Sermon.

By the Rev. HUGH MARTIN, D.D.

JONAH iii. 10.

LUKE xi. 32.—“The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.”
* This sermon is taken from Dr. Martin’s excellent work, The Prophet Jonah.—Editor.

SUCH is the practical application which the Saviour Himself made of the singular incidents that have been engaging our attention. And it forms a striking instance of the duty of thoughtfully applying to our own case those things which were written of old, and which an apostle declares were “written for our admonition on whom the ends of the world are come” (1 Cor. x. 11). But it constitutes a still more imposing allusion to the great day of universal judgement, and reminds us how, not only all generations of men shall stand there face to face with God, the character and doings of different generations, separated by wide gulfs in time, may have mutual bearings on each other, most intimate, and wonderful, and unexpected.

That the men of Nineveh, who had all disappeared from among the living more than eight hundred years before the days of Christ, should confront the very generation to whom the Saviour personally ministered in the days of His flesh, and should reflect light upon the character and destiny of that sinful generation, is surely a very extraordinary and solemnising thought; and a thought that is fitted to lead to many a train of singular and impressive meditation. When we shall all stand in the most solemn assemblage;—when the whole race of man, from Adam to the youngest of the latest generation, shall appear in one vast body before the judgement-seat of Christ:—oh, what mutual relations will be found subsisting between individuals or communities that had never even seen each other in the flesh! Even among those who may have been contemporaneous, what strange bearings on each other’s spiritual interests and eternal destinies will be disclosed! How terrible a thought is it, for instance, that Christ’s redeemed people may there meet with some on the left hand of the Judge to whose impenitence and consequent perdition, they may have been instrumental in ministering by their negligence, supineness, infirmities, or more easily besetting sins! Alas! how many have been confirmed in their hatred to religion by the more obvious defects and blemishes in the character and conduct of religion’s true friends! And what child of God can ever contemplate that judgement-seat without the agonising fear, that there may be present there, as heirs of wrath, some with whom he companied in the days of his ungodliness, and whom he contributed thereby in no small degree to harden,—and some whom, in the subsequent years of a true walk with God, he may have, even then also, done not a little by levity of intercourse or worldliness of spirit, or even by his falls or backsliding, to confirm in their dislike of Christianity. Oh, what disclosures must then be made as to the bearing of our lives and conduct upon the eternal interests and destinies of our fellow-men,—and of theirs and ours! If generations so far apart as these two of which the text speaks are seen on that day coming into a relation so singular, as that the “men of Nineveh shall rise up” with the men of Christ’s day “and condemn them,” how much more complicated, and amazing must many of those relations be in which individuals and communities much more closely interconnected shall stand one towards another! How glorious will the one entire process of the world’s moral government and history then appear! How replete with evidence of God’s glorious attributes! And if the brilliant shining of the sun at noon-day is a demonstration of our Creator’s mighty power, how unspeakably more fully will that dispensation of judgment—that final disclosure and reckoning, that consummation of all things—bear on the face of it the vindication of the perfect rectitude, and profound wisdom and magnificent unity with which the moral administration of this strange world’s history had from first to last been conducted! It will be from the concurrence of overwhelming evidence that the saints will then enter into the exclamation of adoring wonder:—”Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements, and His ways past finding out!” “And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways thou King of saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy: for all nations are made manifest” (Rom. xi. 33; Rev. xv. 3, 4).

But to return. On that great and awful day, midst the irresistible blaze of light that shall reveal the secrets of all hearts, among millions of amazing disclosures, thiis, our Lord tells us, shall be a very patent and simple one:—”The men of Nineveh shall rise up in judgement with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and behold, a greater than Jonas in here.”

