The Storm

“But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.” — Jonah i, 4. “Stormy wind fulfillimj his word.” — Ps. cxlviii. 8. /

y rriHE Lord now begins to deal with Jonah with the view of -L bringing him to repentance and obedience. He has perinitted him to carry out his project of fleeing from the shores of the sacred land. He has quietly left him to succeed so far, that he thinks his plan is now safely on foot. He has not interfered

/ to baffle any one of the successive steps he has had to take in

I putting his design into execution. Jonah has been allowed

thoroughly to show all his desire, and thoroughly to prosecute all

his design. And now, when the utmost success he could have

wished has crowned his efforts, immediately the Lord interposes

to show their futility.

For the Lord can afford to wait. You may trespass against Him, and pass on apparently unpunished, the Lord apparently uncognizant. But the path along which you pass has the punishment lining both sides of it, and looming dark at some surely fixed point farther on. In combination with your envious brothers you may succeed in quietly selling Joseph into the hands of Ishmaelites, and there may be no word of him and your offence against him for many days. But a day full surely comes, when, in combination with the same brothers, ranged in full number, rank and file, and face to face, you have to cry out, “We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us” (Gen. xlii. 21). God has many an agent whom He may commission in pursuit. He may therefore make no haste in putting any of them under commission; and you may have enormously the start of your pursuer. But the fire, or the tempest, or the water, or the pestilence, when once under the command of the Most High, calmly and surely hunt down the fugitive, and bring him resistlessly to the bar. There is no art that can elude or baffle the messengers of Him who is the Judge of the quick and the dead. There is no blinding them; there is no bribing them. There is no loophole of escape. “Be sure your sin will find you out.” With what measure you mete out to others, it shall be measured to you again. “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” “Though they dig into hell, thence shall mine hand take them; though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down; though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence; and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them” (Amos ix. 2, 3).

Surely if there be “no divination against Israel,” still less can there be against Israel’s God. All things are naked and open unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do; and all the powers and elements of nature are in His hand, to prosecute His controversies and to serve His purposes. Flight from Him is futile, useless, and in vain.

Oh, what praise is due to that blessed Mediator, through whom flight to God is possible, yea, blessed! Seek no hiding-place from. God. Let God himself be your hiding-place. “Deliver me, 0 Lord, from mine enemies: I flee unto Thee to hide me” (Ps. cxliii. 9). “For this shall every one that is godly pray unto Thee in a time when Thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him. Thou art my hiding-place; Thou shalt preserve me from trouble; Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance” (Ps. xxxii. 6, 7). Ultimately Jonah also learnt to adopt this more excellent way; but not till he had been taught by the discipline of sore and stern experience.

Accordingly “the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.” A “great wind,” a “mighty tempest;” and “the ship like to be broken,” — as when the Lord sends forth “the east wind that breaketh the ships of Tarshish.”

I. Now let us observe here that it is not said there arose a great wind; but, “The Lord sent out a great wind.” The Lord’s hand is recognised, The storm is attributed not to the elements of nature, but to the God of nature; to Him who is over all and “above all.” He has established laws in nature; but they cannot administer themselves. The Lawgiver administers them. He has arranged a series of causes and elements, and placed them in various adaptations towards one another. But He supports, maintains, controls, and moves them at His own pleasure. “Praise ye Him, sun and moon: praise Him, all ye stars of light. Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord: for He commanded, and they were created. He hath also established them for ever and ever: He hath made a decree which shall not pass. Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and all deeps: fire and hail; snow and vapour; stormy wind, fulfilling His word” (Ps. cxlviii. 3-8). “They continue this day according to Thine ordinances, for all are Thy servants” (Ps, cxix. 91). Such is the doctrine of Scripture concerning the elements and laws of nature. They are distinguished, indeed, by permanence of properties and constancy of operation. Their regularity is unbroken, save when miracle has occasionally intervened. Their movements are calculable, or at least fit subject for calculation. The movements of the planets have actually been calculated by human wisdom; and the motions of every mote of dust and drop of water are capable of being as accurately predicted, were man’s powers of calculation as great as we can conceive them to be. But while perfect regularity pervades all nature, and thus man can reckon on a steady order of progression, in respect of “day and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest,” surely this is not to exclude the superior and supreme action of a living and personal God superintending and directing all. The order and regularity with which events fall out, surely does not go to invalidate the truth, that it is by divine superintendence, appointment, and control that they do so. It only shows in addition that the Being who arranges and guides all, is a God, not of confusion, but of order. The very regularity which scoffers found upon as a proof that the laws of nature may account for all without introducing the idea of a Supreme Ruler, will be regarded by right reason, as well as by spiritual faith, as not only proving that there is an almighty personal Governor sitting above all, and guiding all continually, but that He is characterised by no iitful, arbitrary, capricious changeableness; that He is a “God of order,” “the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

