The Knell of Nineveh
“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” — Jonah in., 4.
IN the banks of the Tigris there is a great capital, sixty
miles in circumference, surrounded by a wall broad enough to allow three chariots to go abreast; fifteen hundred turrets, each two hundred feet high, carrying aloft the grandeur of the city. There are six hundred thousand inhabitants. The metropolis is not like our crowded cities; but gardens wreathe the homes of private citizens with tropical blaze of color, wet with the spray of falling waters, and there are pasture-fields, on which cattle browse, in the very midst of the city. It is a delicious climate, even in midsummer never rising to more than seventy degrees. Through the gates of that city roll the commerce of Eastern and Western Asia. On its throne sits Sardanapalus, his every meal a banquet, his every day a coronation. There are polished walls of jasper and chalcedony, bewildering with arrow-head inscriptions, and scenes of exciting chase and victorious battle. There are mansions adorned with bronze, and vases and carved statues of ivory, and ceilings with mother-of-pearl, and mantel enameling, and floors with slabs of alabaster. There are other walls with sculptured flowers and paneling of Lebanon cedar and burnished copper, and doorways guarded by winged lions. The city roars with chariot wheels and clatters with swift hoofs, and is all arush and ablaze with pomp and fashion and power. The river Tigris bounds the city on one side, and moat and turreted wall bound it on the other sides, and there it stands defiant of earth and heaven. Fraud in her store-houses. Uncleanness in her dwellings. Obscene display in her theatres. Iniquity everywhere. Nineveh the magnificent. Nineveh the vile. Nineveh the doomed.
One day, a plain-looking man comes through the gate into that city. He is sun-burned as though he had been under the browning process of a sea- voyage. Indeed, he had been wrecked, and picked up by such a life-boat as no other man ever rode in, a whale’s fins and flukes being to him both oars and rudder. The man had been trying to escape his duty of preaching a disagreeable sermon; but now, at last, his feet strike the street of that city. No sooner has he passed under the shadow of the wall and entered it, than, clearing his throat for loud and distinct utterance, he begins; and the water-carrier sets down his jug, and the charioteer reins in the steeds, and the soldiers on the top of the wall break ranks to look and listen, while his voice shivers throu2:h the avenues, and reverberates amidst the dwellings of potentate and peasant, as he cries out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” The people rush out of the market-places and to the gates to listen to the strange sound. The king invites the man to tell the story amidst the corridors of the palace. The courtiers throng in and out amidst the statues and pictures and fountains, listening to the startling message, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
“What is that fellow about?” say some of the people. “Is he a madman escaped from his keepers? He must be an alarmist, who is announcing his morbid fears. He ought to be arrested, and put in the prison of the city.” But still the man moves on, and still the cry goes up.
“Yet forty clays, and Nineveh shall bo overthrown.” There is no madness in his eye, there is no fanaticism in his manner, but only a Divine authority, and a terrible earnestness which finally seizes the whole city. People rush from place to place, and say, “Have you seen that prophet? What does he mean? Is it to be earthquake, or storm, or plague, or besiegement of foreign enemy?” Sardanapalus puts off his jeweled array and puts on mourning, and the whole city goes down on its knees, and street cries to street, and temple to temple, and the fifteen hundred turrets join the dirge, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” A black covering is thrown over the horses and the sheep and the cattle. Forage and water are kept from the dumb brutes, so that their distressed bellowing may make a dolorous accompaniment to the lamentation of six hundred thousand souls who wring their hands, and beat their temples, and throw themselves into the dust, and deplore their sin, crying out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
God heard that cry. He turned aside from the affairs of eternal state, and listened. He said, “Stop! I must go down and save that city. It is repenting, and cries for help, and it shall have it, and Nineveh shall live.” Then the people took down the timbrels, and loosened the foot of the dance, and flung new light on the panels of alabaster, and started the suppressed fountains, and the children clapped their hands; and from Sardannpalus on the throne, clear down to the keeper of the city gate, where brown-fiiced Jonah first went in with his thrilling message, there were song, and laughter, and congratulation, and festivity, and jubilee. “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them: and he did it not.”
