires from every man a personal and practical reformation: "Let them turn every one from his evil way."
A. Raleigh, The Story of Jonah, p. 216.
References: Jon 3:5-9.—J. Menzies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 100. Jon 3:5-10.—W. G. Blaikie, Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 295. Jon 3:8.—J. N. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 152. Jon 3:9.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 275.
Jon 3:10
I. In the last verse of the third chapter we come upon a difficulty which has exercised the faith and called forth the ingenuity of interpreters. The difficulty is this, there are passages in Holy Scripture which assert in the strongest way that God cannot repent, and that He never does. There are certain other passages (of which this is one) which assert, just as strongly, that He can repent, and that, in fact, He has often done so.
II. If the question is put, "Why was not Nineveh destroyed? how can we reconcile the sparing of the city with Divine veracity, since there is no condition or qualification in the denouncing cry?"—the answer is, that the condition was involved and understood. The possibility of mercy was clearly understood by Jonah, for he was displeased with it. It was understood also by the Ninevites, for they cried for long days and nights. If God had made unreserved announcement of destruction, the city must have been destroyed, for He is in one mind, and who can turn Him? "Hath He said it, and shall He not do it?" "But He knew that the city would repent: why then did He threaten without any expressed reference to this eventuality?" The answer is, that He knew that the city would repent under the shadow of the Divine commination. Not otherwise. The commination was uttered because it was deserved, because it suited the moral condition of the people, because it was necessary in the perfect government of God. Also, God foresaw its good effect; and therefore, in all truth and sincerity, it was put forth. "God knows that His believing children will persevere unto the end: why, then, does He speak to them as if they might not—as if they might apostatize and drawback unto perdition?" The answer is, because they might. It is a clear possibility that they might; and very likely the realization by them of this awful possibility is one of the elements which compose and complete the certainty of perseverance unto the end.
III. The mind of God is the one perfect mirror reflecting without the least distortion or refraction, every object, act, state, being, in the universe, just as it is. God morally regards us at any one moment just as we are. If we repent of all sin and grow into all goodness, His thought and feeling will rise with us; and as, repenting, He spared Nineveh, so will He spare us, and we shall live and not die.
A. Raleigh, The Story of Jonah, p. 241.
References: 3:10-4:1.—J. Menzies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 117; W. G. Blaikie, Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 297. Jonah 3—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iii., p. 103. Jon 4:1-4.—W. G. Blaikie, Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 356. Jon 4:2.—S. Cox, Expositions, 2nd series, p. 75.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren1905 · Public DomainOn v1Jon 3:1 - Jon 3:10.
Jonah
THREEFOLD REPENTANCE
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Jon 3:1 - Jon 3:10.
This passage falls into three parts: Jonah’s renewed commission and new obedience {Jon 3:1 - Jon 3:4}, the repentance of Nineveh {Jon 3:5 - Jon 3:9}, and the acceptance thereof by God {Jon 3:10}. We might almost call these three the repentance of Jonah, of Nineveh, and of God. The evident intention of the narrative is to parallel the Ninevites turning from their sins, and God’s turning from His anger and purpose of destruction; and if the word ‘repentance’ is not applied to Jonah, his conduct sufficiently shows the thing.
I. Note the renewed charge to the penitent Prophet, and his new eagerness to fulfil it.
His deliverance and second commission are put as if all but simultaneous, and his obedience was swift and glad. Jonah did not venture to take for granted that the charge which he had shirked was still continued to him. If God commands to take the trumpet, and we refuse, we dare not assume that we shall still be honoured with the delivery of the message. The punishment of dumb lips is often dumbness. Opportunities of service, slothfully or faintheartedly neglected, are often withdrawn. We can fancy how Jonah, brought back to the better mind which breathes in his psalm, longed to be honoured by the trust of preaching once more, and how rapturously his spirit would address itself to the task. Duties once unwelcome become sweet when we have passed through the experience of the misery that comes from neglecting them. It is God’s mercy that gives us the opportunity of effacing past disobedience by new alacrity.
The second charge is possibly distinguishable from the first as being less precise. It may be that the exact nature of ‘the preaching that I bid thee’ was not told Jonah till he had to open his mouth in Nineveh; but, more probably, the second charge was identical with the first.
The word rendered ‘preach’ is instructive. It means ‘to cry’ and suggests the manner befitting those who bear God’s message. They should sound it out loudly, plainly, urgently, with earnestness and marks of emotion in their voice. Languid whispers will not wake sleepers. Unless the messenger is manifestly in earnest, the message will fall flat. Not with bated breath, as if ashamed of it; nor with hesitation, as if not quite sure of it; nor with coldness, as if it were of little urgency,-is God’s Word to be pealed in men’s ears. The preacher is a crier. The substance of his message, too, is set forth. ‘The preaching which I bid thee’-not his own imaginations, nor any fine things of his own spinning. Suppose Jonah had entertained the Ninevites with dissertations on the evidences of his prophetic authority, or submitted for their consideration a few thoughts tending to show the agreement of his message with their current opinions in religion, or an argument for the existence of a retributive Governor of the world, he would not have shaken the city. The less the Prophet shows himself, the stronger his influence. The more simply he repeats the stern, plain, short message, the more likely it is to impress. God’s Word, faithfully set forth, will prove itself. The preacher or teacher of this day has substantially the same charge as Jonah had; and the more he suppresses himself, and becomes but a voice through which God speaks, the better for himself, his hearers, and his work.
Nineveh, that great aggregate of cities, was full, as Eastern cities are, of open spaces, and might well be a three days’ journey in circumference. What a task for that solitary stranger to thunder out his loud cry among all these crowds! But he had learned to do what he was bid; and without wasting a moment, he ‘began to enter into the city a day’s journey,’ and, no doubt, did not wait till the end of the day to proclaim his message. Let us learn that there is an element of threatening in God’s most merciful message, and that the appeal to terror and to the desire for self-preservation is part of the way to preach the Gospel. Plain warnings of coming evil may be spoken tenderly, and reveal love as truly as the most soothing words. The warning comes in time. ‘Forty days’ of grace are granted. The gospel warns us in time enough for escape. It warns us because God loves; and they are as untrue messengers of His love as of His justice who slur over the declaration of His wrath.
II. Note the repentance of Nineveh {Jon 3:5 - Jon 3:9}.
The impression made by Jonah’s terrible cry is perfectly credible and natural in the excitable population of an Eastern city, in which even now any appeal to terror, especially if associated with religious and prophetic claims, easily sets the whole in a frenzy. Think of the grim figure of this foreign man, with his piercing voice and half-intelligible speech, dropped from the clouds as it were, and stalking through Nineveh, pealing out his confident message, like that gaunt fanatic who walked Jerusalem in its last agony, crying, ‘Woe! woe unto the bloody city!’ or that other, who, with flaming fire on his head and madness in his eyes, affrighted London in the plague. No wonder that alarm was kindled, and, being kindled, spread like wildfire. Apparently the movement was first among the people, who began to fast before the news penetrated to the seclusion of the palace. But the contagion reached the king, and the popular excitement was endorsed and fanned by a royal decree. The specified tokens of repentance are those of ordinary mourning, such as were common all over the East, with only the strange addition, which smacks of heathen ideas, that the animals were made sharers in them.
There is great significance in that ‘believed God’ {Jon 3:5}. The foundation of all true repentance is crediting God’s word of threatening, and therefore realising the danger, as well as the disobedience, of our sin. We shall be wise if we pass by the human instrument, and hear God speaking through the Prophet. Never mind about Jonah, believe God.
We learn from the Ninevites what is true repentance They brought no sacrifices or offerings, but sorrow, self-abasement, and amendment. The characteristic sin of a great military power would be ‘violence,’ and that is the specific evil from which they vow to turn. The loftiest lesson which prophets found Israel so slow to learn, ‘A broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise,’ was learned by these heathens. We need it no less. Nineveh repented on a peradventure that their repentance might avail. How pathetic that ‘Who can tell?’ {Jon 3:9} is! We know what they hoped. Their doubt might give fervour to their cries, but our certainty should give deeper earnestness and confidence to ours.
The deepest meaning of the whole narrative is set forth in our Lord’s use of it, when He holds up the men of Nineveh as a condemnatory instance to the hardened consciences of His hearers. Probably the very purpose of the book was to show Israel that the despised and yet dreaded heathen were more susceptible to the voice of God than they were: ‘I will provoke you to jealousy by them which are no people.’ The story was a smiting blow to the proud exclusiveness and self-complacent contempt of prophetic warnings, which marked the entire history of God’s people. As Ezekiel was told: ‘Thou are not sent . . . to many peoples of a strange speech and of an hard language. . . . Surely, if I sent thee to them, they would hearken unto thee. But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee.’ It is ever true that long familiarity with the solemn thoughts of God’s judgment and punishment of sin abates their impression on us. Our Puritan forefathers used to talk about ‘gospel-hardened sinners,’ and there are many such among us. The man who lives by Niagara does not hear its roar as a stranger does. The men of Nineveh will rise in the judgment with other generations than that which was ‘this generation’ in Christ’s time; and that which is ‘this generation’ to-day will, in many of its members, be condemned by them.
But the wave of feeling soon retired, and there is no reason to believe that more than a transient impression was made. It does not seem certain that the Ninevites knew what ‘God’ they hoped to appease. Probably their pantheon was undisturbed, and their repentance lasted no longer than their fear. Transient repentance leaves the heart harder than before, as half-melted ice freezes again more dense. Let us beware of frost on the back of a thaw. ‘Repentance which is repented of’ is worse than none.
III. We note the repentance of God {Jon 3:10}.
Mark the recurrence of the word ‘turn,’ employed in Jon 3:8 - Jon 3:10 in reference to men and to God. Mark the bold use of the word ‘repent,’ applied to God, which, though it be not applied to the Ninevites in the previous verses, is implied in every line of them. The same expression is found in Exo 32:14, which may be taken as the classical passage warranting its use. The great truth involved is one that is too often lost sight of in dealing with prophecy; namely, that all God’s promises and threatenings are conditional. Jeremiah learned that lesson in the house of the potter, and we need to keep it well in mind. God threatens, precisely in order that He may not have to perform His threatenings. Jonah was sent to Nineveh to cry, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown,’ in order that it might not be overthrown. What would have been the use of proclaiming the decree, if it had been irreversible? There is an implied ‘if’ in all God’s words. ‘Except ye repent’ underlies the most absolute threatenings of evil. ‘If we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end,’ is presupposed in the brightest and broadest promises of good.
The word ‘repent’ is denied and affirmed to have application to God. He is not ‘a son of man, that He should repent,’ inasmuch as His immutability and steadfast purpose know no variableness. But just because they cannot change, and He must ever be against them that do evil, and ever bless them that turn to Him with trust, therefore He changes His dealings with us according to our relation to Him, and because He cannot repent, or be other than He was and is, ‘repents of the evil that He had said that He would do’ unto sinners when they repent of the evil that they have done against Him, inasmuch as He leaves His threatening unfulfilled, and ‘does it not.’
So we might almost say that the purpose of this book of Jonah is to teach the possibility and efficacy of repentance, and to show how the penitent man, heathen or Jew, ever finds in God changed dealings corresponding to his changed heart. The widest charity, the humbling lesson for people brought up in the blaze of revelation, that dwellers in the twilight or in the darkness are dear to God and may be more susceptible of divine impressions than ourselves, the rebuke of all pluming ourselves on our privileges, the boundlessness of God’s mercy, are among the other lessons of this strange book; but none of them is more precious than its truly evangelic teaching of the blessedness of true penitence, whether exemplified in the renegade Prophet returning to his high mission, or the fierce Ninevites humbled and repentant, and finding mercy from the God of the whole earth.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow1909 · Public DomainOn v1Repentance and Pardon of the Ninevites
Repentance and Pardon of the Ninevites
3. An exceeding great city] lit. 'great unto God,' i.e. regarded as great by God: cp. Gen_10:1.
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Of three days' journey] i.e. in breadth.
8. Even the cattle join in the mourning. Neglected by their owners, they fill the air with their groanings. Cp. Joe_1:20, 'The beasts of the field pant unto thee,' and for an interesting parallel, Jdt_4:9-15. The Persians are said, by Herodotus, to have clipped the hair of the horses and baggage animals that they might seem to share in the mourning for a general.
10. For the term 'repentance' = 'change of purpose,' as applied to God, cp. Jer_18:8, and for the action Exo_32:14.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield1917 · Public DomainOn v2(See Scofield "Nah 1:1")
Nineveh
(See Scofield "Nah 1:1")
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein1922 · Public DomainOn v1Jonah Preaching in Nineveh
CHAPTER 3
Jonah Preaching in Nineveh
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1. The repeated commission and Jonah’s obedience (Jon 3:1-4)
2. The repentance and salvation of Nineveh (Jon 3:4-10)
Jon 3:1-4. And now after Jonah’s death and life experience the Word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, telling him to arise and go to Nineveh to preach there what the Lord would command him. And now he is obedient. Jonah arrived in the great city of three days’ journey, and advancing a day’s journey into it he cried out his message, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Following is the objection of higher criticism as to this statement: “If we were reading a historical description the narrative would be full of difficulties. A strange prophet announced the impending destruction as he traveled through the vast city for one day, and the huge population immediately believed and repented. The king, who is not named, heard, put on sackcloth, sitting in ashes. If this were history, Jonah did what no prophet, no apostle, what Christ Himself never did. Never did a day’s preaching bring a vast strange city to repentance. But we repeat, it is not history; it is a story with a meaning, an allegory; it is the great announcement that God cares for the heathen world, and calls it to repentance, and whenever men anywhere repent, His compassion is kindled towards them” (New Century Bible). We reserve the answer to the supposed difficulties in this historical account for the typical unfolding of this event.
Jon 3:4-10. The people of Nineveh believed God. The news that a strange prophet had appeared with the message of doom must have spread like wildfire and hundreds upon hundreds must have passed it on so that in a very short time it reached every nook and corner of the great city; it reached the palace of the king and the prisoners in the dungeon. That this is real history has been confirmed by archaeology. For just about that time Nineveh was in great trouble and facing a crisis, which made them eager to believe the message and return to God. They evidenced their faith by a universal fast and humiliation before God. The king laid aside his royal robe and humiliated himself as every one of his subjects did. He issued a proclamation to abstain from food and drink, in which the dumb creation was included. What a solemn time the great city had, when hundreds and thousands humbled themselves and when the lowing and groaning of the domestic animals was heard throughout the city. The people acknowledged all their wickedness and turned away from their evil ways and deeds of violence, expressing the hope of God’s mercy. “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from His fierce anger, that we perish not.” And God answered and was merciful to them.
The Typical Application
1. As to the Lord Jesus. Jonah who typifies in his experience the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord, preached the message as one who had been in a grave and came to life out of that grave. In Luk 11:29-30; Luk 11:32, our Lord makes the application: “For as Jonah was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of Man be to this generation ... The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and, behold, a greater than Jonah is here.” Christ was not preached as a Saviour to the Gentile world till He had died and risen from the dead. The Greeks who inquired after Him Joh 12:1-50 received no answer. But the Lord spoke of Himself at that time as the corn of wheat which was to die to bring forth the abundant fruit. Christ died for the sins of His people Israel, “for that nation,” but He also died as a member of the nation, from which He came according to the flesh, so that He might rise and become the Saviour of the Gentiles. Christ preached as having died for our sins, buried and risen on the third day, is the true gospel and carries with it the power of God in the salvation of sinners.
2. As to the Nation. The third day is the day of Israel’s spiritual and national resurrection. When that day comes converted Israel will be, according to God’s gifts and calling, a holy nation, a nation of priestly functions, a kingdom of priests. They are then fit to show forth the Lord and His glory, and to bring the message, not of judgment, but of life and glory, to the nations of heathendom. The statement in the New Century Bible quoted above is quite correct in one particular-- that “Jonah did what no prophet, no apostle, what Christ Himself never did”--that never a day’s preaching brought a vast strange city to repentance. And we might add that no preaching today, during this age, can ever bring such results. The case is unique; it never happened again, that a man who was disobedient, who turned against the divine commission, became a castaway, was miraculously preserved and delivered, led a great world city to God and to true repentance. But if we take into consideration the fact that this true history is a prophecy, all these invented higher critical difficulties vanish altogether. When the nation is reinstated in the land, filled with the Spirit, they will fulfill their calling and go forth in bringing the message to the nations of the world. Then Mat 28:19 will be accomplished. Then and not before will the world be converted, and all the nations will be joined in the kingdom to Israel, His kingdom people.
And as for repenting Nineveh there came a day of joy and gladness, as animal creation in that city ceased its lowing and groaning, so will come the day of joy and gladness for this poor world, “in that day” when even groaning creation will be delivered of its groans and moans.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann1924 · Public DomainOn v1Jonah’s Message to the Ninevites and Its Results.
Jonah’s Message to the Ninevites and Its Results.
The disobedient prophet had received a severe lesson at the hand of God, but he now profited by this lesson and was ready to undertake the commission which had originally been issued to him.
