Divine Pity

THEN said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not la­boured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: and should not I spare Nine­veh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" (Jonah 4:10, 11).

The Revised Standard Version translates verse eleven: "Should not I pity Nineveh?" I like that word "pity"—"Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left?"

Have you ever thought about how much a question reveals about a person? For instance, when a child says, "Where's mommy?" you know "mommy" is the cen­ter of that child's life. He has revealed it in one little question. When an older child greets his father with the question "What did you bring me?" he has given away his self-centeredness, which the father hopes will be overcome as the child grows to adulthood. We think of the question Peter asked. He said, "Lord, we've left all to fol­low Thee, what shall we have therefore?"

A tremendously revealing question about the character of Peter! I'm sure as he looked back on it in later years he wished he had never asked it.

I wonder if we ever think of the ques­tions we ask God, questions of doubt, un­certainty; questions such as "Why did this happen to me?" These questions reveal much about ourselves. But have you ever thought about the questions God asks us? They reveal a great deal about God. They reveal something about His character, about His interest in humanity. Our ques­tion today does just that—"Should not I pity Nineveh?" Surely this reveals a great deal about the character and the love of God for lost humanity.

Jonah had been a reluctant prophet. He didn't want to go to Nineveh. He felt no burden for the people of Nineveh. He con­sidered it a hostile, heathen city, and when God told him to go east to Nineveh, he went west on a ship headed for Spain. But through a devious route he finally ended up on the road to Nineveh. He walked up and down the streets of Nineveh and in three days he had preached to everyone. He preached a message of doom—"Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be over­thrown."

I'm rather interested in what the Bible says about Nineveh. It was "an exceeding great city." We know where Nineveh is. The walls have been excavated. It has been possible to measure Nineveh, and those who have done the work tell us it is seven and one-half miles around the walls of the city. They tell us furthermore that the city covered 1,640 acres.

When we look at some of the cities of Palestine we are rather surprised at their size. Those of us who have had the privi­lege of visiting some of those cities have been amazed at how small they are. Sa­maria, for instance, was the capital of the kingdom of Israel. But Samaria covered just nineteen acres! When I saw Jericho I thought it was such a little city! The chil­dren of Israel could have easily marched around it seven times in a day. Jerusalem was 86 acres, so when you compare that with Nineveh, you can see why the Bible says that Nineveh was an exceeding great city—1,640 acres. But compared with our modern cities they seem very small indeed. I have no explanation for the wonderful success of Jonah. As he walked the streets of Nineveh it seemed as though everything he did was wrong. His message wasn't at­tractive; it was a message of doom. His attitude was sullen; he did not want to be there in the first place. And his resentment of this heathen people could not possibly have attracted them. I don't know why they responded. I have only one answer—God's message was being preached at God's di­rection, by God's appointed man, at God's time. Somehow I gain courage from the realization that whenever we bear God's message, at God's time, to the people that God points out, and we know we are ap­pointed by Him to do it, God can and will bless, no matter how poor the instrument may be that bears that message.

After Jonah had preached he retreated to a littie place outside the city and built for himself a shelter. Then he prepared to wait for the countdown and to watch the blast-off. He was very upset when he dis­covered that God had cancelled the whole operation because Nineveh had repented. He said, "This makes me look like a fool. I've told everybody that the city would be overthrown in forty days, and now You have repented."

God decided He had to teach Jonah a lesson, so He caused a gourd to grow up and provide him a little shade. Apparently his shelter was just a booth that went around him. He was grateful for the shade the gourd provided, because it was a hot day. But then after a little while a worm, also prepared by God, came, and the very next night the plant withered and died and was gone.

Because Jonah had been so angry at the idea that God had spared Nineveh, and now was so exceedingly angry at the idea that the gourd had disappeared, God had to talk to him. He said, "You have had pity on a gourd. You had nothing to do with its growth; nothing to do with its destruction; but you had pity on it. Shouldn't I now pity Nineveh, a city in which are 120,000 people who don't know their right hand from their left?" I'm delighted to see that to God Nineveh was more than a city. Nineveh was a city made up of people, in­dividual persons.

I flew over New York City yesterday for the first time in my life. Since I live in New York I have always put down there, but yes­terday I came from Boston and flew right over New York, looking upon it, I suppose, as God must see it; only He sees it from an exceedingly greater height than mine of 12,000 feet. I picked out the buildings. There was the United Nations, the Em­pire State Building—familiar landmarks to me. I looked at the docks to see if any ships were in. It was only after New York had gone by that I realized I had not thought about the people. But when God looks down, He sees persons. And Nineveh was full of people—120,000 of them. "Should not I pity Nineveh?"

We can be pleased with the attitude America has toward helping under-devel­oped nations. I read something the other day that greatly impressed me. It said that if we were to take 2.5 billion people of the world and compress them into a village of 1,000 population, 60 of those people would be Americans and 940 would be all the other people of the world! Further, those 60 would earn half of the income; 940 would have the other half. The 60, even though they would eat 72 per cent more than was good for them and more than they needed, would have a life expectancy of 70 years. The other 940 would have a life expectancy of 40 years, and many of them would eke out those years in poverty, sickness, ignorance, and despair.

We feel pity for the undeveloped na­tions. We have programs. We are trying to send things to help them build themselves up, and other nations are joining us in this. We are urging Japan and Germany, coun­tries that have much to offer, to join with Canada and the United States and Britain and France and other countries to lift this burden—to help the undeveloped nations. It is good to pity the people in the world about us.