I learn, in the first place, from this subject the jirecision and ‘punctuality of the Divine arrangement. You will see that God decided exactly the day when Nineveh’s lease of mercy should end. If Jonah preached that sermon on the first day of the month, then the doom was to fall upon Nineveh on the tenth day of the next month. So God decides what shall be the amount of our rebellion. Though there may be no sound in the heavens, he has determined the length of his endurance of our sin. It may be forty days, it may be forty hours, it may be forty minutes, it may be forty seconds. The fact that the affairs of God’s government are infinite and multifarious is no reason why he should not attend to the minutiee. God no more certainly decided that on June 15th, 1215, England should have her Magna Charta; nor that on the 4th of July, 1776, the Declaration of Independence should go forth; nor that at half- past eleven o’clock at night on the 14th of December, 1799, George Washington should die; nor that forty days after Jonah preached that sermon Nineveh’s chance for mercy should end unless she repented, than he has decided the point beyond which you and I can not pass, and still obtain the Divine clemency. What careful walking this ought to make for those who are unsaved, lest the hour-glass of their opportunity be almost empty! Men and women do not lose their souls by putting off repentance forever, but only by putting it off one second after the time is up. They propose to become Christians in mid-life, but they die in youth; or they propose in old age to be Christians, but they die in mid-life; or on the forty-first day they will attend to the matter, but on the fortieth Nineveh is overthrown.
gg THE KXELL OF XIXEVEE.
Standing on a, ship’s deck amidst a coil of chains, sailors roughly tell you to stand back if you do not want your limbs broken, or, by the chains, be hurled overboard, for they are going to let go the anchor; and when the anchor does go, the chains make the deck smoke with their speed. As swiftly our time runs away from us. Now it seems coiled all around us in a pyramid of years and days and minutes; but they are going, and they will take us off with their lightning velocity. If I should by some supernatural revelation to-night tell you just how long or how brief will be your opportunity for repentance and salvation, you would not believe me. You would say, “I shall have tenfold that time; I shall have a hundredfold that time.” But you will not have more; you will have less. You have put off repentance so long that you are going to be very much crowded in this matter of the soul’s salvation. The corner of time that is left you is so small that you will hardly have room to turn around in it. You are like an accountant who has to have a certain number of figures added up by four o’clock in the afternoon. It is two full, round hours’ work, and it is a quarter-past three o’clock, and yet he has not begun. You are like a man in a case of life and death five miles from the depot, and the train starts in thirty minutes, and you have not harnessed the horse. You are like a man who comes to the bridge across the Naugatuck Kiver in time of a freshet. The circumstances are such that he must go across. The bridge quivers, the abutment begins to give way; but he stands and halts and waits, until the bridge cracks in twain and goes down, hoping then that on the floating timbers he may get over to the other shore.
God is not looking inertly and unconcernedly upon the position jou occupy. Just as certainly as there is a bank to the East River, just so certainly there is a bank to the river of your opportunity. The margin is fixed. There will be a limit to God’s forbearance. “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
Still further, I learn from this subject that religious learning may seem preiwsterous. Now, we think that our city is safe from all foreign invasion. We have Fort Hamilton, the Battery, Fort Lafayette, and a half-dozen strongholds; but the city of Nineveh had fifteen hundred turrets, and they were all strongholds. Then it had for a natural defense the Tigris, and it was not an easy thing for an army to swim across that river under the shadow of a wall on which stood a defending army; and yet it was through that impregnable city that Jonah went, uttering the warning words of my text. It must at first have seemed preposterous to a great many of the people. So it is now that religious warning seems to many an absurdity. It is more to them a joke than any thing else. “Repent? Prepare? Was there ever a man with stronger health than I have? Vision clear, hearing alert, lungs stout, heart steady. Insurance companies tell me I shall have seventy years of life. My father and mother were both long-lived. Feel the muscle in my arm.” Ah, my brother, it is not preposterous when I come out to tell you that you need to make preparation for the future. I have noticed that it is the invalids who live on. They