As I was traveling to Poprad and back home I was reading this book from John Piper, called The Hidden Smile of God - The Fruit of Affliction in the Lives of John Bunyan, William Cowper, and David Brainerd. It’s actually book two from the series Swans Are Not Silent. The first book was about Augustine, Luther and Calvin that I read last Christmas.
In this post I just want to give you a small taste of what the book is about.
So the first of those people is John Bunyan. A tinker that was able to read and write. And that was all his education. Yet, God used this man in such ways that were Him glorifying more even by the fact that Bunyan was a simple man. Read for example this:
The greatest Puritan theologian, and a contemporary of Bunyan, John Owen, when asked by King Charles why he, a great scholar, went to hear an uneducated tinker preach, said, “I would willingly exchange my learning for the tinker’s power of touching men’s hearts.”
Bunyan’s live wasn’t easy by any means. Not that his mother and sister both died when he was 15, he was drafted as a 16 years old young man into the Parliamentary Army for about two years. Two years after he returned (20) he married a woman and they had four children. The first of them – Mary – was born blind. Ten years after this his wife died and left him with four children. A year later he married Elizabeth and a year after their marriage he was imprisoned and Elizabeth, who was pregnant at that time, miscarried in the crisis. Altogether was Bunyan under arrested for 12 years. And this deserves a little bit more to be said about.
Lesser known is the fact that his twelve years in prison were “voluntary,” in the sense that a commitment not to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ would have obtained his freedom at any time.
In August 1661 his wife Elizabeth went to authorities. She had already been to London with one petition. Now she was met with one stiff question:
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- “Would he stop preaching?”
- “My lord, he dares not leave off preaching as long as he can speak.”
- “What is the need of talking?”
- “There is need for this, my lord, for I have four small children that cannot help themselves, of which one is blind, and we have nothing to live upon but the charity of good people.”
Matthew Hale, with pity, asks if she really has four children being so young.
- “My lord, I am but mother-in-law [stepmother] to them, having not been married to him yet full two years. Indeed, I was with child when my husband was first apprehended; but being young and unaccustomed to such things, I being smayed at the news, fell into labor, and so continued for eight days, and then was delivered; but my child died.”
Hale is moved, but other judges are hardened and speak against him.
- “He is a mere tinker!”
- “Yes, and because he is a tinker and a poor man, there- fore he is despised and cannot have justice.”
One Mr. Chester is enraged and says Bunyan will preach and do as he wishes.
- “He preacheth nothing but the word of God!” she says.
Mr. Twisden, in a rage:
- “He runneth up and down and doeth harm.”
- “No, my lord, it is not so; God hath owned him and done much good by him.”
The angry man continues,
- “His doctrine is the doctrine of the devil.”
She replies,
- “My lord, when the righteous Judge shall appear, it will be known that his doctrine is not the doctrine of the devil!”
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After twelve years of imprisonment he was released because of the Declaration of Religious Indulgence. There was one more imprisonment in the winter and spring of 1675-76. Other then that he was preaching at the church in Bedford. John Bunyan died on August 31, 1688 of a violent fever.
These are some parts of the book that I enjoyed. This one speaks of his two years of overwhelming darkness that happened when he thought he was established in the Gospel. But this was the decisive moment for him:
One day as I was passing into the field . . . this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteous- ness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants [lacks] my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteous- ness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteous- ness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, “The same yesterday, today, and forever.” Hebrews 13:8. Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God [about the unforgivable sin] left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.
Bunyan has learnt, through all of his afflictions and troubles and pains, how TO LIVE UPON GOD THAT IS INVISIBLE.
Judge not the lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
WILLIAM COWPER
“GOD MOVES IN A MYSTERIOUS WAY”
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