The Scriptures, in speaking of natural events, are remarkable for the unfaltering and continual ascription of them to God. “There arose a great wind,” the vast majority of men would say. Holy Scripture uses this style: “The Lord sent out a great wind into the sea.” Hence, according to the same style, those who go down into the sea are said not merely to see great works and wonders, but the works and wonders of the Lord; as in that magnificent, that unrivalled description of a storm, “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. For He commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven; they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven. Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!” (Ps. cvii. 23-31).

Throughout that splendid ode, the hand of the Lord in sending forth and recalling the winds, and conducting the whole terrific drama of the storm from first to last, is sedulously and sustainedly acknowledged.

This is a peculiarity distinguishing the Scriptures. In them, justice is ever done to the Supreme Being; and in a measure, by all those, and by none else than those, who have drank into the spirit of the Scriptures. Believers must be conscious of this, as forming part of the great change which they have undergone in being turned from darkness to light. Formerly they had no pleasure in retaining God in their remembrance; they had no disposition to observe His hand and work in creation and providence. They took no delight in generously doing Him the justice of attributing the stores of plenty wherewith the world is re-

62 The Stoinn.

plenished to His bounteous liberality; nor in reverentially owning His voice in the tempest and the thunder, or His hand in the bolts of lightning, or the stormy wind fulfilling His command. Their thoughts of God, indeed, may at one time have been little better than as of some abstract, impersonal, infinite terror, hanging like a pall of death on their spirit. A living God, capable of entering into fellowship with them, and striving to bring them into fellowship with Him, may not have been in all their thoughts. But when they underwent a change that may be described by saying that the principles of their nature were brought into harmony with the principles of Scripture, so that the language of Scripture became the language of their heart, — in other words, the language and mind of God’s Spirit became the language and mind of their spirit also; — then, just as Scripture witnesses unfalteringly for the supremacy and sovereignity of God — of our God, who is in the heavens, and doeth whatsoever pleaseth Him; yea, doeth all things, and doeth all things well — so also did their thoughts and tendencies turn towards the acknowledgment of their God, the living and the true, the One and the only God; and nature became to them an open volume, in which they have ever since been reading “the invisible things of God, even His eternal power and Godhead,” understanding and seeing them in the mirror of “the things that He hath made,” and the events which He causeth to fall out.

There are few surer signs of a change of heart and feelings towards God than a strong disposition to trace with delight the working of His hand and the evidence of His presence in the works of creation and providence. The renewed soul longs after God — the living God: “When shall I come and appear before God?” It hath a feeling many times as if it would “break” (Ps. cxix. 20) in its yearning to get near unto God. There is at such times a deep feeling almost of impatience at the present necessity of walking by faith — of having to be content with fellowship conducted only by faith. But in this trying life of faith it is delightful to read in the heavens, stretched out with their glittering hosts of mighty mansions: or in the urgent ascending journey of the morning sun, scattering with his glory the shades of darkness; or in the mighty roll of the billows, when they rise to assert their utmost majesty, as if each in turn

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were king of the ocean realm; or in the voice of thunder, that breaketh the cedars of Lebanon; or in the lightning flash, seeming to create out of darkness, and bury with utmost speed again, the scenery on which, from heaven above, it glanceth forth its rapid glory: — in all these it is delightful to a child of God to read the working and the hand of the Father who has promised to bless and to protect him. And though nature’s estate carries in it, in the meantime, many a ground of sorrow, and many a remembrancer of sin, — as when the low monitory wail of tempest prophesies the storm that shall put many a life in jeopardy; and the sullen underswell and moan of the waves, outliving that storm, is too often but the requiem of victims that failed in their weakness to outride it, — it is a relief to the believing heart to know that these sore evidences of derangement and misrule shall not always last; and that even already they are the “groanings” of creation, “travailing” in pain to be emancipated from the bondage of corruption, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God,” and longing to be delivered, as at last creation shall, “into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. viii. 19-22). At such times the believer learns to glory in this hope: — “Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” Nor is he backward to remember the solemn admonition; — “Seeing then that all these present things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all manner of holy conversation and godliness?” (2 Pet. iii. 11, 13).

