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STARTS WITH NIGHT (Wednesday night, Thursday, Thursday night, Friday, Friday night, Satur-
day). We should be able to recognize instantly that the phrase is NOT "three nights and three days"
but it is "three days and three nights." The Wednesday to Saturday theory demands that we ignore
the sequence of counting as given in God's Word, the Scriptures -- beginning with the day first! If
we use the Biblical sequence of counting, we would get four days and three nights!

Second of all, the long-standing authority for the interpretation that this phrase refers to a
full 72 hours is E.W. Bullinger ALONE. But, are the speculations of Bullinger, a 19th-century lin-
guist, to be taken as final authority? I hope not, for his theory is found to be unsupportable -- as are
many other of his hypotheses. To demand that it be exactly 72 hours the scriptures would have to
say something like "exactly, a full three days and three nights" or "from such and such an hour to
such and such an hour" -- which they definitely do not!

What, Then, Was the Sign of Jonah?

The interpretation that views the sign of Jonah as being an exact period of 72 hours in the
grave has been discredited by the evidence we have just covered. We would now like to show that
the sign of Jonah consisted NOT in a 72-hour entombment but IN THE MIRACLE OF THE
RESURRECTION!

The first proof is the absence of any time frame in the other two passages mentioning the
sign of Jonah -- Matthew 16:4 and Luke 11:29-32. In Matthew 16:4 we read: "A wicked and adul-
terous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet
Jonah." Then, in Luke, we read: "And while the crowds were thickly gathered together, He began
to say, 'This is an evil generation. It seeks a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of
Jonah the prophet. For as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so also the Son of Man will be to
this generation...The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn
it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and indeed a greater than Jonah is here.'"

We should take note of the fact that in the passage from Luke there is no reference whatso-
ever to the length of time Jonah survived in the great fish's stomach. If the sign of Jonah consisted
of the time factor, the meticulous Luke would hardly have ignored it. "The comparison in Luke be-
tween Jonah and Christ is not in terms of identical duration of entombment, but of SIMILAR MI-
RACULOUS RESURRECTIONS: 'as Jonah...so will the Son of man be'" (The Time of the
Crucifixion and Resurrection, chapter 3).

Why, then, did the whole city of Nineveh repent and do so in the hope that God would not
destroy them? Jewish historians have long been fascinated by this story and have concluded that
the ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION was that the Ninevites knew that Jonah had been swal-
lowed up by a great fish as God's judgment on his disobedience, and that while he would normally
die in such circumstances, God kept him alive and, in His mercy, delivered him from the stomach
of the fish. This alone explains the seriousness with which they listened to Jonah and their hope of
mercy if they repented. It was NOT the length of time that Jonah was within the great fish.

The book of Jonah suggests that Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites because of the mi-
raculous way in which God raised him out of the fish's belly and cast him up alive on the beach.

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