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v. 1. And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
v. 2. Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, the Assyrian capital and metropolis, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee, loudly proclaiming the message which the Lord would reveal to him in due time, yielding himself in ready obedience to whatever the Lord may see fit to have him speak.
v. 3. So Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord, in unquestioning obedience. Now, Nineveh was an exceeding great city, literally, "a great city to God," regarded by Him as such, of three days’ journey, that is, it took three days to make the round of its main sections, if a person passed through all the chief market-places.
v. 4. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, he commenced his trip through the various centers comprising the larger city, preaching wherever he found a suitable place and a fitting opportunity; and he cried and said, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown, this threat being the climax of his proclamation, of his call to repentance.
v. 5. So the people of Nineveh believed God, they accepted His word, they were filled with a wholesome fear, and proclaimed a fast, as an outward evidence of their sorrow, and put on sackcloth, the garment of mourning, from the greatest of them even to the least of them, old and young, all without exception.
v. 6. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, into the neighborhood of whose palace the prophet had very likely progressed in his first day’s journey, and he arose from his throne, symbol of his earthly power, and he laid his robe from him, his royal mantle, and covered him with sackcloth, also adopting the mourning-dress, and sat in ashes, all signs of sorrow and repentance. Cf Job 2:8; Eze 27:30.
v. 7. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, the royal heralds being dispatched in accordance with the custom of making edicts of this kind known, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything, the domestic animals being included in this order, as sufferers with the people; let them not feed nor drink water,
v. 8. but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, clothed in mourning, and cry mightily unto God, the very lowing of the cattle and the bleating of the sheep in their distress being considered appeals for mercy; yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, from his sinful habits, and from the violence that is in their hands. Cf Isa 59:6.
v. 9. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, the possibility of His doing so being suggested by His interest in sending a prophet to warn them, and turn away from His fierce anger that we perish not? It was a true repentance on the part of the Ninevites and is so cited by Christ in reproof of those who, with much greater light and privileges, did not repent. Mat 12:41; Luk 11:32, even if its effects were not lasting.
v. 10. And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, from the security of their open transgressions of the Lord’s will; and God repented of the evil that He had said that he would do unto them; and He did it not, letting His mercy guide His actions rather than a stern and immutable justice. As God spared Nineveh when its inhabitants turned to Him in repentance, so He is ready to show mercy to all those who lay aside their obstinate impenitence and plead with Him for forgiveness.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0On vv1, 4The word of Yahweh came
The word of Yahweh came
This is an idiom that means Yahweh spoke. See how you translated this in Jonah 1:1. AT: "Yahweh spoke his message" (See: Idiom)
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the word of Yahweh
Here "word" represents Yahweh's message. AT: "the message of Yahweh" (See: Metonymy)
Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city
"Go to the important city of Nineveh"
Get up
This refers to leaving the place one is at. (See: Idiom)
proclaim to it the message that I command you to give
"tell the people what I tell you to tell them"
So Jonah got up and went to Nineveh in obedience to the word of Yahweh
"This time Jonah obeyed Yahweh and went to Nineveh"
So Jonah got up
"So Jonah left the beach." "got up" refers to leaving the place Jonah was at. (See: Idiom)
Now
This word is used here to mark a change from the story to information about Nineveh.
one of three days' journey
"a city of three days' journey." A person had to walk for three days to completely go through it. (See: Idiom)
Tyndale Open Study Notes2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0On vv1, 3, 43:1–4:11 God again commands Jonah to preach to Nineveh.…
3:1–4:11 God again commands Jonah to preach to Nineveh. This time Jonah obeys, leading to an irony: The city repents, as Jonah had feared, and he is angry at God.
3:1-2 The second part of the book opens as the first part did (see 1:1-2).
GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv1–4 There is here set before us a remarkable proof…
There is here set before us a remarkable proof of God’s grace, — that he was pleased to bestow on Jonah his former dignity and honor. He was indeed unworthy of the common light, but God not only restored him to life, but favored him again with the office and honor of a prophet. This, as I have said, Jonah obtained through the wonderful and singular favor of God. As he had previously fled, and by disobedience deprived himself in a manner of all God’s favor, the recovery of his prophetic office was certainly not obtained through his own merit.
It must, in the first place, be observed, that this phrase, The word of Jehovah came the second time, ought to be noticed; for the word of God comes to men in different ways. God indeed addresses each of us individually; but he spoke to his Prophets in a special manner; for he designed them to be witnesses and heralds of his will. Hence, whenever God sets a man in some peculiar office, his word is said to come to him: as the word of God is addressed to magistrates because they are commanded to exercise the power committed to them; so also the word of God ever came to the Prophets, because it was not lawful for them to thrust in themselves without being called.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4 This is a great declaration of God’s mercy, that…
This is a great declaration of God’s mercy, that he receiveth him again, and sendeth him forth as his Prophet, which had before showed so great infirmity.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–4 Jon 3:1 And the word of the LORD came…
Jon 3:1 And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
Ver. 1. And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time] Jonah is a sinner, but not a castaway. God lays him not by as a broken vessel, treads him not to the dunghill, as unsavoury salt; but receives him upon his return by repentance, and restores him to his former employment, gives him yet a name and a nail in his house; yea, sends him a second time on his message to Nineveh; and counting him faithful, puts him again into the ministry, who was before a runagate, a rebel, &c. But he obtained mercy, 1Ti 1:13, as did likewise the apostles, after that they had basely deserted our Saviour at his passion; and Peter, after he had denied him, see Joh 20:22-23; Joh 21:15-17. The penitent are as good as innocent, Quem poenitet peccasse, pcene est innocens (Sen. Agam.). "Return, ye backsliding children" (saith the Father of mercies), "and I will heal your backslidings," Jer 3:22. The Shulamite returning is as lovely in Christ’s eye as before; and all is as well as ever between them, Son 6:4. There is a natural Novatianism in the timorous conscience of convinced sinners to doubt and question pardon for sins of apostasy and falling after repentance; but had they known the gift of God, and who it is that saith to them, "Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee," they would have conceived strong consolation.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1–4 And, after that Jonah had been well disciplined for…
And, after that Jonah had been well disciplined for his contumacy, and was set at liberty,
the word of the Lord came; the command, or the prophetic Spirit: see Joh 1:1.
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The second time; the first time Jonah rebels against the command, now, better prepared and humbled, he is tried again, God doth give him the gift of prophecy, and by that signifies his reconciliation to him, and admits him into his old station.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–4 And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah…
And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time,.... Jonah having been scourged by the Lord for his stubbornness and disobedience, and being humbled under the mighty hand of God, is tried a second time, whether he would go on the Lord's errand, and do his business; and his commission is renewed, as it was necessary it should; for it would have been unsafe and dangerous for him to have proceeded upon the former without a fresh warrant; as the Israelites, when they refused entering into the land of Canaan to possess it, upon the report of the spies, and afterwards reflecting upon their sin, would go up without the word of the Lord, and contrary to the advice of Moses, many of them perished in the attempt, being cut off by the Amalekites, Num 14:1; and this renewal of Jonah's commission shows that he was still continued in his office as a prophet, notwithstanding his failings; as the apostles were in theirs, though they all forsook Christ, and Peter denied him, Mat 26:56; and that the Lord had heard his prayer, and graciously received him, and took away his iniquity from him, employing him again in his service, being more fitted for it:
saying; as follows:
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4 Jonah's mission renewed and executed, ver. 1-4. The humiliation…
Jonah's mission renewed and executed, ver. 1-4. The humiliation and reformation of the Ninevites, ver. 5-9. Their sentence revoked, ver. 10.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1–4 Jonah is sent again to Nineveh, a city of…
CHAPTER III
Jonah is sent again to Nineveh, a city of three days' journey,
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(being sixty miles in circumference, according to Diodorus
Siculus,) 1-4.
The inhabitants, in consequence of the prophet's preaching,
repent in dust and ashes, 5-9.
God, seeing that they were deeply humbled on account of their
sins, and that they turned away from all their iniquities,
repents of the evil with which he had threatened them, 10.
NOTES ON CHAP. III
Verse 1. And the word of the Lord] The same oracle as that before given; and which, from what he had felt and seen of the justice and mercy of the Lord, he was now prepared to obey.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 4 Jon 3:1-3. And the word of the Lord, &c.…
Jon 3:1-3. And the word of the Lord, &c. — After Jonah had been well chastised for his disobedience, and was set at liberty, as recorded in the preceding chapter, the divine call to him to prophesy was repeated. He had rebelled against God’s command the first time, but now, being humbled and better prepared, he is tried again. So — Hebrew, And, Jonah arose and went into Nineveh — He now obeys without reluctance. Such was the blessed fruit of the correction which he had received. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city — The Hebrew reads, A great city to God: so the mountains of God are the same with great mountains, Psa 36:6, and the cedars of God are translated goodly cedars, Psa 80:10. Nineveh was the greatest city in the known world at that time; greater than Babylon, whose compass was then three hundred and eighty-five furlongs; but Nineveh was in compass four hundred and eighty furlongs, which makes something more than sixty of our miles. It is said that its walls were one hundred feet in height, and broad enough for three coaches to meet and pass safely by each other: that it had one thousand five hundred towers on its walls, each two hundred feet high. Diodorus Siculus represents it as an oblong figure, the two longer sides of which measured one hundred and fifty stadia, and the two shorter ninety. “Ninus,” says he, “hastened to build a city of such magnitude, that it should not only be the greatest which then existed in the whole world, but that none in succeeding ages, who undertook such a work, should easily surpass it; and his expectation has not been deceived. For no one has since built so great a city; both as to the extent of its circuit, and the magnificence of its wall.” According to a report recorded by Eustathius, fourteen myriads of men were employed for eight years in building this city. It is here said, that it was of three days’ journey; and Diodorus asserts the same; that is, of three days’ journey in circuit, allowing twenty miles to each day.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1–4 And the word of the Lord came a second…
And the word of the Lord came a second time to Jonah - o “Jonah, delivered from the whale, doubtless went up to Jerusalem to pay his vows and thank God there. Perhaps he hoped that God would be content with this his punishment and repentance, and that He would not again send him to Nineveh.” Anyway, he was in some settled home, perhaps again at Gath-hepher. For God bids him, “Arise, go” . “But one who is on his way, is not bidden to arise and go.” God may have allowed an interval to elapse, in order that the tidings of so great a miracle might spread far and wide. But Jonah does not supply any of these incidents . He does not speak of himself , but only of his mission, as God taught him.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv2–4 Bid thee before, or when thou shalt be there.…
Bid thee before, or when thou shalt be there. (Calmet) --- He seems to have retired to Jerusalem. (Menochius)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v1 [The Renewal of Jonah’s Commission (Jon_3:1-2). His Preaching to…
CHAPTER 3
[The Renewal of Jonah’s Commission (Jon_3:1-2). His Preaching to the Ninevites (Jon_3:3-4). Humiliation and Reformation of the Ninevites (Jon_3:5-9) Reversal of the Divine Sentence (Jon_3:10).—C. E.]
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1And the word of the Lord [Jehovah] came [was communicated] unto Jonah the second time, saying, 2Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto 3it the preaching [make the proclamation to it] that I bid thee. So [And] Jonah arose, and went unto [to] Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord [Jehovah]. Now [And] Nineveh was an exceeding great city [a great city to God] of three days’ journey. 4And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey [a journey of one day], and he cried1 [proclaimed], and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall 5be overthrown. So [And] the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. 6For [And] word came [had come] unto [to] the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he [omit he] laid his robe from him [put off his robe from him], and covered him [himself] with sack cloth, and sat in ashes. 7And he caused it to be proclaimed and published [and said] through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let 8them not feed, nor drink water:2 But [And] let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea [and] let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. 9Who can tell3 [knoweth] if [but that] [the] God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger 10[glow of anger], that we perish not? And [the] God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that [which] he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
Jon_3:1-9. The preaching of Repentance by Jonah in Nineveh and its Result.
Jon_3:1-2. God sends the prophet, the second time, to make his proclamation—his Krîah—against Nineveh; the same that was to be put in his mouth. דֹּבֵר, part. fut. as in Isa_5:5. [דֹּבֵר signifies, according to the idiomatic use of the participle, about to tell, and suggests the idea of a proximate futurity.—C. E.]
Jon_3:3. Jonah is made wiser by the chastisement which he experienced, and does not again attempt to evade the call.
Now Nineveh was a great city (comp. the Introduction, p. 9) before God [für Gott]. The ,dativus ethicus designates not an inward peculiar relation of Nineveh to God, as in the passage (Act_7:20) quoted by Hitzig; but it corresponds to the phrase “before God,” which is applied to Nimrod, the founder of the city (Gen_10:9), and denotes here the world-position of the city, there of the person. Men may appear great to their people; cities to their possessors, or spectators, and still not occupy a world-position. (Deu_1:28). [“עִיר גדוֹלָה לֵאלֹהִים, a city great to God. This phrase has been variously explained. Some, with Kimchi, deem it merely a superlative form; Gesenius construes the ל instrumentally, great through God, i. e., through his favor. Others consider it to be equivalent to לפִנֵי אֱלֹהִיםbefore God, Gen_10:9. Thus the Targum קָדָם יִיָ. Of this last interpretation I approve, as it was most natural to refer the size of a city, of which the Hebrews could form no adequate conception, to the Divine estimation. I have accordingly rendered the words literally, as our preposition to is often used to note opinion, or estimate.” Henderson On Jonah.
“But Nineveh was a great city to God (le’löhîm), i. e., it was regarded by God as a great city. This remark points to the motive for sparing it (cf. Jon_4:11) in case its inhabitants hearkened to the word of God.” Keil and Delitzsch.
“Nineveh was an exceeding great city; lit. great to God, i. e., that would not only appear great to man who admires things of no account, but what, being really great, is so in the judgment of God who cannot be deceived. God did account it great, who says to Jonah, Should not I spare Nineveh that great city, which hath more than six score thousand that cannot discern between their right and their left? It is a different idiom from that, when Scripture speaks of the mountains of God, the cedars of God. For of these it speaks, as having their firmness or their beauty from God, as their Author.” Pusey.
“The phrase ‘an exceeding great city,’ stands in the Hebrew, ‘a city great to God,’ i. e., great before Him,—great as to Him, in his estimation. The Hebrews were accustomed to express their highest ideas of the superlative degree by using the name of God, e.g., ‘mountains of God,’ etc. The sense of this passage may be somewhat more specific, representing the city as great in its relations to God, and not merely as very great apart from these relations.” Cowles.
See Lange on Gen_10:9; also the note by T. L.—C. E.]
Three days’ journey—accusative of measure, as in Gen_14:4.
Since (comp. on Jon_1:2) the direct diameter of the city was only a day’s journey, then the circumference is either designated by מַֽהֲלַךְ (this signification of מַֽהֲלַךְ, though consistent with the statement that the circumference of the city was four hundred and eighty stadia in extent, cannot be maintained), or the way (comp. Eze_42:4), which united together the market-places of the different individual cities forming the great aggregate [complexes], and which it was, therefore, necessary to travel over, in order to go entirely through the city. Jon_3:4, in which מהלךְ designates the way which Jonah travelled over, during the first day (יוֹם אחד, Ges. sec. 120, 4), points to the latter supposition. So certain is he of his message, and so impressed with the urgency of his mission, that he immediately begins to enter into the city, before obtaining a survey of it, and commences to preach on the first day’s journey. His sermon is short, but powerful: Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Forty days are here a round number, meaning after a short time, whose term Jonah measures by the period of the deluge. The LXX. translate it by a still more rigid formula,—Yet three days. This shortening of the time, however, would not harmonize with the facts of the case, since no time would have been left to the Ninevites for repentance,4 for Jonah required three days to go through the city. The word employed to denote the destruction is the old prophetical technical term הפךְ, evertere (Isa_1:7; Isa_13:19), which everywhere points back to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha. (Original passage, Gen_19:25)
[Jon_3:4. “Its greatness amounted to a ‘three days’ walk.’ This is usually supposed to refer to the circumference of the city, by which the size of a city is generally determined. But the statement in Jon_3:4, that Jonah began to enter into the city the walk of a day, i. e., a day’s journey, is apparently at variance with this. Hence Hitzig has come to the conclusion that the diameter of the city is intended, and that, as the walk of a day in Jon_3:4 evidently points to the walk of three days in Jon_3:3, the latter must also be understood as referring to the length of Nineveh. But according to Diod. ii. 3 the length of the city was one hundred and fifty stadia, and Herod. (v. 53) gives just this number of stadia, as a day’s journey. Hence Jonah would not have commenced his preaching till he had reached the opposite end of the city. This line of argument, the intention of which is to prove the absurdity of the narrative, is based upon the perfectly arbitrary assumption that Jonah went through the entire length of the city in a straight line, which is neither probable in itself, nor implied in בּוֹא בָעיר. This simply means to enter, or go into the city, and says nothing about the direction of the course he took within the city. But in a city, the diameter of which was one hundred and fifty stadia, and the circumference four hundred and eighty stadia, one might easily walk for a whole day without reaching the other end, by winding about from one street into another. And Jonah would have to do this to find a suitable place for his preaching, since we are not warranted in assuming that it lay exactly in the geographical centre, or at the end of the street which led from the gate into the city. But if Jonah wandered about in different directions, as Theodoret says, ‘not going through the city, but strolling through market places, streets,’ etc., the distance of a day’s journey over which he travelled must not be understood as relating to the diameter or length of the city; so that the objection to the general opinion, that the three days’ journey given as the size of the city refers to the circumference, entirely falls to the ground. Moreover, Hitzig has quite overlooked the word וַיָּחֶל in his argument. The text does not affirm that Jonah went a day’s journey into the city, but that he ‘began to go into the city a day’s journey, and cried out.’ These words do not affirm that he did not begin to preach till after he had gone a whole day’s journey, but simply that he had commenced his day’s journey in the city when he found a suitable place and a fitting opportunity for his proclamation. They leave the distance that he had really gone, when he began his preaching, quite indefinite; and by no means necessitate the assumption that he had only begun to preach in the evening, after his day’s journey was ended. All that they distinctly affirm is, that he did not preach directly he entered the city, but only after he had commenced a day’s journey, that is to say, had gone some distance into the city. And this is in perfect harmony with all that we know about the size of Nineveh at that time. The circumference of the great city Nineveh, or the length of the boundaries of the city of Nineveh in the broadest sense, was, as Niebuhr says (p. 277), ‘nearly ninety English miles, not reckoning the smaller windings of the boundary; and this would be just three day’s travelling for a good walker on a long journey.’ ‘Jonah,’ he continues, begins to go a day’s journey into the city, then preaches, and the preaching reaches the ears of the king (cf. Jon_3:6). He therefore came very near to the citadel as he went along on his first day’s journey. At that time the citadel was probably in Nimrod (Calah). Jonah, who would hardly have travelled through the desert, went by what is now the ordinary caravan road past Amida, and therefore entered the city at Nineveh. And it was on the road from Nineveh to Calah, not far off the city, possibly in the city itself, that he preached. Now the distance between Calah and Nineveh (not reckoning either city), measured in a straight line upon the map, is eighteen and a half English miles.’ If, then, we add to this, (1) that the road from Nineveh to Calah or Nimrod hardly ran in a perfectly straight line, and therefore would be really longer than the exact distance between the two parts of the city according to the map, and (2) that Jonah had first of all to go through Nineveh, and possibly into Calah, he may very well have walked twenty English miles, or a short day’s journey, before he preached. The main point of his preaching is all that is given, namely, the threat that Nineveh should be destroyed, which was the point of chief importance, so far as the object of the book was concerned, and which Jonah of course explained by denouncing the sins and vices of the city.” Keil and Delitzsch.—C. E.]