But as Seventh-day Adventists we have a much greater pity—pity for the Ninevehs of the world about us. We should pity them because they don't know their right hand from their left! They don't have the spir­itual understanding we have; they don't have the message we have. To God the in­habitants of Nineveh were needy because they knew so little. God knew how many there were—120,000—and to Him every one was precious. If God had such a bur­den for Nineveh, how does He feel toward New York, Tokyo, Toronto, Philadelphia, London, et cetera? Should not I pity these Ninevehs? I'm sure God pities them. I'm sure God thinks of each and every person in them.

I'd like to have you think about what God sees when He looks down on our mod­ern cities today. To what kind of world are we trying to bring our wonderful mes­sage?

First there is the blight of Communism. I don't want to say too much about that; so much has already been said. But let me say this—in Soviet Russia there are 200 million people; in Red China there are 630 million people—a total of 830 million people exposed every day to God-denying atheism. The Soviet encyclopedia even goes so far as to deny the existence of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Eight hundred and thirty million people of our world exposed daily to atheism, which denies even the very existence of Jesus Christ. A few months ago I stood at the gates of Communist China. I was allowed within a half mile of the bor­der. As I looked from a vantage point I could see into Communist China, see the mountains, the villages, the people. And I tried to envisage what was beyond. It's a staggering and overwhelming thought to realize that we cannot reach those 630 mil­lion people with our gospel message.

Today educationists put great emphasis on modern science. Schools are lending themselves to teaching more and more sci­ence, and I suppose that is good. But I wonder whether we realize what's hap­pening as far as scientific build-up is con­cerned, and what is happening with God. Not long ago a distinguished Harvard as­tronomer produced the little book Science Ponders Religion. In this book eighteen well-known scientists explain their attitude toward religion, toward God. Not one of them profess any belief whatsoever in a personal, omnipotent God. Nor does a sin­gle one confess that he has any hope what­soever in a future life. They are agnostics. They state themselves to be so, rather proudly, and they say they are a cross sec­tion of world scientists. And probably they are right. Wilbur M. Smith estimates that not 10 per cent of the outstanding scientists of the world today are Trinitarians!

Think about the place of philosophy in our world. Philosophy is even more an­tagonistic than science toward religion. In the realm of psychology, for instance, Sig-mund Freud, perhaps the most outstanding spokesman for psychology, scoffed at the very existence of God. Read the works of the great philosophers and among the ma­jority of them you will find no belief what­soever in God. What a world! "Should not I pity Nineveh?"

Perhaps you have been interested, as I have been, in reading some of the things that Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam has writ­ten and spoken. Bishop Oxnam, an out­standing ecclesiastic in the Methodist Church, retired only last year. He has been a bishop in the Methodist Church since 1936. He served as president of the Council of Bishops, and in addition to the highest possible office in his own denomination, was president of the World Council of Churches from 1948 to 1954. Three years ago he wrote a book titled Testament of Faith. But so far as I could see, it was not a testament of faith but a testament of lack of faith. In it he ridiculed the idea of the virgin birth. He scoffed at Biblicaldoes chrome run on linux inspira­tion. He emphatically repudiated the truth of the atoning work of Jesus Christ. He made the following statement: "I have never been able to carry the idea of justice to the place where someone else can vicar­iously pay for what I have done in order to clean the slate. They argue that God sent His own Son who died upon the cross, and in so doing satisfies God's sense of legisla­tive justice. It simply doesn't make sense to me. It is rather an offence. It offends my moral sense. Must God have a sacrifice? The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, the Book says. No! No! I cannot think of it in this way." So what is the bishop going to do with his own sins? "I cannot see forgiveness as predicated on the act of someone else. It is my sin. I must atone." It gives me chills, the idea of aton­ing for our own sins. No Saviour! And this statement from a man who has been head of the World Council of Churches!

James A. Pike, Protestant Episcopal bishop of the diocese of California, said of the virgin birth, "I'm inclined to believe it is a myth." On the work of the Holy Spirit he stated, "I no longer regard grace, or the work of the Holy Spirit, as limited explic­itly to the Christian revelation." Of the Bi­ble he says, "It came along as a sort of Reader's Digest anthology." And then on the great doctrine of the Trinity, he declares "I see nothing in the Bible, as critically viewed, which supports this particularly weak and unintelligible philosophical or­ganization of the nature of God. In other words, I believe totally in that which the formula is seeking to express. My belief is in God, not in the formula about Him." Now these statements may leave us cold or they may stir us up until we want to fight back and argue. But the amazing thing is that members of the churches these men are part of have not stood up to these leaders of Protestantism today and told them, "You are wrong. You must be silent. We will take your credentials away from you if you speak this way. You have been ordained a bishop in the Methodist Church to preach Christ and His atoning blood. You have been ordained a bishop in the Episcopalian Church because we believe in the foundation of the Bible, the Trinity, and all the rest." No, the churches have not objected; and many of the bishops have risen to support what these leaders have said.

So as I look about the world today I say, "Should not I pity Nineveh?" How must God feel as He looks upon the cities and sees their great need? I am encouraged when I read that God pitied a city of 120,000 souls of men who did not know their right hand from their left. I know His great heart of love is stirred by our great cities and by the problems that we face. I know that He is concerned. I know that He is asking that we, the Jonahs of today, go out to carry His message to a needy world. The instrument may be weak, may not know how to present the message attrac­tively—certainly Jonah did not know how —but with the blessing of God results will be accomplished. Today we take the mes­sage of warning to our modern Ninevehs by way of radio and television—ways that Jonah knew nothing about. The message goes out with many mistakes; some things we wish were different; many things we would like to correct. We talk about our lack of means, how it hampers us—and it does. We talk about weak human vessels —and they are weak and inadequate, and we wish they were better. The real need, however, is for the Spirit of God to place His blessing on what we do. "Should not I pity Nineveh?" God does. And as we work with God we are going to see results in the Ninevehs of today.