itary stranger to thunder out his
loud cry among all these crowds! But he had learned to do what he was
bid; and without wasting a moment, he 'began to enter into the city a
day's journey,' and, no doubt, did not wait till the end of the day to
proclaim his message. Let us learn that there is an element of
threatening in God's most merciful message, and that the appeal to
terror and to the desire for self-preservation is part of the way to
preach the Gospel. Plain warnings of coming evil may be spoken tenderly,
and reveal love as truly as the most soothing words. The warning comes
in time. 'Forty days' of grace are granted. The gospel warns us in time
enough for escape. It warns us because God loves; and they are as
untrue messengers of His love as of His justice who slur over the
declaration of His wrath.

II. Note the repentance of Nineveh (vs. 5-9). The impression made by
Jonah's terrible cry is perfectly credible and natural in the excitable
population of an Eastern city, in which even now any appeal to terror,
especially if associated with religious and prophetic claims, easily
sets the whole in a frenzy. Think of the grim figure of this foreign
man, with his piercing voice and half-intelligible speech, dropped from
the clouds as it were, and stalking through Nineveh, pealing out his
confident message, like that gaunt fanatic who walked Jerusalem in its
last agony, crying, 'Woe! woe unto the bloody city!' or that other, who,
with flaming fire on his head and madness in his eyes, affrighted London
in the plague. No wonder that alarm was kindled, and, being kindled,
spread like wildfire. Apparently the movement was first among the
people, who began to fast before the news penetrated to the seclusion of
the palace. But the contagion reached the king, and the popular
excitement was endorsed and fanned by a royal decree. The specified
tokens of repentance are those of ordinary mourning, such as were common
all over the East, with only the strange addition, which smacks of
heathen ideas, that the animals were made sharers in them.

There is great significance in that 'believed God' (ver. 5). The
foundation of all true repentance is crediting God's word of
threatening, and therefore realising the danger, as well as the
disobedience, of our sin. We shall be wise if we pass by the human
instrument, and hear God speaking through the Prophet. Never mind about
Jonah, believe God.

We learn from the Ninevites what is true re