I. Jesus is greater than Jonah in the greatness of His Person;

And this consideration attaches a weight to His ministry incalculably greater than any belonging to that of Jonah. The occasion which God took to call the men of Nineveh to repentance was one of those ‘sundry times,’ and the singular commission given to Jonah, one of “divers ways,” in which “God spake” of old to the ancient world “by the prophets.” But He “hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things by whom also He made the worlds” (Heb. i. 1). These are the well remembered expressions with which Paul commences that marvellous Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the transition from the Old to the New Testament economy is so specially explained, authorised, and vindicated; and in which he lays the foundation of his argument to the fact that it was initiated by the eternal Son of God in person, and for the superiority and perfection of the new economy, by referring to it as had thereby an honour conferred upon it incalculably transcending all that had gone before. In the course of his argument, and in his second chapter, he makes special practical use in enforcing duty, of the fact that these things “at the first began to be spoken of the Lord;” and, in the third chapter, he expressly institutes a comparison between Moses, the head, under God, of the old dispensation, and Christ the eternal Son,—also under God, who is all in all,—the head of the new. It is precisely in substance and in spirit the argument of our text. That argument implies, of course, that both Jonah and Jesus were commissioned of God. Without that, there could indeed be no comparison. It was in both cases God’s call that was delivered; God’s message that was proclaimed; the very preaching which God commanded these respective preachers to preach. They were both acting under authority; and in that respect the words uttered by Jonah were as much Divine, and of divine authority and infallibility, as the words that were uttered by Jesus. But in the one case the Godhead sent as its ambassador and envoy a mere man;—in the other, one of the three adorable, co-equal persons of the Godhead. How glorious, therefore, is the prophet of the new dispensation! Hear how His loyal and loving forerunner spake of Him: “He must increase, but I must decrease; He that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: He that cometh from heaven is above all. And what he hath seen and heard, that He testifyeth” (John iii. 30, 31). Oh! we shall never fathom the riches of love and glory, implied in God giving His Son as His ambassador to reveal His will, and call His strayed and alienated children back to mercy and salvation. Most blessed qualification for His office! He is “the Only-begotten which is in the bosom of the Father.” Habakkuk would get him at his post, his watch-tower, his high look-out; and wait for the message and the vision: “I will stand upon my watch, and set me on my tower, and will watch to see what He will say unto me.” But Christ’s watch-tower,—Christ’s post of observation for learning the Father’s will—was the Father’s very bosom! And what he hath seen and heard there, that He testifyeth. Yes! the Father’s bosom! There He hath ever dwelt without intermission. He was in the bosom of the Father,—enjoying His unlimited, absolutely unlimited confidence,—even while speaking with men upon the earth. Oh, how near Christ’s hearers are to the bosom of the Father! How clearly open, in its infinite purity, and bliss, and love, the Father’s bosom is, when the lips of Jesus speak! “Thou art fairer than the children of men; grace is poured into thy lips,”—grace unalloyed, undeteriorated, straight from the Father’s bosom;—”therefore God hath blessed thee for ever” (Ps. xlv. 2).

And when such a one speaks on earth personally by human lips, or by a written word, or by a preached gospel, not without the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven;—when such a one speaks on earth,—speaking forth from “the Father’s bosom,”—and asks and entreats the long-alienated child to return and embrace the love and joy, and protection, and purity of “the Father’s bosom;” to leave behind, all that he can bring with him into “the Father’s bosom,”—all the darkness which he cannot bring into the Father’s light;—in a word, when such a one calls us to repentance, with what overwhelming urgency does the call come, and how great the guilt of rejecting it! If, at the preaching of a mere human being, the men of Nineveh repented, shall they not rise up in judgment against us, if we put away from us the preaching of Him who speaketh from “the Father’s bosom?”

II. Christ is greater in Office than Jonah.

The office, indeed, is in each case the same. But in the case of Jesus it is in the highest, the infinite degree. All the prophets called unto repentance. It formed a leading portion of their duty. They denounced the anger of God upon the impenitent. In God’s name they straitly commanded the people to repent; and they declare His readiness to forgive, as the greatest encouragement to repentance. But the commission which a prophet such as Jonah had, was but a very limited one. It was but a small number of his fellowmen that he could address, and a very much smaller number that he could expect to affect for good; it was but a small fragment of the truth of God he could be instrumental in disclosing; it was but a sectional, limited portion of the Church or world to which he could prophesy; and it was during but a very brief day that he could exercise his office. Christ, in His office, is the way, the truth, and the life: disclosing all the truth of God; officiating on behalf of the whole Church in all climes and ages, being from beginning to end the only authoritative Teacher,—head of all other teachers, and source of all their illumination and knowledge. In Jonah, or in any mere human prophet, a portion of Divine wisdom and a measure of Divine words might dwell; but Jesus was the Wisdom of God and the Word of God. It was only a very small portion of this world’s ongoings that Jonah’s preaching could directly exert any influence on it; but the whole history of the race, as effected by a revelation from heaven, is moulded by the prophetic office as wielded by Christ. Jonah and others, as servants in the house, brought now and then a fragmentary message from the Master and the Lord. Christ, as a Son over His own house, brought with Him the entire and exact transcript of all the Father’s will. Yea, and He thus makes His people like Himself, not servants, but sons, not servants but friends;—”Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (John xv. 15). In Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. With Him is the most perfect knowledge of the Father’s affections, of every thought and purpose of the Father’s heart. It is in rivulets of truth from His infinite intellect, as the very counterpart of the Father’s intellect, that all communications to mere human prophets have flowed, as from an ocean full and overflowing as before. When He Himself, therefore, deals with us, when disdaining neither the nature nor the office of those by whom at sundry times and divers ways God spake unto the fathers, He comes forth Himself exercising the very original, the fulness, the transcendent perfection of the prophetic office;—surely the call which He delivers is infinitely urgent. And if the same call to repent has been delivered by a mere fellow-creature, and been respected and obeyed by the wicked community to whom it was addressed shall not these men of Nineveh rise in the judgment against the men of gospel times, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and, behold, a greater than Jonah is among us?

