THE MINOR PROPHETS
5. JONAH
John H. Paterson
AMONG the Minor Prophets Jonah is unique. In terms of response to his message, he was arguably history's most successful preacher; he had barely begun his sermon when a whole city of 120,000 people was converted -- and converted genuinely enough for God to be moved to withhold His judgment. Yet of this remarkable preaching all we have is a single sentence (consisting of only five Hebrew words): "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown". That, in fact, is all that constitutes the 'prophecy' of Jonah, properly speaking. The rest is the story of the man, rather than his message.
This lack of a detailed message has led some students of the book to suppose that, in order to give it value and justify its inclusion in the canon of Scripture, it must be read as an allegory -- that Jonah should be taken to represent disobedient Israel, or the three days in the fish as the captivity in Babylon. It would be hard to prove this -- or disprove it, for that matter -- and it seems to be making heavy weather of the story. The Lord Jesus referred to Jonah, and certainly seems to have intended the reference to be taken as historical rather than allegorical: "as Jonah ... so shall the Son of man" (Matthew 12:40). It will be well for our understanding of the book if we can keep out of the realm of speculation and stick to what can be learned directly from the story.
It has been suggested in each of the articles in this series that the twelve Minor Prophets were raised up by God to draw attention to different aspects of His character which were in danger of being forgotten. Most of the prophets did this by means of a spoken message. Hosea, as we have earlier seen, did it partly by speaking and partly by acting out a role which God assigned to him -- that of a man with an unfaithful wife. In Jonah's case, uniquely, all of the message is in the prophet's own experience or, to be more precise, in the parallelism between three experiences in which he was involved.
At first sight, the conundrum posed by the life of Jonah seems very obscure: what is the connection between a disobedient prophet, a wicked city and the plant ricinus or gourd? And the answer seems to be: a God who is a God of resurrection.
The dictionary defines 'resurrect' as 'to restore to life'. In this literal sense of the word there were three situations in Jonah's experience where a resurrection was called for. The first and most obvious was when Jonah was thrown into the sea, far from land and in a raging storm. At that moment, he was as good as dead, and only a divine intervention could bring him back to life again, by way of the fish's belly. The second situation was when Jonah finally reached Nineveh and announced that the city had just 40 days to live. Only a miracle could save it from destruction; its inhabitants were as good as dead. The third situation was when the gourd under which Jonah was sheltering from the sun withered and died. To judge by his remarks (4:8-9), Jonah felt strongly that a fresh miracle of resurrection was called for, to bring the gourd back to life. [92/93]
So we have three deaths, followed by two resurrections. What in fact happened can be set out for the sake of clarity in this way:
5. JONAH
John H. Paterson
AMONG the Minor Prophets Jonah is unique. In terms of response to his message, he was arguably history's most successful preacher; he had barely begun his sermon when a whole city of 120,000 people was converted -- and converted genuinely enough for God to be moved to withhold His judgment. Yet of this remarkable preaching all we have is a single sentence (consisting of only five Hebrew words): "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown". That, in fact, is all that constitutes the 'prophecy' of Jonah, properly speaking. The rest is the story of the man, rather than his message.
This lack of a detailed message has led some students of the book to suppose that, in order to give it value and justify its inclusion in the canon of Scripture, it must be read as an allegory -- that Jonah should be taken to represent disobedient Israel, or the three days in the fish as the captivity in Babylon. It would be hard to prove this -- or disprove it, for that matter -- and it seems to be making heavy weather of the story. The Lord Jesus referred to Jonah, and certainly seems to have intended the reference to be taken as historical rather than allegorical: "as Jonah ... so shall the Son of man" (Matthew 12:40). It will be well for our understanding of the book if we can keep out of the realm of speculation and stick to what can be learned directly from the story.
It has been suggested in each of the articles in this series that the twelve Minor Prophets were raised up by God to draw attention to different aspects of His character which were in danger of being forgotten. Most of the prophets did this by means of a spoken message. Hosea, as we have earlier seen, did it partly by speaking and partly by acting out a role which God assigned to him -- that of a man with an unfaithful wife. In Jonah's case, uniquely, all of the message is in the prophet's own experience or, to be more precise, in the parallelism between three experiences in which he was involved.
At first sight, the conundrum posed by the life of Jonah seems very obscure: what is the connection between a disobedient prophet, a wicked city and the plant ricinus or gourd? And the answer seems to be: a God who is a God of resurrection.
