JONAH

JONAH

Jonah 1; Jonah 2; Jonah 3; ^[p. 25] Jonah 4

Prophets such as Jonah that have to do with the Gentile world are interesting, showing that though God has ever special regard to His own people, He does not overlook men in general. The thoughts of God’s heart come out wonderfully in this book, and the workings of man’s heart are exposed, too, even in a true saint and servant of God. We see with Jonah how the thought of his own importance obscured everything. His own reason for not going to Nineveh was not that he was afraid of that city, but that he knew God! He tells us so in the fourth chapter: “And it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed unto Jehovah, and said, Ah, Jehovah, was not this my saying when I was yet in my country? ... for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great lovingkindness, and repentest thee of the evil”. He knew that he was bidden to cry against Nineveh a message of judgment. Supposing that he cried for forty days and that it worked out that God had mercy on them, what a fool it would make of Jonah! He would rather that all Nineveh perished than that anything should reduce his self-importance — that is man! Though he knew Jehovah in a remarkable way, he was not at all in accord with Jehovah; God’s goodness was most distasteful to him; it made him quite angry, and he was angry without making any apology.

It has often been said that Jonah sets forth the state of the Jews, who could not bear that grace should go out to the publicans and sinners. We see this exemplified in the gospel of Luke in the case of the elder son (chapter 15) and in other instances. It was this which necessitated the casting out of the Jews, and their casting out has made room for us to come in, so that we have profited. The Jew should have been the exponent to the Gentile world of the goodness and grace of God. Jonah became a testimony to God’s character by God’s judgment coming on himself — he had to acknowledge that he was under the judgment of God himself. Paul speaks of the Jews as “forbidding us to speak to the nations that they may be saved”, and that “wrath has come upon them to the uttermost”. That is the casting out of the Jew, which comes out in the first chapter: “And they took up Jonah and cast him forth into the sea”. The Jews should have been a testimony to God Himself, but instead are a testimony of the judgment of God. It is a warning to Gentile nations; all that the Jews are suffering today is a warning to us.

^[p. 26] The whole thing in the record is left in suspense. There is nothing to indicate that Jonah is brought into line with God at all; he is still angry and self-important, and the book closes with that. You wonder what is going to happen next, and that is just the position l Jonah is given to make us interested and look somewhere else for the sequel. God says that His people are going to be an ornament to set forth His character to the Gentiles. Jonah never became that ornament. He had to learn that he was as much dependent on the sovereign mercy of God as Nineveh was. And we cannot afford to be off that ground in our souls, though, like Jonah, we often lose sight of it. Jonah is all right in the whale’s belly, in “the belly of Sheol”, for no one could be self-important there! But as soon as he comes out, it all rebounds again. No amount of experience will reduce the self-importance of the flesh.

Jonah’s experience of being in the belly of the fish three days and three nights is very striking. The Lord appropriates it as a type and sign of His own death, and that sign when it is truly seen by the Jew will transform him. The Lord said, “A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and a sign shall not be given to it save the sign of Jonas the prophet”. All will be based on the experience of which Jonah was a type. The Jew will see that his Messiah had to go under the judgment on his account, when he sees that he will be permanently cured. The flesh is so a part of us that we cannot overcome it until we are brought spiritually into the presence of God. Jonah’s prayer indicates the great end to which Jehovah meant to bring him eventually, and which is not seen in this book. The true power of reduction comes by the introduction of Christ and His experiences before the soul.

Jonah speaks of his life being brought up from the pit: “But thou hast brought up my life from the pit, O Jehovah my God”, that is, he speaks of a life which typically would find all its springs in God. If all that is of the flesh is brought to nothing in the death of Christ, if we come up out of that, it is to live in a life that has all its sources in God. Jonah reached that in prophecy, but he did not reach it personally in his own experience; and we can reach things in the way of light through ministry that we have not reached experimentally. He spoke of coming up from the pit; when that is spiritually wrought in the soul we live by what we know of God. Jonah is just the contrast. In his utterance he really reaches God: “I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that which I have vowed. Salvation is of Jehovah”. He reached it all in the spirit of prophecy, but he ^[p. 27] did not reach it in his own experience. It is like the psalmists; they reached the things of which they spoke in the spirit of prophecy. They voiced what will yet be true of God’s people; they “sought out and searched out; searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them pointed out ... . To whom it was revealed, that not to themselves but to you they ministered those things”. We may have things as light which we do not know experimentally. If it had been made good in Jonah’s soul he would not again have showed the same spirit. Paul says, quoting from the Psalms, “I have believed, therefore have I spoken”. Jonah in the whale’s belly inspired by the Spirit is a very different man from the man in the booth outside Nineveh. This principle of self-importance was even in Paul and had to be kept down by “a thorn for the flesh”. So Jonah personally is rather a disappointing man; he had a second opportunity, but he finds it was what he thought at the beginning, he finds the goodness of God. What a man, he thinks, it will make of me, what a poor prophet I shall seem to be!

