Luke 11:29-30 And when the people were gathered thick together, he began to say, This is an evil generation: they seek a sign… There is a peculiarity here which you ought carefully to consider. A sign was asked by an evil generation, that if Jesus were truly the Christ, they might receive Him as their King, and give Him their allegiance; but the sign which is proffered, even the sign of the Resurrection, presupposed the perpetration of that crime, the prevention of which was the great object for which the sign was solicited. A sign, in short, is asked, which would prevent the rejection of Christ; a sign is proposed which would be no sign at all until He bad been rejected. The Jews must crucify the Christ in order to their obtaining the sign; whereas, they wanted the sign in order that they might be withheld from the crucifixion. Let us look into this matter. If, after all, an additional sign were to be given, why was such a sign selected as could have no existence until the crime had been perpetrated which it was the object of a sign to prevent? To this we reply, that it was not our Lord's object to prevent the Jews from crucifying Him; but it was His object to leave them inexcusable in so doing; and therefore did He ply them with miracles which were fitted to convince all who had understanding, and with discourses which were adapted to move all who had hearts. He gave proof enough of the justice of His pretensions, for it was proof which prevailed to the bringing many to His side; but when asked to carry proof to that extreme point where it becomes absolutely irresistible, to crowd the landscape or the firmament with signs which should leave the beholders no option, but compel them to receive Him as Messiah, why, He was then solicited to a course not only inconsistent with the free agency of man, but counter to the work which had brought Him down as a sojourner to earth. And why marvel that Christ should have withheld that additional evidence which was not necessary to make His countrymen inexcusable, and which would directly have interfered with the completion of the scheme of redemption? "Yes," you may say, "but the question is not why Christ should have refused all additional signs; the answer to this is comparatively easy; but why, in consenting to give another sign, He should have selected just that one, the sign of a resurrection, which must necessarily have been ineffectual in withholding the Jews from the greatest of crimes, and which could not exist unless and until they had committed that crime?" Does it not almost seem a mockery of the Pharisees, that when they asked a sign which might enable them to receive Jesus as the Christ, they were denied all but one, which they could only obtain by rejecting Him as the Christ. Remember, however, that sufficient evidence had been already vouchsafed; so that the Pharisees would have had no ground of complaint had the demand for further signs been met by unqualified refusal. And you are, moreover, probably quite wrong in speaking of the sign of the Resurrection as though it must necessarily have been too late to have been of service to the Jews, because undoubtedly too late to prevent His crucifixion. The crucifying Jesus did not fill up the measure of the guilt of the Jews; they did not touch the unpardonable sin, for they did not withstand the whole amount of evidence until they had refused to be convinced by the resurrection of Jesus and the miracles which evidenced the diffusion of the Spirit. It was indeed such a crime as had never been committed on the darkened stage of this fallen creation, that of putting to death as a malefactor the Being who went about doing good, and in whose actions there was the power as well as the loving-kindness of God. Yet — and there is no fact more glorious in the whole range of theology — yet the blood of the crucified made atonement for the crucifiers. Men had not sinned beyond the reach of mercy when they uttered the cry, "Away with Him, away with Him"; they had not blocked up against themselves the escape-path for eternity, when they buffeted the Mediator, and circled His forehead with thorns, and nailed Him to the cross, and reviled Him in His agonies. We will not indeed say that the Jews occupied so advantageous a moral position after as before they had crucified their King. They had resisted a vast body of evidence, and had therefore grown stronger in infidelity; they had perpetrated a most atrocious crime, and their consciences must have been scared in the perpetration; but if they had rendered themselves less accessible to the demonstrations of evidence, less susceptible of the remonstrances of righteousness, they had not rendered themselves one jot less the objects of the Mediator's regards, nor thrown themselves beyond the reach of His extraordinary sacrifice. The blood upon their hands, whilst it cried for vengeance on them as murderers, cried also — and oh I the voice which spake of pardon was far louder and deeper than that which spake of wrath — cried for mercy on them as the objects of redemption. And if that evil and adulterous generation, moved by the sign of the Resurrection, overcome by that most stupendous of all miracles, the breaking forth in His own might of the Crucified One from the sepulchre — if they had discerned and acknowledged and bewailed their iniquity, and flocking round the despised Nazarene had offered Him with tears their allegiance, and besought of Him pardon, and bowed before Him as a prince and a Saviour, who questions that this generation, eminent in guilt, foremost in all that can make human nature infamous, would have gathered to itself the smiles and the succours of God, and that Jesus would have stood, the upholder of those who had scorned Him, and