Albert Barnes Commentary Jonah 3:4

"And Jonah began to enter into the city a day`s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." — Jonah 3:4 (ASV)

And Jonah began to enter the city a day’s journey - Perhaps the day’s journey enabled him to traverse the city from end to end, with his one brief, deep cry of woe: “Yet forty days and Nineveh overthrown.” He prophesied an utter overthrow, a turning it upside down. He does not speak of it as if it would happen at a time beyond those days. The close of the forty days and the destruction were to be one.

He does not say strictly, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” but, “Yet forty days and Nineveh overthrown.” The last of those forty days was, before its sun set, to see Nineveh as a “thing overthrown.” Jonah knew from the first God’s purpose of mercy for Nineveh; he had a further hint of it in the altered commission he had received. It is perhaps hinted in the word “Yet.” “If God had meant unconditionally to overthrow them, He would have overthrown them without notice. ‘Yet,’ always denotes some long-suffering of God.” But, taught by that severe discipline, he discharges his office strictly.

He cries what God had commanded him to cry out, without reserve or exception. The sentence, as are all God’s threats until the last, was conditional. But God does not say this. That sentence was now within forty days of its completion; yet even so it was remitted.

Wonderful encouragement, when one Lent sufficed to save some 600,000 souls from perishing! Yet the first visitation of cholera was checked in its progress in England, upon one day’s national fast and humiliation; and we have seen how general prayer has often at once opened or closed the heavens as we needed.

“A few years ago,” relates Augustine, “when Arcadias was Emperor at Constantinople (what I say, some have heard, some of our people were present there), did not God—willing to terrify the city and, by terrifying, to amend, convert, cleanse, and change it—reveal to a faithful servant of His (a soldier, it is said) that the city should perish by fire from heaven, and warn him to tell the Bishop! It was told.

The Bishop did not despise it, but addressed the people. The city turned to the mourning of penitence, like that Nineveh of old. Yet lest people should think that he who said this deceived or was deceived, the day which God had threatened came. When all were intently expecting the outcome with great fear, at the beginning of the night, as the world was darkening, a fiery cloud was seen from the East—small at first, then, as it approached the city, gradually enlarging, until it hung terribly over the whole city.

All fled to the Church; the place could not hold the people. But after that great tribulation, when God had accredited His word, the cloud began to diminish and at last disappeared. The people, freed from fear for a while, again heard that they must migrate, because the whole city would be destroyed on the next Sabbath. The whole populace left the city with the Emperor; no one remained in his house. That multitude, having gone some miles, when gathered in one spot to pour forth prayer to God, suddenly saw a great smoke and raised a loud cry to God.” The city was saved.

“What shall we say?” adds Augustine. “Was this the anger of God, or rather His mercy? Who doubts that the most merciful Father willed by terrifying to convert, not to punish by destroying? As the hand is lifted up to strike, and is recalled in pity when he who was to be struck is terrified, so was it done to that city.”

Will any of God’s warnings now move our great Babylon to repentance, that it not be ruined?