The attitude of the Lord Jesus Christ toward the Old Testament is a source of great embarrassment to those who acknowledge him as a Divine Teacher, and yet are not in accord with his views on this subject. The puzzle is to reconcile the uniqueness of his person as the incarnate Son of God, the uniqueness of his claim to implicit reverence and confidence, and his supreme authority as a Divine Teacher, with the admission that he was or could be mistaken in any of his teachings, or that he ever gave his sanction to the errors or mistakes of others. The difficulty created by his attestation given to other parts of the Old Testament recurs in equal measure in the language which he uses respecting the Book of Jonah. The attempt to save his authority by minimizing the force of his words can neither be acceptable to him, nor can it answer its mistaken purpose.

      There is no reason for discrediting the Book of Jonah, unless it is to be found in the contents of the book itself. The extraordinary and supernatural occurrences here related can not be pronounced incredible by him who believes in the reality of the miracles recorded elsewhere in the Bible, unless their nature is such, or the occasion is such as to justify any one in affirming that they are mere freaks of power with no worthy end, mere prodigies, so out of analogy with all true [vii.] miracles, that it is altogether insupposable that God could, or would, have wrought them. But how can any one venture upon such an assertion in view of the fact that the Lord Jesus speaks of them without in any way suggesting that they were incompatible with the character of God, and that he even puts the most marvelous of them in relation to his own stupendous miracle of rising from the dead, the one a sign to the Ninevites, the other to the men of his own generation. [viii.]