a life-giver to those who had slain Him? Call ye the sign of Jonas a sign which came too late, when the blood had just been shed which blotted out the sin of the world? Call ye it too late, when apostles were proclaiming to their unbelieving countrymen, "Unto you first, God, having raised up His Son Jesus, sent Him to bless you!" Too late, when the publication of the gospel and the resurrection is to "begin at Jerusalem," and the very men who with wicked hands had crucified and slain the Prince of Life are to be entreated to look in faith to a Saviour waiting to embrace them, ere the tidings of deliverance may be carried to the cities and the islands of the heathen? Oh 1 no: all the aspect of strangeness disappears from our text; in place of manifesting harshness, in place of giving a compliance of less worth than a refusal, Christ displayed wondrously the graciousness of His character, and showed a still mighty desire to win the Jews from infidelity, when in answer to a demand to show more signs to an evil generation He said, "There shall no sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas." You ask us to show that the sign of the Resurrection was in itself sufficient to work conviction in all fair inquirers, and we give you our reply by going back over the waste of long ages, and leading you to Nineveh, that exceeding great city, with its vast but impious population. We bid you mark how on a sudden the sounds of revelry are hushed, how all the business and all the pleasures of the stirring and luxurious metropolis come as in a moment to a stand, and how the great and the mean, the king in his palace and the nobles in their halls, and the poor in their hovels, as though shrinking from a wrath which rushed visibly on, bow themselves to the earth, and cry mightily for deliverance. And why is this? Hath God indeed come forth from the solitudes of eternity, and, riding the firmament in the chariot of His vengeance, hath He made bare His arm in the view of the Ninevites? Have angelic beings, withering the eyesight of those who dared gaze on their forms of fire, come down with the proclamation, that yet forty days and the proud city shall be a ruin? Nay, a foreigner with no attendants, a poor and unprotected stranger, a wanderer without a home and without a friend in the magnificent capital, this is the being at whose bidding the tide of a nation's wickedness has been stayed in its flowings. This is the being whose voice, syllabling calamity, has put an arrest on the occupations and the joyousness of hundreds of thousands. Then this foreigner, this stranger, this wanderer, must have given striking evidence that he spake in God's name: and you will allow, that if in any other case the like evidence be afforded, the effect wrought on the Ninevites clearly shows that it ought to prove convincing. But this evidence was the evidence of a resurrection. This prophet of disaster had been sepulchred three days and three nights in the depths of the waters, and then rose up uninjured from that strangest of tombs. This fact it is that the Ninevites knew; on this fact it was that they received Jonas as a prophet. The evidence, then, of the resurrection was sufficient, under the most unpromising circumstances, when it stood absolutely alone, and the parties to be convinced were the idolatrous and the profligate. It follows, therefore, that enough evidence is afforded, whenever the evidence of a resurrection is afforded. When assured that a particular evidence has overcome the infidelity of one people, I can be morally certain that it is not owing to deficiency of proof that the like evidence failed to overcome the infidelity of another people. There is a voice, then, in the history of Nineveh, which proclaims the Jews inexcusable in their unbelief. The voice of weeping and of wailing which issues from every house in that terrified capital is witness against the wickedness of the haughty Jerusalem. A nation clothed in sackcloth, and prostrating itself in spirit, and all because moved by the sign of a resurrection, this is our proof that the sign of a resurrection is powerful enough to test the pretensions of a prophet; and when, therefore, another nation resists the sign which has thus shown its strength, continuing in unbelief, though the messenger who declares himself authorized by God hath burst the bands of death and mastered the grave, we can be persuaded of this nation that its infidelity is not to be overcome by any evidence which consists with human accountability, and we are convinced that Christ did all that could be done for "an evil and adulterous generation," when He promised them as the last in the long series of proofs "the sign of Jonas the prophet; for as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of Man be to this generation." Well, then, might the Redeemer, when He had referred the scribes and the Pharisees to the sign of His resurrection — well might He conjure up the scenery of the last judgment, and represent the Ninevites as convicting the Jews and justifying their condemnation. "The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonas! and, behold, more than Jonas" for this is the true rendering, not "a greater than Jonas" — "behold, more than Jonas is here." The evidence granted to the Jews in the resurrection of Christ, in the preaching of the apostles and the gift of the Spirit, exceeded any that may be supposed to have been granted to the Ninevites in the preservation of Jonah. (H. Melvill, B. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when the people were gathered thick together, he began to say, This is an evil generation: they seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet. |
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