,
even when in captivity, the preservation of every servant of God who
turns to the Lord in his chastisement, the exhibition of penitence as
the way of deliverance, are the purposes for which the miracle was
wrought and told. Flippant sarcasms are cheap. A devout insight yields a
worthy meaning. Jesus Christ employed this incident as a symbol of His
Death and Resurrection. That use of it seems hard to reconcile with any
view but that the story is true. But it does not seem necessary to
suppose that our Lord regarded it as an intended type, or to seek to
find in Jonah's history further typical prophecy of Him. The salient
point of comparison is simply the three days' entombment; and it is
rather an illustrative analogy than an intentional prophecy. The
subsequent action of the Prophet in Nineveh, and the effect of it, were
true types of the preaching of the Gospel by the risen Lord, through His
servants, to the Gentiles, and of their hearing the Word. But it
requires considerable violence in manipulation to force the bestowing
of Jonah, for safety and escape from death, in the fish's maw, into a
proper prophecy of the transcendent fact of the Resurrection.

'LYING VANITIES'

'They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.'--JONAH
11. 8.

Jonah's refusal to obey the divine command to go to Nineveh and cry
against it is best taken, not as prosaic history, but as a poetical
representation of Israel's failure to obey the divine call of witnessing
for God. In like manner, his being cast into the sea and swallowed by
the great fish, is a poetic reproduction, for homiletical purposes, of
Israel's sufferings at the hands of the heathen whom it had failed to
warn. The song which is put into Jonah's mouth when in the fish's belly,
of which our text is a fragment, represents the result on the part of
the nation of these hard experiences. 'Lying vanities' mean idols, and
'their own mercy' means God. The text is a brief, pregnant utterance of
the great truth which had been forced home to Israel by sufferings and
exile, that to turn from Jehovah to false gods was to turn from the sure
source of tender care to lies and emptiness. That is but one case of the
wider truth that an ungodly life is the acme of stupidity, a tragic
mistake, as well as a great sin.

In confirmation and enforcement of our text we may consider:--

I. The illusory vanity of the objects pursued.

The Old Testament tone of reference to