A Study by John King (c. 1560-1621)   Jonah 1:1-2 - Jonah’s Commission, pt. 1   [This study is taken from a series of lectures given in 1594 by John King, who later became the Bishop of London in 1611.] 1  The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2  “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me” (Jonah 1:1-2, KJV). The duties of princes, pastors, people, all estates; the nature of fear, force of prayer, wages of disobedience, fruit of repentance, are herein comprised. And as the finers of silver and gold make use not only of the wedge, but even of the smallest foil or rays that their metal casteth, so in this little manual which I have in hand, besides the plenty and store of the deeper matters, there is not the least jot and tittle therein but may minister grace to attentive hearers. The substance of the chapter presently to be handled and examined, spends itself about two persons: Jonah and the mariners. In the one, opening his commission, transgression, apprehension, execution; in the other, their fear, and consequent behaviour, which I leave to their order. The words already proposed, offer us these particulars to be discussed: 1. First, a warrant, charge, or commission: “Now the word of the Lord came…”  2. Secondly, the person charged: “…to Jonah the son of Amittai…”  3. Thirdly, the matter or contents of his commission: “Arise, and go to Nineveh, that great city...”  So first, 1. In the commission, I refer you to these few and short observations: (1.) The nature of the commission. It is a word; that is, a purpose, decree, determination, edict, advised, pronounced, ratified, and not to be frustrated; according to the sentence of the psalm, “Thy word, Lord, endureth forever in heaven,” (Ps. 119). (2.) The author is the Lord, the ocean that filled all these earthly springs, who “spake by the mouth of all the prophets which have been since the world began,”  (Luke 1:70). (3.) The direction or suggestion thereof. It came; that is, it was not a phantasy or invention of Jonah, but he had his motion and inspiration thereunto. The first shows the stability of his ordinances. For with God, neither does his word disagree from his intention, because he is truth; nor his deed from his word, because he is power. Hath he spoken, and shall he not perform it? The second shows the majesty and credit of the prophecies. “For no prophecy of old time came by the will of man; but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). The third declares his ordinary and necessary course in disclosing his will, which is too excellent a knowledge for flesh and blood to attain unto without his revelation. For “who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor at any time?”  (Rom. 11:34). 1. The commission, in general, is most requisite to be weighed, that we may discern the priests of the  sanctuary from Jeroboam’s, or false priests, of whom we read that “whosoever would, might consecrate himself” (2 Kings 13:33); lawful ambassadors from erratic and wandering messengers, such as run when none has sent them; stars in the right hand of Christ, fixed in their stations, from planets and planers of an uncertain motion; shepherds from hirelings, and thieves that steal in by the window; prophets from intruders (for even the woman Jezebel called herself a prophetess, see Rev. 2); seers  from seducers, enforced to confess from a guilty conscience, as their forerunner sometimes did, of whom Zechariah maketh mention, “I am no prophet, I am an husbandman,” (Zech. 13); Aaron from Abiram; Simon Peter from Simon Magus; Paul, a doctor of the Gentiles, from Saul, a persecutor of the Christians; Cephas from Caiaphas; Jude from Judas; Christ from antichrist; apostles from apostates, backsliders, revolters, who, though they bear the name of apostles, are found liars (see Rev. 2); and finally, faithful dispensers from merchandisers of the word of God, and purloiners of his mysteries. Whoever intruded himself with impunity, and without dangerous arrogancy, into this function? The proceeding of God in this case is excellently set down in the Epistle to the Romans, wherein, in chap. 10, as the throne of Solomon was mounted unto by six stairs, so the perfection and consummation of man ariseth by six degrees. The highest and happiest stair is this: “He that shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved… But how shall they call upon him on whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe on him of whom they have not heard? or how shall they hear without a preacher? Or how shall they preach except they be sent?” (Rom. 10:13-15). A singular and compendious gradation, wherein you have 1, sending; 2, preaching; 3, hearing; 4, believing; 5, invocating; 6, saving. “For no man taketh this honour unto him, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron” (Heb. 5:4). The apostle’s rule is universal, and exempts not the lawgiver himself. For “Christ took not this honour to himself, to be made the high priest, but he that said unto him. Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee” gave it him (Heb. 5:5). The first question that God moved touching this ministration is, “Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?” (Isa. 6:8). The devil could easily espy the want of commission in the sons of Sceva, when they adjured him by the name of Jesus, whom Paul preached; “Jesus I acknowledge, and Paul I know; but who are ye?” (Acts 19:15). Your warrant is not good, your counterfeit charms are not strong enough to remove me. There are no chains of authority, no links of iron to bind the nobles and the princes of the earth, and to restrain devils, but in those tongues which God has armed from above, and enabled to his service. What was the reason that Micaiah was so confident with Ahab king of Israel (see 1 Kings 22), and Zedekiah the king’s prophet, or rather his parasite, who taunted him with insolence, and smote him on the face, that yet, notwithstanding, he neither spared the prophet nor dissembled with the king his final doom? Only this, he had his commission sealed from the Lord, and Zedekiah had