Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 1.pdf/288

 a gourd as a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. And Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. (iv. 6.) But soon a worm smote the gourd, and it withered. The sun beat upon the head of the prophet, he fainted, and wished to die, saying, "it is better for me to die than to live." (ver. 8.) It was now that God put this searching question, "Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death." (ver. 9.) Jonah, as a Jewish prophet, was a sign to the house of Israel, and while sitting under the gourd, shewed the true state of that church as to faith, religion, and life. The church was then grounded in self-love, and thence in falsities of various kinds; the gratifications of which with sensual indulgences, led Jonah to have pity upon the worm-smitten gourd, but none for Nineveh and its repenting inhabitants. This gourd, a shrub-kind of plant, with large broad leaves, was a true representation of that self-love in which the Jewish church was then principled, and from which her members acted. The prophet sat in his own fancied security, looking for the destruction of the Ninevites; but they repented; found mercy from the God of Jonah, and Jonah was angry on that account. In self-love there is what was concealed in Jonah's gourd, a worm; this will cause the withering away of the hope and peace of him who sits under its shade. It is said of the gourd that it "came up in a night and perished in a night" (iv. 10), to instruct us that the evil of self-love is the legitimate production of spiritual ignorance; for ignorance is a mental darkness, which, in Scripture, is called night. Darkness is evil's dwelling-place; like the gourd it comes up and withers in a night. On the contrary,