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Chapter V
But why no sign? In the parallel passage we read: "`The wicked generation and adulterous seeketh a sign, but there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah'; so he left them and departed" (Matt. 16:4). The real explanation of this reference to Jonah is given by Luke (11:32), and missed or misdeveloped in Matthew (Matt. 12:40). Nineveh recognized instinctively the inherent truth of Jonah's message, and repented. Truth is its own evidence—like leaven in the meal, like seed in the field, it does its work, and its life reveals it. God is known that way. When the chief priests demand of Jesus to be told plainly what is his authority (Mark 11:27), he carries the matter a stage further: Was the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, i.e. from God, or was it of men? Does God make His message clear, does He properly authenticate Himself? And the uneasy weighing of alternatives, summarized by the evangelist, leads to the answer that they could not tell whence it was; and Jesus rejoins that he has nothing to say to them about his authority. He had taken what we might call an easy case—where it was evident that God had spoken; and this was all they made of it—they "could not tell." It was plain, then, either that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the word of God came upon John," Luke 3:9,), or that, if they did recognize it, they thought it did not matter. For the insincere and the trivial there is no message from God, no truth of God—how should there be?
If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus' opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God's word for him. If a man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life with seriousness and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish. Such a man is prepared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little facts, and then God dawns on him in them. This is put directly in the Fourth Gospel (7:17), and in parable in the Synoptists. The leaven works, till the whole is leavened; the uneasy process is over and the result achieved. Or, it comes more quietly still—the seed grows while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade springs up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a reality. Or, the knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash—sudden, illuminative, decisive. "The Son reveals" God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt. 11:27). The Son of Man may be a disputable figure—"Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him" (Matt. 12:32)—but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the spirit of Truth. So he taught, and all history shows he was right—the refusal of truth is fatal. "Jesus," wrote Matthew Arnold, "never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon experience." It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his message. The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky, and the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather (Matt. 16:2; Luke 12:55).