III. But Christ is also greater than Jonah in respect of His discharge of the office.

The Old Testament made men prophets which had infirmity; but the gospel age is inaugurated, and its ministrations carried forward by a prophet who is infinitely perfect, infallible, unchangeable; in whom is light and no darkness at all; in whom is infinite store of truth and grace. For “the word was made flesh, and we beheld His glory; the glory as of the Only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Other prophets were liable to err, and did err. Elias was a man of like passions with ourselves. Behold this Jonah; how grievously he erred! He fled from the presence of the Lord, refusing His commission of Nineveh. The “greater than Jonah” says, “Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God.” When the Lord spared Nineveh it displeased Jonah. Did ever any of the Father’s doings displease Jesus? When the Father assigned to Him a houseless, homeless life;—when for the birds of the air the Father appointed nests, and resting-places for the foxes; but appointed for His own Son that He should not have where to lay His head:—did it displease Jesus? When His weary pilgrimage drew towards a close, and instead of His prospects clearing like the path of the just shining more and more unto the perfect day, they darkened more and more as the Just One suffered for the unjust, till, in the end, all accumulations of evil fell upon Him, saving and alone the one evil that never was but infinitely far from Him—personal sin;—when His Father withdrew from Him the comfortable light of His favour, and put on towards Him all the aspect of an angry judge armed with almighty wrath to avenge the controversy which Jesus intervened to clear away, and to exact the ransom which Jesus undertook to pay, and uphold the offended justice which Jesus interposed to appease;—when He had to exclaim in amazement and anguish, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—did this on His Father’s part displease Jesus? And oh! when His Father’s mercy takes effect, and threatened wrath is removed from any miserable soul; when that soul, in its deep penitence,—the singular and blissful elements of heaven’s sweetest joy being poured into the cup of godly sorrow,—exclaims, “I will praise thee, O Lord, for, though thou wast angry with me, thine anger is turned away;” is Jesus then like Jonah, displeased, disappointed, angry unto death? What answer need we give? Oh! if even in the travail of His soul and His exceeding sorrow He was not displeased; how when “He seeth of the travail of His soul and is satisfied”? Displeased? Displeasure? Nay, “the pleasure of the Lord doth prosper in His hand.”

Were it not well that we sometimes meditated with delight on the fact that Christ’s discharge of office is stained with no blemish; invalidated by no imperfection; incapable of any deduction from its infinite excellence; standing alone in matchless, and incomparable, and unsullied glory? There is no want; there is no excess; there is no defect; there is no spot, nor wrinkle, nor any such thing in this “greater than Jonah,” who now calls us to repentance. And if we turn a deaf ear to Him, how powerful must be the condemnation which the men of Nineveh shall rise up to pronounce upon us in judgement!

