OUR ATTITUDE TO APPROACHING JUDGMENT.
By D. M. PANTON, B.A.
The narrative of Jonah is ablaze with light for us who stand
on the threshold of the last judgments.
Judgment truth had grasped Jonah with a grip of iron: he was God’s ambassador
to announce doom, and he knew it: he was all alive to the awful justice of God,
the frightful iniquity of sin, and the appalling collision between the two
which will wreck a universe. Cowardice
had been buried in the disgorging whale: with his life in his hand, through
those immense crowds - probably not less than a million, for 120,000 infants
are named - and through its enormous areas - Nineveh was ninety miles in
circumference - a strange, wild figure, clothed in rough skins, and himself
risen, literally, from the Gates of the Grave, marched, announcing doom. It is an overwhelming fact that we, to-day,
through all the cities of the continents, have been commissioned of God, in
mercy to mankind and at the peril of popularity, reputation, and even life, to
announce the worse doom, not ,of a single city, but of an entire world.
PROPHECY NEGATIVING ITSELF.
Now the whole narrative of Jonah is throughout a revelation
concerning the preaching of judgment unparalleled in the Bible. The critical truth it states is this:- Prophecy of evil is delivered to defeat itself;
destruction is foretold that it may never fall; Hell is disclosed in order that
no man may ever enter it: if judgment were all, the supreme weapon would be
silence. A sand-glass of forty days:- had God wanted the destruction of Nineveh, He
would have drowned Jonah, not
delivered him: Nineveh’s
dead-sure doom would have lain in a silent forty days. The real peril
to the world’s cities in all ages is when no prophets tread their streets: a
thing indescribably awful in God is His silence. For what actually happened? The rousing appeal, ringing through the awed
and silent streets, brought a million souls to God; one of the mightiest cities
of the ancient world, “from the least unto the greatest,” fell on its knees; and, above all, the prophecy was
dead. “And God” – the glorious heart of our God – “repented of the evil, which
He said He would do unto them; AND HE
DID IT NOT” (Jonah 3: 10).
Wrapt up in the heart of the prophecy, as was wrapt up in the heart of
God – unnamed, unrevealed, but there because God is God – was mercy,
lisping the accents of wrath.
THE PROPHET’S ANGER
Now comes our peril, so acute, yet so
concealed in apparent goodness, that a whole Book of the Bible is reserved for
its disclosure. Jonah’s mission had been
successful beyond all conceivable dreams: he had reached the heart of
wickedness, and cured it: he had postponed Nineveh’s doom for two hundred years. It is hardly excessive to call it the
Pentecost of the Old Testament. But how
does God’s prophet regard it? “It displeased Jonah
exceedingly” - literally,
it was to, Jonah a great evil – “and he was angry” (Jonah
4: 1); and in extreme bitterness of spirit, he prays for death. Jonah’s
own words prove that it was God’s mercy which angered him. “I knew,” he cries, long ere ever I came to Assyria,
“that Thou art
a gracious God, and full of compassion” (Jonah 4: 2): I suspected all along that the thunderbolts
would never fall. Why did You choose me as a prophet of judgment if You meant vast
mercy instead? I am a disappointed man. Give me my rest. It is the supreme example in the Bible of
mortified vanity. His self-importance was so, wounded; he so feared the laughter of his
critics over his collapsed prophecy, and his injured reputation as a prophet;
his mind (to put it at the best) was so exclusively filled with Nineveh’s
wickedness, and with the love of sheer justice - that if Nineveh escapes he
wishes to die; if Nineveh perishes, he is willing to live. The very thing the absence of which is the heart-break of most who
speak for God - no sobbing crowds - is a despair to Jonah
so keen that he hates his life: pride
makes his spirit so stiff and unbending that he prefers to snap rather than to
melt. What a contrast to Him who, over
the City that was about to murder Him, Wept! Or, to take a lower parallel better within our
reach:- Jonah, on the heights outside Nineveh,
prays for its doom; Abraham, on the
heights outside still wickeder Sodom,
intercedes passionately that it may be saved.