The dictionary defines 'resurrect' as 'to restore to life'. In this literal sense of the word there were three situations in Jonah's experience where a resurrection was called for. The first and most obvious was when Jonah was thrown into the sea, far from land and in a raging storm. At that moment, he was as good as dead, and only a divine intervention could bring him back to life again, by way of the fish's belly. The second situation was when Jonah finally reached Nineveh and announced that the city had just 40 days to live. Only a miracle could save it from destruction; its inhabitants were as good as dead. The third situation was when the gourd under which Jonah was sheltering from the sun withered and died. To judge by his remarks (4:8-9), Jonah felt strongly that a fresh miracle of resurrection was called for, to bring the gourd back to life. [92/93]
So we have three deaths, followed by two resurrections. What in fact happened can be set out for the sake of clarity in this way:
| Jonah | Nineveh | The Gourd |
| Death | Death | Death |
| Resurrection | Resurrection | ---------------- |
But this evidently struck Jonah as a very unsatisfactory, not to say arbitrary, use of God's power of resurrection. He himself (4:2a) would have preferred a different sequence:
| Jonah | Nineveh | The Gourd |
| Death | Death | Death |
| Resurrection | ---------------- | Resurrection |
while before the end of the story he had become so exasperated with the actual course of events that he twice requested that he might die (4:2b, 8) -- or, in other words, he was wishing for:
| Jonah | Nineveh | The Gourd |
| Death | Death | Death |
| ---------------- | ---------------- | ---------------- |
His memory was evidently short; he had grown tired of resurrections.
It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that the argument of God was with the prophet, rather than with the heathen sailors or the condemned Ninevites, both of whom turned to Him immediately they realised what was happening. The man who had just undergone the most dramatic resurrection in history outside the New Testament appears to have treated his own experience not as revealing a basic characteristic of God and His working but as a personal favour; so personal, in fact, that it should certainly not be extended to anybody else.
It was certainly not simple ignorance of God's manner of working which led Jonah to adopt this attitude. For the second chapter of the book contains as clear a statement as one could wish for of God's principle of resurrection, voiced by Jonah himself, and culminating in the words, "For my deliverance comes from the Lord alone" (2:9,Living Bible). Jonah knew that only God could bring about a resurrection, but then he seems to have slipped into feeling that God should perform or withhold this miracle on demand -- Jonah's demand.
So God had to introduce into Jonah's experience another lesson. Not only is it true that God, and He alone, is the God of resurrection, but it is also true that He exercises this power of bringing back to life at His own discretion. This is, as it happens, one of the commonest lessons in the school of God; Job had to learn it, and so did Abraham and David (Hebrews 11:19; 2 Samuel 12:13-22). Now it was Jonah's turn, and he found the going hard. Twice the book reports him as being angry at God's decisions (4:1, 9), the first time because God hadexercised His prerogative of resurrection, the second time because God had not. The full dimensions of his false values then had to be pointed out to him (4:10-11): he wanted God to resurrect a mere plant, but he could contemplate without a tremor the destruction of a whole city, its population and its "much cattle". Perhaps it was to make clear the true extent of Jonah's unreasonable prejudice that God included the cattle in His rebuke. Supposing, He seems to be asking Jonah, the choice had been between one plant and one cow, should I not have chosen to save the cow? Do cows not like to stand in the shade of a tree on a hot day just as you do? Are they any different from people in this respect? And here we have a city with many cows, and a hundred and twenty thousand people, and I choose to resurrect them all; yet you question my judgment?
We are left with little sympathy for Jonah; we can only hope that he learned his lesson. Clearly, it had not been his preaching that turned the scales for Nineveh, because he had only just begun the sermon when the city repented, and so none of the credit belonged to him, and perhaps that had something to do with his chagrin. But that fact, of course, is all of a piece with the rest -- with the sole prerogative of God to bring about this miracle. And happily for us, we have the sequel -- the greater resurrection, of which that of Jonah had been the sign. Perhaps as a result of observing his mistakes and misjudgements we can appreciate in a new way the significance of those New Testament words, "I am the resurrection and the life". Resurrection is God's miracle; it is for Him alone to decide when and on what conditions to perform it. And surely to us the enormously encouraging thing is that He chose, over the protests of His own servant, to perform it in favour of a wicked city, which He spared because His resurrection power is activated by His pardoning grace. [93/94]
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