Jon_3:5. Then the men of Nineveh believed God. That the Babylonians had a great respect for divination, so that what is here related does not appear strange (Keil), may appear apologetically an important observation; but this was probably not in the mind of the writer: it was his intention to relate something extraordinary. Moreover, he would not have employed the expression “believe,” but the more common פחד, fear, or a similar word. (See moreover below at Jon_3:8.) The word believe here, as often elsewhere, is used with special reference to the appropriation of prophetical instruction to the soul’s inner life (Isa_7:9; Hab_2:4), without however excluding the element of justification, when confidence is exercised in the mercy of God. Its fruits, Jon_3:5 ff., are those which are required from preaching, repentance, and conversion (Joe_2:15 ff.). And this repentance was indeed a general one, a repentance of the people, as it was carried out by bringing over to it all the inhabitants, the king, and even the beasts. Jon_3:6 ff. is only a fuller recital of the brief historical statement in Jon_3:5, and should, according to the context, be rendered in the pluperfect: For the matter had come to the King of Nineveh, etc, to Jon_3:9. Our author is fond of such pluperfect adjuncts (Jon_1:5-10). Following the natural, epic character of the narrative, we have retained the aorist in the translation. The king rises from his throne (comp. 2Sa_13:31), and lays aside his royal robe (comp. Jos_7:21), puts on a mourning-dress and sits in ashes—all a sign of sorrow and repentance (Eze_26:16).
The verbs in Jon_3:7 ff. have the indefinite subject “one”: one proclaimed and said in Nineveh by the command of the king and his nobles also, etc. The royal heralds are meant, to whom the execution of the טעם (a north-Semitic word = תּוֹרָה, comp. Dan_3:29 f.) was committed. That the beasts were included in the public humiliation is nothing unusual in the East. When Masistios fell at Platæa, the Persians, in honor of him, sheared the hair from their horses. (Herod. ix. 24. Comp. Brissonius, De Regni Persarum Principiis, II. c. 206). Horses hung with black were, in the time of Chrysostom, frequently seen at funeral processions, and they are frequently to be seen at the present day. The custom has its foundation in the lively feeling of the mutual adaptation of man and nature. (Comp. Joe_1:18, and the description of the great grief in the fifth Eclogue of Virgil [also Æneid, 11:89, c. e.].) Besides it is especially mentioned here as a reason, just as “great and small” Jon_3:5, that not merely repentance of sin, but also compassion toward guiltless creatures should move God to spare them (Jon_4:11). But it is not required to press to the utmost the separate applications of the royal edict, in the interest of the fides historica, otherwise we would be obliged to infer from Jon_3:8 that the cattle were clothed in mourning and that their lowing was taken for prayer, which was certainly not so. The strength of the expressions paints the depth of the repentance, and Jon_3:8 b shows the reason of their use by the king and by the narrator, who reproduces the edict: and let them turn every one from his evil way (Eze_18:23), etc., that we perish not (comp. Jon_1:6). It is too strongly asserted that this result of Jonah’s denunciation of doom is psychologically incomprehensible in itself (Hitzig), because he spoke as a foreigner to a foreign people in a foreign language. But the esteem of antiquity for the oracles of the gods [Götterstimmen] is known; and the fact that the limits of national worship were thereby left undetermined, in proof of which we cite the well-known fact that Crœsus consulted the Grecian oracles (comp. Ezr_1:1 ff.; Genesis 41; Numbers 22; Luke 7). And the more threatening these oracles were, the more certain were they to obtain belief, as is natural, since the threatenings of divine punishment have a powerful ally in the conscience of man. If one reflects on the excitement, which ruled the souls of men about the year 1000 A. D.; on the results which the discourses of a Peter of Amiens, Capistrano, and others of their time had, though delivered in a language not understood; and considers that awe in which holy men were held by antiquity, of which even profane writers afford frequent examples, then the psychological difficulty vanishes, and there is no need of bringing the affinity of the Hebrew and Assyrian languages to our help, in order to find the result possible. It is injudicious to remove, in the interests of apologetics, everything miraculous from the narrative; but it is equally so to push, in the interest of polemics, the miraculous to silliness. Another psychological motive to repentance on the part of the Ninevites our Lord indicates, Luk_11:30, when by the expression σημεῖον τοῖς Νινευίταις, he undoubtedly brings to light that the account of the wonderful events of his life formed an essential part of Jonah’s sermon on repentance. (Comp. Luk_11:32, and the Ob. of Luther on Jon_3:4 below.)
With reference to האלהים, Jon_3:9-10 (comp. Jon_1:6) Burck remarks: “Non hic adhibetur nomen Jehovah, quia de populo gentili ser mo est. Jehovœ cognitio sublimior, quam Dei.”
Jon_3:10. The Compassion. As faith expects, so it comes to pass. (Comp. Exo_32:12; Exo_32:14.) God looked upon the Ninevites: He turned his countenance, with kind thoughts, toward them. (Comp. Jon_3:9; Jon_3:1; Jon_3:6.)
[“But however deep the penitential mourning of Nineveh might be, and however sincere the repentance of the people, when they acted according to the king’s command; the repentance was not a lasting one, or permanent in its effects. Nor did it evince a thorough conversion to God, but was merely a powerful incitement to conversion, a waking up out of the careless security of their life of sin, an endeavor to forsake their evil ways which did not last very long. The statement in Jon_3:10, that “God saw their doing, that they turned from their evil ways; and He repented of the evil that He had said that He would do to them, and did it not” (cf. Exo_32:14), can be reconciled with this without difficulty. The repentance of the Ninevites, even if it did not last, showed, at any rate, a susceptibility on the part of the heathen for the word of God, and their willingness to turn and forsake their evil and ungodly ways; so that God, according to his compassion, could extend his grace to them in consequence. God always acts in this way. He not only forgives the converted man, who lays aside his sin, and walks in newness of life; but He has mercy also upon the penitent who confesses and mourns over his sin, and is willing, to amend. The Lord also directed Jonah to preach repentance to Nineveh; not that this capital of the heathen world might be converted at once to faith in the living God, and its inhabitants be received into the covenant of grace which He had made with Israel, but simply to give his people Israel a practical proof that He was the God of the heathen also, and could prepare for Himself even among them a people of his possession. (Keil and Delitzsch.)
Dr. Pusey expresses himself unwarrantably, when he says: “But, what Scripture chiefly dwells upon, their repentance was not only in profession, in belief, in outward act, but in the fruit of genuine works of repentance, a changed life out of a changed heart. …Their whole way and course of life was evil; they broke off, not the one or other sin only, but all, their whole evil way. Dr. P. has inserted the adjective “whole” before “evil way.” It is not used by the sacred writer. The repentance of the Ninevites was—though in some instances, it may have been more—a public confession and humiliation ordered by the “king and his nobles.”—C. E.].
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL5
See Introduction, p. 5 ff.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
The repentance of the Ninevites, a model of a genuine national repentance.
1. It hears God’s proclamation and asks not why? Jon_3:1-4.
2. It springs from faith and is accompanied by faith? Jon_3:5; Jon_3:9.
3. It bows itself under the curse of the common guilt, and not a single person asks: how much have I deserved? Jon_3:6 ff.
4. It is united with the purpose of amendment.
On Jon_3:1. The Lord does not withdraw his calls. (Comp. Joh_21:16.) It is a great and enduring grace to be called by Him. Jon_3:2. No one should undertake, of his own absolute power, to threaten others with the Divine wrath and punishment. Preachers, who speak from their own mind, have no right to do so. Therefore, consider well and pray for the Holy Spirit, and entirely humble thyself, and forget thyself, if thou hast in mind to, or must perform such a duty.
Jon_3:3. Whoever feels that he is sent of God should not be afraid of the greatest city. As many a the Lord intends shall hear Him, will hear Him.
Jon_3:4. Speak promptly and delay not. In God’s kingdom every moment is precious. The time, when He puts his word in thy mouth, is the right time; not that which thou fanciest for thyself.
Jon_3:5. Because the Ninevites believed, they repented. Repentance comes not from the law alone; but from the law and faith. From the law alone comes death. Children are not innocent.
Jon_3:6. It becomes a king, who takes precedence in everything, to take the lead also in repentance. (Psalms 51) In repentance and especially before God, all are on a level; purple is of no avail, but only a broken heart. Magistracy is of God’s appointment; but those who possess it are nevertheless sinners.
Jon_3:7. It is a good work and belongs to the office of the magistrate to foster true piety. The state has not merely the negative duty of providing that those who observe their religious festivals [Feiertage] be not disturbed, but also a positive duty. There is no state conceivable with out having duties to discharge to religion and the church. The kingdom of God can subsist without it, but not the reverse. To repentance belongs necessarily the purpose of amendment.
Jon_3:9. The heathen do not despair of God’s mercy, though they do not yet know Christ. It is worse than heathenish to doubt that God is gracious and ready to forgive.
Jon_3:10. The repentance of God is included in his gracious decree. It is the harmonizing of [die Auseinandersetzung zwischen, lit., the settlement between] wrath and forgiveness, justice and love. Wrath is not the final end; but it has for its end and object, love. Law without the Gospel would be an ungodly thing: the Old Testament cannot subsist without the New. Woe to him who makes light of the wrath of God: he can never taste of love.
Luther: Jon_3:1. It is therefore written that we may bear in mind, that nothing is to be undertaken without God’s word and command. For the first command, of God having been violated by disobedience, had not God renewed it, Jonah would not have known, whether he should do it, or not. (Comp. Num_14:1 ff.; Deu_1:41 f.) The Israelites at first would not fight at God’s command; afterward they wished to do so of their own accord and were beaten. (1Pe_4:11.)
Jon_3:2. Nineveh, the city of God. God cares also for the heathen. (2Ki_5:1; Jer_25:9.)
Jon_3:4. He doubtless did not confine himself in preaching to these words; his proclamation is briefly reported.
Jon_3:5. They do some things, which God does not command. Therefore He, afterward, Jon_3:10, does not commend their fasting and sackcloth, but that they turned from their evil way. God saw their earnestness; therefore He permitted the foolish things—that the animals should fast, etc.,—to be acceptable to Him, which He would not have beheld with favor, had the earnestness been wanting. Free will, or our own power, does not produce such earnestness; but faith by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Jon_3:9. The king speaks as if he doubts. But he doubts not; for doubt does not call upon God and employ such earnestness. A truly penitent heart stands with fear in the contest, and fights against despair; but as it has not yet won, it speaks as if it were uncertain. If there were no faith, it would not hold out amidst such toil and trouble. Therefore, words are rather a sign that faith is there.
Jon_3:10. Here the works are commended; what shall we say against it? Here the legalists have the advantage, yes, a fine advantage! Look at the text. It says, God saw their works, that is, they pleased Him. But what kind of works were they? The text shows: They turned from their evil way. Such works do and teach, then we will not refuse to thee the praise of works; but we will help thee to extol them. To turn from one’s evil way is not a trifling work; it includes, not fasting and sackcloth, but faith in God from the heart, and the loving of our neighbor as ourselves; that is, it requires the whole man to be pious and just in both body and soul. For God requires the whole man, and dislikes half-converts and hypocrites.
Starke: Jon_3:1. God’s purpose and command must succeed and be accomplished; for it cannot be hindered or frustrated by any human designs. God by means of the ministry saves sinners by sinners.
Jon_3:2. God even during the time of the Old Covenant, sought the salvation of the heathen.
Jon_3:3. Nineveh, a great city to the Lord, should surely have been devoted to God: God had wrought for it (Jon_4:10). Παθήματα, μαθήματα, nocumenta, documenta, poor in spirit, rich in faith (armselig macht gottselig, Isa_28:19). God can well tolerate great cities, if they only give place to Him and his word.
Jon_3:4. Since God has still his own everywhere, these most likely were the first to have been awakened, and to have served as coadjutors in the preaching of repentance.
Jon_3:5. Credidit Ninive et Israel incredulus perseverat; credidit Præputium, et circumcisio permanet infidelis. Where the Word of God is preached sincerely and purely, there it brings fruit in its season, if not in all, at least in some. (1Th_2:13.) Jonah did in his mission, as did the Apostles. Wherever they came, they did not seek first permission from the magistrate; but they rested [their authority] upon the command of Christ.
Jon_3:7. It is well for the masses of a community, when pious magistrates have also pious servants around them. It is a strong proof of sincere repentance for sins committed to remove every occasion to lust out of the way.
Jon_3:8. One must prove his repentance by external acts. It is a peculiar instance of Divine justice that God suffered Israel to be destroyed by the same people, who repented at the voice of his prophet, while on the contrary, the Israelites had despised all the prophets from Samuel down. God’s decree has always a fundamental reference to conversion [hat die Ordnung der Bekehrung immer zum Grunde].
Pfaff: God does not change his commands. He repeats his calling grace. He calls the sinner twice, thrice, yea, even to the end.
Jon_3:4 : A preacher must speak the truth frankly [deutsch], and not sugar it over and deprive it of its power by ornaments and flattery. One must plainly say to sinners that they are hastening to destruction.
Jon_3:7. Here we find established the right of the magistrate in spiritual things; especially in regard to the externals of Divine worship and its right ordering.
Jon_3:9-10. It is certain that God bestows his grace upon the penitent.
Quandt: Jon_3:1. With God nothing is impossible. Truly, the heart must suffer itself to be broken, otherwise even God cannot break it by his Almighty power. The same word of God, which was rejected and despised by us in former times, is received by us with devotion, when it comes to us the second time and we in the meantime have become different persons. Many individuals and families want nothing but the cross to bring them back.
Jon_3:3. Alas! Jonah has more followers in the way of flight than in the way of obedience.
Jon_3:4. Three ways may be pursued on receiving such a terrible message—despair, frivolous mockery, repentance and conversion. The Ninevites chose the third.
Jon_3:9. Faith disappoints nobody.
Jon_3:10. That Nineveh was converted was a wonder. With us, it is a wonder, if we are not converted.
Marck: Jon_3:1. God is so good and so indulgent to the weaknesses of his servants, that even after repeated proofs of his grace, He makes known his will to them, not once, but oftener, in order that they may have no pretext of ignorance, but may know the true object of their redemption, namely, to obey the commands of their Redeemer and to manifest his glory.
Burck: God does not utterly reject him, who has failed once; but He rather gives him a new opportunity of correcting former faults.
Rieger: To him, who comes out of trouble, danger, and sickness, God commonly permits an opportunity soon to occur, when he can pay his vows.
Schlier: In renewing the command, God says not a word about the guilt of Jonah; for Jonah is humbled. In the miracle of his deliverance he has learned what obedience is, although he does not yet know what Divine compassion toward the perishing heathen is.
Burck: Jon_3:4. Preaching is usually efficacious, from the very first, among those who do not receive the Word in vain. There is very little hope of those, who have heard the Word of God proclaimed by the same messenger, not merely many days, but years, without becoming better, even if they should have the opportunity of hearing the same preaching a thousand years.
Marck: Jon_3:5. There is not only a very close connection between evil, guilt, and punishment, so that they are commonly mutually dependent, but also the good is connected by intimate bonds, since from one virtue of one man other virtues of others flow, and the Divine blessing follows virtue. This is illustrated by the obedience of Jonah, with which the repentance of the Ninevites and the Divine compassion were closely connected.
Rieger: The exercises of repentance are here described for the most part by the outward circumstances that accompanied them,—quite different from what is practiced at the present day, when one would perform the several acts of repentance, devotion, and prayer, in such a quiet way as to be scarcely perceived by those who are nearest about him. But where there is genuine earnestness within, there the outward manifestation is not so readily suppressed.
Burck: Jon_3:6. There is a difference between a court, which is a stranger to the true religion, and one that is attached to it in only a hypocritical way. The former is more easily moved; the latter, in consequence of God’s decree, is more hardened.
Bochart: Jon_3:7. This edict, issued to the Ninevites, in order to appease the anger of God; the edict of Darius (Dan_6:26 ff.); that of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan_3:20), and others, were just so many preparations for the conversion of the heathen, which followed the advent of Christ. In this way God’s goodness and glory became gradually, and in a certain measure, known to the nations, which were strangers to Israel (Exo_5:2).
Schmieder: Jon_3:8. The understanding may call the penitential acts on the part of the beasts foolish; but the heart will seize upon them, because they show deep contrition of heart; and this is certainly the main point here.
Hieronymus: Jon_3:10. God soon changed his purpose, because He saw that their works were changed. He did not hear words, such as Israel was wont to say: “All that God has said will we do” (Exo_19:8; Exo_24:3); but He saw works. He will rather that the ungodly turn from their evil way, than that they should die. (Eze_18:23; Eze_18:32).
