THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO JONAH.
It has become fashionable to divorce Christ from the Old Testament, to set him over against prophets as their antipodes. The cry is, Give us Christ, as for this man Moses and these men the prophets, we care not what becomes of them. The opinion has credence that the Old Testament marvels and characters detract from the character and purpose of Christ, and so they must not be mentioned the same day. Take a prophet like Jonah, whose incidents and history require faith to accept them. The popular idea is that it complicates Christ to be in any way connected with them. License is demanded to disassociate Christ from the Old Testament worthies and history—no relation, mediate or immediate, must be established between them. The old-fashioned theory that the Old and New Testaments are part and parcel of the same system must be discarded. The orthodox Christian still holds to the old theory, the only divine one, that these two are one. That Christ is the product and perfection of Old Testament facts and theories. That they stand or fall together. That Moses is the forerunner and type of Christ. That his system made Christ's mission and work possible. Daniel in the lions' den must go hand in hand with Paul's delivery from the viper's bite. That the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego must stand or fall with Paul's shipwreck or Peter's jail delivery. That the ten commandments find their reproduction and spiritual expansion in the sermon on the mount. But the modernizers who clamor against dogma and creed will have none of this marriage between the saints of the Old and those of the New. The old are classed as Jewish myths. This may look wise and seem pious, but what does Christ say about it? Does he in his own estimate stand singular and alone in this regard? He, it is true, makes no mention of the heroes and conquerors of the Roman Empire, of which he was the subject. As far as he is concerned, they neither had mission nor work; served neither for illustration nor model. But the Old Testament men served him for illustration and proof. Jonah will serve as a specimen. The personality of the prophet is minor and obscure. Christ refers to him and without hesitancy puts the seal of truth on that, to the higher criticism, eye-sore incident, the being swallowed by the whale. Christ was bound, as the light of the world, to explode all traditions and myths which had been foisted on the credulous as religious truth. What does Christ think of this discredited incident of Jonah being swallowed by the whale? He refers to it with the greatest calmness and the clearest apprehension of its historical verity. "An evil and adulterous generation," he said, "seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it; because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and behold, a greater than Jonas is here." He stamps the book as a fact, the prophet as a real person, and this most criticised and dishonored incident in it as typical or suggestive as a sign of one of the sublime and fundamental facts in his own life and work, making it a sign to an evil and adulterous generation of the power of God, which was soon to be illustrated in his own resurrection. To him these marvels of Old Testament history were not to be handled with the vandal handling of modern criticism, but as facts which show the power and presence of God all along the stream of revelation, and instead of giving occasion for doubt or sneering unbelief, should stablish and strengthen the faith of God's elect in the mighty power and oneness of the God of the Old and New Testament.—Selected.