our duty of witnessing for Him, or any other of His plain commands, unfaithfulness will be our ruin.  The storm is sure to break where His Jonahs try to hide, and their only hope lies in bowing to the chastisement and consenting to be punished, and avowing whose they are and whom they serve.  If we own Him while the storm whistles round us, the worst of it is past, and though we have to struggle amid its waves, He will take care of us, and anything is possible rather than that we should be lost in them.

The miracle of rescue is the last point.  Jonah’s repentance saved his life.  Tossed overboard impenitent he would have been drowned.  So Israel was taught that the break-up of their national life would not be their destruction if they turned to the Lord in their calamity.  The wider lesson of the means of making chastisement into blessing, and securing a way of escape—­namely, by owning the justice of the stroke, and returning to duty—­is meant for us all.  He who sends the storm watches its effect on us, and will not let His repentant servants be utterly overwhelmed.  That is a better use to make of the story than to discuss whether any kind of known Mediterranean fish could swallow a man.  If we believe in miracles, the question need not trouble us.  And miracle there must be, not only in the coincidence of the fish and the Prophet being in the same bit of sea at the same moment, but in his living for so long in his strange ‘ark of safety.’

The ever-present providence of God, the possible safety of the nation, even when in captivity, the preservation of every servant of God who turns to the Lord in his chastisement, the exhibition of penitence as the way of deliverance, are the purposes for which the miracle was wrought and told.  Flippant sarcasms are cheap.  A devout insight yields a worthy meaning.  Jesus Christ employed this incident as a symbol of His Death and Resurrection.  That use of it seems hard to reconcile with any view but that the story is true.  But it does not seem necessary to suppose that our Lord regarded it as an intended type, or to seek to find in Jonah’s history further typical prophecy of Him.  The salient point of comparison is simply the three days’ entombment; and it is rather an illustrative analogy than an intentional prophecy.  The subsequent action of the Prophet in Nineveh, and the effect of it, were true types of the preaching of the Gospel by the risen Lord, through His servants, to the Gentiles, and of their hearing the Word.  But it requires considerable violence in manipulation to force the bestowing of Jonah, for safety and escape from death, in the fish’s maw, into a proper prophecy of the transcendent fact of the Resurrection.

‘LYING VANITIES’

     ’They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.’—­JONAH
     11. 8.