Talmud: Dear brethren, sackcloth and fasting avail nothing; but repentance and good works. For it is not said of the Ninevites, etc.
Burck: How far are God’s thoughts removed from the thoughts of man, even from the thoughts of men, who seem unto others to be sound in the faith.
Rieger: The Lord Jesus bears testimony to this repentance of the people of Nineveh (Mat_12:14), that, in its good consequences, it will extend to the day of judgment; and hence, in sparing them, God must have been sincerely and kindly in earnest. But because Nineveh fell back into its former sins, it was overthrown by the wrath of Jehovah scarcely a century after this salutary conversion: so also it befell Jerusalem, because it did not acknowledge and receive Him, of whom Jonah was a type.
[Calvin: Jon_3:3. He went, then, according to the command of Jehovah; that is, nothing else did he regard but to render obedience to God, and to suffer himself to be wholly ruled by him. We hence learn how well God provides for us and for our salvation, when he corrects our perverseness; though sharp may be our chastisements, yet as this benefit follows, we know that nothing is better for us than to be humbled under God’s hand, as David says in Psalms 119.
Jon_3:10. God had respect to their works—what works? not sackcloth, not ashes, not fasting; for Jonah does not now mention these; but he had respect to their works, because they turned from their evil way.
Fairbairn: “Why should God have sent his prophet to admonish us of sin, and foretell his approaching judgment, a prophet, too, who has himself been the subject of singular mercy and forbearance? If destruction alone had been his object, would he not rather have allowed us to sleep on in our sinfulness? And why, in particular, should these forty days have been made to run between our doom and our punishment? Surely this bespeaks some thought of mercy in God; it must have been meant to leave the door still open to us for forgiveness and peace.” So undoubtedly they reasoned, and, as the event proved, reasoned justly.
Pusey: Jon_3:10. And he did it not. God willed rather that his prophecy should seem to fail, than that repentance should fail of its fruit. But it did not indeed fail, for the condition lay expressed in the threat.
Cowles: Jon_3:10. Works meet for repentance will infallibly secure the reversal of threatened and impending doom. God’s immutability is that of principle—not of plan and action. He immutably hates and punishes sin: hence, when a sinner becomes a penitent, God turns from threatened vengeance to free pardon.—C. E.]
Footnotes:
[1][Jon_3:2.—קְרִיאָה, that which is proclaimed, proclamation; τὸ κήρυγμα, (LXX.); prædicatio (Vulgate).
[2][Jon_3:7.—טַעַם = טְעֵם, Dan_3:10; Dan_3:29, a technical term for the edicts of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings.
[3][Jon_3:9.—מִי־יוֹדֵעַ, who is knowing?—C. E.]
[4]For the Heb. Text are Aqu., Symm, Theodot., Syr.; also, Hieron., Theodoret, Aug. Lange, Bibelwerk O. T., 19.
[5][ [Reichsgedanken, see note, p. 20.—C. E.].
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv3–4 arose and went--like the son who was at first…
arose and went--like the son who was at first disobedient to the father's command, "Go work in my vineyard," but who afterwards "repented and went" (). Jonah was thus the fittest instrument for proclaiming judgment, and yet hope of mercy on repentance to Nineveh, being himself a living exemplification of both--judgment in his entombment in the fish, mercy on repentance in his deliverance. Israel professing to obey, but not obeying, and so doomed to exile in the same Nineveh, answers to the son who said, "I go, sir, and went not." In it is said that Jonas was not only a sign to the men in Christ's time, but also "unto the Ninevites." On the latter occasion () when the Pharisees and Sadducees tempted Him, asking a sign from heaven, He answered, "No sign shall be given, but the sign of the prophet Jonas," . Thus the sign had a twofold aspect, a direct bearing on the Ninevites, an indirect bearing on the Jews in Christ's time. To the Ninevites he was not merely a prophet, but himself a wonder in the earth, as one who had tasted of death, and yet had not seen corruption, but had now returned to witness among them for God. If the Ninevites had indulged in a captious spirit, they never would have inquired and so known Jonah's wonderful history; but being humbled by God's awful message, they learned from Jonah himself that it was the previous concealing in his bosom of the same message of their own doom that caused him to be entombed as an outcast from the living. Thus he was a "sign" to them of wrath on the one hand, and, on the other, of mercy. Guilty Jonah saved from the jaws of death gives a ray of hope to guilty Nineveh. Thus God, who brings good from evil, made Jonah in his fall, punishment, and restoration, a sign (an embodied lesson or living symbol) through which the Ninevites were roused to hear and repent, as they would not have been likely to do, had he gone on the first commission before his living entombment and resurrection. To do evil that good may come, is a policy which can only come from Satan; but from evil already done to extract an instrument against the kingdom of darkness, is a triumphant display of the grace and wisdom of God. To the Pharisees in Christ's time, who, not content with the many signs exhibited by Him, still demanded a sign from heaven, He gave a sign in the opposite quarter, namely, Jonah, who came "out of the belly of hell" (the unseen region). They looked for a Messiah gloriously coming in the clouds of heaven; the Messiah, on the contrary, is to pass through a like, though a deeper, humiliation than Jonah; He is to lie "in the heart of the earth." Jonah and his Antitype alike appeared low and friendless among their hearers; both victims to death for God's wrath against sin, both preaching repentance. Repentance derives all its efficacy from the death of Christ, just as Jonah's message derived its weight with the Ninevites from his entombment. The Jews stumbled at Christ's death, the very fact which ought to have led them to Him, as Jonah's entombment attracted the Ninevites to his message. As Jonah's restoration gave hope of God's placability to Nineveh, so Christ's resurrection assures us God is fully reconciled to man by Christ's death. But Jonah's entombment only had the effect of a moral suasive; Christ's resurrection assures us God is fully reconciliation between God and man [FAIRBAIRN].
Nineveh was an exceeding great city--literally, "great to God," that is, before God. All greatness was in the Hebrew mind associated with GOD; hence arose the idiom (compare "great mountains," Margin, "mountains of God," ; "goodly cedars," Margin, "cedars of God," ; "a mighty hunter before the Lord," ).
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three days' journey--that is, about sixty miles, allowing about twenty miles for a day's journey. Jonah's statement is confirmed by heathen writers, who describe Nineveh as four hundred eighty stadia in circumference [DIODORUS SICULUS, 2.3]. HERODOTUS defines a day's journey to be one hundred fifty stadia; so three days' journey will not be much below DIODORUS' estimate. The parallelogram in Central Assyria covered with remains of buildings has Khorsabad northeast; Koyunjik and Nebbi Yunus near the Tigris, northwest; Nimroud, between the Tigris and the Zab, southwest; and Karamless, at a distance inward from the Zab, southeast. From Koyunjik to Nimroud is about eighteen miles; from Khorsabad to Karamless, the same; from Koyunjik to Khorsabad, thirteen or fourteen miles; from Nimroud to Karamless, fourteen miles. The length thus was greater than the breadth; compare , "a day's journey," which is confirmed by heathen writers and by modern measurements. The walls were a hundred feet high, and broad enough to allow three chariots abreast, and had moreover fifteen hundred lofty towers. The space between, including large parks and arable ground, as well as houses, was Nineveh in its full extent. The oldest palaces are at Nimroud, which was probably the original site. LAYARD latterly has thought that the name Nineveh belonged originally to Koyunjik, rather than to Nimroud. Jonah () mentions the children as numbering one hundred twenty thousand, which would give about a million to the whole population. Existing ruins show that Nineveh acquired its greatest extent under the kings of the second dynasty, that is, the kings mentioned in Scripture; it was then that Jonah visited it, and the reports of its magnificence were carried to the west [LAYARD].
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On v1 JONAH’S PREACHING AND NINEVEH’S REPENTANCE, Jon_3:1-10.
JONAH’S PREACHING AND NINEVEH’S REPENTANCE, Jon_3:1-10.
Jehovah repeats the command to Jonah, to preach to Nineveh (Jon_3:1-2). This time Jonah obeys and delivers the message, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jon_3:3-4). The preaching results in the conversion of king and people, who give every evidence of heartfelt repentance (Jon_3:5-9); whereupon Jehovah withholds the judgment (Jon_3:10).
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1-4. The preaching of Jonah. Jon_3:1, is almost identical with Jon_1:1, the only difference being the addition of “the second time” and the omission of “the son of Amittai”; Jon_3:2 a, is identical with Jon_1:2 a; but Jon_3:2 b is different.
Preach — The same word as in Jon_1:2, “cry”; “preaching,” derived from the same root, occurs only here in the Old Testament. The message is to be determined by Jehovah.
Jonah has learned a lesson; and, though still rebellious in heart (Jon_4:2), he proceeds immediately to carry out the divine commission. The narrative of Jonah’s preaching is interrupted by a brief description of Nineveh’s greatness (Jon_3:3; compare Jon_4:11).
Was — Definitely expressed in Hebrew; may indicate that Nineveh was no longer a “great city,” when the description was written (see p. 335).
An exceeding great city — Literally, a city great unto God, that is, great even in the estimation of God (compare Gen_10:9); Kautzsch renders in German “unmenschlich gross” (superhumanly great). Probably an anticipation of Jon_4:11, where the size of the city and the number of the inhabitants are given as a reason for God’s desire to save it.
Three days’ journey — It seems more natural to interpret this of the diameter than of the circumference. True, some of the classical writers make it appear that the diameter was only one day’s journey, while the circumference was approximately three days’ journey. But, as Marti suggests, there is no reason why Herodotus and the Book of Jonah should agree on this point; besides, if we should interpret “three days’ journey” of the circumference, and make the diameter only one day’s journey, Jonah must have passed through the entire city before delivering his message, while Jon_3:4 declares that he “began to enter into the city a day’s journey,” which expression certainly presupposes that there was considerable distance to traverse before he could reach the other end (see further on Jon_3:4). It seems best, therefore, to interpret “three days” of the diameter. The extent of the city walls is given by C.H.W. Johns as follows: “The city on the river side of the Tigris extended about two and one half miles; its north wall measured about seven thousand feet, the eastern wall was nearly three miles long, and the southern about one thousand feet.… The actual extent of Nineveh proper is about eighteen hundred acres.… Outside this citadel city lay the ‘outskirts.’… Farther afield, and apparently close to Khorsabad, lay Rebit Ninua.” The latter is perhaps the Rehoboth-Ir of Gen_10:11. In order to get a city three days in diameter or three days long, it is necessary to include all the cities mentioned in Gen_10:11-12, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen, which, though not all identified, must have been in the immediate neighborhood of Nineveh proper. Koenig insists that even this combination would fail to give the required size (see p. 317).
Began to enter into the city a day’s journey — A day’s journey is still called a beginning, because two more were beyond. The natural interpretation seems to be that he journeyed one day; then, having found a suitable place, he delivered his message. Others give a different interpretation. “He began to perambulate the city, going hither and thither, as far as was possible in the first day.” While thus going from street to street, and market place to market place, he is thought to have delivered his message again and again. While the former is the more natural interpretation of the Hebrew, the latter has this advantage, that, with it, Jon_3:4 throws no light on the meaning of “three days’ journey” in Jon_3:3. It would be possible, then, to understand the extent indicated of the circumference, which would reduce the size of the city, and thus remove a geographical difficulty.
Yet forty days… — A very simple message, but one destined to create consternation. Apparently the words of Jonah contained an unconditional announcement of judgment; but later developments showed that it was conditional, that the execution depended upon the people’s attitude toward the prophetic message.
Several modern commentators insert Jon_4:5, after Jon_3:4. Jonah, after having delivered his message, is thought to have left the city to await further developments. Jon_4:5, would make a good continuation of Jon_3:4, but the transposition is not necessary.
Marti’s statement, “Undoubtedly Jonah did not await the coming of the fortieth day in the city, but left the same previously,” is not conclusive.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1–4 1–4. Jonah’s Preaching
1–4. Jonah’s Preaching
1. the second time] Like St Peter (Joh_21:15-17), Jonah is not only forgiven, but restored to his office, and receives anew his commission.
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Ch. Jon_3:1-10. Jonah’s Preaching and its result
Sent a second time by God on a mission to Nineveh, Jonah promptly obeys, Jon_3:1-3 a. He enters into Nineveh and delivers his message, Jon_3:3 b–4. The Ninevites believe God and repent, Jon_3:5-9; and are spared, Jon_3:10.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv2–4
III.
THE PROPHET FULFILS HIS COMMISSION.
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ITS RESULT.
(2) Preach.—In Jon_1:2 the word is rendered “cry.”
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1–4 Vers. 1-10. Part III JONAH"S PREACHING IN NINEVEH; THE…
Vers. 1-10. Part III JONAH"S PREACHING IN NINEVEH; THE REPENTANCE OF THE NINEVITES.
Vers. 1-3. Jonah is sent a second time to Nineveh, and obeys the command.
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The second time. He is forgiven and restored to his office, and the commission formerly given is renewed. Commentators have supposed that he went up to Jerusalem to pay his vows, and that the word of the Lord came unto him there. But all unnecessary details are omitted from the account, and we know nothing about this matter. The beginning of the next verse, "arise," seems to imply that he was then in some settled home, perhaps at Gath-hepher.
HOMILIES BY J.E. HENRY Vers. 1-3. Peremptory reiteration and prompt obedience.
We see Jonah entering here on the second stage of his strange career. And it is adjusted logically to the first. His recent experiences and their resulting sentiments form an obvious preparation for the duty next to hand. He has sinned and suffered and repented. He has deserted, and been captured and surrendered unconditionally. He has prayed, and been forgiven and set free. And it is natural that duty should be faced from a different standpoint henceforward. He is in another mind now, and ready for a new departure in personal effort and official tactics. And the opportunity to make it is promptly furnished.
I THE SPIRITUAL DESERTER"S RETURN IS FOLLOWED BY HIS RE-ENGAGEMENT. Jonah had discarded much and been stripped of more. He had refused to act, and had ipso facto forfeited his commission. Now with a return to his right mind there is reinstatement in his lost calling, and re-employment in his forsaken work. We account for this on the principle that:
1. There is forgiveness with God, that he may be feared. There is a forgiveness that only encourages transgression. Such is weak forgiveness, implying a want of firmness in the forgiver, on which there is the temptation to make further aggressions. Such is careless forgiveness, that takes no hostages for the future, nor even makes terms. Such is inequitable forgiveness, in which principle is ignored, and the offence hushed up without regard to the claims of justice. But the Divine "more excellent way" of pardon is at once equitable and defined and strong. Amends for the past and amendment for the future are both exacted sternly. God forgives when he has punished, and on the unbending condition that the offence cease. Then punishment is mingled with so much of mercy, and requirement is sweetened by such]promise of grace, that gratitude mates with reverence, and obedience is the firstborn issue of the happy tie. The insubordinate, mutinous Jonahs having been ironed and subdued, are at length released, that in after action they may exemplify obedience unquestioning and without a semblance of the old self-will.
2. Spitual office attaches to existing spiritual relation. The Divine government is paternal God"s officers are first, of all his children. Their fitness for the discharge of spiritual functions is due to their previous endowment, with spiritual gifts. If unspiritual men and whilst unspiritual they may be formally in office, but are incapable of spiritual work. When Jonah fell for the time being out of the spiritual connection, he ceased to be a prophet of God. He could not be at once a recruiter and a deserter, an ambassador and a rebel. Now he has come back, and in resumed spiritual relations he finds the condition of restored religious functions. He may again speak for God now that again he is on God"s side. No man goes legitimately on God"s errand who cannot do it con amore. Spiritual officers are to be sought exclusively by promotion from the spiritual ranks. Every true shepherd has been first of all a sheep in God"s fold, and to each relation has come in by Christ, the Door.
II GOD"S PROGRAMME IS STEREOTYPED, WHATEVER ELSE MAY CHANGE. (Ver. 2) God has not changed, although Jonah has. The prophet"s mutinous outbreak has not moved him a hairbreadth from his purpose. What he meant at first he means still, and will have. So the prophet is brought back exactly to the point at which he had broken away, and told to begin where he had left off.
1. God is moved still by the same compassion for the doomed. "That great city." The repetition of these words on each occasion of the mention of Nineveh is significant. It shows that God had regard to the tact of its size; that all through the arrangement of measures for its warning he was moved by the thought of its teeming population given over to death. Hence it is styled in ver. 3 "a great city to God," i.e. in his estimation, and in Jon_4:11 the Divine compunction is directly connected with the existence of its hundred and twenty thousand children, not yet responsible, but bound to perish with it. The Divine compassion is a glorious factor in human life. Its attitude is catholic. It embraces in wide paternal arms the heathen that knows not God, the infant that could not know him if revealed. Its outflow is unstinted, averting myriad evils altogether, softening the inevitable, indemnifying the past by the amends of rich compensatory good. Believe in God"s pity. It is a splendid fact. It is hunger"s provision, and pain"s anaesthetic, and misery"s comforter, and humanity"s good Samaritan in the darkest reaches of its Jericho journey, and the most calamitous experiences by the way.
2. God"s prescribed step remains the fitting one to take. What other methods it was within the resources of Divine omnipotence to use for the conversion of the Ninevites, we cannot tell. What we know is that the proclamation of the truth was the ordinary method, and that God keeps to it. "The sword of the Spirit," with which he pierces the soul and kills its sin, is the "Word of God." "The foolishness of preaching" is that special presentment of the Word by which in all ages it has pleased God to save them that believe. And there is, if we could see it, the perfection of fitness in this ordinance. Truth is light revealing things as they are and as they ought to be. Truth is motive, presenting considerations that move intelligence to seek that better state. Truth is force, conveying to the soul and constituting in it the Divine omnipotent energy in the strength of which the new man arises, and the new life is lived. Truth is comfort, unfolding the soul rest and joy of the free which climb the throne of being when the new regime of righteousness begins. Then truth preached with the living voice and personal element is all this and more. To the influence proper to the abstract truth is added its influence as concreted in a human life. As light it is intensified by the added ray of an illustrative experience. As power it is reinforced by the impulse of a cooperant human will. As comfort it is at once confirmed and sweetened by personal testimony and fellow feeling. There is no conceivable substitute in the enginery of grace for the personal preaching to sinners of the word of life.