take more care of their health, and so they outlive the robust and athletic. I have noticed in my circle of acquaintances, for the last few years, that five robust and athletic men go out of life to one invalid. Death prides himself on the strength of the castle he takes. “Boast not thyself of the morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” Dr. Eddy, the eloquent missionary secretary, died the other day from swallowing a small flake of an oyster-shell. EmiliusLepidus lost his life by having his toe wounded. A splinter may be lancet sharp enough to bleed our life away. Look out! The slip of a railroad train from the track, the rush of a runaway horse through the street, any one often thousand perils may be upon you. “In such a day and hour as you think not, the Son of man cometh.” Your opportunity for repentance is almost over, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
Still farther, I learn from my subject that God gives every man a fair chance for his life. The iniquity of Nineveh was accumulating. It had been rolling up and rolling up. There the city lay — blotched, seething, festering under the sun. Why did not God put an end to its iniquity? Why did not God’ unsheathe some sword of lightning from the scabbard of a storm-cloud, and slay it? Why did he not with some pry of an earthquake throw it into the tomb where Caraccas and Lisbon now lay? AVhy did he not submerge it with the scorn of his indignation, as he did Ilerculaneum and Pompeii? It was because he wanted to give the city a fair chance. You would have thought that thirty days would have been enough to repent in, or twenty days, or ten days. Ay-, you would have said, “If that city don’t quit its sin in five days, it never will.” But see the wide margin. Listen to the generosity of time. “Yet forty days!”
Be frank, my brother, and confess to-night that God is giving you a fair chance for safetj’-, a better chance than he gave to Nineveh. They had one prophet. You have heard the voices of M.y. They had one warning. You have bad a thousand. They had forty days. Some of you have had forty years. Sometimes the warnings of God have come upon your soul soft as the breath of lilies and frankincense, and then again as though hurled from a catapult of terrific providence. God has sometimes led you to see your unsaved condition while you were walking amidst perils, and your hair stood on end, and you stopped breathing; you thought your last moment had come. Or, through protracted illness, he allowed you in many a midnight to think over this subject, when all was still save the ticking of the clock in the hall and the beating of your own anxious heart. Warned that you were a sinner. Warned that you needed a divine Saviour. Warned of coming retribution. Warned of an eternity crowded with splendor or catastrophe. Warned by the death of those with whom you were familiar. Warned day after day, and month after month, and year after year — warned, warned, warned. Oh, my dear brother! if your soul is lost, in the day of judgment you will have to acknowledge “no man in Brooklyn ever had a better chance for heaven than I had. I was preached to, and prayed for, and divinely solicited. I was shown the right, and fully persuaded of it; but I did not act and I did not believe, and now, in the presence of a burning earth and a flying heaven, I take the whole responsibility. Hear me, men! angels! devils! — I took the life of my own soul; and I did it so thoroughly that it is done forever. And now I trudge off over the hot desert and under the burning sky — a suicide! a suicide!” Yes, I think you have all been warned; and if up until this very hour you have happened to escape such intimation, to-night I ring it in your ears: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
Still further, I learn from this subject that lolien the people repent, the Lord lets them off. While yet Nineveh was on its knees, and Sardanapalus sat in the ashes, and the unfed cattle were yet moaning in the air, and the people were yet deploring their sin, God reversed the judgment, and said, “Those people have repented. Let them live!” And the news flew. The gardens saved. The palaces saved. Six hundred thousand people saved. A belt of sixty miles of city saved. Let the news be flung from one wall to the other; from the east wall, clear over to the west wall. Let the bells ring! Let the cymbals clap! Let flags be fluno; out from all the fifteen hundred turrets! Let the king’s lamp-lighters kindle up the throne-room! “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them: and he did it not.” In other words, when a sinner repents, God repents. The one gives up his sins; the other gives up his judgments. The moment that a man turns to God, the relation of the whole universe toward him is changed, and the storms, and the lightnings, and the thunders, and the earthquakes, and the grandeurs of the judgment- day, and the realities of the eternal world, all become his