This man-trap at our feet, like the leaf-covered pit that ensnares
elephants, deadly yet concealed, is so critically dangerous that, to expose its
peril, let us express it in the light the most favourable possible for
Jonah. Jonah might have expressed it
thus:- the prophecy God gave me was absolute - no
condition, no mitigation, no possibility of postponement or annulment, was
attached: there was no summons to repentance - it was a pure announcement of
doom: God’s Word, therefore, is utterly pledged; and if Nineveh is un-destroyed,
the Divine honour is impugned, God’s prophet is stultified, and Nineveh itself
will never believe God’s Word again. Moreover, it is right that it should be fulfilled: does not Nahum describe Nineveh
as the “bloody
city, all full of lies and robbery,” and Zephaniah,
as “filthy and
polluted”? The iniquity of Nineveh (it is true) so stank
in the face of Heaven that not forty years, like Jerusalem, but only forty days were given, before final lightning or
earthquake-shock. Moreover, this mightiest
metropolis of the world was simply the world: whereas mercy, favour, love, bliss (so Jonah might argue) are for
the People of God alone; and the People of God are never named
throughout the Book: therefore judgment,
for every reason, ought to fall. So Jonah
goes to an eminence outside the City, “till he might see what would become of the city” (Jonah
4: 5), saying, even to God, “I do well to be angry.” Had Jonah
been armed with the lightnings of Elijah, or with the fires James and John asked
from Christ, Nineveh
had been ashes. In that pitiful figure waiting for thunderbolts behold the peril of the
Advent Church!
THE PITY OF
GOD
Now follows the incomparably valuable
lesson of how God Himself deals with the situation. It has been said that Leviticus is a fifth
Gospel: I am not sure that the Book of Jonah is not a sixth. Puncture the Book in any vein, and it bleeds mercy. The mariners are saved from the storm; Jonah
is delivered from Sheol; vast Nineveh is spared its doom: and as though that
were not enough, mercy is pleaded by Jehovah
Himself, by question, by argument, by parable, by sweet reasonableness, by
love. Jonah, sitting, watching for a
huge city’s death-stroke, nevertheless was not unmindful of his own comfort - he “was exceeding glad because of the gourd”: alas, there are keen Second Advent Christians
to-day, watching for a world’s doom, as devoted to amassing wealth as most worldlings. So
God raises the gourd; then he raises the worm; then he raises the wind: thus to Jonah, now bared himself before the judgment-blast, He says:- On
the transient, soulless, perishable plant you never made - springing in a
night, and dying in a night - you had pity; on vast Nineveh, with its six score
thousand infants, and innocent cattle - for even the lowing of kine can be a supplication in heaven - all my handiwork and
my care - your only desire is an opening
pit as under Korah. You never made the gourd; it does not belong
to you; no energy of yours shot it up in a night or blighted it in a night - yet
you pity it; but the poor vast world with Heaven over it and Hell under it, the
teeming millions of the lost - flesh and blood like yourself, with all their
human smiles and tears - they are
nothing to you. “Should I not have pity on Nineveh, that great city?” (Jonah
4: 11): is not pity according to
the principles of My government and universe, the very
law and foundation of My nature and life? Misanthropy is Satanic,
never Divine. ALL PROPHECY OF EVIL IS MADE) IF POSSIBLE, AND SO LONG AS GRACE LASTS,
TO DEFEAT ITSELF. So the peril of
the whole body of prophetic students at the end is lest we become an embodied Jonah, so absorbed in judgment, so blind to
mercy, that we miss the heart of God; and lest, as on Jonah so on us, the curtain rings down sharply
and finally on a futile and abortive
prophet.
OUR ADVENT
VIGIL
So now we arrive at the exact mind of
God, and the critical embassage vital to the tremendous modern need. It is a combination rare and lovely and solemn
beyond expression. It is a prophet so
gripped and grasped by the terrors of judgment, created by the frightful
wickedness of sin, that the vast crowds are met without fear, and without
flight: irremediable, and possibly instantaneous, destruction, proclaimed
without condition, without mitigation, without end - on all unrepentant sin: no
Heaven without Hell, no salvation without damnation, no escape without Blood. But - behind it all, a heart that is a sob
over Hell, and that flings wide the Gates of Heaven;
an election of grace beyond our dreams; a work of the Holy Ghost yet to be
beyond precedent, beyond imagination; a God that willeth not the death of one sinner. No city stands more for the entire world-merchants
multiplied above the stars of heaven, kings as locusts, field-marshals as grasshoppers
(Nahum 3: 16) - than does Nineveh; and, most
remarkably, within a few years of Jonah and this Old Testament Pentecost, Joel
poured forth his amazing forecast of the Holy Ghost’s descent in the days of vast judgments. So, therefore, every intensest activity in
every direction of truth is the divine vigil with which to confront impending judgment; and it is our very
success, our own activity, which
will falsify some of our darkest forecasts. We preach hell to people heaven.
For there’s
grace enough for thousands
Of new
worlds as great as this;
There is
room for fresh creations
In that upper room of bliss.
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