This repentance that was brought about in Nineveh was one of the most wonderful things that God ever did; it was a kind of anticipation of what Isaiah says will be brought about in a day yet to come. Jonah knew the character and disposition of God, but he did not appreciate it one bit — he dreaded it. It shows the patience of God, for it must have grieved Him, that His servant was morally so far from Him in mind and heart, yet He treats him kindly as though he deserved consideration. Probably there were a million people in Nineveh and all of them were brought to repentance from the king downwards, and they, were heathen the day before! Everything was to be affected; man and beast were covered with sackcloth. It involved even the beast. This king seems to have had a sense that the brute creation is involved in man’s sin. So God “repented of the evil that he had said he would do unto them, and he did it not”. The death of Christ is the righteous ground on which God can act; it does not deny His mind or His heart. Christ died because God was favourable to us, in order to supply a righteous ground for mercy. The death of Christ has not changed God’s thoughts one lot or tittle, but has provided a basis on which God can show His grace and mercy, and even in Old Testament times we see how merciful and gracious He is.

Now Jonah goes out of the city full of repenting people, and he goes out of it and watches to see what will happen to a city ^[p. 28] under sentence of judgment. What strikes one in this book is that almost everyone in it is more affected than Jonah himself. Jehovah says, “Doest thou well to be angry?” Is it not wonderful to think of the blessed God suggesting to Jonah that he should consider whether he was really doing well to be angry? It is very touching that the gourd should be given to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his trouble when he had not a single thought in correspondence with God. It was something for himself, and he liked that, and he was more touched about the gourd than he was about Nineveh. It is difficult to think of a true servant of God getting so far away from Him.

The second chapter gives us one of the very affecting delineations by the Spirit of what Christ went through. “All thy breakers and thy billows are gone over me ... . The deep was round about me ... . I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the bars of the earth closed upon me for ever”. He went to the extremest place — to the heart of the earth, that was something more than death, death was not the limit to which Christ went. The sentence on Adam involved burial as well as death. The Lord went to the point of burial, so that He was in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. When Israel sees that, it will change everything for them. When they see that their Messiah has gone through all that for them, through death and burial, it will effectively cure them of all their self-important hatred of grace. The end of it is the temple, and thanksgiving, and the vow is paid; it ends really in a spirit of worship. They will have to learn that instead of being better they are worse than the Gentile; they will have to come to it that they have rejected and murdered their Messiah. When God forgives them it will remain true that they will never forgive themselves. “And I will pour out upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplications; and they shall look on me whom they pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for an only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn”, Zechariah 12: 10.

This whole book is the history of one to whom God had disclosed Himself but who turned out to be unfaithful and ungracious. And that is the history of Israel really; they were not prepared to move with Jehovah to the Gentile. God was proposing great enlargement to His servant; if God glorified Himself in His grace, that would be making much of His servant. So he had to be degraded in the eyes of the Gentile, and the Gentile did

^[p. 29] come in. It was a solemn sign to the Jews that they were just like Jonah. Jonah did not continue in the grace and goodness of God, and his behaviour was really a false testimony to God.

The second chapter discloses Jonah’s secret history with God. It is in verse form, really in the nature of a psalm. The public position today is that the Jew is cast out, and that is a public witness to God; all the Gentiles know it. But that is not the end of it. These are really the exercises of the ungracious and unfaithful nation that finds itself under the judgment of God, exercises that will be those of Israel in a coming day. The testimony of His surpassing grace is connected with the assembly. The Jews are an object-lesson for us of God’s government, that is, they illustrate to us His discrimination between good and evil and His dealing with each as it deserves. All is in view of carrying out His purposes, so that His governmental ways with Israel will result in their coming into blessing. These are the secret exercises God will bring the remnant through in order that ultimately He may bring them into blessing. Now Jonah passes through this personally. That is the secret exercise; the public matter ends with his being thrown into the sea. So Israel will have these severe exercises under God’s government. This is the exercise of those who fear God in the time of Jacob’s trouble; they come into Isaiah 53 eventually. These experiences are connected with the temple. “Thy holy temple” is twice referred to. It is an intimation that they will get the sense, notwithstanding the sentence of government, in the secret of God’s presence of something that can be counted upon: God’s ways with Israel are intended to be instruction to us; there is not much of God’s government given in the New Testament, because we have it in the Old.

