A Study by John King (c. 1560-1621)   Jonah 1:1-2 - Jonah’s Commission, pt. 2   [This continues a study 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).   3. The substance of Jonah’s commission followeth, “Arise, and go to Nineveh, that great city,” etc. Every word in the charge is weighty and important. Arise. In effect, the same commandment which was given to Jeremiah, “Truss up thy loins, arise, and speak to them” (Jer. 1); the same which to Ezekiel, “Son of man, stand upon thy feet” (Ezek. 2); that is, set thyself in a readiness for a chargeable service; sit not in thy chair; lie not upon thy couch; say not to thy soul, Take thine ease; Arise! It craveth the preparation and forwardness, not only of the body, but also of the mind and spirit of Jonah. Go. When thou art up, keep not thy tabernacle; stand not in the market-place, nor in the gates of Jerusalem, nor in the courts of the Lord’s house; but gird up thy reins, put thy sandals about thy feet, take thy staff in thine hand; thou hast a journey and voyage to be undertaken. Go. To Nineveh. Not to thine own country, where thou wast born and bred, and art familiarly acquainted, linked with thy kindred and friends, and hast often prophesied, but to a foreign nation, whose language will be riddles unto thee, to the children of Asshur, the rod and scourge of Israel. Go to Nineveh. To Nineveh, a city, etc. No hamlet nor private village, but a place of frequency and concourse, proud of her walls and bulwarks, plentifully flowing with wealth, her people multiplied as the sands of the river; and the more populous it is, the more to be feared and suspected, if thy message please them not. The first that ever built a city was Cain (see Gen. 4); and it is noted by some divines, that his purpose therein was to environ himself with human strength, the better to avoid the curse of God. A great city. Large and spacious, which had multiplied her merchants above the stars of heaven, and her princes as grasshoppers (see Nah. 3); the emperor’s court, the golden head of the picture, the lady of the earth, the seat of the monarch, the mother city and head of the whole land. Cry. When thou art come to Nineveh, keep not silence, smother not the fire within thy bones, make not thy head a fountain of tears to weep in secret for the sins of that nation, write not the burden in tables, whisper not in their ears, neither speak in thy usual and accustomed strength of speech, but cry; lift up thy voice like a trumpet, charm the deafest adder in Nineveh, let thy voice be heard in their streets, and thy sound upon the tops of their houses. Against it. Thou mightest have thought it sufficient to have cried within the city of Nineveh; it would have drawn the wonder of the people upon thee, to have seen a matter so insolent and seldom used; but thou must cry against it, even denounce my vengeance, and preach fire and brimstone upon their heads if they repent not. For their wickedness, etc. But the reason shall be handled in the proper place thereof. For brevity's sake, I will reduce the whole unto three heads. 1. The place which the prophet is sent unto. Arise and go to Nineveh. 2. What he is to do in Nineveh. Cry against it. 3. For what cause. For their wickedness is come up before me. So for 1. Arise and go. These two former words, differing somewhat in degree, the one calling up Jonah, as it were from sleep, Arise; the other setting him forward in his way, Go; and the one haply belonging to the inward, the other to the outward man. As they import a dullness and security in us, without God’s instigation and furtherance, so they require a forwardness and sedulity of every servant he hath, in his several callings. Our life is a warfare upon the earth, saith Job (see Job 7), the condition whereof is still to be exercised. Jacob the patriarch, after his long experience of a hundred and thirty wearisome winters, called it “a pilgrimage of few and evil days” (Gen. 47), therefore no rest should be taken in it. They that account it a pastime show that their heart is ashes, and their hope more vile than the earth we walk upon. We must “awake from sleep, and stand up from the dead,” (for idleness is a very grave unto us), that “Christ may give us light” (Eph. 5:14). We are called into a vineyard, some one or other vocation of life, and Christianity, the universal vineyard, is common to us all. Shall we stand to see and to be seen, as in a marketplace, and do nothing? Are we now to learn that the penny of eternal bliss is reserved for workmen? And the difference between the hiring of God and the devil is, that God requireth the labour before he payeth the wages; the devil payeth the wages beforehand, that so he may dull our edge unto labour, and nurse us in idleness, for pains to come. When we hear the messengers of God return with these unwelcome tidings unto him, “We have gone through the whole world, and, behold, it sitteth still, and is at rest,” (Zech. 1), can we be ignorant what echo resounds unto it? For “when they shall say, ‘Peace and safety,’ then shall come upon them sudden destruction, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” (1 Thess. 