coadjutors. God and the angels come over on his side. Repent, give up your sin and turn to God, and you will be saved. ‘Ah,” says some one, “that’s a toudi thins: to do.” “I have been drinking,” says some one; or, “I have been unchaste,” sa3’s some one; or, “I have been blasphemous,” says another; or, “I have been a Sabbath-breaker,” says another; or, “I have a hard heart,” says another, “and now you ask me to give up my sin. I can not do it — and I won’t do it.” Then you will die. That is settled. But somebody else says, “I will give up my sin, and I will now take the Lord for my portion.” You will live. That is just as certainly settled. You will to-night either have to fling away sin or flingaway heaven. The one is a husk — the other is a coronet. The one is a groan — the other is an anthem. The one is a sting — the other is an illumination. Christ’s fair complexion, of which his contemporaries wrote, is gone, and his face is red and his hands are red and his feet are red with the rushing blood of his own suffering, endured to get you out of sin and death and hell. Oh, will you to-night implore him to let his suffering take the place of your ill desert? If you will, all is well, and you may now begin to twist garlands for your brow, for you are already a victor. All heaven comes surging upon your soul in the announcement, “There is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” Now, will you do it? I care nothing for a sermon unless it has an application, and this is the application: will you do it? “Ah,” says some one, “I believe that is right. I mean some day to surrender the entirety of my nature to God. It is reasonable. I mean to be a Christian, but not now.” That is what thousands of you are saying.
I am afraid if you do not give your Leart to God to-night, you never will. You may have heard of the ship Rebecca Goddard that came near one of our ports this last winter. They were all scoured up and ready for the landing, when, coming almost into the harbor, an ice-floe took the ship and pushed it out to sea, and it drifted about two or three days, and there was great suft’ering, and one was frozen dead at his post. How near they got into the harbor, and yet they did not get in! How many there are here to-night who feel they are almost in the harbor of
God’s mercy! Why do you not come ashore, lest some ice-floe of sin and worldliness drive you out again to the sea, and you die in the rigging? I throw you this rope to-night. I hurl you this warning. Make fast to heaven now. This moment is vanishing, and with it may go every thing; and so I run up and down through this audience with the banner of the cross — Rally, immortal men, rally!
“But,” says some one in the house, “I won’t take your advice. I’ll risk it. I defy God. Here I take my stand, and I ask no odds either of earth or heaven.” Let me tell such that they are in a battle where they will be worsted. “Yet forty days!” Perhaps thirty days. Perhaps ten days. Perhaps three days. Perhaps one day The horses that drag on that chariot of doom are lathered with the foam of a great speed, and their hoofs clip fire from the flinty road, and their nostrils throb with the hot haste as they dash on. Get out of the way, or the wheels will roll over you. You can not endure the ire of an incensed God. Throw yourselves down on your knees now, and pelt the heavens with blood-red cries for mercy. The terminal chance is going, the last chance is going, going. Oh, wake up before you wake up among the lost! May God Almighty, by his eternal Spirit, wake you up!
There is a story running indistinctly through my mind of a maiden whose lover was doomed to be put to death when the curfew bell struck nine o’clock at night, and she thought that if she could keep that bell from ringing for a little while, her lover and friend would be spared. And so, under the shadow of the night, she crept up into the tower, and laid hold of the tongue of the bell. After a while the sexton came up to the tower, and he put his hand on the rope, and waited for the right moment to come; and then by the light of his lantern and his watch he found it was nine o’clock, and he seized the rope, and he pulled, and the bell turned, but in silence, and the maiden still held on to the tongue of the bell swinging back and forth wildly through the belfry, and the curfew bell rang not, and so time was gained, and pardon arrived, and a precious life was saved. Oh, it seems to me as if there were those here doomed to death. You have condemned yourselves. It seems to me as if the death -knell of your immortal soul were about to strike. The angel of God’s justice has his hand on the rope, and yet I seize the tongue of that bell, and I hold on, hoping to gain a little time, and I cry out, “0 God! not yet! not yet!” hoping that time may be gained, and pardon may fly from the throne, and your soul may live. May the God who saved Nineveh save you! But some of you have put it off so long that I fear your time is up.