IV. Jesus is greater than Jonah in that He has, in one sense, a great right to call us to repentance.

There is a sense in which the right of Jonah and of Jesus were the same; grounded alike on the communications given them respectively by the Lord to deliver. But personally, on His own account, Jesus has a claim upon us, and a personal right to summon us peremptorily to repent. As representing the Godhead, Himself very God, He may say unto us: “Against me, me only, have ye sinned, and done evil in my sight, that I might be just in judging and clear in speaking.” It is against me that all your enmity and rebellion have been directed. Against the Godhead, in my person, have ye lifted up the hand. As very God, and as God’s ambassador, alike in my own and in my Father’s name, I charge you with the guilt of rebellion: and I summon you now to repent, and return, and surrender to God,—to me, to my Father by me. Jonah had no personal quarrel with the Ninevites, and no personal claim upon them. He might say of them as Paul said of his Galatian converts: “Ye have not injured me at all.” But in this respect a greater than Jonah is here;—greater in the relation in which He stands to us as entitled to all our service, gratitude, love, and admiration; and entitled to complain when these in any measure are withheld, or given Him in less than absolute perfection; and to call for satisfaction and redress. His has all the urgency and force of a personal, a directly and intensely personal matter. He is Himself the representative of the offended Godhead. He is Himself possessor of the nature and substance of that offended Godhead. When He calls to repentance, there cannot be a greater. With infinite authority, and not as the scribes, must He speak. We cannot adjourn the matter from Him, or appeal it to another more closely implicated in it. To Himself we are responsible; and the case cannot be more accurately or more powerfully put to us than by Him. If His call to repent is refused, our last prospect or possibility is thrown away. It is amazing that Godhead should have delegated to none less than God, in the person of the Son, the office of being a herald and ambassador to proclaim peace, and thereon to insist upon repentance. And it is altogether beyond eternal admiration that when God in His absolute glory could hold converse with no rebelling creature, and yet it was desired to send to rebels an embassy of reconciliation and a call to repent, Godhead should still have been sent—the Only-begotten, dwelling in the bosom of the Father—to press and secure the rights of His Father, which in the unity of the Godhead are also His own. There is no lowering, by transmission to a stranger, of the authority with which the embassy and call are clothed. There is no deteriorating of the majesty and claims of the offended Sovereign by another party foreign to the offence, and not affected by it, being called in to fulfil the service of demanding or achieving redress. All men shall honour the Son even as they honour the Father: I have set my King upon my holy hill of Zion: kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way, when once His wrath is kindled but a little. With Him we have to do. There is none higher with whom we can have to do. Assuredly, in this respect, “a greater than Jonas is here;”—in respect, namely, of His greater right to call to repentance.

V. While in His Godhead He is equal with the Father, and therefore supreme in authority, He is, as man, greater than Jonah, in that He has an experience of His own with which to enforce His message, greater, unspeakably, than Jonah had.

“As Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so was the Son of man three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Beyond question, Jonah informed the Ninevites of his own terrible experience of the anger of God. In that experience,—in that altogether matchless history,—Jonah was a sign unto the Ninevites. He could enforce the certainty of judgment on transgression, by quoting the things that had befallen himself; and the greatness of that calamity, and the manifest evidence of the immediate hand of God in it, could not fail to strike terror into the hearts of the men of Nineveh, and convince them that the message of such a God would be executed relentlessly and to the full. They would, in fact, argue that if these things were done to a prophet of His own for one act of disobedience, what would befall those who lived in perpetual and perfect rebellion? They would argue on the principle, “If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? If judgment begin at the house of God, what shall the end be of them that obey not God at all?” (Luke xxiii. 31; 1 Pet. iv. 17). Jonah, escaped from the deep and from the jaws of death, was to the men of Nineveh a sign of the certainty and terrors of the Lord’s vengeance on sin.

