the sea be calm unto you:  for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. 13.  Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring it to the land; but they could not:  for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous against them. 14.  Wherefore they cried unto the Lord, and said, We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not upon us innocent blood:  for Thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased Thee. 15.  So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea; and the sea ceased from her raging. 16.  Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows. 17.  Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.  And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.’—­JONAH i. 1-17.

Jonah was apparently an older contemporary of Hosea and Amos.  The Assyrian power was looming threateningly on the northern horizon, and a flash or two had already broken from that cloud.  No doubt terror had wrought hate and intenser narrowness.  To correct these by teaching, by an instance drawn from Assyria itself, God’s care for the Gentiles and their susceptibility to His voice, was the purpose of Jonah’s mission.  He is a prophet of Israel, because the lesson of his history was for them, though his message was for Nineveh.  He first taught by example the truth which Jesus proclaimed in the synagogue of Nazareth, and Peter learned on the housetop at Joppa, and Paul took as his guiding star.  A truth so unwelcome and remote from popular belief needed emphasis when first proclaimed; and this singular story, as it were, underlines it for the generation which heard it first.  Its place would rather have been among the narratives than the prophets, except for this aspect of it.  So regarded, Jonah becomes a kind of representative of Israel; and his history sets forth large lessons as to its function among the nations, its unwillingness to discharge it, the consequences of disobedience, and the means of return to a better mind.

Note then, first, the Prophet’s unwelcome charge.  There seems no sufficient reason for doubting the historical reality of Jonah’s mission to Nineveh; for we know that intercourse was not infrequent, and the silence of other records is, in their fragmentary condition, nothing wonderful.  But the fact that a prophet of Israel was sent to a heathen city, and that not to denounce destruction except as a means of winning to repentance, declared emphatically God’s care for the world, and rebuked the exclusiveness which claimed Him for Israel alone.  The same spirit haunts the Christian Church, and we have all need to ponder the opposite truth, till our sympathies are widened to the width of God’s universal love, and we discern that we are bound to care for all men, since He does so.

Jonah sullenly resolved not to obey God’s voice.  What a glimpse into the prophetic office that gives us!  The divine Spirit could be resisted, and the Prophet was no mere machine, but a living man who had to consent with his devoted will to bear the burden of the Lord.  One refused, and his refusal teaches us how superb and self-sacrificing was the faithfulness of the rest.  So we have each to do in regard to God’s message intrusted to us.  We must bow our wills, and sink our prejudices, and sacrifice our tastes, and say, ‘Here am I; send me.’