《The Biblical Illustrator – Jonah (Ch.0~4)》(A Compilation)
General Introduction
Over 34,000 pages in its original 56 volume printing, the Biblical Illustrator is a massive compilation of treatments on 10,000 passages of Scripture. It is arranged in commentary form for ease of use in personal study and devotion, as well as sermon preparation.
Most of the content of this commentary is illustrative in nature, and includes from hundreds of famous authors of the day such as Dwight L. Moody, Charles Spurgeon, J. C. Ryle, Charles Hodge, Alexander MacLaren, Adam Clark, Matthew Henry, and many more. The collection also includes lesser known authors published in periodicles and smaller publications popular in that ara. Unlike modern publishers, Exell was apparently not under any pressure to consolidate the number of pages.
While this commentary is not known for its Greek or Hebrew exposition, the New Testament includes hundreds of references to, and explanations of, Greek words.
Joseph S. Exell edited and compiled the 56 volume Biblical Illustrator commentary. You will recognize him as the co-editor of the famous Pulpit Commentary (this commentary is even larger than the Pulpit Commentary). This remarkable work is the triumph of a life devoted to Biblical research and study. Assisted by a small army of students, the Exell draws on the rich stores of great minds since the beginning of New Testament times.
The Biblical Illustrator brings Scripture to life in a unique, illuminating way. While other commentaries explain a Bible passage doctrinally, this work illustrates the Bible with a collection of:
· illustrations
· outlines
· anecodtes
· history
· poems
· expositions
· geography
· sermons
· Bible backgrounds
· homiletics
for nearly every verse in the Bible. This massive commentary was originally intended for preachers needing help with sermon preperation (because who else in that day had time to wade through such a lengthy commentary?). But today, the Biblical Illustrator provides life application, illumination, inspiriation, doctrine, devotion, and practical content for all who teach, preach, and study the Bible.
00 Overview
JONAH
INTRODUCTION
IT is very interesting and very instructive to scrutinise the faces in a great gallery of portraits. The man who does so has before him materials which should help him to gain a wide knowledge of human character. Here is a countenance noble and winsome. The spectator is certain that it was a tender and brave and faithful heart which beat beneath an exterior so fair. Features like these could not cover any littleness of soul. Perhaps it is a soldier in his coat of mail, whose likeness the artist has drawn, or it may be a woman’s face that looks out from the canvas; but whoever it be, the onlooker is glad that he has seen the picture. But a painting of a different kind attracts him next--that of one who has evidently had many fierce battles with temptation, and who has not come out of them all scathless. This much the spectator learns from the sad expression which rests on the features; and yet, as he examines them more carefully, he sees that dissatisfaction and sorrow are not their most prominent characteristics. There is peace stamped on the face as well as trouble--peace which seems in the end to have gained the mastery over the trouble. There are no portraits like those which have been painted for us in the pages of the Bible. They have been drawn by the hand of a Master, and they are very varied in the types of character which they represent. In the goodly fellowship of the prophets--to think meanwhile of no others--what differences of natural disposition, and of spiritual attainments, there are I Some, like Joel, and Amos, and Hosea, are without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Beside them we see our own shortcomings, and know what manner of men our Lord would have us to be. And others, like Jonah, are far from faultless. They are genuine servants of God, but servants who sin and fall, whose loyalty is not steadfast and immovable, who carry to this day dark blots on their fair name. We are encouraged ourselves to make trial of His compassion and His grace. That Jonah, after his wilful disobedience and foolish querulousness, was healed of all the diseases of his spirit--that, like many a wayward child, he learned to sorrow over his self-will, and came home with a penitent and reproachful heart to his Father’s house--who of us can doubt? I take it that he was himself the author of the book which bears his name, though some have thought of it as the embalming by a subsequent writer of an ancient and venerable tradition. £ I can see no reason for doubting that the prophet penned with his own hand these four short chapters. Before his life closed he sat down to recount for the generations that should follow the story of his memorable journey to Nineveh. And how does he tell the story? Very humbly, we shall admit, and very impartially. They are bitter things which he writes in it against himself. He extenuates nothing. He unveils all his hardness of heart, all his Jewish exclusiveness, all his murmuring against the Lord. He is relentless in his self-condemnation, whilst over against the confession of his lack of obedience and of charity he places the record of God’s loving-kindness and tender mercy. The book exalts God, indeed, and rebukes and punishes Jonah. It is a book of Confessions which Jonah has written, not an Apologia pro vim sua. He acknowledges publicly the wrongness of his thinking and acting. When we read his chapters we are reminded of Peter going out to weep bitterly, and afterwards inspiring the Gospel of Mark, which tells more fully than any of the other evangelical records how he sinned and fell; of Augustine, composing the narrative of his foolish youth; of John Bunyan, declaring how grace had abounded in his experience to the chief of sinners. Jonah must have been a new man, with a heart within him from which the old pride and unkindness and disobedience had been driven quite away, before he could pen the book which bears his name. The Book of Jonah is not like other prophetic writings. It is not a recital of discourses, but a vivid narrative of a strange episode in its author’s life. It has been described as a drama in three acts, each of which is full of interest and replete with instruction.