Behold, a greater than Jonah is here! Jesus was three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Jonah died and rose again in a figure, a metaphor; a figure carrying in it terrible reality, but stopping short of actual death. Jesus died and rose again. He suffered, the just for the unjust. In the room of transgressors He stood: in the name, and as bearing the persons, of transgressors He was judged, condemned, avenged upon in all the completeness and terrors of the wages of sin which is death, the wrath and curse of the Lord God Almighty. The arrows of Jehovah pierced Him: the curse of the Eternal Ruler’s broken law descended on Him: He tasted the bitterness, yea, the sting, of death: His soul was exceeding sorrowful: He poured out His soul unto death. He “knoweth the power of God’s wrath” unto the uttermost. And if the experience of Jonah was a sign and an enforcement conjoined with his message—Oh, with what overwhelming urgency may Jesus refer to His experience! My reader, when Jesus counsels you to repent and flee from the wrath to come, the exhortation comes from One—if we may reverently use, as we may with intense truth use, the saying—comes from One who knows what He is speaking of. Yes: He knoweth that wrath. The tears He shed over lost souls are prompted, in part, by personal knowledge of the wrath whereinto they are plunging themselves. The melting calls, “Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?”—oh! they come from One who knoweth what that cursed death is from which He labours to win and woo you to His love and salvation. Greater in experience of the evils from which He desires to save you, there is none than this Saviour Himself. Of all terrors and agonies, saying that alone of a self-accusing conscience, Jesus had, of all beings in the universe, the deepest and most dread experience. Great as was the anguish of Jonah,—as in the very “belly of hell,” cast out of God’s sight”—behold, a greater than Jonah is here;—greater in respect of the same endurance in infinitely higher degree, as pursued by the angry justice of God, avenged upon for God’s quarrel with transgression. Study the psalms that open up to us the exercise of our Saviour’s agonised soul in suffering for sins not His own. Bear in mind continually, it is this Sufferer that pleads with you to flee from the strokes of that sword of justice whose burning edge pierced keen to the dividing of His soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow. It is He who bore the mighty load, that implores you not to rest an hour under the weight of your Creator’s curse. It is He who drank the cup of trembling and of death to the dregs, that implores you to prefer the cup of blessing and salvation. Let your soul be quiet at His call. Let your ear incline at His voice; and sweetly and mournfully and most implorably trembling through all its accents you shall hear an element of tenderest feeling, sighing after you lovingly and sorrowfully,—as of One who remembers the wormwood and the gall, the furnace and the sword, the clouded face of Jehovah, and the unspeakable sting of death, and fain would save you from them all, would you only give Him true belief, and turn even now that you may live.

VI. A greater than Jonah is here, in that He hath greater power than Jonah.

Jonah may denounce wrath; but Jesus can give repentance. He hath the hearts of all in His keeping. He hath the fulness of the Spirit. He is exalted a Prince and a Saviour to give repentance to Israel and the remission of sins. Jonah may denounce the vengeance due to sin; but the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sin. How unspeakably greater, then, is Jesus as a herald and ambassador to call men to repentance! How unspeakably more worthy of our believing and obedient reception! It may be a grace hard to flesh and blood, a grace altogether supernatural, to which He summons us, when He calls us to repent; to renounce our old nature, and put on another and a new one. But however difficult, however contrary to nature and above nature it may be, we are summoned to it by One greater than Jonah; by One so great by nature as to be able to give, and so great by office as to be commissioned and appointed to give, the very grace which He requires us to exercise. If you tell me merely that a Divine messenger summons me to lay aside all my old motives and principles of action, and aims and objects in life, and to begin and act truly and simply on the singular principles of really doing everything to promote the glory of God, and of consulting in everything the will of God’s will; you assign me a work perfectly hopeless, so far as any strength of mine for accomplishing it is concerned. I either do not see the greatness of this moral change—so great that greater it could not be;—or in seeing it, I at once despair of achieving it myself. “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?” But tell me that “the Son,” who summons me to be renewed in the spirit of my mind, “quickeneth whom He will,” hath the hearts of all in His keeping; and is only acting in His office when He giveth repentance and remission of sins;—tell me that He is calling me that if I only knew His nature and His love, I would not hesitate to ask, and asking would receive; even as He said, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith unto thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water;”—tell me this; and, combining the knowledge of my powerlessness, with some insight into His power to work repentance in my heart, I am directed, urged, hemmed in, and shut up to Christ as my Royal Priest—effectually conferring on me the gracious and perfect forgiveness of sins, and the sin hating, mourning, contrite, believing heart to receive all this mercy freely. Yes: a greater, verily, than Jonah is here. Paul may plant and Apollos may water; but God only giveth the increase. The treasure is in earthen vessels; but the excellency of the power is of God. And this “greater than Jonah” is “God—manifest in the flesh,” and the Surety of an irrefragable covenant,—a covenant in which “grace reigns,” and in which all that law demands is by grace supplied.

Had Nineveh rejected Jonah, they might still have said, it was merely a crier of danger that we put away from us. But he that rejecteth Jesus, rejecteth One that can give repentance and forgiveness of sins, and that can say:—“They shall look on me whom they have pierced, and shall mourn;”—“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;”—“If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink: out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Thou art the King of glory, O Christ! Grace is poured into Thy lips!