3. Repentance is best proved by obedience in the matter at which there was stumbling before. Jonah had passed through a severe discipline for the conquest of his self-will. Whether or not it was really overcome, this reiterated commission would test. And there was a needs be that the point should be settled. All judgment is "unto righteousness;" to bring us to it if afar from it, to restore us to it if we have strayed. And it is this not in the general, but in the particular. It is to check particular faults and produce the opposite virtues. In this object God will see that it succeeds... He cannot fail as men fail. His chains must bind. He gives no disputable instructions, nor moves to their observance by futile action. In tow of his disciplinary privateers when they return to port, will be formal, as a prize of war, every skulking craft that had been trying to do the enemy"s work. The proof that his measures have not been nugatory is the circumstantial realization of their purpose. The iniquity he visits with the rod he must see put away. The forsworn task he enforces with the strong arm he must see done. "God looks upon men when he has afflicted them and has delivered them out of their affliction, to see whether they will mend of that fault particularly for which they were corrected; and therefore in that thing we are concerned to see to it that we receive not the grace of God in vain (Matthew Henry).
III THE DISCIPLINED SERVANT IS AN IMPROVED SERVANT. (Ver. 3) The stern discipline has done its work at last. The rebellious fit is over, and the unruly servant is pliant to his Master"s will. What evils of terror and pain and agony he might have escaped if he had only done this at first! But God bends all things to his purpose, and Jonah"s rebellious freak among the rest. His message to Nineveh is not only done, but better done than it could possibly have been at first.
1. Jonah is better prepared for it than he was. He has sinned and been forgiven, has suffered and been delivered, has prayed and received an answer. And each experience is of the nature of a qualification for the better doing of his work. "Rejoicing in the sweetness of a fresh and full reconciliation; lightened in spirit by tasting in God a mercy larger than he could formerly have thought of; cleansed from the darkness that brooded over his soul, and the countless images of terror and of evil which rose up before him while be was fleeing from his God in rebellion, and his God was pursuing him in wrath" (Martin), he would approach his Master"s work as never before. Reverence for a God so great and good, and gratitude to a God so merciful and kind, would spring together and work together the new mind and way. Affliction, moreover, had left its mark on him. He was subdued and chastened. He knew experimentally his impotence and God"s omnipotence. He could speak by book of the terrors of the Lord, and the fatuity of hoping to defy him and escape. And his preaching would have a reality and vividness about it attainable only by way of his late experience. Then "he had called upon the Lord in circumstances almost fitted to shut out the possibility of hope." If there be a case on record pre-eminently fitted to confirm the declaration, "Men ought always to pray, and not to faint," it is his. Would he not resume his post with livelier loyalty and implicit sense of duty, when he could resume it with the blessed protestation, "I love the Lord, because he hath heard the voice of my supplication: because he hath inclined his ear unto me, I will call upon him as long as I live"? (Martin).
2. He does it implicitly. (Ver. 3) "So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh: Submission is now as thorough as at first self-will was resolute. The change is excellent, and its occurrence a vindication of the treatment that has brought it about. An infinitely wise and holy will is God"s. The ideal of a man"s life is to believe in that will, and will it, and find his joy in doing it. From irreconcilable variance to absolute harmony with that ideal is Jonah"s change, a change that means his spiritual readjustment. It will mean no less to us all "The felicity of heaven greatly consists in perfect submission in all things to the government of Jehovah the Saviour. The misery of this world is the want of that temper of mind; the very end and desert of grace is to restore us to it; and so far as we are under the influence of the grace of life, we are brought back to it; the more grace the more submission; and grace will not cease its operation in the saints till every thought is brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (Jones). A man following absolutely the lines of the infinitely perfect will; a man moving thereon with fullest faith and sympathy and zest; a man starting therein as a child starts for the haven of a mother"s arms; a man incapable of other thought than following them to the highest good, and till his life"s end; that is a man in the highest sense, and to the highest spiritual effect.
3. He goes closely by his instructions. (Ver. 3) According to the word of the Lord. This terse record is instinct with suggestiveness. He went because he was told, and where he was told, and when he was told, and as he was told, and to do the thing he was told, and in the way he was told. His conduct now was exemplary as before it was intolerable. And his case is typical. His instructions were the preacher"s instructions for all lands and times. "Preach the preaching that I bid thee." It was this Moses preached, (Deu_18:18) and Jeremiah, (Jer_1:7) and Paul, (1Co_11:23) and Christ himself. (Joh_7:16 Joh_12:50) It is this we must preach. What else is worth preaching, or can or dare be preached? As to the substance of his message, the preacher has no discretionary power. He is not to preach science, nor philosophy, nor sentiment, nor his own notions, nor human knowledge. He is rightly to divide the Word of life. That is all, "There is not the greatest minister, not the most learned or acute, But must observe this rule; not James, not John, not Peter, not all the troop of the apostles, my once vary from this: he who shall bring other doctrine, let him be accursed by us; he who speaketh of himself, let him be refused by us; howsoever godly or holy he do pretend himself, yet if he decline that word which should be his direction, let him be declined by us" (Abbot). Here is an admirable maxim for universal use, "according to the Word of the Lord." It is good, and wise, and true, and pertinent to every case, the key to every puzzle of life. Are you a sinner? there is salvation for you, full, and free, and present, and "according to the Word of the Lord." Are you a seeker? expect to find, for salvation is in Christ, and of those that come to him there are none cast out, "according to the Word of the Lord." Are you a saint? then fight and persist and hope; for that you are "kept by the power of God," and will yet "reap if you faint not," is "according to the Word of the Lord. J.E.H.
HOMILIES BY W.G. BLAIKIE Vers. 1-4. Jonah"s second call.
"And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee," etc.
I REINSTATEMENT OF THE PROPHET. "The word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time." Jonah"s rebellion had had a twofold effect on his relations to God broken up his personal fellowship with him, and suspended his official function as a prophet. God"s grace restored him both personally and officially, as afterwards in the case of Peter; but, as in this case, the restoration of the first did not necessarily include that of the second. Servants of God who have fallen need a second call to public service; it needs to be shown that God trusts them with his work again. It is natural for ministers who have been publicly dealt with and censured to desire to be reponed; but this cannot be rightly done without some token that God again calls them.
II THE NEW COMMISSION. "Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee." We know not where Jonah was where he had been landed what had happened in the interval. Imagination can picture the prophet on the shore making for Gathhepher, and probably arriving there. Again the message is preceded by the word of stimulation, "Arise;" brace thyself, prepare for arduous work; and this time it would bring a lesson of warning remember how easily you were turned aside before! The work was not to be made easier out of regard to the prophet"s proved weakness, but the prophet must seek a higher strength. The greatness of Nineveh is again dwelt on that great city exceeding great city, and great unto God" (ver. 3). "Think of a whole vast city, full of this humanity, of this God-breathed life; and is it surprising that a great city should be great unto God? What flashings of intellectual lights in one day! as many almost as the separate rays of the sun. What throbbings of moral or immoral purpose, the moral faculty acting in each! What a sighing of wandering spirits, unconsciously or blindly seeking the lost portion! What a swell and heave of the great tide of animated life composed of the blended individual streams I London is like a great and wide sea of life. The daily agitations which stir in her bosom are felt in feebler pulsings even in far off shores; and in multitudes which no man can number her thoughts and acts, and in these her checkered moral history, are going up to God"s heaven. Such was Nineveh of old, and for such reasons as we have named, it was still, as at first, a city great to God" (Raleigh). The message is somewhat different from before: "Preach the preaching literally, "cry the cry"] that I bid thee." This may either mean, "the cry that I will bid thee at the time," or "the cry that I already bade thee." Either Jonah was to go, like an admiral, with sealed orders to be opened at a certain place; or he was to say what he had been ordered to say before, but had shrunk from saying. The latter view is probably correct a further trial of Jonah"s sincerity and submissiveness in the very matter which had dissatisfied him before, he was called to place himself in God"s hands, and to engage to do precisely as God would direct. In all cases, true preaching is "the preaching that I bid thee." It is a simple message from God; it becomes effectual when it is given as such. All very well to be able to reconcile it with reason and commend it to the conscience, and to set it forth with the enrichments of learning and, the embellishments of art; but there is danger lest its true simple nature be thereby disguised; nothing should be allowed which prevents it from being presented as a simple message from God: "the preaching that I bid thee." "How often did our Lord disclaim the authorship of all that he said, and assign it continually to the Father! "Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me; the words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself". (Joh_7:16) Himself personally cognizant of all truth, he acts as the Church"s Teacher under the responsibility and within the exact limits of his office. Officially ordained the Father"s Ambassador, he confines himself to a declaration of the Father"s words.... Exactly as the Father had said unto him, so he speaks" (Martin).
III THE OBEDIENCE OF THE PROPHET. "So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord." "How different every way from what he was when he fled to Tarshish? We see him no more consulting with flesh and blood, but yielding prompt obedience to the heavenly call. No more running away, but asking, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? Here am I; send me." The Lord saith, "Go to Nineveh;" he instantly goes without gainsaying or resistance" (Jones). "In the present case, Jonah would resume his commission with a new obedience; with a meekness, a faith, a courage, to all of which his punishment and pardon had been the signal means of disciplining him. He would resume his work and mission with another spirit
(1) as a sinful man, whose sin had been eminently forgiven;
(2) as a prayerful man, whose prayer had been eminently answered;
(3) as an afflicted man, whose affliction had been eminently blessed" (Martin). "The Word says, "Arise," and Jonah arose; the Word says, "Go," and Jonah went. It is beautiful It is grand. We must not indeed exaggerate. For we know that there is something dark and bitter in this man still, which will break out again. But meantime, and in this act of obedience, so far as we see it, there is a grandeur like that of an angel a simplicity like that of a child" (Raleigh).
IV THE MESSAGE DELIVERED. "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." Jonah in Nineveh what a contrast to Gath-hepher, Joppa, or even Jerusalem! What temples! what tombs! what monuments! what new impressions of its vastness and power! Perhaps new impressions of its horrible treatment of those who opposed themselves to it. It was no uncommon sight to witness a row of prisoners, each impaled alive on an iron spike; or men of mark flayed alive; or captives, with hooks in nose, dragged by halters, carrying the bleeding heads of their kings or nobles. Anyhow, pictures of such things abounded. They made no undue impression on Jonah. "Strong in faith," he went boldly forward and delivered the message. "He cried, and said lifted up his voice like a trumpet under the windows of the rich, in the resorts of the poor before the proud military array before nobles and judges and all His message was more specific and startling than before. Stern, but faithful and honest preaching; no flattery; no shrinking from exposure of the true mind of God. They might do with him as they pleased; he had not a single friend in that vast multitude no protection but God"s nevertheless, he would proclaim the message. As John Knox said long afterwards, "I am in the place where I am commanded of God to speak the truth; and the truth I will speak, impugn it whoso list." Contrast the feeling of Jonah now and when he fled to go to Tarshish. His soul tumultuous and agitated then, in peace and serenity now. "He that sayeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Acknowledge the reality of Divine protection and strength sense of peace and proof of it, for, after all, fidelity to God is the true policy. "Them that honour me, I will honour". W.G.B. (1Sa_2:30)
HOMILIES BY G.T. COSTER Vers. 1-4. Jonah in Ninevah.
I A GREAT RESTORATION. After his recreancy to duty, who had been surprised if Jonah had been thrust out of the prophet"s office? The guilt of his flight, the moral insensibility into which he had sunken, rendered him, many would think, unfit to be God"s spokesman to men. But God had mercy on him. And saved, he had presently the assurance of it. He was reinstated in the prophet"s office, and solemnly commissioned anew to the prophet"s work. A second time" bidden go, he went. It was a great restoration, and openly marked by the great errand on which he was sent. The work showed that the worker was restored. For that still the backslider is recovered. Not for mere personal enjoyment in religion. Not merely to have the assurance of individual safety. But also to "show" what great things God hath done for him. Was Peter restored? Let him prove it: "Feed my sheep .... my lambs." So was Jonah comforted; restored, he had the assurance of it in the renewed commission, "Go to Nineveh.
II A GREAT SPHERE FOR WORK. God himself, in giving this commission, spoke of Nineveh as "that great city." Jonah knew from human testimony that the city was great. But God says it is. Then let Jonah be ready for difficulties. It is no little work to which he is bidden. And is the greatness of Nineveh mentioned only to prepare him for the magnitude of the task before him? Is there not implied therein a reason, should the people repent, for the Divine compassion? "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city?". (Jon_4:11) In a town, with its many homes, families, cares, virtues, vices, how much to impress a human imagination, to affect a human heart! But in great cities, throbbing with restless life, each man of the millioned multitude with his own history, his own destiny, how the solemn interest is deepened! Great cities are great to God. Religion is the only protection of city or state. The repentance of the Ninevites averted the doom of Nineveh; its wealth, valour, fame, availed not to effect this. This punishment of nations as such comes in this world. The sins of nations have destroyed them. May our own nation know the time of its visitation, that it perish not!
III A GREAT EXAMPLE. Jonah is here seen at his best. There is a moral sublimity in his promptitude. "Arise, go." He went. The difficulty of obedience always grows by delay, it may be hard at the beginning, but it will be easier then than ever after. "God loveth a cheerful giver," whatever be the gift. Bold was Jonah. Wisely bold. As soon as Nineveh was reached he began his solemn cry. Bold, though alone. He had no human companion to encourage him, to help him. Bold, to utter the cry of woe. Destruction was the burden of his oft-repeated message. Nothing in that to gather affection to him loving, joyful attention. May his courage be ours! We have glad tidings to tell; and no such lonely path to tread as he. With such a message, and with the viewless presence of the Messenger, we may well be of good courage. G.T.C.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4 And the Word of the Lord came unto Jonah…
Jon_3:1-2
And the Word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying.
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The restored commission
Here we learn what God is to those who truly repent. God may even restore all that has been forfeited. For those who have done grievous wrong, it is encouraging to think that there is honour, and glory, and a blessed restoration to the full love of God, if only they return out of the darkness into the presence from which they have departed. God sent Jonah on the very same mission in which he had failed before,--and yet with a marked difference distinguishing the second from the first call. The changed command, though full of restored confidence, implies a warning to be exact in fulfilling the will of God--to be careful as to giving the message exactly as he received it. It seems to say, Risk not any further disobedience even in the least particular of the mission on which you are sent.
1. The exceeding mercy of God shown in this, that He offers renewed opportunities to those who fail to profit by the first opportunity; and it may be even opportunities of the same kind. They may have to be followed after a different manner, but yet the same object, the same end may be set before us till finally accomplished.
2. There is this further wonder in the forgiving and forbearing of God, that He causes the trials of the returning penitent to be the means of good. Those who have passed through the experience of such penitential struggles and fears may become afterwards a blessing to others, because they can tell of the dangers that beset them, and of the mercy through which they have been saved. The grace of God not only restores a man generally, as it were, but renews him in the very point in which he had sinned and failed. Take courage then, you who are beset with some special sin. Let us learn from the long catalogue of those who have fallen and have been recovered to take hope for ourselves. God desires a perfect, not an imperfect work. Grace crowns acts of penitence and faith. (T. T. Carter.)
The preacher of judgment
Jonah, the runaway prophet, is now before us as Jonah the successful preacher.
1. Sin in God s servants is a great hinderer.
2. Faithlessness in the servant does not necessitate failure to the Master. Chastisement may lead to consecration, and that to successful service.
3. Moral delinquency repented of is no impassable barrier to former favour, privilege, and honour. God does not take advantage of our weakness to cut us off for ever. He is patient, pitiful, forgiving, and will restore His penitent servants to forfeited blessings and dignities.
4. The preachers true function is to declare what God commands him. The message as well as the commission must bear the impress of Divinity. Divine thoughts, purposes, desires, truths, and not human notions, creeds, sentiments, opinions, fancies, must ever fill the mind, inspire the tongue, constrain the utterance, and fire the eloquence and enthusiasm of every ambassador of the Cross. Note that Jonah was obedient at last to the holy orders. He did what he should have done at first. Obedience is true or false according to the temper in which we act. Notice the method and matter of his preaching. His method was earnest, courageous, impressive. He cried. His matter was adapted to rich and poor. It was solemn, humiliating, definite, merciful. We have the practical fruits of the preaching,--repentance and reformation. Ninevehs repentance was well timed, well grounded, well evidenced, by self-denial, self-abasement, earnest prayer, personal reform. Learn that genuine repentance averts the punitive purposes of God. God watches for genuine indications of moral reform. Behold them, He refrains from executing His threatenings. Repentance is a wonderful power in the domain of moral government. (J. O. Keen, D. D.)
The history of Jonah set before the young
The prophet Jonah opposed the will of God, and would not do what God commanded him, as did Balaam; but there was this difference between them,--that Jonah did fear and love God. God destroyed Balaam. He only punished Jonah, and brought him to repentance. It is then a very good thing to love and serve God; because those who do so cannot quite turn away from God, and Cod will never quite turn away from them. If they sin, they will be punished, like Jonah was; but those who love and serve God are still under His care, and like Jonah are brought back to repentance. If there are among you any that are wishing to serve God, but are yet sometimes tempted to disobey Him, you may learn much by thinking of what happened to Jonah.