5:3). Have we not read that idleness and security was one of the sins that overthrew Sodom and her daughters? That although themselves slept and snorted in pleasure, yet their damnation slept not? And what else is an idle man, but a city without defense, which, when the enemy of the soul hath destroyed, he saith, as that other enemy in Ezekiel, “I will go up to the land that hath no walled towers; I will go to them that are at rest, and dwell in safety, which dwell all without walls, and have neither bars nor gates” (Ezek. 38:11). The fodder, the whip, and the burden belong to the ass; meat, correction, and work unto thy servant: send him to labor that he grow not idle, for idleness bringeth much evil. Happy is that man that ordereth his servant according to that counsel; I mean, that saith unto his flesh, Arise, and it ariseth; Go, and it goeth; as the centurion in the Gospel said to his soldier, Do this, and he did it. Augustus, the emperor, hearing that a gentleman of Rome, notwithstanding a great burden of debt wherewith he was oppressed, slept quietly, and took his ease, desired to buy the pallet that he lodged upon; his servants marveling thereat, he gave them this answer, that it seemed unto him some wonderful bed, and worth the buying, whereon a man could sleep that was so deeply indebted. Surely if we consider with ourselves the duty and debt we owe to God and man, to our country, to our family, to home-born, to strangers, that is, both to Israel and to Nineveh, and most especially to those of the household of faith; that as it was the law of God before the law, that we should “eat our bread in the sweat of our face” (Gen. 3), so it is the law of the gospel also, that “he that laboureth not should not eat” (2 Thess. 3); that the blessed Son of God ate his bread, not only in the sweat, but in the blood, of his brows; rather he ate not, but it was his “meat to do his Father’s will, and to finish his work”  (John 4); that even in the state of innocency, Adam was put into the garden to dress it (see Gen. 2); that albeit all labourers are not chosen, yet none are chosen but labourers; that the fig-tree was blasted by the breath of God’s own lips with an everlasting curse, because it bare but leaves; and the axe of heavy displeasure is “laid unto the root of every tree” that is barren of good fruits, and if it be once dead in natural vegetation, it shall be twice dead in spiritual malediction, and plucked up by the root; it would make us vow with ourselves, “I will not suffer mine eyelids to slumber, nor the temples of my head to take any rest” until I have finished that charge whereunto I am appointed. Jacob’s apology to Laban may be a mirror to us all, not to neglect our accounts to a higher master than ever Laban was: “These twenty years have I been in thy house; I was in the day consumed with heat, and with frost in the night, and the sleep departed from mine eyes” (Gen. 31); so industrious was Jacob to discharge the duties of his place, and careful to make his reckoning straight with his master upon the earth. But I speak of a heavier reckoning, to a heavier lord, that will ask an account of every idle word, much more of an idle habit; and therefore let them foresee that heat, and that frost to come, those restless eyes, the hire of their fore-passed drowsiness, for days, for nights, for everlasting generations, that are ever framing an excuse, “It is either too hot or cold that I cannot work; there is a lion in the street, or a bear in the way” (Prov. 26), that I dare not go forth; that being called to an office, and having their tasks laid forth unto them, say not with Samuel at the call of the Lord, “Speak, Lord, thy servant heareth” (1 Sam. 3), but in a stubborn and perverse vein, Speak and command Lord, and appoint my order wherein I shall walk, but I neither hear thy voice, neither shall my heart go after thy commandments. “I passed by the field of the slothful,”  saith Solomon in Prov. 24, “and by the vineyard of the man destitute of understanding, and lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof.” Peruse the rest of that scripture. The wise king beheld, and considered it well, and received instruction by it, that a little sleep brought a great deal of poverty, and a little slumber a great deal of necessity. And surely as the field of the slothful is covered with nettles and thorns, so shall his body be overgrown with infirmities, his mind with vices, his conscience shall want a good testimony to itself, and his soul shall be empty of that hope hereafter which might have rejoiced it. With that, I end this point. The command to Jonah, Arise and go to Nineveh, giveth a warning to us all, for we have all a Nineveh to go unto. Magistrates, arise and go to the gate, to execute God’s judgments. Ministers, arise and go to the gospel, to do the works of evangelists. People, arise and go to your trades, to eat the labours of your hands; eye, to thy seeing; foot, to thy walking; Peter, to thy nets; Paul, to thy tents; merchant, to thy shipping; smith, to thy anvil; potter, to thy wheel; women, to your wherns and spindles; let not your candle go out, that your works may praise you in the gates. Your vocations of life are God’s sanctions; he ordained them to mankind, he blesseth them presently at his audit, he will crown them, if, when he calleth for an account of your fore- passed stewardships, you be able to say, in the uprightness of your soul, “I have run my race;” and as the master of the house assigned me, so by his grace and assistance, I have fulfilled my office. But why to Nineveh? Nineveh