none. What other reason made Elisha, a worm of the earth (in comparison), so plain with Jehoram? As in 2 Kings 3:13, “What have I to do with thee? Get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother” etc.; see there his further protestation. Had he nothing to do with the king, when the king had so much to do with him? Did he not fear the wrath of the lion, who could have said to the basest minister that ate the salt of his court, “Take his head from his shoulders”, and he would have taken it? But his commission was his brazen wall to secure him, and that, Jehoshaphat the king of Judah witnessed, saying, in ver. 12, “The word of the Lord is with him.” This is the fortress and rock that Jeremiah stood upon before the priests, prophets, and people of Judah: “If ye put me to death, ye shall bring innocent blood upon yourselves; for of a truth the Lord hath sent me unto you to speak all these words in your ears” (Jer. 26:15). Yea, the princes and people upon that ground made his apology: “This man is not worthy to die, for he hath spoken unto us in the name of the Lord our God” (Jer. 26:16). To spare my pains in examples, fearful are the woes, and not milder than wormwood, and the water of gall (for under these terms I find them shadowed, and but shadowed by the prophets), which he denounces in the course of that prophecy against false prophets, that spoke the “visions of their own hearts,” and said, “The Lord saith thus and thus; that were not sent, yet ran; were not spoken unto, yet prophesied; that cried, I have dreamed, I have dreamed,” when they were but dreams indeed, see Jer. 23. They are given to understand, that their sweet tongues will bring them a sour recompense, and that the Lord will come against them, for their lies, flatteries, chaff, stealth of his word (as they are termed), and other such impieties. Their cup is tempered by Ezekiel with no less bitterness, as in Ezek. 13, for following their own spirits, playing the foxes, seeing of vanity, divining of lies, building and daubing up walls with untempered mortar. The head and foot of their curse are both full of unhappiness. Their first entertainment is a woe; and their farewell an anathema, a cursed excommunication: “They shall not be accounted in the assembly of my people, neither shall they be written in the writings of the house of Israel” (Ezek. 13:9). To end this point; let their commission be well scanned that come from the seminaries of Rome and Rheims, to sow seeds in this field of ours, whether, as Jonah had a word for Nineveh, so these for England and other nations, yea or no; whether from the Lord (for that they pretend, as Ehud did to Eglon, Judges 3), or from Balak of Rome, who hired them to curse the people of God; whether to cry openly against sin, or to lay their mouths in the dust, and to murmur rebellion; whether of zeal to the God of the Hebrews, or to the great idol of the Romans, as they to the great Diana of the Ephesians, to continue their craft, as Demetrius there did, and lest their state should be subverted, see Acts 19; whether to come like prophets with their open faces, or in disguised attire, “strange apparel” in regard of their profession (Zeph. 1:8), a rough garment to deceive with, as the false prophet in Zechariah, in chap. 13; whether their sweet tongues have not the venom of asps under them, and in their colourable and plausible notes of peace, peace, there be any peace, either to the weal public, amidst their nefarious and bloody conspiracies, or to the private conscience of any man, in his reconciliation to their unreconciled church, formal and counterfeit absolution of sins, hearing, or rather seeing, histrionical masses, visiting the shrines and relics of the dead, numbering of pater nosters, invocation of saints, adoration of images, and a thousand such forgeries; whether they build up the walls of God’s house with the well-tempered mortar of his written ordinances, or daub up the walls of their antichristian synagogue with the untempered mortar of their unwritten traditions; whether they come ambassadors from God, and instead of Christ seek a reconciliation between God and us, and not rather to set the mark of the beast in our foreheads, to make us their proselytes, and the children of error as deeply as themselves. If this be the word they bring, a dispensation from a foreign power, to resist the powers that God hath ordained, and instead of planting faith and allegiance, to sow sedition, and not to convert our country to the truth, but to subvert the policy and state thereof, to poison our souls, and to dig graves for our bodies against their expected day, to invade the dominions, alienate the crowns, assault the lives of lawful and natural princes, to blow the trumpet of Sheba in our land, “Ye have no part in David, nor inheritance in the son of Jesse” (2 Sam. 20:1), no part in Elizabeth, nor inheritance in the daughter of king Henry, every man to your tents, O England; let them reap the wages of false prophets even to the death, as the law has designed, see Deut. 18; and let that eye want sight that pities them, and that heart be destitute of comfort that cries at their downfall. Alas! for those men. Their bloody and peremptory practices call for greater torture than they usually endure, and deserve that their flesh should be grated, and their bones rent asunder with saws and harrows of iron (as Rabbah was dealt with, in 2 Sam. 12), for their traitorous and unnatural stratagems. 