Basic HTML Version
128
Royalty and Ruin
Yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.” ...
When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord;
And my prayer went up to You, Into Your holy temple. ...
I will pay what I have vowed.
Salvation is of the Lord.’”
Jonah 2:2-4, 7, 9.
At last Jonah had learned that “salvation belongs to the Lord.”
Psalm 3:8
. With repentance and a recognition of God’s saving grace,
deliverance came. Jonah was released from the perils of the mighty
deep; the fish cast him up on the dry land.
Once more God commissioned His servant to warn Nineveh:
“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message
that I tell you.” This time he did not question or doubt, but “arose
and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord.”
As Jonah entered the city, he began at once to “cry out against”
it with the message: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be over-
thrown!” From street to street he went, sounding the warning. The
[102]
cry rang through the streets of the godless city until all the inhabi-
tants heard the startling announcement. The Spirit of God pressed
the message home to every heart, and multitudes repented in deep
humiliation.
“Then word came to the king of Nineveh; and he arose from
his throne and laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth
and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published
throughout Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying,
‘Let ... every one turn from his evil way and from the violence that
is in his hands. Who can tell if God will turn and relent, and turn
away from His fierce anger, so that we may not perish?’”
As king and nobles, the high and the low, “repented at the preach-
ing of Jona” (
Matthew 12:41
), they received mercy. “God relented
from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He
did not do it.” Their doom was averted, and throughout the heathen
world the God of Israel was honored and His law respected. Not
until many years later, by forgetting God and cherishing boastful
pride, did Nineveh fall a prey to the surrounding nations.