of the Gentiles, uncircumcised Nineveh; Nineveh of the Assyrians, imperious, insolent, intolerable Nineveh; Nineveh swollen with pride, and her eyes standing out of her head with fatness; Nineveh settled upon her lees not less than a thousand three hundred years; Nineveh infamous for idolatry with Nisroch, her abomination (see 2 Kings 19); Nineveh with idleness so unnaturally effeminated, and her joints dissolved under Sardanapalus, as some conceive, their thirty-eighth monarch, who sat and span amongst women; that as it was the wonder and by-word of the earth, so the heavens above could not but abhor it. Four reasons are alleged, why Jonah was sent to Nineveh: first, God will not smite a city or town without warning, according to the rule of his own law, that no city be destroyed before peace hath been offered unto it (see Deut. 20). The woman of Abel in her wisdom objected this law unto Joab, when he had cast up a mount against Abel, where she dwelt: “They spake in old time, and said, ‘They should ask of Abel;’ and thus have they continued” (2 Sam. 20:18); that is, first, they should call a parley and open their griefs, before they used hostility against it. The sword of the Lord assuredly is ever drawn and burnished, his bow bent, his arrows prepared, his instruments of death made ready, his cup mingled; yet he seldom poureth down his plagues, but there is a shower of mercy before them, to make his people take heed. Pax domine huic, peace be unto this house, Luke 10:5, was sounded to every door where the apostles entered; but if that house were not worthy of peace and benediction, it returned back unto them. Virtues were wrought in Chorazin and Bethsaida, before the woe took hold upon them. Noah was sent to the old world, Lot to Sodom, Moses and Aaron to the Egyptians, prophets from time to time to the children of Israel, John Baptist, and Christ and the apostles, together with signs in the host of heaven, tokens in the elements, to Jerusalem, before it was destroyed. Chrysostom, upon the first to Timothy, giveth the reason hereof, that God, by threatening plagues, showeth us how to avoid plagues, and feareth us with hell beforehand, that we may learn to eschew it. And it was his usual speech (as he there confesseth) that the commination of hell fire doth no less commend the providence of God towards man, than the promise of his kingdom; the terror of the one, and sweetness of the other, working together, like oil and wine, to make man wise to his salvation. Nineveh had not stood a longer time, if Jonah had not said before, ‘Nineveh shall be overthrown,’ the message of their overthrow, overthrew the message; the prophecy fell, and the city fell not, because her fall was prophesied. “O new and admirable thing!” saith he in a homily to the people of Antioch, the denunciation of death hath brought forth life, the sentence of destruction hath made a nullity in the sentence, etc. It was a snare, it became their fortress; it was their gulf, it became their tower of defence; they heard that their houses should fall, and they forsook not their houses, but themselves, and their ancient wicked ways. Secondly, He sendeth him to Nineveh, to make the conversion thereof, as it were, of his first-fruits, a figure and type of the conversion of other the Gentiles, and to shew to the people afar off (far from the seat of Judea, and farther from the covenant), that the days drew on, wherein they should be called by the names of sons and daughters, though they were now strangers. And as ten men in Nineveh took hold of the skirt of one Jonah, a Hebrew, and said. “We will go with thee, for we now hear that God is with you”  (Zech. 8), so ten and ten millions of men, out of all languages, should join themselves to the Jews in the worship of that Lord whom they adored. A glimpse of this overspreading light had now and then opened itself in some singular persons, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel: as in Melchisedec king of Salem; Naaman the Syrian; Job in the land of Uz; in Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, inserted into the pedigree of Christ (see Matt. 1); this to show, amongst other reasons, that as he came of the Gentiles, so for the Gentiles too; and that “the waters of life” (as Zechariah termeth them in chap. 14) “should flow from Jerusalem” (farther than to the river of Tigris, whereon Nineveh stood), “half of them towards the east sea, and half of them towards the uttermost sea,”  that both ends of the earth might be watered therewith. Thirdly, He sendeth him to Nineveh, as he sent Joseph into Egypt, to provide a remedy against a mischief not far off; Joseph to prepare bread for his father’s house in the famine; Jonah to prepare a place for the Lord’s exiles in the captivity. This carefulness of their well- doing herein appeareth unto us, in a charge given to Moab in the prophecy of Isaiah: “Hide them that are chased out; bewray not him that is fled; let my banished dwell with thee, Moab; be thou their covert from the face of the destroyer” (Isa. 16:3-4). The time was to come when the sons of Jacob should go captives into Assyria, righteous and unrighteous, clean and unclean, those whom he tendered as the apple of his own eye, with their ungrateful and ungracious brethren; yet such was his provident foresight towards his little remnant, growing as thin among the rest