“Nineveh, That Great City”
177
preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.”
Matthew
12:40, 41
. Into the busy world, filled with the din of commerce and
the altercation of trade, where men were trying to get all they could
for self, Christ had come; and above the confusion His voice, like the
trump of God, was heard: “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain
the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in
exchange for his soul?”
Mark 8:36, 37
.
As the preaching of Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so Christ’s
preaching was a sign to His generation. But what a contrast in the
reception of the word! Yet in the face of indifference and scorn the
Saviour labored on and on, until He had accomplished His mission.
The lesson is for God’s messengers today, when the cities of the
nations are as verily in need of a knowledge of the attributes and
purposes of the true God as were the Ninevites of old. Christ’s ambas-
sadors are to point men to the nobler world, which has largely been
lost sight of. According to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, the
only city that will endure is the city whose builder and maker is God.
With the eye of faith man may behold the threshold of heaven, flushed
with God’s living glory. Through His ministering servants the Lord
Jesus is calling upon men to strive with sanctified ambition to secure
the immortal inheritance. He urges them to lay up treasure beside the
throne of God.
[275]
There is coming rapidly and surely an almost universal guilt upon
the inhabitants of the cities, because of the steady increase of deter-
mined wickedness. The corruption that prevails is beyond the power
of the human pen to describe. Every day brings fresh revelations of
strife, bribery, and fraud; every day brings its heart-sickening record
of violence and lawlessness, of indifference to human suffering, of
brutal, fiendish destruction of human life. Every day testifies to the
increase of insanity, murder, and suicide.
From age to age Satan has sought to keep men in ignorance of the
beneficent designs of Jehovah. He has endeavored to remove from
their sight the great things of God’s law—the principles of justice,
mercy, and love therein set forth. Men boast of the wonderful progress
and enlightenment of the age in which we are now living; but God sees
the earth filled with iniquity and violence. Men declare that the law
of God has been abrogated, that the Bible is not authentic; and as a
result, a tide of evil, such as has not been seen since the days of Noah