What is the sign of Jonah?

He had done sign upon sign and they had ample proofs of His divinity. Upon such an evil, unbelieving request He can only utter His righteous indignation. So He calls them a wicked and adulterous generation.

The perverse critics of the Lord asked again for a sign in Matt 16, and again He referred them to the story of Jonah. But He rebuked their hypocrisy... It was indeed "fair weather" for the Jewish people at that moment, for the Sun was shining brightly in their midst; but "foul weather" was approaching — judgement from God for their evil unbelief. "He left them and departed" — significant words! The doom of the people was certain.

If those dark and stormy waters spoke of death, surely the belly of the fish tells us of the grave. We know that this is so, for our Lord Jesus Christ tells us plainly that Jonah at this time was a type of Himself... Little did Jonah know the honour that was being put upon him at this moment, in that he was for ever after to be a sign of how his Lord and Master would later on go down voluntarily into death and the grave, in order to save others.

Just as Jonah was cast into the boiling sea because of his own sin, and was miraculously preserved in a fish's belly three days and nights, so Jesus would enter into the flood-tide of God's judgment upon sin — not His own, but that of others — and, dying, would lie in the heart of the earth three days and three nights, and be raised by God Himself, the Saviour of His people. None but faith could read the sign, or interpret the riddle. To reason it looked like nonsense.

But let it be observed that according to the Jewish way of calculating time, there is no inaccuracy in this statement... instead of speaking of an evening and morning being a day, modern Gentiles say that a day consists of a morning and evening, and so calculate accordingly. And if the Jews reckoned any part of a day as part of a night and a day (for the evening and the morning in Genesis 1 made a day), the alleged inaccuracy wholly disappears.

Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, of death and resurrection, and that only God could save man. That was the sign. None but the hand of God can deliver, whether Jonah or the Ninevite then, or you and me today.

No further sign would convince them, but the Lord gives them two that would condemn them. Jonah, up from the depth of the sea, type of Christ risen from among the dead, and preached in grace to the Gentiles, was the first... And the fact that the men of Nineveh received and bowed to the voice of the prophet, while the men of Israel refused the voice of One greater than Jonah, would add tenfold to their condemnation.

But the sign of Jonah equally sets forth the history of Israel; inasmuch as that nation is now doomed to the judgment of death and the grave: but in the purpose of the love of God, it is destined to be called forth from under the power of death, and to rise again into the life and liberty of God's people.