as olive berries upon the tree after the vintage, a berry here and there in the outmost boughs, that though they bear their part of thraldom in a strange land, yet they should meet with some of mild and tractable spirits, whose hearts had been mollified before by the preaching of Jonah. Lastly, He sendeth him to Nineveh (which I rather fasten upon), to provoke his people of the Jews, with those that were not a people, to upbraid their contempt, defy their frowardness, and to show that his soul loatheth, abhorreth, abominateth their incorrigible rebellions; whom he had girt to himself, as a girdle to one’s reins, and married in everlasting kindness; to whom he had risen early, and stretched out his hand all the day long, and cried upon them all, “Hearken, O Israel, and I will protest unto thee, Thou shalt be my people, and I will be thy God;” whom he had chidden or not chidden, with so fatherly a spirit, and such obtesting protestations, that they seem to be angry without anger, “As I live, I would not your deaths;” “Why will ye die, house of Israel? Wilt thou not be made clean? When shall it once be?” Lastly, to whom he had appealed, though men of unequal judgments, yet not so far from equality as to condemn his ways: “Wherein have I grieved thee? Testify against me;”  these he giveth to understand, that, at the preaching of one prophet,—when they had precept upon precept,—a stranger among strangers, a man of an unknown tongue, the whole people of Nineveh, though heathenish and idolatrous, should be won to repentance. “Arise, Jonah, go to Nineveh;” sanctify a people unto me, where I had no people; fetch me sons and daughters from far; let the barren bear children, and let the married be barren. I have been served with the sins of Israel for a long time, I am weary of their backsliding; let them henceforth lie and rot in their iniquity, go thou to Nineveh. Many the like angry and opprobrious comparisons hath the mouth of the Lord uttered with much indignity in other places: In the eighteenth of Jeremiah, “Ask now amongst the heathen. Who hath heard such things? The virgin of Israel hath done very filthily;”  strumpets and brothels had done but their kind, but in the virgin of Israel who would have thought it? In the first of Hosea, “Go, take thee a wife of fornication;”  the meaning of the type is this, I will find more faithfulness in a land inured to whoredoms, than one which I tenderly loved as mine own wife. Christ in the Gospel justifieth this collection against the evil and adulterous generation of that time: “The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and, behold, a greater than Jonah is here”  (Matt. 12). And in the same evangelist, he rateth them in parables, for despising the doctrine of John: “Publicans and harlots shall go before you into the kingdom of God, for they believed him; and ye, though ye saw it, were not moved to repentance” (Matt. 21). The argument briefly thus standeth: the people of Nineveh shall condemn the people of Israel, for they will repent at the preaching of one Jonah; the others repent not at the preaching of many hundreds of prophets. It is a curse of all curses, the very bottom of the vial, and dregs of the vengeance of God, when prophets are willed to relinquish their accustomed flocks, and their message is translated to foreigners and strangers; the dust of whose feet but shaken against a city or town, or the lap of their garment emptied, the least remembrance, I mean, and watchword in the world, between God and his servants, that here or there they have been, delivered their errand in his name, and were not accepted, shall witness (with a witness) their disobedience in the day of his visitation. So the disciples of Christ were willed to proclaim in every city of the earth, where they were not received, even in the streets and thoroughfares thereof, “The very dust of your city which cleaveth unto us, we wipe off against you: notwithstanding, know this, that the kingdom of God was come near unto you” (Luke 10). You see the scourge of those places from which the disciples are enforced to go for want of entertainment; the kingdom of God goeth with them. And if that kingdom be once gone, their joy goeth with it; all the empires and dominions in the world subdued, all sceptres and crowns heaped together, cannot bless them. Paul and Barnabas, in Acts 13, observed the direction of their master to the Jews at Antioch, both in gesture and speech; for they first shook off the dust of their feet against those that despised them, and then went to Iconium; but they had told them before their going (which, if they had any sense, was as the wounding of penknives and razors unto their hearts), “It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken unto you, because the law must come out of Zion, and the gospel begin at Jerusalem; but seeing you put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.” Gospel and everlasting life, you hear, are joined together. And therefore the judgment of God was sharper against them there pronounced, than if they had brought them tidings, such as these: “Behold, the Romans are come to take away your kingdom, to fire your towns, ruinate your houses, ravish your wives and daughters, to dash your infants against the stones in the streets, to pull your eyes from out your heads, and your bowels from out your bodies.” Behold, we