Matthew 12:39,40

Matthew 12:39

Jonah being spoken of in the text as a type of Christ, let us consider that part of his history which is typical. It is contained in the first and second Chapter s, and presents us with the following pictures:

I. Man shunning God's presence. Like those mariners who, leaving the sacred soil which was the place of God's sanctuary and the scene of God's revelations, launched forth upon the waste salt billows and made for the great heathen mart of Tarshish, so went man forth from his primitive condition of holy bliss, to seek diversion from the thoughts of God and judgment, to seek entertainment for a few short hours in the traffic and merchandise of the world.

II. God's awful wrath in consequence of man's departure from Him. The raging tempest, which well-nigh broke the ship wherein Jonah was embarked, supplies us with a just emblem of the wrath of God. By nature we live and move in the element of that wrath. Every man who has not by a personal appropriating faith laid hold of the hope set before him in the Gospel is at this moment in imminent peril.

III. The vain attempts made by man to propitiate an offended God. The great majority of men instinctively seek to have something which may serve them to fall back upon in the hour of affliction and distress. Acknowledging by a certain natural instinct that there is a God, and that they have offended Him, men will do everything but that which is required of them to make their peace with Him and obtain His favour. But then sacrifices, the mere dictates of natural religion, cannot avail to turn away the wrath of God.

IV. The Divine method of propitiation by the death of Christ. Jonah's being taken up and cast into the sea is a figurative representation of Christ's being made over, as our Substitute, to the fury of God's indignation.

V. The last point shadowed forth in Jonah's history is the triumph of Christ over death and hell meaning by that latter term the place of departed spirits. Jonah, being swallowed by the fish, was miraculously preserved alive within it, and was afterwards delivered from his marvellous hiding-place and laid upon the dry land in safety. Christ rose again the third day from the dead, in a body identical indeed with that which hung upon the cross, but spiritual, eternal, heavenly, adapted to a new and imperishable condition of existence.

E. M. Goulburn, Sermons in Holywell,p. 23.

References: Matthew 12:40. J. N. Norton, Golden Truths,p. 165.Matthew 12:41. Ibid., Old Paths,p. 487; W. M. Punshon, Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 19. Matthew 12:42. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix., No. 533; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 209; Parker, Cavendish Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 257; J. Hamilton, The Royal Preacher,p. 31.Matthew 12:43. G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 132. xii. 43-45. T. R. Evans, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiv., p. 88; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1,648.