2. The person to whom the commission was directed is Jonah, the son of Amittai, wherein you have, 1, his name, Jonah; 2, his parentage, the son of Amittai; 3, you may add his country from the ninth verse, a Hebrew; 4, his dwelling place, from the 2 Kings 14:25, Gath-hepher (for there was another Gath of the Philistines); 5, the time of his life and prophecy, from the same book, under the reign of Jeroboam the Second, or not far off; 6, the tribe whereof he was, namely, a Zebulonite, for that Gath appertains to the tribe of Zebulon; you have as much of the person as is needful to be known. The opinion of the Hebrews is, and some of our Christian expositors following their steps affirm, that Jonah was son to the widow of Sarepta, and that he is called the son of Amittai, not from a proper person, his father that begat him, but from an event that happened. For after Elias had restored him to life, in 1 Kings 17:17-24, the mother broke forth into this speech, “Now I perceive that thou art the man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is true.” Therehence, they say, he was named the son of Amittai, that is, the son of truth, by reason of that miracle truly accomplished. Surely the word of the Lord that gave a commission to Jonah to go to Nineveh, gives no commission to us to go to such foreign and unproper interpretations. So long as we hear it but in our own country, as the Queen of the South spoke, of those that are flesh and blood like ourselves, and interpreters, perhaps, not so much of the counsels of God as their own conjectures, we are at liberty to refuse them; where we hear it from the mouth of Solomon, or Jonah, or one that is more than them both, we are ready to give credit. Our bounds are set which we must not pass; we may not turn to the right hand nor to the left, and neither add nor diminish, nor alter anything of God’s testimonies. It is a zealous contention that God maketh in Jeremiah, chap. 44:29, “They shall know whose word shall stand, mine or theirs.” “Who hath instructed the Spirit of the Lord, or was his counsellor, or hath taught him?” (Isa 40). Shall we correct, or rather corrupt, falsify, and deprave the wisdom of God in speaking, who is far wiser than men, who made the mouth and the tongue, opens the lips and instills grace and knowledge unto them? Let it suffice us, that the Spirit of truth, and the very finger of God, in setting down his mind, has eased us of these fruitless and godless troubles, and expressed this prophet to be a Hebrew, and not a Gentile; his dwelling-place to be Gath-hepher, in the possessions of Zebulon, not Sarepta, a city of Sidon (see Luke 4). And as it is the manner of the Scripture, where the prophets are named, there to reckon withal the names of their fathers, as Isaiah the son of Amos, Jeremiah of Hilkiah, Ezekiel of Buzi, etc., so there is no likelihood to the contrary but the father of Jonah is meant when he is called the son of Amittai. But it is the manner of some to languish about words, and in seeking deeply after nothing, to lose not only their time, travel, and thanks, but their wits also. Such has been the sickness of the allegorists, for the most part, both of the former and latter times (I except not Origen, their prince and original patron), who, not contenting themselves with the literal and genuine sense of the Scripture, but making some mystery of the plainest history that ever was delivered, and darkening the evident purpose of the Holy Ghost with the busy fancies of their own heads, as if one should cast clouds and smoke upon the sunbeams, have left the Scripture in many places no more like itself than Michal’s image in the bed upon a pillow of goat’s hair, see 1 Sam. 19, was like David. How forward have our schoolmen been in this rankness of wit! How have they doted and even died upon superfluous questions; how have they defaced the precious word of God, finer than the gold of Ophir, with the dross of their own inventions, setting a pearl above value in lead, and burying the richest treasure that the world knoweth in their affected obscurities! For, not to speak of their changing the style of the Holy Ghost into such barbarous and desert terms, as that if the apostles now lived (as Erasmus noteth), they must speak with another spirit, and in another language, to encounter them. How many knots have they made in divinity, subtilties without the circle and compass of the world, and such as Chrysippus never thought upon, to as little purpose as if they had thrown dust in the air or hunted their shadows! They had done more service to the church of God if they had laid their hands (a great number of them) upon their mouths, and kept silence. Rupertus Gallus likens them to one that carries manchet at his back, and feeds upon flint stones; for these rejecting the bread of life, the simple word of God and the power thereof, macerate and starve themselves with frivolous sophistications. One of their questions, for a test, or rather, as Melchior Cane terms them, their monsters and chimeras, is whether an ass may drink baptism? It is not unlike another in that kind, whether a mouse may eat the body of the Lord? More tolerable a great deal were the questions which Albutius the mooter proposed in a controversy: Why, if a cup fell down, it brakes; if a sponge, it brakes not? Cestius as scornfully censured him: Tomorrow he will declaim why thrushes fly, and gourds fly not? These are the mists of God’s judgment upon the hearts of such men, who, having manna from heaven, prefer acorns before it, and leave the bread in their father’s house, to eat the husks of beans, and cannot be satisfied with the pure and undefiled word of God converting their souls; but being called out of darkness into a marvelous light, they call themselves out of light into a marvelous darkness again. What is this but to feel for a wall at noonday, as Job speaks? In chap. 5, that is, when the clearest light of the gospel of Christ shineth in the greatest brightness and perfection thereof, to wrap it up in the darkness of such disputations as bring no profit. You see the occasion of my speech, the indiscretion and abuse of those men, who take the Scriptures, as it were, by the neck, and writhe them from the aim and intention of the Holy Ghost. 3. The substance of the commission follows, “Arise, and go to Nineveh, that great city,” etc. Every word in the charge is weighty and important. [This study will continue, D.V., in the next issue.]     This article is taken from:  King, John (Bishop of London). Lectures Upon Jonah. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864 (originally published c. 1600). A PDF file of this book can be downloaded, free of charge, at: http://www.ClassicChristianLibrary.com.