Certain of the scribes and Pharisees asked a sign from our Lord, They did not ask with any good intention of being persuaded of our Lord's divine commission, but to try to catch Him in His words. Our Lord replied, " An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: for as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and behold, a greater than Jonas is here." (Matt. 12:39-4139But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: 40For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here. (Matthew 12:39‑41)).
We may well be surprised that Jonas should be chosen by our Lord as a type of Himself. Indeed it would be hard to find two characters so dissimilar as Jonas and our Lord. Jonas was the disobedient prophet, who fled from the presence of the Lord; our Lord was obedient to the will of God, even to the death of the cross. But our Lord Himself narrowed the sign to one incident in the life of the disobedient prophet, to the time when he was vomited out of the belly of the great fish, and preached to the inhabitants of Nineveh with such remarkable results.
The story is simply told. Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, was the greatest city of the then-known world. To cross it on foot was a three days' journey, so vast was it. We are told it contained over 120,000 souls, who did not know their right hand from their left. But the wickedness of the city was great, and had come up before God. He bade Jonah, the son of Amittai, to cry against it, and pronounce its doom. Jonah shrank from the task. How could he, an unknown Jew, denounce such a great city? It would be at the peril of his life were he to attempt it. So he rose to flee from the presence of the Lord. Instead of traveling east at the bidding of the Lord, he traveled west in disobedience. He became a passenger in a ship going to Tarshish. Then the Lord caused a mighty tern-pest to arise, so that the ship was like to be broken. The mariners were afraid, crying every man to his god, and casting forth the wares of the ship to lighten it. Mean-while Jonah had gone down to the sides of the ship, and was fast asleep. Jonah had already told them that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord. The storm was so threatening that these superstitious mariners cast lots as to why the tempest had arisen, and for whose cause it had come upon them. The lot fell on Jonah.
The sailors then asked Jonah what was to be done. Under enormous pressure, we may be sure, and with a deep sense that God was dealing with him, and that after all there was no chance of escaping from His presence, in utter despair Jonah replied that the one and only remedy was to cast him into the sea, and then it would become calm. The kind-hearted mariners were lothe to take such a tragic step, and tried their best to bring the ship to land, but without avail.
They were faced with the awful choice of one dying for the many, or the many dying. In either case Jonah would be drowned, they would argue. So the inevitable had to be, and with great reluctance Jonah was flung into the boiling sea, and the sea became calm.
In the east at that time news traveled far and wide in an incredibly short space of time, with unbelievable rapidity. Gossip passed from mouth to mouth, bazaar to bazaar, city to city, country to country. Such a story as this could not fail to excite the liveliest interest. What sort of God was this God of the Hebrews from whom His prophet could not escape, the God who could bring His disobedient servant, as they thought, to such a tragic end? Even the people of Nineveh would surely hear the startling news. When the waters rolled over the head of Jonah, the mariners, and all, who afterward heard the tragic news, would of course come to the conclusion that the prophet was dead, and that this was the last they would hear of him. At the least the news would give the people fresh ideas of the wonderful God of the Hebrews. He would stand out as utterly different from their gods. They would be prepared to pay heed to what message He might send.
Startling as the news was, the like of which had never before been known, in three days' time news of a far more startling and wonderful nature was passed from lip to lip. Jonah was alive and well. Incredible! At first news of this it would be promptly disbelieved as a thing impossible. But the witnesses to His being cast into the tempestuous sea were many. There could be no doubt as to his fate. Humanly speaking nothing could save him from being drowned. But Jonah was actually alive and well. The God of the Hebrews had ordained a great fish to be at the exact spot when Jonah sank into the water to swallow him, and convey him for three days and nights, through the sea, and finally to vomit him alive upon dry land. Here was to them a new and mighty power in the world..It took a lot of believing, but the witnesses to the prophet's supposed death, and the witnesses to the fact that he was alive, and even at that moment carrying out God's commission, and on his way to Nineveh, were so many, that extraordinary as the news was, there was nothing to do but to admit facts.
We know that this story has been the occasion of much derision. Not many years ago, it would have been the occasion of similar skepticism, that men could make a submarine, capable of carrying a number of men at the bottom of the sea for a lengthened period of time, and bring them safely to the surface of the sea alive and well. Yet this is a common experience to-day. And could not God, who created all the fishes by His omnipotent word, create a single fish for the purpose of receiving Jonah as he sank in the waters, and bring him safely to land? Of course He could.
Then the news came that Jonah had actually penetrated into Nineveh a days' journey, uttering fearlessly his message of doom, " Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." (Jonah 3:44And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. (Jonah 3:4)). What did the Ninevites say amongst themselves? They would say surely that if God was so determined to warn them—first by commissioning His servant to deliver the message of doom; second, by sending a mighty tempest to stop His runaway servant; third, by preparing a great fish for his journey under the water; fourth, by directing the fish to vomit Jonah upon dry land; fifth, by giving him courage to proclaim His message in the midst of their great city—surely it was high time that they paid heed to God's warning.
So from the least to the greatest they put on sack-cloth and ashes and proclaimed a fast, the very King on his throne divesting himself of his royal robe, clothing himself in sackcloth, and sitting in ashes. God, ever gracious to the repentant, spared the city.
Our Lord drew the contrast between the people of Nineveh repenting at the preaching of Jonah, and the evil and adulterous people who stood before Him, and who were trying to catch Him in His words. He told them plainly that the men of Nineveh would rise in judgment against them, adding "a greater than Jonas is here."