II. Another very interesting and important point is raised in reading this verse. We see God’s controversy with one individual involving many others in danger. The storm is sent forth to pursue, arrest, and punish Jonah, but it implicates in his punishment multitudes, doubtless — multitudes who had neither share nor knowledge of his guilt. Certainly it implicates all that sail with him; and many other vessels, in all probability, were exposed to the same tempest.

Now, God can easily vindicate His righteousness in involving many in the chastisement of Jonah; but Jonah cannot escape the responsibility and guilt of having been the occasion of injury to others.

1. The rio-hteousness of God is easily vindicated. No doubb the storm was primarily designed to prosecute His quarrel with Jonah. It was appointed for liivfi, — for him so specially and expressly, so that, save for him, we have no reason to believe it would have been sent out at all. And as a pursuer to arrest the flight of a disobedient subject, the commission given to it is manifestly and wholly righteous. With regard to the other sufferers from the storm, let us bear in remembrance God’s great long-suffering and forbearance. Let us not forget that “every sin deserveth God’s wrath and curse, both in this life and in that which is to come.” If this solemn statement be true, everything less, in the case of unconverted sinners, than the execution of the sentence on the barren fig-tree, “Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?” — instead of being difficult to reconcile with Divine justice, must rather be attributed to Divine forbearance. And hence, though not conspirators with Jonah in his particular sin, these mariners, with the multitude of their own sins, and with these very idolatries of theirs which they insult the living God with on this occasion itself (Jonah i. 5) — were sufficiently obnoxious to be overtaken and involved in this tempest, as well as the guilty prophet. No doubt the leading aim — the immediate Divine design — of this particular storm was to arrest and chastise a particular offender. But all were offenders. And while pursuing one special end, God might combine with it various subsidiary purposes, and in connection with His leading one He might gain them also. The iniquities of the sailors were not unduly punished by this affliction coming upon them, though, so far as appears, it would not have come upon them save for Jonah. Great and marvellous is the scheme of God’s moral government. Ten thousand purposes is the Lord daily prosecuting by the measures of His providence. One purpose, for the time, may rise into a position of prominence and importance that seems to us to cast all others into the shade. Yet while that one alone, from its palpable and forcible prominence in our view, may concentrate and engross all our attention, it neither engrosses the Divine attention, nor deranges the Divine designs. The subsidiary and subordinate ends are advancing under the Divine control with a regularity never interfered with, and with a wisdom past searchins; out. The Lord’s controversies on this occasion with these

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mariners may have been very indistinctly pointed out, and are very partially explained to us, compared with the flood of light that is thrown on His controversy with Jonah. Yet while His punishment of Jonah has all this light thrown upon its perfect equity and righteousness, equally righteous is God’s dealing with the rest, though its righteousness is not equally, or rather so broadly, exhibited.

2. But this consideration, while it vindicates the justice of God, affords no relief for the compunctions of Jonah. Jonah cannot vindicate himself from the charge of being the guilty means of involving others in the Divine displeasure, and bringing down upon them a most afflictive dispensation. For while God — continually meting out to sinners, while they are on earth, more or less largely from a free fund of patience, which, though ever righteously administered, is at the disposal of His mere mercy and forbearance — can easily justify Himself, if at any time He diminish the measure which he deals forth from that fund, always finding sufficient reason in the offences against Himself which He thus calls into reckoning; yet Jonah, when he stands in between these mariners and the amount of Divine patience which, save for him, they would have enjoyed, can never justify himself herein, inasmuch as he cannot plead their offences against him as God can, — for they had never injured Jonah, — and even though they had, lie is not to be acknowledged as the judge by whom providential dispensations and punishments are to be meted out to them. He, therefore, remains as blameworthy as if the righteousness of these men’s sufferings could not be vindicated at all. They, indeed, have no right to lay the blame on him, as if they were innocent. But Jonah himself must take all the blame because he is guilty. They are not innocent; God in thus dealing with them is righteous. God is righteous in visiting upon them transgressions of their own, and in punishing them in this particular way, namely, by sending among them a man whose very presence and company involve a storm, and exposure to death by means of it. But Jonah is not innocent of the distress entailed on the mariners, because he carries about with him a disobedience which God is righteously avenging upon him in a way that must inevitably involve multitudes besides himself.