Jonah is a witness sent of God; if such a man is unfaithful and ungracious, all God’s waves and billows will roll over him; there is no doubt about it. We ought to pay great attention to God’s ways with Israel, not only to His ways in the past but in the future, for if we do not do so we shall be off the line. Israel needs to be perfected in the ways of God’s government if they are to be head of the nations. It is in that way that the prophets are so valuable to us. We in this dispensation shall never have quite the same exercise that Jonah had, but we do not need to have the exercise to get the good of it. We can learn through the experiences of others.

Psalm 42, of the sons of Korah, is a kindred exercise to this. The wonderful thing is that Israel’s Messiah has entered into it ^[p. 30] all and has taken it up in the presence of God. He has taken up their condition as under the anger of God and He has answered perfectly to God on that score, and more. He has made atonement of them so that they are forgiven. The remnant will learn that He has felt it all far more deeply than ever they will; they will never fully do so, I believe. He felt it according to the greatness of His own Person. Atonement was made on the cross, whereas in the garden the Lord was feeling in His own spirit what it was right for Israel to feel — which they did not, but He did.

Psalm 22 is purely prophetic of Christ and was never entered into by any other. There are other Psalms mostly speaking of suffering and affliction, that are the product of the Spirit of Christ in the remnant; they own it to be God’s dealings with them, like Jonah and God’s waves and billows. It is different with us; our position with God is the fruit of redemption as “perfected for ever”, as “accepted in the Beloved”. It is not easy for us to enter into the exercises of a people with no knowledge of redemption, a people who do not know Christ, who have not the Spirit, and who are all under law. “Their mercy” — we shall see that they have it. None of us will be under God’s waves and billows for we are accepted in the Beloved permanently. We never knew, and never can know, God’s punitive judgment. The gospel brings with it the knowledge of the righteousness of God in justifying us and setting us before His face in Christ. It is very different from the experience of the Jew, who does not know Christ and is under law.

In the course of his prayer Jonah finds relief, before he comes out of the whale’s belly: “Thou hast brought up my life from the pit, O Jehovah my God”. He gets a sense, in spite of intense distress under God’s displeasure, that there is that in Jehovah that can be counted upon, and that is how it always is with faith. He has really reached Jehovah and Jehovah’s thoughts as established in the temple; that is, it suggests Christ to us and all God’s precious thoughts hidden there in Christ for a poor oppressed people under the displeasure of God. So with the remnant there will come a moment when there is a secret presentation of Christ to their hearts and then the severity of their distress will be over. The first lamentation of Jeremiah answers very much to Jonah’s prayer; when that is gone through we can move on to the exercises of the Song of Solomon, and then on to Psalm 45. The prince’s daughter in Lamentations goes through unspeakable distress and she comes out as the spouse in the Song, and eventually reaches the place of honour along with the King.

“^[p. 31] I will pay that I have vowed”, Jonah says. I suppose, if we take him as representing Israel, they will be brought to the point of doing all that they said they would do: “All that Jehovah has said will we do”. They will come under the hand of the Mediator; it is He who writes the law upon their hearts. Christ is only brought in in a very veiled way here in the temple, and so I suppose it will be for them light of that obscure character, not very bright at first. It makes us thankful that we live in a very different dispensation and take up our exercises on a very different ground. We learn from studying God’s ways with Israel. The assembly’s place is the greatest and best, and from our great elevation we can descend to contemplate His doings with others. We shall never have God’s waves and billows, but there are those who will; we see that in the Psalms. We have our own knowledge of Christ, which is far deeper than theirs, and that is according to the heavenly position and heavenly blessing. It is remarkable that in John’s gospel there is no agony in the garden; we are in another region, the region of God being glorified in the Son. Matthew and Mark speak of the agony in the garden; all that is on the side of God’s government. Israel will not enter into what John presents. The corrective exercises of other families increase our knowledge of God, and we get a knowledge of the extreme holiness of God’s government. In Revelation God shows the temple and the ark of the covenant, that is, He has His own secret. Jonah sees there is a temple, that is, that there is something outside the sphere of His government where God has His own secret thoughts that He is going to preserve. The assembly is in the secret of Israel’s past and future, and has her own secret portion. God’s government is learnt in Israel. At the end of chapter 2 of Ephesians we come down from the heavenly position to be a habitation of God on the earth. He is teaching the angels His all-various wisdom in the assembly so that He is making one family dependent on another. It is just like Him! The result from every exercise that we go through is that God is magnified. So it is with the discipline of the saints; we are not under His severe fury, but we have His discipline. Is not that a warning that under the discipline of God we may turn to some form of idolatry for relief? If we do, we forsake our own mercy! Out of the discipline we should come up to the assembly charged to the top with God’s praise, and God gets all that He looks for, the responsive praise of His saints.