turn to the Gentiles, wild, unnatural, and neglected branches; and herein behold the full measure of your miseries, behold the dispersion and dissipation of your persons upon the face of the earth, behold the desolation and waste of your country, behold the detestation of your names, the hissing and clapping at your downfall amongst all nations. The loss of the word of God hath lost you credit, liberty, peace, prosperity, salvation, both in your own days and in the days of your children’s children. In the eighteenth of the Acts, when the Jews at Corinth resisted and blasphemed the doctrine of Paul, “testifying unto them, that Jesus was that Christ,” he shook his raiment as before, and loosed his tongue with much boldness against them: “Your blood be upon your own heads, I am clean; from henceforth I will go to the Gentiles.” As if he had said, I found you the children of death, and so I leave you; grow in your filthiness and unrighteousness till you have fulfilled the measure of your forefathers; for mine own part, I wash my hands in innocency, I can free my soul in the sight of God, I was careful to apply my cure to the hurts of Corinth, but you were not healed. Lastly, at Rome, in the last of the Acts, he made an open proclamation to the unbelieving Jews, “Be it known unto you that the salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles, and they shall hear it.” And so be it known unto us (my brethren) that the meaning of the Holy Ghost in these terms of promulgation, know (in Luke 10) and be it known (in Acts 20), was to make these despisers of Antioch, Corinth, and Rome, examples to all posterity, especially to us, on whom the ends of the world are come, and with the end of the world an end of all goodness, that if we take not warning hereby, as we plough the like disobedience, so we shall reap the like wretchedness. If ever the like transgression be found in this land of ours (I will sooner wish it a wilderness for serpents and dragons to dwell in) that as Jordan went back and turned his course, so the gospel go back and turn his passage; and as it was said to a prophet in Israel, “Arise, and go to Nineveh,” so it be said to the prophets in England, Arise, and go into India, Turkey, or Barbary, and there prophesy, and there eat your bread; I will then say that judgment hath both begun and made an end with us, and that our case is more desperate than if the ground of this island had opened her jaws, and in one common grave buried all her inhabitants. If ever the like transgression be found in this city of yours (I will sooner wish it pools of water, and all the stones of your building thrown down into emptiness), that as the brutish people of the Gadarenes esteemed of their swine, so you of the pleasure of sin for a season, more than Christ Jesus, and even hunt him from your coasts, as they did; and as it was said unto a prophet in Israel, Arise, and go to Nineveh, so to the prophets amongst you. Arise, and go the borders, where theft and revenge are held for current law, and all the streams of blood which Christ shed upon the tree, cannot beg redemption for one injury done unto them; go, carry your tidings of peace to those unpeaceable, uncivil, lawless, and graceless persons; then were your honour gone. And though the gravel of your river that bringeth in merchandise unto you, were turned into pearls, and every shower of rain from the clouds above were a shower of silver and gold into your houses, yet then were you cast from the favour of God, your sons and your daughters accursed, the sin of their fathers not to be forgotten, nor the iniquity of the mothers to be done away, whilst your name and memory should continue. The prophets are yet in Israel, long may they prophesy in Israel; the pearl is yet in our field, foreign merchants have not bought it from us; the gospel is yet amongst us, oh always may it flourish, and spread like a palm- tree, amidst our tabernacles; the kingdom of God is now not far off: neither in heaven above, that we need climb up; neither in the earth beneath, that we need dig low; neither beyond the sea, that we need go over for it; neither in those mists and obscurities, wherein former ages had involved it. We have the sound thereof daily in our ears, the books in our houses and hands, the letter walking through our lips. Oh that we wanted not the power of the gospel in our consciences, the life and manifestation of it in our lives. May the Lord make a happy and an inseparable conjunction between all these, and grant that his law and our obedience may always meet together, his gospel and our fruits kiss each other, his truth and our righteousness, his blessings and our thankfulness, never be found asunder! Let him say of England, even for ever and ever, as sometimes he said of Zion, Here will I dwell, I have chosen England for my habitation (see Ps. 68); let him confirm that blessing of the psalm upon us: The Lord gave the word, great was the company of the preachers. And let him make those preachers and hearers, hearers and doers, doers and perseverers, good teachers, good learners, good livers, everlasting companions within our borders. So shall our land be blessed with all both heavenly and earthly increase, and God, even our own God, shall never repent that he bestowed such blessing upon us. Amen. [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.