Thus may a calamity fall righteously upon a whole family for

E the sake of one guilty member; and in the grief of none of them is God unrighteous, while yet, in a sense, the whole guilt lies on one. The father of a household may so offend the Lord, as that the adequate punishment of his provocation shall not alight solely on his person, but may involve all his house. “Is God unrighteous” in chastising them? “God forbid; for how then should God judge the world?” But does this exempt the guilty man from the blame, the compunction, the remorse, springing from his being the responsible agent in bringing down on those around him the complicated distress in which he and they alike are sharers? Assuredly not. And when the king of Israel disobeyed the Lord and numbered the people, and was punished by a pestilence on his land which slew three score and ten thousand — innocent in this particular crime — it was not as one arraigning the justice of God, but in the bitterest and most mournful compunction for having been himself the guilty cause of suffering and death to others, that he exclaimed, “Lo, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly; but these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, be against me, and against my father’s house” <2 Sam. xxiv. 17).

There is a very solemn lesson in this.

In our different families, we may, without taking heed to it, be the guilty instruments of deeply injuring those we are bound, and may be anxious to benefit. For, our individual provocations may be provoking the Lord to limit the temporal prosperity, and still more the spiritual blessing, which otherwise He might bestow upon them. His righteousness in so dealing with them He can easily demonstrate. But our guilt in leading Him so to deal with them He can demonstrate as easily. He can prove that He is just. But how can we avoid the blame of temporally and spiritually injuring those to whom we ought rather to be the instruments and channels of good? The benefit of God’s vindication of His own procedure can never be arrogated by us — can never pass over to us for our vindication. He vindicates Himself on grounds which cannot be pleaded by us, for they do not pertain to us. He vindicates Himself on the ground that the pains and penalties from His hand, brought through us no others, are the righteous punishment of their own offences against Him, or are the beneficial chastisements through means of which He designs ultimately to crown them with benefits which in no other way could He have conferred, or in no other way so well. We, on the other hand, have had no righteous quarrel to prosecute, and have been seeking to confer no ultimate good. With us lies the naked evil — the unalleviated guilt; and if there be aught of generous feeling remaining, it will, when we awake to face the facts, sting us to the quick with deep compunction and remorse. Let it not be forgotten that in this way a single individual may be a source of calamity to multitudes; and that this may result the more surely and extensively as that individual is more closely connected with the cause and kingdom of the Lord. Because of a single private member of a congregation, God, in visiting his provocations with the punishment deserved, chastising his sensuality, or pride, or covetousness, or passion, may involve in much spiritual leanness and unprofitableness all his fellow worshippers. For one single Achan, altogether unnoticeable and. insignificant, save for his sin, the whole camp of Israel may be troubled; and victory may never return and tarry on their standards, till “judgment return unto righteousness, and all the upright follow after it.” But how much more if the guilty individual be no private and unnoticeable Achan, but a prophet such as Jonah! In that case, may not the “wind sent out into the sea” be expected to be “a great wind,”- — “a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship is like to be broken?”

If, therefore, the question be raised by members of families, Why is there not more of God’s blessing on our households? or by members of congregations, Why is there not more spiritual life in our assemblies? — surely it is for each individual to examine himself and prayerfully to inquire, “Lord, is it I?” The same truth and generosity of spirit which would revolt from inflicting injury upon another, and which would say with the greatly agitated king, — “Lo, 1 have sinned, and / have done wickedly; but these sheep, what have they done? let thy hand, I pray thee, be against me, and against my father’s house,” — will be incapable of resting under the mere possibility of standing in the way of good, or proving a channel of evil, to another. The bare possibility will give pain: the bare possibility will suggest inquiry: “Lord, Is it I?” And when the risk, the danger, the possibility of being an actual source of disadvantage, whether temporal or spiritual, does not tenderly touch the soul with sorrow and induce examination, there is reason to fear that the clearest demonstration of this being not only a possibility, but the actual fact, would be met with a heartlessness which neither Achan nor Jonah exhibited, and which would go far to destroy the sympathy and pity with which, in the one case, we listen to Joshua advising the culprit to “give glory to the Lord Ged of Israel, and make confession unto Him” (Joshua vii. 19); and with which, in the other case, we look on while they “take up Jonah and cast him forth into the sea, and the sea ceases from her raging” (Jonah i. 15).

To be instruments of good or evil to each other is what, in the present state of God’s government over us, we cannot possibly avoid. “None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself “(Rom. xiv. 7). Society is constituted by Divine ordination into a body politic; and the Church, by eternal covenant, and by every fundamental principle of its nature and estate, is a body spiritual. It is one body. No member can isolate himself. If he could, he would thereby destroy himself. “But God hath tempered the body together, so that there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. And God hath set some in the Church — first, apostles; secondarily, prophets; thirdly, teachers: after that, miracles; then gifts of healing, helps, governments, diversities of tongues. Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret? But covet earnestly the best gifts. Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not chairity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

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doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth” <1 Cor. xii. 24-31, xiii. 1-8).