I. First of all, the prophecy deals with Jonah himself. Very little is known regarding him beyond what we learn from these chapters. There is, however, one other mention of him in the Old Testament. We read, in the Second Book of Kings, about Jeroboam II., the powerful and able and sinful ruler of the Northern tribes under whom Amos and Hosea lived and preached, that “he restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain, according to the word of the Lord God which He spake by the hand of His servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath-hepher.” Jonah was a native, then, of Lower Galilee, a child of the tribe of Zabulon, born in a little village among the hills not far from Nazareth. And his first message as a prophet was a message of gladness, in which he took delight, and which brought him honour and esteem. He had foretold the success of the king of Israel, how he should regain provinces that had been lost, how he should win back for a short space the glory of his empire. It is strange that one whose ministry began under such bright auspices should end it under a cloud, and should be presented to us not as a model but as a beacon. It is a warning to take heed lest we fall--an illustration of the truth that even the saints of God are weak and brittle in themselves, in constant danger of losing the crown, and needing always the support of a higher hand. We can scarcely be surprised that legend should have busied itself about Jonah, and should have tried to augment our scanty knowledge of his earlier years. There is the old tradition, for example, that he was the son of the widow of Zarephath, the boy whom Elijah brought back from death to life. And indeed it would be pleasant to think that the first apostle of the Gentiles, sent on a mission of mercy to a heathen people, was himself a Gentile on the mother’s side; £ and that he stood in so interesting a relation to the great prophet who fought single-handed the battle of God against Baal. But the very pleasantness of the fancy is its condemnation. It fits in too neatly with our preconceptions and desires. Whether, during the years when he lived at home in the Northern Kingdom, Jonah had other announcements given him to publish to his countrymen beside that happy announcement of victory and national enlargement, we cannot say. The time was very evil, and the land was sick unto death. What we do know is, that to the prophet, dwelling among his own people, there came one day a message from God which startled him, and for which he had no liking. He was commanded to leave his kindred, and journey to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire. There he was to proclaim the Lord’s judgments. When God pointed in one way, he moved in exactly the opposite direction. What made him so rebellious? Partly it may have been fear. He was appalled at the greatness and the hazardous nature of the task allotted him. He forgot that God’s servants, who do His will, are kept by Him safe in the hollow of His hand. But there was another reason for his disobedience, as he tells us himself. He could not help feeling that though he was sent to Nineveh with a fearful woe on his lips, his mission was in reality one of love. He understood well that often his God threatened in order that He might afterwards spare, and that His terrors were meant to drive to Himself, for forgiveness and healing, those who would not be won by gentler methods. And Jonah had no desire to go on an errand of compassion to Nineveh. A mistaken patriotism prompted him to recoil from seeking the good of the metropolis of Assyria. He would rather a thousand times that it should be left to its fate--that it should sink beneath God’s hand to rise no more for ever. We can sympathise in some measure with him. We know how the hearts of our own fathers were filled with a stern joy when the tremendous power of the first Napoleon, which hung like a thundercloud over Europe, was dispelled and dissipated. They thought it no shame to triumph in his downfall. The instinct of self-preservation and the love of country kindled these emotions within them. So it was with Jonah; and indeed he had even better ground for the feelings he cherished. For Assyria was a heathen empire, while Israel was the land which God had blessed, the home of His chosen people. Why should an effort be made to save the foes of the true faith? Therefore he disobeyed. He thought himself wiser than God. He imagined that he had the interests of God’s peculiar people more truly at heart. But whither shall a man go from the Spirit of the Lord? or whither shall he flee from His presence? If he dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall God’s right hand hold him. The traveller who climbs a high mountain in the tropics passes through many zones of temperature, leaving the luxuriant vegetation of the plain to enter a land of pine forests and of colder skies, and finding himself at length in a region where God giveth snow like wool and casteth forth His ice like morsels. If we imagine the order reversed, we shall understand the progress of Jonah’s prayer. It starts from the cold and gloomy wilderness, and it ends in the bright and warm sunshine. “Salvation is of the Lord,” salvation even for souls so unworthy as mine--that is the last triumphant note. “The Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.” Thus the first section of the book closes. And this is the truth which it teaches us, the comfortable message which it brings, that the goodness of our God passeth knowledge. There can be no sin so grieving to Him as the sin of His chosen servants--those whom He has brought into His kingdom and entrusted with its high and honourable work. He expects much from them because they have received much from Him; and, when they disappoint Him, He must be wounded to the very heart. He must feel their disloyalty, as David felt the treachery of Ahithophel, his own familiar friend, and the rebellion of Absalom, the son whom he loved most fondly; as Christ felt the cruelty and faithlessness of Peter, the foremost of His disciples. Yet He forgives these worst offenders; He restoreth their souls. Is not this the very acme and climax of His mercy? Is not this what distinguishes Him from the best of men? They are unwilling to permit a servant who has failed them once to have an opportunity of retrieving himself; they will hardly allow him a second chance. Even Paul, the very noblest and tenderest of the apostles, refused to trust John Mark when he turned away from the work, and looked askance on him for many a day.
II. So we come to the second division of the narrative, that which concerns itself with Nineveh. It is a brief and yet most graphic account which is given us of the grandeur of the city. Its vast size is described; and the imagination is left to complete the scene, to fill in the wide area with royal palaces and crowded markets and vineyards and gardens, to summon up to view the most magnificent of all the capitals of the ancient world. The city was great, great not only to man’s thinking but to God’s, for that is the meaning of the Hebrew phrase. Looking down from heaven upon it, the Lord of all things admired its extent and stateliness and strength. But He sorrowed over its sin; and He bade His prophet travel all the way from Israel to warn it of its danger. His injunction, deliberately slighted at first, was graciously renewed; and, when it came the second time, Jonah made haste and delayed not to keep God’s commandment.