1. God gave him a command to go and tell the people of Nineveh that He was about to destroy them. It was a very hard command for him to fulfil. Jonah could not tell what might happen to him, if he ventured into that great foreign and heathen city. But God could take care of him. He knew that God was a loving Father to him. Whenever we are disposed to do wrong, then we are afraid of the Bible; we are afraid of every thing that tells us of our sin; we are afraid of pious persons; we cannot bear to pray. Whenever you are disposed to do what is wrong, you feel equally disposed to flee from the presence of the Lord. You act like Jonah. Therefore our best way is to love and serve God with all our hearts, and ask Him for grace to do all our duty, as Jonah ought to have done. When the lot fell upon Jonah, they asked him what he had done; and he was obliged to tell them how he had been shrinking from doing his duty, and was trying to escape from God, who followed him, and who knew where he was, and what he was doing. It must have made him more miserable to have seen how much better the heathen were than he. For he had brought them into danger, and they were trying to save his life. At last, at his own wish, they took him up, and threw him into the sea. Ungodly persons, when they are brought into trouble, cannot pray. Now there is not a place on earth, and there is not a degree of guilt in which we may be living, in which our believing prayer cannot reach the ear and heart of God: for when Jonah cried unto the Lord, in the midst of his troubles, God heard him, and caused the fish to vomit him out upon the shore of his own land. How humble and grateful he must have felt that day! He was not left, however, to be indolent and inactive. Jonah was brought through all his troubles, to just this point, that he must obey the commands of God. Gods commands never alter. Our sins will not alter them; our troubles will not alter them; our deliverance will not alter them. God commands you to love and serve Him with all your hearts; God commands you to confess Jesus Christ in the world, to make the Bible your rule of life, and to live by faith and in prayer. Jonah was brought to Gods command a second time; and if he had refused, he would have been brought to it a third time. He must do Gods will. When he accomplished the will of God, and found it so easy, doubtless he thought, Why did I not do it at first? (Baptist W. Noel, M. A.)
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
Jonahs first and second commission
What are the points of difference between them? One respects Jonah himself. Formerly he knew the message that he was to deliver. Now he is simply told that a message will be given him, but he is not to know it until he arrives at the place. It may be the same. It may be milder; it may be sterner. Undoubtedly this change has reference to his former disobedience. The message was different in its substance also, to meet the change in Nineveh. When the message was given, it proved to be the never varying cry, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed. Some think he preached on this as a text; but as the cup of Ninevehs iniquity was now full, what was proper to the case was just a cry of coming judgment, brief and plain, startling, stern, unalterable, except by quick and unfeigned repentance. Probably Jonah did not add to this message by the faintest hint or suggestion. The simplest interpretation is the truest. This message makes us think.
1. Of the exceeding sinfulness of sin.
2. How inflexible is the justice of God.
3. What a stupendous power a city has for good or evil. (A. Raleigh, D. D.)
A missionary message
Jonah was foolish, Jonah was wise; foolish to expect to balk God, wise to learn so quickly his folly. Misery, calamity, peril, and the sense of an ever present God who had brought them, did their work; and the prophet, back again at the starting-point, heeds the Divine voice, and turns with an obedient heart to fulfil the mission which he had thought to escape.
I. Gods authority. The Being who speaks is conscious of His right. He does not mince words. Gods demand on Jonah now is precisely what it was in the first place. There is no effort to compromise because of Jonahs former flight. Now comes the command again, plain, stern, uncompromising--Arise, go, preach. The slight change of form in the expression seems full of meaning. Arise, go, and preach the preaching that I bid thee. See that thou preach no other message than Mine. God owns men. All that we are, all that we have, all the service of our lives belongs to God. We delude ourselves with any sense of self-ownership. We get the idea that we own what God only loans to us.
II. Gods way with the disobedient. See how God goes to work to bring this mans will into subjection to His own. What a complex of world-wide, universe-wide machinery the Sovereign of all can set in motion for the subduing of a human spirit! Jonah is not more obdurate than Pharaoh. The storms, the seas, the worse tumults in his own bosom, the upbraidings of the crew, his thoughts of his past, his fear,--all are Gods instruments, and under His direction each does its unconscious part toward the subjection of Jonah, and the salvation of the Assyrian capital. Jonah is a changed man. From a coward he has become a dauntless hero and prophet. Jonah thought himself free when he fled, but in fact his first real enjoyment of freedom came when he started to fulfil Gods command.
III. Gods missionary message and its effect. Jonah was the first foreign missionary. The men of far-off Nineveh were to learn of God, His love and holiness. The very heart of our conception of God as a moral being is His holiness. The holiness of God compels Him to insist upon holiness in all men. In Nineveh sin had taken on its most frightful developments. Nineveh had much, but it lacked just one element of fortune--righteousness. Ninevehs cup of iniquity was well-nigh full. Jonahs preaching was plain, earnest, effective, impressive. God went into the city with Jonah, but God had also gone before. The men of Nineveh were ready for the missionary. The people believed God. To believe God is a great thing. The best possible evidence of the Ninevites belief in the missionarys sermon was their conduct. They acted. They bestirred themselves as if they believed that the sin of their hearts and lives was endangering them. The ringing cry of Jonah reaches even the royal palace, and the king, humbled, joins his subjects in their plea for Gods mercy. The people turned from their sin, and cried for mercy.
IV. Gods mercy. Gods heart was moved; doom was averted; Nineveh was saved. God was merciful to Jonah in following him through all his flight, in bringing him back to the starting-point, in using him though he had shown himself unworthy. God was merciful to Nineveh in sending the messenger to warn the city, and in preparing the hearts of the people for the message. And God is merciful in listening to their cry for forgiveness. God repented. His attitude toward Nineveh was changed. What changed it? Ninevehs attitude toward sin. What is meant by Gods repentance? Speaking to man, God must use language with which man is familiar. Repentance means a changed attitude. The whole attitude of the Ninevites toward sin, and so, toward God, being changed, in that same hour Gods attitude toward them was changed. (John H. Mason.)
Conditions of ministerial success
I. The character of the sermon; or the objective elements of success.
1. It should be argumentative. To expect men to believe without proof is to expect them to become irrational.
2. It must be positive; mainly concerned in the teaching of truth, rather than in the refutation of error.
3. It is doctrinal. The larger part of those who compose our congregations depend upon the preacher for all the knowledge they will ever have of these great theological truths. That preaching is the most practical which indoctrinates the hearers with the fundamental elements of the Christian faith.
4. It should be systematic. As there is a logical coherence between all the parts of the religion we teach, why should we exclude system from our mode of exhibiting it?
5. A bold, unflinching testimony to the great doctrines of Gods sovereignty, mans inability, election, and other unpopular doctrines of the Gospel.
II. The character of the man; or the subjective elements of success.
1. Individuality.
2. Earnestness is self-evidencing.
3. Consciousness on the part of the speaker that he is speaking to his audience. Some preach for the sake of the sermon. Others preach for the sake of the people.
4. The good preacher speaks with authority. Which may be derived from--
(1) Consciousness of official dignity.
(2) Unwavering conviction of the truth.
(3) Consciousness of personal acceptance with God.
5. The manner of delivery should be in accordance with the rules of good speaking. Delivery is an art, and is based upon scientific principles.
6. The preacher must have weight of personal character; not only piety, but weight of character. Who of us is sufficient for these things? (J. W. Pratt, D. D.)
Preaching to great cities
The Lord seems to say to Jonah, Begin where you were when you started out to have your own way. Come back to the very point at which we were, and start again. But the Lord distrusted him a little still, notwithstanding the discipline to which he had been subjected. Now God is more definite. The preaching that I bid thee. There must be no mistake, no dodging, no evasion. Man may disobey God in two ways. He may not go, may plead excuses, and refuse to try to do the work. Or he may not do what God tells him to do, may do something somewhat like it, but not it. It is against this second kind of disobedience that God guards His servant. It is not difficult to obtain men, in this age, who are quite ready to go to great cities. But there are many who, when they go, do not do what God tells them to do. There is preaching enough, but when you come to take out of it the theological dialectics, and the wranglings, and the discussions of the secular phases of life, and the material interests of the Church, and the meddling with current events, you find that the bulk of Gods preaching is comparatively small, and often of weak portent. The great question which lays itself down at the door of our hearts is, Are we doing our whole duty to the city?--not to ones self simply, but to the city? We are here upon Gods errand. Is the city being saved? Is it being saved as we might save it? As God expects us to save it?
I. What are the methods with which we are to go into this great city as appointed by the Almighty? God sends us with a definite commission, and there is to be decisiveness of action on our part. There is to be activity, earnestness. We are to impress upon these sinners round that we can die for them, but we can never leave them unsaved. This indefiniteness, this far-off century, this millennium dawning out of small faith is not of the Gospel. That is for the prophets of evolution, of aesthetics and social culture, for the false prophets. Within the Church are the leverages and forces to bring the millennium to this sinking world.
II. What about the place; what about the exact methods; what about the appliances of the Gospel? If we are to preach to people the preaching God bids us to preach them, how are we to reach them? Jonah was to preach street preaching. Jesus Christ preached in the streets. The preaching of the Gospel should be just as accessible to men as when it is preached in the streets and in the fields. Christ expects men and women to be able to come to the preaching of the Gospel with as much freedom as they go along the highways. There should be nothing in the Churches or in the preaching of the Gospel that shall embarrass in the slightest degree any poor man, or plainly clad man, who may want to find Jesus Christ. We have built our churches away from the people. We imitate a useless, liturgical style of architecture. We let pews to the well-to-do. When men come to the altar of God, and it is their home, how they then throng about their minister; they dont hide away from him.
III. What shall we preach? The Gospel. Just simply the plain old Gospel of the old time. You and I are to preach that very same Jesus who went into Rome, and into Athens, and into Asia-Minor, and whom our fathers preached, and whom our fathers revered. Human nature needs it as much as ever it did. Preach to it the Crucified One; not a petty little philosophy of salvation, or a poetic story of a perfect Man Christ. But preach a God Christ, a Divine Christ, who was torn, lacerated by a devil-world; a risen Christ, risen by His own power, which He will exert in due time for all who die in Him. Preach a Gospel of conviction of sin, of repentance, of regeneration, of the witness of the Spirit, by which human hearts are made new, human character is transformed, human faces are transfigured, and dying mortals are translated into that glory where all are always like Him. (J. R. Day, D. D.)
Effect of Jonahs preaching
There was never a mission undertaken apparently more unpromising than this of Jonah to Nineveh. Here was.--
I. A most unsuitable missionary.
1. To begin with, he was thoroughly unwilling to go. His reason he gives in Jon_4:2. He was fearful that the heathen would repent at his preaching, and in that case God would have compassion, and forgive and spare them. What a fear to be entertained by a missionary!
2. Unsuitable because of the self-deception which he could practise on himself, and his moral confusion and compromise. Let us not think worse of Jonah than the case demands. He has his good traits. At least he is honest, and he is as severe on himself as he is on others.
3. It would have seemed unfavourable also that Jonah should be sent on such a mission entirely alone.
II. Nineveh was a very difficult field. Perhaps the most discouraging thing about it was that its people already knew Jonahs country, his race, and his religion, and thoroughly despised them all. It was to the proud metropolis of a resistless empire, overflowing with wealth and numbers, filled with insolence and luxury, that the lonely man from the village of Gath-hepher was sent. And did it not make matters worse that God had bidden Jonah to carry to Nineveh such a disheartening, exasperating message?
III. Yet the mission of Jonah was a success. A success scarcely paralleled in ancient or in modern times. Nineveh believed God. It is not possible to tell the extent or the permanence of this national repentance. Learn--
1. All races of men have been in Gods loving care.
2. We see the method of Gods mercy to the heathen.
3. We may cherish great expectations concerning the hardest fields of the heathen world.
4. The religious use of fear.
5. The moral power of leaders, whether social or political.
6. Learn Christs own lessons from this history. (Arthur Mitchell, D. D.)
Jonahs commission
The eye of God is always on man. We seem to act as if God retired into the distance of heaven, and took no cognisance of the actions of man. But if Gods eye does look upon man, the disposition of God is to show mercy to man. For do we not see here the messenger sent to Nineveh? If God has a disposition to show mercy, God is one whose patience has limits. We are not to suppose that we can trifle with God; that we can go on with our iniquity, and that God will never vindicate His honour. Learn also that we may hope in preaching to the very worst and most abandoned. Wicked Nineveh listened to the voice of warning. The text further teaches us the duty of the Church, the duty of all Gods people. They are to arise and go and preach the preaching which God bids.
1. We are to arise and go. Here at once activity is demanded at our hand. There must be no lethargy and no lukewarmness.
2. Besides showing activity, the Church is to be aggressive. Jonah was to go away into the haunts of wickedness, and there to scatter in the midst of those people the warnings of Almighty God. So we are to go unto the dark places, and carry that light which God has communicated to man.
3. The Church is to be as the salt of the earth. What does that involve? That it is to influence everything that it touches. And how many are the stimulants to urge us to this active, aggressive work! And observe that we are to preach the preaching that God bids. The preaching must be only what God wants. There must be no addition on our part, no fancies or imaginations of our own. Three parts in preaching.
(1) A warning to the people.
(2) We are affectionately to expostulate.
(3) We must speak the language of comfort and encouragement. (Canon Hussey.)
Christian enterprise
This is an age of enterprise. The world is more active and energetic than ever before. Gigantic schemes, of which the world scarcely dreamed in days gone by, are being hourly put into practical effect. This spirit also pervades the Church of Christ.
I. Christian enterprise is Divinely commanded. Arise and go is the Divine command to every church, to every society, to every Christian to-day.
II. The object of Christian enterprise. It is included in Gods command to Jonah, Arise, go . . . and preach . . . that I bid thee. The work of the Church is to preach, to proclaim what God commands it--all the word of God. Nothing can be accomplished without time, trouble, expense, and labour.
III. The effect of Christian enterprise.
1. It had its proper effect upon the people toward whom it was directed. They believed God, they repented in sackcloth and in ashes.
2. It received the approval of God. God was pleased with Jonah and with the people. He heard their cry of repentance. (S. H. Doyle.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v1 Jonah 3
THE REPENTANCE OF THE CITY
Jonah 3
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HAVING learned, through suffering, his moral kinship with the heathen, and having offered his life for some of them, Jonah receives a second command to go to Nineveh. He obeys, but with his prejudice as strong as though it had never been humbled, nor met by Gentile nobleness. The first part of his story appears to have no consequences in the second. But this is consistent with the writers purpose to treat Jonah as if he were Israel. For, upon their return from Exile, and in spite of all their new knowledge of themselves and the world, Israel continued to cherish their old grudge against the Gentiles.
"And the word of Jehovah came to Jonah the second time, saying, Up, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call unto her with the call which I shall tell thee. And Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, as Jehovah said. Now Nineveh was a city great before God, three days journey" through and through. "And Jonah began by going through the city one days journey, and he cried and said, Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overturned."
Opposite to Mosul, the well-known emporium of trade on the right bank of the Upper Tigris, two high artificial mounds now lift themselves from the otherwise level plain. The more northerly takes the name of Kujundschik, or "little lamb," after the Turkish village which couches pleasantly upon its northeastern slope. The other is called in the popular dialect Nebi Yu-nus, "Prophet Jonah," after a mosque dedicated to him, which used to be a Christian church; but the official name is Nineveh. These two mounds are bound to each other on the west by a broad brick wall, which extends beyond them both, and is connected north and south by other walls, with a circumference in all of about nine English miles. The interval, including the mounds, was covered with buildings, whose ruins still enable us to form some idea of what was for centuries the wonder of the world. Upon terraces and substructions of enormous breadth rose storied palaces, arsenals, barracks, libraries, and temples. A lavish water system spread in all directions from canals with massive embankments and sluices. Gardens were lifted into midair, filled with rich plants and rare and beautiful animals. Alabaster, silver, gold, and precious stones relieved the dull masses of brick and flashed sunlight from every frieze and battlement. The surrounding walls were so broad that chariots could roll abreast on them. The gates, and especially the river gates, were very massive.
All this was Nineveh proper, whose glory the Hebrews envied and over whose fall more than one of their prophets exult. But this was not the Nineveh to which our author saw Jonah come. Beyond the walls were great suburbs, {Gen_10:11} and beyond the suburbs other towns, league upon league of dwellings, so closely set upon the plain as to form one vast complex of population, which is known to Scripture as "The Great City." To judge from the ruins which still cover the ground, the circumference must have been about sixty miles, or three days journey. It is these nameless leagues of common dwellings which roll before us in the story. None of those glories of Nineveh are mentioned of which other prophets speak, but the only proofs offered to us of the citys greatness are its extent and its population. {Jon_3:2} Jonah is sent to three days, not of mighty buildings, but of homes and families, to the Nineveh, not of kings and their glories, but of men, women, and children, "besides much cattle." The palaces and temples, he may pass in an hour or two, but from sunrise to sunset he treads the dim drab mazes where the people dwell.
When we open our hearts for heroic witness to the truth there rush upon them glowing memories of Moses before Pharaoh, of Elijah before Ahab, of Stephen before the Sanhedrim, of Paul upon Areopagus, of Galileo before the Inquisition, of Luther at the Diet. But it takes a greater heroism to face the people than a king, to convert a nation than to persuade a senate. Princes and assemblies of the wise stimulate the imagination; they drive to bay all the nobler passions of a solitary man. But there is nothing to help the heart, and therefore its courage is all the greater, which bears witness before those endless masses, in monotone of life and color, that now paralyze the imagination like long stretches of sand when the sea is out, and again terrify it like the resistless rush of the flood beneath a hopeless evening sky.
