'Although,' to use the words of Gregory, 'God never swerves from His decree, yet He often varies in His declarations': that is always and immoveable; these are sometimes seemingly discordant. So when He gave sentence against the Ninevites by Jonah, saying, 'Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown,' the meaning of the words is not that God absolutely intended, at the end of that space, to destroy the city, but that, should God deal with those people according to their deserts, they would be totally extirpated from the earth, and should be so extirpated unless they repented speedily.
Likewise, when He told King Hezekiah by the prophet Isaiah, 'Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live,' the meaning was that with respect to second causes, and, considering the king's bad state of health and emaciated constitution, he could not, humanly speaking, live much longer. But still the even showed that God had immutably determined that he should live fifteen years more, and in order to that had put it into his heart to pray for the blessing decreed, just as, in the case of Nineveh, lately mentioned, God had resolved not to overthrow that city then; and, in order to the accomplishment of His own purpose in a way worthy of Himself, made the ministry of Jonah the means of leading that people to repentance. All which, as it shows that God's absolute predestination does not set aside the use of means, so does it likewise prove that, however various the declarations of God may appear (to wit, when they proceed on a regard had to natural causes), His counsels and designs stand firm and immovable, and can neither admit of alteration in themselves, nor of hindrance in their execution. See this farther explained by Bucer in Rom. 9, where you will find the certainty of the Divine appointment solidly asserted and unanswerably vindicated." - Jerome Zanchius, Absolute Predestination
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