176
Prophets and Kings
“Doest thou well to be angry?” the Lord inquired. “So Jonah went
out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him
a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would
become of the city. And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made
it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to
deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.”
Verses 3-6
.
Then the Lord gave Jonah an object lesson. He “prepared a worm
when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it
withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God
prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of
Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is
better for me to die than to live.”
Again God spoke to His prophet, “Doest thou well to be angry for
the gourd?” And he said, “I do well to be angry, even unto death.”
“Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the
which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up
in a night, and perished in a night: and should not I spare Nineveh,
that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also
much cattle?”
Verses 7-11
.
Confused, humiliated, and unable to understand God’s purpose
in sparing Nineveh, Jonah nevertheless had fulfilled the commission
given him to warn that great city; and though the event predicted did
not come to pass, yet the message of warning was nonetheless from
[273]
God. And it accomplished the purpose God designed it should. The
glory of His grace was revealed among the heathen. Those who had
long been sitting “in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound
in affliction and iron,” “cried unto the Lord in their trouble,” and “He
saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness
and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder.” “He sent His
word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.”
Psalm 107:10, 13, 14, 20
.
Christ during His earthly ministry referred to the good wrought
by the preaching of Jonah in Nineveh, and compared the inhabitants
of that heathen center with the professed people of God in His day.
[274]
“The men of Nineveh,” He declared, “shall rise in judgment with
this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the