It is, then, with an art most fitted to his high purpose that our author-unlike all other prophets, whose aim was different-presents to us, not the description of a great military power: king, nobles, and armed battalions: but the vision of those monotonous millions. He strips his countrys foes of everything foreign, everything provocative of envy and hatred, and unfolds them to Israel only in their teeming humanity.
His next step is still more grand. For this teeming humanity he claims the universal human possibility of repentance-that and nothing more.
Under every form and character of human life, beneath all needs and all habits, deeper than despair and more native to man than sin itself, lies the power of the heart to turn. It was this and not hope that remained at the bottom of Pandoras Box when every other gift had fled. For this is the indispensable secret of hope. It lies in every heart, needing indeed some dream of Divine mercy, however far and vague, to rouse it; but when roused, neither ignorance of God, nor pride, nor long obduracy of evil may withstand it. It takes command of the whole nature of a man, and speeds from heart to heart with a violence, that like pain and death spares neither age nor rank nor degree of culture. This primal human right is all our author claims for the men of Nineveh. He has been blamed for telling us an impossible thing, that a whole city should be converted at the call of a single stranger; and others have started up in his defense and quoted cases in which large Oriental populations have actually been stirred by the preaching of an alien in race and religion; and then it has been replied, "Granted the possibility, granted the fact in other cases, yet where in history have we any trace of this alleged conversion of all Nineveh?" and some scoff, "How could a Hebrew have made himself articulate in one day to those Assyrian multitudes?"
How long, O Lord, must Thy poetry suffer from those who can only treat it as prose? On whatever side they stand, skeptical or orthodox, they are equally pedants, quenchers of the spiritual, creators of unbelief.
Our author, let us once for all understand, makes no attempt to record a historical conversion of this vast heathen city. For its men he claims only the primary human possibility of repentance; expressing himself not in this general abstract way, but as Orientals, to whom an illustration is ever a proof, love to have it done-by story or parable. With magnificent reserve he has not gone further; but only told into the prejudiced faces of his people, that out there, beyond the Covenant, in the great world lying in darkness, there live, not beings created for ignorance and hostility to God, elect for destruction, but men with consciences and hearts, able to turn at His Word and to hope in His Mercy-that to the farthest ends of the world, and even on the high places of unrighteousness, Word and Mercy work just as they do within the Covenant.
The fashion in which the repentance of Nineveh is described is natural to the time of the writer. It is a national repentance, of course, and though swelling upwards from the people, it is confirmed and organized by the authorities: for we are still in the Old Dispensation, when the picture of a complete and thorough repentance could hardly be otherwise conceived. And the beasts are made to share its observance, as in the Orient they always shared and still share in funeral pomp and trappings. It may have been, in addition, a personal pleasure to our writer to record the part of the animals in the movement. See how, later on, he tells us that for their sake also God had pity upon Nineveh.
"And the men of Nineveh believed upon God, and cried a fast, and from the greatest of them to the least of them they put on sackcloth. And word came to the king of Nineveh, and he rose off his throne, and cast his mantle from upon him, and dressed in sackcloth and sat in the dust. And he sent criers to say in Nineveh":-
"By Order of the King and his Nobles, thus:-Man and Beast, Oxen and Sheep, shall not taste anything, neither eat nor drink water. But let them clothe themselves in sackcloth, both man and beast, and call upon God with power, and turn every man from his evil way and from every wrong which they have in hand. Who knoweth but that God may relent and turn from the fierceness of His wrath, that we perish not"?
"And God saw their doings, how they turned from their evil way; and God relented of the evil which He said He would do to them, and did it not."
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4 Jon_3:2. Arise] J. might not imagine that God would…
CRITICAL NOTES.]
Jon_3:2. Arise] J. might not imagine that God would send him again. But he appears to have some settled home, and an interval seems to have elapsed before the second commission, to give time for the report to spread. Preach] Lit. proclaim.
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HOMILETICS
JONAH A SIGN TO THE NINEVITES.—Chap. Jon_3:1, and Luk_11:30
Jonah would obey the second commission with renewed strength and Divine authority. He would appear in Nineveh as a sign, an outward proof of a Divine purpose in his life and work (cf. Luk_11:30).
I. A sign of God’s mercy towards men. As in a mirror, we see much of God and men, of sin and grace, in the history of Jonah. God proved that he was reconciled.
1. In forgiving sin.
2. In restoring a backslider.
3. In reinstating a runaway prophet. If we abuse the confidence of our fellow-creatures, they seldom forgive and employ us again. But God freely forgives, restores to favour after rebellion, and grants commission to unworthy servants. “I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins; return unto me, for I have redeemed thee.”
II. A sign of God’s inflexible justice towards men. God’s servant must be punished and corrected. The sincerity of his penitence, and the honour of his God, must be vindicated. Nineveh must be threatened, and her sin forsaken. Pardon gives no licence to disobedience. Neither the righteous nor the wicked can sin with impunity. God will be glorified in the life of his people, and the law magnified in the destiny of nations.
III. A sign of God’s unchangeable purpose towards men. God’s plans are made in wisdom, and must be accomplished. He does not alter them to gratify the whims and caprice of man. “He is of one mind, and who can turn him?” Nineveh must be warned, and Jonah must go. All pleas and excuses are in vain. God gives to every one his work, and expects him to do it. If he runs away he must be fetched back. Treachery and cowardice God has determined to scourge. “He that knoweth his Master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”
THE SECOND CALL.—Jon_3:1-2
If Jonah doubted whether after sin like his he would ever be restored to favour and service again, he had not long to wait for an answer; for “The word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time.” This second call was—
I. Divinely given. The prophet might be ready, but he had need to be certain that God required him to go. If we are willing, we require instruction in duty. The spring of action is not mere religious feeling, but apprehension of God’s word. Emotion will not ensure consistent life, without faith in Divine truth. God had to speak again. “The first verse,” says Luther, “is therefore written that we may bear in mind that nothing is to be undertaken without God’s word and command. For the first command of God having been violated by disobedience, had not God renewed it, Jonah would not have known whether he should do it or not.”
II. Urgent to immediate service. “Arise, go,” are terms of incitement, and indicate that he was not girded for work, but resting in contentment and ease.
1. The duty was imperative. The more quickly we perform, the better for our souls. Delays are signs of distrust, and impeachment of Divine wisdom. We must prove the sincerity of our profession by prompt obedience. “Be ready to every good work.”
2. The communication was suspended. The exact message seems not to be given at first. Immediate departure to Nineveh was required, and further revelations were delayed. God thus cultivates the dependence and tries the faith of his servants. His own authority in prescribing duty must be sufficient. His simple word is entitled to respect and compliance. Present duty should be enough for us. God will give enlarged views, greater strength, and more consolation, if we practise what we already know. “If any man will do the will of God, he shall know,” &c.
III. Specific in directions.
1. The destination was still the same. “To Nineveh, that great city.” The trial is not abated, the dangers are not hidden. He is again reminded that it was a great, proud, and heathen city, to which he was sent. A city whose inhabitants were pre-eminently wicked and violent, and whom he was to threaten with speedy and complete ruin. But God had given Jonah proofs of his love, and Jonah should give not less evidence of his obedience.
2. The message would be given him. “The denunciation that I shall speak to thee.” He was not to concern himself about his message and its results. That would be given to him when he was ready for it. He is to add nothing, nor diminish nothing. The Christian minister is not left to his own discretion, nor must he study to gratify the taste of the people. He must preach the Word—the message from God to him—earnestly and faithfully. If he tries to explain away or soften down what is severe to the ungodly, “he takes upon himself a double responsibility—responsibility for the salvation of the souls entrusted to him, and responsibility for his own disobedience.” Many may speak to us smooth things, but we must not please men, for how can we then be servants of God? Jonah must be faithful:
(1) In the matter of his preaching. The unwelcome message must be delivered. Nineveh was to be denounced for sin.
(2) In the manner of his preaching. He was to “cry.” Cry in compassion for perishing men, as a proof of his own sincerity, to rouse a careless and sinful people. “Proclaim the preaching that I shall bid thee.”
(3) A second call summoned him. Ingratitude and failure had disgraced his conduct. But God had chastised and forgiven him. His experience was a preparation for service. Before we can proclaim mercy to man we must receive it ourselves. Profound repentance and perfect restoration to Divine favour will qualify us for a proper discharge of duty. Repeated acts of grace to us are a ground of hope for others. Severe trials and deep sorrow are often forerunners of great trust and high distinction. “Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners shall be converted unto thee.”
HOMILETIC HINTS AND OUTLINES
Jon_3:1. God does not utterly reject him who has failed once; but he rather gives him a new opportunity of correcting former faults [Lange].
The most prominent lesson in this verse is that God gives to men successive opportunities for the accomplishment of their life-work. We are not crushed by the weight of our first sin or failure. If so, few would have anything like hope for the future. Life would be a dreary foreboding, lest any message committed to our care should be neglected, and entail final condemnation. The world would be full of wretched mortals, upon whom would rest the woe of unfulfilled mission [Exell].
Jon_3:2. Jonah would resume his work with a new obedience.
1. As a sinful man, whose sin had been eminently forgiven. He would accept his mission in a spirit of gratitude, reverence, and submission.
2. As a prayerful man, whose prayer had been eminently answered. Prayer answered was (a) a testimony to him of his sincerity and integrity; (b) It would inspire him with the assurance that he was not returning alone—that he had One who would carry him through all danger, and give him success in his work.
3. As an afflicted man, whose affliction had been eminently blessed. Like the Psalmist, before he was afflicted, he went astray, but was chastened and subdued. He knew the “goodness and severity of God,” and was fitted to teach them to others [H. Martin].
The preaching. Nothing should be more sacred to the preacher of God’s word than truth, and simplicity, and inviolable sanctity in delivering it [Pusey]. The grand doctrines of the New Testament are eternally fixed. We must preach them, all, faithfully and fully; should we alter, add, or diminish, we do not preach unto the people the preaching which the Lord bids us. If, instead of this, we preach another gospel, we shall bring down upon us a curse and not a blessing [Jones].
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 3
Jon_3:1-3. This is substantially the same commission, and yet different. The “second” call to a man is never exactly the same as the first. The third is never a repetition of the second. Another tone is in the voice of the speaker, firmer or milder. Other shades of meaning are in the message. If it is “the second time,” still more if it is the seventh time, or the seventy-and-seventh time, there will be changes in the message corresponding with changes which time has brought in circumstances and in character. It may seem a refinement, but, properly understood, it is but a simple truth, that he never receives exactly the same command or invitation from God more than once. “If slighted once, the season fair can never be renewed” [Raleigh].
A great city. Nineveh covered a great extent of ground. Historians say that its walls were 480 stadia, or 60 miles, in circumference. It was great in population. Jonah mentions 120,000 who could not discern between their right hand and their left. It was great in splendour and power. “The researches in the mounds have astonished Europe with the barbaric grandeur of the statuary, and the full details of life and history sculptured on marble, or stamped in arrow-headed characters upon the bricks.” But it was morally great to God on account of the human souls, and their spiritual condition. In God’s sight, grandeur, territory, and architectural beauty, are nothing to immortal souls, and the influence which they exert. The material worlds, the sun with its satellites, are not so great as a man. Try to realize how great you are in the sight of God.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 I. From Joppa the prophet probably went up to…
Jon 3:1
I. From Joppa the prophet probably went up to Jerusalem, to appear in the Temple, to which he had looked from the deep, to sacrifice to God with the voice of thanksgiving, to pay what he had vowed. Then, probably, he returned to Gath-hepher, his former home. And there, as it would seem, he was living when he received the second commission to go to Nineveh. Notice the points of identity between the first and the second commission. (i) God still needs to speak. (ii) Nineveh is still a great city. Therefore that is the place for Him to speak. There are also points of difference between the first and the second commission. (1) One respects Jonah himself, and glances, not reproachfully, but still in a spirit of fatherly faithfulness at his recent disobedience. "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, preach the preaching that I bid thee." Formerly he knew the message that he was to deliver. Now he is simply told that a message will be given him, but he is not to know it until he arrives at the place. He is relegated, as it were, from the position of the "friend who knoweth his Lord’s will," to, or towards, that of the "servant who knoweth not." (2) The message is different in its substance also, to meet the change in Nineveh.
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II. From Jonah’s preaching in Nineveh we see: (i) The exceeding sinfulness of sin. The horror of great darkness which settles down with the night upon Nineveh is all brought by sin. (ii) The inflexible justice of God. (iii) The stupendous power a city has—power for good and power for evil.
A. Raleigh, The Story of Jonah, p. 189.
References: Jon 3:1-4.—W. G. Blaikie,Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 250. Jon 3:2.—J. McC. Hussey, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 177; J. Keble, Sermons from Lent to Passiontide, p. 279. Jon 3:4.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi, p. 333; J. Vaughan, Sermons, 15th series, p. 85.
Jon 3:5
I. Our Lord tells us that "Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites." He was a sign (1) of the impartiality and inflexibility of the Divine justice. Prophet though he was, raised to a higher place of life than common men, admitted to a knowledge of some of the secrets of the Divine government of the world; in favour, as might be supposed, in the celestial court, he no sooner swerves and turns from the way of obedience, than God turns upon him the arrestive and vindicative powers of His government. He is pursued, convicted, cast into the deep. It will appear manifest to them that all nature serves God for His just occasions; that the nets of capture are already woven—spread wherever there can be the footsteps of flight; that storms are brooding in the air and vengeance sleeping in the sea, for those who choose to awake them. (1) He was also a sign of Divine mercy. For he is alive! He has been delivered. From sea and grave, and death and hell, he has come forth. He is not merely in life, he is in favour, once more, with God. Let us take this man as a sign of mercy,—repent and pray, and press towards the gate—see if it will not open a little wider. So the prophet was "a sign" unto them.
II. Notice the effects which are produced upon the city by Jonah’s progress through it. They are such as no man ever produced in a single day, either before or since. They are such as could flow only from the presence and action of the mighty power, and the still mightier grace of God. A sense of God soon filled the city. It was shed from group to group, from street to street. It was awful, painful, at the first, like a "resurrection of condemnation," to their spirits. It turned them away from their own gods as effectually as the sailors in the ship were turned from theirs. "They believed God." Possessed of that faith, all that follows is natural and inevitable.
III. The proclamation which was the faithful exposition of the true sentiments, both of king and people, bears certain marks which we may briefly note. (i) We cannot fail to be struck with the comprehensiveness of it. The prohibition is over every human being, and over all the animals possessed by and related to man. (ii) Fasting was the first part of the decree. Fasting has been a religious exercise in the East as far back as history takes us. The efficacy of it will be more or less, according to climate, individual temperament, and other circumstances. (iii) The covering with sackcloth was the next part of the decree. In its nature and purpose it is closely allied to fasting—with this difference, that it is visible. (iv) Each person is to utter a mighty cry. The Eastern nations have always been addicted to vocal demonstration for the expression of the stronger emotions. The "might," no doubt, is to be in the desire more than in the mere voice that utters it. (v) But by far the most striking and satisfactory characteristic of this proclamation is the last—that which requires from every man a personal and practical reformation: "Let them turn every one from his evil way."
A. Raleigh, The Story of Jonah, p. 216.
References: Jon 3:5-9.—J. Menzies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 100. Jon 3:5-10.—W. G. Blaikie, Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 295. Jon 3:8.—J. N. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 152. Jon 3:9.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 275.
Jon 3:10
I. In the last verse of the third chapter we come upon a difficulty which has exercised the faith and called forth the ingenuity of interpreters. The difficulty is this, there are passages in Holy Scripture which assert in the strongest way that God cannot repent, and that He never does. There are certain other passages (of which this is one) which assert, just as strongly, that He can repent, and that, in fact, He has often done so.
II. If the question is put, "Why was not Nineveh destroyed? how can we reconcile the sparing of the city with Divine veracity, since there is no condition or qualification in the denouncing cry?"—the answer is, that the condition was involved and understood. The possibility of mercy was clearly understood by Jonah, for he was displeased with it. It was understood also by the Ninevites, for they cried for long days and nights. If God had made unreserved announcement of destruction, the city must have been destroyed, for He is in one mind, and who can turn Him? "Hath He said it, and shall He not do it?" "But He knew that the city would repent: why then did He threaten without any expressed reference to this eventuality?" The answer is, that He knew that the city would repent under the shadow of the Divine commination. Not otherwise. The commination was uttered because it was deserved, because it suited the moral condition of the people, because it was necessary in the perfect government of God. Also, God foresaw its good effect; and therefore, in all truth and sincerity, it was put forth. "God knows that His believing children will persevere unto the end: why, then, does He speak to them as if they might not—as if they might apostatize and drawback unto perdition?" The answer is, because they might. It is a clear possibility that they might; and very likely the realization by them of this awful possibility is one of the elements which compose and complete the certainty of perseverance unto the end.
III. The mind of God is the one perfect mirror reflecting without the least distortion or refraction, every object, act, state, being, in the universe, just as it is. God morally regards us at any one moment just as we are. If we repent of all sin and grow into all goodness, His thought and feeling will rise with us; and as, repenting, He spared Nineveh, so will He spare us, and we shall live and not die.
A. Raleigh, The Story of Jonah, p. 241.
References: 3:10-4:1.—J. Menzies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 117; W. G. Blaikie, Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 297. Jonah 3—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iii., p. 103. Jon 4:1-4.—W. G. Blaikie, Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 356. Jon 4:2.—S. Cox, Expositions, 2nd series, p. 75.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v1 Jon 3:1 - Jon 3:10.
Jonah
THREEFOLD REPENTANCE
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Jon 3:1 - Jon 3:10.
