ts in the great fish that God had prepared
was not a fiction.

Our Lord further certifies to the historicity of the book of Jonah by
his reference to the great prophet's preaching. The critic's objection
is thus stated: "Can we conceive of a heathen city being converted by an
obscure foreign prophet?"

Of course, the objection to the record of that mighty moral movement
comes from those who have counted God out of Jonah's preaching. If they
can eliminate the divine power from that event, they can easily hand the
whole record over to what they are pleased to call the "folk lore of the
Bible." Here, as ever, the critic must rid the Scriptures of the
supernatural.

But our Savior knew that "power belongeth unto God" (Psa. lxii. 11), and
he put on record the repentance of the Ninevites, saying, "The men of
Nineveh shall rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it,
_because they repented at the preaching of Jonah_." (Matt. xii. 41.) But
if the book is not history, our Lord's statement is false, for he says
the Ninevites did repent.

There is no rational possibility of denying our Lord's positive
statement without impeaching his veracity.

His words authorize the following conclusions:

I. There was a prophet whose name was Jonah, as is stated in 2 Kings
xiv. 25. He was not a myth or figment, but a prophet whose personality
is authenticated by Christ himself.

2. There was a city of Nineveh. The skepticism of other days denied the
existence of Nineveh. So completely was the prophecy concerning the
destruction of Nineveh fulfilled that the enemies of God's Word refused
to believe that the city had ever existed, until the excavations of the
last century revealed the hidden ruins. But the word of God was true,
and in God's time Nineveh was revealed.

3. God sent this same prophet Jonah to Nineveh to preach. Christ tells
us what took place under "the preaching of Jonah." It terminated in a
great awakening and reformation for:

4. "The men of Nineveh ... repented at the preaching of Jonah."

Did the Savior know what he was talking about? Did he know the truth of
the statement he made? Or, knowing (as is assumed) that there were no
such events, did he resort to _fiction_ in order to assert the
_certainty_ of his own resurrection? If the latter, then we must correct
his statement concerning Jonah, and read: "As Jonah has been
fictitiously represented to have been three days and three nights in the
whale's be