This passage falls into three parts: Jonah’s renewed commission and new obedience {Jon 3:1 - Jon 3:4}, the repentance of Nineveh {Jon 3:5 - Jon 3:9}, and the acceptance thereof by God {Jon 3:10}. We might almost call these three the repentance of Jonah, of Nineveh, and of God. The evident intention of the narrative is to parallel the Ninevites turning from their sins, and God’s turning from His anger and purpose of destruction; and if the word ‘repentance’ is not applied to Jonah, his conduct sufficiently shows the thing.
I. Note the renewed charge to the penitent Prophet, and his new eagerness to fulfil it.
His deliverance and second commission are put as if all but simultaneous, and his obedience was swift and glad. Jonah did not venture to take for granted that the charge which he had shirked was still continued to him. If God commands to take the trumpet, and we refuse, we dare not assume that we shall still be honoured with the delivery of the message. The punishment of dumb lips is often dumbness. Opportunities of service, slothfully or faintheartedly neglected, are often withdrawn. We can fancy how Jonah, brought back to the better mind which breathes in his psalm, longed to be honoured by the trust of preaching once more, and how rapturously his spirit would address itself to the task. Duties once unwelcome become sweet when we have passed through the experience of the misery that comes from neglecting them. It is God’s mercy that gives us the opportunity of effacing past disobedience by new alacrity.
The second charge is possibly distinguishable from the first as being less precise. It may be that the exact nature of ‘the preaching that I bid thee’ was not told Jonah till he had to open his mouth in Nineveh; but, more probably, the second charge was identical with the first.
The word rendered ‘preach’ is instructive. It means ‘to cry’ and suggests the manner befitting those who bear God’s message. They should sound it out loudly, plainly, urgently, with earnestness and marks of emotion in their voice. Languid whispers will not wake sleepers. Unless the messenger is manifestly in earnest, the message will fall flat. Not with bated breath, as if ashamed of it; nor with hesitation, as if not quite sure of it; nor with coldness, as if it were of little urgency,-is God’s Word to be pealed in men’s ears. The preacher is a crier. The substance of his message, too, is set forth. ‘The preaching which I bid thee’-not his own imaginations, nor any fine things of his own spinning. Suppose Jonah had entertained the Ninevites with dissertations on the evidences of his prophetic authority, or submitted for their consideration a few thoughts tending to show the agreement of his message with their current opinions in religion, or an argument for the existence of a retributive Governor of the world, he would not have shaken the city. The less the Prophet shows himself, the stronger his influence. The more simply he repeats the stern, plain, short message, the more likely it is to impress. God’s Word, faithfully set forth, will prove itself. The preacher or teacher of this day has substantially the same charge as Jonah had; and the more he suppresses himself, and becomes but a voice through which God speaks, the better for himself, his hearers, and his work.
Nineveh, that great aggregate of cities, was full, as Eastern cities are, of open spaces, and might well be a three days’ journey in circumference. What a task for that solitary stranger to thunder out his loud cry among all these crowds! But he had learned to do what he was bid; and without wasting a moment, he ‘began to enter into the city a day’s journey,’ and, no doubt, did not wait till the end of the day to proclaim his message. Let us learn that there is an element of threatening in God’s most merciful message, and that the appeal to terror and to the desire for self-preservation is part of the way to preach the Gospel. Plain warnings of coming evil may be spoken tenderly, and reveal love as truly as the most soothing words. The warning comes in time. ‘Forty days’ of grace are granted. The gospel warns us in time enough for escape. It warns us because God loves; and they are as untrue messengers of His love as of His justice who slur over the declaration of His wrath.
II. Note the repentance of Nineveh {Jon 3:5 - Jon 3:9}.
The impression made by Jonah’s terrible cry is perfectly credible and natural in the excitable population of an Eastern city, in which even now any appeal to terror, especially if associated with religious and prophetic claims, easily sets the whole in a frenzy. Think of the grim figure of this foreign man, with his piercing voice and half-intelligible speech, dropped from the clouds as it were, and stalking through Nineveh, pealing out his confident message, like that gaunt fanatic who walked Jerusalem in its last agony, crying, ‘Woe! woe unto the bloody city!’ or that other, who, with flaming fire on his head and madness in his eyes, affrighted London in the plague. No wonder that alarm was kindled, and, being kindled, spread like wildfire. Apparently the movement was first among the people, who began to fast before the news penetrated to the seclusion of the palace. But the contagion reached the king, and the popular excitement was endorsed and fanned by a royal decree. The specified tokens of repentance are those of ordinary mourning, such as were common all over the East, with only the strange addition, which smacks of heathen ideas, that the animals were made sharers in them.
There is great significance in that ‘believed God’ {Jon 3:5}. The foundation of all true repentance is crediting God’s word of threatening, and therefore realising the danger, as well as the disobedience, of our sin. We shall be wise if we pass by the human instrument, and hear God speaking through the Prophet. Never mind about Jonah, believe God.
We learn from the Ninevites what is true repentance They brought no sacrifices or offerings, but sorrow, self-abasement, and amendment. The characteristic sin of a great military power would be ‘violence,’ and that is the specific evil from which they vow to turn. The loftiest lesson which prophets found Israel so slow to learn, ‘A broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise,’ was learned by these heathens. We need it no less. Nineveh repented on a peradventure that their repentance might avail. How pathetic that ‘Who can tell?’ {Jon 3:9} is! We know what they hoped. Their doubt might give fervour to their cries, but our certainty should give deeper earnestness and confidence to ours.
The deepest meaning of the whole narrative is set forth in our Lord’s use of it, when He holds up the men of Nineveh as a condemnatory instance to the hardened consciences of His hearers. Probably the very purpose of the book was to show Israel that the despised and yet dreaded heathen were more susceptible to the voice of God than they were: ‘I will provoke you to jealousy by them which are no people.’ The story was a smiting blow to the proud exclusiveness and self-complacent contempt of prophetic warnings, which marked the entire history of God’s people. As Ezekiel was told: ‘Thou are not sent . . . to many peoples of a strange speech and of an hard language. . . . Surely, if I sent thee to them, they would hearken unto thee. But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee.’ It is ever true that long familiarity with the solemn thoughts of God’s judgment and punishment of sin abates their impression on us. Our Puritan forefathers used to talk about ‘gospel-hardened sinners,’ and there are many such among us. The man who lives by Niagara does not hear its roar as a stranger does. The men of Nineveh will rise in the judgment with other generations than that which was ‘this generation’ in Christ’s time; and that which is ‘this generation’ to-day will, in many of its members, be condemned by them.
But the wave of feeling soon retired, and there is no reason to believe that more than a transient impression was made. It does not seem certain that the Ninevites knew what ‘God’ they hoped to appease. Probably their pantheon was undisturbed, and their repentance lasted no longer than their fear. Transient repentance leaves the heart harder than before, as half-melted ice freezes again more dense. Let us beware of frost on the back of a thaw. ‘Repentance which is repented of’ is worse than none.
III. We note the repentance of God {Jon 3:10}.
Mark the recurrence of the word ‘turn,’ employed in Jon 3:8 - Jon 3:10 in reference to men and to God. Mark the bold use of the word ‘repent,’ applied to God, which, though it be not applied to the Ninevites in the previous verses, is implied in every line of them. The same expression is found in Exo 32:14, which may be taken as the classical passage warranting its use. The great truth involved is one that is too often lost sight of in dealing with prophecy; namely, that all God’s promises and threatenings are conditional. Jeremiah learned that lesson in the house of the potter, and we need to keep it well in mind. God threatens, precisely in order that He may not have to perform His threatenings. Jonah was sent to Nineveh to cry, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown,’ in order that it might not be overthrown. What would have been the use of proclaiming the decree, if it had been irreversible? There is an implied ‘if’ in all God’s words. ‘Except ye repent’ underlies the most absolute threatenings of evil. ‘If we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end,’ is presupposed in the brightest and broadest promises of good.
The word ‘repent’ is denied and affirmed to have application to God. He is not ‘a son of man, that He should repent,’ inasmuch as His immutability and steadfast purpose know no variableness. But just because they cannot change, and He must ever be against them that do evil, and ever bless them that turn to Him with trust, therefore He changes His dealings with us according to our relation to Him, and because He cannot repent, or be other than He was and is, ‘repents of the evil that He had said that He would do’ unto sinners when they repent of the evil that they have done against Him, inasmuch as He leaves His threatening unfulfilled, and ‘does it not.’
So we might almost say that the purpose of this book of Jonah is to teach the possibility and efficacy of repentance, and to show how the penitent man, heathen or Jew, ever finds in God changed dealings corresponding to his changed heart. The widest charity, the humbling lesson for people brought up in the blaze of revelation, that dwellers in the twilight or in the darkness are dear to God and may be more susceptible of divine impressions than ourselves, the rebuke of all pluming ourselves on our privileges, the boundlessness of God’s mercy, are among the other lessons of this strange book; but none of them is more precious than its truly evangelic teaching of the blessedness of true penitence, whether exemplified in the renegade Prophet returning to his high mission, or the fierce Ninevites humbled and repentant, and finding mercy from the God of the whole earth.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 Repentance and Pardon of the Ninevites
Repentance and Pardon of the Ninevites
3. An exceeding great city] lit. 'great unto God,' i.e. regarded as great by God: cp. Gen_10:1.
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Of three days' journey] i.e. in breadth.
8. Even the cattle join in the mourning. Neglected by their owners, they fill the air with their groanings. Cp. Joe_1:20, 'The beasts of the field pant unto thee,' and for an interesting parallel, Jdt_4:9-15. The Persians are said, by Herodotus, to have clipped the hair of the horses and baggage animals that they might seem to share in the mourning for a general.
10. For the term 'repentance' = 'change of purpose,' as applied to God, cp. Jer_18:8, and for the action Exo_32:14.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On v2 (See Scofield "Nah 1:1")
Nineveh
(See Scofield "Nah 1:1")
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 Jonah Preaching in Nineveh
CHAPTER 3
Jonah Preaching in Nineveh
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1. The repeated commission and Jonah’s obedience (Jon 3:1-4)
2. The repentance and salvation of Nineveh (Jon 3:4-10)
Jon 3:1-4. And now after Jonah’s death and life experience the Word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, telling him to arise and go to Nineveh to preach there what the Lord would command him. And now he is obedient. Jonah arrived in the great city of three days’ journey, and advancing a day’s journey into it he cried out his message, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Following is the objection of higher criticism as to this statement: “If we were reading a historical description the narrative would be full of difficulties. A strange prophet announced the impending destruction as he traveled through the vast city for one day, and the huge population immediately believed and repented. The king, who is not named, heard, put on sackcloth, sitting in ashes. If this were history, Jonah did what no prophet, no apostle, what Christ Himself never did. Never did a day’s preaching bring a vast strange city to repentance. But we repeat, it is not history; it is a story with a meaning, an allegory; it is the great announcement that God cares for the heathen world, and calls it to repentance, and whenever men anywhere repent, His compassion is kindled towards them” (New Century Bible). We reserve the answer to the supposed difficulties in this historical account for the typical unfolding of this event.
Jon 3:4-10. The people of Nineveh believed God. The news that a strange prophet had appeared with the message of doom must have spread like wildfire and hundreds upon hundreds must have passed it on so that in a very short time it reached every nook and corner of the great city; it reached the palace of the king and the prisoners in the dungeon. That this is real history has been confirmed by archaeology. For just about that time Nineveh was in great trouble and facing a crisis, which made them eager to believe the message and return to God. They evidenced their faith by a universal fast and humiliation before God. The king laid aside his royal robe and humiliated himself as every one of his subjects did. He issued a proclamation to abstain from food and drink, in which the dumb creation was included. What a solemn time the great city had, when hundreds and thousands humbled themselves and when the lowing and groaning of the domestic animals was heard throughout the city. The people acknowledged all their wickedness and turned away from their evil ways and deeds of violence, expressing the hope of God’s mercy. “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from His fierce anger, that we perish not.” And God answered and was merciful to them.
The Typical Application
1. As to the Lord Jesus. Jonah who typifies in his experience the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord, preached the message as one who had been in a grave and came to life out of that grave. In Luk 11:29-30; Luk 11:32, our Lord makes the application: “For as Jonah was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of Man be to this generation ... The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and, behold, a greater than Jonah is here.” Christ was not preached as a Saviour to the Gentile world till He had died and risen from the dead. The Greeks who inquired after Him Joh 12:1-50 received no answer. But the Lord spoke of Himself at that time as the corn of wheat which was to die to bring forth the abundant fruit. Christ died for the sins of His people Israel, “for that nation,” but He also died as a member of the nation, from which He came according to the flesh, so that He might rise and become the Saviour of the Gentiles. Christ preached as having died for our sins, buried and risen on the third day, is the true gospel and carries with it the power of God in the salvation of sinners.
2. As to the Nation. The third day is the day of Israel’s spiritual and national resurrection. When that day comes converted Israel will be, according to God’s gifts and calling, a holy nation, a nation of priestly functions, a kingdom of priests. They are then fit to show forth the Lord and His glory, and to bring the message, not of judgment, but of life and glory, to the nations of heathendom. The statement in the New Century Bible quoted above is quite correct in one particular-- that “Jonah did what no prophet, no apostle, what Christ Himself never did”--that never a day’s preaching brought a vast strange city to repentance. And we might add that no preaching today, during this age, can ever bring such results. The case is unique; it never happened again, that a man who was disobedient, who turned against the divine commission, became a castaway, was miraculously preserved and delivered, led a great world city to God and to true repentance. But if we take into consideration the fact that this true history is a prophecy, all these invented higher critical difficulties vanish altogether. When the nation is reinstated in the land, filled with the Spirit, they will fulfill their calling and go forth in bringing the message to the nations of the world. Then Mat 28:19 will be accomplished. Then and not before will the world be converted, and all the nations will be joined in the kingdom to Israel, His kingdom people.
And as for repenting Nineveh there came a day of joy and gladness, as animal creation in that city ceased its lowing and groaning, so will come the day of joy and gladness for this poor world, “in that day” when even groaning creation will be delivered of its groans and moans.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On v1 Jonah’s Message to the Ninevites and Its Results.
Jonah’s Message to the Ninevites and Its Results.
The disobedient prophet had received a severe lesson at the hand of God, but he now profited by this lesson and was ready to undertake the commission which had originally been issued to him.
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v. 1. And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
v. 2. Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, the Assyrian capital and metropolis, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee, loudly proclaiming the message which the Lord would reveal to him in due time, yielding himself in ready obedience to whatever the Lord may see fit to have him speak.
v. 3. So Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord, in unquestioning obedience. Now, Nineveh was an exceeding great city, literally, "a great city to God," regarded by Him as such, of three days’ journey, that is, it took three days to make the round of its main sections, if a person passed through all the chief market-places.
v. 4. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, he commenced his trip through the various centers comprising the larger city, preaching wherever he found a suitable place and a fitting opportunity; and he cried and said, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown, this threat being the climax of his proclamation, of his call to repentance.
v. 5. So the people of Nineveh believed God, they accepted His word, they were filled with a wholesome fear, and proclaimed a fast, as an outward evidence of their sorrow, and put on sackcloth, the garment of mourning, from the greatest of them even to the least of them, old and young, all without exception.
v. 6. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, into the neighborhood of whose palace the prophet had very likely progressed in his first day’s journey, and he arose from his throne, symbol of his earthly power, and he laid his robe from him, his royal mantle, and covered him with sackcloth, also adopting the mourning-dress, and sat in ashes, all signs of sorrow and repentance. Cf Job 2:8; Eze 27:30.
v. 7. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, the royal heralds being dispatched in accordance with the custom of making edicts of this kind known, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything, the domestic animals being included in this order, as sufferers with the people; let them not feed nor drink water,
v. 8. but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, clothed in mourning, and cry mightily unto God, the very lowing of the cattle and the bleating of the sheep in their distress being considered appeals for mercy; yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, from his sinful habits, and from the violence that is in their hands. Cf Isa 59:6.
v. 9. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, the possibility of His doing so being suggested by His interest in sending a prophet to warn them, and turn away from His fierce anger that we perish not? It was a true repentance on the part of the Ninevites and is so cited by Christ in reproof of those who, with much greater light and privileges, did not repent. Mat 12:41; Luk 11:32, even if its effects were not lasting.
v. 10. And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, from the security of their open transgressions of the Lord’s will; and God repented of the evil that He had said that he would do unto them; and He did it not, letting His mercy guide His actions rather than a stern and immutable justice. As God spared Nineveh when its inhabitants turned to Him in repentance, so He is ready to show mercy to all those who lay aside their obstinate impenitence and plead with Him for forgiveness.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 4 The word of Yahweh came
The word of Yahweh came
This is an idiom that means Yahweh spoke. See how you translated this in Jonah 1:1. AT: "Yahweh spoke his message" (See: Idiom)
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the word of Yahweh
Here "word" represents Yahweh's message. AT: "the message of Yahweh" (See: Metonymy)
Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city
"Go to the important city of Nineveh"
Get up
This refers to leaving the place one is at. (See: Idiom)
proclaim to it the message that I command you to give
"tell the people what I tell you to tell them"
So Jonah got up and went to Nineveh in obedience to the word of Yahweh
"This time Jonah obeyed Yahweh and went to Nineveh"
So Jonah got up
"So Jonah left the beach." "got up" refers to leaving the place Jonah was at. (See: Idiom)
Now
This word is used here to mark a change from the story to information about Nineveh.
one of three days' journey
"a city of three days' journey." A person had to walk for three days to completely go through it. (See: Idiom)
translationWords
word of God
Nineveh
preach
obey
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 3, 4 3:1–4:11 God again commands Jonah to preach to Nineveh.…
3:1–4:11 God again commands Jonah to preach to Nineveh. This time Jonah obeys, leading to an irony: The city repents, as Jonah had feared, and he is angry at God.
3:1-2 The second part of the book opens as the first part did (see 1:1-2).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.